The goggles were uncomfortable, too tight around my eyes, as I carefully searched the closets and the shelves in them and under the beds, looking for any trace of her. But it seemed every trace of her was gone, the way she was.
I quietly made my way downstairs.
Ghost said, “I checked the basement. It’s so clean it’s like they’re fixing to sell.”
“It’s like they didn’t just clean out everything except the furniture,” I said. “It’s like he had somebody sweep the place.”
“I’ll take one more look upstairs,” he said, “’case you missed something.”
He went silently up the stairs. It occurred to me, and not for the first time, that they didn’t call him Ghost for nothing.
There was a den next to the main living room that I had already checked, with a huge vintage desk with brass handles on the drawers. I pulled them out again, one by one, and checked underneath them, feeling like an idiot to even think that the old woman had taped something to one of the drawers, or had some kind of secret compartment. The desk was pressed up against a side window. It was a bear to move it away from the wall, but with some work I managed to at least move it forward a couple of inches.
When I did, I heard something gently fall to the carpet.
And there it was.
It was easy to see how anybody who had cleaned out the house could have missed it. How even Ghost had missed it. It must have fallen halfway down behind the desk and just stayed there, until now.
A small, slender picture frame.
With a color photograph inside, slightly faded, of a beautiful, dark-haired woman who I assumed was a younger version of Maria Cataldo.
She was smiling, and had her hand on the shoulder of a boy who looked to be about nine or ten, in front of a sign for the Grand Canyon National Park.
A boy who looked amazingly like a young Richie Burke.
Fifty-Two
When we were back in Boston I dropped Ghost on Tremont Street. He said it was close enough to his apartment. I had pointed out to him, more than once, that I was a private detective by trade and could find out where he lived if I really wanted to. But this was the way we’d always done it, just as I’d always paid him in cash.
He said he had to get out of his cat-burglar clothes and get dressed up to go out.
“One of the jackets from your Fontainebleau collection?” I said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he said.
I smiled and thanked him again for doing me a solid.
On the sidewalk he shook his head and said, “I just knocked over Albert Antonioni’s house.”
“But you didn’t steal anything.”
“Yeah,” Ghost said, “that’ll get me over if he ever finds out it was me did it.”
It was a little after eleven. I called Richie from the car and asked if he might want to come over.
“Is this about romance?”
“Not tonight, dear,” I said. “Too tired.”
“Shit, I was afraid of that,” he said, and said he was on his way.
“Cute kid,” Richie said. “But it’s not me.”
“He looks just like you,” I said. “And didn’t you tell me you went to Arizona when you were a boy?”
Richie nodded.
“Felix took me,” Richie said. “My father had promised me a spring-break trip. Then something came up, the way it always seemed to. But Felix didn’t want to disappoint me, so we did go to Arizona. But not to the Grand Canyon. We went to Sedona. We hiked the red rocks and rode horses. I liked the riding better than the hiking. Made me feel like a cowboy.”
“You never went to the Grand Canyon?” I said.
“Good Christ,” he said. “Just how stuck are you on this?”
“He looks just like you,” I said.
“But he,” Richie said, “is not me.”
He took in some air, let it out.
“My father and my uncle may lie to you,” he said. “I do not.”
He had always exhibited an almost eerie self-control. I had told him once that he was a good sport until he wasn’t. But when he did stop being a good sport, no matter what the setting or the circumstances, something would change. In his eyes, mostly. It had always reminded me of the flash of lightning.
It wasn’t happening now. But it was clear that my line of questioning about the photograph was beginning to annoy him.
“I had to ask,” I said. “I’m not looking for a fight.”
“Gee,” he said, “there’s good news.”
“I’m guessing that we could probably find a lot of pictures of a lot of dark-haired kids that age who look like that, too,” he said. “But they’d remember the goddamn Grand Canyon, and so would I.”
“Well, maybe you got me there,” I said.
“Let me get this straight,” he said. “It was about to be a working theory of yours that Uncle Felix and me just happened to run into my father’s long-lost love at one of the most famous landmarks in America? And that he wanted to have a picture of the two of us so, what, he could put it in a scrapbook when we got back to Boston? Am I missing anything?”
We were drinking Bushmills tonight. We both sipped some. I didn’t like it as much as Jameson, but I knew Richie liked it a little more. He scratched Rosie behind an ear as he drank. I sensed in the moment that he liked her better than he liked me.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s take you out of the picture.”
“Thanks,” Richie said.
“You’re welcome,” I said.
He raised his glass in a mock toast.
“At the very least,” I said, “this picture could mean Maria had a son that no one, at least no one back here, knew about.”
“Finally you make some sense,” he said.
“Just spitballing here, big boy.”
“And Sunny Randall’s first rule of spitballing is that you can’t be afraid to hold back a cockeyed idea.”
“Correct.”
“Even if it happens to be an especially cockeyed idea, like me having posed for a photograph with Maria Cataldo, someone I never met, at a place I never visited.”
I finished my drink. He finished his and abruptly stood up.
“Gonna head out,” he said.
“Don’t be mad,” I said.
“I’m not,” he said. “Now I’m the one who’s tired.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Maria could have just been visiting Arizona the way Felix and I did,” Richie said.
“She and Little Richard also could have lived there,” I said, “and it was just a day trip.”
“Little Richard,” he said, sadly shaking his head.
“Couldn’t help myself,” I said.
We kissed lightly on the lips. He put his arms around me. I felt the same rush of excitement I always did when we were this close. I knew he knew, as I put my head on his shoulder.
When I finally pulled back I looked up at him and said, “So I’m going to assume, once and for all, that my theory about you and Felix running into Maria in Arizona is a big old no-can-do?”
Richie leaned down now and said to Rosie, “You deal with her.”
He left. I looked out the window and saw his car pull away, and then the one I knew had Desmond’s men inside pull out behind him. I briefly wondered why they didn’t just carpool.
I rinsed our glasses, stuck my .38 in the zippered pocket of my favorite Eileen Fisher vest. Rosie and I went outside. She did her business quickly, dear girl.
We went back inside. I set the dead bolt, not thrilled with how easily Ghost had vanquished the one on Pleasant Valley Parkway, and set the alarm. Wireless. Remembering how quickly Ghost had disarmed the wireless alarm at Maria’s house, I made a mental note to get a better one installed. Went through my nightly process with my ridiculously expensive face wash and cream, brushing and flossing. Put the gun on the table next to my bed, shut off the bedroom lights, having left the door ajar just enough that some light from the hallway snuck into the bedroom.