Brothers and Bones (43 page)

Less than an hour later, the alarm on my watch woke me. I was the only one awake in the apartment. Because I didn’t want to listen to pleas or threats or just plain whining from our friends, I stepped quietly into the kitchen for a glass of orange juice, then quietly to the bathroom, where I showered away the grime the city had deposited on me since my last shower, which seemed like a month ago. After getting dressed, I dropped back onto the couch and, as I’d done most of the night, I just sat and thought. As I sat, Bonz woke, ate, and threatened Rantham and Harwick. And still I sat, thinking until, finally, the time had come for us to leave. I had to meet Siracuse at ten o’clock in Charlestown. Rantham’s and Harwick’s hospitality never seemed to cease, as it took very little persuasion to get them to loan us their cell phones—seeing as the battery in Randy Deacon’s phone was just about gone—and even their cars. I took Rantham’s, a Honda Civic, and Bonz took Harwick’s Camaro. We promised to call them later to tell them where they could find their cars and phones. Then we put tape across their mouths and promised to call the building super in a few hours and tell him to go to Rantham’s apartment to cut them loose. The very last thing Bonz did was to advise the men, in very strong terms, what a huge mistake they’d be making if they spoke to the police about our visit.

Bonz and I drove separately away from Jamaica Plain, through a fog so thick we could have been driving on the surface of Venus, if the physics of the universe would allow it, and I wouldn’t have known the difference. The sea of white around me lent an unreal atmosphere to the morning, a day already surreal because I was driving to meet the head of the Italian Mafia, a man who believed I’d had a hand in killing his closest friend, a man who I knew wanted to torture me, eventually to death. What should I have expected on such a day? Sunshine and bluebirds?

As instructed, I pulled up in front of a warehouse on Medford Street in Charlestown. I got out of the car, didn’t bother to lock it, and crossed the sidewalk to the warehouse. There was a big roll-up door, closed at the moment, and beside it, a smaller door, through which I walked. Inside I saw men moving crates around. I figured they were filled with drugs and hookers, the latter of which I hoped had been given the benefit of air holes. Just inside, to the right of the door, was one of Siracuse’s men. It was the guy with the fat, dark mole by his nose, the one I’d seen at the charity dinner. He frisked me, found Rantham’s cell phone and pocketed it. I hadn’t bothered to bring along my Swiss Army knife. Mole Man pulled open my shirt, unbuttoned my pants and yanked them down to my knees, then did the same with my boxer briefs. I turned my head and coughed but he didn’t seem to get my joke. He gave me a second to redress myself, then shoved me toward an office door.

Inside, Carmen Siracuse’s bulk was squeezed into a chair behind a plain wooden desk. He had a quarter of a breakfast sandwich in his hand and the other three-quarters in his mouth. Hammer Grossi sat in a chair in the corner, his wide-set eyes dark and dull, a white bandage enveloping what remained of his left ear, his teeth violently attacking a stick of gum. Andrew Lippincott sat in a chair in front of the desk, looking smaller than I remembered him. His hands were folded demurely in his lap.

“Sit down,” Siracuse said around a mouthful of egg, bacon, and bagel. It wasn’t a request. I took the chair beside Lippincott’s. “Where’s Bonzetti?” With his speech permanently altered by his damaged tongue, it sounded like, “Wherth Bontheddi?”

“Where’s Jessica?” I asked.

“Where’s Bonzetti?” he repeated. “And the tape?” He looked up at the Mole Man, who was standing in the doorway, and said, “He have a tape on him?”

“No, Uncle Carmen.”

“Anything at all on him?”

“Just this.” He held up Rantham’s cell phone and put it on top of a file cabinet near the door.

Siracuse looked at me. “Where’s the fucking tape, Beckham?” All pretense was gone. Good old Uncle Carmen, the jolly mobster, everybody’s favorite Mafia don, had disappeared, as if Siracuse had slipped off a Halloween mask. The cold gangster he really was sat in front of me, glaring malevolently at me.

“Do you think I’m stupid, Siracuse? You think I’d come waltzing in here and hand you my only leverage, my only defense?”

“So where is it?”

“Bonz has it. He’ll bring it when I call him and tell him to.”

