“There’s a Boston cop named Kelly,” I said. “And a couple of members of the Desmond Burke family that know I’m here.”
I was lying, but Kragan didn’t know that.
“Being pretty careful,” he said.
“I don’t want you to make any mistakes,” I said. “You made one already and Georgie paid for it.”
Kragan waved his left hand dismissively.
“So what do you want?” he said.
“You’re trying to kill Millicent Patton,” I said.
“Really?”
“Un huh. And me, too, while you’re at it.”
“You, too?” Kragan said.
“She heard you and her mother talk about killing a man who turned out to be a plumber from Framingham named Kevin Humphries.”
“She tell you that?” Kragan said.
Georgie had slowly gotten his breathing under control and was now sitting up on the floor, trying to get oriented.
“You killed him because Albert Antonioni told you to,” I said.
“Who’s Albert Antonioni?”
“Antonioni wants to move into Massachusetts and to have his own governor in office when he does. The plumber had pictures of himself and Betty Patton that would ruin the governor plans.”
“So?”
“So he had you kill the plumber. But the girl heard you and her mother planning it, so the girl had to go, too. Otherwise the whole story comes out and puts you and Albert inside, not outside,” I said.
“And you can prove all of this?” Kragan said.
“I can prove enough of this to give you a lot of grief.”
“Say the girl did hear me, which she didn’t, but say for the moment I believe your fairy tale. All she heard was an agreement to kill somebody. How do you tie that to the plumber?”
I almost bit. My mouth had actually opened before I closed it. If he knew that I thought I could turn Betty Patton, then he would kill her. I waited a moment before I spoke and breathed in a couple of times through my nose and thought a couple of sentences ahead. Then I answered.
“I can’t,” I said.
“So?”
“I’m not after you,” I said. “I’m after Albert Antonioni.”
“And?”
“Somebody’s going to have to go down on this thing. I thought maybe we could work a trade — him for you.”
As he leaned against the wall, Spike was absently thumbing the shells from the magazine he’d taken from Georgie’s gun. Georgie had gotten unsteadily to his feet and gone to the couch, where he sat now, not feeling very well.
“And all you got is the kid’s story,” Kragan said.
“That’s all I’ve got, yet.”
Kragan laughed.
“Come back when you got more,” he said.
“Such as who popped Bucko Meehan,” I said.
“Well, you are a nosy little girl, aren’t you.”
Spike finished emptying the magazine and put the shells into his coat pocket.
“Yes,” I said, “I am, and stubborn and annoying. But a lovely person for all of that.”
“You’re like a housefly,” Kragan said slowly, his voice so deep that some of it seemed to drop out as he talked. “Don’t do no real damage. But you keep buzzing around until you irritate somebody, and then you get swatted.”
“This is your last chance,” I said. “Do you want to be the one who gets the break or not?”
Kragan didn’t speak, but he made a gesture with his hand as if he were swatting a fly, and he looked at me straight on as he did it, and I felt a little thrill of fear dart through my stomach.
“Well,” I said. “You better send somebody better than Georgie.”
Kragan kept looking at me.
“It won’t be Georgie,” he said.
I looked at Spike. He shrugged. I nodded and started out of the living room. Spike tossed the empty magazine on the floor beside the gun.
“Nobody’s wearing smoking jackets anymore,” he said to Kragan, and followed me out.
Chapter 54
“I know Georgie McPhail,” Richie said. “He used to do strong-arm collection for a loan shark named Murray Vee.”
“What kind of name is Vee?” I said.
“Short for a long funny name, I never knew what it was.”
We were sitting at Spike’s kitchen table. Richie and Millicent had just come back from the movies. Spike was cooking venison sausage with vinegar peppers on his big six-burner professional-looking stove. Rosie had located the sausages with her keen nose and was now immobilized on the floor under Spike’s feet, on point.
“Georgie isn’t that easy to take.”
“Like Grant took Richmond,” Spike said and shook the long-handled sauté pan briskly.
“Could you win a fight with him?” Millicent asked.
Richie smiled at her.
“Don’t know,” he said. “I never tried.”
“Richie could take Georgie McPhail,” Spike said from the stove. “He’s pretty tough for a straight guy.”
Richie grinned.
“Did the Kragan man say anything about me?” Millicent said.
“No,” I said. “I did most of the talking.”
“What did you talk about?”
“I offered him a chance to cooperate with us in our investigation,” I said.
“And Spike really beat up a guy?”
“He was protecting me,” I said.
“What did the Kragan man say?”
“He said he didn’t want to cooperate.”
“So you went through all that for nothing?” Millicent said.
“Well, maybe not for nothing,” I said. “It might get something to happen.”
“What?”
“I don’t know, but anything is better than nothing. Things happen, I can react to them. Nothing happens, I have nothing to do.”
“But what if the something that happens is bad?”
“I expect to deal with it,” I said. “It’s better than nothing happening.”
Millicent shook her head.
“My parents better be paying you a ton of money for this,” she said.
I didn’t say anything. Spike cut a small bite of sausage, checked to see if it was done, blew on it to cool it, and then scraped it off the fork and let it drop into Rosie’s quick jaws.
“They’re not paying her anything,” Spike said. “They fired her a long time ago.”
“Fired her?”
“Yeah. When she wouldn’t give you back to them.”
Millicent stared at Spike for a long time. But she didn’t say anything. Then she shifted her gaze to Rosie. She didn’t look at me.
“Can you get me to Albert Antonioni?” I said to Richie.
“Yes. But it’ll probably have to include my father and my uncle.”
“Okay,” I said. “As soon as you can.”
“It’ll include me, too,” Richie said.
“That’s good,” I said.
“I’d have backed you up with Kragan if you’d asked,” Richie said quietly.
“I know. I couldn’t ask.”
“But you could ask Spike.”
“Spike is not my ex-husband,” I said.
“But you can ask me to set you up with Antonioni.”
“I don’t fully understand it, Richie. I am feeling my way along — with this case, with you, with her — I wish I knew what I was doing, but I don’t. So I have to go by what feels right, and it didn’t feel right to ask you to back me up with Kragan.”
“But it feels okay to use my family’s influence to get you to Antonioni.”
“Actually,” I said, “it doesn’t. But I have nowhere else to go, and I need to do this, so...” I shrugged and turned my palms up.
Spike was discreetly busy with the sausage and peppers. But Millicent was young enough to feel no need for discretion. She was leaning forward, fascinated with the exchange.
“I’ll set it up,” Richie said.
Spike put the peppers onto a cold burner, and added two big handfuls of pasta to a large pot that was already boiling.