Robert B. Parker's Blood Feud

by Mike Lupica

  “And you took up with Vincent Cataldo’s daughter?” Richie said.

  “I did,” his father said. “For the first time in my life, I had power. Including, as I discovered, power over women.”

  “How lucky for you,” Richie said.

  “I am asking you again not to judge,” Desmond said.

  “You’re allowed to ask,” Richie said. “And I’m asking you if Mom knew.”

  Desmond nodded. “I finally admitted the affair to her. And she accepted.”

  “Easy for you to say,” Richie said.

  “No,” his father said. “It is not. And was not.”

  He gave a quick shake to his head.

  “It was around that same time that Vincent discovered that his daughter and I had been seeing each other,” Desmond said. “And let everyone know that his solution to this particular problem was to have me killed. But Maria told him that if he did that, she would kill herself.”

  “So how was it resolved?” I said.

  “There was finally a sit-down with Vincent and me,” Desmond said. “He said I was lucky that his daughter had interceded on my behalf, or he would have commenced killing those close to me one by one. But he told me that I had to be the one to break it off with her, without telling her that I had met with her father.”

  “Did you?” I said.

  “I did. I told her I was Catholic and could never be divorced and that it had been foolhardy of both of us to think that we ever could run away together,” Desmond said. “I think she knew I was lying. But she accepted.”

  “The way mom did,” Richie said.

  There was something in Desmond’s eyes, like a match being lit suddenly. But he let it go.

  “What happened then?” I said.

  “A few months after we stopped seeing each other, Maria left Boston,” Desmond said. “On her own. Or was sent away. I never knew which. I was not told where she went, and never saw her again.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “I swear to you I don’t know,” he said.

  “So you don’t know if she’s dead or alive?” I said.

  He shook his head. “I always assumed that somehow or someday I would see her again. I never did.”

  “You didn’t attempt to find her.”

  He gave me a long look. “Nor did she attempt to find me.”

  “But now it appears someone is coming for you and those close to you much as her father once threatened to do the same,” I said.

  “Perhaps someone who wants to hurt you as he apparently believes you hurt her,” Richie said. “And then kill you.”

  “Blood feuds,” his father said. “As mean as brass knuckles.”

  “How did Vincent Cataldo die?” I said to Desmond.

  “The theory at the time was Albert Antonioni,” he said. “Who had become his partner by then.”

  I looked at Richie. He looked at me. We both looked at his father.

  “Small world,” Richie said.

  “One full of coincidence suddenly,” I said.

  “Do you believe in coincidence?” Richie said to me.

  “Not even a little bit.”

  “Is that all of it?” Richie said to his father.

  “As much as is relevant,” Desmond said.

  “Even if holding back might keep us all in danger,” Richie said.

  “Even if.”

  There was one last, interminable staredown between father and son, two pairs of dark eyes locked on each other.

  “Please go now,” Desmond Burke said.

  We went.

  THIRTY-TWO

  WE DROVE BACK to Melanie Joan’s in Richie’s Jeep. Two of Desmond’s troopers were in a car right behind us.

  Richie found a parking spot on River Street. He’d always had great parking karma, there was simply no explaining it. The troopers double-parked halfway up the block and shut off the engine. I tried to imagine the fun that might ensue if one of the good ladies from the neighborhood told them to move it.

  We went inside. Richie immediately sat on the floor and Rosie jumped into his lap and began lapping his face. Whatever reservations she’d once had about Richie were clearly melting away, at an increasingly rapid rate. I asked Richie to take her out and he did. When he came back he locked the door behind him, gave Rosie a bone, walked across the living room and kissed me, hard and for a long time, with absolutely no resistance from me. When we finally pulled back, our faces were still very close.

  “Lost love seems to be the theme of the day,” Richie said.

  “Not here,” I said.

  “Meaning you don’t want us to do it in the middle of the living room?” he said.

  “No,” I said. “Not here and not in front of Rosie.”

  “Where to?” Richie said. “Place is full of possibilities, according to Melanie Joan.”

  “Bedroom,” I said.

  “I could carry you up the stairs,” Richie said.

  “Would be a bad time to lose you,” I said.

  “You will never lose me,” he said.

  We headed for the bedroom, both of us resisting the urge to run. I asked him to undress me. He did. There had been multiple times in our life together when Richie had struggled, and mightily, getting my bra off. Not today.

  “Have you been practicing on the bras of others?” I said.

  “Please stop talking,” he said.

  I did.

  And somehow this time, even after all the other times, was like the first time, with the room in shadows, as if day had suddenly been transformed into night, at least in here, with the shades drawn and door locked and the two of us as together as two people could be, with a coupling informed by fierceness and gentleness and want and need. And love. Eventually I exploded and then he did. Or perhaps it was the other way around, in a moment where it was impossible to know where I ended and he began, in the big bed that Melanie Joan said had seen more traffic than the T.

  It was Richie who finally spoke.

