When Rosie and I got to Melanie Joan’s, I saw nothing suspicious on the street, waited until Rosie performed her last ablution of the night, went inside, locked the front door, set the alarm, decided to take a hot bath before I went to bed.
When I got out of the bath, I checked my naked self out in front of the full-length mirror in the bathroom. Front first. Then, looking over my shoulder, back.
“Older my ass,” I said out loud, winking at myself. “And I do mean ass.”
It had been over an hour since I’d finished nursing the second martini I’d had at Spike’s. I went to the kitchen and fixed myself a Jameson, neat, and got into bed with a ballpoint pen and a yellow legal pad and wrote down everything that had happened, both everything I thought and everything I knew. Trying to make things linear this time.
Lists always help me. I never wrote them up on a laptop. I wrote them out in longhand, in my Catholic school handwriting. I thought better with a pen in my hand, the way I did with a brush in my hand.
I wished it were easy to make things take shape now.
I wrote and occasionally sipped whiskey.
It was late. I knew I should be tired, and just slightly overserved. I was neither. Maybe I could hold my liquor better as I got older. I thought of an old line from Winston Churchill, the one about how he liked to drink alcohol before and during and after meals, and often in the intervals.
It had never bothered me to drink alone. I never drank in excess when drinking alone, which meant alone with Rosie. This Rosie and the one before her. It was past midnight now. Another old line came to me, though I couldn’t remember who’d written it or said it, about this being the hour when people told each other the truth. If I were with Desmond Burke right now, would he tell me the truth? Would Albert Antonioni?
Would they tell me truths about themselves, or each other?
If Richie were here with me right now, in Melanie Joan’s big bed, and asked for the truth about us, what would I tell him?
Maybe I had been overserved after all.
Would I tell Richie that I preferred being alone? Maybe that was the real truth, from me, to me, at this time of night. I had been unable to work for others and with others when I was still a cop. Now I worked alone. I had been unable to succeed as a wife. So now I lived alone.
The most stable relationships of my adult life, other than the one with my father, had been with two miniature English bull terriers, both female, and a gay man.
My relationship with Richie, I knew in my heart, was both stable and unstable at the same time.
I checked what I had written one more time, still found more questions than answers, finished my drink, turned out the lights.
At least I did have Spike and Rosie.
Yeah, girl, I thought, before sleep came far more quickly than it usually did.
Who’s got it better than you?
Thirty-Seven
I left the Albert Antonioni negotiations to Spike and tried to find out everything there was to know about Dominic Carbone.
He had been born in Cranston, as it turned out, dropped out of high school there, been raised, according to a couple classmates I was able to track down, by a single mother who worked as a cocktail waitress at various local establishments that were never confused with the bar at the Four Seasons.
The father, according to Pete Colapietro, had been a midlevel thug in Antonioni’s operation until he was found dead one night, shot in the head, in the front seat of a car parked at the Red Sox’s minor-league ballpark in Pawtucket. Despite having been estranged from his father for most of his hardscrabble life, by then Dominic Junior had already gone into the family business.
I called Richie about Carbone. Richie said his father had assured him he had nothing to do with the guy ending up the way Dominic Senior had. I asked if Desmond had bought into the notion that Carbone had been the one shooting at the Burke family.
“He’s like you, and Belson,” Richie said. “Suspicious of how insanely neat it all seems.”
“But might there now be an escalation of the bad blood between him and Albert?” I said.
“My father says no,” Richie said.
“Do you believe him?”
“I do not,” he said. “But if there is the kind of escalation you’re talking about, I’d sort of like you to stay out of the crossfire.”
“You know I can’t,” I said, “even if your father is having a difficult time accepting that fact.”
“He doesn’t think you can’t,” Richie said. “He thinks you won’t.”
“All part of getting to know me,” I said. “Just not as well as you do.”
“And what a lucky boy I am for that,” Richie said.
“Neither your father nor Albert Antonioni is the type to let bygones be bygones,” I said. “I just find it counterintuitive to believe that this is over just because a stiff in Boston had the right gun in his possession when he died. I frankly think someone planted it on him.”
“Counterintuitive,” Richie said. “You continue to sound remarkably unlike a private cop.”
“And you,” I said, “sound remarkably unlike a child of the Boston Mob.”
The second morning after they had discovered the body of Dominic Carbone, Spike called before my run and told me that, almost like a Christmas miracle, Albert Antonioni had agreed to once again meet with us.
“I think you and Albert are kind of in the same place,” Spike said. “You want him to show you his, and he wants you to show him yours. So to speak.”
“Where is this happening?”
“Joe Marzilli’s Old Canteen,” Spike said.
“It’s practically become our place,” I said.
Spike was dressed in what he called gangster chic for the occasion: black pinstriped suit with wide chalk stripes and wider lapels than I’d ever seen on him, white shirt, silver tie, ankle boots with zippers on the sides.
“You do look like a gangster,” I said. “Unfortunately, it’s Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls.”
“I see what you did there,” he said, as I slid into the front seat next to him. “Played the Broadway-musical card on the gay guy.”
“Stereotypes are ugly,” I said. “Just not as ugly as that suit.”
“You no longer seem concerned about being followed,” Spike said.
“I look at it this way,” I said. “Desmond gonna be Desmond.”
“Did you just say that?”
I giggled.
We hit little traffic on I-95 and ended up with a parking spot about a block away from the Old Canteen. I left my gun in the glove compartment. So did Spike. Our operating theory was that we would once again be patted down. A larger theory was that if Albert wanted to shoot both of us today, he could, but likely would not.
It was the same table as before, with what looked to be the same lineup of sidemen posted around the room.
There were no coffee cups on the table, no offer of anything to drink, nothing social about the gathering, which had all the charm of a parole board hearing.
“I don’t have a lot of time,” Albert Antonioni said when Spike and I were seated.
He sounded like Desmond.
“Maria Cataldo,” I said.
“What about her?”
“Why did you pay to have her buried?” I said.
“Who says I did?”
“Albert,” I said. “You said you didn’t have a lot of time. Let’s not either one of us waste it.”