The Old Turk's Load Page 16

  Lloyd was creeping him out. At that point Harry didn’t care if the Newark heavies did come back and find him sitting there folding and refolding his pants. They’d storm in, Lloyd would tell them where the stuff was, and they’d kill him, just like Kelly. He could feel the menace gathering out there, like a very nasty storm. He needed shelter.

  He called Irene, who told him to come back to her.

  The Endless Summer

  M

  addy never said a word about the power failure the next morning—nobody in Wallis Sands cared much about what went on in New York—and Gloria didn’t find out about it until that evening when she went down to Philbrick’s to make her call. The headline on the pile of Manchester Union Leaders beside the brass cash register said, “Blackout Hits Northeast.”

  She asked Irene about it first thing.

  “It was a weird night. But, Glo, I’ve got some bad news for you.” All Gloria could think of was the drugs. “Go ahead . . .” “Your father had a heart attack at the airport. He’s dead. Murchison and Kraft are taking care of things.”

  It shocked Gloria that all she felt at first was a kind of lightness. Then came the slam of something very complicated beneath the relief. “Give me a while, okay? I’ll call you at your office later.”

  She wandered across the street to the tumble of boulders that marked the north end of the little sand beach. She sat looking over the water at the huge old hotels on the Isles of Shoals, illuminated like a floating metropolis by the westering sun. As if her mother and father were there now, in that mysterious Golden City, and she could no more get to them than she could swim to Appledore Island.

  The pain began to come on in waves, each stronger than the last. She wasn’t going to be able to think her way through this, nor would her self-assurance help. Much as Kelly might’ve done, she worked through it, in her extremity, image by image. Oldest memories first—Daddy young and strong. She and Daddy playing. Daddy and Julie. Daddy coming home once when she was very young—she could absolutely hear his voice—and calling Mommy “Honey Bunch.”

  That one brought the tears; then wrenching sobs gutted up from a place she’d never been before. The images slid into patterns. She gasped for breath, and slowly the racking waves diminished. She remembered her mother’s hugs, and the way Daddy’s pride in her—his and Mommy’s both—had felt warm like the sun in summer.

  As that part of their lives expanded for her, all the troubled present shrank down to its rightful trifling size.Then she understood it was going to be very difficult for a while, but that it had been essentially right with Daddy and her, as it had been with Mommy, and for exactly this reason she would be okay. Missing him would hurt, but she’d be able to function. She thanked the both of them, her parents, for everything they’d given her, wished them peace, and stared over the ocean as the island beyond turned red, then gray. Eventually she made her shaky way down the road to Maddy’s.

  It was an impressive job of self-persuasion, and whenever she thought of it afterward she knew she’d only been able to pull it off because of Maddy and that womb of a place on the marsh by the edge of the sea. She’d been damned lucky to land there.

  The Jar

  L

  loyd sat on the edge of his bed for a few hours after Harry left, a second at a time. While he was sitting, he thought about his situation. The Mafia guys kept not showing up, but his encounter with Jarkey had given him an idea. If they didn’t come, the thing to do was call them. Eventually, even in his hinky state, the thought gained purchase and Lloyd shuffled from his bed into the big front room, found the phone, lifted the receiver from its cradle, got a dial tone, called a guy he knew who knew a guy in the Newark gang, and got word to them that way. It was an impressive sequence for a man with his synaptic challenges.

  In high gear now, Lloyd phoned Kevin Gallagher. He wanted the Communists in on this, too. But Gallagher, thoroughly tamed by his hours in the closet, didn’t bother with the foco. He reported Lloyd’s news directly to Spaulding.

  Lloyd considered calling the cops for an encore, but decided that’d be overdoing it. The cops, it turned out, were good, that is, against the drugs. He didn’t want them getting hurt.

