All Our Yesterdays (37 page)

“Kind of a big day,” Gus said.

Peggy’s face was tight. She was scared. She had been scared since Gus said, “Let’s have a drink.”

“Will you get a raise or a promotion or anything?” Peggy said.

Again Gus did that laugh.

“No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”

“Too bad,” Peggy said. “I saw a nice dining room set I was thinking about getting. I was shopping with Rose Mary, and you know I’m a shopper. I know where the bargains are. And we went into the discount place on Morrissey Boulevard, I know quality, you know that. Well, there was a solid mahogany table, four chairs, and a sideboard….”

Gus leaned back and closed his eyes.

He said, “I’m in bad trouble, Peggy.”

She felt the scaredness sharpen and thrill along her nervous system.

“What have you done?”

He took a long pull on his drink, and swallowed and took in a long breath and let it out and told her. While he told her she sat staring at him with an uneasy, half-embarrassed expression. He spoke slowly. He knew she had trouble tracking ideas, and when she was scared, which he knew to be often, she was unable to grasp even the most ordinary of remarks. It was a catatonic terror that hid behind her half-embarrassed, slightly quizzical expression.

When he finished, she was silent for a moment and then she said, “What?”

“I been on the take,” Gus said. “I covered up three murders. I’m going to turn state’s evidence.”

Peggy’s face got paler than it had been and the lines around her mouth and nose became deeper.

“What’s going to happen to me?” she said.

“You’re going to be all right,” Gus said. He took out a bank book and handed it to her. “There’s
money. It’s in your name,” he said. “Chris’ll help you manage it.”

She took the bank book and stared at it, without any sign that she knew what it was.

“What did you say Chris would do?”

“He’ll help you manage your money,” he said.

She poured herself some more bourbon.

“I don’t know anything about money,” she said.

“I know.”

“You think I’m stupid, don’t you? Well, let me tell you right now, that if you would have listened to me you wouldn’t be in trouble. When Ellie Gavin’s husband retired they had a nice home in Scituate, only two blocks from the water.”

Gus smiled. Some things change, some things don’t.

“I’m not retiring, Peggy. I’m going to jail.”

“And what am I supposed to tell people?” Peggy said. Her face wasn’t pale anymore. It was flushed with anger, and bourbon. “That my husband’s a crook?”

“That’s about right,” Gus said.

“Well, all I can say to you, Mr. Big Shot, is that I am dreadfully disappointed.”

“Yeah,” Gus said. “Me too.”

“And not just in you. Chris can’t even hold on to a girlfriend and now he’s going out with God knows who, and you mark my words, they’ll take him for all they can get.”

“I don’t think he’s giving them money, Peg. I think they’re fucking him free.”

“And don’t you bring that policeman gutter talk into my kitchen.”

Gus stood.

“We’ve known each other forty years, Peg. And it’s been a long time since we liked each other.”

“What are you talking about? We’re married.”

“I’m leaving,” Gus said. “You keep the house. You got enough money if you don’t let somebody take you for all they can get.”

“What do you mean you’re leaving? Leaving to where?”

“I’m leaving you, Peg.”

“You’re leaving me? You mean for good?”

“Yeah.”

“You mean you’re going to divorce me?”

“Yeah.”

Peggy drank more bourbon.

“You let some whore get her claws into you. You think I didn’t know, all those nights you were out, you pig. You think I didn’t know you were with some prostitute?”

Peggy had had enough bourbon to have trouble with the word
prostitute
.

“Doesn’t matter, Peggy,” Gus said.

He turned and walked from the kitchen.

“You think you can get away with this,” Peggy shouted, “you’ve got another think coming. I’ll take you for everything you’ve got.”

Gus opened the front door and started out.

“You already have,” Gus said.

G
us was sitting on the steps of Chris’s half-house condo in Cambridge, when Chris came home.

“Jesus, Dad. You look like a homeless waif sitting there,” Chris said.

“I was thinking about dogs,” Gus said. “What kind of dogs you’d have if you owned property on the Concord River, and you had it fenced, and they could run around.”

“You been talking about that as long as I can remember,” Chris said as he unlocked the door to his side of the house. “You want a drink?”

“Yeah.”

