“Whatever,” Corsetti said. “All of a sudden you found yourself a whizbang, and you had to do something about the kid, so you conned Markham. I don’t know if you conned him because you thought he’d be a good father . . .”
“He was,” Sarah said loudly.
Everyone in the room looked at her.
“I’m glad he was,” Corsetti said to Sarah, then looked back at Lolly. “Or because he was easy to con and needed money. And the rest of the whole elaborate goddamned thing with Bright Flower, to hide the payments, and then threatening Sunny and the kid when they started looking into her parentage, then murdering a couple of people who knew too much.”
“Do I hear you accusing my client of murder?” Bender said. “On no evidence at all?”
“Not yet,” Corsetti said. “But there’s evidence, and your gofer Delk will roll on you sooner or later. We got conspiracy. We got charity fraud, and we’ll get murder.”
Bender shook his head as if Corsetti was mad.
“Lewis,” Lolly said. “I want this to go away. I can set this child up with a trust fund that will make her secure for life, if that’s what it takes.”
“Two people died,” I said. “It’s not going away.”
Lolly paid me no attention. “You hear me, Lewis?” she said. “I want this stopped now.”
Bender nodded thoughtfully. “We’ll talk again, I’m sure,” he said to Corsetti.
Corsetti nodded and stood. “Only a matter of time,” he said.
Sarah and I stood with him. Corsetti paused a moment and grinned at Lolly. “Nice photos,” he said.
62
I settled into my chair across from Dr. Silverman. I had been seeing her long enough so that I now felt as if I was supposed to be there.
“I go back and forth to New York so much, I’m starting to feel like Amtrak,” I said.
Dr. Silverman nodded. She was carefully dressed and made-up, but very understated. I wondered what she looked like when she was going out to dinner. If she let it go, she’d look like something.
“We have the case about Lolly Drake almost solved,” I said.
“Almost?”
“We know what happened—we can’t quite prove everything yet.”
“But you expect to?” Dr. Silverman said.
She was equally interested in everything I said. But somehow she never let me ramble. She concentrated entirely on me for the fifty minutes I was there. She saw every movement, heard every intonation.
“It’s the old domino thing,” I said. “We have a whole bunch of freestanding hypotheses. We need one hard fact to tip the whole thing. One person to say ‘I did it.’ Or ‘She did it.’ Or ‘They did it.’ Or whatever. It’s like we have the fulcrum but we need a lever.”
Susan nodded.
“And Sarah?” she said.
“In a sense, we’ve solved her part. We know who her mother is, and we know that we will probably never know who her father is.”
“So that the questions she asked you to answer are answered or prove to be unanswerable.”
“Yes,” I said, “except, what the hell is she supposed to do now?”
Dr. Silverman tilted her head to the side a little.
“I mean, she’s twenty-one, and with my help she discovered that she’s alone.”
“And you feel responsible?”
“Not for finding out things. That’s what I do. But . . . on the drive back from New York, I gave her a small lecture on it. She was responsible for herself. She needs to stop smoking, stop the drugs, stop sleeping around, stop drinking too much.”
Dr. Silverman smiled.
“And was that effective?” she said.
“Of course not. She needs a shrink.”
“What you have done, which may be more effective, is to give her an image of competent adult womanhood, living alone.”
I smiled.
“And needing a shrink,” I said.
Dr. Silverman acknowledged what I said with a small single nod.
“Would you see her if she wanted to come?” I said.
“Have her call me,” Dr. Silverman said.
We were quiet. Dr. Silverman seemed perfectly comfortable with quiet.
After a while, I said, “I had a good talk with Richie the other day.”
“Really?” Dr. Silverman said. “What made it good?”
“He told me things about himself that he’d never told me when we were married.”
Dr. Silverman nodded. She was leaning forward a little in her chair, resting her chin on her fist.
“He also said he still loved me . . . more than his wife . . . and he told me it’s never over until it’s over.”
“Do you think that solves your problems?”
“I . . . I don’t . . . it made me feel thrilled and hopeful,” I said. “But I suppose it’s a little soon.”
She nodded very slightly, but I knew she thought it was a little soon, too.
“And there is the wife,” I said.
“And there is the wife,” Dr. Silverman said. “Do you think he’s changed?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I think I have.”
“How so,” Dr. Silverman said.
“Well,” I said, “I had lunch again with my father.”
“Let’s talk about that,” she said.
63
I was doing lunges up and down the length of my loft. Rosie kept a foot in front of me, looking at me over her shoulder, getting in the way, and having a nice time. The cordless phone rang. I picked it up and kept going and said, “Hello.”
“Sunny,” a man said, “this is Felix Burke.”
“Uncle Felix!” I said.
He was a pretty bad man but a pretty good uncle, and he kept his word. I kind of liked him.
“You got a cop you trust?” he said.
“Several,” I said.
“Well, bring one of them and meet me at Richie’s place at two.”
“The saloon?”
“The saloon,” Felix said, and hung up.
