“Counselor,” Cogan said, “take my word for it: that’s what they think.”
“Ahhh,” the driver said. “But still, he really didn’t do anything.”
“It’s his responsibility,” Cogan said. “He did it before and he lied before and he fooled everybody, and, I said it to Dillon, I said: ‘They should’ve whacked him out before.’ And Dillon agreed with me. Now it happened again. It’s his responsibility for what guys think. On the street it’s Trattman, nothing but Trattman. Gets fifty, fifty-two thousand, whatever it was, he got about the same, he hadda split something, okay, but he got about the same the last time. And now they break his jaw. He’s hurt and he’s out what the kids cost him and he’s clipped guys that trusted him about eighty thousand, and he’s still walking around and everybody knows he did it.”
“He didn’t do it,” the driver said. “Not this time, anyway.”
“That’s not what everybody knows,” Cogan said. “There’s lots of guys that’d drink milkshakes for a year, if they got caught, for that kind of dough, they had their jaws wired shut. Shit, we’re gonna have kids waiting in line, knock them fuckin’ games over, they open up again. You got any idea how many wild-ass junkies there are around? If he gets away with this, well, we might as well just forget it, once and for all, and just quit.”
“I still don’t know,” the driver said. “I see what you mean, the public angle, and I don’t take issue with what you say about the other people. But I’m not sure how he’s going to feel about this, with a man who didn’t do what everybody thinks he did, when I suggest that.”
“Tell him,” Cogan said, “ask him, where the guys come from, in the games. Not from the street. They don’t care, Trattman got beat up. They’re not gonna come in, is all. Trattman did it before, Trattman did it again. Trattman’s through, and he can’t do nothing else. Except get laid. He’s good at getting laid. Otherwise he can’t do nothing for us. We lose nothing there.
“Tell him also,” Cogan said, “the guys onna street. They think the same thing, and they’re gonna take what they think and nobody else’s games’re gonna be safe. He’s hurt. Big deal. You hit a game and it’s big money and the worst they do to you, they beat you up. The kids’ll start their own union. We’re gonna have nothing but guys running around for a while, knocking down doors worse’n cops, and then after a while there’s not gonna be no games, no games at all. ‘Goin’ to a game? Right. Save yourself some time. Go inna room, put your hands up, throw the cash onna bed, you get home early and the wife’s glad and you didn’t take no chances, getting yourself shot.’ Guys’re not gonna go for it, and there’s no two ways about it.
“Counselor,” Cogan said, “go talk to the man. Trattman’s gotta be hit, and you put it up to the man, he’ll agree with me right off. Give it a try. You don’t do it? Forget about the money. He made a mistake.”
“A long time ago,” the driver said. “He made a mistake a long time ago.”
“He made two mistakes,” Cogan said. “The second mistake was making the first mistake, like it always is. That’s all you get, two mistakes. Tell the man.”
“If he agrees with you,” the driver said, “assuming that. You can hit Trattman?”
“Yeah,” Cogan said.
“How about this Amato fellow?” the driver said. “He seems like the leading candidate to me.”
“He’s right up there,” Cogan said. “Not yet. Wait’ll we do Trattman. It’ll make him easier, we do that. But sooner or later, yeah.”
“Can you handle?” the driver said.
“Right now,” Cogan said, “probably not. Not the way things are right now.”
“Who?” the driver said. “He knows people, of course, but he always wants to know who was suggested by the fellow I talk to.”
“I got a couple things in mind,” Cogan said. “That one, I got to think about that one, and I got to make sure. Maybe, maybe we’re gonna need Mitch.”
“He does this kind of thing?” the driver said.
“Let’s think about Trattman for now,” Cogan said. “Later on, we can start to think about what guys do. But yeah, Mitch’s been at it a long time. One of the best.”
9
“It was fuckin’ beautiful,” Russell said. He sat on the trunk of the GTO and Frankie leaned against a parking meter. The car was parked in front of the Chicken In the Box on Cambridge Street in Boston.
“We leave inna middle of the night, for Christ sake,” Russell said. “I said to him: Tor Christ sake, Kenny, we’re gonna have to drive inna daytime sooner or later, there’s no way we’re stoppin’ anywhere with what we’re gonna have in there. So why the fuck’re we leaving when we oughta be in bed?’
