BOSTON ENGLISH HIGH SCHOOL was not off Centre Street, as Bennie had said, or even near Centre, but it had the only football field in Jamaica Plain. Manny prowled Washington Street, Call Street, and McBride, all of which were lined with houses with a view of English’s field. Manny parked and started checking out the area on foot. Everything was quiet. He found the rocky ground Bennie had remembered along the ridge above the football field, and picked the most run-down-looking house on the street. It was gray, not red—a little clapboard saltbox on a brick foundation that had settled unevenly.
Manny stole across a patch of crabgrass to the corner of the house, flattened himself against the siding in a shadow, and listened. The place was dark. Nothing stirred. Manny took Bennie’s stiletto from his pocket and scraped the wood. Underneath the gray coat of paint was an older coat, almost maroon. Manny reached into his pocket and took out a safety pin. He reached into another pocket and took out a playing card, the three of clubs, and pinned it to himself.
There were many reasons why a one-man, best-guess showdown with Joe Mears was crazy. Mears had every advantage here: he knew the layout inside and he’d be used to the dark. Manny needed numbers and firepower to overcome Mears’s edge, and Manny could get both by calling Nat Butterman at home and telling him to bring the rest of the team and an assault kit—ram, radios, and pump-action shotguns. Fully armed, Narco could take this place properly, from the front and the back, and clean it out with buckshot. If Mears fought, they would kill him. If he ran, they would kill him. If he surrendered, Manny would take him to the basement and kill him.
But Manny wasn’t phoning Butterman or anybody else, because Manny couldn’t face his men, not after leading them into the last raid, and getting Shecky shot and getting Biff worse than shot. Manny couldn’t lead them anywhere until he had put the death of Shecky right. He reached inside his overcoat and drew his .38 from its holster. His hands were cold, but the gun was armpit-warm. He opened the cylinder with a sharp outward snap of his wrist and rolled the chambers with his palm. Six ugly bullets. He closed the cylinder, thumbed the safety off, and kicked in the front door.
The only thing he knew about Mears’s front room was that it must have four corners, and he found one of the corners with his shoulder blades. The door hung open, slightly off its hinges, and let a shaft of streetlight down the middle of the room toward a dark hall leading to the back of the house. Manny had only a few seconds of surprise to work with, and let these seconds pass backed into the corner, gun barrel against his nose, waiting for Mears to charge down the hallway toward the open door.
Mears didn’t charge. Manny came out of the corner slowly, took a step into the hallway, and listened. Nothing. The hallway sloped with the lot toward the back. Manny stole past a string of cramped, odd-sized rooms. His eyes adjusted to the dark. He relaxed.
He came at Manny low and caught him in the midriff. The man was running for the front door, which stood open just ten feet away, but Manny got a foot in his feet and tripped him up. The man fell hard and let out breath, but crouched to sprint. He pushed off as Manny landed on his back. The man twisted around and found himself staring at the mouth of a .38, Manny’s big-knuckled hand, and Manny, in that order.
The man said, “Are you Joe Mears?”
He was a drifter who had squatted in the house for a few nights because it looked abandoned. He knew the name Joe Mears because he had seen it on ID stashed inside. He thought Manny was Mears, back to reclaim the place. Manny never bothered to straighten the drifter out.
“Find another place to squat,” Manny said.
When it was light, Manny called Ray and told him the story. Ray drove over and together they questioned the neighbors about the occupant of the house on the rocky ridge.
The neighbors didn’t know his name. He came and went, was often gone for weeks, and didn’t seem to drive a car. He kept to himself. The only thing they knew for sure was that he was a Catholic priest—they had seen him several times in the last six weeks wearing a priest’s black suit and Roman collar. It was a funny place for a priest to live, and a funny way for a priest to act, but who could tell what was normal these days.
