“Desmond has always fancied himself as some kind of gentleman pirate, and somehow separate from the other vulgarians,” Phil Randall said. “He must think that the guns he brings up from the gun-loving states fire themselves.”
So his specialty was all of that, my father had told me, and one other thing:
Settling old scores.
I quoted my father now to Desmond Burke and asked if this might have something to do with someone trying to settle an old score with him.
He opened his eyes, almost as if coming out of a deep sleep, and said, “How is your father?” He paused and offered a thin smile and added, “Not that I give a flying fig.”
I told him he was aging both reluctantly and gracefully.
“Does he still, and even in retirement, dream of seeing me behind bars?”
“I think he’s let it go.”
Desmond Burke offered another thin smile and said, “Not bloody likely.”
He sipped more tea.
“The thing of it,” he said, “is that most of my blood enemies are dead and gone.”
There was still just a hint of Dublin in his speech. Sometimes “thing” came out “ting.”
“I saw Tony Marcus before coming up here,” I said.
“You think I don’t know that?” he said.
“He said there was no current conflict that he knows of that would have brought Richie into the line of fire.”
“There is not, at least not at the present time,” he said. “What happened to my son, then, has to be something out of the past, perhaps before the boundaries were as well drawn as they are now. From a time when it took so little for shooting to start up.”
“Could it be something from out of town?” I said. “Albert Antonioni, as I recall, wasn’t exactly thrilled when you backed his people off Millicent Patton for me that time.”
She was a teenage runaway I had rescued both from street prostitution and from her parents, even though it had been her parents who originally hired me to find her and bring her home. Antonioni, as it turned out, owned Millicent’s father, whom he very much wanted to be governor of Massachusetts. That result was worth enough to him, or so he had decided, that he’d tried to kill both Millicent and me. At the time Antonioni saw having his own man in the governor’s office as being the Mob equivalent of being able to print his own money, or winning the lottery, and merely saw Patton’s daughter and me as collateral damage.
So it was two of Antonioni’s men who had chased me all the way into Buddy’s Fox. I told Richie about it. Richie told his father and his uncle Felix. There was eventually a sit-down involving all of us, something that I really did feel was out of a Mob movie, when Desmond Burke quietly and forcefully told Antonioni to call his men off. He did. It all reminded me of a line I’d once heard at a Bette Midler concert, when she was explaining why she called the other singers in her act backup girls.
Because, Bette said, sometimes I have to tell them, “Back up, girls.”
“Albert is in Providence, I am here,” Desmond said. “He manages to keep a hatred for me that began long ago under control now.”
“Do you hate him in a similar way?” I said.
“He has never mattered enough to me to hate,” Desmond Burke said.
He closed his eyes again. There was another silence between us. It was clear that he wasn’t uncomfortable with it. Richie never was. If neither Desmond nor I said another word, it was already the longest conversation we had ever had.
“I will find out who did this,” he said.
“Or I will.”
“I would rather you stayed out of the way.”
“With all due respect,” I said, “that isn’t your decision to make.”
The dark eyes stared at me now, with both force and intense focus.
“You honestly think you can be better at the finding out than the army of people I can put on this?” he said.
“I do.”
“I don’t want us to be at cross-purposes,” he said.
“No reason why we should be,” I said, “except for the fact that we see a different end game, you and me.”
“That being?”
“I want the person who did this to be arrested and put in jail,” I said. “You want to issue a death penalty.”
“After a fashion,” Desmond Burke said.
There was nothing more to say. I thanked him for seeing me, and for the coffee, and told him I would be in touch if and when I knew something.
“As I will be with you,” he said.
“I love him, too,” I said.
He nodded and squinted into the afternoon sun, and I left him there. The only time I slowed up as I walked through the downstairs room was to nod at Buster and Colley, Buster posted near the bar now, Colley near the front door.
I walked out onto the sidewalk and drank in some air.
Tony Marcus and Desmond Burke in the same afternoon.
I was living the dream.
Seven
I called Richie when I got back home and knew immediately from the thickness of his voice that I had awakened him.
“Not gonna lie,” he said. “Getting shot isn’t for sissies. I told myself I’d just close my eyes for a little while and slept until now.”
“I won’t tell Spike what you said about sissies,” I said. “I think he could take you in a fair fight today.”
“Maybe not just today,” Richie said, “not that I’d ever admit that to him.”
He told me that Danny Kiefer, the detective who’d caught the shooting, had called before he fell asleep to tell him that the whole thing was still clean, no cameras, no bullet, no witnesses. The neighbors who’d heard the shot thought it might be a tire backfiring. Kiefer, Richie said, seemed less interested in Richie getting shot than why he’d gotten shot, and kept bringing the conversation back to the Burke’s family business.
“I told him,” Richie said, “that it has always been my policy to mind my own business.”
“Which,” I said, “is not technically true,” and I reminded him of the meeting he had brokered between his father and Albert Antonioni once.
“Didn’t think that was any of his business,” Richie said.
“Even if you might possibly know something that would help him identify the shooter?”
“I don’t,” Richie said, “even if.”
“Kiefer is a good detective,” I said.
“I know how tough a grader you are when it comes to detectives,” Richie said. “It must mean he’s great.”
“Takes one to know one,” I said.
“My father told me that he had asked you to stay out of this,” Richie said. “But I told him that if you listened to me, we’d still be married.”
I asked if he’d eaten anything, assuming that he had not. He told me he had not.
“Maybe later,” he said.
I told him to check out the menu from Spike’s and text me an order and I’d deliver.
“Are all of the good restaurants closed?” Richie said.
“Would you like me to tell him that you said that?”
Richie said that if I was such a great detective I’d figure it out.
Spike and I sat at a table for two in his back room, at a little after seven. The chef was cooking up veal chops for Richie and me, and chopped salads. Spike insisted on adding two orders of apple pie.
I told him I was dieting. He told me to shut it.
“You lied when you said it was his idea to get takeout from here, didn’t you?” Spike said.
“Absolutely not.”
He raised an eyebrow. Not everyone could carry that off. Spike could.