And there was our plan. Our great plan. Because I couldn’t figure out where the tape really was, I’d pretend we had it and then, when the time was right, I’d call Bonz and, instead of the tape, he’d bring the cops to us, telling them that they’d capture Charlie Beckham, wanted murderer. He’d already been in contact with them, told them to be ready, that he’d call later with more specific information. My hope was that they’d save Jessica and arrest Siracuse and Lippincott on kidnapping charges. It was a lousy plan, really, in several respects. First, it was risky. I had to convince Siracuse and Lippincott that we really had the tape, which I wasn’t sure I could do, then hope the cops arrived before my deception was exposed. Second, while my plan might save Jessica’s life, it landed me behind bars with little hope of proving my innocence. I certainly couldn’t expect Siracuse or Lippincott to have a change of heart and confess to the frame on me. No, all that strong evidence against me would remain and I’d likely go to jail. But, if by some miracle the plan worked, at least Jessica would be safe. And Siracuse wouldn’t get Bonz.

“And Bonzetti’s just gonna walk in here and let us grab him?” Siracuse said.

“I convinced him that all you want is the tape. He thinks he’s splitting the money with me.”

“Well, when I have the tape, you’ll have your girlfriend. Oh, yeah, and the half a million.”

Something in the way he said the part about the money, like it was a joke, erased any doubt I had that he intended to kill us all—Jessica, Bonz, and me. “Let me see her now.”

“No.”

I stared at him. He stared back while stuffing the rest of his sandwich into his mouth. Damn it. Bonz was in the area, of course, ready to call the cops again, but he couldn’t do so until we knew where Jessica was being held. I’d hoped she’d be in this building, but didn’t expect that to be the case. That would have been stupid on Siracuse’s part, and the man was a lot of things, very few of them good things, but he wasn’t stupid.

He swallowed his sandwich and said, “So you found the tape, huh?”

“I did.”

“Good for you. Where was it?”

“None of your business.”

Siracuse nodded, licking grease off his fingers.

“I think you’re a fucking liar. I think you’re stalling for something. And I think you and your bitch are dead.”

I took a deep breath, hoped no one could hear the thundering, marching-band-bass-drum beating of my heart, and began to bluff. I’d pieced together what I could and hoped I could describe it in sufficient detail to make them think I had the tape, but vaguely enough not to give away that I didn’t.

“You killed Tommy Lippincott, Siracuse, a six-year-old boy with severe autism. And what’s worse, this disgusting shit bag—” I tipped my head toward Lippincott “—paid you to do it. He paid you to kill his own autistic son because he wanted him dead and didn’t have the balls to do it himself. So he picked a punk he’d put away, one who’d just gotten out of jail, a punk he knew would do what he wanted, and he got him a job at St. Michael’s Hospital.” I turned to Lippincott. “The city loved the ‘DA with a heart,’ the District Attorney who helped ex-cons he’d sent to jail get a new start in life, never suspecting how black your true motives were.” I looked at Siracuse again. “And after you worked at St. Michael’s for a little while, you killed poor little autistic Tommy Lippincott in his sleep. Framed some poor brain-sick teenager for the murder.”

Lippincott sucked in a deep breath and said, “He’s got it, Carmen. He’s got the tape.”

Inside, I let out a sigh of relief so big that, if it hadn’t been only in my mind, it would have been of sufficient force to blow Siracuse’s considerable bulk off his chair and onto his considerable ass. As I’d worked on it in my head this morning, the pieces started to fall together. Siracuse and Lippincott working together to find the tape, implying they were both incriminated on it. Big Frank D’Amico saying what I’d come to believe was more chilling that I’d first thought. What I think he was trying to say was, “Michael, kill, kid,” meaning “St. Michael’s,” and “kill,” which, of course, is what was done to Lippincott’s “kid.” Jake’s margin notes also fit. He wanted to obtain “time records” of “Mike’s”—that is, St. Michael’s—presumably to verify that Siracuse had been scheduled to work on that night in 1976 when Tommy was murdered. And his second note, written just after the first, “B.B. 2/76” clearly referred to the February, 1976,
Boston
Beacon
puff piece about Lippincott, which mentioned his getting Siracuse a job at St. Michael’s. The article appeared five weeks before Tommy Lippincott’s murder.

Of course, though it all seemed to fit, there was a chance I was wrong about some or all of it, maybe something small but telling, a crucial detail, which is why I’d remained as vague as I realistically could. There’d been a lot of bluff that went into my performance. Apparently, I’d been right enough.

