The Rat on Fire (19 page)

“Mavis is on her way to the courthouse,” Scott said. “Alfred is going to be brought in one hour and twenty minutes from now.”

“Have her get him a Public Defender,” Mack said.

“Mavis does not want a Public Defender,” Scott said, “any more than you would want a pauper’s funeral, and for just about the same reason. Those guys’re good, but they are overworked.”

“On this case,” Mack said, “it probably wouldn’t make much difference. There isn’t any way to win it.”

“That doesn’t matter to Mavis,” Scott said. “She wants you to represent him.”

“Ten grand,” Mack said.

“Okay,” Scott said. “The Elks’re going to be sorry to hear you took this attitude.”

“What do you mean?” Mack said.

“Just what I said,” Scott said. “Comes around primary time, Senator Mack is up for reelection, the Elks’ll still be sorrowful.”

“Uh-huh,” Mack said.

“There is nothing worse’n a sorrowful Elk,” Scott said.

“You made your point,” Mack said. “I’ll be in court. What time?”

“Ten,” Scott said. “I knew I could count on you to take care of a good friend.”

T
HERE WERE TWO KIDS
in the alley at Bristol Road when Proctor and Dannaher pulled up in the van. The kids at once ran away.

“Little bastards,” Dannaher said. “Oughta be in school.”

“They
are
in school,” Proctor said. “Breaking and Entering School. We just interrupted their practice, is all.”

“They could recognize us,” Dannaher said.

“Right,” Proctor said, “they could recognize us. Those guys took off like we was the heat. Come on, will ya? You worry too much.” He parked the van, got out and opened the rear doors. He removed a large toolbox which did not clank very much. He went around to the passenger side of the van. “I said, ‘Come on, will ya?’ ” he said. “You deaf or something? For Christ sake, Jimma, you want the fuckin’ money or not?”

“Those kids saw us,” Dannaher said from the passenger seat.

“Which is why they ran, of course,” Proctor said. “They’re scared shitless of us.”

“They could’ve took the license number,” Dannaher said.

“They could’ve,” Proctor said. “Lemme ask you somethin’, all right, Jimma? You ever get up inna middle the night, take a piss?”

“Of course I did,” Dannaher said. “Only thing there is good about being in the slammer—toilet’s right there. ’Course there was one guy that I was in the cell with, and it didn’t matter how you peed down the side of the bowl there, he would wake up and pretend he was still sleepin’ and grab your cock while you were still going at it. But yeah, I remember.”

“Okay,” Proctor said. “Now, when you were busy trying to
take a leak, you had your mind on doing that, right? Nothing else.”

“Yeah,” Dannaher said.

“Same thing with those kids,” Proctor said. “They had their mind on going in some window and swiping somebody’s color TV that they could sell for thirty bucks and get themselves some drugs. And then they see this truck come around the corner and they beat it because they figure we’re gonna recognize
them. You
get a look at their faces?”

“No,” Dannaher said.

“Damned right you didn’t,” Proctor said. “You got a look at their faces, there is a good possibility you might be able, identify them in some line-up or something. Which does not interest them. So they beat it. You got eyes, the back of your head?”

“You’re an asshole,” Dannaher said.

“I haven’t, either,” Proctor said. “That’s why I don’t think two kids takin’ off down an alley probably got a license number off a truck. Now will you get the fuck out of there and carry the stuff with me, or are you gonna sit there and have your fuckin’ period again?”

“Leo,” Dannaher said.

“ ‘Leo’ nothin’,” Proctor said. “We been all through this before. You’re gonna get outta the fuckin’ truck and you’re gonna help me and we are gonna do what we came here to do and then we are gonna leave. Otherwise you are not gonna get no money.”

Dannaher got out of the truck. He took a toolbox. They walked down the alley, Proctor in front.

Proctor and Dannaher walked down the alley and turned right into the back yard. They descended the stone steps to the basement, opened the wooden door and went in. Proctor switched on the three-cell flashlight.

“Over there,” Proctor whispered, “next to all that junk in the coal bin. The thing that used to be the coal bin.”

Proctor and Dannaher opened the toolboxes and removed rags soaked in paint thinner and kerosene. They piled them in a pyramid next to the wooden wall of the coal bin. Proctor took a bottle cap from his pocket. From his toolbox he removed a length of string four feet long.

“Whaddaya gonna do with that?” Dannaher said.

“Just what I soaked it in the chemicals for,” Proctor said. “It’s a fuse. This is eight minutes of time. Burns half a foot a minute. Gimme that rubbing alcohol in your box.”

Dannaher handed Proctor the isopropyl alcohol. Proctor filled the bottle cap with alcohol and handed the bottle back to Dannaher. Dannaher capped it and returned it to the toolbox. Proctor lifted one edge of the rags and placed the bottle cap under it. He draped the string across the top of the bottle cap.

“Ready to leave?” Proctor said.

“Been ready since before I came in here,” Dannaher said.

Proctor took out a plastic throwaway lighter and ignited the string. It glowed instead of burning with flame. He watched it glow for about fifteen seconds. “ ’Kay,” he said, “let’s go.”

