NARCO manned the wires from a listening post—called a “plant”—in a sweltering basement a mile inland from Gibraltar. Four phones rang endlessly—“slave” lines labeled in magic marker: “Gilda’s,” for the restaurant where Caesar Raines took lunch; “club,” for the Suffolk Democratic lair; “dime,” for the five-and-dime; “pool,” for the pool hall. The slaves rang for incoming and outgoing calls both, and teletypes recorded every number dialed. The slaves jangled a total of 406 times on the first full day of eavesdropping, and the four teletypes never stopped. The narcs were jumpy and hungry, and Manny reined them in.
“You will not take action in the field without my say-so,” Manny told them the first morning. “You will not initiate a surveillance. You will not stop a subject, even to ID him. You will not do anything but listen to these four phones. Questions?”
Nat Butterman raised his hand. “Why?”
“Because cops pull bonehead stunts on wiretaps,” Manny said.
Butterman, persisting: “Why?”
“Wiretaps let you hear through walls, hear for miles,” Manny warned. “You’ll figure out who Caesar likes, who he pretends to like, and who he hates. You’ll think you know more about Caesar than anybody who really knows him, see?”
“No,” Butterman said.
Shecky cut in. “Cops aren’t used to intimacy. What do we usually do? We watch. We guess. We act. Listening’s a luxury. It goes to our heads.”
“Dang, you’re deep,” Butterman said.
“Take yourself, Nahum,” Shecky said. “If I listened to your phones, what would I conclude? That Nat Butterman is slick shit with a bargain mortgage and a penchant for other men’s wives.”
“Lay off,” Butterman said.
“I wouldn’t hear the panic in the sales pitch,” Shecky said. “I wouldn’t hear how hard you work just to be the model American—”
“Lay off,” Paddy Hicks said on his buddy’s behalf.
“—I wouldn’t know you lost two aunts at Bergen-Belsen, or that your whole life is just a big defense against being singled out someday, as they were singled out.”
“What’s Bergen-Belsen?” Paddy asked Butterman.
“Nothing,” Butterman said, eyes on Shecky.
“In fact, Nahum, I wouldn’t even know your name,” Shecky said.
“What’s Bergen-Belsen?” Paddy asked Shecky.
“Nothing, moron,” Butterman screamed at Paddy. He was out of his chair and all over Shecky, and Hicks was all over Butterman. Butterman punched Shecky, a blur of little fists, elbowing Hicks’s gut on the backstrokes. Scanlon got Butterman’s knees, LeBlanc his waist, and finally Hicks peeled him off. Manny never moved from his desk.
Butterman stormed out. Shecky refitted his dentures, touched his face where it hurt, and tested his jaw left, right, up, down.
“See?” Shecky said to Paddy Hicks. “See how little you can really know about a person just by listening to them?”
FOR a week, they monitored chitchat, takeout orders, lovers’ quarrels, and everything in between over four community phones in a neighborhood where few had phones at home. One male, drunk and never identified, told a woman he was coming over to beat her brains out. Another man called the same woman and asked her to a dance. A pimp used the five-and-dime phone to manage his affairs, and three others ran competing loan-shark books from Gilda’s. The clubhouse tap was a font of bribes and petty ballot fraud.
“Nothing important,” Manny said.
Raines came on only occasionally. He was out of the pross trade but kept in touch with former whores. He had a piece of several businesses in the area—a bowling alley, bootblacks, even a Chinese restaurant—and was a canny investor. He rescued his Chinese cook from a protection racket, and talked some guy named Kenny out of jumping bail. He got water turned on and child support paid.
Raines called Bo “Sonny.” Once, in a slip, he called him “Garrett.” Bo, too, used the clubhouse phone. He was marrying Miss Smith in September, and promised to move his new family down south. The boy he played with was Garrett’s son, and Miss Smith had been Garrett’s girl. Bo kept tabs on the dope business at Gibraltar Street, talking in elaborate code about “fried rice” and “chop suey” to a half-dozen unidentified males, saying as little as possible. Caesar Raines never called Gibraltar.