Through the magic of cell-phone technology, I found Brian Kelly and he agreed to pick me up at 1:30. Then Rosie and I had a late breakfast. I took a shower and put on my makeup and got dressed. I noticed I was unusually careful about which clothes I wore. Brian and I had enjoyed an interlude shortly after Richie and I had parted. Things linger.
At 1:35, Rosie and I got into Brian’s car outside my loft. I opened the passenger door, and Rosie jumped in and settled into the passenger seat. I had to pick her up and put her on my lap so that I could sit.
“I think it’s against regulations to transport animals in a City of Boston police car,” Brian said.
“Unless they are exceptionally cute,” I said.
“That would cover all three of us,” Brian said.
Richie’s place was down an alley off School Street, past the old City Hall. Brian parked the car, as illegally as was possible, up on the sidewalk past the Parker House. It was ten minutes before two.
“Let’s sit,” I said. “Felix likes things to go the way he said they should go.”
“There’s a limit,” Brian said, “to how much I care what Felix likes.”
“He’s doing us the favor,” I said.
“Whatever it is,” Brian said.
We sat until two, then got out and walked across the street and into the saloon. Felix was sitting in the first booth on the left, across from a strong-looking young man with a square face and receding black hair, which he wore long on the sides and combed back straight. I knew Richie wouldn’t be there. And he wasn’t. Rosie dashed around behind the bar, looking for him. The bartender reached under the bar and came up with a long chew stick. Rosie sniffed it, and grabbed it, and joined Brian and me as we sat in the booth opposite Felix. Felix s
cratched her absently behind the ear.
“Brian Kelly,” I said. “Felix Burke.”
“We’ve met,” Brian said.
“This is Tommy Noon,” Felix said.” He’s got some things to tell you.”
Noon looked at Felix. “Off the record?”
“Tommy,” Felix said. “You’re on my record already.”
“We can listen off the record for now,” Brian said.
“I give you something, helps you out, maybe we can deal?”
“We might work something out,” Brian said.
“Guy comes up from New York, offers me ten to whack a guy named Markham?”
“You do it?” Brian said.
Tommy glanced at Felix and got nothing back.
“Yeah,” Tommy said.
“Who’s the guy?”
“He didn’t gimme his name.”
“How do you know he’s from New York?” I said.
“He said so.”
“How’d he pay you?” Brian said.
“Cash, all hundreds.”
“Describe him,” I said.
“Kind of short, maybe five-eight, kinda fat, soft-looking. Big horn-rimmed glasses. Sort of fluty, you know, college guy, thinks he’s important.”
Harvey Delk.
“Could you identify him if you saw him?” I said.
“Sure.”
“You know who this guy is?” Brian said to me.
I nodded.
“Can we get a picture?”
“Yes.”
“This helps you out?” Tommy said.
“Yes,” I said.
Tommy looked at Felix again.
“I get to bring a lawyer when we go on the record?” he said.
Felix made no comment.
“Sure,” Brian said. “And we’ll Miranda you, and your lawyer and the ADA can work out something. But first you got to pick your guy out of a photo spread.”
“You show me a picture of him,” Tommy said. “I’ll recognize it.”
“We can probably do all this tomorrow,” Brian said. “You and your lawyer want to come in?”
Tommy continued to glance at Felix before he answered.
“Sure,” he said. “Gimme a time and place.”
Rosie was working intensely on her chew stick. Felix looked down at her.
“What’s she eating?” he said.
“That’s called a bull stick,” I said.
“What part of the bull does that come from?” Felix said.
I said, “Let’s not go there, Felix.”
He studied the bull stick some more, and his face changed slightly. I realized he was smiling.
“And if you don’t show?” Brian said.
“He’ll show,” Felix said.
Brian nodded and watched Rosie chew her bull stick for a moment.
“Since we’re off the record here, and just out of curiosity, how come you’re so willing, Tommy?”
Felix answered. “It’s a way to avoid the death penalty.”
“We don’t have a death penalty,” Brian said.
Felix shrugged. Brian studied him for a minute. Then he nodded and looked at me.
“Ah, yes,” he said.
64
Corsetti sent up some photos, and Tommy Noon picked Delk out every time. His lawyer was there; Brian read him his rights. An assistant DA named Missy O’Neil arrived, and she and Tommy’s lawyer sat down to talk. I went home and called Corsetti.
“We got her,” I said.
“Your man ID’d Delk.”
“Every time,” I said.
“There’s your wedge,” Corsetti said. “Delk’s got the cojones of a butterfly. He’ll rat out his children. Lollipop will get a perp walk like the Bataan death march.”
We didn’t have the cuffs on her yet. But I knew Corsetti was right. And I knew that Delk would babble like a spring brook.
“We’ve known for a while what happened. Now we’ll be able to prove it.”
“And maybe get the guy who aced your lawyer friend,” Corsetti said. “How’d you find this guy, anyway?”
“A favor from a friend,” I said. “Next time I’m in New York, we’ll have lunch and I’ll tell you about it.”
“Will your witness hold?”
“He wouldn’t dare not to,” I said.
“Because of your friend?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe you’ll be down to testify at the trial,” he said.
“You think there’ll be a trial?”
“No,” Corsetti said. “Bender will deal. But we may need you down here, anyway.”
