Brothers and Bones (45 page)

I said nothing. What could I say? I’d blown it.

Siracuse laughed. “Shit, Beckham, I really gotta hand it to you. You had me going.” He laughed again. Uncle Carmen, the lovable Mafia don, was back. “And you know what I think? I think bluffing runs in your family. I think your brother was bluffing, too, when he told us about his little plan to protect you. With the shit you’re going through now, I bet if there really was a plan, it would’ve kicked in because whoever has the tape might think we’re involved in your troubles lately. Might think he could help you out if he released the tape. So I think that brilliant plan of your brother’s was nothing but horseshit he was slinging to save your ass.”

“You don’t know that for sure,” I said lamely.

Siracuse shook his head. “Man, you got any idea how many times over the years I said, ‘Fuck it, let’s haul the kid brother in, let Grossi have a go at him, see what he knows?’ But this candy ass—” he tipped his head toward Lippincott “—was always worried about your brother’s plan. So instead, I’ve had to pay a bunch of private dicks for thirteen fucking years, and this Angel kid for four years, and I had people reading reports about everything you did, everywhere you went, every time you took a shit. Christ.”

“You were worried about Jake Beckham’s plan, too, Carmen,” Lippincott said.

Siracuse shrugged. “Hell, we left Charlie alone and the tape stayed hidden, so it seemed like the brother might have been telling the truth. Still, Lippincott, if it hadn’t been for you, I would have ended this shit a long time ago.”

Lippincott looked at me. “I extended your life by years, Charlie.”

I replied, “Let me borrow Grossi’s hammer a second and I’ll thank you like you deserve.”

“So let’s see now,” Siracuse said, smiling. “No tape to protect you. No plan to protect you. No Bonzetti here to protect you. And you sitting there knowing way too much. I guess you’re fucked, Beckham. You’re dead. And Bonzetti? We’ll catch up to him soon enough. I got a thousand eyes on the street looking for that ugly, scar-faced fuck. So he’s as good as dead, too. And, I guess, so’s your girlfriend.”

Beside me, Lippincott tensed in his chair. “Carmen?”

“No choice,” Siracuse said. “Not anymore. Blame Beckham here. It’s his fault.”

I expected Lippincott to stand up and threaten Siracuse, threaten him with exposure, with all the evidence he’d accumulated against Siracuse over the years, with all the forces of justice he could bring to bear. Instead, after a moment, he nodded in resignation, like he’d just done the math himself and had to agree with Siracuse’s answer.

“That’s it?” I said. “You’re going to sit there and let him kill your daughter now?”

“It can’t be helped,” Lippincott said as if he truly believed it. “She knows too much. She’d never keep quiet. And if she goes to the authorities, exposes us, exposes me, well, then all the good I’ve done will be undone.”

Somewhere during that speech Lippincott had ceased to be human to me. I don’t know what he’d become—monster, alien, demon—but it wasn’t a member of the species to which I belong.

“Don’t you see, Charlie?” he continued. “They’ll go back through all my convictions, looking for impropriety. Who knows how many lowlifes would get their convictions overturned. The streets of this city would fill with the scum of the earth. And going forward? Think of that. I’d be in jail instead of where I belong, in my position as USA, with Carmen feeding me information, information with which I could continue to send countless deserving criminals to jail. You get it, Charlie? If Jessica lives, if you live, all the good I’ve done, all the good I still have ahead of me to do, would be gone. As much as I love my daughter, that’s a trade I can’t make in good conscience. My sense of duty to the people is just too strong.”

“What kind of coward are you? You wanted your son dead but didn’t have the guts to do it yourself, so you paid a punk to kill him. Now, you’d stand by and watch that same scumbag kill your daughter just so you can stay out of jail.” Lippincott opened his mouth but I pressed on. “You pretend to be acting in the public interest but the fact is, you’re afraid of going to jail, afraid of having your name dragged through the mud. You’re so afraid that you’d rather let your daughter be murdered than face those things.”

Lippincott looked at me with eyes that honestly couldn’t understand why I was having difficulty with his reasoning. I figured that was the product of decades of telling himself over and over, in the dark of night, in the darkest part of his mind, perhaps screaming into the darkest corners of his heart, that he had done, and was doing, the right thing. I shook my head and turned to Siracuse.

