Saint Oswald by Jay Bonansinga (always you kirsty moseley .txt) 📗

and stings and crusades Rigby has led against the Chicago Outfit.

That was then, and this is definitely now, and the last thing Rigby needs right now is a family reunion with a nutcase like Big Chief.

She lets out a weary sigh and plucks her raincoat from the rack, shrugging it over her shoulders. A plump, matronly woman with the jowls of a bulldog and hard little cinder eyes behind half-glasses, she wears her silver hair in a Margaret Thatcher scoop and favors off-the-rack ensembles from Lane Bryant. Today she wears a navy-blue polyester number that makes her rotund midsection look like a bag of inner tubes.

She has tried dieting. Usually it lasts about a week, and she gains weight.

“I’ll be back in five,” she tells the desk sergeant on her way out.

The moment she steps outside, the leaden atmosphere of the west side engulfs her in piss-fragrant wind. She shoots her collar and trundles eastward toward the corner of Grand and Canal. Morning foot traffic swarms around her as she digs in her purse for her notebook.

On the cardboard backing, faded with age, the ballpoint numerals water-blurred, is a phone number she loathes calling, but what choice does she have?

She makes her way into the crowded Dunkin Donuts on Canal Street. Voices and sugar steam and grease stench waft by as she presses through the crowd toward the payphone in back—the only payphone within a five-mile radius of the squad house surviving the digital age.

A bored, phlegmatic wheeze answers after the fifth ring.

“Mr. Ferri, that lady cop’s on the phone.” The goombah with the Neanderthal brow stands in the doorway with the cordless.

“Who?” Anthony Michelangelo Ferri, an old dandy in a smart Arrow shirt and dapper little pork-pie hat, looks up from his breakfast. His prominent, pock-marked, aquiline nose juts out over a meticulously trimmed pencil mustache the color of old pewter.

“Lady cop with the OC task force?” the goombah says from the doorway in a kind of stage whisper, his big gnarled hand over the remote’s mouthpiece, as though he’s afraid of hurting feelings. “Didn’t say her name, but I think it’s like Rigby, something like that.”

“Like the song.”

The goombah gives him a blank stare. “Huh?”

“The Beatles song, ya mook.” Ferri lets out an off-key croon: “Eleanor Rigby... stands by the sea and does something with her something all day.” He sighs and thinks for a second. “Rigby... Rigby.” His delicate, liver-colored lips purse with vexation. Collar buttoned high and tight against his shriveled neck, his soft-boiled egg sitting before him in its impeccable little sterling cup, Ferri has the quiet dignity of a Sicilian undertaker. He has run the Chicago chapter of the Riccardo crime family for nearly twenty years now without managing to get himself indicted or bumped off. He has a mind for details. He remembers people, if not song lyrics. And he does indeed abide—as stereotype would have it—that revenge for Sicilians is best served cold. Anthony “the Mink” Ferri believes in quiet, clean, top-down efficiency. “Is this person on retainer with the organization?” he inquires softly.

The goombah in the doorway—a capo named Jimmy Dalessandro—nods his prominent unibrow thoughtfully. Dressed in a bowling shirt and Sansa-belt slacks, he is an enormous golem of a man with a tree-trunk neck and pomade-slick graying hair. He looks like a refugee from the 1960s, like a bodyguard for the Rat Pack. “Matter of fact she is on the payroll.”

The old man cocks his head. He has tiny, wiry gray hairs inside his huge ears that catch the light. “Don’t seem to recall working with a lady cop by that name.”

“It’s been a while, sir. The Yid used her back in the Silver Shovel days.”

“No kidding,” Ferri marvels, gazing wistfully across his office at the placid scene outside his window, the swaying olive trees and twinkling cocktail lights of Bocci Ristorante’s Restaurante’s outdoor café. For the last decade, Ferri has managed his affairs out of the rear of this very popular Chicago eatery specializing in Mediterranean fusion cuisine. But right now, the restaurant’s ersatz owner is casting his thoughts back to those tumultuous days of Operation Silver Shovel, and all the legal contortions the mob lawyers had to deploy over the course of those carnival trials. It brings the twitch of a faint smile to Ferri’s wormy gray lips.

“Lemme talk to her, Jimmy,” the old man says finally, making an impatient waving gesture with his crooked, age-spotted hand.

The goombah hands over the cordless, then makes himself scarce.

“Good morning, this is Anthony Ferri,” the old man says softly into the phone. “How may I be of assistance?”

“It’s actually the other way around, Mr. Ferri,” the voice crackles in his ear.

Ferri’s fuzzy gray eyebrows arch with interest. “Pardon?”

“It’s actually me being of assistance to you,” the voice says.

The old man takes a deep breath. “May I ask what this is in reference to... Officer Rigby, is it?”

“Lieutenant.”

“What’s this about, Lieutenant?”

“This is about that knucklehead you got working for you out west.”

“I got a lot of knuckleheads,” the old man says with a beleaguered sigh.

“Goes by the moniker Big Chief?”

“Big Chief?”

The voice on the end of the line lowers a notch, as though imparting something very candid and confidential: “He’s making a spectacle of himself, Mr. Ferri, and that’s when I get my own ass in the soup for looking the other way.”

“Big Chief?” Anthony Ferri is searching his memory banks for the context, the guy, the name.

“The Indian I’m talking about,” the voice says. “He’s showing up more and more often on the radar screen, getting sloppy, and it’s getting embarrassing.”

The old man remembers suddenly. “That fat half breed? He’s a freelancer. Did a few things for me in the nineties. Works for the Nigger now.”

On the other end: “The who?”

“The Nigger, the Nigger.” The word rolls off the old man’s tongue. “Candy-something. West loop moolie. Runs hookers out of a laundromat.”

Another pause on the other end of the line. “The Candy Man you’re talking about?”

“No offense, Lieutenant, but Jesus, Mary,