He leaned back in his chair, clasped his hands across a truly ugly polka-dot shirt.
“Why’re we talking about her?” he said.
“Because she was Desmond Burke’s great lost love,” I said. “Because she was sent away in her youth, or left on her own, thus ending her illicit affair with Desmond. And at the other end of her life, when she dies, you are the one who pays for her final resting place.”
“I promised her father I’d be there for her if she needed me, whenever she needed me,” he said. “I kept the promise even after she died.”
“Desmond says you were the one who had her father killed as a way of assuming full control of the business,” I said.
“Desmond Burke is a liar,” he said. “I wasn’t the one who capped Vincent. He was. And you can fucking well tell him that I said that.”
Antonioni started coughing then, making him sound like a lung patient. Or sounding the way Billy Leonard had that day at Sherrill House. The young handsome guy I remembered from our last meeting was at the table in a flash with a glass of water. Antonioni drank enough to stop the coughing.
“We done here?” he said.
“Not quite,” I said.
“What else?”
“Who’s Dominic Carbone?” I said.
“Guy used to do some things for me,” Antonioni said, “before he went off on his own.” Antonioni shrugged. “I heard what happened to him,” he said. “Life’s hard. Then somebody shoots you.”
“Did you send Carbone after the Burkes?” I said.
“Fuck, no,” he said.
I said, “The gun they found on Dominic happened to be the same one used to shoot my ex-husband and kill Peter Burke and Desmond’s bodyguard.”
“I got nothing to do with any of that shit.”
“You do have to admit that it’s a bit of a coincidence, somebody who you say used to work with you ending up with that particular gun in his pocket,” I said.
“Your problem,” he said. “Not mine.”
I smiled a killer smile at him. He managed to keep himself under control.
“How well did you know Maria Cataldo when she was a young woman?” I said.
He said, “We were friends, nothing more, nothing less. I had too much respect for her father. And too much fear of the old man.”
“You’re sure?”
“Listen to me,” he said. “You know who wanted Maria in those days? Everybody did. Irish, Italians, everyfuckingbody. But the rest of us were smart enough to do our wanting of Vincent’s little girl from a distance. Just not Desmond.”
He leaned forward now in his chair.
“Can I give you a piece of advice?”
“Am I obligated to take it?”
“Walk away from this,” he said. “I’m telling you for the last time. Go tell Desmond I got no problems with him anymore except if he makes problems for me. Then we all live out however many days we got left. But you stay with this, you’re going to get into things you don’t want to get into. And something could happen you don’t want to happen.”
I had more questions but knew they weren’t going to get me where I wanted to go with Albert Antonioni, not now and probably not ever.
I stood up. So did Spike. Albert Antonioni watched both of us with the malevolent indifference of a snake.
“Stay out of my business,” he said.
“What business?” I said.
“All of it,” he said. He waved a dismissive hand at us. “Now go,” he said.
Spike and I walked out of the Old Canteen and into the sunlight of Federal Hill. Neither one of us spoke until Spike’s car was in sight. We both resisted the temptation, once outside, to look over our shoulders.
“He’s hiding something,” I said. “Or lying his ass off. Or both.”
“I’m thinking he might have had a bigger thing for Maria than he’s letting on,” Spike said.
“He said everybody wanted her,” I said.
Spike pressed his key, unlocked the car doors. We both got in.
“He did kind of blow your theory about him being a sucker for a pretty face all to hell,” Spike said.
I said, “Albert didn’t last this long without having an iron will.”
Then Spike put the car into gear. We then got the hell out of Rhode Island.
Thirty-Eight
Charlie Whitaker called the next morning.
“Did you read in the Globe about what happened at Logan two nights ago?”
I told him I was behind on my reading, even with my hometown paper.
“A big shipment of guns got stolen,” he said, “from Smith & Wesson, on their way to Australia. Or maybe it was New Zealand, those countries all look alike to me.”
I told him I would look up the story online when we got off the phone.
“So there’s that,” Charlie said, “which is in the news. But here is something that is not: Two days before that, a lot of guns went missing at Fort Devens.”
“I thought that was some kind of base for the reserves these days,” I said.
“It is,” Charlie said. “Army Reserve and National Guard and Marines. Nearly eight hundred military vehicles. And a lot of guns never get fired.”
“Sounds like they’re going to get fired now,” I said.
“Uh-huh,” Charlie said.
“Stolen guns at Logan and missing guns at Fort Devens,” I said.
“Sounds to me,” Charlie said, “as if somebody might be trying to build up to a big finish on that granddaddy of all gun deals we talked about.”
“You think it’s the same people,” I said.
“Doesn’t matter what I think,” he said. “ATF does.”
“Be a pretty ballsy move to make,” I said.
“I told you that volume is the key if somebody wanted to make real money selling guns illegally,” he said.
“You think Desmond Burke or Albert Antonioni has the manpower to make a ballsy move like this?” I said.
“Whoever did it might have had to outsource some of the labor,” Charlie said. “But, yeah, it’s doable.”
“And would involve enough money to have a fight over.”
“You need to remember something about guys like Desmond and Albert,” Charlie said. “They’d fight over dirt.”
“If Desmond wants it, Albert wants it,” I said. “And vice versa.”
“Heavy on the vice,” Charlie said.
“It might not even be as much about the money,” I said, “as about one of them wanting to beat the other.”
“It doesn’t have to be one of them,” Charlie said.
“I know.”
“But you want it to be.”
“I want this to be over,” I said. “That’s what I want.”
“Welcome to my world,” he said. “Or at least my former one.”
“How’s Mrs. Whitaker, by the way?” I said.
“Visiting her sister in Florida.”
“If you hear anything else, let me know,” I said. “I can use all the help I can get.”
“Just remember something,” Charlie Whitaker said. “If figuring shit like this out were easy, everybody’d do it.”
I told him I would hold the thought.
Thirty-Nine
I met my father for lunch at the Legal Sea Foods at Park Plaza. Every time we went there he would give me a brief tutorial about the history of Legal, from the first one opening in Inman Square in Cambridge in the 1950s, and give me the most up-to-date count on how many there were in the chain now, including one at Logan Airport.
But this one was our favorite. They still served the best seafood in town, the service was terrific. It also wasn’t too loud, even when crowded at lunchtime the way it was now. We both had chowder as an appetizer and fried clams as a main course. By the time the clams were in front of us, I had gone over as much of the conversation with Albert Antonioni the day before as I could remember.