The Rat on Fire (15 page)

“Billy,” Proctor said. “How you hittin’ them?”

“Ah, you know,” Malatesta said. “Sometimes, pretty good. Other times, not so good.”

“Yeah,” Proctor said. “By the way, you wouldn’t happen to have that fifty I loaned you, would you? I’m a little short tonight. Bank caught up with me again.”

Don said, “Yeah, that time. You were having it fixed down here. Get it fixed all right?”

“You call three days’ down-time
all right
.” Mickey said. “Jesus, I had Fritz doing all my work since Lazarus finished his nap and he never does this to me before. And then I’ll be goddamned if I don’t take all kinds of chances with that goddamned three tons of chickens, just so I can get it down here so Fritz can work on it, and the son of a bitch takes
three fuckin’ days
to fix it. I lost a load of fish for Pawtucket. I lost
two
produce runs. I could’ve had one with eggs down from Maine and taken pies up, and I lost that. Goddamned Fritz.”

“What are you?” Malatesta said to Proctor. “You had a long day or something and now you want a little fun, is that
it? Horse around with old Billy here, see if his chain can take another jerking or two? What the hell is this? I thought it was a coffee shop. Now’re you telling me, it’s vaudeville? I’d’ve known that, I wouldn’t’ve come.”

“Take it easy, Bill,” Proctor said. “I know you’re under a lot of pressure. I was just givin’ you the leg.”

“Yeah,” Malatesta said. “Well, that’s all right, but so’s everybody else. Three of you guys make a dozen, easy.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Proctor said. “How’s the old lady?”

“Dryin’ out,” Malatesta said. “Again. Costs about three grand, usually. Doesn’t work. I haven’t got it. Doesn’t matter. Didn’t matter the last time. Didn’t work the last time. Doesn’t matter this time. Won’t work this time. You pays your money, you can find some. You takes your choice, you got one. I can’t find no money. I haven’t got any choice.”

“How’s old Marion?” Proctor said.

“You son of a bitch,” Malatesta said.

“Oh, come on,” Proctor said, “everybody in town knows that. The tide goes out and the tide comes in. The sun comes up and the sun goes down. The Red Sox are not gonna win the pennant. You’re hangin’ around with Marion. Will you get off my ass? I don’t mind you treating me like I’m stupid, but for Christ sake, man, I am not
dumb
.”

“That’s none of your business,” Malatesta said. “That’s none of your fuckin’ goddamned business whatsoever at all.”

“Look,” Proctor said, “it’s not something that I’m looking to make a profit off of. In that respect it is not my business. It
is
something that I know. Which if I did not know it, I would be more or less dead and probably deserve it, because when there are too many things in this town that you do not know, you will probably
get
dead.

“On the other hand,” he said, “Marion does explain a few things about you.”

“Like what?” Malatesta said.

“Like why you need a quick fifty that you can’t pay back,”
Proctor said. “Like why you’re sitting here with me on a night you wouldn’t take a dog out for a walk. Fifteen hundred, Billy.”

“Don,” Mickey said at the counter, “you should’ve known, there ain’t no future in this racket.”

“I know, I know,” Don said. “The trouble is that it’s too late.”

“When?” Malatesta said.

“Late morning, day after tomorrow,” Proctor said. “The first one.”

“This will take some doing,” Malatesta said. “I’m supposed to be off.”

“Yeah?” Proctor said.

“I’ll be on,” Malatesta said.

“I think I’ll have another pastry,” Mickey said. “These things’re pretty good.”

C
ORPORAL
M
ICHAEL
S
WEENEY AND
Corporal Donald Carbone perched on the orange plastic molded chairs in the office of Detective Lieutenant Inspector John Roscommon in the tenth floor quarters of the Criminal Division, Massachusetts Department of the Attorney General, at 20 Ashburton Place in Boston. Sweeney wore blue slacks and a yellow short-sleeved shirt, open at the throat. Carbone wore brown slacks and a pale blue short-sleeved shirt, open at the throat. Roscommon had pulled his maroon tie down from the open collar of his white shirt—he wore gray slacks. All three men perspired.

“Good Christ,” Roscommon said, “all that rain last night, I figured for sure it’d break this goddamned heat.”

“Yeah,” Sweeney said. “Too bad this building’s so old,

doesn’t have air conditioning. What is it, two, three years?”

“Least that,” Roscommon said. “And thank you very much, President Carter. Always did like to work in a nice warm place. What’d you guys get besides wet? Mickey?”

“It looks to me—it looks to us, right, Don?” Carbone nodded. “Looks to us like our old friend Lieutenant Billy is getting himself into a hod of shit the Lord couldn’t save him from.”

“Ahh,
shit
,” Roscommon said. “I like Billy. The hell’s he have to fuck things up like this, can you tell me that?”

“It’s the broad,” Mickey Sweeney said. “The cunt down at the Registry. He’s got the stars in his eyes for her. You were right. He’s gettin’ fifteen hundred.”

“Marion Scanlon,” Carbone said.

“Oh, for Christ sake,” Roscommon said. “Didn’t the dumb son of a bitch have trouble enough just with that drunk he married? That broad’s been all over the place like horseshit
ever since she was fifteen, for Christ sake. Honest to God. There’s only three men in the United States that can honestly claim they never fucked her, and they’re all sittin’ in this fuckin’ room. He can’t keep up with her. She’s been making out with wired guys for years. Vegas, Mexico, San Juan. Jesus Christ, a cop can’t afford that kind of ginch.”

“Malatesta doesn’t know that,” Sweeney said. “He thinks if he does a few favors for Leo Proctor, he can have the best piece of ass between here and Portland.”

