At ten forty-five on a raw Sunday night in the middle of a dismal March, the Pigpen lounge in Chelsea was exactly how I expected it to be, which is to say peopled by some of life’s most exquisite losers — beer-bellied guys with tree-trunk necks wearing ill-fitting black blazers, desperate-looking women in caked-on makeup with skirts that revealed things that no normal man would want to see, coked-out servers who had neither showered nor shaved in days.
The place reeked of stale cigarettes, cheap whiskey, and fresh urine, not necessarily in that order. That potpourri actually represented an improvement on the drugstore-quality colognes and perfumes worn by the patrons. If Charles Darwin had ever been able to stop by the Pigpen for a Scotch and a beer chaser, I think he’d have quickly remade his entire theory.
I marched through the front doors and yelled out, “Everyone freeze. Massachusetts Health Department. I’m here to enforce the state’s no-smoking laws.”
Actually, that’s not what I did or said. I didn’t have the luxury of time or humor. Rather, I barged inside, spied old friend Sammy Markowitz sitting in his usual rear booth, and made a beeline for him.
I almost got there, too, but for the two bodyguards who looked as if they had just escaped from the primate exhibit at the Franklin Park Zoo. They stood side by side, blocking my path, their bodies about the width of a football field, and one of them said, “Nobody goes back dere.”
“You must be mistaken,” I pointed out to them. “There are people back there now. So if you’ll excuse me.”
The guy who had spoken to me glanced over at the silent one, as if he was looking for some sort of explanation of what I had meant. He didn’t get one. Then a voice called out from behind them, “He’s good, gentlemen. He’s good.”
The men hesitated, then awkwardly parted in silence. To me, the voice said, “Jack Flynn in the Pigpen. To what do I owe this rarest of pleasures?”
That was Sammy Markowitz, bookmaking kingpin, Pigpen owner, and one of the oldest, most valuable sources of information in my legendary stable. We’d befriended each other years ago when I was reporting out a story on the scope and breadth of his enormously successful criminal enterprise. Desperate for me not to write, he leaked like a sieve about anyone and everyone all around him, from cops to mayors, providing me fodder for a series of stories that nearly — but didn’t quite — win a Pulitzer Prize. We’d remained in occasional touch ever since.
I hadn’t seen him in years, and Father Time had not necessarily been kind. Not exactly Tom Brady to begin with, Markowitz’s jowls now hung so low that they almost rested on the table. His eyes were so bloodshot that I think even his pupils had turned red. His teeth were the color of caramel, most likely from the Camels that were ever present in his mouth, like the one that hung on his bottom lip at that very moment.
He ran his syndicate from this corner booth, and he was sitting there alone with open green ledger books bathed in the soft light of an old-fashioned banker’s lamp, a highball glass of his trademark Great Western Champagne sitting within easy — and constant — reach.
“A favor,” I said, sitting down across from him. “I only come when I’m looking for favors, and I apologize for that. This one I need real bad.”
“Every time you come in here, you need it bad,” he replied, looking at me with that deadened stare.
“I am sorry —”
“I say that as a compliment, kid,” he interjected. “Believe me, you’re me, there are pains in the asses that are shuffling through here seven goddamned days a week looking for this and looking for that. It never ends. You show up, I know it’s important. Go ahead.”
So I did. Mongillo and I had checked the pickup times on the mailboxes, and saw that all Sunday mail was retrieved by four o’clock. That meant the envelope from Paul Vasco was most likely sitting inside the locked and darkened brick building. I needed to get into that post office, and I needed to get in there fast.
I remembered that years before, the U.S. attorney had leaked word that Sammy Markowitz was about to be the subject of a multiple-count indictment on a battery of far-reaching charges that, if proven, could send him to prison for the rest of his life. The crux of the charges, as with the crux of many federal indictments, involved mail fraud. So when a key U.S. Postal Service inspector in the Boston office lost a laptop computer and a box of critical evidence, the entire case fell apart before the grand jury ever took a vote. Supposedly, that inspector now owned a lavish oceanfront spread on Nantucket, courtesy of Sammy Markowitz. I was hoping to hell he was in Boston now and willing to help out.
This is what I told Markowitz. He looked at me, forever flat, the butt drooping off his bottom lip, his eyes sagging into the bridge of his nose, and he said, “That’s all you need, a U.S. Postal Service inspector to allow you to commit a felony on government property on five minutes’ notice?”
He let that hang out there amid the swirl of fresh smoke, the acrid smell of old beer, and the tinny sounds of the jukebox that at that precise moment was playing Huey Lewis and the News. I didn’t say anything, because there was really nothing I could say.
“No problem,” he added, with just the hint of a smile at the edge of his lips. He leaned over and picked up the receiver on an office-style phone that rested on his table, placed a pair of reading glasses across his eyes, and carefully dialed a number.
“Barney, Sammy,” he said into the phone. “Oh, did I wake you…How’s the island been…? You’re using sunscreen, I hope, on that fair skin of yours…Your wife ever ask after me…? Listen, I’m in the market for a favor and I need it now…You’re going to have to go over to the Back Bay post office…I’m sending a guy over there, name of Jack. He’s like my son, but not as good-looking. He needs to go inside…Huh…? What…? Yeah, inside the post office. He’s looking for something. Do whatever you can to help him out…Call me sometime from Nantucket. I want to see if you really can hear the waves from your porch.”
And that was that. I rapped the scratched tabletop twice with the side of my hand as I got up to go.
“Wait a minute,” Markowitz called out after me.
I turned around and he said, “What the hell do I get out of the deal?”
Good question. I replied, “You got the opportunity to do something really good.”
He shook his head in mock indignation, pulled the cigarette off his lip, and said, “What the hell good is that? You owe me, kid. You owe me.”
He was right, I did. As the old saying goes, when you’re looking for a pig, you don’t search the cosmetics counter at Saks. Or something like that.
I slipped out the door, from fetid air to fresh, snapped open the passenger door to my idling car, the dog still asleep in the back, and told Mongillo, “Back to the post office.”
And we were off, one more stop amid a long day in an awful week in an increasingly uncertain life. One way or another, I suspected it would be our last.