The wires looked like a wash until LeBlanc caught an outgoing call on the Gilda’s phone to GA3-2832.
A male picked up, tinny music in the background. “Yeah,” he said.
“Yeah,” Caesar said. “He around?”
“Who?”
Caesar mumbled a name or a word, near or here.
The male said, “Nah.”
Caesar said, “Tell him, call me. I’m up the store.”
New England Bell said GAylord 3-2832 was a skid row hotel off Park Square. Manny, replaying the tape as they waited for the callback, heard a hitch in Raines’s voice when he said “near” or “here.” It was a name Raines hated, and hated saying, a name he was afraid of.
Hicks, on surveillance duty, radioed that Bo was keeping patrons away from the pay phone and Raines was chasing a hip flask with Pepto-Bismol. About forty minutes passed.
The Gilda’s phone rang, incoming. Manny grabbed the headphones. Caesar answered on the second ring. “Yeah?”
A different male this time, same music in the background. “What’s up?” he said.
“Not much,” Caesar said, trying to sound unruffled and failing. “You?”
Silence followed, a beat too long. Caesar blurted, “Gotta see you.”
Another wrong-note silence followed.
The male said, “Come on up.”
Hicks was on the radio, giving play-by-play. Raines and Bo huddled after the call. Then Bo went to his car and drove north, maybe back to Giampanelli’s, another decoy hand job. Raines, now alone, squared the block twice looking for a tail, then started toward the clubhouse.
Manny sat back, headphones around his neck, cigarette lit. Shecky, Scanlon, and LeBlanc watched him thoroughly enjoy a Lark, clouds of blue-gray smoke making the basement even less breathable. Manny was savoring what he knew, and the fact that he knew it: Caesar’s supplier is John Doe Near; Near sounds white and local; Near scares Caesar.
Manny had dragged his big office blackboard into the plant. Now he erased the question mark at the top of his chart with an air of triumph. He wrote:
THE WHITE MAN (NEAR/HERE?)
CAESAR
BO ANGEL
RUNNERS LOOKOUTS INSIDE DEALERS
“We should follow Caesar when he meets the white man,” LeBlanc insisted.
Manny said no. “Caesar will spot you, and when he does, he’ll get to thinking: how did that detective know my movements? It’ll take him five minutes to figure out this wire, and change his patterns. Stay invisible, and you’re a secret. Show yourself, you lose your power.”
Slaves rang and teletypes clacked as Raines’s world got wider and deeper. Martin Luther King came to town that week and people on the restaurant pay phones could talk of nothing else.
“See him at the church?” a woman asked her sister in Brockton.
“Handsome man,” the sister agreed.
The dime-store slave went off, and LeBlanc monitored the call.
“Outgoing,” he told Manny and Scanlon. “Owner calling the cops. Says he’s getting robbed at gunpoint.”
LeBlanc threw down the headset and made for the door. Manny barred his path. “Bonehead stunt,” he warned.
“I can be there in two minutes,” LeBlanc said.
“And Caesar’ll see you and start to wonder how and why a narc got there so fast.”
LeBlanc twisted free of Manny. “Someone might get hurt.”
Manny shoved him backward to a chair. The dime-store phone rang again. Outgoing. Five rings, then silence.
“He’s calling for help,” LeBlanc said.
The phone rang again. Three rings, silence.
By the end of the afternoon, the story was clear. Two brothers, Earl and Andy, had stuck up the dime store, taking four bucks and winging one of the checkout girls. Caesar Raines got wind of it, and tracked the brothers down. He called Bo from the clubhouse and gave him orders.
“You know them?” Caesar asked Bo, with LeBlanc monitoring through the slave.
“Earl, sure,” Bo said.
“Andy’s his little brother,” Caesar said. “They’re over at their momma’s house right now.”
“Yeah?” Bo said, uneasy.
“Go see them, Sonny, hear? You tell Earl he’s been warned about this before, been warned too many times. You shoot him. Don’t kill him. Shoot a finger.”
