“When this is all over,” Bill said, “you’re taking me to the Scotch ’n Sirloin. I’m gonna order myself a juicy prime rib and gawk at some Bruins and Celtics.”
“You never know, one of them might play on your team, Bill.”
The mere suggestion that any one of the manly men on the city’s hockey and basketball teams might be gay was both hearsay and heresy and, to say it in public, invited a thrashing. If I’d said the Pats, nobody would’ve cared and would’ve called it sympathy sex. The Patsies were nine and five last season, placed third in the AFC East, but everyone booed them. The red and white uniforms reminded me of the Cincinnati Reds and were about as sexy as a threadbare negligée, and the team had the worst logo on their helmets. It was supposed to be some scrappy colonial wearing his tricorne hat and, in a three-point stance, hand on a football, but it looked like a guy taking a dump. No matter what Coach Chuck Fairbanks had for talent, the team couldn’t string together consecutive wins, especially after the game against the Raiders in Oakland. December 18, 1976, was the other day in December that would live in infamy for New England.
“Damn,” I said.
The puzzled expression on Bill’s face wanted to ask me whether I needed to use the Little Boy’s Room at any one of the fast food joints on the interstate. He berated himself for not using back roads such as Route 9, which would’ve made it easier for one of us to pull over to take a leak, but I assured him that was not why I’d cursed. I flashed him a peek of the gadget from Motorola and Dot. I explained that the gizmo was my punishment for ignoring a woman I’d never met in the flesh.
Everyone has at least one distinctive voice in their head. There’s Madge, the manicurist, in the commercials for Palmolive soap. Orson Welles’s baritone voice sold Paul Masson’s Emerald Dry wine. John Forsyth’s disembodied tenor assigned cases to Charlie’s Angels. The voice between my ears was Dot from Dayton, Ohio. The pager was all plastic, no heart, and it required batteries like a vibrator.
We pulled over, and I walked over to a payphone. I watched Bill through the glass of the folding door of a payphone watching me through the windshield of his car. Cars flew by behind his Chrysler while I pressed the receiver to my ear after I’d dialed the number. I filled the gap in time between the last digit pressed and her voice with the hazy memory of the HoJo on the other side of the highway.
The place reminded me of road trips, eating lunch in the car, and using my allowance to buy an ice cream sundae with the special cookie on top at the counter of the Howard Johnson. I was Shane from the western Shane, and twenty-eight flavors awaited me and my spoon. I never did order the ‘tendersweet clams from Ipswich,’ but I was one of the few kids who could recite the nursery rhyme that had inspired the restaurant’s mascot, Simple Simon and the Pie Man. I learned later that the food chain owed its existence to a Boston mayor’s banning Eugene O’Neill’s play Strange Interlude. The actors moved the show from Boston to Quincy, MA, and the intermission became dinner at the first HoJo nearby.
“Long time, no hear, Mr. Cleary.”
“You beeped me.”
“Please hold.”
I held.
“Message here says, and I quote, Tammy agrees to give a statement, but only if he’ll (spelled h-e-e-l) agree to a divorce. MSM. I assume you know what MSM means.”
“I do.”
“Initials of the caller’s name?”
“No.”
“Anybody ever tell you that you’re a terrible tease, Mr. Cleary.”
“MSM is Maverick Street Mother, and I have to say ‘heel’ was a nice touch.”
“We all get our jollies anyway we can get them.”
“Whatever closes the case.”
I hung up and reached into my pocket for change. I called Lusk of the DEA pair of Lusk and Miller. He had a messenger service, too, so I left a brief message for the duo. I named the place where we ought to meet the next day.
Satisfied, I unhinged the door and walked back to Bill’s car.
We arrived in Newton before sunset. The entrance to Mr. B’s home was more like Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin. We sat parked in front of a gate that was as wide and high as the one Elvis had at Graceland. Mr. B had doubled up on guards as a deterrent and instructed another car to be parked across the asphalt behind the gate as another form of the barrier method. An armed guard stepped out of the car on the other side of the wrought-iron fence to unhook a chain and walk it from one side to another after the guard in the pillbox next to us made a phone call.
Our car moved slowly, and the numerous eyes of men holding machine guns watched us. Bill said nothing. He’d never been to the house. We rode the long winding snake of blacktop. I could tell that as soon as he’d seen the house on the hill in the distance, he reconsidered the phrase, ‘Crime doesn’t pay.’ It had, it did, and it came with acreage and a lawn that required a ride in a mower and several gallons of gasoline.
We parked in a garage where someone I’d never seen before waited for us. He escorted us inside after he’d taken our coats, my hat, and our guns. We complied without his asking. He welcomed us, told us we’d be taken to Mr. B in his study, where we would enjoy cocktails. He said we were invited to dinner and recited the menu.
Another man, the butler, set the pace for the walk down the long hallway of paintings and other objets d’art. Some were new to me, and Bill whispered a question to me. “Copies?”
I shook my head. I have no doubt everything on the walls was original, including a Caravaggio. If there ever was an artist who could represent the mafia, it was Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. The painter had lived a short, violent life, allied himself with the powerful Grand Master of the Knights of Malta, and ‘made his bones’ by killing another man either because he had besmirched his honor or refused to pay a gambling debt.
As we approached the double doors, I heard laughter I recognized but had not expected to hear. Bonnie’s roar of a laugh rang above that of the men inside with her. Our guide parted the doors, and Bill and I stepped inside. In front of me, his back toward me, was Mr. B in his armchair. Sal sat in the other chair, drinking what he’d had for a cocktail when I’d last seen him with Vanessa in Somerville. Vanessa shared the chair with her beau.
On our right, a fireplace simmered, and tongues of flames threw shadows and flashes of red and orange on the walls and ceiling. Across from me on a sofa sat Tony Two-Times with Bonnie on his lap, a martini glass in her hand. “Look, Shane is here.”
