“Let them go,” Desmond Burke said through swollen lips. “It’s me you want.”
“Shut up, old man,” Bobby Toms said, and asked Joseph Marchetti to go back outside in case Richie and I hadn’t come alone.
Years after the photograph of him and his mother had been taken at the Grand Canyon, Bobby Toms’s resemblance to Richie wasn’t as vivid. But was still there. Maybe because he wore black as well tonight, black leather jacket, black T-shirt underneath.
The gun in his hand was a Sig Sauer.
In a low voice, barely above a whisper, Richie said, “If you’re going to kill us all, at least tell us what this is about before you do.”
Bobby Toms nodded at Desmond. “Ask him,” he said. “We’ve had a good long talk about the old days.”
Desmond looked at Richie and me. He seemed to be summoning all the strength he had just to keep his head up.
“I keep telling him,” Desmond said through swollen lips. “I didn’t know she was pregnant. I never knew he even existed. I never saw her after she left Boston.”
“After you raped her,” Bobby Toms said.
“I did not rape her!” Desmond shouted at him. “How many times do I have to tell you that? I loved her!”
“Liar!” Bobby Toms shouted back, and took two steps closer to him and gave Desmond a hard, open-palm slap to the side of his head, snapping it back.
I sensed Richie leaning forward slightly on the couch and put a hand on his arm.
Bobby Toms turned and put his gun on Richie and said, “Don’t even fucking think about it.”
Then he was pacing back and forth in front of us.
“I didn’t even know it was you until she died,” he said to Desmond. “She told me I belonged to him. Tomasi. She said he died right after I was born. Who the fuck knows where he went or how he died? But she was the one who was dying a little bit at a time, my whole life. Not just because of the Parkinson’s. Like she was dying of being sad. Doing volunteer work at the church the whole time I was growing up. Like she was the one paying for her sins.”
“I would have tried to help her,” Desmond said.
“Mr. Antonioni helped her!” Bobby Toms said, shouting again. “He was the one who loved her. He was the one who took care of her.”
“Who told you that Desmond raped her?” I said, already knowing the answer.
“Mr. Antonioni,” he said. “Told me that he raped her when she told him she planned to leave him for good.”
He turned back to Desmond.
“Now he’s going to admit it to me and in front of you,” Bobby Toms said. “Or he can watch me do the two of you before I do him.”
“I didn’t rape her,” Desmond said, head hanging again. Bobby walked over and hit him harder than he had before.
I needed time.
I said to Bobby Toms, “Why did you kill Peter?”
Keep him talking.
“Why not?” he said. “I called him and told him I knew who had shot him.”
He pointed his gun at Richie.
“Told him to meet me out there in Chestnut Hill,” he said. “Who shoots anybody in Chestnut Hill? I told him it was about Maria Cataldo. You know what he did? He laughed. And called her Desmond’s brasser.”
Even I knew that was the Irish slang for whore.
“So I shot him,” Bobby said. “And then I shot up the other old man’s house to let him know I could. And I shot the mook bodyguard to let him” — he nodded at Desmond — “know I could get as close to him as I fuckin’ well wanted.”
He smiled, his eyes too big and too bright.
“I even shot one of my own,” he said.
There it was.
“Dominic Carbone,” I said.
“Thought I could buy myself a little more time,” he said. “Buy Mr. A. some time while we looked for those guns. Said he’d cut me in when it was over.” He looked at Desmond. “Now you two are gonna tell me where the guns are, because this old fuck won’t.”
“Albert already knows where they are,” I said.
Not technically true. But close enough. “We just made a deal with him tonight. The guns for Desmond.”
If Bobby Toms was faking his surprise at that news, he was doing an excellent job of it. But I didn’t care whether we’d surprised him or not.
Keep them talking, like Phil Randall said.
Somehow it was as if Richie was thinking right along with me.
“Why didn’t Albert tell you sooner?” Richie said. “About Desmond being your father?”
“She made him promise,” Bobby said. “But then she was gone. So he told me. Told me that Desmond had never paid for what he did to her, and that maybe it was time. And maybe we could make him pay in all kinds of ways.”
He shrugged and said, “So I made him pay a little bit at a time. Gotta tell you, this has been some fun shit.”
In the distance there was the sudden crack of what was clearly a gunshot, and then another. Two minutes later, the front door opened and the blond guy shoved Felix Burke into the room ahead of him.
“Gang’s all here,” Marchetti said.
Joseph Marchetti went into the kitchen, came back with a chair, then shoved Felix Burke down onto it.
“He shot Padraig,” Felix said to Desmond.
Padraig Flynn was one of Felix’s body men, and had been for as long as I had known him.
“How did you find us?” Richie said to his uncle.
“Tony told me about the meeting at the diner,” Felix said. “I told you I would stand down. I lied, but it was about something important this time.”
He smiled a sad smile.
“You thought you were looking out for me,” Felix said. “I was looking out for you.”
I casually crossed my right leg, the one that had the gun underneath the boot, over my left.
“What is this about?” Felix said, as if talking to everyone in the room.
“Ask him,” Bobby Toms said again, pointing his gun at Desmond. “Ask him what he did to my mother. How he started killing her a long time ago.”
And then I saw fully all the steel and the rope in Desmond Burke, everything in him that had taken him off the streets of Southie and had separated him from all the others who wanted what he wanted, all the ones who thought they’d end up kings of the hill. Saw everything in him that had enabled Desmond Burke to outlast and outlive them all.
“You can shoot me where I sit, boy,” he said. “You can fucking well shoot all of us. But I will never admit to the lie you were told about me and the lie you are telling. I never forced myself on a woman in my life, and I certainly did not force myself on your mother.”
Bobby Toms walked back over to him and put the gun above the bridge of his nose and said, “For the last time, you stop lying to me.”
“He’s not,” Felix Burke said then.
Turned and looked at his brother, something profoundly sad behind his eyes, and then looked up at Bobby Toms and said, “You’re pointing your gun at the wrong one.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Bobby said.
“He’s not your father,” Felix said. “I am.”
Sixty-Eight
Joseph Marchetti continued to point his gun at Richie and me, which gave me no opening or opportunity to reach for my own, as Felix Burke seemed to be talking to himself as much as he was talking to his brother, or to the rest of us.
“It wasn’t just Albert who loved her,” Felix said. “So did I.”
I remembered the night in his brother’s living room now, when he had practically begged me to walk away from it all. I remembered the photographs I had seen about how much Desmond and Felix had looked alike when they were younger.
In this room now, Felix could no longer hold his brother’s gaze and so stared out the window closest to him instead, at the night or the water or the dark nowhere.