At End of Day (30 page)

The traffic lights showed red at the three-way intersection of Blue Hill Avenue, Cummins Highway and River Street several cars ahead of them. Ferrigno stopped the Impala in the left lane eight cars up, next to a black BMW 740IL with chrome eyebrows on the wheelwells double-parked second from the rear in a line of four cars in front of a Bank of Boston branch with a long line at its sidewalk ATM. The freshly coiffed black woman behind the wheel of the BMW regarded Dowd politely, mouthed “Officer” and smiled. Dowd nodded and smiled back.

“Once he does that, it’s all over. Investigator with a good database takes about eight minutes to find
out
it’s a fake. Okay. Chamberlain comes back at four-fifteen; serious trouble is waiting. Jameson. He has the pharmacist and his assistant identify our friend as the guy who brought in the fake prescription. Tells him he’s under arrest on suspicion of conspiracy to traffic in narcotics, and that’s just for openers. Puts the cuffs on him.”

The light changed and Ferrigno took the Impala onto the divided boulevard where Blue Hill Avenue becomes Blue Hills Parkway in Milton. The traffic separated into four streams. A few cars took the right onto the Truman Highway. Most continued on to Route 138 southbound, the signage designating it for
Canton and Route 128. Some took the left on Route 28 heading east toward East Milton center. Ferrigno took the Impala out of the pack alone straight ahead. Over the rounded hills to the south the darkness was complete.

“Bobby tells him he’s going to take him down to the Mansfield police station and put him in a cell there ’til he can get in touch with us. Tell us that he’s got him, so that we can then talk to someone from the DA’s office. Find out where the DA wants him taken, how any times it’s okay to hit him with a rubber hose. But he should not plan on getting home today in time to catch the end of ‘Oprah.’ And it is at this point that our silver-tongued con man comes unglued.”

“I love it,” Dowd said with satisfaction, “the gifted amateur. First-time criminal genius. Everything’s going
so
good, ‘all the cops’re such
jerks
, no idea what’s going on,’ and then suddenly it comes to a screeching
halt.
He discovers that as sleepy as he thought we were, his brilliant little caper
did
get our attention, and we’ve got him by the
balls.
”

“Lou Sargent,” Ferrigno said, taking the Impala out of the streetlighted neighborhood into the deep darkness of the Blue Hills Reservation on Unquity Road, “is fifty-eight years old.” Now Dowd could see a few scattered stars over the black hillsides. “Nine years ago, his life came apart. ‘Until then I was never in trouble. ’til then I was doing okay.’

“ ‘That’s what they all say,’ Jameson says. He tells me, ‘It’s like I hauled off and belted him. I thought he’s gonna cry. He tells me “No, I really was.” And from what he told me I guess I would’ve thought that, too. He’s forty-nine. He’s divorced from his first wife but that was fourteen years ago, and after that they got along fine. “Sometimes I kind of wondered why we got divorced.” Finished raising the four kids they’d had together. “They tell you to always worry about that, what you’ve done to the kids, but
they
seem to’ve turned out fine, too—least so far.”

“ ‘He’s now with his second wife, married her four years before—this’s still nine years ago now, he isn’t fifty yet—and the
wheels
start to fall off. One day he goes to work, “very nice day. Sunny. I remember. World looked pretty good.”

“ ‘I can see why it would,’ Jameson tells me. ‘He’s been with this outfit years, Acadia-Johnson, Industrial Underwriters, Taunton Industrial Park. What they do’s reinsure companies for unfamiliar projects, jobs that’re bigger or just very different than they’re used to bidding, risks that might not be covered by their regular insurance.

“ ‘Like if a major road-construction company gets a contract to rebuild a shipyard. Now they’re dealing with the ocean. Not just blizzards—
tides
, and currents. Whadda they know about this? “Better go get some more bonding insurance—we fuck up, we don’t hafta pay.”

“ ‘The way he tells it, this’s not a crowded field. Only two or three companies this side of the Mississippi do what they do—and only three or four the other side. Apparently peculiar geographical and population conditions have so much to do with determining risk that there’re practical limits to how much territory any one outfit can know well enough to cover.

