George Higgins - The rat on fire

“Can we move on it?” Roscommon said.

“I don’t think so,” Carbone said. “Mickey doesn’t think so, either. Do you, Mick?”

“No,” Sweeney said, “no, I don’t.”

“They’re liable to kill somebody, the next time,” Roscommon said. “Then we’ll have shit up our nostrils for a month, turns out we expected it and we didn’t do anything.”

“Don’t think so,” Sweeney said. “Billy’s very strong on that – nobody in the building. That’s why the smoker. Drive people out. Besides, right now we can’t prove it.”

“You had a tail on Proctor, I thought I told you,” Roscommon said.

“So what?” Carbone said. “Proctor’s a handyman. There’s a lot of work in those buildings for handymen. We didn’t go in the basement with him and Dannaher. We watched them stop and we watched them go in and we watched them come out in less’n ten minutes and we followed them down Dort Ave and they have a hot dog and a beer and go off someplace else. That’s no arson. All they got to do is get up on their hind legs in court and say they went to fix something and they couldn’t fix it and they left to go get some lunch and some more tools and then they heard it on the radio that there was a fire there so they didn’t go back. Or maybe that they read it in the newspaper the next morning, when they were going back. That’s no case.”

“You got Billy taking money,” Roscommon said.

“John,” Sweeney said, “cop or no cop, the guy can borrow fifty or a hundred bucks off of another guy and that is not a crime no matter how thin you slice or how much bread you serve with it. That is baloney, and it stays baloney. If it was a crime for a cop to borrow money, we would probably all be in jail.”

“He’s got a girlfriend,” Roscommon said.

“He drinks coffee and he eats doughnuts too, when that lippy little broad at the pastry shop will let him have one,” Carbone said. “That’s no crime either. Fein owns a building and it’s no garden spot and he would probably like to get rid of it. Still, no crime.”

“We’ve got to catch somebody so red-hot he’ll have to talk,” Sweeney said.

“I was afraid you’d say that,” Roscommon said. “Good God, what chances we take with people’s lives.”

Proctor could hear Fein talking on the phone when he entered the reception area. Fein was laughing loudly in the conversation. Lois Reynolds grinned at Proctor and said, “He’s on the phone. Tackles. He won’t be long. Have a seat with Uncle Miltie.”

“Sounds like he’s in a good mood, at least,” Proctor said.

“Listen,” she said, “he is. But even when he isn’t in a good mood, he’s in a good mood when he’s talking to Tackles because Tackles gives him a lot of business. Lou Black. Remember him? Played for the old Boston Yanks and then the Redskins when they moved down there. The only black football player who was white. Tackles Black.”

“Oh, him,” Proctor said. “Yeah. Runs the joint down there in Quincy.”

“Braintree,” she said. “Does an awful lot of business. We’ve had as many as three acts in there at once, and some of them were kind of shabby around the edges, you want the God’s honest truth. But Tackles had the joint packed every night. Had them coming out the windows on Mondays, when you could park your car inside most joints without asking any of the customers to move.”

“The food?” Proctor said.

“Doubt it,” she said. “All I’ve ever seen them serve is hamburgers and pastrami and steak, the sandwiches, you know, in those little straw baskets with some pickles and a small bag of chips. I guess on weekends you can get ribs and maybe spaghetti or something like that. Don’t think there is any dessert – never saw any, at least. Put it this way: you can go in there for a drink and if you get hungry, you can find something to eat, and the food’s okay but it’s nothing I’d call special. And it doesn’t cost a lot of money, but it’s not free, either. I don’t think it’s the food.”

Another burst of laughter sounded in Fein’s office.

“Big drinks?” Proctor said.

“Usual size,” she said. “Usual size, usual price. People’re wise to those one-quart martini outfits, where you get maybe two and a half ounces of booze and the rest is melted ice. No, what Jerry and I think it is is that people really like Tackles and when they go there the first time, he makes them feel like he’s really glad to see them and he will do the best he can to make sure they have a good time. So, and they like that and they come back and they bring either some of their friends or else they tell all their friends about it, and Tackles does the same thing with them.

“He’s always there,” she said. “He’s always been there, too. Not like some of these stars you got now, they collect a fee and ten percent of the take on a joint they maybe visited once, the day it opened. Tackles really runs that place.

“And another thing is this,” she said, “and that is he has got this wonderful memory for names. If you went in there tonight and somebody introduced you, he would tell you all about his football career and show you the pictures he’s got over the bar of when he was playing, and then if you didn’t come in for another month, when you did, he would remember your name.

“That’s important,” she said. “There’s too many of the joints now, that they may get Bobby Vinton one week and Wayne Newton the week after that and then they’ve got, oh, Don Rickles coming in. And if you went there every night they had a new act, and left sixty bucks with them, you would still be just another customer without any face on you when you came back the next time to give them sixty bucks more. People don’t like that. If you asked them if they didn’t like it they would probably not know what you were talking about, because they don’t think about it.

“What they do instead,” she said, “is forget about the places with the knockout talent and go down to Tackles’, have a beer, play the pinball, see what Tackles thinks about the spread on Monday Night Football, which is on the big-screen set in the lounge, or sit there and eat a sandwich and listen to some second-rater sing Sinatra songs before some third-rater gets up and tells jokes that weren’t very funny when Bob Hope told them forty years ago to Henny Youngman.

“Then the band comes on,” she said, “which is usually some college kids that’re picking up a few extra dollars, and you can dance if you want to because the kids are always professional musicians but just happen not to be quite as professional yet as they are going to be in a few years. They are getting some experience, and while they are getting it, Tackles never tries to cheat them, always pays them union scale at least, and he promotes his acts in the local papers and the radio, so that also makes them feel good as well. A lot of our best acts in the area got their start and their experience at Tackles’, and I will tell you something: they remember him just as well as he remembers them. You get some guy that’s now at the Music Tent on the Cape warming up a crowd for Tony Bennett or somebody like that, he can get top money around here now, but if he gets a slow week a month or two down the road, he will call up and tell Jerry to ask Tackles if he wants one of the graduates for union scale. Tackles has got a lot of friends.” “Sounds like he must,” Proctor said. “Wished I did.” “Ahh,” she said, “no use worrying about it.” Fein was roaring his conversation into the phone. “It’s a gift,” she said. “Now, you take somebody like Jerry. I worked for him for almost twenty years. He’s a nice guy. I know him, and he’s a nice guy. He would do anything to help out a friend of his.