Pete asked if I planned to circle back here myself before I went back to Boston.
I grinned again. “Maybe I will, maybe I won’t,” I said.
“You gotta keep reminding yourself of something,” he said. “This isn’t just my turf. It’s his.”
“I’m going to head back,” I said. “I got a lot today, pictures and this address and the fact that Little Richard and Albert might be living under the same roof.”
“Okay, then,” Pete said.
“Okay,” I said.
He drove me back to Federal Hill. As soon as his car pulled away, I drove straight back to Mount Pleasant. The Navigator was still parked in the driveway. Then I drove home. I called Spike from 95, asking him if he’d remembered to take Rosie out the way I’d asked him.
“I’m insulted that you even felt the need to ask,” he said.
“Sorry.”
“How did it go?”
“I got a lot today,” I said, and told him about the driver and the house and the pictures I’d taken. Then I said, “All I need now is a plan.”
“Well,” Spike said, “ask yourself something: Who the hell doesn’t?”
Sixty
Pete had shown the pictures I sent him to his buddies at Organized Crime, and was informed that the driver’s name was Bobby Toms.
“Short for Bobby Tomasi,” I said.
“Would be the way I’d bet.”
“What’s his story?” I said.
“That’s the weird part,” Pete said. “He has none. Isn’t in the system as Bobby Tomasi or Robert Tomasi or Robert Toms or Bobby Toms. They say that all of a sudden, and nobody can remember exactly when, he was a fast-tracker with Albert. Who, they say, treats him like a son.”
“Maria’s son,” I said.
“Who you now think is the one trying to start a Mob war with the Burkes,” Pete said.
“Hard to believe he could do that without Albert knowing,” I said. “Or without Albert’s say-so.”
“But if he wants to take out Desmond, or he and Albert want him to take out Desmond, why not just do it without all this fucking around?”
“Maybe the fucking around is part of it,” I said.
Pete said he’d call if he found out any more fun facts from Goombahville. I told him I’d been meaning to ask if it was politically correct for one Italian to call another one a goombah. He said he was pretty sure there were rules in the handbook that covered it.
What I really needed to do was find a way to talk to Bobby Toms. I imagined myself driving back down to Providence, walking up to Albert’s front door, ringing the bell if somebody hadn’t already shot me, and hoping Bobby answered the door.
“Hi,” I could say in a cheerful voice, “I’m conducting a survey about your mother,” and see how things went from there if he didn’t try to shoot me in the eye.
“Oh, and by the way, you sonofabitch,” I could say, “are you the one who shot my ex-husband in the back and smacked me around on Exeter Street that time?”
I was close now. I could feel it. Bobby Toms had to be the son and Desmond Burke had to be his father, because nothing else made sense and because as a boy he really did look like Richie’s twin, evil or otherwise.
But what could Desmond Burke have possibly done to Maria Cataldo to make their son start shooting up Boston this way?
And how did guns somehow figure in to all of this?
The only way to get all the answers I wanted and needed was to close this case. Which I told myself I would. Because I always had in the past. Maybe if I did, I could go back to working on a case that would actually pay me a living wage.
I was so lost in the fog and the moment and all the questions I still had that I didn’t hear the ring of my cell phone right away.
I looked at the caller ID. “Richie.”
“Hey, you,” I said when I answered.
“Desmond’s been taken,” he said.
Sixty-One
I met Richie at Felix’s now-repaired home at the marina in Charlestown.
“The boys were waiting to drive him to Mass,” Felix said. “My brother is always ready at ten minutes to seven. He’s one of those. Thinks even being a minute late is a mortal sin. When I’m a few minutes late, he looks at me like he wants to give me a good smack.”
“And the house had been watched all night,” I said.
“Yes,” Richie said.
“But when they finally went inside to check on where he was, he was gone,” I said.
“Yes,” Richie said.
There were three Dunkin’ Donuts cups on the table in front of us. Felix picked up his and drank some of his coffee. I could see his ruined boxer’s hands shaking as he did.
“They use the key they have,” Felix said, “and go inside and call out to him. But like Richie said. He’s gone.”
“Didn’t he set the alarm at night?” I said.
Felix looked at Richie, then back at me.
“Sometimes he does,” Felix said. “Sometimes he doesn’t.” He shrugged. “We’re old. We forget.”
“The one who took him could have come from the water side,” Richie said. “And in through the back somehow.”
I thought of how easily Ghost Garrity had gotten inside Maria Cataldo’s house, and how the gadget he’d brought disarmed what had been her alarm. How easy he said it was to disarm them in general.
“This is war now, Richard,” Felix said. “If that fuck Antonioni is the one who ordered this, I will kill him with my own hands.”
“It could be one of his people who took Desmond,” Richie said.
“I think I know which one,” I said, and told them both everything I had learned about Bobby Toms, and how Pete Colapietro and I had followed him to the house in Mount Pleasant. Richie looked at me. “You were going to tell me this when?” he said. I told him I was about to call him when he called to tell me about his father.
“Albert knows,” Felix said. “That’s the way it would work with us. That’s the way it would work with them.”
Us. Them. To the death.
“Is there anything you’ve not told us?” Richie said to his uncle.
It took a longer time than I would have liked for Felix Burke to say that he had not.
“Uncle Felix,” Richie said, as if talking to a child.
“Have I ever lied to you, Richard?” he said.
“Often,” Richie said.
“About anything important?” Felix said.
“Less often,” Richie said.
I sipped coffee that had gone cold. Even cold was better than none.
“Desmond’s alive,” I said. “I’m sure of it.”
“You can’t be sure,” Felix said.
“This ends the way it started with me,” Richie said. “If the guy wanted him dead, he’d be dead. Come into the house with a silencer and do it and leave, maybe even by boat.”
I looked at Felix Burke. I couldn’t remember a time when I had ever seen him scared. But he was scared now, and it showed. It had always been him and Desmond against the world. Their other brothers were gone. Now Desmond had been taken.
“You don’t know,” Felix said again.
“I do,” I said. “So much of this has been an elaborate production. He wanted to torture Desmond and, as a by-product, the rest of us. I believe he’s known the endgame from the beginning. But ultimately this is something between him and Desmond. I believe he wants to kill him. But wants it to be a slow death. He might even want an audience.”
“I could go down there and take that fuck Antonioni,” Felix said, as if it were the old days, as if he were young and not afraid of anything or anybody.
“And get yourself killed in the process,” Richie said.
“We have men, too,” Felix said.
“Who didn’t help us a whole hell of a lot today,” Richie said.
“You know the resources I have,” Felix said. “You remember the time I found a killer for you.”
“Tommy Noon,” I said. “I remember.”
He had been the killer in a case on which I had once worked for a young woman named Sarah Markham, who had hired me to find out who her birth parents were.
“We may need those resources before we’re through, Uncle Felix,” Richie said. “But let us handle this for now.”
“‘Us’?” he said.
“Sunny and me,” Richie said.
I looked at him.
“Sunny and I will find him,” Richie said.
“Yes,” I said. “We will.”