Long and skinny.” Bingo brought his hand to his mouth and his fingers played against his lips, as if he would have loved a cigarette, but no smoking at Cedar Junction.

“Am I supposed to think there are guns in the boxes?” asked Peter.
“Start by thinkin’ about this florist’s first name. Mo. Not Larry. Not Curly. Mo.”
“Mo as in Mohammed?”
“As in might as well be A-hab the fuckin’ A-rab, for Chrissakes.”
“And you think he’s bringing guns to that apartment? Why?”
“I don’t know, but that’s the word on the street, and the word’s usually good. So maybe the FBI should know. And you know people. Right?”
“Let me get this straight.” Peter leaned closer to the glass. “A florist named Mohammed delivers long boxes in Dorchester, and you want me to call the FBI?”
“Two fourteen Boston Street.” Bingo hung up and left.
PETER FALLON CONSIDERED himself a good American, too. And he had a client, a retired FBI agent who collected first editions of Ian Fleming….
But maybe a drive to Dorchester first.
He waited until ten thirty at night, when the traffic would be light.
Boston was having its early June heat wave, so he was happy to get in the BMW, open the moonroof, and cruise.
This was his town. He had grown up in Southie. He had gone to B.C. High and Harvard. He was a respected dealer in rare books and documents, a board member of three museums, a quarter owner of Red Sox season tickets, and like most Bostonians, a born skeptic. So he had to see for himself just how crummy this three-decker really was.
He picked up Mass Ave in the Back Bay, went past Symphony Hall, through Roxbury, down to Columbia Road. It was like a ride from the top of Boston’s real estate ladder to the bottom, though real estate prices were so crazy that the bottom here was higher than the top in most towns.
At Columbia, he took a left onto Boston Street.
The sodium vapor streetlamps turned everything to hideous orange daylight, so it was easy to see that the mechanic shops and other businesses on the left side of the street were all closed, and strange to see the Clapp house, one of the oldest houses in Boston, sitting on a grassy knoll, just a dark shadow looking out at all the televisions flickering in the three-deckers across the street.
Three-deckers had once been called “Boston weeds” because so many had popped up in the early 1900s. Wood-frame structures with balconies, bay windows, three floors for three families, built at that moment when quality material, cheap skilled labor, and mass construction all intersected. Back then they were castles for the common man. Today, the nice ones were urban treasures.
Number 214 was not one of them. The balcony was drooping. The shingles were curling. The windows were dark.
Peter slowed but did not stop.
Across the street, a mongrel dog paced behind the fence of an auto body shop. Two battered cars sat in the lot. Peter thought he noticed someone sitting in one of them. Strange.
But there was no sign of life in the three-decker, just an old Plymouth minivan parked outside.
So Peter kept going down to the intersection, pulled into a Dunkin’ Donuts, and bought half a dozen jelly crullers and raised glazed.
Then he cruised back up the street. Now there was a light on in the cellar. And the dog across the street was still pacing. And it sure looked like someone was sitting in that trashed car.
Peter decided to keep driving, back to Columbia Road and on to Upham’s Corner.
This had once been an Irish neighborhood, dominated by St. Kevin’s Parish and St. Margaret’s Hospital.