Back Story. Part 11

"Vinnie got a lotta focus," Hawk said.

Vinnie finished his donut and drank some coffee. There was no sense of hurry, but all his movements were very quick. And exact. He patted his mouth with a paper napkin.

"Sounds to me like a guy named Harvey," he said.

"First name or last?"

"Don't know. He's from Miami," Vinnie said. "Comes up here sometimes, does gun work for Sonny Karnofsky."

"You know him?"

"I met him."

"How?"

Vinnie looked at me.

"I mean 'how?' in general," I said.

"I'm still with Gino," Vinnie said. "Him and Sonny was doing something. Harvey was walking behind Sonny."

"He any good?" I said.

"Yes."

"Better than you?" Hawk said.

"No," Vinnie said.

"As good as you?" I said.

"No."

Hawk grinned.

"Anybody good as you?" he said.

"Maybe that Mex from L.A."

"Chollo," I said.

"He's pretty good," Vinnie said.

Hawk looked at me. "Sonny took over what Joe Broz left behind," Hawk said.

"Which is pretty much everything," I said.

"Except for Gino," Vinnie said.

"And Tony Marcus," Hawk said.

"Talk to me a little more about Harvey," I said.

Vinnie watched a youngish woman walk by in shorts and a cropped tank top. "f.u.c.king broads got no shame," Vinnie said.

"It's one of the many things I like about them," Hawk said.

"Talk about Harvey," I said.

"He's good, but he's got no soul," Vinnie said. "He'll shoot anything."

"He like it?" I said.

"Yeah."

"Could he be working for anybody else?" I said.

"Up here? No. You work here for Sonny, you don't work for anybody else."

"You ever work for Sonny?" I said to Hawk.

"I don't like him," Hawk said.

"Is that a no?"

"It is."

"So why is Sonny Karnofsky worried about a counterculture murder that went down twenty-eight years ago?" I said.

"We criminals," Hawk said. "We don't know stuff like that."

"I don't either," I said. "I guess I'll have to talk with Sonny."

"That would suggest to him that you ain't leaving the case alone."

"It would," I said.

Hawk nodded. "I'll come along," he said.

"When we going to do it," Vinnie said.

"No reason to wait," I said.

21.

Sonny Karnofsky practiced his profession out of the Pulaski Social Club, near the Charlestown line, a couple blocks into Somerville from Sullivan Square. It was a narrow three-decker with clapboard siding, faced on the first floor with rust-colored artificial stone. There was a large plate gla.s.s window to the right of the narrow entry door. Across the window, PULASKI SOCIAL CLUB was lettered in black. An unlaundered curtain hung across the inside of the window so you couldn't see in.

Vinnie waited in the car at the curb. Hawk got out with me and leaned against the car while I got out and walked to the club. There were a couple guys hanging outside the doorway, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer from the bottle and looking dangerous in the way only bottom-rung wiseguys were able to look while they waited for someone to tell them to do something. I started in the door, and a fat guy with a lot of tattoos put his arm out. "You going somewhere?"

"Am I going somewhere," I said. "I never think of saying stuff like that until it's too late. That's great: Are you going somewhere. Hot dog!"

"What are you, a wiseguy?" the fat guy said.

"I am," I said. "And I'm looking for Sonny Karnofsky."

"Yeah?"

"I'm here to talk with him about Harvey."

The fat guy was getting a little careful. Maybe I was important.

"He know you're coming?"

"Tell him I'm here," I said.

The fat guy hesitated. He looked at Hawk leaning on the car. He looked at the other guy, much smaller, wearing a dirty tank top hanging outside pink Bermuda shorts, and black sandals.

"Find out if Sonny wants to see this guy," the fat guy said.

The guy in the sandals went inside. The fat man had dropped his arm, but stood with his body shielding the entrance. If I wasn't supposed to go in and he let me, Sonny would have his a.s.s. If I was supposed to go in and he didn't let me, Sonny would have his a.s.s. We waited. Hawk seemed to be enjoying it. Vinnie didn't seem to know it was happening. The other guy came back out.

"Okay," he said to the fat guy.

The fat guy turned to me.

"Okay," he said.

"I love a chain of command," I said.

The fat guy jerked his head toward the door, and the guy in the sandals opened it for me and I went in. There was a big shabby open room with a table and an old refrigerator against the wall to my right. Four guys were playing cards. Two other guys were at another table, drinking beer and watching The Young and the Restless on television. A big poster of the New England Patriots Super Bowl team was taped to the wall to my left. And straight ahead, to the left of a half-open door, was a large calendar with the days crossed off.

"Through that door in the back," the guy in the sandals told me.

As I walked through the room, the men stared at me. Probably sick with envy. Through the open door was the quintessential back room: dirty brown walls, brown linoleum floor, dirty window covered with wire mesh that looked out at the back of the next building. Old oak desk, old oak file cabinet, old cane-back oak swivel chair behind the desk, big old sagging armchair covered in shabby brown corduroy. In the armchair, crossways, with his legs swung over one of the chair arms, sat my recent acquaintance Harvey, wearing a white linen suit. In the old swivel chair like an imposing toad, wearing a red-and-blue Hawaiian shirt that gapped between the b.u.t.tons over his stomach, was Sonny Karnofsky.

Sonny looked at me without expression. Harvey swung his leg sort of indolently and smirked a little. Sonny waited.

"You know me?" I said.

"Yeah."

"Why'd you send this fop around to scare me to death."

"What's a fop?" Sonny said.

I pointed at Harvey. With his white suit, he was wearing a pale blue shirt and a white tie. Flawless.

"What makes you think I sent him to do anything?"

"Oh come on, Sonny," I said. "You think he felt like threatening somebody, and he picked me out of the phone book? What I want to know is why you care about the murder of some woman from California, happened twenty-eight years ago?"

"Corkie says you got some people waiting for you outside," Sonny said.

There was maybe the hint of an Eastern European accent in his speech, but it was so faint that maybe it wasn't there.

"I do."

Sonny nodded slowly. "Good idea," he said. His voice was thick, as if his pipes were clogged.

"Were you a counterculture radical in 1974?" I said. He raised a hand and pointed at me with a forefinger so fat it made the skin taut.

"Anybody knows me will tell you, you f.u.c.k with me and you're dead."

"I've heard that," I said.

"And they'll tell you, f.u.c.k with my family and you'll wish you f.u.c.ked with me."

"Family?"

Sonny was so used to being king of the hill these days that he probably didn't watch what he said as much as he used to. His face was expressionless, but his mouth clamped hard shut. We looked at each other for a moment. Without taking his eyes off me, he spoke to Harvey.

"Not here. But as quick as you can someplace else," Sonny said. "Kill him."

Harvey looked like a guy with a low-grade fever.

"Be my pleasure," Harvey said.

That pretty well said it all, so I turned and marched out. I hate to be in a place where I'm not wanted.

22.

Sitting in my office, Daryl was sort of hunched with her hands in her lap. "I never really think of it as lying," she said. I nodded. Nondirective.

"It's. " she looked at Paul, who sat quietly next to her, even more nondirective, if possible, than I was. "It's more, like, how it should have been. You know? How it could have been, if my parents. " "Sure," I said. Paul and I looked supportively at Daryl. Daryl looked at her hands.

"They embarra.s.sed me," she said.