Early Autumn (16 page)

“Is he a crook?”

“Yes. He’s a major league crook. If your father knew him, your father was in deep.”

“Are you going to do the same to him?”

“As Buddy?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know. I just go along and see what happens.
He’s a lot harder piece of material than Buddy. You sure you want to come?”

He nodded. “There isn’t anybody else,” he said.

“I’m telling you, Susan…”

“She doesn’t like me,” he said. “I want to stay with you.”

I nodded. “We’re stuck with each other, I guess.”

Harry Cotton’s car lot was up Commonwealth Avenue, near the old Braves Field, in an old gas station that no longer sold gas. There were colored lights strung around the perimeter of the lot and around the useless gas pumps. The overhead door to the repair bay was down. It had been painted with various paints in the glass panes. There was no sign to identify the business, just eight or ten lousy-looking cars without license plates jammed into the lot. There was no one on the lot But the door to the office side of the gas station was open. I went in. Paul came in behind me.

In the office there was an old walnut desk, a wooden swivel chair, a phone, and an overhead light with a dozen dead flies inside the globe. There was an ashtray in the shape of a rubber tire full of cigarette butts on the desk. In one corner of the room a Chow with snarled hair and a gray muzzle raised his head and looked at me as I came in.

At the desk talking on the phone was Harry Cotton. Harry went with the office. He was scrawny and potbellied, with long dirty fingernails and yellow teeth. His hair was about the color of a Norway rat and parted just above his left ear. It was a lot thinner than a Norway rat’s and while he tried to swoop it up
and over, it didn’t make it very well, and a lot of pale scalp showed through. He was smoking a menthol cigarette, which he held between the tips of his first two fingers. Apparently he always held his cigarette that way because the two fingers were stained brown from the top joint to the tip. To the right of the Chow a door opened into the maintenance bay. It was empty except for a metal barrel and three folding chairs. Three men sat on the folding chairs around the barrel playing blackjack. They were drinking Four Roses out of paper cups.

Harry hung up the phone and looked at me. He needed a shave. The stubble that showed was gray. He was wearing a red flannel shirt and over it a long-sleeved gray sweat shirt tucked into black sharkskin pants with shiny knees. His belt was too long and an extended length of it stuck out from his belt loop like a black tongue. He wore black high-top sneakers. With his feet up on the desk, his white shins showing above sagging black socks, he looked like a central casting version of Fagin and he was worth maybe three and a half million dollars.

“What do you want?” he said. The dog stood and growled. Paul moved a little more behind me.

I said, “I’m in the market for a rat farm. Everyone says you’re the man to see.”

“Are you trying to kid me,” he said. His voice was shrill and flat.

“Me?” I said. “Kid you? A big shot like you? Not me. The boy here just asked me to define
class
and I thought it would be easier to bring him over here and show him.”

The three card players in the garage looked up. One of them got up and moved to the office door. I wasn’t sure he could fit through it.

“You want to get your ass kicked,” Harry said, “you come to the right place. Ain’t he, Shelley? Ain’t he come to the right place?”

From the doorway Shelley said, “That’s right. He come to the right place.” Shelley looked about the same size and strength as a hippopotamus. Probably not as smart, and certainly not as good-looking. His hair was blond and wispy and hung over his ears. He wore a flowered shirt with short sleeves and his arms were smooth and completely hairless. He burped quietly and said, “Fucking anchovies.”

“I’m trying to locate a guy named Mel Giacomin,” I said.

“You see him here?” Harry said.

“No.”

“Then buzz off.”

“I heard you’d know where he is.”

“You heard wrong.”

“Listen up, Paul,” I said. “You want to learn repartee. You’re in the presence of a master.”

Shelley frowned. He looked at Harry.

Harry said, “Do I know you?”

“Name’s Spenser,” I said.

Harry nodded. “Yeah. I know you. You’re the one cleaned out Buddy Hartman and that woodchuck he brought with him a while ago.”

“That’s me,” I said. “The woodchuck’s name was Harold, I think. He had a blackjack.”

Harry nodded. He was looking at me while he dragged hard on the short cigarette, making a long glowing coal reach almost to his fingers. He dropped the butt on the floor and let it smolder. He exhaled slowly, letting the smoke seep out of each corner of his mouth.

