THE CHEMIST had an answer. “Nothing,” he said, two pudgy hands making zeros. “There’s no dope or morph or smack or any opiate, or anything else that breaks the law. Thank you, come again.”
Manny wanted to grind the snotty little shit out like a cigarette. What the fuck was he supposed to do now? Apologize to Bennie? He could picture that: kneeling to unlock the double cuffs, “Hey, ha-ha, sorry about running you down and tuning you up. How’s the noggin?”
A doctor Manny knew met him at the motel and worked on Bennie.
“Can he talk?” Manny asked the doctor.
“Not for a while,” the doctor said, closing his bag. “Feed him through this straw. Give him codeine and don’t be stingy. Call me day after tomorrow, and we’ll see.”
The doctor’s brother had been a cop with Manny, so the house call only cost a hundred dollars in cash.
Manny swallowed hard and called Ray at Biff’s flat. “I’m at the Skyway,” Manny said. “You better get up here.”
“Who’s covering Bennie?” Ray asked.
“Bennie’s with me,” Manny said.
“Is he talking?”
“Not in so many words,” Manny said.
RAY arrived at the Skyway Motel with Biff, who immediately turned on the TV and started watching a cartoon. Manny had smoked his way through a pack of butts by then, and Bennie was out cold on the bed, one hand cuffed to the bedstead, his face misshapen from the beating and from the hasty jaw-wiring job afterward. Ray walked around Bennie several times, almost on tiptoes, as if Bennie were a Jackson Pollock hanging in a museum. Then Ray turned to Manny and very quietly said, “What have you done?”
“I worked him over,” Manny said. “Go cry in the corner if you’re so upset.”
Ray hunched awkwardly as men who are not accustomed to fighting often do just before they throw a punch. Manny saw the punch coming before Ray even made a fist, and Manny decided that he would take a shot from Ray. Manny watched as Ray worked himself up to it, then worked himself back down again.
“If we let him go now, he’ll rat me for police brutality,” Manny said.
“And if we don’t, he’ll rat us all for kidnapping,” Ray said.
It felt like the end of the line. Both men sat down and watched Biff watch TV. Manny glumly studied the brown paper bag as if it would tell him how to get out of what it had gotten him into.
“How much property gets used in lab tests?” Manny asked.
“Couple percent of gross weight,” Ray said
Manny stood up. “This bag’s half empty.”
They left Biff with Bennie and blasted crosstown to the lab. The chemist had gone off tour an hour earlier. Ray stood lookout while Manny burgled personnel files and found the chemist’s home address: 12 Perry, Cambridge. They crossed the Charles and took Memorial Drive.
A light was on in an upstairs apartment. Manny shoulder-popped the door. The chemist wore a flowing saffron robe, Manny’s confetti spread in front of him on a low Japanese table, surrounded by rings of lit candles.
“You told my friend the confetti wasn’t contraband,” Ray said, closing the door.
“It isn’t.”
“What exactly is it?” Manny inquired, a frightening lilt to his voice.
“D-lysergic acid diethylamide,” the chemist said. Manny and Ray were silent. The chemist looked rewarded, as if stumping them were the point.
Manny grabbed a fistful of saffron robe and hoisted the chemist to whisper at him, “Explain.”
“Relax,” the chemist gulped. “Jesus. It’s a drug, okay? Actually, it’s an ergot-based synthetic compound invented by Sandoz in Switzerland during the war. Takes about forty-five minutes to set in. I swallowed a rather ambitious dose, oh, forty minutes ago. So no more violence. I’ll tell you what you want to know. Just don’t send me on a bad trip.”
Ray and Manny thought he meant a prison term.
“It’s called different things,” the chemist said. “LSD, acid, whatever. But it’s all the same splendid shit. Half of Harvard has tried it. You guys narcs from Antarctica or something?”
Ray was flashing back to monthly newsletters he got from the USBN, the federal narcs. The bulletins were constantly hyping new drug epidemics with headlines like Hashish Horror and Morphine Menace. They were filled with “case studies” about Iowa coeds who puffed on a joint and wound up lesbian. Ray had always thought the newsletters were useful—for starting fires and training puppies. But maybe the feds were finally on to something. Ray remembered reading an item in one of them about a strong hallucinogen invented in Switzerland catching on in bootleg form on college campuses. He remembered the funny name, “acid.”
“So it’s like marijuana then?” Manny asked.
