Sacred

It was my turn to kick her.

Groning raised an eyebrow and leaned forward as if to see what we were doing on the other side of his desk. “Yeah, well, like I always say, miss, you could do whole lots worse than this here town, but not whole lots better.”

Call the Stoneham Chamber of Commerce, I thought, you got yourselves a town slogan.

“Oh, absolutely,” Angie said.

He leaned back in his chair and I waited for it to tip, send him back through the wall into the next office. He pulled the Slim Jim out of his mouth, looked at it, and sucked it back in again. Then he looked at his computer screen.

“Anthony Lisardo of Lynn,” he said. “Lynn, Lynn, City of Sin. You ever hear it called that?”

“First time.” Angie smiled brightly.

“Oh, sure,” Groning said. “That’s a hell of a place, ol’ Lynn. Wouldn’t raise a dog there.”

Bet you’d eat one, though.

I chewed my tongue, reminded myself I’d resolved to work on my maturity this year.

“Wouldn’t raise a dog,” he repeated. “Well. Anthony Lisardo, yeah, had himself a heart attack.”

“I thought he drowned.”

“He did, fella. He surely did. First, though, he had a heart attack. Our doc didn’t think it was so big it would have killed him on its own, him being a young kid and all, but he was in five feet of water when it happened, so that was pretty much all she wrote. All she wrote,” he repeated with the same musical lilt he’d used on “wouldn’t raise a dog.”

“Anybody know what caused the heart attack?”

“Well, sure, fella. Sure someone knows. And that someone is Captain Emmett T. Groning of Stoneham.” He leaned back in his chair, left eyebrow cocked, and nodded at us, that Slim Jim rolling along his bottom lip.

If I lived here, I’d never commit a crime. Because to do so would put me in the box with this guy, and five minutes with Captain Emmett T. Groning of Stoneham, and I’d confess to everything from the Lindbergh baby’s killing to Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance just to get locked up in a federal pen, as far away as possible.

“Captain Groning,” Angie said, using the same breathy voice she’d used on Poor Walter, “if you could tell us what caused Anthony Lisardo’s heart attack, why, I’d be much obliged.”

Much obliged. Angela “Daisy Mae” Gennaro.

“Cocaína,” he said. “Or yeh-yo as some call it.”

I was stuck in Stoneham with a fat guy doing his Al Pacino-as-Tony Montana imitation. Life didn’t get much better.

“He snorted cocaine, had a heart attack, and drowned?” I said.

“Didn’t snort it. Smoked it, fella.”

“So it was crack?” Angie said.

He shook his tiny head and his jowls made a flapping noise. “Your standard cocaine,” he said. “Mixed in with tobacco. What’s known as an Ecuadoran cigarette.”

“Tobacco followed by a hit of coke, followed by tobacco, then coke, tobacco, then coke,” I said.

He seemed impressed. “You’re familiar with it.”

A lot of people who went to college in the early to mid eighties were, but I didn’t tell him that. He struck me as the kind of guy who decided whether or not to elect presidents based on whether he believed they’d “inhaled” or not.

“I’ve heard rumors of it,” I said.

“Well, that’s what this Lisardo boy smoked. Had himself a groovy high going, man, but that high came a crashing on down in a real bummer way.”

“Word,” I said.

“What?”

“Def,” I said.

“What?”

“Never mind,” I said.

Angie’s heel ground into my toe and she smiled sweetly at Captain Groning. “What about the witness? The newspaper said Lisardo had a companion.”

Groning took his confused eyes off me and looked back at his computer screen. “Kid named Donald Yeager, aged twenty-two. Left the scene in a panic, but called it in about an hour later. We ID’d him from a jacket he left behind, sweated him in the box for a bit, but he didn’t do jack. He just went to the reservoir with his buddy, drank some beer, smoked some mary jew wanna, and went for a dip.”

“Did he do any coke?”

“Nah. He claimed he didn’t know Lisardo was doing it either. Said, ‘Tony hated coke.’” Groning clucked his tongue. “I said, ‘And coke hated Tony, fella.’”

“Terrific comeback,” I said.

He nodded. “Sometimes when me and the boys get going in the box, there’s just no stopping us.”

Captain Groning and the Boys. Bet they had barbecues and went to church together and sang Hank Williams, Jr., songs together and never met a rubber hose they didn’t like.

“So how does Anthony’s father feel about his son’s death?” Angie asked.

“Crazy Davey?” Captain Groning said. “You see in the paper how they called him a ‘mobster’?”

“Yes.”

“Every corrupt guinea north of Quincy’s a mobster all a sudden, I swear.”

“And this particular guinea?” Angie said, her hands locked together into fists.

“Small-time. The papers said ‘loan shark,’ which is partly true, but mostly he’s a chop-shop guy on the Lynnway.”

Boston is one of the safest major metropolitan cities in the country. Our murder and assault and rape rates are barely blips on the screen compared with those of Los Angeles or Miami or New York, but we have all those cities beat when it comes to car theft. Boston criminals, for some reason, love to boost cars. I’m not sure why that is, since there’s nothing terribly wrong with our public transportation system, but there you go.

And most of these cars end up on the Lynnway, a stretch of Route 1A that cuts over the Mystic River, and is lined from end to end with car dealerships and garages. Most of those dealerships and garages are legitimate, but several aren’t. That’s why most Bostonians who get their cars stolen shouldn’t even bother checking their LoJack satellite-tracking system—it will just beep from a spot in the depths of the Mystic, just off the Lynnway. The tracking system, not the car. The car’s in pieces and those pieces are on their way to fifteen different places within half an hour after you parked.

“Crazy Davey isn’t pissed about his son’s death?” I said.

“I’m sure he is,” Captain Groning said. “But there’s not much he can do about it. Oh, sure, he gave us all the usual ‘My son don’t do coke’ bullshit, but what else is he going to say? Luckily, the way the mob’s all messed up around here these days, and Crazy Davey not even being in the running for a slot, I don’t have to care what he thinks.”