He leaned back in his chair now, made a steeple with his fingers and placed them under his chin.
“Is this a professional matter with you,” he said, “or personal?”
“Both,” I said.
“But more personal.”
“Yes.”
He nodded. “And knowing what a hard people Desmond and Felix Burke are, even though they old as shit, we can assume that if there is some kind of dispute going on that they would prefer to a-ju-di-cate it theyselves, and for you to keep that fine ass of yours out of it.”
“Listen to your own bad self,” I said. “A-jud-i-cate.”
He shrugged modestly. “Lot of layers to me, Sunny Randall, even the way I talk and all. You ought to know that by now.”
“Lot of layers like an onion,” I said. “But you haven’t answered my question. Is there something going on that would make somebody ballsy enough to shoot Desmond Burke’s son?”
Tony shook his head. There was still the faint smell of cigar in this room, even though Tony had told me the last time we were together that he had quit.
“Haven’t heard anything, much as my ear is always to the ground,” he said. “Got no idea why somebody would involve your ex. There’s always been an understanding with the rest of us at the table, so to speak, that your man Richie had been granted diplomatic immunity. Not like in the past, when Whitey Bulger’s crew didn’t give a fuck who they took out. Sometimes it wasn’t no more than Whitey waking up on the wrong side of the fucking bed.”
“Until now,” I said.
“But they didn’t shoot to kill,” Tony said.
“Guy knew what he was doing,” I said.
“Even from point blank, you could make a mistake.”
“He didn’t,” I said.
“If he wanted him gone, he’d be gone,” Tony said.
“That’s what everybody’s saying,” I said, “all over town.”
I stood up.
“You’ll ask around?” I said to Tony.
“What’s in it for me?” he said.
“What about a good deed being its own reward?”
He laughed again, more heartily and full-throated than before, slapping a palm on his desk for emphasis.
“Gonna be like always,” Tony said. “If I do for you, you do for me. Cost of doing business.”
“Think of it this way, Tony,” I said. “Maybe this time I’m the one pimping your ass out.”
“I see what you did there,” he said. “You ask me, it sounds like somebody wants old Desmond to know they coming for him, through people close to him.”
“Nobody closer than Richie.”
Tony nodded. “Best you be careful, too,” he said.
“Always,” I said.
“’Fore you go,” Tony said, “how’s your boy Spike?”
“As you remember him.”
“Toughest queer I ever met,” he said.
I told him he was going to make Spike blush.
Then I told him not to get up. Tony said he had no fucking intention of getting up. At the door I turned to Ty Bop and grinned and pointed and pulled an imaginary trigger with my thumb.
In a blur, he had pulled back the front of the leather jacket he was wearing and showed me the .45 in the waistband of the skinny jeans, without changing expression.
Oh, Sunny, I thought to myself, the places you’ll go.
Six
It turned into my version of Take a Crime Boss to Work Day.
After I left Tony Marcus I arranged to meet Desmond Burke at Durty Nelly’s, an Irish pub on Blackstone Street in the North End that said “circa 1850” on the sign in front and “Old Time Traditions” on another sign behind the bar.
Richie had taken me there once, after a Celtics game.
“Being here makes me want to burst into ‘Danny Boy,’” he’d said.
I’d offered to pick up the check if he promised not to.
Now his father and I were sitting at a table on the second floor. There was the last of the lunch crowd downstairs, all men, as white as Buddy’s Fox had been black, eating hamburgers and hot dogs and egg sandwiches at the bar, watching a rugby game on the television sets above them.
There were, I’d also noticed, two men I always saw with my former father-in-law, and whom I’d seen standing near the entrance to Mass General about twelve hours before, whose names I knew were Buster and Colley. They took turns driving Desmond Burke around and acting as bodyguards. Richie had once told me that there was enough of an arsenal in the trunk of the black Town Car to invade New Hampshire.
“I’ve always liked it here,” Desmond said. “Used to take Richie and his late mother here when he was a little boy for Sunday brunch.”
“He told me.”
I told him Richie and I had been here recently.
“Was there live music?” he said. “I’ve never been much for that.”
He wore a blazer and a navy polo shirt underneath it buttoned all the way to the top and dark gray slacks and gray New Balance running shoes that he said eased the pain in his knees. His gray-white hair was cropped close to his head. It matched the color of his skin today. At the hospital and now here, he looked as old and tired as I’d ever seen him. I wondered if he’d slept at all.
“He’s resting now,” Desmond said.
“I spoke to him.”
“You would.”
“I assume you have people watching his apartment,” I said.
“Of course,” Desmond Burke said.
He was drinking Bewley’s Irish Tea, plain. I was drinking coffee with cream and sugar. The cream and sugar made me feel soft. It wasn’t the only thing about Richie’s father that could make you feel that way.
We sat with the afternoon sun coming through the windows and on Desmond like a spotlight, and as we did I could recall only a handful of times when I’d ever been alone with him, when Richie and I were still married and then when we were not. Our relationship had been complicated from the start, because of my father being what Desmond still called a copper.
But we had always shared the bond created by our love for Richie, one that was not broken even after the divorce, especially when he could plainly see that Richie still loved me, and always would, even later, when he was married to someone else.
“I am sure you have spent the time since we were last together asking yourself who would do something like this,” I said. “To him and to you.”
He lifted his cup to his mouth and sipped some of his tea. It was not the first time it had occurred to me that his movements were as spare as the rest of him, the same as Richie’s were.
“I have no answer,” he said. “At least not yet.”
He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms in front of him and closed his eyes, and then there was just silence between us, as if he were alone. I knew some of his history, from what Richie had told me and from what my father had told me, about how he came out of the Winter Hill Gang in Somerville, after he and his brothers had made their way to America from Dublin. It was before the gang had been taken over by Whitey Bulger.
By the time Whitey did take over the gang, Desmond and Felix Burke had gone off on their own, according to my father, and somehow Bulger had let them, partly out of respect for Desmond, and partly because of the Irish in him.
“I think it was the Irish Mob version of Verizon and AT&T,” Phil Randall told me one time. “As batshit crazy as Whitey was, pardon my French, they thought there was enough of a market share for both of them.”
Now, all this time later, Desmond and Felix and the other Burke brothers had outlasted Whitey Bulger, and even the Feds who’d gone down with him. Desmond Burke had outlasted just about everybody with whom he’d come up, and his family was still the biggest player in our part of the world, still doing most of its business in loansharking and money-laundering. Lately, according to my father, he had made a modest move into the gun trade.