Bo said nothing.
“Not a finger,” Caesar said. “Man can’t work without a finger. Shoot a toe. Little toe. Then give him a bus ticket someplace. Tell him, he comes back except to see his folks, I’ll know it.”
Bo said nothing.
“Make sure the little brother, Andy, watches. Make sure he knows it’s a warning.”
“Any particular toe?” Bo asked.
“Little one, I said.”
“Yeah, but, like, right foot or left foot?”
“What damn difference could that make?”
Bo said nothing.
“Listen,” Caesar said, “you’re a gentle soul, I know. Gram raised you proper.”
“Not like Garrett, you mean.”
“Garrett was different, is all. And Garrett’s gone.”
“And I don’t want to wind up like Garrett,” Bo said.
“I know you don’t like the gun part. I know that. But, listen, we’re figures of respect around here. People expect us to stand up for ’em. You’re doing Earl a service, running him out of town with just a toe blown off. And you may be saving his little brother from a life of stickups. Think of it that way.”
Dave LeBlanc disengaged the slave just after Bo hung up. He told Manny about it.
“It’s up to you,” Manny said. “You can go save Earl’s toe and flush the whole drug case. That’s a lot of work for all of us, flushed, and over a little toe. But—and I mean this sincerely, Dave—it’s your choice.”
LeBlanc looked miserable.
“Fuck ’em,” Scanlon said. “Earl, Andy, Bo, Caesar. Fuck ’em all.”
“Clam up,” Manny said. He turned to LeBlanc. “Dave, decide.”
Scanlon gnawed a toothpick down to pulp. LeBlanc held his breath and stared at the four slave phones as if he wished they’d never come into his life.
Manny said, “Well?”
“Let it happen,” LeBlanc said.
MANNY stopped downtown to give Ray Dunn a progress report on the Caesar Raines wires. Ray was on the way out.
“Lot going on,” Manny told him.
“Let’s take a ride,” Ray said. “You can tell me all about it on the way.”
Manny got on the expressway, southbound, in a steady rain. Traffic crawled, halted, crawled some more.
“Where we going?” Manny asked.
“City & County,” Ray said. The wipers beat as they inched past South Station.
“What’s there?”
“A psychiatrist named Lem Childs. He’s a witness in the priest killing. He’s been dodging us, so I figured I’d surprise him at his hospital. Perhaps your glowering presence will jog his memory. How’s the wire?”
“Good,” Manny said, “but we won’t nail the source with just a wire—the source and Caesar are too hinky. We got Caesar’s MO pretty well mapped out, and we got a line on the source. He’s male, and he’s white, and he’s scary. Caesar reaches out for him every other day, sometimes at an old hotel in Park Square, sometimes in bars or restaurants or on street corners. Caesar leaves a message and waits for a callback. The source gets back to him—usually in an hour or two. Him and Caesar talk, then they meet. There’s no pattern to the phones the source uses, so you can’t set up on ’em in advance.”
“And you can’t tail Caesar?”
“Not for any distance, no. Caesar’s as good as they get.”
Below Chinatown, the traffic cleared, and Manny made for Quincy in the breakdown lane.
“So what do you want to do with Caesar?” Ray asked.
“I want to take him down. If we nail him on a felony drug sale, he’ll roll over on the white man.”
“Are you sure he’ll roll?”
“No.”
“Do we have him on a felony sale?”
“No.”
Ray thought this over for a minute until he got Manny’s drift. “You want to use my brother,” Ray said.
Manny had a little speech prepared. “Angel Chacon buys from Caesar, and Biff buys from Angel. So let’s send Biff to Angel with a wad of cash, begging to do a big package. Angel could decline the deal, but he won’t, ’cause he’s greedy. So Angel will take Biff to Caesar.”
“No,” Ray said.
“Why not? It makes sense. Admit it makes sense.”
“Biff’s not ready to go in the deep end of the pool, and you know it.”
“If Biff was just another undercover, you’d tell me to go ahead.”
“Well, he isn’t, so make a different plan.”