“ ‘He’s one of his company’s top risk analysts, knows his job and does it well—and since that happens to be the kind of people that the company can’t do its job without, function in the field it serves, he feels pretty secure. But this particular morning he finds out he isn’t. They tell him when he gets in that he can turn around, go home. Company’s been sold to its major competitor. All it’s going to be’s a name now, a division. In other words, a shell, and he no longer has a job. And because the field’s so small to begin with, obviously the reason the competitor did this, bought the one he worked for, was to eliminate it, and then economize on overhead. Make high-priced people like him redundant, and get rid of them—their salaries, benefits and pensions.

“ ‘Naturally, he’s devastated. Almost fifty and here he’s going to have to try to find another job, where he can use skills that he developed for the very
specialized
job that now no longer exists. Where does he begin? He doesn’t know.

“ ‘He has to get focused. He’ll deal with the practical side of things, like nailing down his COBRA rights, the continuation of benefits law that protects people thrown out of work from losing their life- and health-insurance coverage. And a friend who went through something similar when
his
firm bit the dust tells him that given his age and situation—looking for another job—he should take advantage of this great health plan he’s only going to have for another six months, go in and get himself a thorough work-up. So then when he’s out actively looking for a job, he’ll be able to say, “Look, not only am I
unbelievably
highly qualified and so forth, but I just had a complete checkup. My health is perfect.”

“ ‘Because hiring people’re not supposed to take health into the question. There’s a federal law against it, Americans with Disabilities Act. But they do do it; they’re just very cagey. They don’t say it. They say only, “What’s this guy done?” They mean, “How old is he?” And if he’s over thirty, “How’s his health been? Not interested in hiring somebody’s going to come in here, set new records for sick days.”

“So, Jameson says,” Ferrigno said, the Impala ascending the rise at the Hillside Street intersection, “he takes the advice.” Ferrigno turned west. “ ‘He goes to the doctor, and the doctor gets that look on his face nobody wants to see. Asks him if he’s lost any
weight
recently. And Sargent says he has—he was actually kind of glad, first noticed it was happening. Been meaning to drop a few pounds; he’d been getting kind of heavy. And the doctor says how many, and what did he do to lose them; anything special, like cut out the sweets, or the beer. And Sargent says no, nothing actually; hadn’t given up anything—that was
what made it so nice, to have those fifteen or sixteen pounds just melt away. And the doctor says how long ago was that, and Sargent says he isn’t really sure, six-eight months ago, and the doctor looks like he smells cat piss and tells him he wants him in the hospital, “not next week; tomorrow,” and have a bunch of tests. Which he does, and they find out what caused the weight loss. Not a nice surprise at all. And now it’s in his bones.’ ”

Ferrigno with the Paddock Stables on the left and the base of Great Blue Hill on the right reached over with his right hand and turned on the radio. A male voice came on saying, “RKO Talk Radio, six-eighty on your dial, and this is Howie Carr. Stay with us now as we——”

“I’ll do it,” Dowd said, leaning over. “Ninety-eight-point-eight, you said?”

“Right, FM,” Ferrigno said, both hands back on the wheel now as they passed the parking lot at Houghton’s Pond and the lights from the restaurants and filling stations clustered near the Route 138 cloverleaf with Route 128 washed out the stars. “Ninety-eight-point-eight, FM. You’ll probably have trouble. There’s at least three other stations fairly close to it. Sometimes atmospherics sort of billiard them around. But I promise you, it’s there. As the guy said to his bride, ‘Yeah, I know it’s little, dear, but think of it as your lollipop—there’ll be hope for both of us.’ ”

Dowd chuckled. A woman’s high and breathy voice said, “So, do you have any idea what that could possibly’ve been that was making all that
noise
? And what we could do about it? To get rid of it, I mean?”

A different kind of voice that sounded as though it might have been produced by another radio inside the car radio began by making a metallic panting noise, then segued into words uttered in something resembling the sound of a normal male voice. “As a matter of fact, I think I do,” it said.

“You got it,” Ferrigno said. “That’s him.” Dowd sat back.

“In fact,” the synthetic voice said, “I think I know
exactly
what it is you hear sometimes in your pear tree at night. As though there’s something fighting in it. There is.”

“Nooo,”
she said, mild indignation mixed with disbelief. “
Fighting
in it?
Birds
don’t fight.”

