Sweetheart (3 page)

A noise made him swivel around. A man he had never seen before stood unannounced at his desk. The man’s outer coat was draped over his arm. His suit was dark and tailored to accommodate the small burden of a revolver. The man said, “You don’t know me.”

“Sure I do,” Wade said. “You’ve got government written all over you. Let me guess. FBI.”

“You’re quick.”

“Show me something.”

Russell Thurston produced identification. Wade read it and returned it. A metal chair was available, but Thurston remained erect. “I understand you went through Quantico.”

“Hasn’t everybody?”

“Nice to know you, brother,” Thurston said and extended a hand. The handshake was neither warm nor cold. It was professional and bone dry, like the man himself. Each studied the other and hid his judgment. Wade had little liking for the FBI, which had never broken its habit of aiding local police and then taking full credit if the results were favorable. Thurston said, “You can guess why I’m here.”

“More or less.”

Thurston draped his coat over the back of the chair. “For me it’s a break. Can you understand why?” There was no comment from Wade, no admission of any sort, and Thurston took another tack. “I wasn’t always Bureau, you know. For a short time I was with the CIA. Good years, let me tell you, but I was a budget casualty. Saddest day of my life.”

“You seem to have landed on your feet.”

“I have that facility. I used to fight Communists, and now I fight scum of another kind.”

“Sounds like an obsession.”

“Everybody moves to his own music, Lieutenant. I imagine you move very nicely to yours — given the chance, that is. Out here, I suspect you march to a bored drummer.”

Wade placed his hands on his desk, one covering the other, no wedding band, only an emerald, his birthstone. In a low and knowing voice, he said, “You want Tony Gardella.”

“I’ve got his picture in my wallet. You want to see it?”

“I know what he looks like.”

“I know you do.”

“He’s in Boston, but you come all the way here to get him.”

“This is where the action’s going to be, wouldn’t you say?”

Wade preferred not to say. “Why don’t you sit down, Thurston? You make me nervous. You’re working on some kind of scam, aren’t you? You want to squeeze Gardella.”

“Wouldn’t you if you were in my shoes?”

“I’m not in your shoes. Mine have been reheeled three times.”

“Are you afraid to get involved?” Thurston’s stance was the stillest, and his voice gave Wade an image of a spider climbing its silk.

“I wouldn’t want a fed calling my shots.”

“Get your coat.”

“What?”

Thurston bared his teeth in what did not in the least look like a smile but was meant to be one. “I’m going to buy you a drink.”

• • •

They went to a place called the Hunter’s Cove, drank dark beer, and stayed for dinner. The huge stone fireplace blazed, igniting faces. The waitresses wore buckskin vests and skirts, and the music was country. Wade, who was known there, had steak. Thurston had soup, annoying Wade by the deliberate and almost mannered way in which he ate. They discussed the lack of immediate evidence in the double homicide — no workable fingerprints, merely a long list of area toughs thought capable of such violence and an uncooperative witness surrounded by dogs. Thurston said, “The witness intrigues me. What did you say his name is?”

“Rogers.”

“You think he’s holding back?”

“It’s a feeling, nothing substantial to base it on.”

“Law enforcement people have special feelings. Insights. I’ve always maintained that.”

The waitress, pale and petite, made an unnecessary trip to the table and fussed over Wade, who had a solid, half-handsome face and usually a gentle voice. He had once taken the waitress to a movie and later would have brought her back to his place had she not mentioned she was married. Thurston watched with amusement and afterward asked, “Are you a ladies’ man?”

Wade did not trouble himself to answer.

“I didn’t think so,” Thurston said and for a number of moments gazed at other diners, sizing up men by the women with them. The light of the fire flattered many of the faces. Gradually he returned his gaze to Wade. “I’m curious. How the hell did you manage to get yourself assigned way out here?”

“I go where I’m told.”

“Translated, that means you don’t have the right people in your corner. Too bad. Your family’s back in the Boston area, I understand. Wellesley, is it?”

“My wife and I have separated.”

“I know that. You have two daughters going to BU. The tuition must be killing you.”

“While you’re at it, why don’t you tell me my bank balance?”

