Family Honor

by Robert B. Parker

  “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.

  I said to Millicent, “Do you think your mother loves you?”

  “What?”

  I said it again.

  “I don’t . . .”

  Her shoulders stiffened and her body got that pained angular look I’d come to recognize.

  “No. I don’t think so,” she said.

  “If you found that she did, could you love her back?”

  “I hate her,” Millicent said.

  Her voice was flat, and she seemed once again the sullen little girl I had dragged away from a pimp.
/>   “But if she changed,” I said. “And it was clear that she loved you and was different than she had been, could you love her?”

  “You trying to get rid of me?”

  “Millicent,” I said. “If I haven’t proved that I care about you by now, I’m not going to be able to prove it.”

  “Then why are you asking?”

  “Because I want to know. If you and your mother could be together and help each other to be happy, it would be a good thing.”

  “But I don’t have to.”

  “You can stay with me as long as you need to,” I said.

  I felt a twinge of dismay in the bottom of my stomach. I did not want a teenaged daughter. I felt like I still was one.

  “You’re nice to me,” Millicent said in a very small voice.

  “Yes,” I said. “You deserve to be treated well. I am beginning to think that your mother might love you. That she might be capable of change. We won’t hurry that. But I just want you to keep an open mind. Remember no one will force you to do anything.”

  Millicent nodded. Her posture eased a little. Spike placed a large basket of French bread on the table. Then he took the pot off the stove and poured the pasta into a colander in the sink and let it drain and dumped it onto a platter. He distributed the sausage and peppers over it and plonked the platter in the center of the table.

  “Red wine?” he said.

  “Be fools not to,” Richie said.

  Spike began to unscrew a big jug of Cabernet. Rosie, tracking the sausage, trotted over and jumped up into Richie’s lap where she was eye level with her quarry.

  “Richie,” I said, “I don’t think she should be at the table.”

  “Don’t be so bossy,” Richie said.

  “That’s right,” Spike said.

  “You are kind of bossy,” Millicent said.

  I looked around at the odd gathering. Then I broke off a small piece of French bread and gave it to Rosie.

  “Oh, bite my clank,” I said.

  CHAPTER 55

  I bought some new place settings to make up for the ones that had been vandalized, and I took them to the empty loft and carefully set my table with them and stood back and looked at them.

  “Very nice,” I said.

  On my bed, Rosie raised her head and looked at me.

  “You like?” I said.

  She stared at me and kept her opinion to herself.

  I fussed with the table setting for a while and then put Rosie’s leash on and went down to my car. It was early evening, still sort of half lit with a blue tone, as I put the car in gear and drove away from my loft. As I always did these days, I circled the block once to see if I could spot anyone following me. I didn’t see anyone, but, as I came back to Summer Street, a black Lexus settled in behind me. It didn’t have to be a tail. This was a prime route out of South Boston. Past South Station I took a left and headed past Chinatown toward the expressway. There was a lot of traffic. The car behind me did the same thing. In fact ten cars behind me did the same thing. Most of them peeled off toward the Southeast Expressway, but at least three of us deked and dived among the pylons and construction hazards and onto the Mass Pike heading west. The Lexus cruised past me. It had tinted windows and I couldn’t see the driver. Maybe I was jumpy because of the vandalism in my loft, and the way Kragan had looked at me when Spike and I left him. On the other hand, there was no exit until we got to Allston so he could tail me from in front without worrying that I’d turn off on him. We went under the Prudential Center and past Fenway Park and behind B.U. The sign said Cambridge/Allston; as I pulled into the right lane to exit, I passed the black Lexus and when I went off, he was behind me. At the river, I turned right onto Storrow Drive. If he was tailing me he’d have to show himself. There wasn’t much reason for someone to come out here on the pike and then head right back into town. As I passed B.U. from this side, he was behind me. I felt the little thrill of fear again. I looked at Rosie. She was on the floor of the passenger side with her nose almost in the heater. Good. She was out of the line of fire. I took my gun out and put it in my lap.

  At the overpass to the Fens the Lexus began to close on me. I took the Fenway exit and cut over to Mass Avenue and went south. The Lexus was right behind me now, and as we approached Washington Street the Lexus pulled out as if to pass me. A window in the back seat rolled down. I slammed on my brakes as hard as I could and a shotgun blast went sweeping over the hood of my car. I yanked the car left onto Washington Street. Behind me I could hear the tires squealing on the Lexus. I was heading for the police station on Warren Ave., but I wasn’t going to make it. There was a red light two blocks ahead. Cars were stopped in both directions. If I got stuck in traffic I was dead. But I had a backup. I yanked the car right, and then right again onto Tremont and jammed it up on the sidewalk in front of Buddy’s Fox. Tony Marcus. It wasn’t much but there wasn’t anything else. I picked up my gun, scooped Rosie up and ran in the front door. The place was full. Everyone was black, and most of them were male. I went to the bar.

