“Melancholy,” he said. “Or maybe it’s horny.”
Neither one of us spoke. He said he’d left the restaurant early.
“I’ll die on the hill of you needing a client to make you feel better about things,” Spike said. “But you’ll never need a man to be fabulous.”
“How come when you say ‘fabulous’ it doesn’t sound gay?” I said.
“Because I’m fabulous!” he said, gaying it up as much as he possibly could.
I laughed.
“Now take two more slugs of wine and call Dr. Spike in the morning if you’re not feeling better.”
I didn’t drink more wine, took Rosie out for one last walk, washed up, got Rosie settled in at the end of a bed that really did look large enough to be a helicopter pad, turned off the lights.
I slept until Richie’s uncle Felix called me from Mass General a little after two in the morning to tell me that someone had shot Richie in the back.
I sat up in bed, feeling all of the air come out of me at once, instantly awake, knowing this wasn’t a dream, knowing the nightmare was real, processing what I had just been told.
Richie.
Shot.
“Alive?” I said to Felix Burke, my voice loud and brittle.
I could see Rosie up and staring at me from the end of the bed.
“Alive.”
I told him I would be there in twenty minutes, got dressed, blew up Storrow Drive, and parked at the Emergency entrance to the hospital, and realized I had made it in fifteen.
Richie.
Shot.
But alive.
Three
To be any closer to Mass General when he was shot, Richie would have had to have taken a bullet at the front door.
The distance from his saloon to the hospital was less than a mile. Maybe a few minutes with no traffic and if you hit all the lights.
The doctors were still working on closing up the wounds, front and back, when I got there. Richie’s father, Desmond, and his uncle Felix were in the ER’s waiting area. They immediately walked me past the admittance desk and through some double doors, nobody saying anything to us, nobody making any attempt to stop us. It was as if the most famous hospital in Boston, one of the most famous in the world, was now being run by them.
“My son’s wife,” Desmond said to the first nurse he saw, as if somehow that explained everything.
The last thing Felix Burke had told me before we’d ended our phone call was “Through and through.”
Meaning the bullet.
Now Felix said, “It was underneath his right shoulder. He was walking to where he’d parked his car after he closed up.”
“Why was he even there on a Sunday night?” I said.
I was trying to process all of this at once. Why Richie was even at the saloon was a good enough place to start.
“Mickey, his regular weekend guy, called in sick. Richie knew he could watch the Sunday-night football game and thought it would be fun to work the stick.”
We were about twenty feet down the hall from the room where Richie was.
“They cleaned him out with the kind of rod they use if the bullet doesn’t stay in you,” Felix Burke said.
“When the cops finished, they came over and asked if they could talk to Felix and me,” Desmond Burke said. “I told them there was a better chance of Jesus stopping by tonight.”
He was staring past me with his dark eyes, toward the room where his son was, or maybe past that, and into the darkness of his entire adult life, a life from which I knew he had worked mightily to insulate his only son. I had always thought he looked like some pale Irish priest.
Felix Burke was different. Richie had shown me pictures of his father and Felix when they were teenagers, skinny, slicked-back black hair, all the brio in both of them staring out at you from the grainy black-and-white photographs. They could have passed for twins in those days. But that was a lifetime ago. While there was such an ascetic look to Desmond now, somehow Felix had grown broader as Desmond had become all hard angles and planes. He had been a heavyweight boxer in his youth, and you didn’t have to look very closely to see the scarring around the eyes and that his nose was far more crooked than the one with which he had been born.
“One shot,” Felix said. “Richie never heard him coming.”
Desmond Burke said, “The shooter spoke to Richie after he put him down.”
“The fucking fuck,” Felix said.
I looked at Desmond. “What did he say?”
“‘Sins of the father,’” Desmond Burke said. “He didn’t want to kill him. If he had, he would have put one in the back of his head. He wanted to send a message. To me. About my sins.”
“Tell the fucking fuck to send an email next time,” Felix said.
In a quiet voice Desmond Burke said, “Richard has never been a part of this.”
“The family business,” I said.
“Which has now brought him to this night and this place,” Desmond said.
“Which will bring consequences,” Felix said.
It went without saying. Felix had decided to say it anyway.
Four
“Fancy meeting you here,” Richie said when we were finally alone.
He was in a room of his own. I didn’t know how many private rooms were available in Emergency at Mass General at this time of night, but I assumed that even if it had been an issue, Desmond and Felix would have handled it. If they’d gotten it into their minds to put Richie’s bed in the office of the chief of staff, I further assumed they would have made that happen, too.
By now I knew that the doctor who had cleaned out the wound and done the stitching preferred that Richie at least stay around for a couple hours. Richie had told him that wasn’t happening and to please start the paperwork.
“Did you actually say ‘please’?” I said.
“It was more an implied type of thing.”
I had pulled a chair over near his bed and was holding his hand.
“They said you were lucky that the angle of the shot was up and not down,” I said. “If he’d fired down, the damage could have been much worse.”
“I gather luck had very little to do with this,” Richie said.
“Meaning?”
“You know my meaning,” he said. “If he’d wanted me dead I’d be dead.”
We both let that settle until I smiled at him and said, “I thought we had an understanding that I’m the one who gets shot at.”
“Shot at,” he said, “but never hit.”
“Yet.”
“You know how I like to be first,” he said.
“Are we still talking about shooting bullets?” I said.
Richie offered a weak smile of his own.
“Tell me what happened,” I said. “Your father and Uncle Felix told me what they know. Now you tell me.”
“It’s not a case, Sunny.”
“Isn’t it?” I said.
He started from the beginning, with Mickey Dunphy calling in sick. Richie said that because his social calendar happened to be wide open on a Sunday night, he decided it might be fun to cover for him. Sunday night was for regulars and, besides, he said, he still liked to bartend from time to time to keep himself in the game.
He had closed up, counted up, put the cash part of the evening’s take in his office safe, set the alarm, and was walking to where he’d parked his car on Portland Street.
“And you heard nothing.”
“Saw nothing,” he said. “But I wasn’t looking.”
“And when you were on the ground he said what he said about the sins of the father.”
Richie nodded.
“Is there any current trouble between your family and, uh, competing interests?” I asked.
“My father says no.”
“But this was no random shooting,” I said. “This was done with purpose, and planning.”