The Rat on Fire (22 page)

“What they do instead,” she said, “is forget about the places with the knockout talent and go down to Tackles’, have a beer, play the pinball, see what Tackles thinks about the spread on Monday Night Football, which is on the big-screen set in the lounge, or sit there and eat a sandwich and listen to some second-rater sing Sinatra songs before some third-rater gets up and tells jokes that weren’t very funny when Bob Hope told them forty years ago to Henny Youngman.

“Then the band comes on,” she said, “which is usually some college kids that’re picking up a few extra dollars, and you can dance if you want to because the kids are always professional musicians but just happen not to be quite as professional yet as they are going to be in a few years. They are getting some experience, and while they are getting it, Tackles never tries to cheat them, always pays them union scale at least, and he promotes his acts in the local papers and the radio, so that also makes them feel good as well. A lot of our best acts in the area got their start and their experience at Tackles’, and I will tell you something: they remember him just as well as he remembers them. You get some guy that’s now at the Music Tent on the Cape warming up a crowd for Tony Bennett or somebody like that, he can get top money around here now, but if he gets a slow week a month or two down the road, he will call up and tell Jerry to ask Tackles if he wants one of the graduates for union scale. Tackles has got a lot of friends.”

“Sounds like he must,” Proctor said. “Wished I did.”

“Ahh,” she said, “no use worrying about it.” Fein was roaring his conversation into the phone. “It’s a gift,” she said. “Now, you take somebody like Jerry. I worked for him for almost twenty years. He’s a nice guy. I know him, and he’s a nice guy. He would do anything to help out a friend of his.

“But Jerry,” she said, “Jerry’s got a lot of clients that he’s had for a long time, but he doesn’t have all that many friends. Jerry just doesn’t make friends very easy. He plays the golf with Max Winchell, and he has a drink with Max Winchell when they finish playing the golf, but that’s it. I bet the two of them’ve been members at the same club for fifteen years or so, and they’ve been playing golf all that time. But they’re not friends. They don’t do anything else together. I know Max’s divorced because Jerry said something about it a while ago, but they never did anything together with their wives when Max was still married. ’Course, Jerry got married late, and Pauline’s pretty young for somebody like Max’s ex-wife, so maybe that could be it, I don’t know. But, and most of the people Jerry represents, you know, he’s been handling for years. He’s done a good job for them, although they’re show business people and a lot of them may not think that because they always think it’s their agent’s fault or their manager’s fault that they never got booked in to do a month headlining at Caesars Palace or the Sands. Never crosses their mind that maybe they’re just not good enough, or it’s the breaks in this game just like in every other one.

“Pauline was like that when she was singing,” Lois said. “I was always surprised he ended up marrying her, because she used to bitch all the time about the only thing he could get her was club dates in Fitchburg, but I guess he was really in love with her and he just decided he would take it. Pauline couldn’t sing very good. She looked good—she was a real knockout when she was younger, but she wouldn’t strip. She was a
singer
. I don’t know—maybe he married her so he wouldn’t have the aggravation of representing her.”

Fein opened the door of his office and stuck his head out. “You coming in, Leo?” he said.

“That Tackles,” Fein said. “Lois ever tell you about Tackles? That guy is the goddamnedest guy I ever met. And he is
smart
, too. He may not be the brightest light I ever saw, but you know how it is, you see some football player that is starting up a club, and you figure he must’ve played a few games without his helmet. And in
Braintree
, for Christ sake? Who the hell, a genius couldn’t make a club go in Braintree.

“Tackles did it,” Fein said. “Him and his partner, they went ahead and they did it. Even when they had to shut down the operation for a while, they made it go.”

“Who’s his partner?” Proctor said.

“Well,” Fein said, shutting the door, “not many people know this, because Tackles is the up-front guy and everything with Buddy’s strictly hush-hush, but …”

“Buddy Kelley,” Proctor said.

