MANNY had served with Shecky almost ten years and considered him a close friend. Yet Manny realized in the days after Shecky bled to death on a sidewalk in Telegraph Heights that nobody really knew Shecky after all. Shecky sometimes mentioned sisters in Brookline whom he rarely saw, and didn’t like. They were his only family. The one other thing Manny knew was that Shecky had left a will with a nice young lawyer on Beacon Hill, and when Manny called the lawyer with the fucked-up news, the lawyer asked him to come over.
“You’re the executor,” the lawyer said when Manny arrived.
Manny and the lawyer unsealed the will in the presence of one of the lawyer’s secretaries. Manny gathered that this was some kind of ancient legal requirement.
The lawyer read it out loud. It was brief; Shecky didn’t have much beyond a checking account, which he wanted split between two women Manny had never heard of, old flames. “There’s one other thing,” the lawyer said. “It’s an old book which had belonged to Shecky’s father, an Orthodox rabbi, who’s long dead. The book is in a safe deposit box at Shecky’s bank. I think it might be quite valuable, this book. It’s a very old collection of Torah commentaries.”
“What did Shecky want me to do with it?” Manny asked.
“He wanted you to give it to someone,” the lawyer said, running a finger over the will. “Yes, here: you’re to give the book to a Nahum Butterman.”
The lawyer looked up. “Do you know anyone by that name?”
The will included some instructions, “Things to do if I am killed LOD,” line-of-duty. Shecky didn’t want a hero’s send-off. No flags, no uniforms, no muffled drums, and no one from the police department above the rank of sergeant. Shecky wanted a memorial service, quick and simple.
What he got was a maudlin, showy sob fest, nothing like the service he had asked for in his will. The sisters took over and carted a hundred of their friends in from the suburbs, none of whom knew who Shecky was.
The men from Narco were the pallbearers: Scanlon, Butterman, and Hicks on one side, Manny and LeBlanc on the other, and some pimply kid from the undertaker’s filling in to make six. The narcs wore dark suits with narrow lapels, thin black ties, spit-shined shoes. Strangely, it was Shecky’s nemesis, Nat Butterman, who took it the hardest. He cried straight through the service.
Manny bribed the undertaker to tuck Shecky’s shield inside his suit pocket, loaded service .38 on Shecky’s left ankle, a pair of cuffs through a back belt loop, because you can’t send a narc to the next world naked.
BY THE time Shecky was buried, Vinnie Sullivan had been retained on Biff’s behalf. It was Vinnie who brought word to Ray that the DA’s Office, at the very highest levels, was bent on indicting Biff for murder.
“That’s ridiculous,” Ray said. “Let’s assume Biff shot Shecky, although I think it’s far from clear that he did. It’s obvious that Biff had some kind of mental breakdown during the raid. He was delusional when they brought him to Carney—seeing things, hearing things. A dozen cops can testify to that.”
“I don’t think this is about Biff,” Vinnie said.
“What do you mean?”
“I think they’re out to dirty you up, Ray. I think they still see you as a threat.”
“Are you saying they’d indict Biff to punish me?”
Vinnie said, “Johnny Cahill feels betrayed, and you know Johnny—he believes in an eye for a tooth.”
“Maybe I should go to Johnny. Pledge my fealty—whatever it takes.”
Vinnie shook his head. “Don’t go near Johnny. They got Biff committed to City & County on a thirty-day observation order. After that, Biff’ll be cut loose and we’ll have our own shrinks take a look at him.”
“Thirty days in City & County?” Ray said. “That place is a hellhole. Get him out of there, Vinnie.”
“I’m working on it,” Vinnie said.
In the hospital, Biff lost ground. Ray was permitted to see him once a day. Some days Biff was half sedated, chain-smoking Lucky Strikes, and remembering less and less about the morning he had chased Joe Mears out the window of the back bedroom in the Gibraltar Street projects.
He would ask Ray, “Why am I here?”
Ray would explain that there had been a shooting and Biff would ask, “Who got shot?”