Gus followed Chris into the kitchen and sat at the kitchen table, which had natural-stained pine legs, and a green top painted to look like marble. The house was all Crate and Barrel, Grace had told him once, when she used to live here too. Gus had never been in Crate and Barrel. Chris made Gus a Scotch and soda and got a bottle of Saratoga beer from the refrigerator.
Chris drank every new heal beer that appeared. Fresh is best. Would you go to Germany for bread?
He put Gus’s drink in front of him and sat across from his father at the table. His black knit tie was open. His white button-down shirt was loosened at the collar. His gray tweed jacket fitted him easily. Gus always envied that. His own clothes never fit. Always his jackets were tight at the arms, and pulled across the chest. Chris’s
face was clean shaven. His features were regular, his big eyes were full of intelligence. Sometimes Gus saw Peggy in Chris’s face, sometimes himself, but mostly, almost furtively, the look of Gus’s father. Gus reached across the table and patted his son’s forearm. Chris smiled. Gus stood and made himself another drink and took in a third of it at a single swallow.

“We going to get drunk?” Chris said.

“We might,” Gus said. “We’re Irish.”

“We got a genetic right,” Chris said. He drank some beer.

“You ever have a dog?” Chris said.

Gus shook his head.

“My mother wouldn’t have an animal in the house. Said it was filthy and uncivilized. Your mother felt the same way.”

“I was thinking I might get one,” Chris said. He grinned. “Being a single guy, soon to be unemployed, I can do whatever the hell I want.”

Gus nodded and swallowed most of his drink.

He made another one and leaned his hips against the counter, and sampled it. Chris’s beer bottle was half empty. Gus reached in the refrigerator and got another one and opened it and set it down beside Chris.

“Getting fired bother you?” Gus said.

Chris shrugged.

“Yeah. I mean I’d like to say no, fuck ’em. But, yeah, it bothers me. It was my chance to do something. It bothers me that I failed.”

“You didn’t fail. You got sold out.”

“By who?”

Gus took another drink.

“Butchie and Patrick had a cop in their pocket. They knew everything before it happened.”

Chris had his bottle half raised to drink from it. He held it there without drinking and looked past it at his father.

“Cassidy?”

“Me,” his father said.

Chris held the bottle rigid for a moment, then slowly put it down, centering it carefully in the wet ring it had left on the tabletop.

“Oh, shit,” he said.

He leaned back in his chair, his head lowered a little so that his chin rested on his chest. He didn’t say anything else. But Gus could see that his breath was deep, just the way he used to breathe when he was six, in first grade, watching
Captain Kangaroo
on television before the school bus came. Then he straightened and took a drink from the beer bottle.

“Well,” Chris said, “you’ll tell me about it. Before you do you need to keep one thing in mind. You’re my father. I love you. And whatever you tell me, when you’re through I’ll still love you.”

Gus’s throat was nearly closed. He took a long pull on his drink to relax it. His breath was short and rapid. He could feel the layered containment of a lifetime begin to crack. He felt as if he would cry. He drank again. It was going to break. What would be left, he wondered, after it was over?

“When my father was a young man in Ireland,” Gus said, “he was in the war with England.” His voice sounded remote to him, as if someone else were speaking. “During that time he had an affair with a woman named Hadley Winslow.”

“Grace’s grandmother?” Chris said.

“Yeah. She was a married woman, and when he wanted her to leave her husband she refused, and later, betrayed him to the British.”

Chris smiled at his father’s old-fashioned locution. Gus saw the smile.

“I don’t know how else to say it,” Gus said.

Chris nodded. His father’s voice was devoid of inflection.

“She returned to Boston with her husband, and my old man dodged the British and came here too. He claimed he was just running from the Brits, and I believe him. But I always figured he ran to Boston, because she was here. He got on the cops, and did okay and married my mother and had nothing to do with Hadley Winslow until one day her son, Tom, got in trouble with the law.”

“Grace’s father?”

“Yeah.”

Gus finished his drink and made another one. He walked down the narrow length of the rehabbed kitchen and looked out the back window at the narrow half yard surrounded by a high board fence.

“Not much room for dogs,” he said.

“No,” Chris said.

Gus turned and leaned against the wall beside the back window. The kitchen had exposed beams. There were dried herbs hanging from them, and copper pans that showed no sign of use.