“Ray, please. My whole life as a narc—which seems like my whole life period—I’ve been making shit-ass street-level cases. Thousands of them. Slam a junkie here, bang his dealer there. The squarest, cleanest shit-ass cases, but still. Maybe, on a great day, I get Bennie Anastasia to rat out one of the brokers, and bust my rump for a month and take the broker out. Then some other broker fills his shoes and nothing changes. That whole time I’ve never seen pure, uncut product. I’ve never looked the source in the eye. Now I’m close, and I got to have it, whatever the cost.”
“You sound like a junkie.”
“Good narcs always do. Besides, Biff wants to make the buy.”
“Biff wants to make you happy.”
“It’s his life.”
“Exactly,” Ray said.
They were heading for the ocean on a winding road. A Corrections cop loomed from the fog in a yellow slicker, waving a flashlight across his knees. City & County was linked to the mainland by a rickety half-mile causeway with locked iron gates at the shore end. Manny pulled up at the gates and rolled down his window.
“BPD,” Manny said, showing the guard his shield.
“We’re here to see Dr. Childs,” Ray added from the passenger side.
The cop jogged into his guardhouse and called out to the island.
“Childs’ll know we’re coming,” Manny said, watching the cop talk on the phone. Ray watched him too.
The guard jogged back to the car. “Dr. Childs says he can’t see you. He’s very busy. Perhaps if you wrote him a letter—”
“Open the fucking gate,” Manny yawned.
The guard hemmed. Manny got out of the car and the guard scampered back and opened the gate. Manny drove onto the causeway, waving to the guard as he passed.
City & County looked like the ruin of a war ministry behind the Iron Curtain. One wing was dark and boarded-up, gutted in a fire and never rebuilt. The rest was harshly lit, square against the fog.
They went inside the big front doors and stopped at a security desk, where Manny checked his .38 after emptying it, dropping the bullets into his pocket. The elevator smelled like muscatel piss. They got off on the top floor and buttonholed an orderly pushing a cartful of pills. A leather sap hung on the orderly’s belt, next to jailer’s keys and a rabbit’s foot.
“Where’s Dr. Childs?” Ray asked.
The orderly pointed down the ward at an old man smoking a cigarette and signing papers against the wall. Childs had the twitchy movements of a hare. He wore a shabby summer-weight suit and white sneakers.
Childs looked up from his papers, and saw Manny first. Manny folded his arms across his chest and did his best to glower. Childs looked down and saw that Ray was shaking his hand.
“You’ve been avoiding us,” Ray said.
Down the ward, someone screamed.
Childs took them to a cramped office. Manny perched on the corner of the desk and grabbed the papers out of Childs’s hands.
“Four lobotomies so far,” Manny said, leafing through them, “and the night is young—”
Childs snatched his papers back and dropped them in his out box.
Ray said, “Father Sedgewick is dead.”
“Did you come all the way out here to tell me that?” Childs asked.
“You’ve lost a lot of friends in the last few years,” Ray said. “First there was Harlan Poole, then Seth Zimquist.”
“Zimquist committed suicide,” Childs said. “And Poole was hit by a car. George Sedgewick was my best friend. If I could help you find his killer, I would gladly do so.”
“You and Zimquist ran the Special Wing in Portsmouth,” Ray said. “Harlan Poole kept the patients in line, and Sedgewick took everyone’s confession. You were all pretty cozy.”
Childs’s phone rang. He picked it up, listened, grunted, then hung up. “I’m needed in the ward,” he said.
“Zimquist came east from California because the Navy promised him the chance to do something experimental with electroconvulsive therapy,” Ray said. “You were Zimquist’s partner, the pharmacology wizard, the man with the magic medicine chest. You and Zimquist were on the verge of a breakthrough—we’re talking Nobel Prize stuff here. You called yourselves the Manhattan Project.”
“It was a joke, our joke,” Childs said to Manny.