“Yeah, sure,” the chemist said, “except five to ten million times more potent. That’s if pure. Pure LSD is supposed to be crystal. I’ve never seen it pure—only accredited researchers can get their hands on pure crystal.”
“Why?” Ray asked.
“You are not dealing with grass here. Acid is way the fuck too powerful. Take that pack of butts there,” the chemist said, pointing to the Larks in Manny’s shirt pocket. “What’s that? Five grams? Five grams of pure crystal LSD is five million micrograms.”
Manny said, “So?”
“So a street-standard LSD dose is something like seventy-five micrograms. Think about it. Five lousy grams would be enough to supply Boston for a year. Sandoz’ll only ship pure LSD to doctor types with FDA import licenses.”
Manny said, “Is it dangerous?”
“If not controlled, very. There are hospitals in the Haight in San Francisco that see ten cases of LSD-induced psychosis a day, climbing all the time. Bad trips are easy to have. The guy who turned me on to acid used to steal it from the Psychology Department at Harvard. There was a prof over there, Tim Leary, big LSD guru, kept a few grams around at all times. Later my friend flunked out and couldn’t steal the stuff anymore. So he mixed up a batch in his kitchen sink and tried a dose. He miscalculated purity by just a little bit and wound up in a locked mental ward.”
Ray was remembering the USBN bulletins—something from over the winter about acid getting outlawed. “Is it still legal?” he asked the chemist.
“For another week. New laws go into effect on April 12. After that, possession’s a big felony. In six days acid goes criminal and the whole psychedelic scene changes forever. That’s why every hustler up and down the East Coast is scrambling to get an LSD stockpile together.”
“And that’s why you stole our bag,” Manny said.
“Yeah, I stole your bag. I can only imagine how you got it. After April 12, Sandoz stops shipping and the only acid on the streets will be unstable homemade shit which has put a lot of hippies in the hospital.”
“Who are the hippies?” Ray asked.
“This a put-on? Alan Funt, come out.”
Manny grabbed an armful of saffron and annunciatingly asked, “Who are the mother fucking hippies? Give me names. Nicknames. Descriptions. Hangouts. KAs. Start with the leaders. Speak slowly. Go.”
“They’re everyone,” the chemist sputtered, shutting his eyes. “Jesus Christ, you two. Go to the Common any Sunday. Ever wonder who those kids are, the ones flying kites, playing guitar, wearing floppy hats?”
Ray, come to think of it, had noticed college-age youths in public places dressing strangely.
“Well, that’s my generation, dig it? We are tuning in and dropping out, attacking the evils of capitalism.”
“You mean like the Commies?” Manny asked.
The chemist ignored him. “Hippies are just a bunch of kids who don’t like what’s been happening to this country. I mean, is this why we fried Nagasaki? So you two could kick in my door, no idea what you’re chasing, and strangle me? You probably aren’t bad men, just caffeine junkies with B-movie minds. You are what the hippies don’t like.”
Ray was beginning to understand.
“You ever hear of a light-skinned Negro guy named Bennie Anastasia selling LSD out of a house over on Kirkland?”
“Heard of him,” the chemist said. “His product is strong, man. They say he has a connect inside.”
Manny: “Inside?”
“Yeah, like a university lab.”
“Or a mental hospital,” Ray said. He described Mears. “Do you know anybody like that?”
“No,” the chemist said.
Ray and Manny ransacked the chemist’s place.
“What am I looking for?” Manny called from a bedroom closet.
“Who knows?” Ray said, maniacally rifling a desk.
They found the chemist balled up like a scolded tot in the corner of his kitchen, eyes squeezed shut. They left him a handful of tabs. Ray stopped at a sign on the wall, the circle with the interior lines like collapsed crosshairs from the front door of 505 Kirkland.
“What’s this mean?” Ray asked.
“Peace,” the chemist smiled, tripping.
“NOW what?” Manny asked. They were on Memorial Drive, Boston-bound.
“Follow the drugs,” Ray said.
“Which drugs? Mears’s fentanyl or Bennie’s acid?”
“Mears is the source for both of them. Think about it. Mears flees Gibraltar after tossing liquid in Biff’s eyes, giving Biff symptoms that sound a lot like an LSD dosing. Bennie Anastasia was in with Mears from before the beginning of your case against Gibraltar. Remember, Caesar Raines said Mears had a source inside Narco—a source that told Mears what you were up to. That source has to be Bennie. He’s been fucking you all along.”
