by Mike Lupica
A new bodyguard of Tony’s, who introduced himself as Tayshawn, was waiting for me at the bar. He did not ask to pat me down, just simply said, “Gun?” With the firepower on the premises, Tayshawn had clearly decided we could go with the honor system.
“Not to Tony’s?” I said, and opened the Bottega Veneta bag that Richie had paid far too much for last Christmas to show him.
He walked me back to Tony’s office. Tony’s two main sidemen were back there with him. One was a small, jittery young guy of indeterminate age named Ty Bop. He was Tony’s shooter. Today he was wearing a black baseball cap with a yellow P on the front, and the skinniest pair of skinny jeans I had ever seen on a man or woman. Even those hung down off his hips. His high-top sneakers were bright white. We had met plenty of times before, but he gave no sign of greeting or recognition, just leaned against the wall and swayed slightly from side to side, as if listening to music that only he could hear.
Ty Bop was to my right. To my left, opposite wall, was Junior, Tony’s body man, one roughly the size of Old Ironsides. The threat from both of them was palpable. There had been a time, with two badass men in pursuit and fully intending to shoot me dead, that I had come running into Buddy’s Fox, where Tony’s guys had dissuaded them.
Tony ran prostitution in Boston, and was involved with other criminal enterprises when they suited his interests, much like a street venture capitalist. He was as much of a badass as anybody in town, no matter how much he liked to present himself as a gent. He had always reminded me of what Billy Dee Williams looked like when he was young, a light-skinned black man with a thin mustache, bespoke tailoring at all times, day or night, a soft-spoken manner that was nothing more than a front.
Tony Marcus had his cut in Boston, and the Burke family had theirs, and the Italians, what was left of them, had theirs. Eddie Lee still controlled Chinatown. Two of the old bosses, Gino Fish and Joe Broz, were long gone. Joe had died of old age. Gino had not.
Tony and I were not friends. Tony didn’t have friends, unless you counted Ty Bop and Junior. But we had managed to do favors for each other from time to time when our interests had coincided. I still trusted him about as far as either one of us would have been able to throw Junior. I was sure he felt the same about me.
He did not get up from behind his desk when I entered the office, just studied me up and down as if I were auditioning to be one of his girls.
“Sunny Randall,” he purred. “You are still one fine-looking piece of ass, girl.”
I sat down in the chair across from him and crossed my legs. The black skirt I was wearing was already short enough to show off my legs. Crossing them showed off more. Tony noticed, in full. But that had been the point.
“Don’t make me file a complaint with Human Resources, Tony,” I said.
It made him laugh.
“Girl, in my world, I am Human Resources,” he said.
“How’s business?” I said.
“Busier business than ever, Sunny Randall,” he said. “Tryin’ to keep up with the modern world. Lookin’ to do some of that di-ver-si-fi-cation shit.” Then proceeded to give me more information than I wanted or needed about how he planned to do that, with what he described as his “new fucking business model,” and his plans for expansion out of state. As always, he went back and forth between talking street and trying to sound as if in training to become Warren Buffett.
He was wearing a gray pinstriped suit, a pale lavender shirt, a lavender tie just slightly darker than the shirt, and a pocket square that matched both. But he was looking older than he had the last time I saw him, softer underneath the chin, his face a lot puffier than I remembered, as if he had put on weight.
“So,” he said, “to what do I owe the pleasure?”
“Somebody shot Richie Burke on Portland Street last night,” I said.
“So I heard,” Tony said. “Back-shot him, I heard.”
“Before the shooter left him there,” I said, “he told Richie it was about his father.”
Tony nodded.
“I was wondering,” I said to him, “if you know what might have precipitated such an event.”
Tony chuckled. “I do love listening to you talk, Sunny Randall,” he said.
“I’m just trying to get a handle on why somebody would not just make an aggressive move like this on the Burkes, but on the Burke who has nothing to do with the family business,” I said.
“So ask them.”
“I wanted to ask you,” I said, and smiled. “Didn’t you once tell me that you know everything in Boston except why the Big Dig took so long?”
“Was just being modest,” Tony said. “Knew that, too. The Italians just asked me not to tell.”
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 imagin
ary 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.
“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 f
or 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.