“This isn’t a me-too moment,” I said. “But they have no right to impose their will on mine.”
“Nor should they.”
“You want to know the truth?” I said.
There might have been another slight upturn to the corners of her mouth.
She said, “My experience is that the truth serves everyone best in here.”
“I get angry when they treat me like a little girl,” I said.
“Angry or less empowered.”
A statement of fact more than a question, as if she were answering for both of us.
“Both,” I said.
“But are you more empowered to solve the mystery,” she said, “or to prove a point that you will not be cowed or told to stand down, even by men who care about you?”
“Both,” I said again.
Her dark eyes were alive, alight, and completely focused on me.
“May I say something that might sound less than politically correct?”
“Of course.”
“I can’t let some old goombah threaten me,” I said.
She nodded.
“And I always have hated being told what to do,” I said.
“Only by the men in your life?”
“Not just them. But yes.”
“What about Richie?”
“We’ve discussed this,” I said. “This is my chance to protect him.”
“And in the past, you have always felt, especially when going to him for help, that he was protecting you.”
“Yes.”
“But you will allow your friend Spike to assist you, and even protect you if need be.”
“Spike asks nothing in return.”
“But Richie does?”
“He wants me in return.”
“Something you are unwilling to give.”
“At least not in total.”
“To go back to the beginning,” Susan Silverman said, “you were shattered when you thought you had lost him to another woman.”
“I felt my own sense of loss defining me,” I said. “Even consuming me.”
“And making you feel powerless.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Loss is a defining and consuming thing,” she said.
“Oh, baby,” I said.
Susan Silverman smiled fully now, eyes and face and teeth. A rare thing from her. It was as if one more light had suddenly been turned on in the room, or the sunlight outside her window.
“Oh, ha!” she said.
“‘Oh, ha’?” I said.
“It’s a combination of ‘oh, ho’ and ‘aha,’ she said, still smiling.
“Is that an expression you learned at Harvard?” I said.
“Actually,” Susan Silverman said, “I got it from the man of my dreams.”
Forty-One
I had the feeling that my car was being followed on the way back from Susan Silverman’s office.
There was a black car making the turns that I made off Linnaean to Humboldt to Mass Ave. I wasn’t good on car makes but thought it might be a Taurus.
The car stayed with me to 2A to Eliot Street to John F. Kennedy. It was gone when I got to North Harvard, and then to Cambridge, but it meant little if whoever was following me, if somebody was following me, knew where I lived.
So instead of taking Soldiers Field Road and then Storrow Drive to my usual exit, I headed down Commonwealth Ave toward Chestnut Hill, before circling around to the entrance to the Mass Pike in West Newton. By then there was no black car behind me. I had called Spike and put him on speaker before I got on the Pike, and he told me to drive straight to his place if I thought the tail was still with me. I told him I would. He told me that even if I didn’t spot anybody, he was going to meet me at Melanie Joan’s, and bring food with him, and wasn’t going to take no for an answer.
“Who says no to you?” I said.
“Gary,” he said.
“May I ask who Gary is?”
“No you may not,” he said.
By the time I had gotten off the Pike at the exit for Copley Square and the Prudential, I had lost the tail, if it had even been a tail in the first place.
I took Rosie out when I got back, fed her, changed into jeans and a sweater, and opened a bottle of wine and thought about Maria Cataldo, and how little I still knew of her life. I did not know if she had ever married, I did not know if she had had children, I did not know where she had gone after her father had sent her away, or if she had simply left on her own. Tomorrow I would call Wayne Cosgrove, who liked to brag that he was better at finding out things than I was, and never had to point a gun at anybody to get information.
But Maria Cataldo was dead, that was now part of the world of objective facts. So was Dominic Carbone. And Peter Burke. And poor Buster. Somebody had shot at Richie, and shot up Felix’s house, and beat me up. Somebody was coming for Desmond, that much remained clear. It could have been Dominic Carbone who did all the shooting, but it if had been, what grudge had he been settling?
And if it wasn’t the late Dominic Carbone, then we were right back where we started, with a gun still pointed at the Burkes.
And what did any of this, or all of this, have to do with guns suddenly going missing?
I looked at Rosie at the other end of the couch and said, “Rosebud, maybe it’s not too late for med school.”
She picked up her head, quickly ascertained that there was no food anywhere in the area, put her head back down, and was soon snoring. Some sidekick.
The wine was in the ice bucket next to the dining room table, which I had set. I had already lighted the candles. Romantic dinner for two, just without the romance.
Spike arrived a few minutes later with a big bag full of food: Caesar salads with extra anchovies, veal Milanese, which he assured me traveled extremely well, a side order of french fries. I told him I didn’t recall french fries being served with veal Milanese at Spike’s and he said, “Have you ever turned down my french fries?”
I said I had not, nor would I ever.
“Didn’t think so,” he said.
When we were finished eating and on the couch drinking coffee laced with Jameson, Rosie between us, I said to Spike, “This thing really is a hairball.”
Spike nodded. “Usually we’re able to think a couple moves ahead,” he said.
“We’re able to think a couple moves ahead?” I said.
“Yup,” he said. “Me and you, kid. A team. Like Nick and Nora.”
It was just one more thing to love about Spike. He loved old Thin Man movies as much as I did. A lot of snappy patter and a couple pitchers of martinis before they finally figured out who was responsible for that stiff in the drawing room.
“Let’s say that killing Carbone was just a head fake, which is what Frank Belson called it,” I said. “Why, though? Whoever’s behind this wanted Desmond to know he was closing in on him. He wanted to tighten the noose. Why would he plant the gun on Carbone and do everything except hire a skywriter to make the cops and the rest of us think the thing is over?”
I sipped coffee that tasted more like whiskey than coffee and was lip-smacking good.
“Maybe,” Spike said, “it is you he is trying to throw off.”
“Why me?”
“Because this person, whomever he is, has clearly done his homework,” Spike said. “And if he has done his homework, he knows that you may be a bigger threat to him than Desmond or Felix or even the cops, whom he may have surmised aren’t kept up at night worrying about bad guys shooting each other up. You should be flattered, if you think about it. All those bad guys and he’s worried about a girl.”
“I’m convinced a girl started this,” I said.
“Say it’s Albert,” Spike said. “If he waited this long to get even with Desmond over Maria Cataldo, he’s got nothing but time now.”