“Yeah,” Fein said. “See, Buddy had the money, but there was no way he could get the license for the booze, so Tackles comes in and he has the name and gets the cabaret thing like nothing, and they’re in business. Couple of smart cookies. Only time they had any interruption was when the guy who comes in once a week to tell them there is something funny with the phones, and when they get that information, they, Buddy does his business somewhere else until the guy tells him it’s all clear again. And the only thing the cops get on those tapes is orders for beer and conversations about the weather. I tell you, Leo, if you’re smart and you take no chances, you can do all right in this world. Not even the IRS can get them—they do so much legitimate business in the club there’s no tax thing there at all. It’s beautiful.”

“I’m glad to hear somebody else’s making out,” Proctor said. “How’re we doing?”

“On what?” Fein said.

“On being the Camp Fire Girls, for Christ sake,” Proctor said. “How’re we doing? Lemme have the details.”

“Great,” Fein said. “Spent the whole day playing golf, there’s no way in the world anybody can get hold of me because the only one who knows where I am is Lois, and
she’s out buying trucks or something. I get home around quarter-eight, Pauline tells me the cops’re coming, there’s been a fire. It’s these two young kids who’d probably trade a razor back and forth because neither one needs it except every other day and there’s no use wasting money. They tell me it looks as though somebody stacked a whole bunch of oily rags next to the coal bin and there was a lot of smoke and everything, but nobody was hurt so that is good. And they tell me it looks as though somebody was trying to burn the building down.

“I go into my song-and-dance routine about the fuckin’ niggers destroying the place,” Fein said. “They bought it. Then I had another idea, which I thought was a pretty good one. I tell them, which is the truth, that I’m surprised they even went to the trouble of setting something. All the trouble I had with them the past couple years sticking pennies in the fuse box so they can overload the wiring and overheat it at the same time, I’m surprised they didn’t just do that and burn the place flat with no trouble at all, and I would even have to pay for the juice.

“I tell them: ‘That is not a new building. I can’t afford, on the rent I
don’t
get, to rewire that whole building. I can’t go in every apartment every night, every hour on the hour, and make sure they haven’t got a toaster and a broiler oven and a window fan and the television set and three lamps plugged into six extension cords all plugged in to the same socket, and if they don’t burn the place down on purpose, they will probably burn it down with their goddamned radios and record players and tape decks and portable dishwashers, and by the way, how do all those welfare niggers get all those fancy goods, huh?’

“They loved it,” Fein said. “They ate it right up. Wrote it all down. Pauline sat there almost crying, she felt so sorry for me and all my troubles.”

“She doesn’t know, then,” Proctor said.

“Are you kidding?” Fein said. “Pauline’s crowding forty and she looks like she’s twenty-five. She wants a little face lift, I bought her a little nip and tuck. Her tush is tight and she’s got great boobs and in bed, well, I don’t need to waste my time jogging to keep my weight down. But I don’t tell her none of my business. I would rather eat her cooking’n tell her my business, and about her cooking I will tell you that I am glad they make all that frozen crap now. I’ll take my chances with the preservatives and stuff—it’s better’n risking getting fuckin’
poisoned
.”

“Okay then,” Proctor said, “Billy Malatesta did his job.”

“Malatesta wasn’t with them,” Fein said.

“Naturally he wasn’t,” Proctor said. “Malatesta’s kind of a jerk when it comes to women, but he’s not dumb enough to do the actual investigation of this himself. He sent you two dummies, two rookies, so you could set them up. And it sounds like you did. I’d kick his ass for him if his tracks showed up on one of those reports.”

“I didn’t think of that,” Fein said.

“Okay then,” Proctor said, “I’m gonna pop the thing tomorrow morning, soon’s you give me the rest of the money, that is.”

“No,” Fein said. “Wait till Monday.”

“Why Monday?” Proctor said. “I got a cage full of rats in my cellar. I got other people living in my house. One of them goes down in that basement, he’s liable to wonder what other kind of house pets I got in mind. I get up in the morning and I have to go down the cellar and practically take my life in my hands getting fish guts and dog food into the cage. I got Dannaher and I got to prop him up like he was a wall that somebody put up and they forgot the studs. This’s Thursday. Why the hell wait till Monday?”

