by Mike Lupica
“Do you believe him?”
“I do not,” he said. “But if there is the kind of escalation you’re talking about, I’d sort of like you to stay out of the crossfire.”
“You know I can’t,” I said, “even if your father is having a difficult time accepting that fact.”
“He doesn’t think you can’t,” Richie said. “He thinks you won’t.”
“All part of getting to know me,” I said. “Just not as well as you do.”
“And what a lucky boy I am for that,” Richie said.
“Neither your father nor Albert Antonioni is the type to let bygones be bygones,” I said. “I just find it counterintuitive to believe that this is over just because a stiff in Boston had the right gun in his possession when he died. I frankly think someone planted it on him.”
“Counterintuitive,” Richie said. “You continue to sound remarkably unlike a private cop.”
“And you,” I said, “sound remarkably unlike a child of the Boston Mob.”
The second morning after they had discovered the body of Dominic Carbone, Spike called before my run and told me that, almost like a Christmas miracle, Albert Antonioni had agreed to once again meet with us.
“I think you and Albert are kind of in the same place,” Spike said. “You want him to show you his, and he wants you to show him yours. So to speak.”
“Where is this happening?”
“Joe Marzilli’s Old Canteen,” Spike said.
“It’s practically become our place,” I said.
* * *
—
SPIKE WAS DRESSED in what he called gangster chic for the occasion: black pinstriped suit with wide chalk stripes and wider lapels than I’d ever seen on him, white shirt, silver tie, ankle boots with zippers on the sides.
“You do look like a gangster,” I said. “Unfortunately, it’s Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls.”
“I see what you did there,” he said, as I slid into the front seat next to him. “Played the Broadway-musical card on the gay guy.”
“Stereotypes are ugly,” I said. “Just not as ugly as that suit.”
“You no longer seem concerned about being followed,” Spike said.
“I look at it this way,” I said. “Desmond gonna be Desmond.”
“Did you just say that?”
I giggled.
We hit little traffic on I-95 and ended up with a parking spot about a block away from the Old Canteen. I left my gun in the glove compartment. So did Spike. Our operating theory was that we would once again be patted down. A larger theory was that if Albert wanted to shoot both of us today, he could, but likely would not.
It was the same table as before, with what looked to be the same lineup of sidemen posted around the room.
There were no coffee cups on the table, no offer of anything to drink, nothing social about the gathering, which had all the charm of a parole board hearing.
“I don’t have a lot of time,” Albert Antonioni said when Spike and I were seated.
He sounded like Desmond.
“Maria Cataldo,” I said.
“What about her?”
“Why did you pay to have her buried?” I said.
“Who says I did?”
“Albert,” I said. “You said you didn’t have a lot of time. Let’s not either one of us waste it.”
He leaned back in his chair, clasped his hands across a truly ugly polka-dot shirt.
“Why’re we talking about her?” he said.
“Because she was Desmond Burke’s great lost love,” I said. “Because she was sent away in her youth, or left on her own, thus ending her illicit affair with Desmond. And at the other end of her life, when she dies, you are the one who pays for her final resting place.”
“I promised her father I’d be there for her if she needed me, whenever she needed me,” he said. “I kept the promise even after she died.”
“Desmond says you were the one who had her father killed as a way of assuming full control of the business,” I said.
“Desmond Burke is a liar,” he said. “I wasn’t the one who capped Vincent. He was. And you can fucking well tell him that I said that.”
Antonioni started coughing then, making him sound like a lung patient. Or sounding the way Billy Leonard had that day at Sherrill House. The young handsome guy I remembered from our last meeting was at the table in a flash with a glass of water. Antonioni drank enough to stop the coughing.
“We done here?” he said.
“Not quite,” I said.
“What else?”
“Who’s Dominic Carbone?” I said.
“Guy used to do some things for me,” Antonioni said, “before he went off on his own.” Antonioni shrugged. “I heard what happened to him,” he said. “Life’s hard. Then somebody shoots you.”
“Did you send Carbone after the Burkes?” I said.
“Fuck, no,” he said.
I said, “The gun they found on Dominic happened to be the same one used to shoot my ex-husband and kill Peter Burke and Desmond’s bodyguard.”
“I got nothing to do with any of that shit.”
“You do have to admit that it’s a bit of a coincidence, somebody who you say used to work with you ending up with that particular gun in his pocket,” I said.
“Your problem,” he said. “Not mine.”
I smiled a killer smile at him. He managed to keep himself under control.
“How well did you know Maria Cataldo when she was a young woman?” I said.
He said, “We were friends, nothing more, nothing less. I had too much respect for her father. And too much fear of the old man.”
“You’re sure?”
“Listen to me,” he said. “You know who wanted Maria in those days? Everybody did. Irish, Italians, everyfuckingbody. But the rest of us were smart enough to do our wanting of Vincent’s little girl from a distance. Just not Desmond.”
