I hadn’t noticed Desmond Burke come up behind us.
“He was told not to go anywhere alone,” he said. He shook his head fiercely and stared at the water. “A fucking cowboy until the end,” he said.
It came out “fooking.”
“He called me after midnight and told me he might have a lead on Richie’s shooter,” Felix Burke said. “I told him to stay where he was until he spoke to Desmond. He said he would. He lied. Peter did that. He was the youngest of us, and never much took to being bossed around.”
“Wasn’t anybody with him?” I said.
“He sent them home,” Felix Burke said. “Without telling Desmond or me.”
“Anybody find a phone?” I asked.
“Shit,” Belson said, slapping a hand to his forehead. “Why didn’t I think of that. Good thing for me I’ve got a crime solver like you on the case.”
“I’ll take that as a no,” I said. “Car?”
“Found it over there at the construction site where they’re building some new fucking facility for the football team,” Belson said.
“How would you possibly know that?” I said.
Belson jerked a head in the direction of the big uniformed cop standing with his arms crossed, facing in the general direction of Cleveland Circle. I’d spent a lot of college nights there drinking at a bar called Mary Ann’s, where their policy on fake IDs was more liberal than Elizabeth Warren.
“Novak played tight end here until he blew out his knee with one of those injuries that has all the initials,” Belson said.
“Weapon?” I said.
Richie answered before Belson could. “The lieutenant thinks it might be the same kind of .22 used on me.”
“I’m surrounded by crime solvers this morning,” Belson said. He looked at me and said, “Sometimes you run into them in the oddest places.”
He turned now to face Desmond Burke. My own father might be out of the game. Frank Belson was not.
“You say you have no working theories about what happened to your son and what has now happened to your brother,” Belson said.
“I do not,” Desmond Burke said.
They were a few feet apart, eyes locked on each other. It reminded me of a playground stare-down.
“You’re convinced this had nothing to do with some kind of grudge against your brothers.”
“I am.”
“You’re likewise convinced it is only about you,” Belson said.
“I am,” Desmond Burke said.
“You need to leave this to professionals,” Belson said.
“I have my own professionals,” Desmond said.
Belson said, “How’s that working out for you today, Desmond?”
I could see the tightness in Desmond’s face, and saw him clench his fists, but Belson was already walking away from him, trying to relight his cigar, bending down to take another look at the exact spot where I assumed Peter Burke’s body had been discovered.
When he stood up, he made a motion with his hand. Richie and I started to walk in his direction.
“Just her,” Frank Belson said.
When I got to him he said, “I assume you’re all the way into this.”
“They shot Richie,” I said. “You knew I wasn’t going to sit this out even before they shot his uncle.”
“Sadly, I do know that,” he said. “But since you are the daughter of a great policeman, I also know that you know that if you in any way interfere with my homicide investigation, you can add the fact that you’re Phil Randall’s kid to the list of things about which I don’t give a fuck.”
“Understood,” I said.
“I’ll be in touch,” he said, and walked past Desmond and Felix Burke and past the young cop Novak, in the general direction of where I could already see TV satellite trucks lining up on the side road that fed into St. Thomas More.
When he was about twenty yards away, I said, “Hey, Frank?”
He turned around.
“That list you just mentioned?” I said. “Is that an actual thing?”
Eleven
I’d met Wayne Cosgrove of The Boston Globe when I was still with the cops.
My father had always trusted him, which was about as much of an endorsement as Wayne could ever have expected from a member of the force. Like most Boston cops, Phil Randall had always viewed most reporters as a life form just slightly higher than the New York Yankees.
We stayed in touch after I got my PI license, and he’d occasionally helped me out on cases, mostly because of what was, in a simpler time, known as an encyclopedic knowledge of the city and its players, good guys and bad guys. Especially bad guys, from Desmond Burke and Joe Broz and Gino Fish and Eddie Lee and Tony Marcus and the DeMarco family all the way to the politicians in the State House. Eventually the newspaper had been smart enough to give him his own column.
Every time I would run into him, I would hear versions of the same complaints about what had happened to the newspaper business. But he was still at it, two days a week, appearing on local television as a talking head, and occasionally on MSNBC and CNN and even Fox News, where he said he felt safest, knowing they wouldn’t use words that were too big for him.
He had looked like the last hippie when I first met him, dressing as if the sixties were still in full force. But by now he had cut his hair, telling me that guys his age who still wore their hair too long made him think of Howard Fucking Hughes. When I’d see him on TV, he’d be wearing blazers and a white shirt and skinny dark silk ties, like a real grown-up, even though I knew that below where the camera was shooting him he was still wearing jeans and beat-up Doc Martens boots.
In a world where you heard such an amazing amount of bullshit about Fake News, Wayne Cosgrove was as real as the dust on library books.
I was having a drink with him the night after Peter Burke had been shot. We were in the bar facing out to Arlington Street in the Taj Boston. My father still called the place the “old Ritz,” even though it now had absolutely no connection to the much newer Ritz-Carlton on the other side of the Boston Common. The only connection here was to the past, because the bar remained unchanged, and one of the very best on the entire planet.
We had managed to score a table by the window. I had decided that it was a civilized enough hour in this civilized place to have a dirty martini, with extra olives. Wayne was nursing a glass of Pappy Van Winkle bourbon, which I knew was a rare and expensive brand only because of him. He had been coming here long enough that they kept one bottle of the stuff for him, and off the drink menu.
We were talking about Desmond Burke. Wayne had written a column published in that morning’s Globe about Peter Burke’s death. The headline read “Casualty of War We Thought Was Over.”
Wayne told me he had missed me at the reservoir by about fifteen minutes.
“In the old days,” I said, “you would have beaten me there.”
“Operative word being old,” he said.
“Be happy you’re in a game where it doesn’t matter if your legs go,” I said. “Because the words never do.”
We clinked glasses.
“Problem is,” he said, “words matter less and less and the game is more and more about page views and the president’s last fucking tweet. Not the business I entered.”
“You sound like a Burke talking about days gone by,” I said.
He said, “But their business, as far as I can tell, is still lucrative, if less than it used to be.”