by Mike Lupica
“I’m insulted that you even felt the need to ask,” he said.
“Sorry.”
“How did it go?”
“I got a lot today,” I said, and told him about the driver and the house and the pictures I’d taken. Then I said, “All I need now is a plan.”
“Well,” Spike said, “ask yourself something: Who the hell doesn’t?”
SIXTY
PETE HAD SHOWN the pictures I sent him to his buddies at Organized Crime, and was informed that the driver’s name was Bobby Toms.
“Short for Bobby Tomasi,” I said.
“Would be the way I’d bet.”
“What’s his story?” I said.
“That’s the weird part,” Pete said. “He has none. Isn’t in the system as Bobby Tomasi or Robert Tomasi or Robert Toms or Bobby Toms. They say that all of a sudden, and nobody can remember exactly when, he was a fast-tracker with Albert. Who, they say, treats him like a son.”
“Maria’s son,” I said.
“Who you now think is the one trying to start a Mob war with the Burkes,” Pete said.
“Hard to believe he could do that without Albert knowing,” I said. “Or without Albert’s say-so.”
“But if he wants to take out Desmond, or he and Albert want him to take out Desmond, why not just do it without all this fucking around?”
“Maybe the fucking around is part of it,” I said.
Pete said he’d call if he found out any more fun facts from Goombahville. I told him I’d been meaning to ask if it was politically correct for one Italian to call another one a goombah. He said he was pretty sure there were rules in the handbook that covered it.
What I really needed to do was find a way to talk to Bobby Toms. I imagined myself driving back down to Providence, walking up to Albert’s front door, ringing the bell if somebody hadn’t already shot me, and hoping Bobby answered the door.
“Hi,” I could say in a cheerful voice, “I’m conducting a survey about your mother,” and see how things went from there if he didn’t try to shoot me in the eye.
“Oh, and by the way, you sonofabitch,” I could say, “are you the one who shot my ex-husband in the back and smacked me around on Exeter Street that time?”
I was close now. I could feel it. Bobby Toms had to be the son and Desmond Burke had to be his father, because nothing else made sense and because as a boy he really did look like Richie’s twin, evil or otherwise.
But what could Desmond Burke have possibly done to Maria Cataldo to make their son start shooting up Boston this way?
And how did guns somehow figure in to all of this?
The only way to get all the answers I wanted and needed was to close this case. Which I told myself I would. Because I always had in the past. Maybe if I did, I could go back to working on a case that would actually pay me a living wage.
I was so lost in the fog and the moment and all the questions I still had that I didn’t hear the ring of my cell phone right away.
I looked at the caller ID. “Richie.”
“Hey, you,” I said when I answered.
“Desmond’s been taken,” he said.
SIXTY-ONE
I MET RICHIE AT FELIX’S now-repaired home at the marina in Charlestown.
“The boys were waiting to drive him to Mass,” Felix said. “My brother is always ready at ten minutes to seven. He’s one of those. Thinks even being a minute late is a mortal sin. When I’m a few minutes late, he looks at me like he wants to give me a good smack.”
“And the house had been watched all night,” I said.
“Yes,” Richie said.
“But when they finally went inside to check on where he was, he was gone,” I said.
“Yes,” Richie said.
There were three Dunkin’ Donuts cups on the table in front of us. Felix picked up his and drank some of his coffee. I could see his ruined boxer’s hands shaking as he did.
“They use the key they have,” Felix said, “and go inside and call out to him. But like Richie said. He’s gone.”
“Didn’t he set the alarm at night?” I said.
Felix looked at Richie, then back at me.
“Sometimes he does,” Felix said. “Sometimes he doesn’t.” He shrugged. “We’re old. We forget.”
“The one who took him could have come from the water side,” Richie said. “And in through the back somehow.”
I thought of how easily Ghost Garrity had gotten inside Maria Cataldo’s house, and how the gadget he’d brought disarmed what had been her alarm. How easy he said it was to disarm them in general.
“This is war now, Richard,” Felix said. “If that fuck Antonioni is the one who ordered this, I will kill him with my own hands.”
“It could be one of his people who took Desmond,” Richie said.
“I think I know which one,” I said, and told them both everything I had learned about Bobby Toms, and how Pete Colapietro and I had followed him to the house in Mount Pleasant. Richie looked at me. “You were going to tell me this when?” he said. I told him I was about to call him when he called to tell me about his father.
“Albert knows,” Felix said. “That’s the way it would work with us. That’s the way it would work with them.”
Us. Them. To the death.
“Is there anything you’ve not told us?” Richie said to his uncle.
It took a longer time than I would have liked for Felix Burke to say that he had not.
“Uncle Felix,” Richie said, as if talking to a child.
“Have I ever lied to you, Richard?” he said.
“Often,” Richie said.
“About anything important?” Felix said.
