MANNY set up in a laundromat diagonally across from Bennie’s rainbow crash pad until he conned a vacant apartment from the landlord, a John Birch type, who believed Manny was investigating Harvard’s Russian Department. Manny camped by a window upstairs the rest of Monday and all Tuesday. He walked around the block. He sat in his car. He read the funnies, smoked devoutly, and couldn’t remember when he’d been happier. This was your basic stakeout, something Manny was the best at.
At least fifteen people were staying at 505 Kirkland. Three times that number came and went each day: short visits, strange faces, few repeaters. Nerves going in, some even counting money; smiles coming out. Classic drugrelated foot traffic, another Gibraltar.
Wednesday, early: Bennie left the house for the first time since Monday lunch. He was wearing white jeans, paratrooper boots, and some kind of African shirt thing Manny had once seen on the Nigerian ambassador at Logan.
Bennie went northwest on Kirkland toward Harvard Square. Manny followed in his Chevy, staying a block back, making like he was hunting for parking, and feeling very obvious. Bennie was heading for a meet in the Square, Manny guessed, so Manny left Kirkland and came around on Sumner. He set up behind a wall, back to Kirkland, rearview mirror catching the corner. He waited a tense minute thinking he’d lost Bennie, until the white jeans appeared in the rearview mirror, right where they should be, cutting across the fire station lot, heading for the Yard.
Manny was thinking pickup. Bennie sold smack. He was a pro. He wouldn’t keep more than a few hundred decks on hand at a time. Assume half the foot traffic is legit. Bennie sold to twenty, twenty-five kids a day, for three days, averaging two nicks a kid. Every three days he’d meet a guy, pay him off, re-up.
Manny watched Bennie slip behind the firehouse, neon African shirt flapping like a sign: BUST ME. Manny had run Bennie as an informant for six busy years. He’d spent more time with Bennie than he had with his wife. Bennie’s defiance shook Manny’s confidence. Find your mom—the balls of the guy. Now Bennie would get his. The afternoon presented known ground: buyers and suppliers, weasels walking green into meets, easy tails on suckers in loud shirts. Sitting in his Chevy, untuned engine arbitrarily gunning, Manny felt a surge of what another man might call joy.
Bennie beelined for the China Bowl, a pink-painted chow-mein monstrosity that Manny remembered from Intelligence Division reports as a pusher hangout. Bad food too, Intel said.
Manny chose his play. No way to see the handoff from inside the China Bowl without being made and queering everything. Manny would have to stay in the street and jump Bennie after he scored. This meant the supplier would walk. Okay. The bag Bennie’d get in the Bowl would have a few hundred decks of heroin in it, too big for Bennie to put in his pants pockets. So Bennie would go in, sit down, talk future deals with his man, pay, score, maybe eye-balling the decks quickly in the dim light, probably not, then step into the street carrying the bag in his hand. Manny would wait here, roust Bennie with the junk, then reminisce about Mears.
Manny parked his car and lounged near a Rexall’s across Dunster, his back to the China Bowl, watching its flamingo reflection in the storefront glass. Ray wanted the case against Bennie to be clean. “Nail him with the dope in Boston,” Ray kept saying. “If Bennie’s in Cambridge, call Cambridge PD. No stunts this time.” Manny agreed, although even as he did, he knew Ray was in dreamland. Bennie would stay out of Boston, and Cambridge PD would observe all the legal niceties if they arrested Bennie. Manny hadn’t sorted everything out yet, but he was clear on this much: Shecky Bliss was RIP, and Bennie knew something about it. For that, Bennie would get hammered, and Manny didn’t give a fuck where it happened.
The door of the China Bowl swung open and Bennie stepped into the light. Manny ducked behind a newspaper stand and craned to see the telltale package in Bennie’s hands. Bennie was walking and pedestrians were everywhere; Manny couldn’t see. Bennie turned, now thirty yards away. Manny couldn’t take the package in front of half the Harvard student body. Manny stepped into Rexall’s and pretended to admire the corrective girdles.
Salesgirl: “May I help you?”
Manny, furtive, startled, sweating: “Just looking.”
