“On a bet,” he said, “you do not want to be in the middle of this any longer.”
“I’m still not sure what this is,” I said.
“Irrelevant,” he said.
“I got into it because of Richie, and if I am in the middle of it, it’s still because of Richie.”
“Or because, and I say this with love, you are more stubborn than a tick.”
“A tick,” I said. “Really, Daddy?”
He shrugged.
“Come on,” I said. “You think Antonioni is going to kill me for being nosy?”
He gave me a long look but said nothing. But we both knew it was his way of answering my question in the affirmative.
“So you’re saying he would kill me for being nosy?” I said.
“I didn’t say that,” he said. “But clearly there is bad blood between those two old men that might be deeper than the kind you get in the Middle East.”
He picked up a fried clam and dipped it in tartar sauce and ate it.
“But maybe if I can figure this all out,” I said, “I can take everybody out of danger once and for all. Including me.”
“My stubborn, darling daughter,” he said. He grinned. “You think it’s too late for med school?”
I had stuck my yellow legal pad in my purse. I used it as a study aid and told him everything that I knew and everything I thought and everything that had happened. I told him about my conversation with Charlie Whitaker.
“This continues to be a hairball, without question,” he said.
“I can’t let somebody like Antonioni scare me off the case,” I said.
“It’s never been your case,” my father said.
“But if I do let him scare me off, what does that make me?”
“Alive,” he said.
“If Desmond thinks Albert is after him,” I said, “why hasn’t he gone after Albert?”
“Just because he hasn’t doesn’t mean he won’t.”
He had finished with his clams. I’d eaten only half of mine, if that. He looked at the pile of them still on my plate, then looked at me, raised his eyebrows.
“Have at it,” I said.
It had always been a wonder to me that for my entire life I had watched Phil Randall eat like a horse and never put on a pound. And, by his own account, he had cholesterol levels so low his doctors wanted to carry him around the room on their shoulders.
“I know this is important to you because Richie is,” my father said. “It is why I have helped you as much as I can. But it becomes more clear by the moment that the only person who still wants you in this is you.”
I started to say something. He reached across the table and patted my hand to stop me.
“Desmond would never harm you,” he said. “Likewise, I do not believe he would let anyone else harm you if he could stop it. But that does not mean he can stop this thing if it becomes a runaway train. And Albert Antonioni, from the sound of things, has issued his last warning to you.”
“You’re telling me I’m beating a dead horse here,” I said. “Right?”
My father smiled his answer, and he was the one who looked younger than springtime. And made me feel safe, even as I knew I was not.
Forty
When you first came to see me,” Dr. Susan Silverman said, “you said that you felt as if you lacked self-worth and purpose because Richie was about to marry someone else.”
“As I recall,” I said, “I did a lot of blubbering that day about the one whose name must not be mentioned.”
She smiled a smile that made Mona Lisa look as if she were in the midst of a laugh riot.
“Kathryn,” she said.
“Her,” I said.
It occurred to me I sounded like Frank Belson talking about his new boss Captain Glass.
“And if there has been one consistent thread since that time,” she said, “it has been your desire to understand both the depth and complexity of your feelings for Richie.”
She was right, of course. I had been trying to deal with that in this room, as well as the daddy issues that she had made me confront for the first time in my life. And was doing better with it all. I knew there were qualities, especially ones involving strength and confidence, that both Richie and Phil Randall shared. I knew that as quick and funny as Richie could be, my father was quicker, and funnier. I knew I relied on both for their strength and confidence, even as I felt that challenged my own confidence and made me feel weak, almost as if I were existing on a fault line.
Susan Silverman had once asked me what she said would sound like a simple question, and was not.
“Is Richie your type?” she said.
I told her I had never thought about it, what my type was. The best I could do that particular day, and in many of the days since, was admit that someone I considered the love of my life might only partially be my type. And that I hated his strength as much as I loved it.
At least I did far less blubbering these days.
So there was that.
She wore a white sweater today and a black leather skirt and her skin looked as flawless as ever, and so did her thick, gleaming black hair. Her necklace was a freshwater pearl with small gold bands crisscrossed in front of it. Her fingernails were crimson. Susan Silverman, as usual, made me think of an old David Letterman line: She looked like a million damn dollars.
I wore a gray Michael Kors sweater dress I had bought on sale, with shoes to match. I always dressed up for her, every single time, as if we weren’t just therapist and patient but having an ongoing fashion-off, even though I knew the competition existed only in my mind.
“We’ve come a long way since then,” she said.
“Have we?” I said.
She didn’t respond. She rarely did when I was the one asking a question. I had called her the day before upon returning from Providence and asked when her soonest opening was. It turned out to be late in the afternoon today. I had spent the hours between lunch with my father and my appointment trying in vain to find out anything about where Maria Cataldo had lived her life after leaving Boston, and had run into one dead end after another. The best I could do was her last residence, in Providence, not far from Federal Hill, the address listed on her death certificate. I had not yet been able to find out who owned the house because the tax assessor’s office in Providence had closed early today. But I planned to take a ride down there myself tomorrow and talk to her neighbors. You just keep poking around and hope that eventually something will fly up at you.
For now here the two of us were, in the office on Linnaean Street, with the last of the afternoon sun coming through the blinds behind her. There was the soft scent of perfume in the room, hers or mine, or both.
“On some basic, practical level, I know my father is right and Richie is right, and even the old gangsters are right, and I should let this go,” I said.
“But you remain resistant to the notion of quitting,” she said.
“It all started with Richie,” I said.
“It often does,” she said.
“Man of my dreams,” I said.
“Is it still about him, or has it become more about you?” she said.
She was completely still and self-contained, not taking notes in this moment. But as always, I still had the sense that she was in motion somehow and that I was trying to keep up with her. There were many times when I left this office feeling better than I had when I’d entered, but I often left feeling exhausted as well.
“There is a part of me pushing back against powerful men telling me to do something I myself have not chosen to do,” I said.
“The old men are powerful,” Susan said. “Your father has always held a position of power in your life. As has Richie.”