“Evidently.”
“He had to have followed you to the bar and waited,” I said. “Because he had no way of knowing that you’d even be there on a Sunday night.”
“Maybe he had been to the bar before,” Richie said. “He picked a spot on the street with no cameras, according to the police. After I was hit, I tried to roll over to get a glimpse of him, or maybe a car. But he had just walked off into the night.”
I leaned closer and said, “Who would do this? You’ve never been a part of that world.”
“But I’m a part of their life,” Richie said.
“You know what I mean.”
“I do,” Richie said. “My father always talked about boundaries. Now someone has decided to cross them.”
“As a way of sending a message,” I said.
“Evidently,” Richie said.
“But about what?”
“Maybe that someone is coming for him,” Richie said. “But we’re not going to figure that out right now.”
“Let me drive you home,” I said.
“My father and my uncle have already insisted, I’m afraid.”
Another weak smile.
“But feel free to engage them in a lively debate about that.”
I squeezed his hand, in the quiet room in the quiet of the big hospital in the time before dawn. “Pass,” I said.
“And you, always tough enough to charge at an automatic weapon,” Richie said.
“There are boundaries that even I won’t cross,” I said.
“You should go,” Richie said.
“When you go, big boy.”
“Okay.”
“Do you need anything?”
“As a matter of fact, I do.”
“Name it,” I said. “As long as it doesn’t involve me locking the door and disrobing.”
“Some Florence Nightingale you are,” he said. “I’m just going to assume you dressing up like a candy striper is out of the question as well.”
“Seriously,” I said. “Is there anything you need?”
“For you to leave this alone,” Richie said.
“You know I can’t do that.”
“I mean it,” Richie said.
“Me, too,” I said.
But the good news now that he was a client, I told him, is that he was looking at a whopping family discount.
Five
The last thing Richie had told me was that he wanted to sleep. So I didn’t call him until late the next morning, to ask how he was feeling. He said that, all things considered, the biggest being that he’d been shot, he felt all right. I asked him if he was armed. He said that he was, with pain meds, and that he was going back to sleep.
An hour later I was sitting in Tony Marcus’s back office at Buddy’s Fox, his club in the South End. He had briefly changed the name to Ebony and Ivory. But now it was back to Buddy’s Fox, and was as I remembered it, booths along both walls as you walked in, bar in the back. There were a handful of customers when I walked in, some in booths, some eating lunch, some seated at the bar. All of the customers were black. As always at Tony’s place, I felt whiter than the Republican National Convention.
A new bodyguard of Tony’s, who introduced himself as Tayshawn, was waiting for me at the bar. He did not ask to pat me down, just simply said, “Gun?” With the firepower on the premises, Tayshawn had clearly decided we could go with the honor system.
“Not to Tony’s?” I said, and opened the Bottega Veneta bag that Richie had paid far too much for last Christmas to show him.
He walked me back to Tony’s office. Tony’s two main sidemen were back there with him. One was a small, jittery young guy of indeterminate age named Ty Bop. He was Tony’s shooter. Today he was wearing a black baseball cap with a yellow P on the front, and the skinniest pair of skinny jeans I had ever seen on a man or woman. Even those hung down off his hips. His high-top sneakers were bright white. We had met plenty of times before, but he gave no sign of greeting or recognition, just leaned against the wall and swayed slightly from side to side, as if listening to music that only he could hear.
Ty Bop was to my right. To my left, opposite wall, was Junior, Tony’s body man, one roughly the size of Old Ironsides. The threat from both of them was palpable. There had been a time, with two badass men in pursuit and fully intending to shoot me dead, that I had come running into Buddy’s Fox, where Tony’s guys had dissuaded them.
Tony ran prostitution in Boston, and was involved with other criminal enterprises when they suited his interests, much like a street venture capitalist. He was as much of a badass as anybody in town, no matter how much he liked to present himself as a gent. He had always reminded me of what Billy Dee Williams looked like when he was young, a light-skinned black man with a thin mustache, bespoke tailoring at all times, day or night, a soft-spoken manner that was nothing more than a front.
Tony Marcus had his cut in Boston, and the Burke family had theirs, and the Italians, what was left of them, had theirs. Eddie Lee still controlled Chinatown. Two of the old bosses, Gino Fish and Joe Broz, were long gone. Joe had died of old age. Gino had not.
Tony and I were not friends. Tony didn’t have friends, unless you counted Ty Bop and Junior. But we had managed to do favors for each other from time to time when our interests had coincided. I still trusted him about as far as either one of us would have been able to throw Junior. I was sure he felt the same about me.
He did not get up from behind his desk when I entered the office, just studied me up and down as if I were auditioning to be one of his girls.
“Sunny Randall,” he purred. “You are still one fine-looking piece of ass, girl.”
I sat down in the chair across from him and crossed my legs. The black skirt I was wearing was already short enough to show off my legs. Crossing them showed off more. Tony noticed, in full. But that had been the point.
“Don’t make me file a complaint with Human Resources, Tony,” I said.
It made him laugh.
“Girl, in my world, I am Human Resources,” he said.
“How’s business?” I said.
“Busier business than ever, Sunny Randall,” he said. “Tryin’ to keep up with the modern world. Lookin’ to do some of that di-ver-si-fi-cation shit.” Then proceeded to give me more information than I wanted or needed about how he planned to do that, with what he described as his “new fucking business model,” and his plans for expansion out of state. As always, he went back and forth between talking street and trying to sound as if in training to become Warren Buffett.
He was wearing a gray pinstriped suit, a pale lavender shirt, a lavender tie just slightly darker than the shirt, and a pocket square that matched both. But he was looking older than he had the last time I saw him, softer underneath the chin, his face a lot puffier than I remembered, as if he had put on weight.
“So,” he said, “to what do I owe the pleasure?”
“Somebody shot Richie Burke on Portland Street last night,” I said.
“So I heard,” Tony said. “Back-shot him, I heard.”
“Before the shooter left him there,” I said, “he told Richie it was about his father.”
Tony nodded.
“I was wondering,” I said to him, “if you know what might have precipitated such an event.”
Tony chuckled. “I do love listening to you talk, Sunny Randall,” he said.
“I’m just trying to get a handle on why somebody would not just make an aggressive move like this on the Burkes, but on the Burke who has nothing to do with the family business,” I said.
“So ask them.”
“I wanted to ask you,” I said, and smiled. “Didn’t you once tell me that you know everything in Boston except why the Big Dig took so long?”
“Was just being modest,” Tony said. “Knew that, too. The Italians just asked me not to tell.”