by Mike Lupica
I smiled. “Bastard finally came to his senses,” I said.
She offered a smile in return.
“You’ve suggested that your feelings for Richie are uncomplicated,” she said, “even though there is no clear resolution to them, or commitment from either one of you about the future.”
“I think I might have to table those issues,” I said, “until I find the sonofabitch who shot him.”
I snuck a look at my watch. I know she saw me do it. Only a few minutes left in the session.
“There might be one other thing to consider,” Susan Silverman said. “Perhaps you feel the sense of purpose that you’re feeling right now, and clarity, because you’ve decided that in this particular case he needs you more than you need him.”
“Gotta admit,” I said. “Didn’t see that one coming.”
She tilted her head just slightly and raised an eyebrow, though not as artfully as Spike could. She wasn’t perfect.
“Kind of my thing,” she said. “And something else for you to consider until next time.”
She stood and smiled and said, “While you are occupied with the rat-bastard sonofabitch who shot your ex-husband.”
The mouth on her.
And her such a lady.
THIRTEEN
ON MY WAY BACK from Cambridge I called my father and told him I was probably going to have to make a much deeper dive into Desmond Burke’s past.
I had Phil Randall on speaker, and could hear him make a snorting noise.
“Good luck with that,” he said.
I told him that I’d already met with Wayne Cosgrove.
“Good reporter,” my father said, “for a reporter.”
“He actually knows a lot about the history of the Irish Mob,” I said.
“From the outside,” Phil Randall said. “Doesn’t make him an insider. It’s like thinking you know how to play shortstop for the Red Sox because you’ve watched a lot of baseball from the Monster Seats.”
I looked in the rearview mirror and saw myself smiling.
“You know how much I love you, Daddy,” I said. “But you do know how I stop listening when you use baseball analogies, right?”
“What I’m saying,” he said, “is that you’re gonna need someone who actually is on the inside. Or was. And whose last name isn’t Burke.” There was a pause and then he said, “I’m assuming you would have mentioned it if any of them had been shot so far today.”
“Still early,” I said.
I had slowed on Storrow Drive, and could see flashing police lights up ahead near the exit onto David G. Mugar Way.
“Desmond Burke is the most fastidious criminal I have ever encountered, if there even is such a thing,” my father said. “It is why I haven’t locked him up and no one else has, either.”
I never failed to notice that he still talked about his career as a cop in the present tense. And, I assumed, always would.
Traffic had now come to a complete stop.
“You got a minute?” he said.
“I’ve come to a complete stop on Storrow Drive,” I said. “I’ve abandoned all hope that I will ever make it back to River Street Place.”
“I think you’re being dramatic,” he said.
“I get that from mother,” I said.
He let that one go.
“One thing about the Burkes that always fascinated me is that as closely as Desmond and Felix have worked, and as much as they’re connected, there’s a wariness that exists between them,” my father said. “Like they’ve been concerned one might make some kind of move on the other. I’ve always wondered if there might be some brotherly resentment that Desmond was the one in charge.”
The traffic finally began to move again, and then I was off Storrow and onto Beacon and making my way toward Charles Street. It occurred to me that the geography of the area was starting to feel more and more normalized.
“So what are you saying?” I said.
“You need to talk to somebody who knows where all the bodies are buried.”
“Literally or figuratively?” I said.
He snorted again. “Both.”
Then he said to hold on, he wanted to check his phone contacts, a list that he had slowly transferred to the iPhone I had gotten him last Christmas, something that had taken some doing, since the list was only somewhat shorter than the Old Testament.
Finally he said, “Write this down. It’s Vinnie Morris’s new number and his address up on Concord Turnpike.”
“I’m moving again, Daddy,” I said. “Text me.”
“You know I’m not much for texting,” he said.
“Make an exception for your precious princess,” I said, then told him I should have thought of Vinnie on my own.
“It’s like I keep trying to tell you,” my father said over the speaker, “I taught you everything you know, missy. Not everything I know.”
I told him I was pretty sure he had stolen that line from a movie. He told me to prove it. And then he reminded me once again of another line, from an old boxing promoter friend of his.
“It’s better to be stolen from than to have to steal,” he said.
“But aren’t you technically the one who did the stealing?”
“What is this,” my father said, “a grand jury?”
I asked him what Vinnie was doing these days.
“He owns a bowling alley,” Phil Randall said.
“No shit?” I said.
“The mouth on you,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “And me such a lady.”
FOURTEEN
WHEN I GOT HOME I walked Rosie, locked up, got back in the car, put Vinnie’s address into Waze. I thought about calling in advance to tell him I was coming and decided to surprise him instead, even knowing that someone who’d begun his professional career as a trigger man for Joe Broz and then moved up to bodyguard Gino Fish probably liked surprises about as much as the Secret Service did.
When I was on my way back to Cambridge, my father called back.