“I’m one of the guys that threw one of your people in the river off the Mass. Ave. Bridge too,” I said.

Shelley was chewing tobacco. He spit tobacco juice on the floor behind him.

“What makes you think it was one of mine?” Cotton said.

“Aw, come on, Harry. We both know they were yours. We both know you’re tight with Mel Giacomin and you were doing him a favor.”

Harry looked at Paul “Who’s the kid?”

“He’s a vice cop, undercover,” I said.

“That Giacomin’s kid?”

I put my hands in my hip pockets. I said, “What’s your connection with Giacomin, Harry?”

“I got no connection with Giacomin,” Harry said. “And I don’t want you sticking your nose into my business. You unnerstand?”

“Understand, Harry. With a
D
. Un-der-stand. Watch my lips.”

Harry’s voice got a little shriller. It sounded like chalk on a blackboard.

“Shut your fucking mouth,” he said. “And keep your fucking snoop nose out of my fucking business or I’ll fucking bury you right here, right out front here in the fucking yard I’ll bury you.”

“Five,” I said. “Five
fuck’s
in one sentence, Paul. That’s colorful. You don’t see color like that much anymore.”

The other two card players were standing behind Shelley. They weren’t Shelley, but they didn’t look like tourists. Harry took out his handkerchief and blew his nose. He examined the results, then folded the handkerchief up and stuffed it back in his right pants pocket. Then he looked at me.

“Shelley,” he said. “Throw the bum the fuck out,
and make it hurt.” There was a faint touch of pink on his cheeks.

Shelley spit another batch of tobacco juice on the cement floor behind him and took a step toward me. I took my gun out of its hip holster and pointed it at him.

“Stay right there, Shelley. If I put a hole in you, the shit will seep out and you’ll weigh about ninety-eight pounds”

Behind me I heard Paul breathe in.

“Harry,” I said. “I can see you out of the corner of my eye. If your hands go out of sight under the desk, I’ll shoot you through the bridge of your nose. I’m very good with this thing.”

Everyone was still. I said, “Now what was your connection with Giacomin, Harry?”

“Go fuck yourself,” Harry said.

“How about I shoot off one of your earlobes?”

“Go ahead.”

“Or maybe one of your kneecaps?”

“Go ahead.”

We were all quiet. The Chow had stopped growling and was sitting on his haunches with his jaw hanging and his purple tongue out. He was panting quietly.

“Paul,” I said. “You see before you an example of the law of compensation. The little weasel is ugly and stupid and mean and he smells bad. But he’s tough.”

“You’ll find fucking out how tough I am,” Harry said. “You may as well stick that thing in your mouth and pull the trigger. ’Cause you’re a dead man. You unnerstand that. I’m looking at a dead fucking man.”

“On the other hand,” I said to Paul. “I am handsome, good, intelligent, and sweet-smelling. And much tougher than Harry. Let’s go.”

Paul went out the door, I backed out after him. The Bronco was right in front of the station. “Go around,” I said, “and go fast. Get in the other side and crouch down.”

He did what I told him and I followed, backing, my gun steady at the open door. Then we were in the car and out of the lot, and heading toward Brighton on Commonwealth Avenue.

Beside me Paul was very white. He swallowed several times, audibly.

“Scary,” I said.

He nodded.

“Scared me too,” I said.

“Did it really?” he said.

“Sure. Still does. But there’s nothing to be done about it. Best just to go ahead with your program. Being scared is normal, but it shouldn’t change anything.”

“You didn’t seem scared.”

“Best not to,” I said.

“Why would he let you shoot him? If he’s doing something with my father, he must really want to keep it quiet.”

“Maybe. Or maybe he’s just stubborn. Won’t be pushed. He didn’t get to be as big a deal in this town as he is by being a piece of angel cake. Even garbage has pride sometimes. Maybe you need to have more if you’re garbage.”

I U-turned where Commonwealth curves off toward BU and headed back downtown.

“What did you get out of that?” Paul asked.

“Found out a little,” I said.

“What?”

“Found out that your father’s connection to Harry Cotton is worth covering up.”

“Maybe that other guy was lying,” Paul said.

