Robert B. Parker's Blood Feud

by Mike Lupica

  “You think?”

  “Might I make a fatherly suggestion?”

  “Have you ever had to ask permission?”

  “See if you can find out if there was a wake and a funeral for her down there,” he said. “If there was, find out who paid. Not hard to check. Find out where she’s buried, and who paid for the plot, and paid for a stone if there is one.”

  I smiled to myself. The guy Desmond Burke called an old copper. Still doing his copper thing.

  “I would have thought of all these things, you know,” I said. Still smiling. “It’s in my genetic code.”

  “Still don’t know why the Red Sox aren’t,” he said.

  I got on my laptop and got as comprehensive a list as I could of all the funeral homes anywhere near Providence, Rhode Island, and simply started cold-calling them.

  Finally found myself speaking to a man who identified himself as Mr. Otero Senior, at the Otero and Son Memorial Chapel, in Pawtucket.

  I told Mr. Otero Senior that I was from the Boston Police Department, which was technically true. Invoking the spirit of the law, if not the letter of the law.

  I inquired about funeral arrangements made for Maria Theresa Cataldo, if there had been any.

  “Why, yes, there were,” he said.

  “And you handled them?” I said.

  “We did.”

  “Was she buried or cremated?”

  “You said you were with the police,” he said. “Might I ask to what this is in reference?”

  “A homicide investigation,” I said.

  Whole truth, nothing but.

  “She was buried,” he said.

  “In Rhode Island?” I said.

  “No, as a matter of fact,” he said. “Up in your neck of the woods.”

  “Boston?”

  “St. Augustine’s,” he said. “It’s on Dorchester Street.”

  “In South Boston,” I said. “I know where it is.”

  I knew where it was because Peter Burke had just been buried there. I could hear my own breathing, and wondered if Mr. Otero Senior could as well.

  Down, girl.

  “Ms. Randall? Are you still there?”

  “I am,” I said.

  “Thought I’d lost you,” Mr. Otero Senior said, and chuckled at his own joke.

  “Was a headstone purchased?” I said.

  “A tasteful granite one, actually,” he said.

  “By whom?” I said.

  Now he was the one who paused on the other end of the line.

  “To be clear,” he said. “This is a police matter, is it not?”

  “Three people who may have had a connection to Maria Cataldo have now been shot to death,” I said. “So we can do this over the phone or in person.”

  “Just give me a moment,” he said, perhaps needing to consult with Mr. Otero Junior.

  When he came back on the line he said, “The headstone, and plot, were paid for by Mr. Albert Antonioni.” He chuckled again. “I assume, you being a law enforcement professional, that you are aware of who he is.”

  “He’s an acquaintance of mine,” I said to Mr. Otero Senior.

  “I’ll bet!” Mr. Otero Senior said.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  IN THE LATE afternoon I went for a long run along the Charles, my short-barrel .38 Velcroed above my ankle and beneath baggier running pants than I usually wore.

  I went past the Charles River Bistro after I crossed the footbridge, said hello to the bust of Arthur Fiedler, took a left at the small dock facing Cambridge, and headed toward Mass Ave, a light, pleasant breeze in my face.

  Normally I liked listening to music on long runs. Just not today. I wanted my head clear, a blank board, hoping the quiet and solitude of the run would help sort out the information overload inside my brain, so much of it having to do with an old knockaround guy named Albert Antonioni, and whether or not he had been the puppetmaster here all along; whether whatever was happening here wasn’t just about a woman out of the past, his and Desmond Burke’s, or part of a much deeper blood feud between him and Desmond that neither one of them wanted to talk about, at least not with me.

  I kept coming back to the same thing: Was it only about Maria Cataldo, or was it about something more?

  I thought back to all the times when I was at BU and I had gone with either dates or friends to the Brattle Theatre to watch Casablanca, all of us bringing cheap wine and glasses, everybody in the theater toasting the screen by saying “Here’s looking at you, kid” when Humphrey Bogart said the same thing to Ingrid Bergman, not long after Sam had broken one of Bogey’s rules by singing about hearts full of passion, jealousy, and hate.

  How much of this might simply be about jealousy and hate?

  Before I got into the shower Frank Belson called and told me that the casings found at the scenes of the shootings of Richie, Peter, and Buster did match the gun found in Dominic Carbone’s pocket.

  “You think Carbone was the shooter?” I said.

  “No,” Belson said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t,” he said. “Because I think this is some kind of head fake.” And promptly hung up.

  After my shower I fed Rosie and thought about fixing myself a martini, and decided that the cocktail hour was always better when it included Spike.

  I called him and told him I was on my way over.

  “And to what do I owe the impending pleasure of your company?” Spike said.

  “I am hopeful that you can help me bring order to the world of objective facts,” I said.

  “Boy,” he said, “I wish I had a dollar for every time somebody has asked me to do that.”

  I asked if I could bring Rosie.

  “Absolutely,” he said.

  “You know she bothers the customers sometimes,” I said, “especially when they bother her.”