“I should have mentioned that the bowling alley is just a front with Vinnie,” he said.
I told him that I had come to that same conclusion on my own.
“I hear he’s got his own crew now,” Phil Randall said.
Who knew, I thought, that Vinnie, of all people, had always wanted to direct?
There was a solitary bowling pin outlined against the sky, looking as if it belonged in another time, in a much older Boston. There was a guy behind the counter inside who looked as big as Tony Marcus’s man Junior, just white, almost to the extreme, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and halfheartedly cleaning the outside of some bowling shoes. I wanted to suggest perhaps working on the insides of the shoes but thought better of it.
The man had a huge shaved head that somehow seemed perfectly proportional to the rest of him, or perhaps to the place, as if you could take it off his shoulder and roll it down the lane to convert a difficult split.
“Vinnie around?” I said to the man.
“Who wants to know?”
“Sunny Randall.”
“He know you?”
“Do any of us ever really know anyone?” I said.
“Is that supposed to be funny?” he said.
“Apparently not,” I said.
There was a phone and intercom set on the counter in front of him. Something else out of another time. I pointed at it. “Would you mind terribly telling him I’m here?” I said.
He picked up the phone, turned as he spoke, turned back around and said, “Upstairs.”
Vinnie Morris, by both reputation and results, had always been known as the best shooter in Boston, though a record like Vinnie’s wasn’t something you could find the way my father loved to find baseball records. He had, as far as I knew, operated at various times on both s
ides of the law. There had even been times when he had acted as a sideman for an old boyfriend of mine—Boyfriend, Sunny? How old are you?—named Jesse Stone, the chief of police in Paradise.
Vinnie was waiting for me at the top of the stairs. He was as I remembered him, small and whippet thin, gray hair short and parted almost military-style on the side, looking as if he’d just stepped out of the Brooks Brothers on Newbury Street: blue blazer, gray slacks, white shirt with pinpoint collar, thin rep tie. As I made my way up the stairs, I could see the shine on his cap-toed black shoes. There was no sign of a gun interfering with the sleek lines of his clothes. But I knew at least one was on him somewhere, one that could be easily accessed if necessary.
He looked as out of place in a bowling alley as my mother would have at a rap concert.
“So,” he said, walking behind me into his small office.
“Nice to see you, too, Vinnie,” I said.
“Yeah.”
Then: “Have a seat.”
There was a desk, a single chair across from it, a couch, a flat-screen television mounted on the wall, a small refrigerator. On one of the other walls was a shooting-range target, the outline of a man black against white, featuring a series of concentric circles with numbers inside ranging from 7’s to 9’s.
“A target, Vinnie?” I said. “Seriously?”
“Whatsa matter?” he said. “Got no sense of humor?”
“I do,” I said. “I just didn’t know you did.”
“Yeah,” he said.
Then: “You want a Coke? I got some of those small bottles in the fridge.”
I said that sounded delicious, and that just the bottle would be fine, no ice.
He went and got two bottles, uncapped them, set one down in front of me on a coaster.
“Old school,” he said. “Like me.”
He went back around the desk, sat down, drank some Coke, put the bottle down carefully on the coaster in front of him. Calling Vinnie Morris a neat freak didn’t even begin to tell the story.
We sat looking at each other until he said, “Richie and Peter, huh? Some fucking thing.”
“Kind of why I’m here.”
“Figured.”
“What do you hear?” I said.
“I got nothing.”
“You’re being far too modest,” I said.
“All due respect to your ex,” Vinnie said. “But in what world do I care about Burkes getting shot? I’m out of that shit.”
I tilted my head to the side and in a singsong voice said, “Are you?”
“I just said. In what world does this involve me?”
“Theirs,” I said. “Yours. Mine. Ours.”
Then I told him what the shooter had said to Richie about his father.
“Maybe I did hear something about that,” Vinnie said.
“So you do have a bit more than nothing.”
“Hearing things is not knowing things,” he said.
I felt as if I were on the other side of Cambridge and back to sparring with Susan Silverman. I sipped some of my old-school Coca-Cola. It defied explanation that it had always tasted better in the small bottles. I placed the bottle carefully on the coaster, afraid that Vinnie might put one between my eyes if I left a ring on the surface of his desk.
“You really want to know what I know?” Vinnie said. “I know that I need the Burkes in my business or me in theirs like I need a fucking hole in my head.”
“Words to live by.”
“Operative word being live,” he said.
“I hear that you’ve become a bit of an entrepreneur yourself,” I said. “Criminally speaking.”
“This business is legit,” he said. “I’m legit now. Like I said, I got no time for the other.”
“So you’re saying you haven’t become, uh, entrepreneurial?”
“Fuck that.”
“Just making conversation.”
“Same.”
“Can’t lie, Vinnie,” I said. “But sometimes it’s hard to tell with you.”