He peeked out the store window, hearing the salesgirl dial the Cambridge cops. Bennie was gone. Manny’s brain was firing on all pistons: He’ll go straight back to 505 Kirkland, no detours. Manny stepped out of Rexall’s, ringing the shop-door bell, and, gambling that Bennie wasn’t now tailing him, ran-walked a quarter mile by an indirect route back to his Chevy parked on Trowbridge. Manny drove like a maniac, hacking and winded, to the corner of Trowbridge and Kirkland. He needed to grab Bennie before Bennie made 505 with all those law scholars around. Manny waited, checking both mirrors, hoping no Cambridge PD prowl cars would make him for the Rexall’s girdle perv, then he turned and saw Bennie sauntering up the block carrying a brown paper bag. Now Manny knew everything any narc ever needed to know: the bag held heroin and Bennie was running it over to 505 Kirkland.
Manny waited the time it took to inhale his cigarette deeply and let smoke out, glanced right and left for Cambridge cops. All clear. He stomped the gas. Bennie saw the Chevy hit Kirkland, saw the face behind the wheel, and streaked across the lawns. Manny caught up to him, flattening Bennie with an open driver’s door. Manny backed up quickly but carefully, missing the precious informant’s head on the pavement by about nine inches. He piled a knocked-out Bennie in the backseat, tucking the brown paper bag in his own jacket pocket, and drove, sweating like a speed freak, over the Charles Street Bridge, back to where he was a cop.
Manny made for the Callahan Tunnel and East Boston. He took Anastasia to the Skyway Motel, a dive hard by the airport, popular with the plainclothesmen. Vice questioned suspects at the Skyway and Homicide used the rooms for naps and adultery. The BPD got a group rate, smashed furniture thrown in free.
Manny double-cuffed Bennie to a chair and upended a pail of toilet broth on his head. As Bennie came to, Manny hit him on the ridge above the nose, bone-on-bone jar running up Manny’s arm. Rage and frustration at everything that had gone wrong since Jay Scanlon broke the door at 10 Gibraltar swamped Manny from nowhere. For a moment, he was close to killing Bennie. He stepped back. Bennie drooled Harvard colors.
Manny pitched the brown paper bag onto Bennie’s lap. His trembling fists lit a Lark. “There,” he said, ugly-triumphant. “I got you with your junk pickup. You’re a fucking career persistent fucking felony fucking offender, and that bag makes me your landlord. Welcome back.”
Anastasia moved his face as if to talk.
“Shut the fuck up. Where is Joe Mears?”
Anastasia spat out teeth, blood, and shredded tongue. His jaw was shattered. “Luk im da bug,” he said.
The bag was full of confetti.
Bennie grinned lopsidedly. Manny turned the TV on loud and gave Bennie the single worst beating he’d ever given any man. This took fifteen minutes. Romper Room was on.
Bennie was a mess. Manny had once heard from some visiting New York narcs that heroin could be soaked into clothes, then later, somehow, distilled out again. It sounded like Buck Rogers to Manny, but he was sure that Bennie was dirty. 505 Kirkland was a drug spot, he’d seen that on Monday and Tuesday. Why walk into an obvious pickup to score a bag of confetti? Bright boys like Bennie sometimes did fake pickups to smoke out a sting, but why had he run from the Chevy if he wasn’t in possession?
Manny left Bennie cuffed to the chair at the Skyway Motel and drove over to the police lab. He bribed a bored young chemist to test the confetti while Manny waited.
“What am I looking for?” the chemist asked.
“Opiate family, including fentanyl,” Manny said. “If not that, try everything else. All I know is, that bag breaks the law.”
“Bullfighting?” the chemist mocked, eyeing Manny’s bloody shirt, then disappeared into the lab.
Manny sprawled in a chair like he was back in the maternity ward, his poor war bride of a wife yet again in labor and yowling for the knockout drops. Manny’s head spun. If it wasn’t drugs in the bag, he had nothing on Bennie, nothing he could prove, and that meant a career-ending brutality suit. The ex-rat was probably just coming to in the Skyway Motel, Mr. Bennie Double Concussion.