“He probably could,” Roscommon said, “but he hasn’t got the right one this time. Jesus Christ, I bet you could drive one of those goddamned trucks up her and she’d thank you for the happy time.” Roscommon stood up and turned his back on Sweeney and Carbone. He stared out over the Government Center. “I swear to God,” he said, “I got no idea whatsoever what the goddamned hell makes women tick, but compared to men like Billy, they’re at least sensible.
Jesus
.”

“He’s had a rough time of it,” Sweeney said. Roscommon turned around. “That won’t do it,” he said. “I know he’s had a rough time, but that won’t do it. Everybody’s had a rough time. My wife’s had rheumatoid arthritis for six years now. She can’t get around, most days. The poor woman’s all crippled up. There are times when she has to use a wheelchair, and I have to feed her. I do the cooking and I do the cleaning and on my way home, I do the marketing. She’s in pain about every minute. God knows what’s been spent on treatments, and thank God for the medical plan.

“We can’t go away,” Roscommon said. “What the hell would we do? We can’t have the furniture done over and we can’t do anything we worked so long for. I’m fifty-eight years old. My last physical I got better grades than men fifteen and twenty years younger than I am. I’m a healthy man. Just as healthy as Malatesta in the body, and a lot healthier in
the mind. I don’t go around fooling with whores and associating with the likes of Leo Proctor.

“I know that son of a bitch,” Roscommon said. “I’ve known Leo Proctor’s name for a hundred years. I know who he is and I know what he does, and the bastard is no damned good. I know his sidekick, Dannaher, and I know the other one, the Carroll fellow there that they all call Clinker. They’re nothing but a bunch of hoodlums and thugs. They steal and they cheat and they’ll do anything to make a buck and then whine at you when you catch them at it. They didn’t mean anything. Then they get some liver-lipped lawyer to come into court and whine some more, and they hit the street again.

“You guys,” Roscommon said, “you guys don’t do that. You go out on lousy nights for lousy pay and no overtime and get yourselves all wet, and you aren’t going to sit there and tell me you don’t have problems paying your bills and taking care of your families. You’re not going to sit there and tell me you’d do the same thing Billy’s doing, because if you did, I would laugh at you. And if you went out and did it, I’d throw you in the can.

“I’ve got no respect for a shit-heel like that,” Roscommon said. “I’ve got no sympathy for him, either. I’m going to do the same for him that I would do for you, if you guys were the scumbag he is, that rotten son of a bitch. Mickey, you tail that fucking Proctor, everywhere he goes. Don, cover Billy as close as you can. We’re gonna nail those two bastards, plus anybody else they’re hooked up with, and we’re gonna nail them damned straight good, once and for all. What else they say?”

“Lemme back things up a little here,” Carbone said. “We found out what Leo and Dannaher were up to in the woods. They were catching rats.”

“Rats?” Roscommon said. “What the hell they want to catch rats for? You got a rat in your house, of course you’d
want to catch him. But go into the woods looking for rats? That doesn’t make any sense. The hell they want rats?”

“I dunno,” Carbone said, “but that’s what they were doing in the woods.”

“Shit,” Roscommon said. “It’s still Fein’s buildings, right?”

“Right,” Sweeney said, “far as we know.”

“Fein’s buildings’re on Bristol, right?” Roscommon said. “The brick three stories there?”

“Right,” Sweeney said.

“Jesus Christ,” Roscommon said, “they are not going to drive those tenants out of those buildings with rats. That’s coals to Newcastle, for the luvva Mike. There’s more rats in that neighborhood’n there is in Boston Garden. Importing rats won’t do them any good. I thought we had an arson thing here, not some goddamned exercise for the New England Anti-Vivisection Society.”

“Well,” Sweeney said, “that’s what they were doing. They were catching rats.”

W
ILFRID
M
ACK WENT
to visit Jerry Fein without calling ahead for an appointment. Jerry Fein’s secretary was Lois Reynolds, a plumpish lady with strawberry hair who had returned to work in her fifties after the children left home, in order to help her husband buy a Winnebago. She was on the phone about the Winnebago when Wilfrid entered the office.

“I don’t
care
about that, Philip,” she said. “You told me that last week and I told you then that I didn’t care about it, and I still don’t. You told me you had this nice clean Winnebago Brave coming in that was only one owner and we could have it for fifty-seven hundred dollars. Now you are telling me that it didn’t come in, and I just don’t believe you.

“You’re just telling me that now,” Lois said. “Last week you didn’t think you’d be able to sell it. Then somebody came in and looked it over and you sold it to them for more money, and so now you’re telling me that it never came in.

“Now look, Philip,” she said, “I’ve been working three years now again, so Harold can get his Winnebago and we can go down to the Cape and go out all the way to Provincetown and he can fish his butt off and we won’t get our butt taken off paying for motel rooms, and you told me that we had it. Next week is Harold’s birthday and he is a hardworking fellow that never bought anything for himself and now, by Jesus, it is Harold’s turn. You hear me, Philip? It is Harold’s turn. He has paid for the bikes and he has paid for the house and he has paid for the schooling and everything else, and he even bought me a fur coat and a watch. Now it is Harold who gets the first bite out of the apple.

“You promised me that bite, Philip,” she said. “You absolutely
promised
me that you had the Winnebago coming in
and it was nice and clean and in good shape and everything, and you had damned right well better get that Winnebago in, or I will use a little influence that I happen to have with this lawyer that I happen to work for, and I will sue your lying ass from here to Buffalo and back.” She paused.

“Right now, Philip, I don’t know. But Mister Fein is a very smart man and he will think of something that will drive you absolutely nuts, if you let me down like this. He will dribble you up and down the court like you were a basketball. He will make you wish that you had never been
born
.” She paused again. She nodded. “That’s better, Philip,” she said. “That is
very
much better. Yes. Thank you. I certainly will. I will call you tomorrow. Yes. That will be fine.”