He leaned forward now in his chair.
“Can I give you a piece of advice?”
“Am I obligated to take it?”
“Walk away from this,” he said. “I’m telling you for the last time. Go tell Desmond I got no problems with him anymore except if he makes problems for me. Then we all live out however many days we got left. But you stay with this, you’re going to get into things you don’t want to get into. And something could happen you don’t want to happen.”
I had more questions but knew they weren’t going to get me where I wanted to go with Albert Antonioni, not now and probably not ever.
I stood up. So did Spike. Albert Antonioni watched both of us with the malevolent indifference of a snake.
“Stay out of my business,” he said.
“What business?” I said.
“All of it,” he said. He waved a dismissive hand at us. “Now go,” he said.
Spike and I walked out of the Old Canteen and into the sunlight of Federal Hill. Neither one of us spoke until Spike’s car was in sight. We both resisted the temptation, once outside, to look over our shoulders.
“He’s hiding something,” I said. “Or lying his ass off. Or both.”
“I’m thinking he might have had a bigger thing for Maria than he’s letting on,” Spike said.
“He said everybody wanted her,” I said.
Spike pressed his key, unlocked the car doors. We both got in.
“He did kind of blow your theory about him being a sucker for a pretty face all to hell,” Spike said.
I said, “Albert didn’t last this long without having an iron will.”
Then Spike put the car into gear. We then got the hell out of Rhode Island.
THIRTY-EIGHT
CHARLIE WHITAKER called the next morning.
“Did you read in the Globe about what happened at Logan two nights ago?”
>
I told him I was behind on my reading, even with my hometown paper.
“A big shipment of guns got stolen,” he said, “from Smith & Wesson, on their way to Australia. Or maybe it was New Zealand, those countries all look alike to me.”
I told him I would look up the story online when we got off the phone.
“So there’s that,” Charlie said, “which is in the news. But here is something that is not: Two days before that, a lot of guns went missing at Fort Devens.”
“I thought that was some kind of base for the reserves these days,” I said.
“It is,” Charlie said. “Army Reserve and National Guard and Marines. Nearly eight hundred military vehicles. And a lot of guns never get fired.”
“Sounds like they’re going to get fired now,” I said.
“Uh-huh,” Charlie said.
“Stolen guns at Logan and missing guns at Fort Devens,” I said.
“Sounds to me,” Charlie said, “as if somebody might be trying to build up to a big finish on that granddaddy of all gun deals we talked about.”
“You think it’s the same people,” I said.
“Doesn’t matter what I think,” he said. “ATF does.”
“Be a pretty ballsy move to make,” I said.
“I told you that volume is the key if somebody wanted to make real money selling guns illegally,” he said.
“You think Desmond Burke or Albert Antonioni has the manpower to make a ballsy move like this?” I said.
“Whoever did it might have had to outsource some of the labor,” Charlie said. “But, yeah, it’s doable.”
“And would involve enough money to have a fight over.”
“You need to remember something about guys like Desmond and Albert,” Charlie said. “They’d fight over dirt.”
“If Desmond wants it, Albert wants it,” I said. “And vice versa.”
“Heavy on the vice,” Charlie said.
“It might not even be as much about the money,” I said, “as about one of them wanting to beat the other.”
“It doesn’t have to be one of them,” Charlie said.
“I know.”
“But you want it to be.”
“I want this to be over,” I said. “That’s what I want.”
“Welcome to my world,” he said. “Or at least my former one.”
“How’s Mrs. Whitaker, by the way?” I said.
“Visiting her sister in Florida.”
“If you hear anything else, let me know,” I said. “I can use all the help I can get.”
“Just remember something,” Charlie Whitaker said. “If figuring shit like this out were easy, everybody’d do it.”
I told him I would hold the thought.
THIRTY-NINE
I MET MY FATHER for lunch at the Legal Sea Foods at Park Plaza. Every time we went there he would give me a brief tutorial about the history of Legal, from the first one opening in Inman Square in Cambridge in the 1950s, and give me the most up-to-date count on how many there were in the chain now, including one at Logan Airport.
But this one was our favorite. They still served the best seafood in town, the service was terrific. It also wasn’t too loud, even when crowded at lunchtime the way it was now. We both had chowder as an appetizer and fried clams as a main course. By the time the clams were in front of us, I had gone over as much of the conversation with Albert Antonioni the day before as I could remember.
“On a bet,” he said, “you do not want to be in the middle of this any longer.”
“I’m still not sure what this is,” I said.
“Irrelevant,” he said.
“I got into it because of Richie, and if I am in the middle of it, it’s still because of Richie.”
“Or because, and I say this with love, you are more stubborn than a tick.”
“A tick,” I said. “Really, Daddy?”
He shrugged.
“Come on,” I said. “You think Antonioni is going to kill me for being nosy?”