“ ‘Well,’ he tells me, ‘see, we gotta do it this way. I wanna get the hell at least onna Jersey Pike before it gets light. Too many fuckin’ cops around here, heard about fuckin’ dogs missing. See a couple guys, earful of dogs, they’re maybe gonna get around to stopping us, see what we got to say.’ But cops other places, they didn’t hear nothing about dogs, nobody told them anything. ‘And besides,’ he says, ‘I did this before. First part of the trip’s really something. So, we start inna dark.’
“Then he shows up,” Russell said. “See, I couldn’t sleep. He told me: ‘Get yourself six, seven hours in the afternoon, you can. We got about sixteen hundred miles in front of us. Last time, took me almost three days. So it’d really help, you get some sleep, all them dogs inna car and everything.’
“Okay,” Russell said, “I try it. I get up. I eat. I sit around. I let my fuckin’ dogs out. I let my fuckin’ dogs in. I feed my fuckin’ dogs. That’s another thing he tells me. ‘When’ve you been feeding them dogs? At night, probably.’ I tell him, yeah, just before I go out, the horsemeat and the fuckin’ meal. Keeps them nice and quiet. ‘Tomorrow,’ he says, ‘feed them, lunch instead. Dogs don’t know the difference. I want them dogs have a good shit for themselves, before we get them inna car. Also, now, I want you to give them something, all right?’
“I thought he means the phenobarb,” Russell said. “Christ, I got myself so much phenobarb I could nod off half the town without doing nothing else. No. Because, see, you dope them just before you load them up, inna car, they all start off with a nice nap. He’s got mineral oil. Four fuckin’ gallons of mineral oil.
“ ‘Dump this in their fuckin’ food,’ he says. ‘Give ’em fuckin’ all of it. Got any tomato soup? Get about twenny cans tomato soup, mix that up and heat it, right? Just like you’re gonna eat it yourself.’ I tell him, I can’t eat it, it hasn’t got rice in it. ‘Always tomato rice inna slammer, Kenny,’ I say. ‘I gotta put rice in it?’ He doesn’t know anything. The guy’s got absolutely no sense of humor and he never did time. He don’t know anything.”
“He should’ve,” Frankie said.
“There’s very few guys,” Russell said, “shouldn’t’ve. ‘Look,’ he says, ‘heat it up and dump the oil in. Then pour it in their food and they’ll woof it down like champs. Otherwise, they won’t. Then, I guarantee it, you make sure them fuckin’ dogs can get out, fast, because that stuff’s gonna come out of them like they’re waxed.’
“Them dogs,” Russell said, “all I could think of was when guys got dysentery the first time, you know? And they didn’t, they never had nothing like you get there, before that, and they didn’t know what was gonna happen to them. So them dogs, I put that food down, they practically trample each other, get at it, and I let them out and pretty soon they’re all wrinkled up, their faces’re all wrinkled and they’re squatting and squatting. Christ, you could smell that fuckin’ backyard in goddamned Springfield, steam’s coming out of the grass like it’s on fire or something. My mother comes home, she’s about a block away and she starts in on me. ‘Where’re you getting them dogs from? They’ll have the Board of Health down.’ I said: ‘Yeah, Ma. You know what you did? You hurt my feelings. You shouldn’t’ve come down here, you should’ve stayed where you are.’ My only son, he’s in jail, she’s got to come down here so she can be around and visit me. Know how many times she visits me? Three times. Three times in almost three years. Brought me a fuckin’ cake, once. They wouldn’t let her bring it in. ‘Shouldn’t’ve put the file in it, Ma,’ I said, ‘I meant to tell you, Ma, they got the metal detector, there. They can spot the file.’ She tells me: ‘There was nothing in that cake.’ Fine mother she is, I tell her. Shit. I said: ‘Ma, you hurt my feelings. Just for that, I’m gonna take my dogs out of here. I’m gonna take ’em out tonight. But just for that, I’m not cleaning up. I was you, taking the garbage out, I think I’d wanna be careful where I was stepping.’ She looks at me. ‘Figures,’ she says, ‘fits right in with everything else I got from you. Do me a favor, willya? Don’t come back.’ I told her: ‘I take after my old man. I won’t.’