“I don’t know if he would, but jeez, John, do I have a choice? I mean, I hear these guys got guns, big ones.”
I thought about Tommy’s wife and her “choices.” And about the other choices he’d already made. “I’ll give it a try.”
Then I got out of there as Tommy Flaherty thanked me and just before he could start crying or resume drinking.
The wind was coming off the water and up her hillside, but it had lost most of its punch by the time it reached the row of granite stones in front of me. I stopped at Beth’s.
John, good to see you.
“And you.”
Any plans for Easter?
Beth and I used to have a big feast with an Italian-American family we’d grown up near in South Boston. But most of that clan had passed on, and many of the rest had moved on.
John?
“Sorry. I’ve got a case that’s making me zone out a little.”
How so?
Watching the gulls wheel and scream by the shoreline, I went over it for her. Tommy, his wife, his debt problems.
A hesitation. Then, What are you going to do?
“Talk to the police, talk to the shark.”
Toward offering him what?
I came back to her stone. “That’s the part I haven’t worked out yet.”
As the waitress served Sergeant Detective Marilyn Alongi her coffee, I reached for the tab. Leaving a five to cover my hot chocolate as well, I said, “Thanks for agreeing to this on such short notice.”
Alongi — fiftyish, trim, and studiously attractive — looked over the rim of the thick porcelain cup, standard diner-issue. “Lieutenant Murphy in Homicide vouched for you, kind of.”
“We’ve known each other a long time.”
“Murphy said, ‘Cuddy’s a Boy Scout, but the only thing he knows how to tie in knots is his own—’ ”
“I get the picture.”
Alongi gave me a nice smile as she lowered her coffee back to its saucer. “So, you’re wired into Homicide at headquarters, what do you need an area detective for?”
“Her ‘area.’ Specifically, a certain bar.”
“Being?”
I named it for her. Alongi leaned back in the booth. “Let me bet a long shot here. Lou Tedesco.”
“You should play the lottery.”
“I do, but Tedesco’s a little easier to predict. He muscling one of your friends?”
“Through a valued associate.”
“DuPage.” Alongi nodded to herself. “He must have a second name, but I’ve never heard anybody use it. And I don’t know about the ‘valued’ part.”
A first ray of hope. “What do you mean?”
“Word on the street is master and pit bull aren’t getting along too well.”
“Reason?”
“Don’t know. So far as I can tell, their operation runs pretty smoothly, which probably means pretty profitably, too.”
“Is Tedesco connected?”
Alongi grew a little straighter on her bench seat. “You asking me that because of his last name or mine?”
“Both.”
A hint of smile again as she took more coffee. “Murphy said you were frank to a fault.”
I waited.
Alongi gestured with her cup. “To save you having to repeat your question, no, Tedesco’s an independent. After the Angiulo Brothers went down in that FBI mega-case, things got kind of loosey-goosey in their old spheres of influence. Lou sensed a niche and filled it.”
“You know them to use violence?”
“What, Tedesco and DuPage?”
“Our current topic of conversation.”
“Tedesco, no. Oh, he might belt some poor guy while DuPage pinned the pigeon’s arms, but Lou fancies himself more the managerial type. DuPage, now, is a different story. Mostly his hands, but word also has it that if he were to open that trenchcoat he always seems to be wearing, you might see an Intratec Tec-9 hanging from a strap.”
Semiautomatic nine-millimeter, thirty-some rounds and nearly as big as Hildy Flaherty’s hair dryer. Which made me think of her husband’s finger, and also gave me an idea. “You ever collar these goons?”
“No. Never caught them dirty on the sharking or the weapons stuff.”
I thought over what Alongi had told me. “Without an arrest, it seems kind of odd that you’d know Tedesco by his first name but not DuPage.”
She slid out from her side of the booth. “Not so odd, since Lou and I went through high school together.”
“Oh,” I said.
Rising from the bench seat and smoothing down her skirt, Sergeant Detective Marilyn Alongi looked at our tabletop. “Be sure to drink your Ovaltine, now, you want to grow up like Captain Midnight.”
It took me a day to get the supplies I wanted from both a medical supply house and a friendly firearms dealer, so it wasn’t till the following evening that I entered the bar Tommy Flaherty had given me as Tedesco’s place of business. If the ceiling had been higher, and the furniture better, you’d might have thought you’d been transported to the lobby of the United Nations.
A black jazz group was gamely trying to play dance music in a corner, Caribbean-American from the accent of the lead singer. Some Cambodian faces sat as far across the room as possible from some Vietnamese ones. Several conversations in what I took for Arabic were flourishing at the bar, and another I knew to be Spanish bubbled up from behind me. A couple of patrons glanced at my right hand, some even making way for me as I edged to the closest tender.
His face and accent suggested Pakistani as he asked if he could help me.
“I’m looking for Lou Tedesco.”
Neither the face nor the accent changed, but a little catch caused his next two words to stumble a mite. “He is... not a man I know, sir.”
“You know DuPage?”
“Sir, I can provide you a drink, or—”
“—I can ask each of your customers if they know my friends. How would that be for business, do you suppose?”
A resigned tone now. “You are police?”
“If I were, could you have pushed me this far?”
The keep nodded, then pointed to a stool while his other hand picked up a phone from below the bar.
You saw him on the street, you’d give him a wide berth, because he’d perfected the walk.
A man in a modest Afro, with barely tinted skin and a belted trenchcoat, came out from a narrow hallway in the back. His hips rolled in a cock-of-the-roost way, his strides more like struts. As he saw me, there was no recognition in his face, but he unbuckled the belt of his coat anyway.
When the man drew even with me, I waited till he opened his mouth before jumping in first. “You wear that thing inside, too?”
DuPage just eyed me, a tiger shark’s stare from a loan shark’s muscle. “The hell are you to care, Slick?”
“John Francis,” I said, using a slight alias. “And I’d like to see Mr. Tedesco.”
“And why would that be?”
“How’s about we all three go over that together?” DuPage signaled to the bartender, just an ambiguous wave, but the keep picked up the phone again.
“Okay, Slick. Hold it right there.”
We’d gotten about two-thirds of the way down the narrow corridor in the back of the bar. I was about to speak when DuPage followed up with, “You play patty-cake with that wall.”
He spread-eagled me against the crumbly plaster, frisking me efficiently. I wasn’t wearing a gun, and I’d taken my investigator ID out of my pocket as well. DuPage was even polite enough to let my right hand alone.
After finishing, he nudged me along the corridor till we reached the door at its end. He knocked in a staccato code, then opened it and waved me over the threshold.