Looking for Rachel Wallace

24

Watertown was next to Belmont, but only in location. It was mostly working-class and the houses were shabby, often two-family, and packed close together on streets that weren’t plowed well. It was slow going now, the snow coming hard and the traffic overcautious and crawling.

Mingo Mulready’s house was square, two stories, with a wide front porch. The cedar shingle siding was painted blue. The asbestos shingles on the roof were multi-colored. I parked on the street and walked across.

There were two front entrance doors. The one on the left said Mulready. I rang the bell. Nothing. I waited a minute, rang it again. Then I leaned on it for about two minutes. Mingo wasn’t home. I went back to my car. Mingo was probably off working at his soft job, driving the rich woman around Belmont. I turned on the radio and listened to the news at noon. Two things occurred to me. One was that nothing that ever got reported in the news seemed to have anything to do with me, and the other was that it was lunchtime. I drove about ten blocks to the Eastern Lamjun Bakery on Belmont Street and bought a package of fresh Syrian bread, a pound of feta cheese, and a pound of Calamata olives.

The bread was still warm. Then I went across the street to the package store and bought a six-pack of Beck’s beer, then I drove back and parked in front of Mingo’s house and had lunch, and listened to a small suburban station that played jazz and big-band music. At three I drove down the block to a gas station and filled my gas tank and used the men’s room and drove back up to Mingo’s and sat some more.

I remembered this kind of work as less boring fifteen years ago when I used to smoke. Probably not so. Probably just seemed that way. At four fifteen Mingo showed up. He was driving a tan Thunderbird with a vinyl roof. He pulled into the driveway beside the house and got out. I got out and walked across the street. We met at the front steps of his home.

I said, “Are you Mingo Mulready?”

He said, “Who wants to know?”

I said, “I say, ‘I do,’ then you say, ‘Who are you?’ then I say—”

He said, “What the fuck are you talking about, Jack?”

He was big enough to talk that way, and he must have been used to getting away with it. He was about my height, which made him just under six two, and he was probably twenty-five or thirty pounds heavier, which would have made him 230. He had one of the few honest-to-God boot-camp crew cuts I’d seen in the last eight or ten years. He also had small eyes and a button nose in a doughy face, so that he looked like a mean, palefaced gingerbread man. He was wearing a dark suit and a white shirt and black gloves. He wore no coat.

I said, “Are you Mingo Mulready?”

“I want to know who’s asking,” he said. “And I want to know pretty quick, or I might stomp your ass.”

I was holding my right hand in my left at about belt level. While I was talking I strained the right against the left, so that when I let go with the left, the right snapped up, and the edge of my hand caught Mingo under the nose the way a cocked hammer snaps when you squeeze the trigger. I accelerated it a little on the way up, and the blood spurted from Mingo’s nose, and he staggered back about two steps. It was a good shot.

“That’s why I wanted to know if you were Mingo,” I said. I drove a left hook into the side of his jaw. “Because I didn’t want to beat hell out of some innocent bystander.” I put a straight right onto Mingo’s nose. He fell down. “But you’re such a pain in the ass that you need to get the hell beat out of you even if you aren’t Mingo Mulready.”

He was not a bunny. I’d sucker-punched him and put two more good shots in his face, and he didn’t stay down. He came lunging up at me and knocked me back into the snow and scrambled on top of me. I put the heels of both hands under his chin and drove his head back and half-lifted him off me and rolled away. He came after me again, but that extra thirty pounds wasn’t helping him. It was mostly fat, and he was already rasping for breath. I moved in, hit him hard twice in the gut, moved out, and hit him twice on that bloody nose. He sagged. I hit him on each side of the jaw. Left jab, right cross, left jab, right cross. He sagged more. His breath wheezed; his arms dropped. He was arm-weary in the first round.

I said, “Are you Mingo Mulready?”

He nodded.

“You sure?” I said. “I heard you were a bad ass.”

He nodded again, wheezing for oxygen.

“I guess I heard wrong,” I said. “You work for a rich woman in Belmont?”

He stared at me.

“If you want to keep getting your breath back, you answer what I ask. You don’t answer, and you’ll think what we did before was dancing.”

He nodded.

“You do. What’s her name?”

“English,” he said.

“She tell you to hire your cousin and his pal Swisher to run me off the road in Lynn?”

He said, “You?”

“Yeah, me. Me and Rachel Wallace. Who told you to harass us?”

He looked toward the street. It was empty. The snow was thin and steady, and darkness had come on. He looked toward the house. It was dark.

He said, “I dunno what you mean.”

I hit him a good left hook in the throat. He gasped and clutched at his neck.

I said, “Who told you to run Rachel Wallace off the road? Who told you to hire your cousin and his pal? Who gave you the two bills?”

He was having trouble speaking. “English,” he croaked.

“The old lady or the son?”

“The son.”

“Why?”

He shook his head. I moved my left fist. He backed up. “Swear on my mother,” he said. “I don’t ask them questions. They pay me good. They treat me decent.” He stopped and coughed and spit some blood. “I don’t ask no questions. I do what they say, they’re important people.”

“Okay,” I said. “Remember, I know where you live. I may come back and talk with you again. If I have to look for you, it will make me mad.”

He didn’t say anything. I turned and walked across the street to my car. It was very dark now, and in the snow I couldn’t even see the car till I was halfway across the street. I opened the door. The inside light went on. Frank Belson was sitting in the front seat. I got in and closed the door.

“For crissake turn the motor on and get the heater going,” he said. “I’m freezing my nuts off.”