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But that November night, after Stevie and I had cleaned up the site, Stevie and Jimmy followed me while I drove McIntyre’s dark-colored pickup truck with a standard shift on the column to Neponset Bridge. I parked it next to the Upstairs Downstairs Lounge, wiped it down, and got into Jimmy’s car. Stevie had McIntyre’s clothes and teeth and said he would get rid of them himself.

The two of them dropped me off at my house and went out for dinner. As soon as I got home, I threw my clothes in the washing machine and went into the shower. And how did I feel? Fine. Because to me it was just business. All I thought about when I was doing business was making money and staying free. There was no sense in doing a crime if you couldn’t get away with it. And McIntyre had turned into an informant who was trying to make me lose my freedom. As an informant, he got what he deserved. A legitimate person would have been different. But someone who comes around and is involved with us and then is giving us up is trying to hurt us. McIntyre wasn’t my partner. He was just a score, an informant who had to be taken care of. Luckily, I can compartmentalize things so they don’t eat away at me. While it’s happening, it’s just business. When it’s over, it’s over. And I don’t think about it ever again. To me it didn’t matter if McIntyre was dead or in South America, as long as he couldn’t hurt us.

The third murder that took place in the house at 799 East Third Street was Deborah Hussey, Stevie’s “stepdaughter.” Stevie had been complaining that Deborah was bringing blacks to the house in Milton where he lived with Marion, Debbie’s mother and his common-law wife, or whatever you call her, and their other kids. Marion said that Debbie was upsetting the household, that she was stripping in town and doing drugs. Little by little, Marion was souping Stevie up, but I hadn’t realized the severity of it or how mad he was getting over the situation.

I had also heard that 799 East Third Street was being sold and that eventually we were going to have to move the two bodies already in the basement. Jimmy and I had been talking about acquiring the house so we could control it and not have to bother moving the two bodies. And I knew Stevie had been talking about buying the house himself.

One day, Jimmy called me up and told me to meet him, and the two of us drove down to that house. I didn’t particularly care for that house because every time I was there someone got killed, but he had called me, so I went. When I asked him what was up, he said we were meeting Stevie at the house, that he had taken Debbie shopping and was buying her a coat. I was thinking maybe that meant he wanted to buy the house for her, which would eliminate the need to move the two bodies.

There were lots of women in Stevie’s life, all beautiful young women, of different nationalities and different backgrounds. It had only been a few years earlier, in 1981, that he’d killed his gorgeous longtime girlfriend, Debra Davis. She had tried to leave him, but his ego had gotten in the way, making it impossible for him to live with her leaving him for another guy. If he couldn’t have her, no one could. So he had killed her, strangled her in his mother’s house at 832 East Third Street. That’s the type of guy he was.

But that night, four years after he killed Debra Davis, Stevie came walking into the house at 799 East Third Street, diagonally across the street from his mother’s house, with Debbie Hussey, also twenty-six. At the time, Jimmy was on the first floor while I was upstairs using the bathroom. As I was heading downstairs, I heard a thud, and when I walked into the parlor, Debbie, her brown hair falling against her shoulder, was lying on the floor. I’d never seen her before and she certainly wasn’t looking good. I could see that she was a rough-and-tumble kind of girl, sort of small, probably five-three and 115 pounds, and not the prissy type. I knew she’d been drugging and stripping in the Naked Eye in downtown Boston,