“Because I had another visitor,” Fein said. “Mister Wilfrid Mack. State Senator Wilfrid Mack.”

“I don’t know him,” Proctor said. “The hell’s he got to do with this?”

“Mack’s district,” Fein said. “He’s black. Bristol Road’s in his district. He’s worried about his voters. About his voters getting hurt when they live in my building and my building burns up. One of them, who pays her rent, actually, came to him last night and said her kid was sleeping in there when the fire started in the basement and she’s worried about staying there.”

“What’d you tell him?” Proctor said.

“Same thing I told the cops,” Fein said. “I told him: ‘Look, Senator, you and me’re getting well acquainted here, and I figure I can talk straight to you. I can’t guarantee the safety of the tenants in my building as long as those tenants are in that building. Somebody set that goddamned fire. Obviously somebody got into that building and set that fire in the cellar. Now I have to hire some people to go in there and clean up the smoke and the water damage and fix whatever needs fixing. If it was somebody that came in from the outside, that probably means new locks on the doors. Maybe even a new door. If it was somebody that was already in the building, new locks aren’t going to do any good anyway because he will still be inside the building after I put the new locks on.’

“Now,” Fein said, “now I laid it on him. ‘From the cops I understand,’ I said, ‘that there was only one person in the building yesterday that anybody saw, and that was Mavis Davis’s son Alfred. He’s not supposed to be in there. He’s a bad kid, if he’s the kid I think he is, and I wouldn’t be surprised if old Alfred had something to do with that fire. What was he doing in there?’

“Mack tells me the Davis kid was resting after working all night,” Fein said. “We had some more back and forth. Finally Mack decides to threaten me. ‘I think, Mister Fein,’ he
says in his best voice, ‘I think I will have to advise my constituents to move out of your building until you can assure me that they need not fear for their safety. Of course you need not expect any rent until they can safely return to their apartments.’

“ ‘Mister Mack,’ I said, ‘that is the best news I had all day. You tell them to move out. You tell them that the minute they move out, considering that most of them haven’t paid their rent in quite a while, those apartments are presumed vacant, and I can rent them to anybody who wants them.’

“ ‘I doubt anyone will want them, if living in them amounts to living in danger,’ he says.

“ ‘If Alfred is out,’ I say, ‘maybe they won’t be.’ So after all of this, where we come out is that they will be out by Sunday night at the latest. And then you can go in there on Monday night and light the thing off, because Mack is right and even when they are out, nobody that will pay his rent will want to live in that building, and I will collect the insurance.”

“Jerry,” Proctor said, “there are times, right? There are times when I think every man should do some time, just so he understands some things about things and does not go around doing dumb things which will get him in the can and a lot of time inside to think about them.”

“What do you mean?” Fein said.

“I mean that you have just fucked everything up, if we wait till Monday,” Proctor said. “On Monday all the tenants’re out of the building, right?”

“Right,” Fein said.

“You told the cops from the fire marshal’s office about overloads on the wiring, and how you wouldn’t be surprised if that started a fire, right?”

“Right,” Fein said. “Jesus Christ, Leo, we’re gonna make it look like a wiring overload. That’s what you told me with them rats. I got them all prepped to say that’s what it was.”

“When there’s nobody living in the building,” Proctor said, “who overloaded the wiring?”

Fein did not say anything.

“Now,” Proctor said, “you have got us in the cream where we have got to make those rats uncomfortable before the tenants pack up and get out. While their toasters and their other electrical goodies are still all plugged in to the six extension cords that come off the same outlet. Don’t we, Jerry?”

“Yeah,” Fein said.

“Everybody in that building works or goes someplace during the day,” Proctor said. “That kid being in there was a freak thing. We’re gonna light her off tomorrow morning, and hope for the best.”

When Proctor left Fein’s office with an envelope of money in his pocket, Lois smiled at him and said, “Is Jerry clear now?”

“Yup,” Proctor said. “Far as I know, at least. But he’s not in a good mood anymore.”