“You’re telling me this all might have started because this Maria wouldn’t go to the prom with Antonioni back in the day?” Belson said. “And went with Desmond instead?”
“It has to be more than that, if Albert is the one behind all this,” I said.
“Which we are only surmising that he is.”
“Correct.”
“When did she go away?” Belson said.
We were sitting in the car in front of the house by then.
“Desmond believes it was April of 1980,” I said. “When she was in her early twenties.”
“Where’d she go?”
“Unclear,” I said. “All I know is that at the other end of her life she ends up in Providence.”
“Near Albert,” Belson said. “Who buried her. Where was she living when she died?”
“It was on the death certificate,” I said. “I don’t remember the exact address.”
“She own that house?” Belson said.
“Don’t know that yet,” I said.
“Worth knowing,” he said.
“In the morning,” I said.
“You think Desmond was aware his long-lost love was living an hour away in Goombah Central?” he said.
“I’d ask him, but Richie said he’s out of town for a couple days.”
“Where?”
I shrugged. “Maybe stealing more guns.”
Belson said, “I’m putting a car out here tonight.”
I grinned. “For me?”
“For your old man,” he said. “It would fuck up our friendship if you got clipped on my watch.”
“You old softie.”
“You know who we really need to talk to?” Belson said. “Maria Cataldo.”
He waited while I went into the house and got Rosie and walked her halfway up the block and back. His car didn’t pull away until an unmarked pulled up in front of the house.
I brushed, washed up, moisturized, put Rosie at the end of my bed and my .38 on the nightstand next to me. Shut off the lights and thought about Maria Cataldo, who’d left and gone away, hey, hey, hey.
In the morning, I called the tax assessor’s office in Providence, Rhode Island, and the third person to whom I spoke, a pleasant woman named Mrs. Krummenacher, informed me that the house in which Maria Cataldo was living on Pleasant Valley Parkway at the time of her death was owned by Mr. Albert Antonioni.
Forty-Five
I met my father for breakfast at the Taj Café, where he had taken me as a little girl for special occasions when it actually was still the old Ritz. It was another reason why I knew it would always be the old Ritz for me, the way it always would be with Phil Randall. He still called the football field at Boston University, my alma mater, Braves Field.
I had waited until this morning to call and tell him about Spike.
“You could have called last night,” he said.
“And had my sainted mother shit a brick?” I said.
“The mouth on you,” he said.
Now I was telling him over our late breakfast what I had learned about Albert Antonioni’s house on Pleasant Valley Parkway and how, no pun intended, even more roads than ever seemed to keep running through him and Maria. By now he was working on eggs with hash. I had ordered oatmeal.
“I think I may have been going about this all wrong,” I said. “I haven’t found out as much as I could have, or should have, about this woman.”
“If it is about her,” he said, “then she has inspired some very deep emotions in some extremely hard men.”
“If Albert gave her a house in which to live, he must still have had feelings about her,” I said.
“Ones that certainly passed the test of time,” my father said. “But this might not be anything more than an enduring friendship, not an enduring love.”
“He still might be the one looking to settle a score with Desmond,” I said. “You do understand we persist in making several leaps of faith here. Some of them giant ones.”
“Faith and hope,” he said.
“Or it could be another of Desmond’s enemies,” I said.
“Who are legion,” he said.
“You mind if we get back to Maria for a second?” I said.
“Whatever you want,” he said. “You’re paying.”
“Could she have married in the time after she left Boston?” I said. “Had children? Had a life completely apart from the one she was leading as Vincent Cataldo’s femme-fatale daughter?”
“She must have left some kind of footprint between Boston and Providence,” he said. “Isn’t Big Brother always watching?”
“Him or Facebook,” I said. “Or the Russians.”
He poured some Tabasco sauce on his hash. He used hot sauce on food only when my mother wasn’t around.
“Start with what footprint she may have left in Providence,” he said, “and work your way back from there.”
“You mean go knock on some doors,” I said.
He smiled. “Good girl,” he said.
“Long time since I’ve been that, Daddy,” I said.
“Not to your daddy,” my father said. “How’s Spike, by the way?”
“Says his arm hurts like a bitch,” I said. “Said the same thing that Richie said, that getting shot isn’t for sissies.”
Phil Randall smiled again.
“Was in his case,” he said.
Forty-Six
I went alone to Providence this time. The only person who knew I was going was my father. He had asked if I wanted him to tag along. I told him that as much as I always welcomed the pleasure of his company, I was going it alone today.
“I know how much you hate baseball expressions,” he said. “But you are some tough out.”
“For a girl,” I said.
“Hey,” he said, “nobody’s perfect.”
It turned out that Albert Antonioni had done well by Maria Cataldo. I had no idea how long Maria had lived on Pleasant Valley Parkway. But according to the Providence recorder of deeds, the two-story brick home with white pillars forming an archway in front had belonged to Albert Antonioni since 1975.
I had no idea if there was still a Mrs. Albert Antonioni. Perhaps he had lived here with Maria. Maybe he moved around, from one property to another, as a way of making himself a moving target. What was the Italian expression for mistress? Goomara? Goomah? One of those. Or both. Maybe Maria, when she was back in Albert Antonioni’s life, had become his goomara.
But there was nothing on this tree-lined street, with obviously expensive homes, that spoke of the Mob. It looked like a street where young professionals could live more cheaply here than they would up in Boston in suburbs like Chestnut Hill or Wellesley. I had read all the stories in the Globe about how more and more people were commuting all the way to Boston from neighborhoods in Providence exactly like this.
My father’s friend from the Providence cops, Pete Colapietro, had told me over the phone that Pleasant Valley Parkway was just far enough away from Providence College to make it a desirable location.
“You get closer to the college,” he said, “you’ve got these absentee owners and a bunch of triple-deckers where they have loud parties and puke out the windows.”
“Kids today,” I said.
“Future hedge-funders,” he said, “and other white-collar criminals.”
I stared up at 140 Pleasant Valley Parkway and thought: Lot of house for an old woman.
I went up the front walk and rang the bell, not knowing if anyone still lived there, or had ever lived there with Maria Cataldo. There was no sound from inside, everything about the house as quiet and still as the neighborhood.