Manny and Ray searched the house. Mears had definitely been here—the discarded ID proved that much, as did five cases of laxative and a mixing setup in the pantry. Manny found a receipt for the laxative in a wastepaper basket. Mears had bought the lax from a wholesale pharmacy two weeks before, paying cash. The brand of laxative matched the cut most commonly found in Caesar Raines’s fentanyl.
Manny picked through piles of clothes, mostly war-surplus, turning every pocket inside out, dumping lint and pennies on the floor. Cigarette butts were everywhere, and so were cockroaches.
Ray found a single dirty mattress in the back of the house. Next to it were an old hi-fi, some record albums, and a dozen books. Everything else in the crash pad was messy and random, except the books, which were lined up along the floor against the wall.
Ray opened each book, looking for anything. He fondled a secondhand copy of Gray’s Anatomy with a busted spine, and hefted some textbooks stolen from the Boston Public Library: Page and Russell, Electroconvulsive Therapy; Cronholm and Molander, Memory Disturbance In Electroconvulsive Therapy; Holmberg, Biology of Electroconvulsive Therapy; Bellak, Manic-Depression; and Chemistry Today!, fifth edition, which was heavily underlined. Ray tossed Chemistry Today! on top of Manic-Depression and crossed the room.
Next to the mattress was the stub of a candle and a dog-eared Latin Bible, Roman Catholic Vulgate, nihil obstat 1928. The Bible was open to Luke 8:26, a story Ray remembered from elementary school: a man, possessed by a legion of demons who drive him to bestial acts, is bound in chains until freed by Jesus when Jesus casts the demons out and drives them into a herd of pigs. Why had Mears kept his Bible open to this passage? Did he see himself as the man possessed, freed by Jesus? Or was he Jesus, freeing others?
Under the open Bible was another book—a hardcover novel called The Island by Aldous Huxley. Ray flipped through The Island to a random page and read about a man who took a drug and had a vision while listening to Bach:
The Allegro was revealing itself as an element in the great present Event, a manifestation at one remove of the luminous bliss. Or perhaps that was putting it too mildly. In another modality this Allegro was the luminous bliss: it was the knowledgeless understanding of everything apprehended through a particular piece of knowledge.
Tonight for the first time, his awareness of a piece of music was completely unobstructed. Between mind and sound, mind and pattern, mind and significance, there was no longer any babel of biographical irrelevance to drown the music or make a senseless discord….
Manny came into the room and saw Ray sitting on the floor, surrounded by books. Ray said, “There’s a Latin Bible here, Manny, and three books on electroshock therapy. Plus there’s the priest suit—”
Manny cut him off. “Take a look at something.”
In a pantry cabinet Manny had found a large gray suitcase of pebbled vinyl with both locks pried open. The suitcase was empty. Manny held it up and shook it, and a single white object, round and flat and an inch across, fell to Ray’s feet like a snowflake. Before it hit the ground, Ray knew what it was. The wafer sat on the tip of Ray’s left shoe, and Manny held the suitcase up as if he expected Mears himself to fall out next.
Manny heaved the mangled suitcase aside and dusted his hands. “Okay,” he said, almost affably, “I’ll ask: what the fuck does that mean?”
Ray looked the Eucharist over. “The suitcase belonged to a priest named George Sedgewick.”
“A real priest or a drug dealer who dresses like one?”
“A real priest,” Ray said. “You know about him, Manny. Sedgewick’s the guy who died at the airport over New Year’s. He was bringing Eucharist from Rome to Boston. It was a publicity stunt to ease the way for the first English-language mass. He was jumped at Logan—”
Ray looked around the pantry, making sure every detail fit what he was about to say. Ray said, “He was jumped at Logan by Joe Mears.”
Ray walked through the house, Eucharist still in his hand, putting the facts together as he spoke. “Before Mears came to Boston he was a patient in a Navy mental hospital in Portsmouth. There were some hotshot doctors there running experiments on people, horrible experiments, and Mears was one of their failures. They went too far with him or made a mistake, I don’t know which. But when Mears got loose, he started killing the hospital staff to pay them back. Remember Childs—the guy we interviewed at City & County?”