I looked at Siracuse and said, “And you framed a poor, mentally handicapped, thirteen-year-old kid for the murder, tearing off a piece of the kid’s pajama sleeve and stuffing it into Tommy’s mouth in his sleep, suffocating him.” I was careful how I said this. I didn’t know if the plan to frame the kid had been discussed on the tape. Once I’d put together the idea of the murder for hire, I went back into the
Beacon
’s story archives and found the one about the murder of DA Lippincott’s autistic son at the hands of another mentally handicapped patient. The story mentioned the sleeve, which sewed things up nicely for the police. But because I didn’t know if Siracuse and Lippincott had discussed on the tape the idea of framing the kid for the murder, I didn’t want to sound as though I’d gotten the information from the tape. Instead, I merely acted disgusted about their decision to frame a poor, addle-brained teenager for murder—an act that wasn’t hard for me to pull off.

“And,” I added, “the beauty of the tape is how obvious it is who the speakers are.” I looked at Lippincott again. “Your deep, soothing voice is famous, Lippincott. And Siracuse, nobody could mistake your voice for anyone else’s, not with that giant chunk of tongue missing.”

Siracuse regarded me with emotionless, black eyes, cold cobra’s eyes in a fat frog’s face.

“You ever wonder what happened to that kid you framed?” I asked him.

It was Lippincott who answered, matter-of-factly. “He hanged himself four years later in a psychiatric ward for violent juvenile offenders diagnosed with mental issues.”

“So Bonz has the tape now?” Siracuse asked, all business, no trace of emotion for Tommy, whose life he ended at the tender age of six, or for the sick kid he framed, whose already ruined life he made more miserable until the poor wretch killed himself before he made it out of his teens.

As repulsed as I was by the callousness of those around me, I had to breathe another mental sigh of relief. They hadn’t pressed me for details. Frankly, I didn’t even know if the tape was of a phone call or a face-to-face conversation. What I figured was that Lippincott had wanted to hire Siracuse, the violent punk, to kill his son, and hadn’t figured him to be smart enough to tape the conversation. But Siracuse wasn’t as stupid as Lippincott had hoped. Though he was no genius, either. Somehow, a copy of the tape Siracuse had made had gotten away from him. Seeing as there is no statute of limitations on murder, both Siracuse and Lippincott desperately needed that tape to disappear. Of course, the tape itself was proof only of a conspiracy to commit murder for hire, and the teenager had been convicted long ago for the murder, but the tape would get people thinking, and digging again, and maybe even considering exhumation of Tommy Lippincott’s body to see what it revealed. A trip back through the evidence box from the murder might be enlightening, too. Maybe the ripped pajama sleeve had some of Siracuse’s DNA on it. You never know. They can do things these days they couldn’t back in 1976. It would help, too, that the time records of St. Michael’s employees on the night of the murder, the records Jake had reminded himself in his notes to obtain, would likely put Siracuse at the scene of the murder on the night it took place. Certainly, this all was enough to scare Lippincott, an experienced prosecutor, which meant it had to scare the hell out of Siracuse.

“Yup, Bonz has the tape,” I said, stone-cold bluffing.

“And you didn’t make a copy?”

I probably should have anticipated the question but I hadn’t, so I hesitated, which Siracuse took to mean that we had, in fact, made a copy.

“You little shit,” he said. “Why the fuck would I want to pay for the tape when you’ll be running around out there with a copy?”

“Because that original’s been a thorn in your side for more than a dozen years and you need to get your fat hands on it so it can’t find its way into general circulation.”

“I need both tapes.”

“I’ll ask again, Siracuse, you think I’m stupid? You think I believe you’ll let Jessica and me walk away, with half a million of your dollars, no less,
after
we give you the only copies of the tape? Jesus, you think that, you’re the one who’s stupid.”

I think Siracuse clenched his jaw in anger. It was hard to see the muscle working under the sagging flesh of his cheek, but it looked that way to me. “And if you do walk away with the money and a copy of the tape, I’m supposed to believe you won’t go to the cops with it?”

“Look,” I said, “you guys have ruined my life. Even if you keep your word and destroy as much of the evidence of Angel’s murder as you can, the evidence you created to point to me, I’m not in the clear. He’s still dead and I was covered in his blood. I could still go to jail. I’d much rather go to a Caribbean island with my girl and five hundred grand.”

Siracuse frowned. “Both tapes, you fuck, or no deal. You die here and now.”