J
ERRY
F
EIN LEFT
the house in his sport coat, tie and slacks that morning without telling his wife that he was going to play golf. He went directly to the Bay State Country Club, changed, and was off the first tee by nine-thirty. He played eighteen holes, had a vodka and tonic and a club sandwich on the terrace, returned to the first tee and began another round.

When he finished he had two vodka tonics on the terrace with his friend, Max Winchell, who had left his insurance business early to get in nine holes before dinner. Max said he wished he had gone to law school so that he could also forget about the office on a nice summer day and spend it playing golf and having a good time for himself. He said that if he took a whole day off in the middle of the week like that, his business would go straight to hell and pretty soon he would not be able to pay the dues and the greens fees and the bar chits and the restaurant charges at the Bay State Country Club in Newton, Massachusetts.

Max said his secretary would have him paged at the golf course every time he teed up a shot and he would not be able to keep his mind on the game anyway. He said that Gloria was about as bright as cole slaw or maybe potato salad, and that she would call him up at every tee to see if it was all right to open an envelope that came in the mail and then call him again to see if he minded if she sealed an envelope to go out in the mail. Max said that Gloria was in the process of getting a divorce and that he was therefore in the process of Gloria getting her divorce, because the whole thing was making a young girl who wasn’t too bright to begin with into some kind of a daffy basket case who spent all day talking about her divorce case and no time at all
doing work for Max Winchell and Company that was paying her.

Max reminded Jerry Fein that he, Max, had been through his own divorce action four and a half years ago and he was just then getting back on his feet both financially and emotionally and he did not have any interest whatsoever in going through Gloria’s divorce with her. He said he would still like to know when Jerry Fein was finally going to do the right thing by his old friend, Max, and start insuring all his profitable real estate with Max so that Max would have a little help from his old friend Jerry in the course of getting back on his feet again, both financially and emotionally.

Jerry Fein said, “Max, you are in business in a nice suburb, and when somebody says to you that he has some real estate that he rents out, you automatically think it is something where Jewish widow ladies go and sit out by the swimming pool on nice days like this and schmoos a little.

“The trouble with what you think, Max,” Jerry Fein said, “is that it is not true in my case and you should be very happy and grateful to me that you do not have the business of insuring the property that I got in Boston, because if I ever gave you that business you would not be able to play golf even in the dark. Because the people who live in my buildings are not nice and they do not pay their rent and they are always doing something to those buildings that every so often costs more to fix than the five-hundred-dollar deductible which is the most policy that anybody is willing to write for me even though I do pay a fortune for it. And I would therefore be calling you up all the time and bothering Gloria and distracting her from all the fun she is having with her divorce, all right?

“As for secretaries,” Jerry Fein said, “let me give you the benefit of a secret which I learned a long time ago, and that is when they have got something on their minds that is such that they cannot concentrate on anything else at the same
time, the sensible thing to do is say to them like I did to Lois Reynolds last night when she was howling about this Winnebago she wants to get for her husband and does not seem to be able to so that she is on the telephone all day about it and is not getting any work done, that the sensible thing to do is to say to Lois like I did last night, ‘All right. You will take tomorrow off and go and settle this matter once and for all, and have a nice time at it, so that when you come back day after tomorrow, you will have finished your business and you will be in a much better mood.’

“Then she will say,” Fein said, “that she cannot possibly do this because it will leave you, which is me, all alone with nobody to answer the phone and when she comes back tomorrow I will have spent the whole day answering my phone and talking to people that I refuse under all circumstances to talk to when she is there and answering the phone, and consequently she will come in tomorrow and have to put up with me in a worse mood than she was in yesterday, because she knows how I get when she’s been out sick or we don’t happen to take the same lunch hour or something.

“I tell her,” Fein said, “that this is not going to be the case. This is because it is summer and I have not had any vacation to speak of and the business’s been going pretty good and I am going to reward myself with a day on the links so that I will not be there today either and the goddamned phone can ring its ass off if it wants without bothering me at all. Besides, I am spending all of my waking hours worrying about whether Mabel and the Golden Throats have got them breaking down the doors at Simmy’s in Taunton. And also whether Foxy Flaherty is satisfied in Lowell with the fine comic routines of Happy Morris, the Poor Man’s Zero Mostel, who has been known to do the same thing in his dressing room at intermission as the customers are doing at the bar out front. Only he does as much of it in twenty minutes or a
half an hour as all of them together do all evening, so he sometimes has trouble making the second show and more than once has missed the third show entirely or else done the material he is supposed to save for the reunions they have when some guy gets back to the old neighborhood after he finishes doing twenty years for armed robbery, if you get my meaning.

“All day every day I worry about such things, and today I decide that I am going to worry about whether I can finally get a par on the eighth and maybe hold myself down to a double bogey on the fifteenth, because I have worked hard and I have earned it, and that is what I did all day. See? That way, nobody has to worry about the phone, because Lois is off buying Winnebagos and I am off playing golf and except for you and the guy that serves the breakfast and the guy that serves the drinks and the lunch and the kid that brought me this drink and the one I had before that, the only person in the world besides Lois who knows where I am is Ralphie, my caddy, that I spent the whole day with having a nice conversation about the economy and gasoline and whether I should use a seven iron or a five iron on a particular approach shot. I like Ralphie. He is a fine young boy and he does not hesitate to say when he thinks you are not maybe using enough club. I tipped him ten bucks.”