“Less often,” Richie said.
I sipped coffee that had gone cold. Even cold was better than none.
“Desmond’s alive,” I said. “I’m sure of it.”
“You can’t be sure,” Felix said.
“This ends the way it started with me,” Richie said. “If the guy wanted him dead, he’d be dead. Come into the house with a silencer and do it and leave, maybe even by boat.”
I looked at Felix Burke. I couldn’t remember a time when I had ever seen him scared. But he was scared now, and it showed. It had always been him and Desmond against the world. Their other brothers were gone. Now Desmond had been taken.
“You don’t know,” Felix said again.
“I do,” I said. “So much of this has been an elaborate production. He wanted to torture Desmond and, as a by-product, the rest of us. I believe he’s known the endgame from the beginning. But ultimately this is something between him and Desmond. I believe he wants to kill him. But wants it to be a slow death. He might even want an audience.”
“I could go down there and take that fuck Antonioni,” Felix said, as if it were the old days, as if he were young and not afraid of anything or anybody.
“And get yourself killed in the process,” Richie said.
“We have men, too,” Felix said.
“Who didn’t help us a whole hell of a lot today,” Richie said.
“You know the resources I have,” Felix said. “You remember the time I found a killer for you.”
“Tommy Noon,” I said. “I remember.”
He had been the killer in a case on which I had once worked for a young woman named Sarah Markham, who had hired me to find out who her birth parents were.
“We may need those resources before we’re through, Uncle Felix,” Richie said. “But let us handle this for now.”
“‘Us’?” he said.
“Sunny and me,” Richie said.
I looked at him.
“Sunny and I will find him,” Richie said.
“Yes,” I said. “We will.”
SIXTY-TWO
RICHIE AND I went back to River Str
eet Place. I changed into a black T-shirt and one of my pairs of preferred white jeans. I knew it was getting a little late in the year for white jeans, but I looked damn good in them. And I knew that Richie thought I looked damn good in them.
When I came down the stairs, Rosie was next to him on the couch. There were two glasses of red wine on the table in front of them. I knew he noticed the jeans. He always did. And I always noticed him noticing.
We both drank some wine.
“You honestly believe he’s not dead already?” Richie said.
“We’re getting to the end of foreplay,” I said. “But I honestly think it’s still foreplay.”
“If he is dead,” Richie said, “Felix will take an army down to Providence and kill them all and let God sort things out.”
“I know,” I said. “But you have to keep him under control for the time being. Let me do my job.”
“Our job,” Richie said.
We drank more wine.
“I feel as if we should be doing something right now,” he said.
“Tomorrow,” I said.
“First thing,” he said.
I nodded.
“You have a plan,” he said, staring at me.
I nodded again. Rosie rolled over and let Richie rub her belly.
“Dr. Silverman says that in the shooter’s mind, everything makes perfect sense,” I said.
“So how do we find where he’s taken him?” Richie said.
“The only thing that makes sense is that it’s another property of Antonioni’s,” I said.
“How do we find out which one?” Richie said.
I smiled at him.
“Forget about your uncle,” I said. “How about if we take Albert?”
SIXTY-THREE
RICHIE SAID HE was going back to Charlestown to spend the night at his uncle Felix’s. He called it babysitting. I told him I wouldn’t necessarily refer to it that way in front of Felix.
“Felix is used to dealing from strength,” Richie said. “Being in charge. This is different. We do something wrong here, Desmond dies.”
I had explained by then that I didn’t exactly want to take Albert Antonioni, I just wanted to borrow him for a little while. And then reason with him.
“Tell me how,” Richie said.
“Let me work on my plan a little more,” I said, and then told him what he needed to find out from his uncle.
“Promise me you won’t set anything in motion without telling me,” he said.
“Have I ever lied to you?” I said.
“Often,” he said.
“But about things that matter?” I said.
“Less often,” he said.
He kissed me hard. I kissed him back. When Richie was gone, and the two men watching him were gone, I called Spike and told him my plan.
Then made two more calls after that.
* * *
—
I MET TONY MARCUS in his office at Buddy’s Fox at noon the next day. Junior was there, as was Ty Bop. Tony was behind his desk, wearing a charcoal suit with wide pinstripes and slightly wider lapels than were the current fashion, dressed for a big night on the town even in the middle of the day.
Always my relationship with him had been transactional. So was it now.
I got right to it, explaining what I wanted to happen and hoped would happen as quickly as possible. For once he did not interrupt, just nodded and listened, as if I were his stockbroker bringing him up to date on his portfolio.
“It would just be a part of the diversification project into Rhode Island you’ve been talking about,” I said.
“Think I couldn’t have come up with this on my own, if I’d’ve thought of it first?” he said.
“I’m sure you could have figured out something on the girls,” I said. “Having guns to bargain with just makes it easier.”