  “We can only hope,” Spike said. “Objectively or otherwise.”

  * * *

  —

  SPIKE WAS WAITING for me at a table he’d held for us near the bar. He was wearing a gray blazer over a gray shirt of almost exactly the same color. Tonight he had a diamond stud in his ear, an accessory that came and went.

  “Any particular reason for when you wear the earring and when you don’t?” I said.

  “I’m feeling kind of awesome,” he said.

  “Any particular reason for that?”

  “Look around,” he said. “Business is fucking awesome.”

  We sat down at the table, Rosie on the chair Spike had provided for her between us. As much as she would sometimes bark at strangers and other dogs when we were out on a walk, a crowded, noisy room did not seem to bother her as much. She was a complicated girl. Like her mommy.

  “I got tired of being inside my own head,” I said to Spike, and he said it had to happen eventually, and told our waitress that he wanted two filthy martinis, extra olives, and to tell the bartender not to get crazy with the vermouth.

  I said, “Why do we even bother with vermouth? Have you ever asked yourself that?”

  “It would diminish us,” Spike said, “to order vodka with olives.”

  Our drinks came promptly, along with a calamari appetizer Spike knew was my favorite, and some chopped-up chicken for Rosie. Spike fed Rosie some chicken. He and I clinked glasses and drank.

  “So where are we?” Spike said.

  “Settle in,” I said.

  “Happily,” Spike said. “The night is young and there’s no telling how many vodka-with-olives we might drink before we’re through.”

  It was not a linear presentation. Spike was used to that. He knew about the body at the skating rink, didn’t know that the gun found on Dominic Carbone had turned out to be the one used on Richie, Peter, Buster. I told him that I knew hardly anything yet about Carbone, o
ther than the fact that he had worked for Albert Antonioni. I told him about how Albert had made sure Maria Cataldo had a proper burial, and where Maria had been born and where she’d died. I told him that Desmond Burke thought it had been Albert who’d capped Maria’s old man. But may have lied about that. Because he could.

  “Albert sure do get around, do he not?” Spike said.

  “Be interesting,” I said, “to know more about what he was doing when Desmond was sowing his wild oats, so to speak, before Maria got sent away by her father.”

  “Could Albert have had a thing with Maria before Desmond came along?” Spike said.

  “Worth knowing.”

  “Think Desmond would know?” Spike said. “And if he did know, would he tell?”

  “Knowing Desmond,” I said, “I might have to extract the information surgically.”

  “Would explain a lot, though,” Spike said.

  “Wouldn’t it,” I said.

  “Got another question,” Spike said. “You think that Richie would know if Desmond and Felix decided this Carbone guy was the shooter and had him taken out?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Even though him getting shot was the thing that started this?”

  “Even though.”

  We reached down for our glasses at the same moment. Synchronized martini drinking. Maybe it should be an Olympic event. Why not? I thought. I knew badminton was.

  “Belson thinks Carbone is too good to be true,” I said.

  “You think it’s him?”

  I shook my head. “Desmond and Felix find out it’s him and manage to lure him to a skating rink in Southie? Makes no sense.”

  “What in this thing does?” Spike said.

  Rosie growled suddenly, first time all night, at an older woman suddenly standing over our table, closer to Spike than to me. Pointing at Rosie.

  “I wasn’t aware pets are allowed here,” the woman said.

  “Actually,” Spike said, “they’re not.”

  He gave her his most brilliant smile now, one that he usually reserved only for dudes. And one I was convinced could turn straight ones gay.

  “But he’s sitting right there between the two of you,” the woman said.

  “He’s a she,” I said. “Her name is Rosie.”

  “Whatever,” the woman said, exasperated.

  “Rosie doesn’t see herself as a dog,” Spike said. “Per se.”

  “Are you trying to be amusing?” the woman said.

  Spike looked at me, then shook his head sadly. “If they have to ask,” he said.

  I knew it was bitchy, but I reached over and fed Rosie some chicken.

  “Well, if the dog stays, I’m leaving,” the woman said.

  Spike smiled at her. I smiled at her. Rosie growled. The woman turned and left. I had never actually seen someone turn on their heel. But I was pretty sure she just had.

  Spike said, “So what’s your next move? Finding out more about this Carbone guy?”

  “I think it might be easier just to speak to Albert again.”

  “Fuck,” Spike said. “I was afraid of that.”

  “If it’s any consolation to you,” I said, “I feel the exact same way.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  THERE WAS NO way of knowing, and might never be a way of proving, if the Burkes had ordered a hit on Dominic Carbone. Or if they had even determined that he was the man who had been stalking them. No way to know, at least not yet, if Carbone had some kind of relationship with the Cataldo family, or what was left of it, and had any real skin in this game.

  And if it had been someone other than Desmond or Felix Burke who had ordered a hit on Carbone, who had? And why?

  I also had absolutely no idea what was going to happen when Desmond found out that Maria had died in Providence, and that Albert Antonioni had been the one to make sure she got a proper burial.

  Other than all that, the gods were smiling on me.

