The Penny Ferry da-2 Read online

  "You keep saying they -"

  " Two gas masks, remember?"

  "Right. They."

  "They set it up, kill Johnny, and snag the pouch. But then they discover the cup isn't there-"

  "Ah! Or maybe Johnny was carrying something else from the Fogg, something smaller that they could easily fence…"

  Joe decided to have somebody from his office follow up with a post-mortem photograph to show to Lucia. Then he went back to staring at the window.

  "Gee, I want to go in there and look at those fancy lighters, Doc. Too bad it's closed."

  "There's a tobacconist's in the Copley Plaza that's open; we passed it on the way out."

  That was all the invitation he needed. In three minutes we were back in the hotel, looking down through the glass of the counter display case, checking out the lighters. But the kind Joe was looking for wasn't there. He grew morose and impatient, asking the clerk if he carried Orsini lighters.

  "We keep them in back, sir. They're not asked for that often. Excuse me a minute."

  He returned shortly with two red leather cases which he unfolded on the glass counter. Set on the plush lining were about twenty lighters. They looked like the one Lucia had used. Joe was agitated: No, he was excited. He was all in a sweat to get one. Then he took a peek at one of the small tags underneath.

  "Jees! Six hundred twenty-five bucks! Uh… I don't know. Doc, whaddayuh think?"

  "I think it's dumb. Get a Zippo for six bucks. You'll never lose a cheap lighter. Just like a cheap pen. But you get one of those, you'll lose it within a month."

  But he couldn't take his eyes off the cases of fancy lighters. Some were blue and gold. Their labels said they were lapis lazuli and pure gold. Big deal. Others were platinum and onyx, tortoiseshell and gold, and so on. Joe was transfixed; he was going to be awhile.

  "Yeah, yeah- how about this one? No, the blue," he said impatiently.

  Now that I considered, I wished Ehrlich's was open; I needed tobacco. I bought a small tin and some Te Amo coronas. Joe looked at lighters. Finally he appeared at my side, ready to go. He hadn't bought anything. We left the shop and walked over I to Joe's car. I put my bag of tobacco and cigars on the seat beside me. Joe eyed the bag enviously.

  "How much did your watch cost?" he asked.

  "You mean the black one? Why do you ask?"

  "How much?"

  "Uh, about four hundred bucks. Don't tell Mary."

  "Hold on a sec."

  He jumped out of the car and hoofed it back to the tobacconist's, reappearing shortly with a little paper bag in his hand. He got behind the wheel and opened it. He took out a small, cardboard box, opened it, and held a jewelry case in his hand.

  On the blue case, in stylized lower-case letters in silver, was the word Orsini. He handed it to me and I snapped it open. Inside was a blue-and-gold lighter.

  "Very handsome," I said. "How much?"

  "Three twenty-five. It was their second~cheapest one. But still nice. He just filled it for me."

  "What does it run on, plutonium?"

  "Butane. Nice, eh? See, the nortes aren't the only ones who can have these. I don't buy that much for myself, you know."

  We headed home. For his dues Joe bought a sack of pears and some Brie in Fresh Pond, and we were home by four. But after the car rolled to a stop and I gathered our purchases to carry inside, I noticed Joe hadn't moved. He was still behind the wheel, regarding the lighter that he flipped around in his big hands. I thought he must really love it. Then he got out slowly, as if burdened by a great weight. He sighed as he walked up the flagstones, carrying the new lighter in front of him in both hands the way a priest carries the host.

  "Dammit, Doc. Why the hell did I ever buy this thing?"

  ***

  "Oh I don't know," mused Mary as she fingered the lighter. "It looks really nice, Joey. And don't worry so much what those nortes do or don't do. We all know they're not really Italians. They're Austrians in drag."

  We had asked Mary to pass judgment on Joe's big purchase. We were sitting around the dinner table after a huge feast.

  "The tortellini was a nice surprise," I said, placing my hand under the table and on her thigh, which I commenced to stroke.

  "That's a ball, Charlie," she said with a sigh.

  "Huh?"

  "Low and outside," she said, patting my hand.

  "That's tawdry, dear. Must you always be so tawdry?"

  "Yep."