“Buddy? No. If he lied, it wouldn’t be like that If Cotton ever heard that Buddy had fingered him, he’d have Buddy killed. Buddy would lie to get out of trouble. But not that way.”

“If that guy Cotton is so rich and everything,” Paul said, “why is he so junky?”

“I suppose he figures it doesn’t attract attention,” I said. “Maybe he’s just thrifty. I don’t know. But don’t let it fool you.”

“What are we going to do now?”

“Your father have an office set up at his apartment?”

“Yes.”

“We’re going to burgle it.”

Paul and I spent the night in my apartment in Boston. And the next morning about ten thirty we broke into his father’s apartment in Andover. There was no one home. Like all the other good suburban business types, Mel Giacomin was out laying nose to grindstone.

“His office is in back where I slept when I was here” Paul said.

Through the dining room with the kitchen opening to the right and down a very short hall there were two bedrooms and a bath. Mel wasn’t a neat guy. The breakfast dishes were still laying around the kitchen. Coffee for one, I noticed, and a Rice Krispies box. A health food addict Mel’s bed in the right-hand bedroom was unmade and there were dirty clothes on the floor. There were wet towels on the bathroom floor. The other door was closed and locked with a padlock. I stepped as far back as the narrow hall would let me, raised my right foot, and kicked the door with the flat of my foot The padlock hasp tore loose from the wood. We went in. The office was neat. There was a studio couch. A table that once functioned in a kitchen, a straight chair, and a two-drawer metal file with a lock. On the table were a phone, a lamp, a beer mug holding pencils and pens,
and a card file. The card file was locked too. There was a small Oriental rug on the floor, an air conditioner in the room’s one window, and nothing else.

“Let’s just take the files,” I said. “Simpler than breaking them open and going through them here.”

“But won’t he know?”

“He’ll already know I kicked in his door. I don’t care if he knows that someone took his files. If he thinks it’s me, fine. If there’s things in here to make him nervous, maybe he’ll make a move. If he does, things will happen. That’s a plus. You take the card file.”

And out we went. Paul with the card file, and me wrestling the bigger file. “It’s not heavy,” I said. “It’s just awkward.”

“Sure,” Paul said. “That’s what they all say.”

We loaded the files in the back of the Bronco and drove away. No one yelled at us. No policemen blew their whistles. I’d learned over the years that if you’re not wearing a mask you can walk in and out of almost anywhere and carry away almost anything and people assume you’re supposed to.

I parked in the alley in back of my office and Paul and I carried the files up. It had been a while since I’d been in my office. There was a batch of mail on the floor below the mail slot. A spider had made a web in one corner of my window. Since it didn’t interfere with my view of the ad agency across the street, I left it alone.

I put the big file down next to my desk. Paul put the card file on top of it. I opened the window and picked up my mail and sat at my desk to read it. Most of it went right to the wastebasket unopened. What was left was a copy of a book autographed by the woman who’d written it, a woman I’d done some
work for awhile ago, and an invitation to attend the wedding of Brenda Loring to someone named Maurice Kerkorian. Reception following the ceremony at the Copley Plaza Hotel, I looked at the invitation for a long time.

“What are we going to do with these files?” Paul said.

I put the mail down. “After we get them open we’ll look and see what’s there.”

“What are we looking for?”

“Don’t know. We’ll see what’s there.”

“What did you mean it would be good if my father knew you’d taken the files?” Paul said.

I got a pinch bar out of the coat closet in the corner of the office and began to pry the file drawers open.

“Gets him moving. The worst thing that can happen if you’re trying to find out about people is to have them hunker down and stay put. If they simply sit on whatever it is and do nothing, then nothing happens. They don’t commit themselves, don’t give you a chance to counterpunch, don’t make mistakes, don’t open themselves up, if you follow.”

“What do you think my father might do?”

“He might try to get the files back.”

“And what if he does?”

“We’ll see.”

“But you don’t know?”

The last file drawer snapped open under the pressure of the bar. “No, I don’t know. But if you’ll excuse the phrase, it’s the way life is. You don’t know what’s going to happen. People whose lives work best are the ones who recognize that and, having done what they can, are ready for what comes. Like the man said, ‘Readiness is all.’”