“I’ll be happy to attend, Eugene,” I said. “And if you’re ever in Boston . . .”
“You can introduce me to your mystery friend,” Corsetti said.
“You’d make an interesting pair,” I said.
We hung up. Rosie was asleep on my bed, stretched out to the extent that her physique would allow. I walked over and lay down beside her and rested my hand on her hip. It was mid-afternoon. The sun was shining obliquely through my skylight, making a long, angular parallelogram of brightness against the end wall of my loft. Rosie was snoring pleasantly. When either part of a relationship changes, she had said, the other part changes, too. I heard myself laugh softly. My shrink had become “she.” I had changed, or I was changing. I wasn’t sure what I had been. And I wasn’t sure what I was becoming. But I could feel the deconstruction and reconstruction process as if it were visceral. Maybe I was a good cop. All these years, my father stayed with my mother because they love each other. Who knew?
Without opening her eyes, Rosie shifted onto her back, with her short legs sticking up, so that my hand was now on her belly. I rubbed it gently. Actually, it was hard to say exactly who solved the Sarah Markham/Lolly Drake entanglement. I had found Moline and gone there—twice. I had slept with Peter Franklin in New York, although that maybe didn’t strictly count as police work. Spike had helped. Brian Kelly. Corsetti. I smiled, thinking about Eugene Corsetti, accent on the first syllable of Eugene. He was a lot smarter than he let you know. My mind wandered. I stopped rubbing Rosie’s stomach. She flopped her head around and looked at me with one beady, black eye. I began to rub it again. She closed her eye. And, of course, Uncle Felix. That was the big irony. Felix Burke found Tommy Noon and convinced him to confess. He was able to do both and make it stick because he was an amoral killer who valued family and kept his word. Felix was everything the law in theory opposes. Yet it was the simple fact that people feared him, and Tommy Noon was terrified of him, that made it happen. I knew he hadn’t done it for me, though I knew, within his limited range, Felix liked me. He had done it because Richie asked him to. And Richie had done it for me.
The elongated sun square had moved up my wall. The loft had that kind of hissing silence that a home has, which is different from the silence in a forest. If Felix had killed somebody finding Tommy Noon, and I couldn’t know that he didn’t, would the gunshot make a sound? Was the saloon they had given Richie purchased with ill-gotten gain? Almost certainly. Did Richie run it honestly? Yes. Would we have nailed Lolly Drake without Felix’s help? Maybe. It was all too complicated for me. Perhaps “she” and I could talk about it. I shifted on the bed so I could hug Rosie.
“The times, they are a-changing,” I said to her.
Rosie seemed mildly annoyed at being woken.
Keep reading for an exciting excerpt from the next Sunny Randall novel, ROBERT B. PARKER’S BLOOD FEUD.
One
I said to Spike, “Do I look as if I’m getting older?”
“This is some kind of trap,” he said.
“I’m being serious,” I said. “The UPS kid ma’amed me the other day.”
“I assume you shot him,” Spike said.
“No,” I said. “But I thought about it.”
We were seated at one of the middle tables in the front room at his restaurant, Spike’s, formerly known as Spike’s Place, on Marshall Street near Quincy Market. It had started out as a sawdust-on-the-floor saloon, before there even was a Quincy Market. It was still a comedy club when Spike and two partners took it over. Then Spike bought out the two partners, reimagined the place as an upscale dining establishment—“Complete with flora and fauna,” as he liked to say—and now he was making more money than he ever had in his life.
It was an hour or so before he would open the door for what was usually a robust Sunday brunch crowd. We were both working on Bloody Marys even though it was only ten-thirty in the morning, being free, well past twenty-one, and willing to throw caution to the wind.
Spike took a bite of the celery stalk from his drink. I knew he was doing that only to buy time.
“Would you mind repeating the question?” he said.
“You heard me.”
“I believe,” he said, “that what you’ve asked is the age equivalent of asking if I think you look fat in those jeans.”
I looked down at my favorite pair of Seven whites. Actually, I had no way of knowing if they were my favorites, since I had four pairs in my closet exactly like them. When any one of them started to feel too tight, I doubled down on yoga and gym time, and cut back on the wine.
“You’re saying I’m fat, too?” I said.
“You know I’m not,” he said. “And in answer to the original question, you always look younger than springtime to me.”
“You’re sweet,” I said.
“That’s what all the girls say. But, sadly, only about half the guys.”
Spike was big, bearded, built like a bear that did a lot of gym time, and able to beat up the Back Bay if necessary. He was also gay, and my best friend in the world.
“Only half?” I said.
“I’m the one who’s getting old, sweetie,” he said. “And probably starting to look fat in my own skinny-ass jeans.”
My miniature English bull terrier, Rosie, was lounging on the floor in the puppy bed that Spike kept for her behind the bar, thinking food might be available at any moment, the way it usually was at Spike’s. Spike called her Rosie Two. The original Rosie, the love of my life, had passed away the previous spring, far too soon. My father had always said that dogs were one of the few things that God got wrong, that they were the ones who ought to be able to live forever.
Melancholy Baby Page 19
