Chapter One
 
 
MY JAILBIRD BROTHER got me into this whole jam. It wasn’t the first time Martin T. Reilly had dragged me into something, but the difference this time was, he wasn’t even around. He was doing another bit, this one in the federal prison up in Ayer at the old Fort Devens Army base.
The feds got a “tip” from a so-called Top Echelon Criminal Informant, and a combined FBI-ATF-MSP task force bagged him down on the Connecticut line, on I-84, driving a truckload of cigarettes that did not belong to him. Marty stood up, not that he had a lot of choice in the matter. Fuckups like Marty either keep their mouths shut or they get whacked. People think everyone in the quote-unquote mob who gets arrested nowadays immediately flips and goes into the Witness Protection Program, but it’s only for guys a lot higher up in the hood hierarchy than Marty.
So my little brother was up at Devens doing federal time, which now means 85 percent of the sentence, and when he and all the rest of the wiseguys (there’s a misnomer) aren’t either working out in the weight room or trying to concoct bogus technicalities for an appeal in the law library, they’re yapping away, swapping lies, dropping names. And poor Marty, what did it say about his utter lack of stature either inside or outside the joint that the biggest name he had to drop was an ex-cop’s, namely mine?
The day I got the call that started the whole thing, I was sitting in my house, which is actually the first-floor apartment of a three-story row house in the South End. That’s where I’ve lived my entire life, except for three years in the Army and a few more in the suburbs when I was trying to do the family thing, which did not work out.
Business was slow, a not-uncommon occurrence in my current line of work, which is officially private investigations, although I’m not so much a peephole gumshoe as a—well, let’s just say the services I presently offer include almost nothing you’d want to see embossed on a business card, if you get my drift. On top of that, or maybe because of that, I was pretty much tapped out. I was sorting my unpaid bills into two piles. One stack was the bills I couldn’t afford to pay until the direct deposit of my monthly city disability-pension check, my kiss in the mail, into my checking account. The second pile included all the bills I couldn’t afford to pay, period, until business picked up, assuming it ever did. That was when the phone rang.
“Reilly Associates,” I said with as much enthusiasm as I could muster.
“Is this Jack Reilly?”
“Speaking.”
“This is Bucky Bennett.” It didn’t ring a bell. “I know your brother.” The bell was ringing now. It was an alarm. “I knew him down in Otisville.” Another federal pen, in upstate New York, inhabited by a lot of Northeast organized-crime types, among them, at one point, my brother.
Marty’s friend spoke softly, but he might have been trying to lull me. “He told me to give you a call sometime.” That was mighty white of good old Martin T. Reilly. “I got a big, big problem, Jack.” Ex-cons often do. “Hello? Are you there?”
“Yes,” I said with a sigh. “I’m here.”
“Jack, you don’t know me, but I heard a lot about you. I heard you used to handle a lot of work for the mayor, the old one, and I know you were a cop, and now you’re on your own.”
That certainly was the CliffsNotes version of the life of Jack Reilly, a man teetering on that fine line between has-been and never-was. I sensed a pitch was imminent.
“I gotta talk to you. They’re looking for me. I gotta screw before they find me.”
“Who’s they?”
A hollow chuckle. “Can I meet you somewhere?”
Some people claim they can smell money. Me, I can smell no money, and I can smell it a mile away. “Pro bono” is just Latin for “deadbeat.” I decided to try to lose the guy.
I asked him, “Have you thought about calling the police?”
Another nervous laugh. “Marty told me you were a funny guy.”
“Look,” I said, staring at the two piles of unpaid bills in front of me. “I’m kinda busy right now.”
“Please, man, I’m desperate. I know what I must sound like, but I got some stuff, I gotta make sure it gets into the hands of the right people or I’m dead. You’re on Shawmut Ave., right? How far are you from Foley’s?”
Oh great. Not only was I not going to get paid, now I was going to have to buy him a drink, in my own place on top of everything else. James Michael Curley used to say that it’s nice to be important, but it’s more important to be nice. That’s excellent advice, I suppose, if you’re running for office, but who exactly was I trying to impress? Still, Bucky wasn’t going to take no for an answer.
“I like old J. J.’s,” he said. So do I, especially if someone else is buying. This, however, was not shaping up as one of those magic moments.
“Lotta cops there,” he continued, talking more to himself than to me. “Almost Southie, but not quite. No-man’s-land, nobody’s home turf, so nobody hassles anybody else. It sure ain’t the Ace of Hearts.”
The Ace of Hearts? That was a gin mill on the other side of the bridge, in South Boston, where a lot of the local bad actors hung out. The guys my brother was “associated” with, as the prosecutors sometimes put it at his sentencings. Maybe I’d underestimated Bucky, or perhaps he was still engaging in that eternal jailbird pastime—name-dropping.
“Okay,” I said, “I’ll meet you at Foley’s in a half hour.”
“I’ll need about an hour,” he said. “Marty told me you look like him, only shorter and not as good-looking.”
*   *   *
BUCKY BENNETT looked just about how I’d figured he would. Somewhere in his late forties, early fifties, thinning dark hair, maybe five-eight but fairly well built. They’re all in great shape when they get out of the can. At least the organized crime guys. If you split your days between the Nautilus machines and the prison’s law library, you tend to come out physically fit and well read.
Bucky had a little paunch on him, though, which by my calculation meant he’d been out at least a couple of years. I knew my brother hadn’t been in Otisville for at least two years himself. His latest home-away-from-home, Devens, was supposed to be a hospital of sorts, although I was pretty sure Marty didn’t have anything wrong with him, unless terminal stupidity has been declared a disease, in which case Marty will be eligible for SSDI the moment he hits the street.
Bucky had that furtive, darting-eye look of a guy from a tough neighborhood who’s always been on the fringes, just close enough to the action to get seriously burned on a fairly regular basis. He was wearing sweatpants—thanks for putting on your Sunday best for the occasion, Bucky. I was decked out the way I used to dress when I worked at City Hall—Oxford shirt, no tie, V-neck sweater, and a blue blazer.
The mayor always told me, and probably everybody else...