“If millions of people are right, and there’s a hell, you’ve got a first-class ticket. You know that, don’t you?”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “I actually go to confession every week. Say the Hail Mary a few times, the Our Father a few times, and I’m clean.”

I was about to tell him that that wasn’t the way it worked when I paused. I replayed in my head what I’d just heard. And it hit me. “Our Father.” I’d said these words a hundred times just since I woke up that morning. But there was something about the way he said it with that speech impediment of his that flipped a switch in my head. A streak of light shot across my mind, dazzlingly bright. It shone on a memory for a moment, a fact I’d stored, and a second later, it shot off in another direction, leaving a trail of fire in its wake, until the light illuminated another fact, and another, and the path lay before me in my mind, burning bright, shining out of the darkness, like someone had poured gasoline in a line along the ground, dropped a match, and
whoosh
.

This all took place in the span of seconds. Some change in my facial expression must have taken place because Lippincott said, “Charlie, what’s the matter?”

I barely heard him. I now knew exactly where to find Jake’s tape. Now I had to figure out how to use that information to save my life, and Jessica’s. And I had to do it fast.

FORTY-NINE

“You having a stroke or something, Beckham?” Siracuse asked. “What the fuck’s the matter with you?”

I knew without a doubt where Jake had hidden the tape. I needed a new plan. I needed to think of a way…

“Look at him,” Siracuse said, “he’s losing it. He’ll piss himself in a second.” His voice sounded very far away to me.

I was trying to block out that voice, the eyes staring at me, and concentrate, concentrate on things I knew, things I remembered seeing, things I’d forgotten until then that I’d seen, things I’d stored in my mind with my unusually powerful memory.

“Lippincott,” Siracuse said, “give him a shove or something. See if he’s still alive.”

And then, suddenly, I had it all. All the dots were connected. I had a plan. It was a long shot, of course, but my odds in this had never been good anyway. But while the plan I’d arrived with entailed saving Jessica while I ended up in jail—a plan, by the way, that was no longer even a viable option—my new plan carried with it a faint promise of nearly total victory for me. If it worked, of course. But if I was a betting man I’d have bet my life against it working—that is, if I wasn’t already betting my life that it
would
work.

“Charlie?” Lippincott said.

I shook my head as if to clear it. “Sorry about that. I was just thinking.”

“Oh, yeah?” Siracuse said, smiling. “About what?”

“About how excited the authorities are going to be when Bonz gives them the tape.”

Lippincott looked confused. Siracuse looked annoyed. “Shut the fuck up, Beckham. You already tried that one. Didn’t work, remember?”

“I admit that I don’t have the tape.”

“No shit.”

“But Bonz does. Or he will, very soon.”

Siracuse shook his head and his jowls swung pendulously. “Lousy bluff, Beckham. You were better than that before.”

“I’m not bluffing,” I bluffed. “The tape will be in our hands in two hours. If I’m not there to meet him, Bonz will get it himself. And he knows that if I’m not there, then something bad happened to me and he goes straight to the cops.”

“You’re starting to bore me, Beckham, and piss me off, because you’re wasting my fucking time. If you knew where the tape is you’d already have it. So I’m gonna stop this horseshit.” He turned to Grossi, whose eyes lit up as he did. “Take this shithead outta here and do whatever—”

“Shut the fuck up, Siracuse, and listen to me, or you’ll be spending the rest of your life in jail getting your fat ass boned by all the goons you worked with Lippincott to put away over the years.” I had to be as cocky as I could, piss him off, if necessary, or he’d never swallow my story. “Think you’re popular on the outside? You’ll be the belle of the fucking ball on the inside. Your dance card will be full all day and all night.”

He was glaring, the animal in his eyes full of fury. But he said nothing. We were fully seated at the poker table now, staring at each other across green felt, looking for signs that the other was holding a winning hand or a collection of mismatched junk.

Lippincott broke the silence. “Charlie, if you think—”

“Shut up,” Siracuse said without taking his eyes from me. Lippincott did as ordered. “Like I said a second ago, and like I said last night, if you knew where the tape is, you’d have already gone to the cops. You’re bluffing.”