“You pretty cocky, girl, thinking you can produce those guns,” he said.
“I can’t,” I said. “But I believe Felix Burke can. And will be highly motivated to do so.”
“Where the guns at?”
“Somewhere,” I said.
“And you think Felix just gonna tell you where they at?”
“If it means saving his brother’s life he will,” I said. “I’d bet my own life on that.”
“You think Albert been the one calling the shots on this war on the Burkes all along?” Tony said.
“He’s the only one who could have set it all in motion,” I said.
“What’s in it for him?”
I said, “This is nothing more than a working theory. But I think he set this whole thing up to take Desmond’s guns, and then take out Desmond once and for all.”
“Lot of moving pieces,” Tony said. He smiled. “So to speak.”
“Still are,” I said. “Why I’m here.”
Tony made a steeple with his fingers. I wanted to ask him where he had his nails done, because I was convinced his manicurist was way better than my own.
“You get something you want, Albert gets Desmond’s guns, Felix gets what he wants most in the world,” I said. “He gets his brother back.”
“If that old fuck still be alive.”
“If he is,” I said, “we need to move on this.”
“And you’re telling me all’s I got to do is set up the meet,” Tony Marcus said.
“Uh-huh,” I said. “Sooner rather than later.”
“And then I got to just do a little acting job when you show up and try to find out what you lookin’ to find out,” he said.
“Who better than you to play you?” I said. “The part you were born to play.”
He smiled.
“I love it when you blow smoke up my ass,” he said, “you come here wanting something bad enough. Most girls be willin’ to fuck me to get something they want that bad.”
“You should know by now,” I said to Tony Marcus, “that I’m not most girls.”
His fingers were still steepled. He closed his eyes in thought. Finally he said, “Rewards here do seem to outweigh the risk.”
“Uh-huh,” I said again.
“I’ll set up the meet,” he said.
“Nice doing business with you,” I said.
Tony’s smile was as white as what I could see of his white shirt.
“The balls on you,” he said.
I said, “That’s what they all say.”
SIXTY-FOUR
TONY HAD ALREADY managed to set up the meeting for that night at a diner on the outskirts of Taunton, not far from the Rhode Island line, not exactly halfway between him and Albert Antonioni but close enough.
I had suggested Taunton to Tony, out of the same sense of compromise that had once brought Desmond Burke and Albert Antonioni there for the sit-down I had attended during the Millicent Patton case. Desmond had been there that day to provide support for me and to have my back. If everything went as planned, though hardly anything ever did, tomorrow I would now have his.
Richie and I were on the couch in the living room after I returned from Buddy’s Fox. We had gone over my plan, and were now going back over everything that had happened since he had been shot, one last time. We knew that everything that could be set in motion for tomorrow had been set in motion, despite all the loose ends that I knew still existed and all the questions I had that still needed answers, including the one about who had shot Dominic Carbone.
“That one still doesn’t fit,” I said.
“Unless Bobby Toms wanted to throw us off,” Richie said, “and didn’t care how he did it.”
“Remember, Susan Silverman says that what might seem like a pathology to us likely makes perfect sense to him,” I said.
“The avenger,” Richie said.
“But avenging what?” I said.
We had
circled all the way back there.
Richie drank some of the coffee I had made for us. When he put his cup down, he seemed to be at rest. I knew better. Knew him well enough to know how fiercely he was fighting to maintain composure. He was Desmond Burke’s son, as much as he had been kept separate from the family business. He was Felix Burke’s nephew. As different as he was from them, he was of them.
He blew out some air, unclenched his fists, and gently rubbed Rosie’s head.
“This will work,” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
“You’re convinced Albert knows where Desmond is being held and that Desmond really is still alive,” Richie said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Felix didn’t even attempt to deny he had the guns,” Richie said.
“He say where?”
“‘In a creative place’ is all he said. And said he would tell us where when Desmond was safe.”
“But his word is good on turning them over?”
Richie nodded.
“Good,” I said.
“Obviously your father knows where they are, too,” I said.
“They would have to kill him before he’d tell,” Richie said.
“Because he won’t give them the satisfaction?” I said.
“Because he’s Desmond Fucking Burke,” Richie said.
There was another silence between us. We both drank whiskey. Finally Richie said, “I very much want you to be right about all of this.”
“I am,” I said.
“And you still believe that we can rescue my father before it is too late?”
“Who better than us?” I said.
SIXTY-FIVE
THE DINER, A dive called Jake’s, was up the road from a sports bar on Bay Street called Home Plate.
It served a breakfast and lunch crowd and was generally closed, we had learned, by four in the afternoon at the latest. The original Jake was an old Providence friend of Albert Antonioni’s. The family still ran it but were long gone by the time the principals and their seconds arrived at a little after nine o’clock. That part of the deal had quickly been brokered by Antonioni’s people.
