Cape Diamond by Ron Corbett

Author:Ron Corbett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2018-10-23T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The funeral for Augustus Morrissey was held at St. Bridget’s Basilica. Belfast Street was shut down for the service and there were patrol cars positioned on the side streets for a six-block radius. There were more patrol cars up on the North Shore. About fifty men who would have been attending the funeral were still in hospital, or still being questioned by police, but they weren’t missed. Television stations later estimated the crowd inside the basilica at eight hundred, with another thousand on the street outside.

Sean Morrissey wasn’t picked up on the sweep of the North Shore, and Yakabuski planned on questioning him as soon as the funeral was finished. It seemed an unnecessary provocation to pick him up beforehand. He stood in the back of the crowd that had assembled on Belfast Street, not surprised by the number of people who had come, as Augustus Morrissey was about as well-known as a man could be in Springfield, and the Shiners were legendary. People gathered to catch a glimpse of his son, or some of the Shiners they had been reading about for years. Men like Harry LaChance, who once stole a shipment of gold on its way to the Bank of Canada, right off the tarmac at the Springfield Airport. Or Peter O’Reilly, tried in court three times for three different murders and acquitted each time. Came to see the out-of-town guests who had flown in for the funeral. Billy Adams, head of the Irish mob in Boston. The Derry brothers from Buffalo, a couple of psychopaths who ran a human smuggling operation so brutal it made Latin American cartels seem like finishing schools.

It wasn’t just Irish. Italians from New York came. Latinos from Miami. They all came to say goodbye to Augustus Morrissey, King of the Shiners, a man many of the funeral guests had once envied, a gangster who ruled not a street, not a neighbourhood or a city, but an entire region. Held dominion over lands the size of New England. Augustus Morrissey had ruled a frontier and taken advantage of all the opportunities that offered — secret meth labs, secret transportation corridors, secret flight paths. Every man inside St. Bridget’s had made money with Augustus Morrissey. Every man had envied his swagger, his success, his lumber-baron mien, which was part hedonist, part carnivore, a rapacious throwback to the days of gangsters like Bugsy Siegel and John D. Rockefeller.

The service was broadcast on speakers set up outside the church. A choir sang as the invited guests filled the church, then there was the reading of passages from the Old Testament and a benediction from Bishop Charles Guiges, a small grey-haired man who had travelled from Montreal to preside over the funeral service. After the benediction, the parish priest for St. Bridget’s, Father Adam McCleary, spoke about Augustus, choosing to reveal only a fraction of what he knew to be true. He spoke of the generous donations to St. Bridget’s. The faithful attendance on Sunday mass and his firm belief in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, in the Power and the Glory.

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