“You’re not funny,” he said.
“Am, too,” I said.
“This,” he said, “is whatever the fuck it is keeps bringing you down here and bothering us.”
“I wasn’t aware I was bothering anybody,” I said. “And how did you even know I was in the neighborhood.”
“Mr. A. knows what he wants to know in Providence,” he said.
“Good for me to know,” I said.
“You being smart?”
“It comes to me naturally,” I said. “What’s your name, by the way?”
He waited, as if debating with himself if it was a good or bad idea to tell me. Then he shrugged.
“Joseph,” he said. “Joseph Marchetti.”
A car slowly passed us. I moved to my left, but not closer to him. When the car was gone, I took another step back into the street. I wondered if Connie Devane was watching the show from her upstairs window, and what she was thinking.
“Did you used to come visit Maria Cataldo here before she died?” I said.
“You just won’t stop fucking with this,” he said. “Is that what you want me to tell Mr. A.? That you won’t stop fucking with this even after being told to stop?”
“You can tell Mr. Antonioni whatever you like,” I said. “I don’t see as how I’m bothering him.”
“I’m telling you that you are,” he said. “And now I’m the one telling you to stop.”
“Or what?” I said pleasantly.
“Or you’ll get hurt,” he said.
I smiled and turned slightly away from him, as if I couldn’t believe I was having this conversation. And then I did something I had often practiced in front of a mirror at home, and reached into the bag that was over my left shoulder and pulled out my gun with my right, and had the .38 out and the hammer back as Joseph Marchetti was still practicing his death stare and not paying nearly close enough attention.
“What, you’re gonna shoot me in the middle of Pleasant Valley Parkway?” he said. “My ass.”
“Probably won’t shoot you there,” I said. “But up to the point when you threatened to hurt me, you’d only been annoying me.”
I kept the gun pointed at his nose. After I had pulled it out of my bag, I had made sure to take another step back and keep myself out of his reach, even if he was dumb enough to make a move on me.
“Now please step away from my car, and keep your hands where I can see them as you walk away from me,” I said.
“You got no idea how much more trouble you just made for yourself,” he said.
“Something else that comes to me naturally,” I said. “Now slide along the car and then get moving.”
He did that.
“No idea,” he said again.
When he was on the sidewalk, he just started walking, not looking back, as if he didn’t have a care in the world. When he was twenty-five yards away from me, I said, “Hey, Joseph.” I was leaning over the roof of my car, gun still on him, which is why he probably didn’t notice that I had my cell phone in my left hand. I had already clicked on the photo icon, so when he turned I was ready to take his picture.
“What,” he said.
“Make sure to tell Albert that a girl got the drop on you,” I said.
Then he smiled. It did absolutely nothing to soften his features.
“You a good shot?” he said.
“Good enough,” I said.
“I’m better,” Joseph Marchetti said.
When he had disappeared around the corner, I got behind the wheel of the Prius and started the engine and was thrilled that it didn’t blow up.
Then I once again got the hell out of Rhode Island, checking my rearview mirror all the way home.
Forty-Eight
Pete Colapietro, Providence cop, seemed to know where most of the bodies were buried from Narragansett to Woonsocket, both literally and figuratively.
Talking to him was a little bit like talking to Frank Belson, except that Pete was funnier than Frank, not that I would ever tell Frank that.
I called Pete when I got back to Boston and asked him about Joseph Marchetti.
“Told he’s worked his way up to midlevel-goon status,” Pete said. “Kind of guy Antonioni would use if he wanted to scare somebody he hadn’t sufficiently scared himself. But Joe’s not like family, if that’s what you’re asking. By all accounts, though, he is supposed to be some shooter.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.
“Protect and serve,” Pete said.
“Does Albert have any other family?” I said. “Wasn’t there a son?”
“Allie,” Pete said. “Dead, as Casey Stengel used to say, at the present time.”
More baseball. I was starting to believe that guys thought about baseball more than sex.
“Natural causes?” I said.
“Considering his line of work and who his old man was, yeah,” Pete said, “I guess you could put it that way.”
“If Albert wanted somebody to be gotten,” I said, “would Marchetti be his man?”
“One of many,” Pete said. “But yes.”
I thanked him.
“Sunny?” he said before I ended the call. “Just from the little I know, Joe Marchetti is not somebody on whom you put a gun and then he just lets it go.”
“Figured.”
“They either have eyes on you,” he said, “or somebody in the neighborhood made a call.”
I thought back to the day I thought I had been followed from Susan Silverman’s office.
“Aware of that, too, Pete.”
“Maybe you need to have somebody good to have eyes on you, too,” Pete Colapietro said.
I told him I would also keep that in mind, thanking him again. Then I texted Connie Devane the picture of Joseph Marchetti I had taken on my phone. We had exchanged numbers before I’d left her house.
She called me after she got the picture.
I said, “Is that the guy who used to come alone and visit Maria Cataldo?”
“No,” she said.
“Shit,” I said.
“You want me to keep watching the house for you?” she said. “It would make me feel useful.”
“That would make one of us,” I said.
Forty-Nine
Richie and I were having dinner at the Capital Grille on Boylston, next door to the Hynes Auditorium. The restaurant had originally been on Newbury, right before you got to Mass Ave. But they’d decided they needed a bigger space and found it the next block over. Blessedly, the steaks hadn’t gotten any smaller, nor the side dishes or desserts. Nor had the big pours for their wine.
Sometimes you just needed red meat and red wine, as diligent as you were about maintaining a girlish figure. Tonight was one of those nights.
“You pulled a gun on this jamoke?” Richie said.
“I did.”
“And you thought this was a prudent decision... why?”
“There was just something about him that pissed me off,” I said. “The casual way he thought he could harass me in broad daylight, and that I was just supposed to take it.”
Richie smiled.
“He fucked with the wrong Marine,” he said and raised his glass. I touched his with mine. We both drank.
Richie said, “I could tell my father to once again urge Albert Antonioni to leave you alone.”
“I think we are well past that,” I said. “Albert told me that your father had run out of favors.”
“Maybe Desmond still has things that Albert wants.”
“You mean business things,” I said.
“Who the hell knows?” Richie said.
Garrett, our waiter, brought Caesar salads for both of us. When he was gone, Richie said, “I’ve been thinking: It’s still a possibility that Maria might only turn out to be a side actor in this.”