The rat on fire

27

Cahbone opened the discussion with Roscommon, Sweeney nodding affirmations as he talked.

“It’s Fein, all right,” Carbone said.

“Well,” Roscommon said, “you thought it was. That’s not news.

“Not quite fair, sir,” Sweeney said. “We suspected it was one of Fein’s buildings, but we weren’t sure. Proctor’s got his own property, too. A lot of what he said, he could’ve been planning to light off one of those and he was just shooting the shit with Malatesta about Fein, confusing him.”

“Yeah,” Roscommon said.

“Thing of it is,” Carbone said, “we nagged every file that Malatesta’s handled, and the one they were talking about was that smoker over on Bristol that went up yesterday. So it’s one of Fein’s buildings, because he’s the guy that owns it.”

“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.”