  Dead Kelly

  J

  arkey was beside himself. “Kelly’s dead, Irene. The mob guys grabbed him at Lloyd’s. One of Helen’s neighbors saw the whole thing go down. It had to be a rubout. He didn’t even take his hat.” He paced her office floor, working the rosary of his doubts and fears. Would Irene be safe now or were they still out there, hunting people down? Was he in danger? What about Gloria? And what would he do without Kelly? Without the paycheck? The wacky jobs? She took him to a sandwich place, and eventually he calmed down. Jarkey filled her in about the Mailman and the drugs and Gloucester. She questioned him closely, lawyerlike, but it was hard for him to concentrate because the hurt had started leaking in. His mind teemed with random recollections—the unique smell of Kelly’s aftershave and whiskey breath, the time he’d actually crouched down behind the outraged husband and Kelly had pushed the guy over and they’d both run like naughty schoolboys. There had been a kind of innocence to it all. Even in the worst of their snooping and petty deceptions, Kelly’s strange simplicity imposed a freshness, an element of adventure, a sense of high purpose.

  Irene told him he’d be safer if he stayed with her for a while. He assented, since nothing would make him happier. However, he explained that, first, he needed to be alone with his thoughts for a while. She told him to be careful.

  He headed south across the city, toward Kelly’s office, striding into the huge ache of the detective’s death, wondering at how weird it was that Irene had come into his life just as Kelly had left it.

  That was when the guilt hit him. He’d been so smitten with Gloria and Irene that he’d forgotten about Mundi. Gloria’s dad had set his friend up. He lashed himself for a block or two. He should have warned him.

  But he and Gloria had warned Kelly. Was there anything he could have done differently? Traded two days of bliss with Irene for—what? Tagged along after Kelly, trying to protect him, getting himself killed, too, in the process? Why was love always so complicated? Why did it have to hurt so much?

  He wrestled with ugly imaginings of Kelly’s last moments. It seemed weirdest that there was no one to tell. No partner, no significant other, no family. Irene and Gloria, of course, but they had no real sense of who Kelly had been. Pepsi? Kelly had paid her, for crying out loud. Even the detective’s so-called friends were nothing more than business associates or, hell—tell it like it is—stoolies. It wasn’t until he approached the neon sign over Sammy’s Undersea Lounge that he remembered Norbert.

  Sammy’s was closed.

  Good Old Julie, Again

  G

  loria had her shit together for her next phone call to Irene. All business now, she received the news about Lloyd, the

  Mailman, and Kelly in a surprisingly philosophical manner. “I knew he was stupid, but I figured he’d be shifty enough not

  to get caught. Did Harry find out what happened?”

  “Apparently Kelly got nabbed in Lloyd’s apartment. Of course

  the drugs were long gone by that time.”

  “Too bad about him, but good news for us. Plus, it settles the

  problem of Harry betraying his boss.”

  “Truly.”

  “And the stuff ’s in Massachusetts?”

  “Lloyd’s hometown, according to Harry. A fishing port.” Gloria paused, thinking some more. “Well, it is what it

  is. Kelly’s gone and Lloyd’s brain-dead. The stuff is there for

  the taking. Either DiNoto knows what’s up, or he doesn’t. If

  he doesn’t, chances are he will soon. We’ll just have to get

  there first.”

  “I still don’t like it.”

  “Irene, stop doing that! You’re already in, and you know it.”

  Gloria was surprised to hear herself talking this w
ay. But it was just

  the nudge her friend needed.

  “Okay, okay.”

  The load’s gravity enveloped them.

  “We’ve got to get some muscle. I’ll call Julie Roth and try to

  get him in on this. After what happened to Daddy and Mossman,

  he might be interested in laying some hurt on Mr. D. If he leaves

  the city tonight, we can meet in Gloucester early tomorrow morning. We’ll roust this guy when he’s getting up for work. Whatever

  it is he does. He’s a mailman?”

  “It’s a little confused. I think he’s a laryngectomee.” “A what?”

  “Throat cancer . . . Gloria, I just want you to know. I’m going

  to bring Harry.”

  “He’s not exactly muscle, but he’s got his uses.” Not a twinge

  of jealousy. She was clean as a whistle.