“Shecky Bliss,” Ray would tell him.
Biff would strain to remember who Shecky Bliss was.
RAY explained to his two oldest sons what had happened, because they might see it on the news or hear it on the playground.
“Your Uncle Biff was in a shooting,” he told Ray Jr. and Timmy. “He’s okay. But he has to be in a kind of hospital for a while. Another man was killed—a good man named Shecky Bliss.”
Ray waited for their questions, but none came. Perhaps they saw this sort of thing on television all the time, or maybe it was just too big a tragedy for them to comprehend. They were either too young or too old, Ray didn’t know which.
“Shecky?” Ray Jr. finally asked. “That a foreign name?”
“Not really, no,” Ray said.
“Sounds foreign,” Timmy said. He pronounced it to himself. “Glad I’m not named Shecky.”
Whenever he was alone with his wife, Ray felt he had shot Shecky. Mary-Pat’s papers and files and mailings prepared in anticipation of their joint plunge into politics had been burned or sent to the dump. All of it was suddenly gone one night when Ray straggled in from the courthouse, and neither of them ever mentioned it.
Ray started staying away, sleeping in Biff’s flat by the bay in Dorchester. Biff’s place was close to City & County. Ray could get out to see his invalid brother pretty easily—at least that’s what Ray told himself. Mary-Pat didn’t ask.
Mostly Ray kept busy. He and Manny went to the Charles Street lockup and reinterviewed Caesar Raines, who had taken a plea to drug charges and gotten, as promised, a walk on the kidnapping and the shooting. He was looking at five to ten years. Caesar wouldn’t even see them until Manny supplied proof that the rest of the deal had been honored—that Bo had been suitably buried, and that Miss Smith and the child, Garrett, had been suitably moved to Richmond.
Caesar didn’t have much to add. Mears had showed up in early ’64 from nowhere. He had claimed to have connections into fentanyl and any other lab drug Caesar might covet, but he had demanded payment in full, on time.
“Mears had a source inside Narco?” Ray asked.
“Mears was talking to someone who was in touch with y’all,” Caesar said. “He knew what you were working on, knew who was who, that sort of thing.” He had names: Manny Manning was the boss, Mears knew that. ‘Shecky,’ ‘Butterball,’ ‘Hines’—these were names Mears knew.”
“Do you think he had a cop on the payroll?” Ray asked.
“Nah,” Caesar said. “He had some inside knowledge, but not that kind. After the blizzard, Mears warned me that Narco was asking questions about fentanyl and Gibraltar and I’d better keep my head low. He said Narco knew about Angel and to be careful of anybody Angel brought to me. When the undercover came ’round, Mears saw him in the street waiting for Bo, and asked, you know, ‘Who’s he?’
“I say he’s some little gangster name of Biff. Has cash, wants product. Mears gets keyed up on the name, Biff.
“He says, ‘Did Angel introduce him?’
“I say, ‘Yeah.’
“He says, ‘That white boy’s a cop.’
“I says, ‘Yeah, sure, fine,’ but Mears won’t let it sit.
“He says, ‘That cop knows too much. Kill him, Caesar.’ Now, after Garrett, I do what Mears wants. I do what I got to do to protect the family I have left. You still lookin’ for Mears?”
“Yes,” Manny said.
“Don’t bother,” Caesar said. “He’s long gone.”
Ray and Manny started to ask the same question. Ray let Manny ask it. “How do you know he’s gone?”
“He said he was leaving even before you sent the undercover in. He’d been saying that since the blizzard. Plus he hit me up for money maybe two-three weeks ago.”
Manny asked, “How much did he want?”
“Ten big ones,” Caesar said.
Ray said, “What did Mears need it for?”
“He was planning some big thing. Needed ten grand.”
“‘Some big thing,’” Ray repeated. “Like what?”
“Revenge, pro’bly,” Caesar said. “That’s what got Mears up in the morning. Whatever it was, he had to do it before leaving Boston.”
