“I know I could be wrong about her,” I said. “But I don’t think I am. I think she’s the star.”
“You hate being wrong,” he said.
“You’re the same way,” I said. I smiled sweetly. “Look how angry you were at yourself after so badly remarrying.”
“I know you like to play this game,” Richie said. “But I don’t.”
“Change of subject?”
“If you do, I’ll pay the check,” he said.
“You’re doing that anyway.”
He smiled. I liked it when he smiled.
I said, “Your father knows more than he is telling about her.”
“I’ve continued to ask about that in different ways,” he said. “To no avail.”
“Ask again when you get the chance,” I said. “I’m willing to offer sex in return.”
Richie Burke smiled then, and I felt the way I did when he smiled at me that way on our first date.
“As if I need to negotiate to get that,” he said.
And, as it turned out, he did not.
Fifty
Before Richie left in the morning I said, “Please do not look for a way to engage with Joseph Marchetti.”
“By ‘engage,’” he said, “I assume you mean do not go down to Providence and find him and beat the living shit out of him.”
“It doesn’t get us any closer to an answer,” I said.
“It would make me feel better about everything,” he said.
“You can’t beat up everybody who’s mean to me,” I said. “It would become a full-time job.”
I spent a lot of my morning trying to do another Google search on Maria Cataldo, an even deeper dive than before, hoping there had been something I had missed. But there was not. I called Pete Colapietro, who said I wasn’t required to check in with him daily.
“How does somebody disappear from radar the way she apparently did?” I said. “Before and after the invention of the Internet?”
“She must have had money,” he said, “because for the life of me I can’t find credit card information on her anywhere. Or a home she ever owned. Or driver’s license. Or anything.”
“Give me the simple life,” I said.
“Must have been a lot of money,” he said.
“Mob money is often like that,” I said.
“Daddy’s money,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
“So far what I’ve mostly got is bupkus,” Pete said.
“Join the club,” I said.
I made myself more coffee and then fell back on one of my rock-solid foundations for first-rate crime detecting:
I made another list.
I painstakingly wrote it all down again, from the start. No supposition this time. Just facts, in an orderly timeline, as accurate as I could make it. I wrote down all the names, from Richie and Desmond and Felix and the late Peter Burke. Buster. Billy Leonard. Vinnie Morris. Charlie Whitaker. Tony Marcus. A bad sport named Joseph Marchetti.
Albert Antonioni.
Connie Devane.
Maria Cataldo.
Who Desmond had loved and lost. Who maybe Albert Antonioni had loved, too. A girl named Maria: who had lived in a house that Albert owned, and had often been visited by him.
And by a younger man.
Who was that younger man?
I looked at my list, and when the beating I had taken off Exeter Street had occurred. I thought about the recklessness of that, and the further recklessness of coming to my house and trying to shoot me and shooting Spike instead. It reminded me of something I had read in a novel once, Baja Oklahoma by Dan Jenkins. It was a book I’d picked up in college, one about a spunky waitress who dreamed of making it as a country songwriter, and who wouldn’t allow herself to ever believe she couldn’t do that in a man’s world.
A woman who wouldn’t take any shit from anybody.
In it there had been a list of the Ten Stages of Drunkenness, and I’d always thought the last two were the best:
Invisible.
Bulletproof.
Maybe that’s where our shooter was now. Maybe he thought nobody could catch him, or touch him.
But he was wrong.
I was going to catch him.
I just needed a little boost.
So I called the best booster I knew, Ghost Garrity, a thief who could disable any alarm and who could pick a lock while wearing oven mitts, and asked if he wanted to make a run down to Providence with me.
There was the brief feeling that perhaps I was the one thinking she was invisible, and bulletproof.
Fortunately, the feeling passed.
Fifty-One
Ghost Garrity had a bad toupee, which presupposed the notion that there were actually good toupees. He usually walked around in sports jackets and ties that seemed to be the color of various sorbets. He was small and whippet-thin and jittery, except when he wanted to steal something, or execute a successful break-in. Tonight he wore a black nylon windbreaker and black jeans and a black ball cap with the “G” logo for The Gap on the front.
“Ghost,” I said, “you shop at The Gap?”
“Lifted it,” he said.
We had waited until dark and parked a block away from Maria Cataldo’s house on an adjacent street.
“Tell me again what we’re looking for here,” Ghost said.
“Something.”
“That narrows it down,” he said. “You never told me who owns the place, by the way.”
We were making our way across the backyard. I told him who owned the house. Ghost stopped.
“The fuck,” he said. “You want me to filch a house belongs to Albert Antonioni?”
“I do,” I said.
Ghost said, “The price I gave you? Double it.”
“If we live,” I said.
“You’re not funny.”
“Am, too,” I said.
We made our way across the rest of the backyard to the back door. Ghost gently tried it, just in case. Locked. Then he reached into his gym bag and came out with two pairs of night goggles that looked as if they’d been borrowed — or lifted — from Navy SEALs.
“Put these on when we get inside,” Ghost said, “unless you want the whole freaking neighborhood to see the lights go on.”
Before he picked the lock, he held up what looked like an oversized version of an iPhone and tapped it a few times with his finger and finally said, “Deactivated the alarm.”
“You were able to do it with that thing?” I said.
“You wouldn’t believe how many of these alarm companies use wireless,” Ghost said. “Takes the challenge out of this shit.”
“Now what?”
“Now I work my magic on the door,” he said. “Want to time me?”
Even with a dead bolt, it took him about a minute, and then we were inside, putting on the goggles, Ghost going around the kitchen and closing the levered blinds, the room now weirdly lit by the night vision, as if we really were Navy SEALs about to go room to room hunting for bin Laden.
“You want to do this together?” Ghost said. “Or you take one room and I take another.”
“We separate,” I said.
“And I’m looking for something, I just don’t know what,” he said.
“Anything she might have left behind,” I said. “Anything that might tell me more about who she was.”
“She was somebody living at Albert Fucking Antonioni’s house,” Ghost said, “that’s who she was.”
“Nobody likes a whiner,” I said.
It seemed that all that had been left was the furniture. No paintings on the wall, no photographs, no books in the wall shelves, nothing on the antique coffee table in the spacious front room, nothing on the mantel above the fireplace. No clothes in the master bedroom upstairs, nothing in the drawers of the nightstand next to the old four-poster bed. No toiletries left behind in the bathroom. The two spare bedrooms were the same. It was as Connie Devane had suggested to me, as if Maria Cataldo had never been here at all.