“Oh, yes, they do,” the artificial voice said. “Jays bully other birds all the time. Crows steal the eggs from other birds’ nests, and the other birds don’t like it. When the crows attack, the other birds make lots of noise—if you really listen you can
hear
how frantic they are. To call their friends to come, gang up, and fight the crows.

“But it’s pretty early for that. What I think you’ve got’s
raccoons.
Big bushy fat raccoons with burglar’s masks and paws with claws that look like fingers—and they use them like that, too.”

“Nooo,”
the woman said.

“Oh,
yes
,” the metallic voice said. “And of course you also have the birds. And the noise that you describe to me, sounds almost like a woman sobbing,
’cryin’ mad
,’ you said? Do it again for us, will you?”

“If I can,” the woman said dubiously. “Ah,
huh
-oo,
huh
-oo, huh-
oo
? Like that.”

Dowd and Ferrigno laughed.

“Very good,” Sexton said. “My guess in that case, they sound like that, would be that these’re definitely owls.”

“Really? Are you sure?” the woman said. “Because we’ve never seen any, and we’ve lived here a long time now, seventeen years. And both my husband and I garden. Got this just huge compost heap—it’s
gorgeous.
So we’re both outdoors a lot. He grows his vegetables behind the garage, lettuce and tomatoes, and zucchini squash, of course—
have
to grow zucchinis. And the eggplants, which we both love. Some herbs we have in salads. Flowers, as the kiddos say, ‘are my bag.’ I do just love my
flowers. Already had the crocuses and daffodils. Glads and then the day lilies. I just——”

“Yes,” the mechanical voice said, “but we’re talking the birds and raccoons here, and we do want to move along. Coming up on seven here. Owls’re nocturnal. You’re diurnal in your garden, out there in the dayime. Owls’re out at night. In this case, probably little screech owls, probably rufous—meaning red, that’s all, fancy birders’ term.

“And the reason that they’re fighting with the raccoons? Well, my guess is, well, raccoons’re very
territorial
, all right? Don’t know if you realize that, but let me assure you, they
are.
Stake out their territories and they make themselves a
nest
, a
home
there and that’s where they’ll spend all their adult lives, all right? If we let them. If they can get themselves enough to eat, which with all the people livin’ all around them now, the suburbs expandin’ like you’ve had all around here since right after World War Two, out into what used to be the forests and so forth, well, all the food we throw away, they don’t have much trouble. They’re just very good
adapters, like
to eat our garbage, and so, if they can get whatever the raccoon version of cable is, no one bothers them? They’ll stay there ’til they die.

“But now this time of year, it being spring and all, the young raccoons born last year’re now out lookin’ for new homes. Their loving parents’ve kicked them out. We do it in September, send ours off to college, say to them, ‘Go on now,
git
, gonna turn your bedroom into an
entertainment
center, monster TV, everything. Be sure and write us now and then, not just when you want money, tell us how it’s goin’.’ ”

The woman snickered and Sexton laughed again, making the metallic panting sound like an engine under load, short on oil and laboring. “But raccoons do it in the springtime, you dig? Kick the young ’uns out, and what those young ones now’re doin’ ’s checkin’ out new pads.

“And what they like especially’s a good old hollow tree. Which I will bet that pear in your yard’s got at least one part trunk that’s dead, gone hollow, and what you’ve been hearing is a disagreement between a young raccoon who’s looked it over, likes it and decided he’ll take it, start a family there—or maybe it’s a she-raccoon, I dunno which raccoon gender does the homesteading—’cept there’s this one catch; it’s already occupied. And that’s what makes the hoots and flapping. The owls already live there. They’re saying, ‘Not so darned fast here.’ They aren’t gonna be evicted—standing up for their rights as the rightful residents.”

“Well, what do I
do
, then?” the woman’s voice said.

“Ma’am,” the mechanical voice said, “I don’t think there’s much you
can
do. Odds favor the raccoon. That raccoon is going to win. And if you should get rid of him, have him trapped and relocated—cost you at least fifty, sixty bucks, maybe more, have somebody come in and do it—or perhaps have someone shoot him, you’re not a gun-control freak and don’t mind a little violence, then pretty soon some night after that when you’re in your yard, you’ll hear another war beginning. Your tree’s a choice dwelling place, and if you don’t have one raccoon, well then, you’ll have another. Only thing that you can do, if you don’t want raccoons, I think, is have that tree cut down.”