“No way,” Manny said. “Bennie wouldn’t do that. I know him.”
“You don’t know him. He was your informant, not your friend. Owning a man and knowing him are two different things.”
Memorial Drive was deserted, now past midnight, and Manny was behind the wheel. They had been in this part of a case before, straight from a meet with a new source, heads abuzz with fresh answers and fresh questions.
Back at the motel, Bennie was groggy but awake and rattling his shackles against the bedframe. Biff sat in front of the television, volume off, room bathed in blue-gray flicker.
Manny unlocked Bennie’s cuffs. Bennie stood up, massaged his wrist, and glared. He sputtered a curse, or tried to, and drooled.
“Listen carefully,” Ray said. “We know you trafficked LSD with Joe Mears.”
Bennie stopped sputtering.
Ray said, “We know you tipped off Mears to Narco’s moves, and we know you told Mears that Biff was a cop. Mears told Caesar, and Caesar nearly killed Biff.”
It was Bennie’s turn to panic.
“That’s a ton of shit on your head,” Ray said. “Conspiracy to murder a police officer is mandatory life. So here’s my offer: you answer a few questions, forget that Manny smashed your jaw, and in return you get to go home tonight.”
Bennie nodded.
“How long has Mears been selling you LSD?”
Bennie held up a finger.
“One month?” Ray asked.
Bennie shook his head.
“One year,” Ray said.
Bennie nodded.
“Who is Mears?” Ray asked.
Bennie shrugged.
“I mean, is he a Boston boy, an ex-con, a member of the Elks? What the fuck was he before he showed up offering fentanyl and LSD to the highest bidder?”
Bennie screwed up his face up, as in Got me.
“Did you ever meet Mears’s source?”
Shrug.
“Did Mears ever mention the source’s name?”
Shrug.
“Any guesses about the source?”
Bennie had no guesses.
“Where is Mears now?”
Bennie spread his hands, palms up.
“Don’t lie to us,” Manny snarled.
Bennie spread his hands even wider, palms still up.
“Was Gibraltar Street his only pad?” Ray said.
Bennie shook his head.
“Where else?” Manny asked. “Where else do I find him?”
Bennie tried to pronounce an address, but his jaws wouldn’t move. Shiny drool hung from his chin.
Ray took a pen from his inside jacket pocket and they hunted for some paper, finding none. Bennie was hopping up and down, trying to spit out Mears’s other address. He took the pen from Ray and wrote in big letters on the wall of the motel room:
JP OFFCENTER
RED HOUSE, ROCKY HILL
VIEW OF FIELD
Bennie topped it off with a childish drawing of a house on top of the Alps.
Manny stood behind him, deciphering what Bennie had written. JP meant Jamaica Plain. OFFCENTER meant near Centre Street, JP’s main drag. The rest meant nothing to Manny.
“What kind of field, you idiot?” Manny said.
Bennie wrote, YOUR MOT
Manny thumped Bennie’s face against the wall before he could finish the H.
“Knock it off,” Ray said, helping Bennie off the floor. “Bennie, what kind of field?”
Ray and Manny watched as Bennie wrote in big letters, FOOTBALL.
They pumped Bennie for more, but this was all Bennie had. He capped the pen and gave it back to Ray.
“Okay,” Ray said. “Get lost. But remember, we got a deal.”
Bennie didn’t nod or shake his head or make any kind of gesture. He just took the brown paper bag of LSD tabs from the bed and went to the door.
Ray stopped him there. “Deal?”
Bennie nodded. He gave Manny a last look, part hate, part guilt—their strange six-year marriage ending, unexpectedly, in stalemate. Bennie limped out to the parking lot and started walking to Cambridge.
“I’ll run Biff home,” Ray said. “We could all use some sleep.”
Manny finished his cigarette in the open doorway, watching Bennie disappear. “Sure,” he said.
After Ray and Biff left, Manny took a long hot shower in the motel room, then crossed the expressway to a truck stop, where he ordered up a huge meal, pancakes, fried eggs, double bacon, grapefruit, and a bottomless cup of coffee, black. As he ate, he stared across the expressway at the half-dark neon of the Skyway, VAC NCY. He finished the feed, had a cigarette, then walked back to the Skyway. There were two hours of dark left. He got into his car and headed for Jamaica Plain.