  “Tony Marcus,” I said. “My name’s Sunny Randall.”

  I could tell that the bartender had seen the gun. But all he said was, “Hold on.”

  He must have hit a button under the bar because all of a sudden Junior appeared in the hallway with Ty-Bop jittering beside him. Kragan came into the restaurant with two other men. All three had their hands in their pockets. Tony Marcus slid past Junior and stood beside me at the bar.

  “Sunny Randall,” he said, and reached out and scratched Rosie behind the ear.

  Kragan glanced around the restaurant and then began to walk toward me.

  “He wants to kill me,” I said to Tony.

  “We don’t want him doing none of that,” Marcus said and stepped in front of me. “Do we?”

  “Step away from her,” Kragan said.

  Tony looked at Ty-Bop, and a gun appeared in Ty-Bop’s hand as if it had always been there.

  “He show a piece,” Tony jerked his head at Kragan, “kill him.”

  From his post in the hallway Junior produced a double-barreled shotgun. The bartender showed a pump gun. Both shotguns were aimed at Kragan’s companions. Kragan looked at Ty-Bop. Ty-Bop looked back at him without expression. He was suddenly motionless, as if the gun had stabilized him. His small eyes had the depth and humanity of two bottle caps. It was as if his life was in his gun. Kragan looked at him the way a huge crocodile might suddenly confront a small, very poisonous viper. In Kragan’s face was the slowly dawning realization that this trivial boy could kill him. Him! Cathal Kragan! The restaurant was dead silent. The diners all hunched a little lower over their tables, trying to watch, trying not to get caught watching, hoping that if the guns went off they wouldn’t get hit.

  “You motherfuckers have a reservation?” Tony said.

  Nobody said anything. Kragan couldn’t seem to take his eyes off me. His desire to kill me seemed almost sensual.

  “No?” Tony said, just as if Kragan had answered. “Then get the fuck out of my restaurant.”

  Nothing moved.

  “I say three, and you ain’t moving,” Tony Marcus said to Kragan. “Then Ty-Bop going to shoot you in the head. One . . .”

  Kragan moved. Without a word he turned and walked out. The two backup men went out after him. The room was quiet for a moment, then someone began to clap and then somebody else clapped, and then everyone in the restaurant began to applaud.

  “Join us for supper, Sunny,” Tony Marcus said. “Later on I’ll have somebody take you home.”

  “I couldn’t eat,” I said.

  “How ‘bout this animal here, she like chitlins?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Never liked them much either,” Tony said.

  CHAPTER 56

  I was i
n a big round booth at the back of a coffee shop opposite the green in Taunton with three Burkes and two Antonionis. I was the only female.

  “I had heard that your son was divorced from this lady, Desmond,” Albert Antonioni said.

  “What’s between them is not our business,” Richie’s father said. “Richie says she’s still family.”

  He was thin Irish—hollow cheeks, deep-set eyes. He had the look of Irish martyrdom about him, like some pale priest willing to starve to death for Ireland’s freedom. His brother Felix, Richie’s uncle, had once been a heavyweight boxer, and he bore the marks of it. There were scars around his eyes. His nose was thick and flat. His neck was short and his upper body was thick and slightly round-shouldered, as if the weight of all that muscle had begun to tire him.

  “We have no problem with you,” Antonioni said.

  He had a white beard and a strong nose, and his dark eyes moved very quickly. His son Allie was beside him, bigger than his father and clean-shaven, but with the same nose, and the same quick eyes.

  “You do, if you have a problem with Sunny,” Desmond said.

  At the next table were men who had come with the Antonionis. That made four on their side, and four on ours, including me. I was flattered. I knew that these things were worked out as meticulously as the seating at the Paris peace conference, and I had been counted as a full person.

  Before we’d come Richie had said to me, “Don’t get feminist on me in this one. These guys live in a male world. We’ll get what we want better if you are, ah, ladylike.”

  “Can I say fuck now and then,” I had asked, “just to be one of the guys?”

  Richie smiled.

  “You will never be one of the guys,” he said. “The less you say, the better it’ll go.”

  I knew he was right, and now, on scrupulously neutral territory—about halfway between Providence and Boston, a little closer to Providence, to show Antonioni some respect, but still in Massachusetts, to show the Burkes respect—I was sitting beside Richie, letting Desmond Burke do the talking. Richie was as quiet as I was.

  “I don’t think we have a problem with Sunny that can’t be worked out,” Antonioni said. “We got some plans. We been careful making those plans, we don’t interfere with your plans.”