I expected Sal to wheel up to the front door with a popular muscle car, such as the Plymouth Barracuda, a Chevrolet Chevelle, a Trans Am, or a Plymouth Superbird. No. His chariot of choice, the miser’s on a budget decision, was a black GT-37m which looked like a skunk, with its white mid-body stripe. I ducked my head down and asked him, “Are you sure about this?”
He recited the ad’s sales pitch. “‘It’s the GTO for kids under 30.’ Get in.”
On the blacktop out of Newton and into Boston, he exercised all the horses under the hood. A winter’s fog hung over Stuart Street, and a whisper of a wind brought in the cold and dampness with it. I asked Sal to drop me off in front of Wirth’s, a German restaurant on the edge of the Combat Zone. I suggested he drive around or walk the Garden and Common and pick me up in a half hour. I played straight with the kid and told him I didn’t want to implicate him or his uncle with the conversation I was about to have inside. I patted his uncle’s briefcase on the seat between us and reminded him to keep the bank safe.
He pulled away from the curb, and I stuck my hands into my pockets. I could feel the Smith & Wesson against one bicep. I read the time on the clock in front of the place. Each hour was a letter to spell out the name JACOB WIRTH, and there were flowers where one expected the numerals three and nine on the timepiece.
From sundown on Saturday to sundown on Sunday, when most Bostonians ate seafood and brown beans for the Puritan Sabbath, Wirth’s brats, brisket, and cabbages offered an alternative to Yankee austerity. If anything from the Rhine was an acquired taste, patrons drowned it in dark beer.
Inside the joint, there was sawdust underfoot and floorboards that creaked like a ship at sea in the eighteenth century. Above the bar, the motto SUUM CUIQUE was engraved into dark wood. I spotted Lusk and Miller parked in a booth, sipping lagers. The foam from their drink clung to their moustaches. They waved me over.
A server in a black jacket stepped out of the darkness. I said, “A club soda, please.”
“You’re no fun,” Lusk said.
I checked my wrist. “It’s not even noon, and the two of you are lifting the tide.”
Miller responded. “As if you didn’t tie one on in the morning over there.”
“Yea, to wash the pills down and because Charlie was trying to kill me.”
The club soda arrived, and I thanked the old man who disappeared as fast he’d appeared.
“Let’s talk shop,” I said. “Pedro Gonzalez, Hoban, and three cops.”
“Forget the slaughter in Southie?” Miller asked.
“Do you have any information?”
“Like what?”
“Look at Starsky and Hutch here.” I pulled my head back. “One talks while the other one sips beer. The two of you are about as coordinated as a ventriloquist and his dummy.”
“Okay, knock it off,” Lusk said. “You’ve had your fun.”
They asked me where I wanted to start. I answered, “A friend of mine on the force was on the scene in Southie, and he said he saw suits there, and they weren’t you. Now, since we last talked, another cop bought it. It’s three dead cops and one Pedro Gonzalez. Same MO.”
“About that last officer, the one without his vest on,” Lusk said.
“What about him?”
Miller answered, “He came to us about a major shipment of drugs coming into Boston. He was scared after the two other officers were killed.”
“About those two officers—anything?” I asked.
“They were clean. We believe the third officer talked to officers one and two.”
“Okay, an honest cop talks to other honest cops, but the guy who came to you with information is killed. Why didn’t you protect him?”
Miller answered. “We pointed him to the U.S. Marshall Service and told him to get himself into WITSEC, but he said he’d have to disappear, and he didn’t want to uproot his family and all. He said he’d take his chances.”
“And now he leaves a widow and his kids fatherless. I know he couldn’t take the info to someone in District One because there’s too much corruption in the precinct.”
There were more flavors to corruption within the police department than there were ice cream shops in Boston. Cops in the Combat Zone accepted beers on the arm. Businesses bribed officers on the beat to look the other way because they were fronts for other activities, or they allowed their inventory to be looted in order to collect the insurance money. A brother in blue who didn’t play along was suspect, likely blackballed, and thought of as a snitch for Internal Affairs.
I sat there, hearing the adding machine inside my head. I thought of William Burroughs, the writer, and heir to the Burroughs Adding Machine fortune, who’d squandered some of his fat inheritance on heroin.
Three dead police officers.
One dead janitor.
Cocaine.
News of a shipment.
I asked what I considered the obvious question. “Any details on this shipment?”
Miller answered, “We have the When and Where.”
“Is it reliable intel?”
“We have it from a wire.”
“A wire?” I tried not to act shocked. “Yours or the FBI’s?”
Miller answered. “Ours, and the FBI doesn’t know we have someone embedded.”
“I’d love to hear what you have on tape.”
Lusk said, “And we’d love to hear what you have for us.”
“A hunch.”
“A hunch?” Lusk said. “And what does this hunch feel like?”
“It itches like a new sweater.”
“Is this itch about Gonzalez or the three dead police officers?”
“Gonzalez. I’m convinced he was trying to start a new life here, in Boston, and either his past had caught up him, or it could be that he’d said, No, when he should have said, Yes, to someone.”
“‘Convinced?’ Miller said. “Any evidence around this itch?”
“No, it’s called a hunch for a reason.”
Lusk and Miller sat there quietly, sipped more of their beer. I sampled some club soda and let the seltzer burn my tongue. Miller asked if there was more to my intuition, so I let him have it.
“Say I talked to a local character, and he said something curious.”
“‘Curious,’ how?”
“When I mentioned to him that there were suits on the crime scene, he told me he wasn’t worried about the Feds. That’s curious to me.”
“You’re thinking a Fed is shielding him?”
“‘Shielding.’ Interesting choice of words, Agent Miller. The fact is I can’t prove it, but this guy seems to walk through fire and over broken glass, and he doesn’t get burned or bleed. That’s more than the luck of the Irish. Next round is on me.”
I raised two fingers for the waiter and pointed to their beers.
Miller said, “Keep what you think about a dirty shield to yourself, okay? The Fibs are on this case like an elephant, and they won’t share even one peanut, and we don’t want anything to jeopardize our guy undercover.”
“He has something on a Fib, doesn’t he?”
“We’re not at liberty to say, but trust us on this one. Keep your thoughts on the matter to yourself.”
I peeled off a bill and left it on the table.
“The BPD was told to back off, which is why I was called into the Gonzalez case. There’s no love lost between me and the department, but when a third man goes down, the BPD won’t sit idle while the Feds dictate policy. The genie has to come out of the bottle.”
Miller spoke again. “There’s nothing we can do about that. What do you suggest?”
“You’re one up on the Fed. Act on your information on this shipment and put an end to this pissing contest between the Feds and local police.”
Lusk grinned. “The department lost a good cop when they let you walk away, Cleary.”
“Let’s not get sentimental.” I pointed to the Latin motto above the bar. “There’s good life advice for you. It says, Each to his own.”
I rose. I buttoned my jacket. “I’d like to hear some of that wire sometime.”
Miller said, “Church service is tomorrow night. Seven pm. Seaport. Pier four.”