  Despite her confident tone, Gloria knew her call to Julius Roth would be difficult. She was having trouble thinking of a sure-fire way to persuade him that further outraging the Mafia would be the thing to do. So she decided to plead for help, banking on the affection that had existed between them all her life. His reply left her gasping into the receiver.

  “I’m in,” he said.

  “In?”

  “Your father’s out, sweetie. He always wanted you to take over

  the company, and I’m about all that’s left of the company.” “I thought you said there was no company.”

  “Depends on how you look at it. Creditors are lined up six

  deep, and Mundi Enterprises is headed for bankruptcy court. If there’s anything left after DiNoto’s guys pick it apart. But what if there was a new Mundi Enterprises? A left-wing legal aid provider? We know how to put a company together, and it seems we have competent legal advice.”

  “Julie, are you serious?”

  “I was getting burned out in Newark. Waxing that kid from the projects was the last straw.”

  “In with Irene? The movement? Everything?”

  “The thought of cracking heads for a just cause inspires me.”

  “Jesus.”

  Officers Wolf and Sponagle

  F

  or years the Gloucester cops had been holding steady at 30 percent rotten, which was probably about the national average. It was a cultural thing on the force. Rookies of a certain persuasion would be drawn into the society of their bent elders, quickly turning bent themselves.The good cops put up with their foul nestlings because to do otherwise would damage the appearance of solidarity upon which their civic franchise depended. There were no bad politicians in Gloucester—or, they were all bad—but they tended to run either weak or strong. The weak ones worked with the bad cops. The strong pretended the bad cops didn’t exist because they didn’t want to have their kids busted on prom night, or wind up in the slammer themselves for a DWI whether they were drunk or not, or wake up to four flat tires, or have the wife get scary phone calls. Nobody wanted any part of that.

  As it happened, two of that 30 percent were on duty when the 911 came in about the junkie on Webster Street. Officers Wolf and Sponagle responded to the call and recognized Langer. Either he’d OD’d or someone had slipped him a hotshot. They put Langer’s works in an evidence bag, and a little of the smack into another one, for lab tests. They secured the scene, searched the premises, conducted interviews. Made their notes. They retained the rest of the Mailman’s Dixie cup for personal use.Then, after the ambulance hauled the corpse off, they paid a visit to the offices of the Continental Insurance Agency to check in with Mr. Reardon.

  “A fucking Dixie cup?”

  “There’s definitely something strange going on, Mr. Reardon. The guy was OD’d, meaning it was either bad shit or uncut. And look at this.” Wolf produced the Dixie cup. “Who scores smack in paper cups? It’s like he scooped it out of a barrel.”

  “You guys search the place?”

  “Clean as a whistle. But you gotta think there’s something out there somewhere.”

  “Very interesting, boys.” Reardon turned things over in his mind. He knew the building. His slumlord cousin had owned it briefly, then sold it to a hardworking Portugee immigrant who lived there. Come to think of it, that was where the Mailman slept, down in his cave at the bottom. Reardon recalled his recent interview with the poor bastard, and thought for the second time in ages about the Mailman’s former neighbor, Lloyd Chamberlain, turning his crummy drug deals down in Manhattan. Very interesting, indeed.

  He looked across his desk at the two cops.

  “Why the fuck are you still here?”

  There was an awkward silence. Then Reardon remembered the Dixie cup and pushed it back across to Officer Wolf. Sponagle gave him a shit-eating grin.

  When Mr. DiNoto called that night to inform Reardon that a shipment of goods had possibly found its way to Gloucester, Reardon had plenty to tell him. DiNoto said he was sending some people up and would appreciate it if Reardon made sure that everyone stayed the fuck out of their way.

  Reardon, acutely aware of his place in the scheme of things, told Mr. D. he’d take care of that detail. DiNoto said, “You bet you will,” and hung up.

  By the time Agent Spaulding called the Gloucester cops, Wolf and Sponagle were out snorting their smack with a couple of part-time hookers. The desk man on duty gave him Chief Movalli’s home number, and Movalli, who’d read Wolf ’s report, was able to inform Spaulding that only a small quantity of heroin had been found at the scene.