“Two hundred and three dollars in your checking and not a dime in your savings. Account closed. How about an after-dinner drink? I like Bailey’s Irish.” Thurston beckoned, and the waitress came immediately.

A bit later Wade said, “You’re smooth.”

“No,” said Thurston. “Just smooth enough.”

“This all going on your expense account?”

“Of course.”

“I’m an item.”

“I’d like you to be an even bigger item,” Thurston said in a tone meant to convey opportunity and promise. The waitress served their drinks, giving all her attention now to Thurston, who ignored her.

Wade bided his time. “Go ahead,” he said restively. “I’m waiting for your pitch.”

“First, let’s put something down for the record. Tony Gardella is garbage, no better than the goons who killed his folks. Sixteen years old, he bit a kid’s ear off in a street fight. That’s a savage, not a civilized member of society. Eighteen, he made his first hit working for a loan shark. Used an ice pick. Boston police picked him up right away, beat the crap out of him, but he never said a word. Impressed the hell out of the Providence people.”

“I’m relatively familiar with his file,” Wade said. “Plenty of arrests in those days, but no convictions.”

“You’re wrong, there was one. He was fined for peddling pornography a couple of weeks after he came out of the army. He moved up fast in the organization. A smart boy. He knew who to crush and who to suck up to. At the same time he was developing a taste for custom shirts and clean fingernails.”

Wade gave an ironic shrug. “Nothing wrong with a little polish.”

“He’s got polish like a snake’s got glitter. Over the years he’s mellowed a little, but that doesn’t make him any less a killer.”

“I still don’t know what you want from me,” Wade said tightly.

“I want you to do Gardella a favor he can’t forget.”

Wade laughed. “That has a nice ring to it, like ‘an offer you can’t refuse.’ What does it mean?”

Thurston paused. A small group was leaving. He viewed the women and then, cynically, the men, as if censuring them. “It means as soon as Gardella gets done burying his parents he’ll approach you. Either him or one of his people. You can count on it. For him, this goes to the gut. He can’t eat or sleep right till it’s settled. His brain’s on hold because he’s all emotion. You help him, you become special. You do it right, you become his brother. Am I getting through to you?”

“I can brief him on the investigation,” Wade said with distaste. “What more can I do?”

“You can give him the witness.”

Wade looked blank, then upset. “What the hell are you getting at?”

“You’ve heard the expression you can’t get blood from a stone. Gardella can.”

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

But they did. For a good half hour, with much argument and no agreement. Twice Wade placed a hand to his brow as though his thoughts were slipping away. Frequently Thurston’s voice dipped dramatically, which suggested theater had been his first love. “This guy’s got friends at City Hall, the State House, the Union Bank of Boston. Imagine how sweet it’d be to strip him bare.”

“There’s got to be a cleaner way,” Wade said. “Your way the witness could get crippled.”

“You cut a deal with Gardella. No blood. Scare tactics only.” Thurston scooped up the check. He scrutinized it and then paid it with bills he had to peel apart, drawn that morning from a special fund. “We wouldn’t expect you to go into this for nothing. We’re generous to a fault when it comes to people who help us.”

“What are you going to do, buy me a new car?”

“No. But we’d pay for your children’s education.” Thurston’s lips curved into a quiet smile as he shoved back his chair. “Two terrific daughters, I’m told. A lot of girls up and get married as soon as they graduate. We’d even pay for their weddings. Every penny of their happiness.”

In the rest room they stood at opposite ends of the bank of urinals. Wade stared at pink tiles, his long legs wide apart, a hand on his hip. Thurston tossed him a glance. “Too much for you? If it is, say so.”

Wade was silent for a long moment. He was remembering a trooper with whom he’d gone through the academy, a red-haired young guy who for a couple of years took bribes from a lower-echelon mafioso from East Boston. Then, to prove he was still his own man, he busted his benefactor on a petty charge. Two weeks later his decapitated body was found in a portable dumpster in the town of Wakefield, a thousand dollars in bloodstained bills bulging a pocket of his uniform. His head was never found.

“Yes, I could do it,” Wade said. “The question is whether I want to.”

They moved to the sinks and then to the dryer on the wall, where they hung their hands under hot drafts. It looked as though they were about to dance. “There’s something else I can do for you,” Thurston said with casual authority. “I can get you back to Boston.”