“Well, you’re right, in part. I
was
bluffing. At least I was when we talked last night. But I’m not anymore. I figured out where the tape is. Unfortunately, it finally came to me when it was time to leave to come here. So I sent Bonz to get it. As I said, I told him I’d meet him there at noon.” I consulted my watch. “That’s less than two hours from now. He’ll wait for me a while, but if I don’t show he’ll just retrieve it himself and go straight to the cops.”

“Just figured it out this morning, huh? Convenient.”

“Not for me, it wasn’t. I’d rather have had the tape in my hands before I came here.”

Siracuse regarded me over his figurative poker hand.

“So where is it, then?” he asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “If you kill me, and Jessica, that tape makes it to the authorities, with a copy going to every major newspaper and news station in Boston.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I don’t care. Take a chance that I’m lying, you bag of shit, and see what happens. Both of you. I’m already good and screwed, but you guys, you guys have it all right now. And that’s a lot to lose.” I glanced briefly at Lippincott before returning my gaze to Siracuse.

Lippincott cleared his throat and said, “Carmen, maybe we should—”

“Shut your fucking mouth, Lippincott, or I’ll have Grossi nail it shut, you got it?” He leaned back in his chair and folded his pudgy hands across his big gut. “If this is true, and I think you’re lying, but if it’s true, why didn’t you say this when you first came in? Why make like you already had the tape?”

“Because I lied to you last night when I said I had it. You’d think I was lying again. Like you think now. I was going to take you to meet Bonz in a couple of hours and you wouldn’t have had to know I was lying at first. I really did send letters to three people before I came here, though, one of them a reporter—I had time enough to do that before I left—telling them where to find the tape, in case I don’t get to it.”

Siracuse was nodding to himself. “Okay, let’s say I’m wrong, which I fucking doubt, and you’re not lying. Where’s that leave us?”

“Right where we were when I came in. You still want the tape and Bonzetti. I still want Jessica, a half million dollars, and the frame on me to go away.”

He considered this. “I can make the gun disappear, and the shirt with that kid’s blood on it—”

“And your DNA,” Lippincott threw in.

Siracuse silenced him with nothing more than a flick of his eyes.

I said, “I thought maybe Grossi dropped the gun in my apartment.”

“Nah, he held onto it. So I guess without a murder weapon and no shirt with blood and your DNA on it, they don’t really have that much on you, do they?”

“What about the half a dozen witnesses who saw me leave covered in Angel’s blood.”

Siracuse shifted his eyes to Lippincott. “Now’s the time to speak up, Counselor. Your thoughts?”

He cleared his throat and said, in that hundred-year-old-scotch-smooth voice of his, the one he’d mesmerized judges and jurors with for decades, “Those witnesses who saw you leave also saw Grossi chasing after you. With a murder weapon with your prints on it and your shirt, the man chasing you is nothing, a phantom you can’t adequately explain, certainly not well enough to counteract the damage done by the physical evidence against you. But without those items, without solid, tangible evidence with your fingerprints and DNA on them, the man chasing you takes on significance. He becomes the Holy Grail for you. Reasonable doubt. Which, of course, is all you’d need. Plus, I can assure you, I’d assist in any way I could. If you decided to fight this and not run off to that Caribbean island with my daughter, I think you’d walk, Charlie. I can almost guarantee it.”

“Reasonable doubt,” I said.

Lippincott nodded.

I said, “It would make me feel better if you could pin it all on someone else rather than leave it to a mysterious man chasing me. How about Grossi over there.”

“Fuck you,” Grossi said as he began to rise from his chair, his teeth snapping down on his chewing gum. Siracuse waved him back down with a wiggle of his thick fingers.

“Grossi’s too valuable,” Siracuse said. “Crazy fucks like him don’t grow on trees, you know.” Grossi sat back, apparently pleased with this praise. “But we’ll see what we can do. Maybe I can pin it on one of my guys, someone we don’t need. Or maybe some poor bastard off the street will fit the bill. We can make it work. We’re good at shit like this. Lippincott will help. He’ll know what’ll fly and what won’t.”

I said, “My career’s over no matter what, of course. I’ve lost everything.”

Siracuse sat forward, his chair creaking and straining under his ample weight. “Jesus, you can’t have everything. So you quit being a lawyer. Big fucking loss. Maybe my five hundred thousand bucks will make you feel better, you little shit.”