Ray and Manny went from the Charles Street lockup to Mears’s apartment, which had been sealed by Crime Scene on the day of the raid. The heat was off and the place was cold. Manny walked from room to room, smoking nervously.
“Crime Scene already searched this place,” Manny said from the kitchenette, pushing a drawer in and out. Cans of baked beans rolled across the floor.
Ray took his head out of Mears’s squalid bathroom. “They don’t know what to look for,” he called down the hall.
Manny mumbled, “Do we?”
Ray put his head in the hall again. “You say something?”
Manny stood in the kitchenette. “The ‘big thing’ Caesar was talking about—the ‘big thing’ Mears had to do before he could leave Boston. What was that, do you think?”
Ray talked through the walls. “Don’t know,” he said.
Manny stepped over splintered pieces of the bathroom door and into the back bedroom, where Mears had been sleeping when the raid team hit. The room filled Manny with dread, but he forced himself to look at every inch of floor, wall, and ceiling, under the mattress, behind the curtains, and in the drawer of Mears’s table. He tapped every space for false walls or false bottoms, winding up on his hands and knees in Mears’s bedroom closet, a flashlight in his armpit. He saw a glint of metal as he played the light around. He brought it back and saw the glint again.
“Ray!” he shouted.
Ray came to the open closet and looked in. By the baseboard in the back of the closet was a stiletto knife, open, blade broken off at an inch. On the handle of the stiletto was a design: an all-seeing, wide-awake eye.
“I’ve seen about a thousand stilettos in my life,” Manny said, “but I’ve only seen one like that. It was Bennie Anastasia’s pride and fucking joy.”
MANNY got home late that night. His wife was waiting in the foyer. She told him that a small gift box had come in the mail during the day, addressed by name to Manny’s oldest daughter, care of “Sgt. Manny Manning.” Dot Manning gave the box to her husband in the driveway, unopened. Dot crossed her arms and said, “What’s happening?”
“Lighten up,” Manny said. “It’s a prank. That damn Butterman.”
“And the chocolates? This was also Butterman?” Dot shook her head. “Tell me what is happening.”
Manny told Dot he was going out for smokes and left her in the driveway.
He put the suspicious box in the back seat of the car, in case it blew, and tried to figure out how much trouble he was in. I’m Mears, Manny began, and I feel the cops closing in on me. So what’s my next move? I stay off the phone, that’s for sure. I move around a lot. I only deal with one customer, maybe two, guys I control, guys like Caesar. That way I’m safe—unless Caesar gets sloppy and sells to an undercover, unless Caesar rolls on me.
Mears had to protect Caesar because Caesar was his firewall against the cops. If Narco had an undercover cop somewhere around Caesar, Mears had to ferret the uncle out, by name and by face. Mears probably thought he could smell the undercover if he ever met him, but to do that, he’d have to meet him, and Mears met no one—that was the whole point of Caesar. So, how?
Manny was stumped again, until he remembered what Caesar had said: “Manny Manning was the boss, Mears knew that.” Mears did what Manny would’ve done: he worked from what he knew to what he didn’t know. Mears used Manny to find Manny’s undercover. Mears knew my name and he worked from that, Manny thought. Mears found the street address for Narco—it’s in the goddam phone book—and sat on the place. Mears’s looking for me. He doesn’t know much, but he knows I’m plainclothes, so he forgets about the uniformed cops. He knows I’m a narc, so he focuses on the plainclothesmen in the precinct who work like narcs, the ones who prowl around slums all day in unmarked sedans—these’ll be narcs. Mears picked the oldest guy, and followed him home. Maybe Mears guessed Shecky was the sergeant, and maybe he shadowed Shecky home to an apartment with BLISS on the buzzer. After that, Mears picked the next-oldest guy, and that’s how he found me: by finding the house I went home to, the one with “The Mannings” written in scroll on a piece of fucking driftwood over the mailbox.
