“Always liked that house,” Billy said. “We had some times there.”
There was, I knew, no point in telling him that Felix had long since moved to the water. I remembered what my father had told me about people in Billy’s state, that you should talk to them like they were drunk.
“I didn’t know Desmond had a daughter,” Billy said to me.
“Only by marriage,” I said. “To Richie.”
“Billy,” my father said, leaning forward, “what we’re trying to determine is who might have a beef out of the past that might make them move on Desmond now.”
Billy’s eyes seemed to brighten suddenly. “Trouble was our business!” he said.
“Wasn’t it, though,” Phil Randall said.
“We used to joke, we did, that Desmond’s real profession was pissing people off,” Billy said.
“Tell me about it,” my father said.
Billy shook his head but was smiling again. “Girls,” he said.
“Desmond had a thing for the ladies?” my father said.
What began as a laugh with Billy Leonard quickly became a terrible-sounding cough.
“He was some cock hound back in the day, I’ll tell you that,” Billy said when he was able to speak. “You didn’t know that? What the fuck kind of detective were you?”
Billy Leonard reached down now without embarrassment, grinning at my father as if I weren’t there, as if this were just old boys being boys.
Then he grabbed his crotch.
“I used to tell him this business going to get him killed before our real business ever did,” Billy said.
“While he was married?” my father said.
Another laugh. More coughing, even worse than before. When Billy was able to catch his breath again he said, “Before, during, after. They’ll probably have trouble closing the casket someday, he’ll probably have one last hard-on.”
I knew little of Richie’s mother other than what he’d told me. He always made her sound like a living saint, and her romance with his father something that could have been imagined only by Irish poets, before the cancer took her. Coupled with what I knew about Desmond Burke, I found it difficult to imagine him tomcatting around Boston as a much younger man.
But I also knew something else: how often men thought with what Billy had just called their “business.”
“Those were the days,” Billy said, as if he was much happier back there than he was here.
“Was there possibly one girl more than the others who might have gotten him into trouble?” my father said.
Billy closed his eyes, rubbed a big hand over them, hard. But he was nodding.
“I forget her name.” He took his hand away and looked at my father and said, “You forget things?”
“Every day, Billy,” my father said. “Every goddamn day.”
“What was that big musical back in the day,” Billy said. “The one with the spics doing all that singing and dancing?”
“West Side Story?” Phil Randall said. “Sharks and the Jets and great to be in America.”
“West Side Story!” Billy Leonard said, slapping his thigh with his right hand. “It was like that. Shit, I thought them fighting over her was going to start a fucking war.”
“Desmond was fighting for this girl from another outfit?” my father said.
But Billy was no longer listening to him.
“So you’re Desmond’s daughter?” he said to me.
Before I had a chance to answer, he was suddenly shouting.
“Didn’t you hear me?” he said. “I asked you a fucking question.”
“Sure,” I said, “I’m Desmond’s daughter.”
“Goddamn it!” Billy said, trying to get up out of the chair, fear in his eyes now or anger or both. “Both of you stop talking to me now!”
He was wringing his hands now, rocking in the wheelchair, eyes darting around the room, having turned into a different person.
Which I knew he had.
“Both of you get the fuck out of here and leave me alone!” he shouted.
The door opened and Tim Leonard came hurrying back in.
“Get them out of here!” he shouted at his son. “I don’t know them!”
My father and I stood. I said to Tim, “I’m not sure what touched this off.”
“Air,” he said.
Neither one of us said anything in the elevator, or until we were back outside.
“You think the girl he was talking about is real?” I said to my father.
“I do,” he said.
“Same,” I said.
“He also said there were a lot of girls,” he said.
“He didn’t say the boys were fighting over a lot of girls,” I said.
“How do you plan on finding out who she was?” my father said.
“I’ll use all of my feminine wiles,” I said. “Look how well it worked with Billy.”
“I need a drink,” my father said.
“Same,” I said, and called Spike and told him we were on the way over.
Twenty-Two
I was still at Spike’s, with Spike. My father had polished off a quick whiskey, neat, and left for home, saying my mother had prepared meat loaf for dinner and to wish him luck.
“So Desmond liked girls, that pervert,” Spike said.
“Billy seemed pretty fixed on the notion,” I said.
“Another old perv,” Spike said.
It was between afternoon and evening. There was an older couple in the back room having an early dinner. A group of young guys, clearly biggies-on-the-go, were drinking and laughing at the bar, likely celebrating the money they’d moved today from one pocket to another.
Spike and I were sipping dirty martinis, extra olives.
“It’s not as if you can now request a sit-down with Desmond so you can ask him how much he was getting back in the day,” Spike said, “and with whom.”
“At which point, incidentally, I would be operating off the ramblings of an old man in the throes of dementia,” I said.
I sipped some of my martini. There were times when a perfect martini tasted so good it made me want to burst into tears. Or song.
This was one of them.
“The thing is,” I said to Spike, “that Billy actually seemed pretty stuck on this one girl, even if he couldn’t remember her name.”
“You know it proves nothing,” he said.
“It does not,” I said. “But how much of everything in this crazy old world comes back to sex or money?”
“Much,” Spike said.
“I want this to be a clue,” I said.
“I can tell.”
“Maybe the story isn’t Desmond fucking around with a gun deal,” I said. “Maybe it’s just Desmond having fucked around on Richie’s mother back in the day.”
“There was probably a more elegant way to put that,” Spike said.
“My father likes to tell people I’m where sailors go to learn to swear.”
Spike said, “Tough to talk to Richie about his father and other women.”
“Gee,” I said. “Ya think?”
I looked over at the bar. One of the young guys, with one of those haircuts shaved close on the sides but with a fade in front, extremely good-looking even if he might be trying too hard with the hair, was staring at me. Now that he’d finally caught my eye, he raised his glass and smiled. I raised mine and smiled back.
You still got it, kid.
“Who would you even talk to about Desmond’s, ah, romantic endeavors?” Spike said.
“It would have to be Felix,” I said.
Spike said, “Even the thought of a conversation like that makes me want another drink.”
“Same,” I said.
It was, after all, why God had invented Uber.
Twenty-Three
I met Felix Burke at 10:30 the next morning at the Warren Tavern on Pleasant Street in Charlestown.