“Don’t sell yourself short,” Ray said. “Remember the admiral’s wife? She couldn’t sleep. She felt as if she were choking and couldn’t abide her husband’s touch. She spent a month under your care and went home a new woman. How about the test pilot—remember him?”
Ray was drawing Childs out, playing up past glories.
“A decorated fighter ace,” Childs said, “the fourth man ever to break the sound barrier, selected for the astronaut program, until they caught him stealing gravy boats from a department store.”
Ray egged him on. “You cured the pilot.”
“In two weeks,” Childs said. “It was a very long time ago—seems like years and years. I felt about pharmacology the way Father Sedgewick felt about God. To me, there was no problem meds couldn’t solve. I believed it was in our power to cure all mental illness.”
“And the Navy thought so too,” Ray said.
“The Navy hated counseling. Counseling was for homos and mama’s boys, they thought. They loved drugs because pharmacology seemed like warfare to them. Soften up the sociopath with a round of Stelazine, and after that, send in the Marines. They could relate to it, you know?”
The phone rang. Childs answered. “In a moment,” he said, then hung up. “I believed that electroconvulsive therapy, used together with certain drugs, could be a powerful therapy—a life-changing therapy.”
“And you were right,” Ray said. “You worked miracle cures.”
“There are no miracles,” Childs said, although the word clearly pleased him.
“Until Harlan Poole died,” Ray said, coming forward in his chair. “They said it was hit-and-run, but everyone knew it was murder. You and Seth Zimquist had an argument over Poole’s death, and never spoke again. Then the Navy shut down the experiments, and kicked you all off the base.”
“You’ve been talking to Zimquist’s wife,” Childs said.
“His widow,” Ray corrected. “Seth Zimquist said that there had been a mistake. One mistake—that’s all. Because of one mistake, your life’s work was destroyed. Tell me, how did it feel?”
Childs assumed the tone of a particularly patient grade-school teacher. “You should know a few things before you make an even bigger ass of yourself, Mr. Dunn. Laura had a nervous breakdown after her husband’s suicide. You interviewed her. Did she strike you as stable?”
Ray didn’t answer, which Childs took as a no.
“More to the point, Laura’s theories about Harlan Poole are drawn entirely from similar delusions expressed by Seth just before he killed himself. I wonder if Laura told you about her husband’s other beliefs in his final months. Seth believed that John Kennedy was killed by a CIA sniper team, did Laura tell you that? He believed that UFOs routinely visit Earth and that the government was covering up hard evidence of this. He believed that cancer could be cured with avocado pits but, again, unseen forces were hushing up the truth.”
Childs went to his file cabinet and pulled out a folder, which he gave to Ray. Inside were a dozen letters from September and October 1963, the months before Seth Zimquist took his last walk in the woods. Ray scanned the letters, handing them to Manny one by one. They were typed on plain paper and signed “Yours, Seth.” In the letters Zimquist espoused many nutty theories—and never mentioned Harlan Poole.
Childs watched them scan the letters. “Seth Zimquist was a brilliant man, but he lost his grip on reality toward the end. Laura has never been the same since Seth took his own life. It’s a pitiful story—but that’s all it is. If you’ve been conducting your probe based on their views, you’ve got a lot to be embarrassed about.”
Childs took the papers back from Manny. “I’ll have my lawyer send you photostats of these letters. In the meantime, may I suggest you get back to the business of finding George Sedgewick’s killer?”
MANNY and Ray pulled their car out of the parking lot. The rain had turned to drizzle.
“You believe Childs?” Manny asked as they rattled down the causeway.
Ray stared out the window, his chin in his fist. “Do you?”
“Those letters are pretty kooky,” Manny said. “Could be the Zimquists are soft upstairs.”
They rode in silence the rest of the way to Ray’s. Manny let him off in the driveway.
Ray leaned into his window. “Are you going to use my brother against Caesar Raines and his source?”
“Let’s let Biff decide. He’s a man. It’s only fair.”
Ray looked beat. “You can leave messages for me downtown,” he said. “I’ll be back in a few days.”
“Where are you going?”
Ray said, “New Hampshire.”