He tailed me into a meeting with Biff. He was with us in church the day I briefed Biff on the big buy. That’s how Mears made Biff for a UC, by playing me as a mark. Mears investigated the investigators.
How had Mears gotten Biff’s name? Manny was stumped again, until he thought of an answer. Mears went down to the Academy, looked at the pictures of the graduating cadet classes hanging outside Combat Cross Auditorium, the Hall of Heroes, till he found Biff’s face from 1958. Biff at eighteen, crew-cut and crooked teeth, barely shaving, proud in blue. Underneath the screwball smile: “Dunn, Biff.” On the day of the fateful buy, Mears saw the same face, older now, buying dope from Caesar Raines.
Manny finally understood why he couldn’t stop driving: Mears tails me. Maybe he’s with me right now. Manny faced three awful truths, one after another:
Mears knew where Manny lived.
Mears knew his wife and his daughters.
Mears was hunting Manny.
Manny was appalled and, strangely, thrilled.
He wound up at Wollaston Beach Park. He walked through the pines to the surf, and threw the box that had been mailed to his daughter up the sand, figuring if it was booby-trapped, this would set it off.
Manny should have called bomb disposal, but then he’d have to explain that he was being quietly terrorized by a drug dealer, which would have snuffed the Manny Manning warhorse legend. Never ask for help. Instead, Manny stood in the drizzle on an empty beach, throwing a small box up the shore.
The package didn’t blow. So he soaked it in the chilly sea and sat on a park bench under an orange streetlight. He opened the box at arm’s length with his pen knife. Inside was a pair of testicles, shrunken and badly discolored, dark dice. Manny shrieked, stood up, ripped his pistol from his shoulder holster, scanned the stunted pines, draped in shifting drizzly mist.
Nothing, nobody.
He reholstered his gun and sat down with the box. The panic passed and Manny was just plain curious.
Whose are these? he wondered. He tried to be Mears. He reviewed the possibilities. Angel was in jail; Butterman and Hicks had scooped him up the day after the raid on apartment 33. Garrett Hays was dead. Bo, dead. Caesar, good as dead.
Were these Biff’s balls? New panic, until Manny got a grip. The box had been mailed days ago. Manny had stopped in to see Biff at the hospital that morning. Biff had balls when Manny saw him.
It didn’t matter whose balls these were. Manny got Mears’s message anyway: stay away from me, I’ll stay away from you. Manny shook the little box, heard a soft rattle of its contents, or was it drizzle falling through the pines?
These are mine, Manny realized as he drove back to his house. He’s giving them back to prove that he took them.
When he got home, he woke everyone up—Dot and his seven daughters, who ranged in age from nineteen to six—told them to pack light. Manny told the girls some story about a gas leak.
“I called the firemen,” Manny said when his family was in the driveway. “They’ll fix it right up. Take a little while for the place to air out, though.”
“I didn’t smell any gas,” Louise, the baby, said.
“That’s because you’re short,” Manny told her. “Gas rises and only tall people smell it.”
The oldest girls were scared. “I have school,” one of them said.
“Forget school,” Manny said.
“Is there a gas leak there too?” Louise asked.
“There’s some kind of leak,” Manny said. “Let’s go.”
He piled everyone in the station wagon, drove them to a motel in the southwest suburbs, and checked his brood into three rooms under the name Kelly. Dot followed them in Manny’s Chevy. When the girls were asleep, Manny and his wife went out to the station wagon to talk.
“There’s a guy,” Manny said. “Red hair, crew cut, well-built. He’ll kill you and the girls if he can. Don’t go back to the house. Don’t let the girls go to school. Don’t let them out of your sight.”
Dot didn’t ask who the man was, or why he wanted to hurt Manny’s family, or how it had come to this. She just watched her husband light a cigarette.
“You’ll find this man?” she said.
“I’ll find him.”
“You’ll make it so he can’t hurt us?” It was like her question of a thousand years ago, when the feds arrested Tim Dunn and the rest: You’ll protect my girls?
Manny gave her a kiss. “I’ll kill him,” he said.