Bomber's Law (3 page)

“I'm not following you,” Dell'Appa said.

“What?” Brennan said.

“I don't get it,” Dell'Appa said.

“Don't get what?” Brennan said. “What the hell're you talking about?”

“What the hell'm
I
talking about?” Dell'Appa said. “What the hell
you're
talking about is what the hell I'm talking about.”

“I don't get it,” Brennan said.

“Goddamnit, Bob,” Dell'Appa said, “the bakery truck guys, and the UPS guys, and the mailmen and
all
of this shit. All of this shit that you're tellin' me, that the guy that called Buddy on Wednesday said to him that got him so hugely pissed off. I don't get it. It doesn't make any sense to me, not the slightest bit of sense at all.”

“Oh,” Brennan said. “Well, okay, see, I guess, I thought you knew, just like everybody else in town. Knew.”

“Well then you thought wrong, then,” Dell'Appa said, “because, and you're really about the last person inna world I oughta have to tell to keep in mind this, but I'm not like everybody else in town because I haven't been in town with everybody else, all right? Remember that. For the past eleven months I've been out in Hampshire County with the cows 'n sheep 'n pigs; anna chickens, ducks 'n goats; anna bull dykes in Northampton and anna gays in all those towns, all that happy horse-shit stuff. Ever since they figure out there's somethin' funny goin' on in the treasurer's office there, right? And the books're gettin' cooked in the county office, right, 'member? So I haven't been around town, 'long with everybody else, and as a result I do not know what the rest of them all do. So you have got to tell me.”

“
Suure
,” Brennan said. “But just let's keep in mind here who it was, whose fault it was, that you got picked and sent out there to do that little job. It wasn't my fault, Harry, boy. I was not the one. It was you, made that choice easy. You made it easy for them. You picked yourself out.”

“You know, Bob,” Dell'Appa said, “there's about, oh, probably there's about six hundred things that you can't do at all, that you're just fuckin' lousy at. But high up on that list of things, of anybody's list of things that you can't fuckin' do at all, right up near the top of it there's an entry that says:
lying.
You're about as good a liar as I am a deep-sea diver, except I've got no experience at doing deep-sea diving, and you have got a shitload when it comes to telling lies.”

Brennan turned his head and stared at him. He drummed the fingers of his right hand on the steering wheel and ran his tongue slowly back and forth on the edges of his upper front teeth. After a while he nodded. “Okay,” he said. He turned again and faced forward, looking out the windshield. He nodded once more. “Okay,” he said, “got that straight: so that's how we're gonna have it. That is how
it's gonna be, then. How it's gonna be 'til I get through and you've got the whole show to yourself. Now you've made it back and this's how you want it played.”

“Just how the fuck did you think I'd want it played?” Dell'Appa said. “Just what exactly what the fuck did you expect to happen, huh? Did you think when I came back here—and there was never any doubt of that, but that I would be
back
, Bob, except maybe in your dreams—I'd come back like Saint Francis, meek and mild and kissing flowers? Up yours, pal, if you did expect that, that was what you did expect.”

“I really didn't know, you know,” Brennan said, arching his eyebrows and tapping the steering wheel with the first two fingers of each hand. “I said that to Margaret. When I first heard you were coming back, I went home that night and told her, that was one the things I mentioned, that we talked about that night, and she said: ‘Oh, what do you think? How will he react? How will he react to you?'

“And I said, I told her, I said: ‘Margaret, I don't know. I've got no idea at all. It could be that he's changed a lot, that this whole thing's changed him, he will've grown up some and we'll get along just fine. Or it could be that he's thought it over now and sees just whose fault it really was. Or it could be he'll come back here and he'll just want it to be ignored. And whichever way he wants it, well, that's the way that it'll be. I'm on short time now, and so to me it doesn't matter. I could get along with Stalin, I think, all the time that I've got left. So we'll do it like he wants to do it, way that Harry wants it done. And that way when the time comes to go out, I'll go out quiet, no beefs with anyone.' ” He looked sadly at Dell'Appa. “And that was what I said to her,” he said. “That was what I said.”

