The Rat on Fire (21 page)

“And Alfred was in there,” Mack said.

“Mister Mack,” she said, “Alfred did not set no fire. I would stake my life on that.”

“You may be doing just that,” Mack said.

D
ON ENTERED
the Scandinavian Pastry Shop less than a minute behind Proctor. Proctor was sitting by himself in a booth. He was drinking coffee and eating a cheese Danish. It was another hot night and the moths collided regularly with the outside of the shop windows.

“Lemme have coffee and a cheese Danish,” Don said to the waitress, who was studying the bugs.

“Haven’t got any more Danish,” she said. “How ya want ya coffee?”

“Guy over there’s eating Danish,” Don said.

“Got the last one,” she said. “Told ya, haven’t got no more Danish. Don’t gimme a hard time, all right?”

“Got any soup, or something?” Don said.

“
Mister
,” she said, snapping her gum, “you been in here before, right? You can probably read the sign and everything. Says it’s a pastry shop, you know? Means we sell the baked goods. We sell the doughnuts and the Danish and we sell the bismarcks and stuff with the whipped cream in them. We sell
baked
goods, mister. Soup and salads and sandwiches, you got to go somewhere else, you wanna get them.”

“How much coffee you bake?” Don said.

“We don’t bake no coffee, mister,” she said. “Ya don’t have to be a wise guy, you know. We
brew
the coffee, you know?”

“How much Coke you bake?” Don said. “You sell Coke and root beer and stuff like that, don’t you?”

“Mister,” she said, “you’re givin’ me a big
pain
. I mean, I hate to say it and everything, but you’re giving me a big pain.”

“Where?” he said.

“In the
ass
,” she said.

Proctor turned around. “Hey,” he said, “why’ncha leave the kid alone again, all right, Mac?”

“Mind your own goddamned business,” Don said. “Gimme a regular coffee and forget the lecture about how it isn’t cream, all right?”

Mickey came in from the parking lot and sat down next to Don. He ordered coffee.

Malatesta came in right after Mickey and joined Proctor in the booth. He ordered coffee. He looked at Proctor’s Danish and ordered a cheese Danish. “Haven’t got no Danish left, mister,” the waitress said. “Outta Danish. You’re too late. You want the Danish, you should come in here early. You been in here before. You oughta know that. How ya want ya coffee?”

“
Jee
-zuss,” Malatesta said. “What the hell did I do?”

“I had a hard day,” the waitress said.

“So’d a lot of people,” Malatesta said. “Just give me the coffee and I already know it isn’t cream. Regular.”

“I was down in Providence,” Mickey said. “Where’d you go?”

“Took a container up to Ludlow,” Don said. “Machine parts, said on it. Yugoslavia. I didn’t know we were getting stuff from them.”

“Oh, sure,” Mickey said. “All them Commie countries. Tools, cars, everything.”

“So,” Malatesta said to Proctor, “how’d it go? You hear?”

“Guys fell out of bed, got hurt less,” Proctor said. “Talked to Fein this morning. Happy as a pig in shit. ‘Guys fell out of bed and got hurt less,’ he says. That kid you sent over, see him? What’s his name, some corporal.”

“Grogan,” Malatesta said. “Well, I sent Caprio too, but I’m not sure Caprio can talk.”

“It was perfect,” Proctor said. “Whoever it was, it was perfect. Fein told me he just sat there and yelled about those
niggers for about an hour, and the two guys sit there taking notes and then they thank him very much and they get up and leave and that is the end of it.”

“So he stuck to it,” Malatesta said.

“Sure,” Proctor said. “Fein’s a big asshole, but once he gets his story down, he tells it and tells it and tells it. See, they started looking for him when the rags went up, only he’s smart enough, he
knows
they’re gonna start looking for him, the rags go up, so he gives his secretary the day off and he goes out and runs around in the weeds all day, playing golf, and then he gets home and there’s his wife, all upset because there’s a fire in their building, and he puts on this great song and dance and she ends up helping him convince the corporals they been having all this trouble with the niggers that don’t pay their rent.”

“Good,” Malatesta said.

“
Good?
” Proctor said. “It was perfect, is what it was. Those two clowns told him he was lucky there was only one tenant in the building and he’s not usually there because he goes off somewhere before lunch.”

“He’d better not be in there when you do it,” Malatesta said.

“I heard you before, Billy,” Proctor said. “You don’t have to remind me.”

“When?” Malatesta said.

“It’s better,” Proctor said, “you don’t know too much. You know the address. Just sit tight.”

“I haven’t seen any money yet,” Malatesta said.

Proctor took three one-hundred-dollar bills from his pocket. “On account,” he said. “Just sit tight.”

C
ARBONE OPENED
the discussion with Roscommon, Sweeney nodding affirmations as he talked.

“It’s Fein, all right,” Carbone said.

“Well,” Roscommon said, “you thought it was. That’s not news.”

“Not quite fair, sir,” Sweeney said. “We suspected it was one of Fein’s buildings, but we weren’t sure. Proctor’s got his own property, too. A lot of what he said, he could’ve been planning to light off one of those and he was just shooting the shit with Malatesta about Fein, confusing him.”

“Yeah,” Roscommon said.

