“Your father,” I said, “has to understand that this isn’t just about him, or what he wants.”
“Why don’t you tell him that?” Richie said.
He leaned forward, grimacing slightly, and reached for the bottle on the coffee table and poured each of us more wine. As he did, I looked past him and saw the painting of mine on the wall behind us, a sailboat in Boston Harbor that was one of my favorites.
“I might have to uncover secrets,” I said to Richie.
“Well, he’ll love that, won’t he?”
“You know the writer Gabriel García Márquez?” I said.
“As a matter of fact I do,” Richie said.
It shouldn’t have surprised me. As much as I knew about him and we knew about each other, I was constantly making new discoveries.
I said, “He once wrote that we all have public lives, and private lives, and secret lives. I have this feeling that the answers we’re looking for might come out of Desmond’s secret life.”
“Finding out secrets,” Richie said. “Your best thing.” He smiled. “Well, maybe not your best thing.”
There was no indication that anything had changed in the quiet of the room, or the air between us. But it had, suddenly, the way it often did. We both sensed it. I turned so I was facing him more directly. I put my glass down. He did the same.
“I have a secret,” he said.
“I don’t think it would take a great detective to figure out what kind.”
“I’m thinking of going public with it,” Richie said.
“I’ll bet you are,” I said.
He stayed where he was and let me come to him. I fitted myself carefully against his left side. He put his arm around me. I leaned up and leaned in to him and kissed him. The kiss lasted a long time. The force of it seemed to have surprised us both when we finally pulled out of it.
“Are you sure you’re up to this?” I said.
Richie brushed hair out of my eyes and gently kissed me on the forehead.
“You know what they say,” he said. “What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger.”
Nine
Richie was already asleep when I got out of bed, dressed, let myself out. Had I planned better for romantic possibilities, I would have arranged for Spike to take Rosie for the night. But I had not.
On my way back to River Street Place it had occurred to me that I hadn’t asked Richie whether Kathryn knew that he had been shot. But there was nothing unusual about that. We discussed his most recent ex-wife about as often as we discussed the opera. As far as I was concerned, it was as if he hadn’t as much divorced her as deleted her.
But I still didn’t know with either clarity or certainty if I wanted Richie all to myself. All I had ever known is that I didn’t want Kathryn to have him all to herself.
I got home a little before midnight. Rosie greeted me as joyfully and loudly as she always did, as if I’d just shipped home from a tour overseas. I put her on a leash, took her out, gave her a treat, put her on the small blanket at the end of my bed, and got ready for bed myself, this time alone.
But after I had washed and brushed and moisturized and hand-creamed, I fixed myself a glass of Jameson and took it over to the Eames armchair that I knew must have cost Melanie Joan thousands. It was situated underneath an antique reading light and at the corner of the wood-burning fireplace. Melanie Joan had told me it was her favorite chair in the whole place for reading.
“And,” she had told me with a wink as theatrical as everything else about her, “it can be used in other creative ways.”
“That chair?” I said.
“Oh, God, yes,” she’d said in a husky voice.
I sat uncreatively in the chair now, in cotton sweatpants and a “Boston Strong” T-shirt I’d bought after the Boston Marathon bombing, feeling the warmth of the whiskey making its way through me. Who was it that had said that whiskey had done more for him than he had ever done for it? Someone. Spike would know. Or Richie, who read Gabriel García Márquez, would know.
Public lives, private lives, secret lives.
What was I going to find out about Desmond Burke’s secret life, if I could find out anything? How many enemies were still alive, and still out there?
What kind of history was involved here, history about the Irish Mob that could not be learned from Google?
All these things I thought as I sipped Irish whiskey, moving up on twenty-four hours exactly when I had gotten the call from Felix Burke about Richie being shot, and I had been on my way to the hospital.
Who had done this?
And, far more important, why?
I finished the last of the Jameson. By now it was past one in the morning. Rosie barely stirred as I got under the covers. I had set the alarm for eight because I wanted to take a class at the Exhale Spa on Arlington Street. My Glock was in the top drawer of the bedside table to my right. I told myself I wasn’t being paranoid, just extremely alert.
I slept, soundly, until I was awakened by the old-fashioned ringtone I used on my iPhone. At first I thought it was the alarm, then looked at the screen and saw that it was still only seven o’clock.
Caller ID said “Richie.”
“Are you all right?” I said.
“Somebody just shot my uncle Peter in the back of the head,” he said.
Ten
It was past eight by the time I met Richie in the little park set above the Chestnut Hill Reservoir, across from the football stadium at Boston College, on St. Thomas More Road. A little sign set in among the benches read “Chestnut Hill Driveway.”
Richie told me that an early-morning jogger, a BC student, had discovered the body of Peter Burke on her way down to run the reservoir. By the time I got there, Peter’s body was gone, and the cops had closed off both ends of St. Thomas More. Richie’s father was with him, and his uncle Felix. So, too, was Lieutenant Frank Belson. Richie had told me over the phone that all of the uniforms at the scene had been told to let me pass.
Frank Belson was a friend of my father’s and had once been a wingman for the great Martin Quirk, the most famous homicide cop in the history of the Boston Police Department and now its assistant superintendent. Frank made no secret, at least to me, of his dislike for Quirk’s replacement as his boss. The department knew her as Captain Glass. To Frank she was “her.” Or worse. He smoked cheap cigars, even in the age of enlightenment about the evils of tobacco whether you inhaled or not, and almost always wore the same navy blue suit, no matter the season. But he was what my father called a righteous detective, no bullshit to him, eyes that took in everything at once, an ability to recall a crime scene after the fact as if he had photographs from the scene spread out on his desk.
When he saw me come walking up the path he took the unlit cigar out of his mouth and said, “Now I know it’s my lucky day.”
He looked tired, even this early. But then he always looked tired. He reminded me of the old Indiana Jones line, the one about how it’s not the years, it’s the mileage.
“I would’ve thought your uncle spent as much time in Chestnut Hill as he did on the fucking moon,” Belson said to Richie.
“The shooter must have set up a meet,” Richie said. “It’s the only thing that makes sense. More privacy up here than the reservoir, even in the middle of the night.”
“Could it have been someone who owed him money?” Belson said.
“Someone like that would have come to Peter,” Richie said, “not the other way around.”
Peter Burke, I knew from Richie, had always run bookmaking in the family. His office, if you could call it that, was in the downstairs part of a two-bedroom flat on West Broadway in Southie. Richie had taken me by it once, after we’d had dinner at the L Street Tavern. It was when Richie was still living in Southie himself. His uncle’s office had about as much charm as a holding cell. When I’d pointed that out to Richie he’d said, “And on a good day, they can clear as much money here as banks do on State Street.”