  Spaulding told Movalli to stand by, that he and another agent would be in Gloucester next morning to assess the situation themselves. Movalli, who was not one of the bad cops, realized Wolf and Sponagle would be back on duty and nearly had a bird. He suggested that Spaulding meet him at his office first for a briefing. Spaulding assented, but told Movalli there were security issues involved, as well as possible interstate felonies, so the FBI would be handling this themselves. No way the locals were going to horn in on his bust.

  Rosy

  V

  ery early next morning Gloria left a note for Maddy that read, I feel so much better now. Thank you for being a friend. She had three days’ credit on her bill; if she ever needed to come back, Maddy would remember her fondly.

  She retraced her drive to Route 1, down the New Hampshire Turnpike and Route 95, then up Route 128 toward Gloucester. The Starship sliced through time and space of its own volition, leaving Gloria free to think about Wallis Sands. It really had been like landing on another world, she decided, where something in the atmosphere changed her, like in that old stoner flick Forbidden Planet—though just the opposite.

  A sign at Route 133 promised Gloucester. She turned off the highway and wound through marshlands and granite clumps fronting patches of woods, with New England cottages and turnof-the-century Queen Anne–style houses tucked into hills. Then, in the midst of her reverie, the road came to a T and the vast harbor spread out before her, glinting gold and blue in the early morning light. Far out over the water a line of trawlers headed seaward, and gulls wheeled above them like a cloud of gnats.

  She turned left at the harbor, toward town, past Pavilion Beach, where the Mailman had once taken his midday swims, coming to a stop where the harbor front road intersected with Main and Rogers at a gas station called Tally’s. She pulled up to one of the six pumps under the canopy and a blimp of a man waddled out of the office. He had a matted gray crew cut and wore a dirty gas station jumpsuit that said rosy over the breast pocket, which was angled forty-five degrees from vertical by the man’s immense belly. He smiled warmly at Gloria. No teeth.

  “Fill ’er up, please. High-test. And I need some help with directions.”

  “Sure thing,” he wheezed. “Just let me get the pump started.”

  He came around to her door and she told him the address. He nodded, went back to his office, and consulted a phone book. “The Portugee Club is 27-29 Webster Street. A big brown building about a quarter mile up the hill on the right
. So number thirty-one would be right next door. Just go down around the corner here— that’s Rogers. Then a half mile or so and left on Eastern at a place called the Main Deck. Then your one . . . two . . . third left would be Webster. Can’t miss it.”

  Thus Rosy recapitulated the route of the Mailman’s weekly pub crawls, and unwittingly memorialized his Last Mile Walk with Langer.

  Gloria paid up and, as she thanked him, regarded his bulk with a clinical eye, wondering how they could possibly have found a grease monkey suit that big.

  True to his word, Gloria did not miss it—a ramshackle tripledecker with green asphalt shingles. She did a drive-by and was pleased to see a ’56 Buick out front. Certainly old enough to be the Mailman’s car, described by Lloyd only as a “junker.” The stuff could still be in the door panel, maybe in the house. They’d have to make sure he didn’t run, calm him down, convince him to play along. Probably they’d wind up taking him back to New York to work out a deal. She’d have Harry drive with her and the Mailman and Julie could take the stash.

  There didn’t seem to be any activity in the basement apartment or anywhere else in the building, but it was early. She parked in the lot at the Portuguese-American Club and waited for her friends, breathing deeply, trying to recall the calm that had been hers only a while ago.

  It was forty long minutes before Roth’s Olds slid in next to her. Gloria motioned them over. Irene and Harry got in the backseat, each carrying a coffee. Roth sat in front. He seemed placid. Jarkey looked grim, as if he expected the worst. Irene, however, looked even grimmer.

  She and Gloria commenced a round of nervous small talk.

  “Ladies,”said Roth.“Either of you have any idea what’s going to go down here?”

  “Right.” Gloria gave an uncertain grin. “Sitting here for an hour hoping I didn’t have to tackle this Mailman guy myself, I’ve gotten some thinking done. Harry,how bad was Lloyd?”

  “Mentally? Physically?”