I hadn’t seen him in years, and Father Time had not necessarily been kind. Not exactly Tom Brady to begin with, Markowitz’s jowls now hung so low that they almost rested on the table. His eyes were so bloodshot that I think even his pupils had turned red. His teeth were the color of caramel, most likely from the Camels that were ever present in his mouth, like the one that hung on his bottom lip at that very moment.
He ran his syndicate from this corner booth, and he was sitting there alone with open green ledger books bathed in the soft light of an old-fashioned banker’s lamp, a highball glass of his trademark Great Western Champagne sitting within easy — and constant — reach.
“A favor,” I said, sitting down across from him. “I only come when I’m looking for favors, and I apologize for that. This one I need real bad.”
“Every time you come in here, you need it bad,” he replied, looking at me with that deadened stare.
“I am sorry —”
“I say that as a compliment, kid,” he interjected. “Believe me, you’re me, there are pains in the asses that are shuffling through here seven goddamned days a week looking for this and looking for that. It never ends. You show up, I know it’s important. Go ahead.”
So I did. Mongillo and I had checked the pickup times on the mailboxes, and saw that all Sunday mail was retrieved by four o’clock. That meant the envelope from Paul Vasco was most likely sitting inside the locked and darkened brick building. I needed to get into that post office, and I needed to get in there fast.
I remembered that years before, the U.S. attorney had leaked word that Sammy Markowitz was about to be the subject of a multiple-count indictment on a battery of far-reaching charges that, if proven, could send him to prison for the rest of his life. The crux of the charges, as with the crux of many federal indictments, involved mail fraud. So when a key U.S. Postal Service inspector in the Boston office lost a laptop computer and a box of critical evidence, the entire case fell apart before the grand jury ever took a vote. Supposedly, that inspector now owned a lavish oceanfront spread on Nantucket, courtesy of Sammy Markowitz. I was hoping to hell he was in Boston now and willing to help out.
This is what I told Markowitz. He looked at me, forever flat, the butt drooping off his bottom lip, his eyes sagging into the bridge of his nose, and he said, “That’s all you need, a U.S. Postal Service inspector to allow you to commit a felony on government property on five minutes’ notice?”
He let that hang out there amid the swirl of fresh smoke, the acrid smell of old beer, and the tinny sounds of the jukebox that at that precise moment was playing Huey Lewis and the News. I didn’t say anything, because there was really nothing I could say.
“No problem,” he added, with just the hint of a smile at the edge of his lips. He leaned over and picked up the receiver on an office-style phone that rested on his table, placed a pair of reading glasses across his eyes, and carefully dialed a number.
“Barney, Sammy,” he said into the phone. “Oh, did I wake you…How’s the island been…? You’re using sunscreen, I hope, on that fair skin of yours…Your wife ever ask after me…? Listen, I’m in the market for a favor and I need it now…You’re going to have to go over to the Back Bay post office…I’m sending a guy over there, name of Jack. He’s like my son, but not as good-looking. He needs to go inside…Huh…? What…? Yeah, inside the post office. He’s looking for something. Do whatever you can to help him out…Call me sometime from Nantucket. I want to see if you really can hear the waves from your porch.”
And that was that. I rapped the scratched tabletop twice with the side of my hand as I got up to go.
“Wait a minute,” Markowitz called out after me.
I turned around and he said, “What the hell do I get out of the deal?”
Good question. I replied, “You got the opportunity to do something really good.”
He shook his head in mock indignation, pulled the cigarette off his lip, and said, “What the hell good is that? You owe me, kid. You owe me.”
He was right, I did. As the old saying goes, when you’re looking for a pig, you don’t search the cosmetics counter at Saks. Or something like that.
I slipped out the door, from fetid air to fresh, snapped open the passenger door to my idling car, the dog still asleep in the back, and told Mongillo, “Back to the post office.”
And we were off, one more stop amid a long day in an awful week in an increasingly uncertain life. One way or another, I suspected it would be our last.
42
When my cell phone rang, I snapped it open so hard I almost snapped it apart. “Flynn here,” I said.
Mongillo was deftly steering my car over the Mystic-Tobin Bridge, the mostly darkened towers of Boston’s Financial District spread out in the near distance below. Huck was snoring in the backseat, oblivious, virtuously so, to all that was wrong in this world.
“Sweeney here.” Hank Sweeney, to be more precise. His voice, as always, was soft, velvety, and welcomed.
“How’s things?” I asked, my pulse slowing for the moment.
“Well, two goons, both newly hired employees of The New York Times, just picked up Elizabeth Riggs, escorted her to the airport, and are getting her out of this crazy town via a company-hired jet. So you should feel good about that.”
“I do.” At least I thought I did. I had to further process the fact that she was gone, though safe, before I could make that same declaration to myself.
“Which frees me up to spend a little more quality time with you,” Sweeney said. He paused, gave me that purring chuckle, and added, “Of course, anytime you and I spend together is quality time.”
“How about we begin anew in about five minutes, in front of the Back Bay post office. I need some help committing a felony — all toward a good cause.”
“Such a coincidence,” Hank replied. “I just happen to be feeling very felonious.” And like that, the line went dead.
Vinny Mongillo glided up to the front of the post office, a hulking brick building that sits on the corner of Stuart and Clarendon Streets in the shadows of the tallest building in Boston, the John Hancock Tower.
I said to him, “You don’t have to do this. You can watch the car, stay with the dog, and I’ll slip in there with Hank.”
“Don’t be an asshole,” he said. “By the end of this night, we’re going to know who killed my mother, one way or another, and I’m going to be front and center in bringing that information home.”
I wasn’t about to argue with that.
Hank was waiting outside, dressed in black, looking like little more than a silhouette. I told the dog to guard the car, though he didn’t so much as open an eye in acknowledgment. As Vinny and I joined Hank outside, my cell phone rang yet again.
“Flynn here.”
“I’m the guy who’s helping you.”
I couldn’t be so sure, especially since the car that at that precise moment was rolling slowly past on Stuart Street bore a striking resemblance to a vehicle parked two spaces behind us at the Pigpen. Thinking even more quickly than usual, I asked, “What did Markowitz tell you to wear plenty of in your last conversation?”
Silence, and then, “Sunscreen. What’s that have to do with breaking into the post office on my watch?”
“Nothing.” And everything, but I didn’t have time to explain. That same car idled about half a block down. I hit Hank on the arm and pointed, and Hank pulled a pair of what looked like opera glasses out of his coat pocket and peered down the street.