RAY DUNN rang the doorbell of the Honorable Johnny Cahill, District Attorney for the County of Suffolk. The doorbell was vintage Johnny: a six-gong chime—the fight song of the Boston College Eagles.
The DA opened the door. He wore a silk brocade gown over striped pajamas. “Jesus Christ, get in,” he said. “It’s cold as hell tonight.”
Ray knocked the snow from his shoes and stepped into the DA’s foyer. Johnny’s manse was done in the faux-baronial splendor favored by successful Irish-American men of Johnny’s generation. A fieldstone fireplace in the study burned logs for heat and imported peat for ambience. Above the fireplace was an elaborate coat of arms for the Clan Cahill or Cawill or Cael—they sold them to Americans in the Dublin airport duty-free shops. The walls of the study were crowded with antique maps of Eire and framed pictures of the DA with everyone that mattered: Mayors Curley, Hynes, and Collins, a line of governors, the Cardinal, Ted Williams, and, in a central place of honor, Johnny C. with old Joe Kennedy at a Friendly Sons of St. Pat’s dance, flush-faced, years ago.
The study was linked by French doors to a heated indoor pool. Ray heard splashing and a woman’s squeals, and knew that Eddie Cahill, the DA’s playboy son, was home. Ray and Eddie Cahill had been classmates at BC Law. Eddie was clever and lazy. He had been an assistant DA in his father’s office for a few months after graduation, until he found that crime victims, as a group, got on his nerves. He’d quit and built a lucrative practice chasing ambulances, but in his personal life he was almost monumentally careless.
Ray had rescued Eddie Cahill from a lot of bad publicity as a favor to Eddie’s all-powerful father. When Ray was a young DA, Johnny Cahill dispatched him to Miami to snuff a vehicular assault beef and get Eddie out of the Dade County Jail. Later a girlfriend of Eddie’s killed herself with pills, and the DA sent Ray to ransack her apartment and find her diary. Ray asked his boss if he wanted the diary brought back so the DA could read about his libertine son, but Johnny was very clear: “Burn it,” he said.
Then there was the abortionist in Fall River, who got an envelope of money from Ray, and a loan shark in East Boston, who got money and a warning. “Go near the DA’s kid and I’ll be back with an arrest warrant,” Ray told him. A few years back, Ray found himself dragging Eddie out of a blackmail trap. A local tinhorn had some pictures of Eddie with a teenage girl. Ray showed up, seized the pictures and the negatives, sent the grifter to prison for parole violations, and gave the girl a bus ticket to Los Angeles after convincing her she was pretty enough for the movies.
Whenever Eddie Cahill got himself jammed up, Ray bailed him out. Whenever Ray did one of these “jobs,” he grew closer to Johnny.
“You think my father really cares about you?” Eddie asked as Ray drove him home after some escapade. “He doesn’t,” Eddie said. “You’re an errand boy to him. The minute you ask him for something—something you really want—he’ll chuck you out. You hate me, don’t you?”
“Actually, Eddie, I couldn’t care less.”
“Of course you hate me. You hate me because I’ve got something you want badly, and I don’t even deserve it.”
“What would that be?”
“My father’s love,” Eddie said.
Ray had joined the District Attorney’s office in 1957, and rose through the ranks. He was promoted to deputy chief of trials in ’59, counsel in ’62, first assistant DA in ’64. As first assistant, he ran the office day-to-day and oversaw the investigative units—Vice, Rackets, Homicide, and Narco. He also personally handled Johnny’s “special projects,” like the bloody clubbing of a Catholic priest with sins on his conscience and scars on his chest. Ray was thirty-three and on the fast track.
Johnny handed him three fingers of Bushmills in a Wexford crystal tumbler as Ray shed his overcoat.
“How was Logan?” Johnny asked, returning to the fire.
Ray placed his tumbler on the coffee table. Johnny always poured Ray whiskey, though Ray didn’t drink. “The cops got themselves into a jurisdictional pretzel,” Ray said. “I worked it out.”
“That’s the boy. Papers show?”
“A couple of stringers, Globe and Record-American. They asked about the Negro kids.”
“You say anything?”
“No.”
“They know anything?”
“No.”
Johnny nodded. “Don’t give me that look.”
“What look?”
“The long face. You don’t approve?”
“Those Negro kids were from the Howard University Glee Club,” Ray said. “They were scheduled to sing for the governor’s wife at the Sheraton. The narcs roughed them up for no good reason.”
“They were muggers,” Johnny said.
Ray shook his head. “Glee Club, all three. Checked it out myself. The cops are lying to us, boss.”
Johnny made a mock-horror face, like Buster Keaton seeing a ghost. Lying? To us? Then he looked bored. “You going soft?”