  What I mostly knew, at least in the world of objective facts, was that Albert Antonioni’s name kept popping up more regularly than old girlfriends did with the president, even though he’d led me to believe he had hardly anything to do with Desmond Burke anymore, whether the subject was guns or anything else.

  “He’s probably had more guys killed than Vladimir Putin,” Spike said before I left the restaurant. “But he might have enough of a heart to have done right by Maria Cataldo.”

  “I still need to know why he was the one to whom it was left to have her buried,” I said. “And why she died at Rhode Island Hospital.”

  “Why would he tell you that?”

  “Sucker for a pretty face?”

  “Okay,” Spike said. “You’ve obviously been overserved.”

  “I’d like to find a way to head off a war between him and the Burkes, if that is what’s looming,” I said. “But it’s not as if I can ask Felix to set up a meeting.”

  “Richie doesn’t even want you to cross the state line,” Spike said.

  “I might have already asked Mike Stanton to call the guy we used last time,” I said. “But he said the guy’s number was no longer in service.”

  “So how do we get back to see him?”

  “We’ll think of something,” I said.

  “Is that the literary we?” Spike said. “Or does that mean me?”

  I smiled at him.

  “Had a feeling that’s where this was headed,” he said.

  It was time to go. Spike said that just because somebody had shot a guy from Rhode Island didn’t mean that I should suddenly stop looking over my shoulder. He insisted on standing with Rosie and me on the street in front of the restaurant until we were not only in the Uber I’d ordered, but also verifying that it was in fact that Uber I’d ordered before I gave the driver my name.

  When Rosie and I got to Melanie Joan’s, I saw nothing suspicious on the street, waited until Rosie performed her last ablution of the night, went inside, locked the front door, set the alarm, decided to take a hot bath before I went to bed.

  When I got out of the bath, I checked my naked self out in front of the full-length mirror in the bathroom. Front first. Then, looking over my shoulder, back.

  “Older my ass,” I said out loud, winking at myself. “And I do mean ass.”

  It had been over an hour since I’d finished nursing the second martini I’d had at Spike’s. I went to the kitchen and fixed myself a Jameson, neat, and got into bed with a ballpoint pen and a yellow legal pad and wrote down everything that had happened, both everything I thought and everything I knew. Trying to make things linear this time.

  Lists always help me. I never wrote them up on a laptop. I wrote them out in longhand, in my Catholic school handwriting. I thought better with a pen in my hand, the way I did with a brush in my hand.

  I wished it were easy to make things take shape now.

  I wrote and occasionally sipped whiskey.

  It was late. I knew I should be tired, and just slightly overserved. I was neither. Maybe I could hold my liquor better as I got older. I thought of an old line from Winston Churchill, the one about how he liked to drink alcohol before and during and after meals, and often in the intervals.

  It had never bothered me to drink alone. I never drank in excess when drinking alone, which meant alone with Rosie. This Rosie and the one before her. It was past midnight now. Another old line came to me, though I couldn’t remember who’d written it or said it, about this being the hour when people told each other the truth. If I were with Desmond Burke right now, would he tell me the truth? Would Albert Antonioni?

  Would they tell me truths about themselves, or each other?

  If Richie were here with me right now, in Melanie Joan’s big bed, and asked for the truth about us, what would I tell him?

  Maybe I had been overserved after all.
<
br />   Would I tell Richie that I preferred being alone? Maybe that was the real truth, from me, to me, at this time of night. I had been unable to work for others and with others when I was still a cop. Now I worked alone. I had been unable to succeed as a wife. So now I lived alone.

  The most stable relationships of my adult life, other than the one with my father, had been with two miniature English bull terriers, both female, and a gay man.

  My relationship with Richie, I knew in my heart, was both stable and unstable at the same time.

  I checked what I had written one more time, still found more questions than answers, finished my drink, turned out the lights.

  At least I did have Spike and Rosie.

  Yeah, girl, I thought, before sleep came far more quickly than it usually did.

  Who’s got it better than you?

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  I LEFT THE ALBERT Antonioni negotiations to Spike and tried to find out everything there was to know about Dominic Carbone.

  He had been born in Cranston, as it turned out, dropped out of high school there, been raised, according to a couple classmates I was able to track down, by a single mother who worked as a cocktail waitress at various local establishments that were never confused with the bar at the Four Seasons.

  The father, according to Pete Colapietro, had been a midlevel thug in Antonioni’s operation until he was found dead one night, shot in the head, in the front seat of a car parked at the Red Sox’s minor-league ballpark in Pawtucket. Despite having been estranged from his father for most of his hardscrabble life, by then Dominic Junior had already gone into the family business.

  I called Richie about Carbone. Richie said his father had assured him he had nothing to do with the guy ending up the way Dominic Senior had. I asked if Desmond had bought into the notion that Carbone had been the one shooting at the Burke family.

  “He’s like you, and Belson,” Richie said. “Suspicious of how insanely neat it all seems.”

  “But might there now be an escalation of the bad blood between him and Albert?” I said.

  “My father says no,” Richie said.