We sat. There must have been customers downstairs, because I would occasionally hear the crash of pins. Despite the setting, I knew I was in the presence of a Boston legend, at least if you were looking for a better shot than Annie Oakley, and idly wondered when was the last time that Vinnie had shot somebody for hire.
“Who would come for Desmond?” I said.
If I asked the question often enough, maybe somebody would finally give me an answer I could use. It was a variation of one of Spike’s fundamental theories of detecting: Annoy enough people and eventually something will turn up. More words to live by.
“Why am I even talking to you?” Vinnie said.
“You like me?” I said. “You like my father?”
“That frankly ain’t enough.”
“Because I’m eye candy?” I said.
Vinnie almost smiled.
“Listen,” he said, “it ain’t a big secret that Desmond is moving toward the door. Looking to get out once and for all. He’s old and he’s tired and he’s made his.”
“But his,” I said, “is not exactly the kind of profession where you cash out on your 401(k) and then retire to Arizona or Florida.”
“Why not?” Vinnie said. “Pretty much everybody Desmond came up with is either dead or in prison. He retires now, he retires with the fucking trophy.”
“But for now he’s still actively in the life,” I said.
“People say he wants to make one last big score.”
“People,” I said.
He nodded.
“And in what realm would that big score be made?”
“Guns,” Vinnie said. “If I heard anything, which I’m not saying I did, what I maybe might have heard is that Desmond has figured out a way to make some real money bringing guns up here. Which frankly ain’t easy, just because of the volume you need to move.”
Just get them talking, Phil Randall had always told me.
Vinnie shrugged. “All this is above my pay grade. As much gun work as I used to do, I never got involved in all that supply-and-demand. But since we’re just talking here, if Desmond has figured out a way to make real money, it might piss off some people who haven’t. Figured that out, I mean.”
“Piss them off enough to start shooting Burkes?” I said.
“I didn’t say that,” Vinnie said. “And I got no idea what Peter would have to do with that. Peter has always run the book, nothing else.”
Before I could say anything, Vinnie said, “Ask you something?”
“Anything.”
“You can’t ask your ex about this without coming up here?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Tell me about it.”
“What does that mean?”
“Something else for you to figure out,” Vinnie said. “I just run a bowling alley.”
“Has anyone ever told you how opaque you can be?” I said.
Vinnie shrugged. “Not my color,” he said.
I stood up. I asked what he wanted me to do with the Coke bottle. He said he’d take care of it. I thanked him for seeing me. He said, “Yeah.”
Then I said, “You’ll be hearing from me.”
“You think you can just come up here and threaten me like that?” he said.
I told him that was a good one. He said, see, he did have a sense of humor after all. I walked down the stairs and made sure not to make any sudden movements as I walked past the guy in the Hawaiian shirt, just to be on the safe side.
FIFTEEN
IT WAS A VERIFIABLE FACT, of both my life and Richie’s, that the new Rosie didn’t love him nearly as much as the original had.
The original Rosie had been as much Richie’s as she’d been mine, of course. After our divorce our custody schedule had been as strict as i
t would have been with a child. But even when Rosie was no longer living with Richie on a full-time basis, the love they continued to share sometimes seemed to pass understanding. Even when they were apart for only a few days the dog would, as Richie loved to point out, lose her shit every single time she saw him again.
The relationship between him and the new Rosie, on the other hand, continued to be a work in progress. Much like our own. Except that the dog, bless her heart, didn’t overthink her relationship with Richie nearly as much as I did. Or require a therapist to sort through it.
Today she had lapped his face when he’d arrived at Melanie Joan’s and then sat next to him on the couch until arriving at the conclusion that no treats were in the offing.
“A little sugar never hurts with a girl,” I said.
“I’m going to forget I heard that,” Richie said, “especially in this time of enlightenment for men and women.”
“Just sayin’.”
“Paying her off makes me feel like a john.”
“Are you calling our precious angel a treat whore?” I said.
“If the round heels fit,” he said.
He was feeling well enough that we had made an actual dinner date for Davio’s, our favorite Italian restaurant in this part of town, on Arlington. He had informed me that the family had decided there would be no wake for his uncle Peter, or funeral, just a brief memorial service at one of the Burke family’s cemetery plots at St. Augustine’s in South Boston. The church itself, on Dorchester Street, was the oldest Catholic Church building in the whole state.
“My mother’s there, and now Peter.” He smiled. “As always, the Church cares about as much where the money comes from as a lot of other people with whom my family has done business.”
Richie asked if we had time for a glass of wine before Davio’s. I told him I was way ahead of him, and had already opened a bottle of La Crema.
I went into the kitchen, came back with two glasses. I handed Richie his, turned and tried to discreetly slip Rosie a small biscuit.
When I turned back to him, he was shaking his head.
“Busted,” he said.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.