  Joe took the lighter back. It had clearly become an object of guilt, an albatross around his neck. Poor guy. Mary had the solution. She went upstairs and got my fancy black watch and fastened it onto Joe's wrist. Then she took the lighter from him and gave it to me. Pretend you've given each other presents, she said.

  "Great," said Joe, regarding the fancy timepiece. "Only trouble is I don't need a watch."

  "And I don't need a cigarette lighter."

  "Well it's the thought that counts," said Mary. "Now Charlie, make the cappucino."

  After dessert we put on a Mahler symphony and sat in the living room speculating on the Robinson/Fabrianni/dead-guy-in-the-chimney connection. There still didn't appear to be any, which made it all the more puzzling.

  "Why are you guys so sure the poor man in the chimney was working for the Fabriannis?" asked Mary, who was busy flipping through a magazine.

  "Well, the main thing is the fact that he looked Italian- not Italian-American but real Italian, you know," said her brother, scowling and fingering his new watch, which seemed to confuse and disgust him. "And also the fact that Johnny Robinson was carrying a gold cup for the Fabriannis earlier. But mainly, he wore a watch just like the one Lucia Fabrianni was wearing. It's called a Bulgari, and it's made in Italy."

  "You guys are full of it," said Mary, looking at her nails.

  "Now what makes you say that?" I asked.

  "The man's watch. Two reasons. One: here's a Bulgari watch right here."

  She flipped the magazine around and showed us a full-page color ad with the name boldly spelled out. I noticed it was spelled with a Roman style u that was shaped like a v. The magazine washer favorite: Attenzione, the magazine for Italian-Americans, or anybody who likes anything Italian. I liked the magazine a lot.

  "Charlie and Joe, these Bulgari watches are the new thing. No more Rolex or Patek Philippe. It's all Bulgari now; the stores on Newbury Street are selling them like crazy. So reason number one, again: everybody's getting Bulgari watches now; the guy in the chimney could be an American."

  "No way," said her brother.

  "Two: you're saying the guys killed Johnny to get the gold cup, or something else valuable? Then why didn't they take the watch? They could sell it easily for a couple hundred bucks. So one, two: you guys are full of it."

  She returned to her magazine and her nails. We didn't exactly know what to say. Leave a woman to screw everything all up. just before Joe left to return to his Beacon Hill bachelor apartment he and I went over the whole thing again, just the two of us. We decided Johnny Robinson's death was a Mob revenge killing after all. So I said good-bye fully expecting to begin making a new bridge for Tom Costello's mouth the next afternoon… and not expecting to see Joe until next weekend. But something unexpected changed all of that. It was a voice. A voice from beyond the grave.

  Johnny Robinson's voice. Talking to me.

  CHAPTER SIX

  I regarded the bloody object that rested on the sterile paper. Clumps of clotted tissue clung to its lower extremities like limpets on a wave-washed rock. Although the patient sitting in my chair would certainly enjoy newfound relief now that the impacted third molar was removed from his lower jaw, I could not help feeling a wee bit like Torquemada every time I clamped my HuFriedy cowhorn forceps securely around an offending tooth and I began to rock it loose from its socket. You do this after you partially lift the tooth with a tool called an elevator; after the forceps are in place you rock the tooth back and forth and then extract it. Sometimes there is a muted crunch
of bone or crackle as a root fractures under the strain. But always there is the sickening wet sucking sound of the gum tissue, a sound like that produced when you sink up to your knee in a muddy bog and then pull your leg out. To mute these noises I always have my patient wear earphones playing classical music- on the loud side. My current patient was listening to E. Power Biggs playing Bach's Toccata in E minor. He felt nothing… yet.

  The lower portion of Ronald Belknap's tooth was bent at a thirty-degree angle. This dogleg had developed over the years as the tooth tried to push its way up through the gum- in the manner God and nature intended all good teeth to do- and join its fellow teeth in the job of grinding up food. But the tooth could not push its way to the surface because the jawbone was too small and there wasn't room. Our tiny mandible, like our appendix, is a curse of human evolution, So the tooth pushed against the twelve-year molar in front not it at an angle. And as it pushed against the molar, it began to bend. Finally all this pushing and bending leads to inflammation, pressure, and infection. Sometimes you need to section impacted teeth before you remove them, but in Belknap's case I didn't.

