“Is your current situation somehow tied up with a gun deal so many think you are in the process of making?” I said.
Now he offered me the barest hint of smile.
“Generally, or specifically?”
“You know what I’m asking,” I said.
He looked down at the coffee table, at Bobby Martini’s book.
“Are you reading that?” he said.
“Are you changing the subject?”
“I am.”
“Research,” I said.
He nodded. “Funny kid, Bobby,” he said.
“I know you don’t want help from the cops,” I said. “But let me help you, Desmond. I’m good at this kind of work.”
“I have never needed anyone’s help,” he said. He nodded at the book. “Not theirs, not yours, not anyone’s. Not ever.”
He abruptly stood.
“Thank you for the beer,” he said.
Then: “Richie told me I was wasting my time.”
“We have to agree to disagree on this,” I said.
“I am generally not one with whom to disagree,” he said.
I told him I was well aware.
“You are either with me or against me,” he said.
He walked out the front door without saying another word. Rosie and I watched him go. Neither one of us said anything. I walked across the room and locked the door behind him and bolted it.
“Leave it,” I said.
Rosie and I both knew I wasn’t talking to her this time.
Twenty-One
My father and I were in front of a nursing and rehab facility called Sherrill House, on Huntington Avenue. He was explaining to me that it was one of the top places of its kind in Boston, providing both short- and long-term care.
“Long-term care, of course,” Phil Randall said, “is the same as God’s waiting room. Just without magazines.”
He shook his head, as if delaying going inside for as long as possible. But then smiled, as if another private joke were being told by him, to him.
“Every time I ask your mother where we should go when we’re no longer able to care for ourselves,” he said, “she gives me the same stock answer.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “She tells you she doesn’t want to discuss it.”
“Bingo,” he said. “Then she asks me to fix her another bourbon.”
“Does bourbon fall into the category of short-term or long-term care?” I said.
“Both,” my father said.
Then we were finally on our way inside and into the part of the place where people in what they called the Special Care Program lived, if you could call it living. It was where they put Alzheimer’s patients, or those suffering from what were described as “related disorders.”
“His son was reluctant to call it Alzheimer’s,” my father said. “But the way he described things, if the old man isn’t officially there yet, his exit is coming up fairly rapidly.”
“But you said he still has good days and bad days.”
“So I was told by the son.”
“So we hope this is one of the good days.”
“If there really is such a thing.” My father sighed. “When you reach my age,” he said, “you’d rather stare down an AR-15 than a place like this.”
“You don’t have to go into the room with me if you’d rather not,” I said.
“I’d rather not,” he said. “But I shall.”
We checked in at the front desk and were directed to the elevators that would take us up to the designated floor. Tim Leonard, the son, was waiting for us at the nurses’ station. He was slightly overweight and had thinning hair and a wide, Irish face and was a successful State Street lawyer, despite being the descendant of a strong-arm foot soldier himself.
“Like Richie, then,” I’d said to my father. “The honest son of a profoundly dishonest man.”
“Well,” Phil Randall had said, “if you can call a lawyer honest.”
Tim’s father, Billy Leonard, had come up on the streets at the same time as Desmond and Felix Burke and their brothers. Somehow along the way Billy managed to leave Buddy McLean’s crew and get with the Burkes without getting himself shot in Scollay Square, where my research told me a lot of old Mob guys had ended up extremely dead.
Billy is someone who had become an honorary Burke over time, mostly working as a body man for Felix, collecting for Desmond in their loansharking business, or doing the same for Peter when he was still making book. The legend was that he’d officially become part of the family when he took a bullet intended for Felix one night when they were coming out of the old Boston Garden after a fight card. Billy Leonard recovered. Desmond and Felix never forgot.
We were here because Phil Randall said Tim Leonard owed him a favor. I’d asked how big. My father said big enough that we were here.
“And you believe he might know some of Desmond’s secrets,” I said.
“Knew Desmond’s secrets,” he’d said.
Billy Leonard was in a wheelchair facing the window when we walked into the sunny room. He was still a big man and made the chair look small, hands folded in his lap. He wore a faded red flannel shirt and faded cords and the kind of sneakers that had Velcro on top.
If he heard us come in, he gave no sign.
It was Tim Leonard who spoke first.
“Dad,” he said as he turned the wheelchair around so Billy Leonard was facing us. “You remember Phil Randall. This is his daughter, Sunny.”
Billy stared at us, frowning, focused on my father.
“I know you,” he said.
It was somewhere between question and answer.
My father smiled as if he were here to get a donation for the Police Benevolent Association.
“Only from all the times I tried to put you away,” Phil Randall said.
And then Billy smiled back at him.
“Phil Fucking Randall,” he said.
“Not the middle name with which I was baptized,” my father said. “But considering our history, I’ll wear it, as the kids like to say these days.”
Billy said, “You’re not dead yet? Jesus.”
“Mary and Joseph,” my father said.
“You knew Phil was coming, Dad,” Tim Leonard said. “I told you what he and Sunny wanted to talk to you about.”
“Tell me again.”
“They want to ask you some questions about Desmond Burke,” Tim said.
“Is he dead?” Billy said.
“No,” I said. “But someone seems to be trying.”
Billy focused his rheumy eyes on me.
“Who are you?”
“Phil’s daughter.”
“Cop?”
“Was until I wasn’t,” I said. “I’m private now.”
Billy nodded, as if the old man were trying to process new information.
“Ask you something?”
“Sure?”
“Your ass as good as your legs?”
“Dad!” Tim Leonard said.
“It’s okay,” I said. And to Billy I said, “The answer is an unqualified yes.”
“I was always an ass man,” Billy Leonard said. “Give me a good ass over big tits anytime.”
Tim sighed, shook his head, told his father he’d be outside, and left us there. My father and I pulled up the two folding chairs in the room so that we were facing Billy.
“Somebody is shooting at the Burkes again, Billy,” my father said, as if he were still the lead detective on the case. “First Desmond’s son, Richie. He lived. Peter Burke was not as lucky.”
“What about Felix?” Billy said. “I worked for Felix, mostly. Took a bullet for him that time. You remember that, Phil? Stepped right up there like a fucking champion.”
“Everybody remembers,” my father said.
“Showed them all some rope that night,” Billy said.
“Somebody shot up Felix’s house this time,” I said. “Just without him in it.”