Free The Pariot GAme by George V. Higgins Page A

Harrington, he really was surprised. Usually when you brought him the sad news, he would look all sad and discouraged and ask you if it was a heart attack. But this time, he didn’t go through that routine. He just sat there staring at us, and finally he said, “Son of a bitch.” No jazz about a shock or was the guy sick a long time, or any of that razzle-dazzle ball-handling bullshit. “No shit,” he said. And he was shaking his head.’
    “What Petrucelli thinks,” Riordan said to Walker in the warden’s office, “was that Digger had every intention of knocking Harrington off. Do it himself, get somebody else to do it, but he was going to get it done. Digger knows everything that’s going on, and if he doesn’t know about it, it isn’t usually going on. And here was obviously something that he didn’t know’d been going on, and the most humiliating part of it was that he had to find it out from the cops, of all people. ‘I think he was not only surprised,’ Petrucelli said, ‘I think he was embarrassed. And he was also worried. Digger Doherty likes to have things under control, and here was somebody taking out one of his guys without asking him. That’s not neat. Means trouble. You could almost hear the gears changing in his head. But for once, just that once, Ireally don’t think he knew who beat him to the punch and saved him the trouble with Harrington.’
    “Well,” Riordan said, “the cops packed up and left, and Digger was still sitting there at his table, big fat guy in a white shirt, sitting there in his own saloon at three in the morning with one light on, shaking his head. And for the next couple of weeks that neighborhood had more buzzing goin’ on’n you’ll generally get in a beehive. And
nothing came out of it.
Nothing. As far as anybody knew, Digger’d been Harrington’s only moonlight employer. Digger couldn’t find out who the hell’d knocked him off, and it was driving him nuts. The cops couldn’t find out who knocked him off, but it really wasn’t bothering them—they were having too much fun watching Digger go snuffling around like some big fat hog in a pen, trying to find some fresh swill, and getting more and more frustrated.
    “Then after a while,” Riordan said, “Digger began to lose interest, and he pretty much gave up the investigation he was conducting on his own. The cops didn’t like that a bit—destroyed their entertainment. ‘So,’ Petrucelli said, ‘we kind of let it be known on the street that we were pretty close to cracking the Harrington thing. Got everybody all stirred up again, and after they stewed in their own juice for about a week, it was picture-taking time again. Run all the boys in, new mug shots front and side, case they changed their hairdressers or grew mustaches or something. Didn’t even question them or anything. Even let a couple guys go that had some small stuff in their cars when we stopped them. They’d ask us what we wanted, must’ve been about thirty of them, and all we’d tell them was we thought we might have a witness to something fairly big but the witness wasn’t sure about the pictures in the books so we thought we’d take some new ones.’
    “ ‘And we did something else,’ Petrucelli said, ‘that was really mean. I must say, even I was impressed. We grabbedDigger and brought him in, and Magro was standing right next to Doherty when we picked him up. But we didn’t pick up Magro. He was practically begging us to take him in, and we wouldn’t do it. So now all the boys know that we’ve got a witness who doesn’t recognize any of the boys on sight, which means that somebody who does recognize the boys must’ve tipped us to the witness, and who is the one guy that we don’t haul in? Magro.’ ”
    “Ahh,” Walker said to Riordan, “that is cute. Old, but cute. Done it myself now and then, but you can’t pull it too often, they catch on.”
    “Digger and his boys didn’t,” Riordan said. “So all of