“Maybe Albert Antonioni is right about the Irish,” he said. “Maybe this is something whose reach makes it all the way back to Winter Hill.”
“I’ve got it!” I said, slapping my thigh. “I’ll just call Whitey Bulger and ask him.”
“Tell me again who played him in that movie?”
“Johnny Depp.”
“I liked him better as the gay pirate.”
“That’s what Spike calls him.”
“Well,” he said, “Spike ought to know.”
“I feel as if most of the people I need to talk to might be dead or in jail,” I said.
My father said, “Maybe not all.”
He got up, picked up my plate and his, took them into the kitchen. I could hear the water running. My whole life, he had been neater than hospital corners. I knew he would rinse the cups before he left, too. And maybe vacuum the rugs.
“You know someone?” I said when he was back in the living room.
“I may,” he said. “Let me make a few calls.”
He picked up the cups now, went back into the kitchen. I could hear the water running again. If you were born round, he always said, you didn’t die square.
He said that he was going to take a nice long walk in the park while he was waiting for the bridge party to clear out of his house.
“The problem with retirement,” he said, “is that you can never take a day off.”
I hugged him. He hugged me back. Neither one of us ever went through the motions with that. I felt as safe and happy in his embrace as I always had been, for as long as I could remember.
“Be careful,” he said.
“Always.”
“I mean it,” he said. “It doesn’t take much knowing or asking around to know that you and Richie are still together. If they came for the others, they might come for you.”
“Not a Burke, Daddy.”
“Not to me,” he said. “But to them.”
I pulled back from him, smiling.
“Mishegoss!” I said in a loud voice.
“God bless you,” my father said.
Twenty
I called Richie, and was sent straight to voicemail. No shocker there. He frequently had his phone turned off, even in times like these. Richie Burke was not one of those people who believed he risked seizure if he didn’t check his phone every five minutes.
I knew I could have gone on the Internet to read more about the Winter Hill Gang but took a walk over to the Boston Public Library instead, having decided to go through ancient copies of the Globe. It was detective work out of the past, without search engines, and had always seemed to suit me. But I was often happier living in the past, even when it involved murder and general mayhem and more questions than I was currently equipped to answer.
It was late afternoon by the time I left, having learned a lot about the bad old days without learning anything that really helped me. After I’d gotten home and fed Rosie and walked her, Spike called and asked if I wanted to come over and have dinner with him at the restaurant. I told him I just wanted to whip up one of my specialties in the space-age kitchen Melanie Joan had inherited, then curl up with a good book.
“This might sound mean,” Spike said. “But you don’t have any specialties.”
“You take that back.”
“Name one.”
“Spaghetti and broccoli.”
“That’s not a specialty,” Spike said. “That’s spaghetti and broccoli.”
“I wasn’t aware that I was talking to a special counsel,” I said.
I didn’t make spaghetti and broccoli. Instead I heated up a pizza from Whole Foods that I’d been saving. That would show him. When I finished I took Rosie for another walk, up Charles and over to the Common tonight. The dog trainer I’d briefly hired told me to always have treats with me and then say “Leave it” as soon as she spotted another dog and commenced growling and barking.
Tonight had been another total breakdown in theory.
The first dog she saw was a chocolate Lab, up in the corner of the Common near the playground. I assumed that you could hear Rosie’s subsequent barking in Kenmore Square.
“Sorry,” I said to the Lab’s owner, a young guy in a Harvard hoodie.
“We never felt unsafe,” he said, grinning. “Have you ever tried a trainer?”
When I got home I poured myself a glass of wine and read a book Wayne Cosgrove had recommended, Citizen Somerville, Bobby Martini’s account of growing up in the Winter Hill Gang. It was about guys with names like Rico and Tony Blue, and about how somebody near the pizza stand always seemed to be watching as Bobby or Rico or Tony got themselves shot.
Somehow, the man who was my ex-husband’s father had come out of that world. The father of someone I loved and always would love, perhaps as much as any man I would ever know.
Me, I thought.
Honorary Burke.
The doorbell rang. I wasn’t expecting anyone. Richie never dropped in unannounced, nor did Spike. Nor did my father. As I walked across the living room I reached into the top drawer of my desk and grabbed a Beretta Pico my father had purchased for me. He’d asked me after the Spare Change case how many guns I had in my house. I told him two. The next day he brought over a couple new ones, including the Pico, and said, “Make it four.”
Before I opened the door, I slid open the peephole.
Desmond Burke was standing there, Buster and Colley right behind him.
I palmed the gun as I opened the door.
“I’m sorry I didn’t call first,” he said.
“How’d you know I’d be here,” I said.
“Intuition,” he said.
He turned to the men behind him and said he wouldn’t be long. I briefly wondered if he and Felix had been those young men once, working strong-arm, as foot soldiers, and dreaming of bigger things.
Somehow Rosie didn’t make a sound in Desmond’s presence. Perfect. Even dogs were afraid of him.
“Can I get you something to drink?” I said.
As he walked ahead of me I put the gun back into the open drawer and quietly shut it.
“A beer would do me fine,” Desmond said.
I went to the refrigerator and came back with a bottle of Samuel Adams. I wasn’t a beer girl. I stocked it for Richie and Spike. I asked Desmond if he wanted a glass. He said the bottle would do him fine as well.
“I’ll get to the point,” he said.
“When have you ever not?” I said.
I smiled at him. He did not smile back. But then he rarely did. Everything about him, his entire taut-coiled self, was all business.
His business.
“I have always treated you, after a fashion, as the daughter I never had,” he said.
“And I have been grateful for that,” I said.
“But I simply cannot have you interfering in this,” he said. “This isn’t about Richie or Peter or what happened at Felix’s. I simply cannot have you challenging my authority.”
I started to ask him what year he thought this was but restrained myself. It wouldn’t get either one of us anywhere.
“I don’t work for you, Desmond,” I said. “I don’t work for Felix. I don’t even work for Richie. I work for me.”
He took a long pull of his beer. Tonight he was a man in black himself, black sports jacket, black knit shirt. It made him look even more pale than he usually did.
“You saw Albert Antonioni day before yesterday,” he said. “With your friend. The gay man who owns the restaurant.”
“I know I wasn’t followed to Providence,” I said. “So how exactly do you know that?”
It was as if the question had gone unasked. He took another pull on his beer and quickly wiped his lips with the back of his hand.
“I know Richie asked you to stand down,” he said. “Obviously it did no good. So tonight I came myself.”