Mr. B stood up. A man of his disposition and experience must’ve heard the doors open, but he was in the comfort of his home and had let his guard down and allowed someone to enter the room and stand behind him. He was holding a martini glass, in which I counted three olives on a toothpick. Three olives were both tradition and superstition, a trick he’d learned from Sinatra himself.
Bonnie kissed me on the cheek and tousled Bill’s hair. Bill looked at me, confused. I didn’t have time to complete his thought with the expletive of my choice because Mr. B’s voice distracted me.
“Martinis, gentlemen? You must be Bill, Shane’s friend on the police force.”
Bill’s grin was more of a tight mask. “We’ve met once, at Wonderland.”
“The dog track, of course,” Mr. B said. “I remember you now.”
Mr. B met John and Bill in Revere. He called John an ‘eggplant’ and Bill, ‘Tinkerbell.’
Mr. B said. “Have a drink, please.”
“I’m the designated driver.”
“Have something anyway. Whatever you drink will have worn off by the time we finish dinner. Same goes for you, Mr. Cleary. Have a cocktail, I insist.”
I requested a Manhattan. “Bill will have what Sal is having.”
“A Godfather, excellent.”
Bill nudged my shoulder. “You’re ordering for me now?”
“Payback in advance for our date at the Scotch ’n Sirloin. You’ll like it. I promise.”
I wasn’t sure that I liked the Bonnie and Tony combination. The butler tended the caddy where I saw the bottles of Lillet and Smirnov vodka. A monster bottle of Galliano, mounted on a stand, stood in the corner behind the bartender. It seemed everyone had one of those in their living room.
I figured Bonnie was into her second or third Vesper, Bond’s favorite. Facing the couple and Mr. B, I could see that uncle and nephew were at ease with each other. I asked, “You two make peace?”
Sal looked to his uncle and then to me. “We’re good.”
The butler handed me my drink, Bill, his, and we raised our glasses for a toast.
I sat there watching Bonnie and Tony. The unexpected and surreal sight of these two was everything but the brassy fanfare of “Tara’s Theme” from Gone With The Wind, which I would hear sitting in front of the television waiting for the Million Dollar Movie of the Week from WOR-TV in Secaucus, New Jersey. The opening credits have changed several times over the years, but it was always New York at night, a paradise in lights before a worm burrowed into the Big Apple. The original clip was of a guy, alone and walking the streets, past bums in the Bowery warming their hands over an open fire inside a trash barrel. I was that guy right now, and the warmth in the room was from a fireplace inside the private study of New England’s top mafioso. Bonnie and Tony were the unlikely leads in this slice of cinéma vérité.
I visited them. “You two seem to have hit it off.”
Bonnie said, “You ought to thank Tony here.”
“For safely driving you here?”
“That, and for remembering to bring Delilah. She’s upstairs, in a room of her own.”
“We can’t forget Delilah was the first thing I said to her. Swear to God.”
“Thank you, Tony.”
I felt chastened, chastised, and humbled. I would need to make amends with Delilah.
Bonnie wrapped an arm around Tony’s neck. “You jealous?”
“Not at all, but I guess it’s true that opposites attract.”
The seated Tony lifted her off his lap and set her down next to him. He stood up and said, “I mean no disrespect. Honest.”
“I know you don’t, Tony, but I’ll say you two took to each other like peaches and cream.”
“Ah, it’s all good fun, and I straightened out one of her coworkers.”
“Brad,” she said.
“With a name like that, I think of Milton Bradley, the toy company. What did Brad do?”
Tony looked at Bonnie, and Bonnie told him to tell me the story. Tony had rolled into the law firm’s lobby around the time the junior associates were let loose for the lunch hour. Bonnie chafed at the designation ‘junior’ more than ‘associate,’ but she called it ‘paying the dues with interest’ and the ‘interest’ was the price of being a woman in a man’s world.
“I’m there in the lobby, you see,” Tony explained. “I’m telling her who I am and that you’d sent me. Can you picture it?”
“A Kodak moment inside the frame.” I glanced at Bonnie and thought of the morning when she’d called me all frantic from a payphone over the sight of a tall scary man on his way to her doormat.
“There I am, trying to be subtle and persuasive, and this one here is giving it to me hard and fast like she’s Katharine Hepburn when Brad butts in and interrupts our conversation. He doesn’t even look at me. It’s as if I didn’t exist. Look at me. Do I look like the kind of guy you can ignore?”
“There’s no hiding you, Tony,” I said. “You’re the lighthouse without a light, and the ships would still know you’re there. What happened next?”
“He hands her a piece of paper, tells her it’s the lunch order for him and the boys upstairs. Sandwiches and salads from Pi Alley. Can you believe that? Some nerve, this guy, and he’s talking down to Bonnie like she’s his secretary or something.”
Bonnie tucked her chin, suppressing a giggle, as Tony approached the punchline.
“I grabbed that piece of paper, and I say to Poindexter, ‘The lady is a lawyer and a colleague of yours. Show a little class and some respect.’ He says to me, ‘Who are you?’ and I tell him, ‘Who I am isn’t important. I was talking to her, and you interrupted, and then you have the audacity to hand her a list. What’s wrong with you?’ He mumbles something, about how as a client, I should respect the firm’s lunch hour. I tell him. ‘I’m no client, and you’re not one to talk to me about respect.’ I picked the little toad up by the throat. He’s squirming against the marble wall and says to me, “What, are you going to say a four-letter word now?” I said, yeah. ‘Disrespect her again, and the four-letter word is you D-E-A-D.’
I smiled, but the grin turned grim the moment I saw Mr. B return to the room.
He wanted a word with me, in private.