“Somebody,” Belson said, “wanted to make a big, loud fucking statement to get somebody’s attention. As if they didn’t have it already.”
Felix had come up next to me, like a ghost appearing.
“They wanted me to know that they could come to my house,” Felix said. “They wanted me to know and my brother to know.”
Belson said, “You saw nothing before you and your men left for church?”
“Marty and Padraig take shifts in the night,” he said. “A way to make sure the perimeter is secure. But once it’s time to leave for Mass, they just walk me out and into the car.”
Belson nodded. At the same time he was focused on what Felix was telling him he was taking in everything around him, even the water in the distance.
He turned to me.
“Drip, drip, drip,” he said.
“I am assuming,” I said, “that is not an assessment of the current weather.”
“You miss nothing,” he said.
He walked over to Desmond Burke. I walked with him. The rain came harder. I tried not to imagine what my hair looked like.
“I am going to ask you again if there is anything you wish to tell me, Desmond,” Belson said. I had seen this before with him. Nothing about his posture or tone had changed, and yet it had become more aggressive anyway. “For fuck’s sake, is there anything that you know and I do not that might help me put an end to this?”
Desmond looked at him, his face impassive. I knew he wasn’t used to people talking to him this way. But Frank Belson had because he could and Desmond knew that he could, whether he liked it or not. It was as if all the animosity that had always existed between Boston cops and the Burkes was now in the air between these two men, even in a moment like this, when their interests should have been aligned.
“If I knew,” Desmond Burke said, in a voice that seemed to be made of razor blades, “I would have already ended this myself. For fuck’s sake.”
Felix was behind him. I saw him reach into the pocket of his khaki pants, the parts of them below the knee not covered by his coat splotched with rain.
He came out with his phone, brought it closer to his face, squinted as he stared at it. Then he wordlessly handed it to his brother.
Then Desmond handed it to Richie.
I looked at the text message on the screen as he did.
“Ask Desmond,” it said, “how he likes it when it’s ones he loves.”
Belson reached over, without asking, took the phone from Richie, read the text himself, put the phone in the pocket of his raincoat, and told Felix he would return it after his people looked at it.
“Probably came from a burner,” he said.
“The way to bet,” I said.
“Gotta check anyway.”
Belson turned to Desmond again.
“You got any idea what that means?” he said.
Desmond’s answer was to simply walk away from Frank Belson and the rest of us toward the water.
“He seems to be having some difficulty processing the fact that we are on the same side here,” Belson said.
“Gee,” I said, “you think?”
Nineteen
“Talking to Desmond Burke and Tony Marcus and Albert Antonioni,” my father said, “seems to be working out splendidly for you. The only people who haven’t been shot at so far this week are riding Duck Boats.”
“You left out Vinnie Morris,” I said.
“He is a separate category,” Phil Randall said. “Vinnie falls on the right side of things more often than not, despite some of the crum-bums for whom he has worked in the past. In addition to being a very natty dresser.”
“‘Crum-bums’?” I said.
“It’s an expression older and nattier dressers like myself still use,” he said.
We were in my living room having coffee that I had made with a Keurig that I’d owned for a month but was just learning to operate properly, having finally figured out when to close the lid. My father was wearing a gray V-neck sweater over a Tattersall shirt, underneath a navy blazer. His gray pants were pressed and cuffed. Black tasseled loafers. Argyle socks. There was the faint whiff in the room of the sandalwood cologne he had been wearing for as long as I had been alive. I called it the dad scent.
It was the morning after someone shot up Felix Burke’s condo. My father had stopped at the Flour Bakery and Café on Dalton Street, down near the Hynes Convention Center, for cranberry-orange scones.
As far as I could determine, he was giving Rosie a bite for every one he took. There was no point in telling him to stop, it was like trying to stop the ocean when the two of them were together.
“Where’s my sainted mother this morning?” I said.
“Don’t try to change the subject,” he said. “But since you asked, it is her turn to host her bridge group.”
My mother, who was resistant to just about everything new except chin tucks, had shocked us all recently by announcing that she was going to learn how to play bridge. My father, who had always been a wonderful bridge player, now lived in fear that she would eventually ask him to partner with her in a separate couples group. This from a man who wasn’t afraid of ISIS.
“How’s that working out for her?” I said.
He sighed and sipped some of his coffee. “Bridge too far,” he said.
I giggled.
“Go ahead,” he said. “Laugh.”
Then he said, “You still haven’t told me about your meeting with Albert.”
We were supposed to have had coffee yesterday, until the shooting in Charlestown. I told him now. I told him about the Old Canteen and Albert suggesting that if this were an ancient grudge, it might be an Irish one.
“An Italian saying that,” he said, grinning. “Old boy’s got balls on him still.”
“This whole thing,” I said, “has become a mishegoss.”
He smiled. It always made his face young.
“I’m not sure I remember that particular expression from our old country,” he said.
“My therapist is Jewish,” I said.
My father fed Rosie again, saw me watch him do it, winked.
“I’m going to tell you things I know you’ve already thought about, and Belson has thought about, and I’ve thought about,” he said. “The guy could have killed Richie, didn’t. Then he only murders some windows and furniture at Felix’s. But he does murder Peter in between.”
“Peter wasn’t as close to Desmond as Richie and Felix are,” I said.
“But them he spares.”
“Makes no sense,” I said. “But then little about this does.”
“Richie would prefer you stay out of it,” my father said.
“But he knows I can take care of myself, Daddy,” I said. “I actually think there’s a part of him that doesn’t want me poking around in his father’s past. Like even now, even though he’s all grown up, he doesn’t want to know what he doesn’t want to know about Desmond.”
“Desmond and Felix,” my father said, shaking his head. “Still acting like knockaround guys even when they should be sitting on the front porch at a retirement community.”
“Old men operating off all the old codes,” I said.
“You still don’t want to piss off any of them,” he said.
“May have already,” I said.
“Desmond loves Richie,” he said. “Richie loves you. These are immutable facts, and will always count for something.”
“You sound like a Jewish therapist,” I said.
“Imagine that,” he said. “An old flatfoot like myself.”
“All we know for sure is that someone is slowly squeezing Desmond,” I said.
“What does that text message to Felix really mean?” Phil Randall said.
“Perhaps just another way of talking about sins of the father,” I said. “Even though Felix is Desmond’s brother.”