One of the troopers stayed in the car, the other stood to the side of the front door.
“You recognize either one of those guys?” Pete said.
“I think they both might have been in the room at the Old Canteen,” I said. “But neither one of them is who I’m looking for. The driver is too blond, and the guy by the door is too old and too fat.”
I showed him the copy of the picture of Maria and the little boy I’d brought with me.
“I’m looking for the grown-up version of him,” I said.
“Because you think he’s the one doing all this.”
I nodded. “Now I just have to find a way to prove it.” I sighed and shook my head. “The things I can prove don’t help me enough. But the things I can’t prove, I know I’m right about.”
“I actually think I followed that,” he said.
“I feel like I’ve been some kind of drone from the start,” I said. “Just being operated by a kid on a sugar high.”
“I got one of those,” Pete said, “you can have him, you want him.”
Albert stayed inside for an hour, came back outside with another old man, hugged the other old man, kissed him on the cheek, got back into the SUV.
“Tallyho,” Pete said.
“You’re not worried they’ll make us?”
“Ho ho ho,” he said.
Besides, Pete said, Albert being the creature of habit that his friends at Organized Crime said he was, he was fairly confident where his next stop was going to be. Pete was right. A few minutes later the SUV pulled up to the Acorn Social Club on Acorn Street.
“You’ve heard of the Ravenite Social Club in New York, right?” Pete said. “Gotti’s old hangout?”
“I have.”
“This is the Providence version of that,” he said.
He said he’d been in there, and it was pretty much everything he’d expected, a windowless front room, old men playing cards, a couple television screens, one showing horse races from various tracks around the country, the other showing the security feed from the camera above the front door.
“They let you inside?” I said.
“The goombahs think it’s funny, having a lively exchange of ideas with cops sometimes,” he said.
He grinned.
“Last time I was there one of them was bitching that he had to go get some cash from an ATM nearby and bail his son out on a DUI,” he said. “I asked him how old his son was. Guy said, ‘Fifty-seven, going on fifty-eight.’”
This time Albert Antonioni stayed inside two hours. When he came out, the SUV was still there, but he got into a different car, a black Town Car. Before he got in, he turned and waved at a Crown Vic parked up Acorn Street.
“Who’s he waving at?” I said.
“Couple guys from Organized Crime,” Pete said.
“They know you’re following him around today, too?” I said.
“More the merrier in Goombahville,” he said.
“Ours is a glamorous lot.”
“Ain’t it?” he said.
The next stop, as predicted by Pete, was at the Palomino Vending Company, which Pete said was actually a legitimate business, and one with which Albert had always done pretty well, even though he left the hands-on running of it to others.
“That way he can focus on his real passion,” Pete said. “Doing really bad shit to people.”
It was past four o’clock when Albert Antonioni finally came out of the Palomino Vending Company. I was past hungry by then, and needed to pee.
The Town Car was long gone. The SUV was still there. But now a black Lincoln Navigator pulled up, only the driver inside.
The driver got out, came around and hugged Albert Antonioni, gave a quick survey to the street, opened the back door, and helped Albert into the backseat. Came back around the front of the car.
I had already pulled the long-lens camera out of my bag, one I’d brought along just in case I needed it.
“Shazam,” I said.
I kept snapping away until the guy got back behind the wheel of the Navigator and drove away.
“We got a winner?”
“Think so,” I said.
“You know him?”
“And had forgotten him,” I said. “He was there at the Old Canteen, both times. I remember thinking the first day that he reminded me a little bit of my ex-husband.”
“Shazam, shazam, shazam,” Pete Colapietro said.
And put our car into gear.
“We gonna stay on Albert?” Pete said.
“I think of it as staying on Little Richard,” I said.
Fifty-Nine
Pete said he didn’t recognize the driver but trusted that somebody at Organized Crime would.
“You think it’s our guy?” Pete said.
“Has to be,” I said.
“Just off what he looks like?” he said.
“Just because it has to be him,” I said.
“My wife always boxes me in with logic like that,” he said.
We followed the car to a big house in what Pete Colapietro said was the Mount Pleasant section of Providence. It looked even richer and more elegant than the street on which Maria Cataldo had lived, bigger, older houses set even farther back from the road.
“This is Mount Pleasant,” I said to Pete. “Maria lived on Pleasant Valley Parkway. As a detective, I’m detecting a trend here.”
“What can I tell you,” he said. “We’re a very pleasant city.”
We passed the Triggs golf course, Pete pointing out that back in the sixties there had been a famous Mob hit there by a couple bookies named Rudy Marfeo and Anthony Melei. I told him that was good to know. He said he had a lot of fun facts like that.
Antonioni and his driver went into the house together. The driver did not come back outside. Pete drove past the house and parked on a side street a block away.
“If this is one of Albert’s houses, it wasn’t on my list,” Pete said.
“Worth repeating that this is an old man,” I said, “who hasn’t lasted this long by throwing caution to the wind. Much the same as his old friend Desmond Burke.”
“Now what?” Pete said.
“We wait.”
“Maybe the one you called Little Richard lives there with him,” Pete said. “Like a live-in bodyguard.”
“Something else that would be good to know,” I said.
Pete turned on the car so he could turn on the radio. “You mind if I listen to the Sox?” he said.
I grinned. “Yes.”
“You come from Boston and you don’t like the Sox?” he said.
It came out “Sawx,” as if that was the way it was supposed to.
“I liked going to games with my dad when I was a little girl,” I said. “And I’d go with Richie once in a while if we had good seats and the weather was nice. But I just never thought there was enough going on.”
“Part of the appeal,” he said.
“So I’ve been told. Repeatedly.”
“I’m feeling the urge for beer and peanuts just listening,” he said.
“It’ll pass,” I said.
We sat and he listened to the game, but as he did, we talked about his job. We talked about how I saw the job when I was still with the cops. He talked about his family, and how you couldn’t do better with a cop wife than he’d done. I told some stories about my dad, some of which he’d heard, starting with the one about my dad and I and the day the Spare Change killer died.
Two hours later Little Richard was still inside the house. I told Pete we could call it a night and he could drive me back to where I’d parked my car on Federal Hill and thanked him again for everything he’d done, that it was above and beyond. He said he didn’t mind waiting a little longer, if I wanted to. I said I was fine, that we knew where Antonioni lived now, or at least lived part of the time.