“My old man fixed it, so that nobody knew—about the kid.”

“What was the crime?” Chris said.

Gus shook his head.

“I gotta tell it in order,” he said.

Chris nodded. The automatic ice maker in the refrigerator
cycled on and rattled some ice crescents into the storage container. Gus glanced toward the sound and then looked back at his son.

“The kid, Tommy, went on to grow up and marry and have kids and be a big deal in the family bank. But my old man kept the evidence in a safe deposit vault in a bank on the South Shore, and he blackmailed Hadley for the rest of their lives. When he died he left me the story and the safe deposit key.”

Outside the kitchen, the late afternoon had darkened. Chris got up and turned on the overhead light. It thickened the outside darkness, and the room seemed smaller around them. Chris sat down again. He finished his second bottle of beer. Gus swirled the ice around in his glass.

“And?” Chris said.

“And I been using it to blackmail Tommy,” Gus said.

Chris pushed his beer bottle away from him and folded his arms on the table and leaned forward as if to rest his chin on his folded forearms. Then he paused and sat back up straight and looked as if he didn’t know what to do with his hands. Finally he folded them and rested them on the edge of the table. He took in a long, slow breath and let it out.

“So what’s this got to do with the Malloys and the O’Briens?” Chris said.

“I been taking money from both of them since I worked out of the old City Square station, thirty years ago. Not so much, pocket money, routine street graft. And as I got promoted where I could do them more good I’d get like a raise.” Gus smiled. “Get a raise from the cops and a raise from the robbers.

“Mostly they were doing loan sharking, numbers,
truck hijackings,” Gus said. “They hustled a little pot, some heroin, but mostly they stuck to strong-arm stuff, until around 1983-84 when crack came along. Coke was upscale, but crack was for everybody. Butchie and Patrick saw the mass-market potential a long time before the Guineas did. Between them, they got control of all of it, north of Columbus Avenue and east of Mass Ave.”

“White Boston,” Chris said.

“More or less. And the Jamaicans got the ghetto.”

“I’m surprised the Italians would give it up.”

“They didn’t have much choice,” Gus said. “When they don’t fight with each other, Patrick and Butchie are pretty much of a load. And Butchie knows how to deal. Patrick was always a loose cannon. But Butchie … Butchie says to the Guineas, We’ll do it whether you like or not, because you can’t stop us. But as a sign of respect, we’ll pay you a royalty of such and such.’ And the Guineas say, ‘Butchie knows how to treat a man,’ and they take the royalty and everybody’s happy.”

“So where do you come in? And Tom?”

Gus took a drink. If it affected him he didn’t show it.

“So now Butchie and Patrick got all this cash they got to do something with. I mean it’s coming in a million, million and a half a week. Five, six million a month. Cash. They gotta launder it. They try smurfing it for a while, but there’s too much. They need a bank and they consult me, because I’m an upstanding motherfucker and probably know a lot of bankers.”

Gus drank.

“And you did,” Chris said.

“Tommy Winslow.”

“And, even better,” Chris said, “you had something on him.”

“Bingo,” Gus said.

Chris blew his breath out.

“Jesus, Dad. Drug money.”

“Yeah,” Gus said. “Anyway, I talked with Tommy, and he was scared as shit of getting into bed with a couple of bone breakers, but”—Gus shrugged—“he arranged for both Butchie and Patrick to buy numbered CDs at the bank, and the bank would then lend them the amount of the CDs back. That way anybody looking at the bank records could see that the loan was collateralized by CDs. And Butchie and Patrick would buy apartment houses, and Laundromats, and self-storage lockers, which would generate clean money. And anyone looking at Butchie’s finances, or Pat’s, could see that the money came from a legitimate loan. And, because it was a loan, they didn’t have to pay taxes on it.”

“And only Tommy knew the identities of the people with the numbered CDs,” Chris said.

Gus nodded.

“And, let me guess,” Chris said. “The bank filed CTRs, and kept a copy on file. But they didn’t send the original to the IRS.”

“Probably,” Gus said. “Or they exempted Butchie and Pat. I don’t know. I never cared much about the details, long as it worked out. And it worked out dandy until some asshole scragged Corky O’Brien for looking at his girlfriend, and everything unraveled.”