“Bullshit,” Dell'Appa said, in a voice like something he'd found rumpled and forgotten on the floor at the back of a closet. He put his head back on the rest and closed his eyes. “Like I said, you've got no talent for that. Finish telling me all about Buddy Royal. I don't think you're making all that up. Some of it, maybe, not all.”

The sun had appeared washed-out and whitish over the Blue Hills to the east and Brennan sucked on his coffee-mug, his shoulders slumped and the folds of his grizzled facial flesh hanging slack around his mouth. “Aww,” he said at last. “It wasn't really very much.
Buddy's first wife left him, 'count of he would beat her up. But he was not like most of those guys, only hit her, it don't show, belly, back, like that; he hit her where it
would
show, 'round the eyes, the nose an' mouth, knock a couple teeth out—like he was
proud
of it, the little rotten piece-ah-shit.

“And then so she finally left him,” Brennan said. “His first wife finally left him, and time goes by and this and that, he finds another woman. Guess she didn't hear the news. Or then again, may be she did, she did hear the news, but she figures: This's cake. I can handle this guy.' And if she did that, if that was what she did to him, well, I guess that she was right—she does handle him.”

“ 'S she do?” Dell'Appa said.

Brennan pulled his shoulders forward, dumped his body off to the left, raised and lowered his eyebrows, exhaled through closed lips, tilted his head, and said: “Hey, what can I tell you? She fucks other guys, 'S what she does.
All
of the other guys there.

“You really can't blame her,” Brennan said. “She was honest with the guy. That's what she told him she would. Before they got married, she changed her mind, changed her mind three or four times, they hadda keep puttin' the weddin' off there. Because she keeps tellin' him, she wants to do, 'stead of marrying old Buddy here—and this's the new bride we're talkin' about now, Buddy's new wife that he wants her to be—is marry the rich jerk that she was screwing, before she met Buddy, all right? And then started in screwin' him. Go and marry the boyfriend she had before Buddy and come home from the honeymoon, I guess, and get settled in, the new husband and so forth, send her clothes to the laundry and so on, rinse out a few pair-ah fresh pantyhose, and then get right back down to business.

“The daily routine, that's what you need, the week-to-week daily routine. Everyone knows what to expect. Screw Buddy afternoons before the rich-jerk new husband gets home from where he goes every morning to make all the money he makes. But not
every
afternoon, darling; only
some
afternoons. Three a week, I think. Or maybe it was three this week and two next week, and three again, week after that. Because apparently Buddy's not the only new boyfriend she got after she turned the rich-jerk new boyfriend into the old boyfriend. She's got to think about keeping the other new boyfriend, the new-new
boyfriend, I guess, happy, too, and that's what the other afternoons a week are gonna be for. I'm tellin' you, this's all very complicated.

“Well, at first everybody's being very sympathetic, ‘Poor Buddy,' all of that shit. Finally falls in love for real, the real thing, the poor guy—and keep in mind here, Buddy's no colt here here; guy's gotta be up close to sixty, and this dame of his, that she's so hot to trot, she's a good fifty-five herself there—”

“A
real
good fifty-five, from what you're tellin' me here,” Dell'Appa said.

“She's pretty lively,” Brennan said. “Anyway, he won't listen, everybody's tellin' him: ‘Forget about about this broad. You won't dare to leave the house, she'll be havin' someone in. You're better off without her. And he wouldn't listen. Know what he does? He wears her down. And she does marry him. And then when they get back here, from where it was they went, well then, just like she promised, she is doin' it, porkin' every guy in town. And that's what that guy Wednesday meant, about all the deliverymen and all that kind of stuff. He meant that all those guys he mentioned, they're all fuckin' Buddy's new wife, while Buddy's down the shop.”

“How'd Buddy react?” Dell'Appa said.

“Well, like you'd expect an actual normal person to,” Brennan said. “Like somebody knocked the wind out of him. It was almost enough, damned near enough, if you knew the guy's a bone-dry, hard-ass, chop artist, steal his own mother's car if it was a red 'Vette and he had a guy needed the parts, make you feel actually sorry for him.”