  "Ohhhhh Jameseeeez," he moaned, looking at the huge tooth that lay soaking the white paper with blood. "No wonder that sucker hurt!"

  "Yes," I said, "and unfortunately, when the local wears off you're going to get some more pain. Notice, Ron, I'm not calling it discomfort, as so many of my colleagues do. I'm calling it pain because that's what it will be. Do you drink?"

  "Sure."

  So I gave him a blue card with instructions. For minors, or people who don't drink, I give a white card with a different set of instructions and a prescription for Tylox. But never do I mix instructions, or cards, because booze on top of a pain-killing drug can make some people drop where they stand after one snort. It's very dangerous.

  "Hey Doc. This just says to go home and get bombed."

  "Uh-huh. There's a good drink recipe on the back. Stay home tomorrow and watch the tube. You'll be in some pain for the next twenty hours because I had to remove a wee bit of infected jawbone. That's going to smart. Next day return to work and a take aspirin. Keep the packing in your mouth until dinnertime and don't rinse. Good-bye."

  "What about payment?"

  "One pain at a time. Susan will bill you."

  He regarded the devastatingly gorgeous Susan Petri, the one who could turn men into stone. Susan Petri should be a controlled substance. He addressed me sotto voce.

  "Wow, Doc. If you'll pardon a personal observation, you've got some really nice scenery around here. Must make coming to work uh, less of an ordeal."

  "If you're referring to Ms. Petri's physical attributes"- I sniffed- "then let me assure you they had next to nothing to do with my hiring her. And, speaking as one twentieth-century man to another, I regret your judging her solely on her physical appearance. It is sexist and archaic. Isn't she dynamite?"

  "Yeah, I-OOOO I think I just got the first twinge!"

  "You ain't felt nothin' yet, Ron. There's more where that came from. Go home and guzzle; I'll see you Friday."

  I saw him out the door just as the phone rang. It was Joe, returning my call to Ten-Ten Comm. Ave.

  "Where the hell have you been? I called you before work."

  "Oh. You mean it was important?"

  "Joe, listen: I've got a taped phone message from Johnny. He called me late Friday afternoon and left a message on my machine."

  "Well what's it say?"

  "I'll play it over the phone. Hold on."

  I pressed the playback button on my phone answering machine and held the receiver right over the tiny speaker: Hello, Doc? This is Johnny. Johnny Robinson, Dependable. Listen, I got your work from the dental lab but I'll be a little bit late with it. Can you hold on until just before suppertime? Sorry, but I'm totin' somethin' hot for my buddy Andy and I've got a- uh [squeak, flap, squeak] complication, dontcha know… [bark, bark]. Sorry for the delay… I'll stay in touch. [bark, click]

  There was a pause on the other end after it was over. Then, Joe asked me to play it again. I did. Then he asked me to play it a third time.

  "Okay, I'll be out in an hour. I might bring O'Hearn with me. You hear that squeaking in the background? Phone-booth door… the old type. And the barking? Johnny's dogs. Somebody was tailing him."

  "Who's Andy?"

  "That's what we're gonna find out. Stay put."

  Joe and I listened to the tape three more times. We played the end of it over and over again to try and determine what the background noises meant. The problem was that the answering device was a crude recorder, and the speaker was a tiny arrangement barely an inch and a half across. Hardly concert-hall realism. Frustrated, Joe said he needed a big tape deck with three heads so he could make more copies. I had such a deck, but the one at the Concord police station was closer and Joe said he'd like Chief Brian Hannon's opinion of the message.

  "You would? Really and truly?"

  "Well why not?" asked Joe.

  "Well why?"

  We nestled ourselves in front of the police department's big Akai tape deck after we'd made four copies of the message, which ran 25.4 seconds, and listened again to the original tape. Brian Hannon sat between us, running his fat fingers through his thinning sand-colored hair as he cocked his ear at the-voice. The details in the background were clearer with the better equipment. The squeak of a door hinge, the faint sounds of traffic and pedestrians and a bell.