“Thing of it is,” Carbone said, “we flagged every file that Malatesta’s handled, and the one they were talking about was that smoker over on Bristol that went up yesterday. So it’s one of Fein’s buildings, because he’s the guy that owns it.”

“Can we move on it?” Roscommon said.

“I don’t think so,” Carbone said. “Mickey doesn’t think so, either. Do you, Mick?”

“No,” Sweeney said, “no, I don’t.”

“They’re liable to kill somebody, the next time,” Roscommon said. “Then we’ll have shit up our nostrils for a month, turns out we expected it and we didn’t do anything.”

“Don’t think so,” Sweeney said. “Billy’s very strong on that—nobody in the building. That’s why the smoker. Drive people out. Besides, right now we can’t prove it.”

“You had a tail on Proctor, I thought I told you,” Roscommon said.

“So what?” Carbone said. “Proctor’s a handyman. There’s a lot of work in those buildings for handymen. We didn’t go in the basement with him and Dannaher. We watched them stop and we watched them go in and we watched them come
out in less’n ten minutes and we followed them down Dort Ave and they have a hot dog and a beer and go off someplace else. That’s no arson. All they got to do is get up on their hind legs in court and say they went to fix something and they couldn’t fix it and they left to go get some lunch and some more tools and then they heard it on the radio that there was a fire there so they didn’t go back. Or maybe that they read it in the newspaper the next morning, when they were going back. That’s no case.”

“You got Billy taking money,” Roscommon said.

“John,” Sweeney said, “cop or no cop, the guy can borrow fifty or a hundred bucks off of another guy and that is not a crime no matter how thin you slice or how much bread you serve with it. That is baloney, and it stays baloney. If it was a crime for a cop to borrow money, we would probably all be in jail.”

“He’s got a girlfriend,” Roscommon said.

“He drinks coffee and he eats doughnuts too, when that lippy little broad at the pastry shop will let him have one,” Carbone said. “That’s no crime either. Fein owns a building and it’s no garden spot and he would probably like to get rid of it. Still, no crime.”

“We’ve got to catch somebody so red-hot he’ll have to talk,” Sweeney said.

“I was afraid you’d say that,” Roscommon said. “Good God, what chances we take with people’s lives.”

P
ROCTOR COULD HEAR
Fein talking on the phone when he entered the reception area. Fein was laughing loudly in the conversation. Lois Reynolds grinned at Proctor and said, “He’s on the phone. Tackles. He won’t be long. Have a seat with Uncle Miltie.”

“Sounds like he’s in a good mood, at least,” Proctor said.

“Listen,” she said, “he is. But even when he isn’t in a good mood, he’s in a good mood when he’s talking to Tackles because Tackles gives him a lot of business. Lou Black. Remember him? Played for the old Boston Yanks and then the Redskins when they moved down there. The only black football player who was white. Tackles Black.”

“Oh, him,” Proctor said. “Yeah. Runs the joint down there in Quincy.”

“Braintree,” she said. “Does an awful lot of business. We’ve had as many as three acts in there at once, and some of them were kind of shabby around the edges, you want the God’s honest truth. But Tackles had the joint packed every night. Had them coming out the windows on Mondays, when you could park your car inside most joints without asking any of the customers to move.”

“The food?” Proctor said.

“Doubt it,” she said. “All I’ve ever seen them serve is hamburgers and pastrami and steak, the sandwiches, you know, in those little straw baskets with some pickles and a small bag of chips. I guess on weekends you can get ribs and maybe spaghetti or something like that. Don’t think there is any dessert—never saw any, at least. Put it this way: you can go in there for a drink and if you get hungry, you can find something to eat, and the food’s okay but it’s nothing I’d
call special. And it doesn’t cost a lot of money, but it’s not free, either. I don’t think it’s the food.”

Another burst of laughter sounded in Fein’s office.

“Big drinks?” Proctor said.

“Usual size,” she said. “Usual size, usual price. People’re wise to those one-quart martini outfits, where you get maybe two and a half ounces of booze and the rest is melted ice. No, what Jerry and I think it is is that people really like Tackles and when they go there the first time, he makes them feel like he’s really glad to see them and he will do the best he can to make sure they have a good time. So, and they like that and they come back and they bring either some of their friends or else they tell all their friends about it, and Tackles does the same thing with them.

“He’s always there,” she said. “He’s always been there, too. Not like some of these stars you got now, they collect a fee and ten percent of the take on a joint they maybe visited once, the day it opened. Tackles really runs that place.

“And another thing is this,” she said, “and that is he has got this wonderful memory for names. If you went in there tonight and somebody introduced you, he would tell you all about his football career and show you the pictures he’s got over the bar of when he was playing, and then if you didn’t come in for another month, when you did, he would remember your name.

“That’s important,” she said. “There’s too many of the joints now, that they may get Bobby Vinton one week and Wayne Newton the week after that and then they’ve got, oh, Don Rickles coming in. And if you went there every night they had a new act, and left sixty bucks with them, you would still be just another customer without any face on you when you came back the next time to give them sixty bucks more. People don’t like that. If you asked them if they didn’t
like it they would probably not know what you were talking about, because they don’t think about it.