“It almost makes you wonder, sometimes, doesn't it?” Dell'Appa said. “If maybe, where these borderline guys like Buddy Royal're concerned, if maybe we shouldn't just leave them alone, right where they are, and let them torment themselves. Makes each others' lives hell on earth, just like they'll do if we don't. Buddy's action, what you say he's doing there? What he's been doing for years. If we caught him, what'd he get? Eight or ten, if he got that? Out in the sunshine, three or four years? Do that like he waits for a table. But if we just leave him, leave him where he is, look what his own friends'll do, make him feel like a turd on the ground. And it works like a charm, too—they do it. Just like a fuckin' charm, it does.

“So maybe that's what we oughta be doin' here, Bob, you think? Huh?” Dell'Appa said. “Just goin' around here and sizin' up guys and seein' what their friends do to them. If they've got enough trouble without us, goin' to all the expenses.”

“ ‘Expenses'?” Brennan said.

“Well,
yeah
,” Dell'Appa said. “It's expensive, catchin' guys, collecting evidence. Taking it before grand juries, gettin' the indictments. Tryin' them if they want trials—those judges make real money. And then puttin' them in jail, is that it? That what you got in mind? That costs like holy shit. And these here're parlous times, you know? Nobody's got no money. The taxpayers, you know, we ought to think about this thing. Maybe they are better off if we do like I just said. Identify the guys who're already getting such a bunch of shit from all their friends, and life in general, too, they just don't justify the cost of putting them in jail. The kind of guys, you put them in, they look around, say: ‘Thanks. I got to thank you guys. This really is a whole lot better'n the shit I had at home.' Makes you feel pretty stupid.”

“Fuck you,” Brennan said.

“I'm
serious
,” Dell'Appa said. “Maybe that's what we should do with our friend Joe Mossi. 'Stead of sittin' here shootin' the shit about Buddy Royal and stuff. Run a profile on Joey. Look at it and then decide if we want to do this. One way we come down it, we say: No, Short Joey goes. This guy is a bad actor, not a good citizen at all. Look what he does for a living: he kills guys on order. This is no way to behave.'

“But then again, maybe we don't. Maybe we don't say that. We take a look at what we got and say: ‘Hey, he's all right. True, he does kill guys for money, but look at the guys he kills: very lousy, low-rent guys. “Riffraff,” you might say. If he didn't kill them then we'd have to deal with them, and look what that would cost. And plus he's good to his brother. Get Joey onna telephone, I wanna talk to him. I think I see a way here, Commonwealth can save some money, we throw him a little work.' ”

“Okay, you wise prick,” Brennan said, “turn off the faucet, okay? At least get a look at the guy this morning, I know you're not goin' off blind on this thing I been workin' so hard for so long.”

“Tell you what,” Dell'Appa said. “If and when the guy does show up this morning, I will take a good look at him, all right?”

“That's all I am askin' from you,” Brennan said. “That is all I am askin' from you here.”

“And if he doesn't,” Dell'Appa said, “if he doesn't, well then, I won't.”

“You know, I got to really say, Harry,” Brennan said, “I really got to say I think you must've gotten outta the western part the state there just about the nick of time. Is all I got to say.”

“Why?” Dell'Appa said. In front of them to the south, on the other side of the bridge, informal, irregular processions had begun, plainly purposeful men and women long experienced in the workday routines, advancing down the hill without expressions on their faces, clustering obediently though restively at the traffic light on the curb at the corner where Dockett Street intersected with a four-lane boulevard connecting to the east with Route 9. They waited there until the crossing signal lighted, advancing
en masse when the white light said
WALK
as though blissfully convinced that no Massachusetts driver had ever disregarded a stop light or would run that one that day.

Brennan was drinking coffee. He furrowed his brow over the Dunkin' Donuts cup, but he did not lower it from his mouth. Behind the Blazer to the north, more commuters just as impassively trudged up the rise to the crest of the bridge, the minority choosing to walk in the street, eddying around the Blazer, and then down toward the inbound-train platform.