  The three of us hunkered down there like sparrows on a wire, listening. I was at one end, a bit lean and graying at the temples. Brian, short, stocky, and almost bald, was in the middle. Bringing up the far side was good old Joe, with his paunch and his hound-dog eyes. Then I knew who it was we must've looked like: Larry, Curley, and Moe. The Three Stooges.

  "Phone booth," growled Brian at the squeak, flap, squeak. "He's opening and closing the door of a phone booth, probably to get a good look at somebody who's tailing him."

  "We agree," said Joe. "And the barking we're hearing is Tommy and Susie, who are on their leads right outside the booth. They usually didn't bark. It took a lot to make them squawk. All these things add up to the message: I'll be late, I got a complication…"

  "Uh-huh," I agreed. "Like somebody tailing me, trying to get what l'm carrying."

  "What?" asked Brian.

  "We're narrowing it down. But what about the chiming bells in the background? Which church is it?"

  "Three bongs. Pretty deep bongs. Must be Park Street Church," mused Joe, "but somehow it doesn't sound like it. Three bongs means three o'clock. Let's consult Johnny's log and see where he was at three."

  Joe flipped out his pocket notebook and checked the page that he'd copied the log information on. He ran his finger down the list.

  "Let's see. At three in the afternoon Johnny was making a cash delivery to National Distilling in Cambridge. That's right over near the Museum of Science. Hell, there's no church there. None at a1ll.".

  "It's gotta be Park Street Church," said Brian. "Do you know any other church that strikes the hours?"

  Joe shook his head. "Doesn't sound like Park Street. The bongs aren't deep enough. God knows I hear that church often enough. They play a little song and then chime the hours. The bongs are slow and deep. These bongs are more like chimes; they're fast and higher-pitched."

  "Is it Trinity Church in Copley Square?" I asked. "I hear tons of people in the background- a lot of street traffic and pedestrians."

  "I don't think Trinity strikes the hours," said Joe, rubbing his chin with his thumb. It made a raspy sound. He rewound the tape again, for the hundredth time. We were going to wear it out. There it was again: the barking, the squeak of the phonebooth door, and three bells, far off. Close by were lots of people walking and talking. Shouting and laughing.

  "A mob scene," said Brian. "Sounds to me like lunch hour. Doesn't sound like three o'clock. Only on a weekend would it be so noisy at three. But it's gotta be either Park Street or Copley Square."

  "Wai
t a minute!" said Joe. "I just heard the word fiari. That's Italian for flowers. Hell, Johnny's in the North End here. That must be Old North Church."

  We thought we'd solved the thing then. But several problems emerged. One was the fact that his log sheet showed him at the distillery at 2:45, over in Cambridge, not in the North End. Second, as Brian had observed, the mob scene outside the phone booth was too manic for three in the afternoon, even on a Friday.

  And finally, on Joe's suspicion that Old North Church did not chime, we called and had this confirmed. Old North was silent. Great for lanterns in the window, but not for chimes. We called Trinity. Also silent. That left us with Park Street, except the bells didn't remotely sound like those in the Park Street belfry. Then I solved it.

  "Listen again," I said. "You'll hear that the bells aren't spaced evenly. It doesn't go bong, bong, bong. It goes bong, bong,… bong. Two and then one. It's a ship's bell, don't you see? It's sounding three bells."

  "Three o'clock?"

  "No. It would be, uh, five-thirty. Eight bells is four, then it starts all over again with a new bell for every half hour. Three bells is five-thirty in the evening. That would explain the heavy street traffic too."

  "I didn't realize the North End was so close to the harbor," said Brian.

  "Right smack dab on it," said Joe, "except that it's mostly hidden by all the crowded buildings. But there's no indication in the log that Johnny went back there after his last job."

  "You remember two of the jobs had a star after them. That meant they weren't completed. One was for my dental work, which is why Johnny called me in the first place. The other unfinished business involved the public library and a party in the North End."

  "Uh-huh. And at the end of the day he went back to the North End to complete that errand, and he was carrying your lab work too. He called to say he'd be late, and right there on Hanover Street, or nearby, he realized he was being followed. And I bet the party in the North End is named Andy."

  Joe got on the phone and rasped out a series of commands to Ten-Ten Comm. Ave.