“What makes you think I want to go back?”

Thurston played his trump. “That’s where your wife is.”

• • •

Silas Rogers, who worked odd jobs, loaded his pickup truck with bone-dry kindling from the lumber yard and, in a lonely drive over twisting winter roads, hauled it across town to the Gillenwaters’. It was dark by the time he got rid of the load, every stick stacked neatly in the makeshift shed beside the sagging frame house supported on two sides by drifts of snow. Old Mrs. Gillenwater, wearing three sweaters, poked her thin head out the door and gave him money. She wanted him to come in to warm himself, but he declined with a quick mumble. He knew that what she wanted most was to talk about the killings.

“Silas, wait!”

He wouldn’t.

He drove into the lighted center of town and parked in front of Ned’s Superette to pick up Gravy Train for the dogs. He pushed the truck door open, but some sudden presentiment rooted him to the seat. The cold crawled in and chilled him. As if paralyzed, he watched two stolid figures break from a web of shadows and approach him with boots crunching the packed snow. They were the Bass brothers, Leroy and Wally. Beyond them he saw the Thunderbird.

“How you doin’, Mr. Rogers?”

The voice chilled him more than the cold did. It came from the older one, Leroy, who was also the taller one by six inches. Despite the cold, each held a punctured beer can in bare hands that were studded with bitten-open knuckles. They had squiggles in their young foreheads and pouches under their ferret eyes, as if they hadn’t been sleeping much, and they reeked of the cows their father owned, none of which gave fit milk.

“Just fine,” Silas Rogers answered in a small burst, wishing someone would come along, anyone. Customers bobbed about inside the superette, but none came out.

“Wanna beer? We got an extra in the Bird.”

He shook his head and shivered. They were straining to read him, he could tell. The younger one smiled out of a pale face raw and red at the nose and swigged from a Budweiser can. He had known them since their raucous years at Greenwood Grammar School, where he had been the janitor and they stay-backs, truants, vandals, and bullies. Remembering their cruelties, he feared them more than ever.

“What you want in the store, Mr. Rogers? Wally here will get it, won’t you, Wally?”

The younger brother muscled his face nearer and loomed like a Hun. “What’s he after?”

“He ain’t said yet.”

“What’s he waitin’ for?”

“He’s thinkin’.”

Silas Rogers wanted only to drive away. At home he had a hunting rifle, but it was unoiled, uncleaned, and he wasn’t sure he had shells. Probably not, which made him want to weep. “Dog food.”

“Give ‘im money, Mr. Rogers. He can’t go in there without money.”

Reluctantly Silas Rogers pulled bills from his pants pocket and skinned off more than enough. Wally Bass raised a hand, one of the fingers mashed from an old injury. Silas Rogers fed it, which made the older brother frown.

“Will that do it, Wally?”

“Don’t think so.”

“Prices are high in there, Mr. Rogers.”

Without hesitation he surrendered all that Mrs. Gillenwater had given him, overly willing to do anything to satisfy them. Their smiles showed they were pleased. Wally Bass crushed his Budweiser can and strutted toward the store. The older brother threw his empty into the dark.

“Bad thing about the Gardellas. I heard you were there.”

“No.” His voice rose in pitch, and his confusion was intense, almost violent. “I was only driving by.”

“That’s what I mean.”

“I didn’t see anything.”

“No?”

“My eyes can see, but not far.”

Leroy Bass smiled and spoke with chilling certainty. “I thought your eyes were good.”

“They’re bad,” he insisted.

“My grandmother had cataracts. You got those?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe that’s good. Good they’re bad, I mean.”

The younger brother came out of the superette with a small bag, which he tossed into the back of the pickup, a light thump, scarcely enough for one dog. Silas Rogers started to close the door, but Leroy Bass stopped him. Their eyes locked. Leroy Bass’s broad face was all meat.

“You oughta give Wally somethin’ for goin’, Mr. Rogers.”

• • •

Later, ensconced in the idling Thunderbird, the heater going, the younger brother counted money and surrendered half to the older one. In an uneasy and tenuous voice he said, “You think he’s lying?”

“Don’t matter,” Leroy Bass said.

“Matters if he saw us, matters a whole hell of a lot.”