“He was one of the Portsmouth people,” Manny recalled.
Ray nodded. “There were three others: a goon named Poole, a doctor, Zimquist, and Father George Sedgewick.”
“And they’re all dead?”
“As doornails,” Ray said. They were in the bedroom, surrounded by books. “Mears winds up in Boston, and so does Childs,” Ray said. “Mears could kill him at any time, and what can Childs do about it? Call the cops? Tell the truth and implicate himself in God knows what? It’s an option, a crappy option.”
Manny lit a cigarette and said, “He cuts a deal instead.”
“A deal with Mears,” Ray nodded.
Manny was nodding too. “Childs supplies Mears with product and Mears starts selling fentanyl to Caesar.”
“And LSD to Bennie,” Ray added. There was a logic to it. Of course Mears winds up in the drug business—it’s all he knows. Of course he specializes in the exotic, to make the best use of Lem Childs. Ray looked at the Eucharist in his hand, and showed it to Manny as if something were written on it.
“Childs knew Sedgewick was coming in from Rome on New Year’s Eve,” Ray said. “Childs told Mears. It was part of the deal: the priest dies.”
Manny tried to take it one step further. “So let’s go to Childs and make him tell us where Mears is.”
“Won’t work,” Ray said. “Childs doesn’t know where Mears is except when they meet to hand off a package. Besides, if you lean on Childs and he plays dumb, what’s your next move?”
“I arrest him for the murder of Sedgewick, and for the drug sales too.”
“Based on what?” Ray said. He brandished the Eucharist. “This?”
“You got a better idea?”
Ray said, “Mears will have to meet Lem Childs at least once more. They’ll do another pickup before this drug goes criminal, so Mears can dominate the LSD shortage. Be a narc, Manny. Stay with Childs, and he’ll lead you to Mears.”
RAY went back to Biff’s apartment and found his brother lying on the kitchen floor and listening to three different radios, tuned to opera, news, and surf music. A kettle whistled on the stove, and an alarm clock had been ringing for some time. Ray went around the apartment, shutting off the radios and the stove and the alarm clock, and sat Biff at the kitchen table.
“You need to hear this,” Ray said. “Manny and I have been working on Mears, and I think we’re getting the picture.”
Ray talked slowly and paused often, hoping Biff was hearing him.
“Mears is into a new drug called LSD. This drug is a million times more powerful than anything Narco has ever seen. It makes you act nuts, see things, do things. You said Mears threw ‘water’ in your face in the back bedroom. Remember? Do you remember?”
Biff looked at Ray as if he could still hear the opera in his head.
“That wasn’t water he threw at you, Biff. That was this new drug. It didn’t show in the tests they performed on you in the hospital because nobody knew to test for it. It won’t even be illegal for five more days.”
Ray put his hand on Biff’s hand. “You didn’t fuck up in the raid. You were drugged. Shecky Bliss isn’t your fault.”
Ray searched Biff’s face in vain for a flicker of recognition. “Mears is still in Boston,” Ray continued. “We had him at the China Bowl selling LSD to Bennie Anastasia, but he slipped away. He’s supplied out of City & County by a man named Lemuel Childs. He’s a doctor there.”
Biff stared at the table.
“We’re gonna tail Childs,” Ray said, “and we’re gonna grab him and Mears with a package when they meet. That package of drugs will prove that Shecky Bliss wasn’t your fault.”
Ray had no idea if any of this sank in. He went into the bedroom and called his office. He asked a secretary to type a subpoena for the bank records of one Lemuel Childs back to the first of the year. As Ray hung up, he heard Biff hit the shower.
Ray sat alone in the bedroom, listening to the shower go, glad that Biff was cleaning himself up. Ray made some soup for lunch and knocked on the bathroom door.
“Biff,” he said, “you hungry?”
He knocked again. “Biff?”
The shower was running ice-cold and it was empty. Ray found Biff’s wallet and shield on the toilet seat.
Biff was gone.