Ray was stung. “Just facing facts. The truth will come out eventually. About Operation Pressure Point, I mean, and the deal with Hanratty and the state rep. The whole truth.”
Johnny got comfortable in the wing chair. “I’ve crushed bigger scandals in my jammies, kid.”
“It’s not the fifties anymore. Times are changing.”
Johnny stirred the fire with a poker. He was worried, Ray could tell. Behind the old DA, in the poolhouse, Eddie and the girl played a form of water polo.
“We have a name for the airport corpse,” Ray said. “George D. Sedgewick. He’s a Catholic priest out in Stoneham.”
Johnny pursed his lips. “My, my. He somebody?”
Meaning was Father George Sedgewick someone they should worry about, someone who could injure Johnny or his friends. Ray had whitewashed embarrassing priests for Johnny before—this was another specialty. There was the priest who ran the orphanage and spanked the boys bare-assed. There was the boozehound pastor who embezzled bingo money and blew it on his “niece.”
“Don’t know yet,” Ray said. “Sedgewick died wearing a scapular—a vest of studs designed to hurt him every move he made. The cops think the scapular was part of a kinky sex game, and they want to start looking at hookers.”
“Sounds like a priest with a skeleton in his closet,” Johnny observed. He sipped Bushmills through a thin, connoisseurial smile. Church scandals were Johnny’s candy. Whenever Ray tamped them down, the DA earned favors from Richard Cardinal Cushing, who was, when all was said and done, the biggest bastard in Boston.
“I hope none of this leaks out,” Johnny said.
“I’ve got everyone in line.”
Johnny smiled. “I’m sure you do. Do we buy the hooker theory?”
“We don’t,” Ray said. “Witnesses in the terminal saw a stocky male in a black knit hat following Sedgewick after his Rome flight landed. I think that’s our guy.”
Johnny warmed. “The priest did him dirt, somewhere, somehow, and the stocky fellow killed him for revenge. That explains the scapular and it motivates the killer.” Johnny certainly hoped so. He could earn some chits from the Cardinal for covering it up.
The pool doors opened and Eddie Cahill paraded past wrapped in a towel, arm around a brunette, who pulled off a flowered bathing cap.
“Raymond,” Eddie sneered.
“Have you met Eddie’s fiancée?” Johnny Cahill said to Ray, who rose. Her name was Yvonne, and Eddie Cahill said he’d met her in Palm Beach, where she was a cocktail waitress. She was certainly tan. Ray noticed a white line where her wedding band belonged. Ray figured he’d be bribing her lawyer by Easter.
“Did you tell him yet?” Eddie asked his father.
“Tell me what?” Ray asked the DA.
“Get upstairs, you two,” Johnny said to the swimmers. “It’s cold as hell down here.” Eddie and the cocktail waitress scurried out.
Johnny stoked the peaty coals. “She’s a helluva girl,” he said.
“She’s married and you know it. Tell me what?”
Johnny stared at the knot in the belt of his bathrobe. “I been the DA for twenty-four years. It’s time to go. Like you said, Ray, everything’s changing.”
Retire. Johnny shunned the word. He slapped his knees, coming to the point. “The politicians will ask you to stand for DA in November. And why not? You’ve run the shop the last few years. Might as well have the title to go with the headaches—that’s what they’ll tell you. But listen, Ray: don’t do it. It’s not in your best interests. I want you to stay on. Help my successor. Nobody knows the mechanics like you. And then, in a few years, I’ll get you something good, a judgeship maybe, or a slot in my law firm.”
Far back in Ray’s brain, a bell went off. “Your successor? You have someone in mind?”
“Eddie,” Cahill said. He talked fast, shifting into shameless hard sell. “Eddie’s had his problems, I admit. You know better than anyone. But he’s a talented lawyer and he’s done a lot of growing up the past few years. He’s human and he’s made mistakes—”
“Mistakes?” Ray felt a head of anger rise. “We call them felonies.”
Johnny struck back hard. “And you’ve committed felonies to get Eddie out of trouble, haven’t you? Breaking into that poor girl’s apartment, paying all those little gratuities, threatening Eddie’s shylocks with indictment. It’s all quite improper, wouldn’t you say?”
Johnny draped a hand on Ray’s shoulder, softening the blow. “It stinks, I know. You’re angry. You’re disappointed. Of course you are. But you’ve been more than an aide to me, Ray. You’ve been like family. And that’s why I feel I can ask you to make this sacrifice for my family—for our family.”
Ray was stumbling out of the study, hat on, coat off, before he knew exactly what was happening. As he crossed the DA’s snowy lawn, he heard Johnny at the stoop calling his name.
Ray dropped his car keys in the snow and stooped to find them. Johnny gave up yelling and went inside, closing the door and shutting off the front walk light, leaving the first assistant DA on his hands and knees.