He gave me a long look but said nothing. But we both knew it was his way of answering my question in the affirmative.
“So you’re saying he would kill me for being nosy?” I said.
“I didn’t say that,” he said. “But clearly there is bad blood between those two old men that might be deeper than the kind you get in the Middle East.”
He picked up a fried clam and dipped it in tartar sauce and ate it.
“But maybe if I can figure this all out,” I said, “I can take everybody out of danger once and for all. Including me.”
“My stubborn, darling daughter,” he said. He grinned. “You think it’s too late for med school?”
I had stuck my yellow legal pad in my purse. I used it as a study aid and told him everything that I knew and everything I thought and everything that had happened. I told him about my conversation with Charlie Whitaker.
“This continues to be a hairball, without question,” he said.
“I can’t let somebody like Antonioni scare me off the case,” I said.
“It’s never been your case,” my father said.
“But if I do let him scare me off, what does that make me?”
“Alive,” he said.
“If Desmond thinks Albert is after him,” I said, “why hasn’t he gone after Albert?”
“Just because he hasn’t doesn’t mean he won’t.”
He had finished with his clams. I’d eaten only half of mine, if that. He looked at the pile of them still on my plate, then looked at me, raised his eyebrows.
“Have at it,” I said.
It had always been a wonder to me that for my entire life I had watched Phil Randall eat like a horse and never put on a pound. And, by his own account, he had cholesterol levels so low his doctors wanted to carry him around the room on their shoulders.
“I know this is important to you because Richie is,” my father said. “It is why I have helped you as much as I can. But it becomes more clear by the moment that the only person who still wants you in this is you.”
I started to say something. He reached across the table and patted my hand to stop me.
“Desmond would never harm you,” he said. “Likewise, I do not believe he would let anyone else harm you if he could stop it. But that does not mean he can stop this thing if it becomes a runaway train. And Albert Antonioni, from the sound of things, has issued his last warning to you.”
“You’re telling me I’m beating a dead horse here,” I said. “Right?”
My father smiled his answer, and he was the one who looked younger than springtime. And made me feel safe, even as I knew I was not.
FORTY
WHEN YOU FIRST came to see me,” Dr. Susan Silverman said, “you said that you felt as if you lacked self-worth and purpose because Richie was about to marry someone else.”
“As I recall,” I said, “I did a lot of blubbering that day about the one whose name must not be mentioned.”
She smiled a smile that made Mona Lisa look as if she were in the midst of a laugh riot.
“Kathryn,” she said.
“Her,” I said.
It occurred to me I sounded like Frank Belson talking about his new boss Captain Glass.
“And if there has been one consistent thread since that time,” she said, “it has been your desire to understand both the depth and complexity of your feelings for Richie.”
She was right, of course. I had been trying to deal with that in this room, as well as the daddy issues that she had made me confront for the first time in my life. And was doing better with it all. I knew there were qualities, especially ones involving strength and confidence, that both Richie and Phil Randall shared. I knew that as quick and funny as Richie could be, my father was quicker, and funnier. I knew I relied on both for their
strength and confidence, even as I felt that challenged my own confidence and made me feel weak, almost as if I were existing on a fault line.
Susan Silverman had once asked me what she said would sound like a simple question, and was not.
“Is Richie your type?” she said.
I told her I had never thought about it, what my type was. The best I could do that particular day, and in many of the days since, was admit that someone I considered the love of my life might only partially be my type. And that I hated his strength as much as I loved it.
At least I did far less blubbering these days.
So there was that.
She wore a white sweater today and a black leather skirt and her skin looked as flawless as ever, and so did her thick, gleaming black hair. Her necklace was a freshwater pearl with small gold bands crisscrossed in front of it. Her fingernails were crimson. Susan Silverman, as usual, made me think of an old David Letterman line: She looked like a million damn dollars.
I wore a gray Michael Kors sweater dress I had bought on sale, with shoes to match. I always dressed up for her, every single time, as if we weren’t just therapist and patient but having an ongoing fashion-off, even though I knew the competition existed only in my mind.
“We’ve come a long way since then,” she said.
“Have we?” I said.
She didn’t respond. She rarely did when I was the one asking a question. I had called her the day before upon returning from Providence and asked when her soonest opening was. It turned out to be late in the afternoon today. I had spent the hours between lunch with my father and my appointment trying in vain to find out anything about where Maria Cataldo had lived her life after leaving Boston, and had run into one dead end after another. The best I could do was her last residence, in Providence, not far from Federal Hill, the address listed on her death certificate. I had not yet been able to find out who owned the house because the tax assessor’s office in Providence had closed early today. But I planned to take a ride down there myself tomorrow and talk to her neighbors. You just keep poking around and hope that eventually something will fly up at you.
For now here the two of us were, in the office on Linnaean Street, with the last of the afternoon sun coming through the blinds behind her. There was the soft scent of perfume in the room, hers or mine, or both.