  “I think you might have scared the baby,” he said.

  We were on our backs, on top of covers that had not been pulled back or down. The throw pillows from the bed were scattered around the room as if the place had been tossed.

  Which, in point of fact, it had been.

  My breathing had not yet returned to normal. Richie’s had. I often joked with him that his standard resting pulse rate was just slightly north of dead.

  Then Richie said, “Holy fucking fuck.”

  “An apt description,” I said. “If not a terribly poetic one.”

  “Either way,” he said.

  He turned and reached his head over enough to kiss me above an eye. When I turned back, I saw him smiling.

  “Did you know this would happen after we left your father’s house?” I said.

  “Ever hopeful,” Richie said.

  “Do you think the boys outside are concerned that I may be holding you hostage?” I said.

  “They’ll figure it out.”

  “You think they may have heard me in the car?”

  He smiled again.

  “Pretty sure,” Richie said, “that they could hear you in Braintree.”

  I punched him in the arm.

  We remained side by side in the big bed, in the dark room. Neither of us made any attempt to cover ourselves.

  “Do you think I’m starting to look older?” I said.

  Richie propped himself up on an elbow and made a big show of turning his head, as if inspecting every inch of me.

  “Hey,” I said. “This isn’t a show.”

  “Speak for yourself, blondie.”

  Then we commenced to do our level best to toss the place again.

  * * *

  —

  LATER, MUCH, I said to Richie, “We
have behaved like horny teenagers.”

  “Redundant,” he said.

  He was in a Dropkick Murphys T-shirt that he kept here for sleepovers, and a pair of black Boston Bruins sweatpants with gold trim. I was in jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt. We had made our way out of the bedroom, at long last. It was, after all, the cocktail hour. Richie had made us both martinis.

  “How much do you think your father held back?” I said.

  “No way to know,” Richie said.

  “I need to find out a lot more about Maria Cataldo.”

  “Like working a cold case,” Richie said.

  “I have before,” I said.

  “Where do you suppose she went?”

  “For me to find out,” I said.

  “A lot trickier for me,” Richie said.

  “Tricky being you right now.”

  “What do you mean right now?” he said.

  The martini was perfect. I couldn’t tell whether or not Richie had actually added vermouth, or just opened the bottle so our glasses could catch a whiff.

  I said, “He said the Cataldos are all gone.”

  “Doesn’t mean they are.”

  “You’re saying your father lies?”

  “Only to stay in practice,” Richie said.

  Richie said he’d cook dinner. I told him that was fine with me, we both knew he was a far better cook than I. And had more specialties than just spaghetti and broccoli. He checked the freezer and refrigerator for possibilities. Found a steak I had bought the day before at DeLuca’s and some mushrooms and a package of onion rings.

  “Steak O’Shrum it is,” Richie said.

  “Yippee,” I said.

  I fed Rosie and took her out for a walk while he cooked. Outside I gave a smile and one-fingered salute to the boys in the car.

  Richie and I ate steak and mushrooms and onion rings at the kitchen counter and drank a Chianti Classico we both liked. When we were finished and had cleared the plates, because Richie Burke never left plates unclean the way my father never did, we both took Rosie out for her last walk. When we came back, Richie and I made love again.

  “I feel like a sailor on leave,” he said.

  “Don’t leave, sailor,” I said.

  “Not tonight,” he said.

  In the morning Frank Belson called and said he might have found the shooter.

  “Shot,” he said.

  “Dead?” I said.

  “Oh, my, yes,” Belson said, and told me where I could find him.

  THIRTY-THREE

  THE BODY HAD been found between the Murphy Rink in South Boston and the park next to it on William Day Boulevard, not far from the Castle Island lagoon.

  A man had been walking his dog at about seven in the morning, according to Frank Belson. The dog had suddenly become agitated and started barking. The man found the body, facedown, near a small clump of trees. The man with the dog called 911. I knew the drill about “body found” from my days as a cop as well as I knew the code to unlock my iPhone. Car dispatched. Patrol supervisor alerted. Full notification to the operations center. Call to the on-duty homicide officer, who called Belson.

  He now stood with me about fifty yards from the perimeter of the crime scene. Body was already gone, pictures had already been taken, a handful of cops inside the perimeter looking for anything Belson might have missed in his own inspection of the scene. By now I knew there was as much a chance of them finding something Frank Belson had missed as there was of them becoming astronauts.

  “We never close,” he said.

  “Fighting crime, reducing fear,” I said from memory.

  “What about improving the quality of life in our neighborhoods?” Belson said.

  “Might have fallen a little short this morning on that one,” I said. “’Least in this neighborhood.”

  He made a snorting noise.

  “One to the back of the head,” he said. “Guy’s own gun in the side pocket of his windbreaker. Looks like he never got the chance to clear it.”

  “What kind of gun?”

  “One that killed him or one in his pocket?”

  “Pocket?”

  “A .22,” Belson said.

  “Was it not a .22 that shot Richie and killed Peter and Buster?”

  Belson said, “Fuckin’ ay.”

  “ID?” I said.

  “Wallet in the back pocket of his jeans, intact,” Belson said. “Rhode Island driver’s license, credit cards, Dunkin’ Donuts card, all in the name of Dominic Carbone, a resident of Cranston until a couple hours or so ago.”

  “I assume he wasn’t moonlighting with the Cranston Chamber of Commerce,” I said.

  “We’ve already run his name through the NCIC,” Belson said. “National Crime Information Center.”

  “I know what it means, Frank.”

  With the morning light hitting his face the way it did, he might have grinned.

  “Dominic, as it turns out, was not what you might call an Eagle Scout. Did two falls for assault as a younger man. A third, according to the Providence cops my guys have already talked to, was tossed on account of a bad arrest.”

  I waited. I knew him and knew there was more.

  “Which is not the most interesting part of Dominic’s portfolio.”

  “Don’t make me beg,” I said.

  “According to the Providence cops, Dominic grew up to be a button man for Albert Antonioni,” Belson said. “Oh, wait. I meant to say alleged button man.”

  “You PC bastard.”

  “His gun is already back at the lab,” Belson said.

  “Because you want to know if it might be the same gun somebody has been pointing at the Burkes,” I said.

  “How did we ever let a Crimestopper like you get away?” Belson said.

  “And if it is a match,” I said, “does that close the books on our recent crime spree?”

  Belson snorted again.

  “Fuck, no,” he said.

  “Would be an awfully tidy package,” I said.

  “Wouldn’t it, though?”

  “This work has made you cynical,” I said.

  “Hasn’t it, though?” Belson said.

  “If there is a ballistics match, then what?”

  “Then officially I’ve only got one stiff to worry about,” Belson said.

  “And unofficially?”

  “Unofficially, and because I am a cynical-type person, I start to think how convenient it is that we put a bow around everything with a Mobbed-up guy from Rhode Island who somehow gets himself shot to death from close range outside an MDC skating rink in South Boston,” Belson said.

  “You think Desmond and Felix could have had this done?”

  “Could have? Sure,” he said. “But that means they got the guy out here and somebody got close enough to shoot him, the way somebody shot Peter Burke.”

  “It was done here?”

  “ME says yes.”

  Being somebody who really did consider herself a good citizen, I thought about telling Belson about Maria Cataldo and what Dominic Carbone, if it was Dominic Carbone, had said to me while holding me down in that alley in the rain. I thought about possible connections between the late Dominic Carbone and the Cataldo family, once run by a man that Desmond Burke said Albert Antonioni had killed, or had ordered killed. Unless Desmond Burke had lied to me, always a distinct possibility.

  If Peter and Felix Burke thought that Dominic Carbone, who worked for Albert Antonioni, was their shooter, how long would it take for them to go after Antonioni himself?

  But I didn’t share any of that with Frank Belson, at least for now.

  Belson looked at me the way I knew he looked at crime scenes, as if he somehow saw something on my face. Or was reading my mind.

  “I like you, Sunny,” he said.
“I love your old man. But you know me well enough to know that if you are holding back from me and I find out about it, I am prepared to harass the shit out of you.”

  “It’s all the rage,” I said. “Harassment.”

  “I didn’t mean that kind,” Belson said.

  “I know.”

  Now Belson grinned. “Me, too,” he said.

  He really could be a funny bastard when he wanted to be.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  I SPENT THE REST of the morning, and most of the afternoon, trying to find out anything I could about Maria Cataldo, whom Desmond Burke said he had loved and then lost. And proceeded to get lucky, because of my father’s assistance and contacts.

  He was able to track down a birth certificate, which informed us that Maria had been born at Mass General in May of 1958. Good to know, I thought. But the information did nothing to help me find out what had happened to her after Boston, where she had gone, what she had done with her life. It wasn’t until several hours later that a cop friend of my father’s from Providence, Pete Colapietro, one who owed him a favor, just because somehow everybody in my father’s orbit seemed to owe him a favor, emailed him a photograph of a death certificate from Rhode Island Hospital in Providence, which Phil Randall forwarded to me. It was dated two months previously, and had the name Maria Theresa Cataldo on it. There was no next of kin listed. The cause of death was listed as complications from Parkinson’s disease.

  “Desmond said he didn’t know whether she was dead or alive,” I said. “But now I know.”

  “You going to tell him?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Just not today.”

  “There could be a husband or son or a daughter somewhere,” Phil Randall said on the phone.

  “But the name on the death certificate,” I said, “is the same as the one on her birth certificate. Maria Cataldo. Daughter of Vincent and Bettina.”

  “Could have gotten married after Boston and never bothered to change it,” my father said.

  “Like you always tell me,” I said. “Blood is blood.”

  “Interesting how much of this story runs through Rhode Island suddenly,” he said.