by Mike Lupica
“Tell me again who played him in that movie?”
“Johnny Depp.”
“I liked him better as the gay pirate.”
“That’s what Spike calls him.”
“Well,” he said, “Spike ought to know.”
“I feel as if most of the people I need to talk to might be dead or in jail,” I said.
My father said, “Maybe not all.”
He got up, picked up my plate and his, took them into the kitchen. I could hear the water running. My whole life, he had been neater than hospital corners. I knew he would rinse the cups before he left, too. And maybe vacuum the rugs.
“You know someone?” I said when he was back in the living room.
“I may,” he said. “Let me make a few calls.”
He picked up the cups now, went back into the kitchen. I could hear the water running again. If you were born round, he always said, you didn’t die square.
He said that he was going to take a nice long walk in the park while he was waiting for the bridge party to clear out of his house.
“The problem with retirement,” he said, “is that you can never take a day off.”
I hugged him. He hugged me back. Neither one of us ever went through the motions with that. I felt as safe and happy in his embrace as I always had been, for as long as I could remember.
“Be careful,” he said.
“Always.”
“I mean it,” he said. “It doesn’t take much knowing or asking around to know that you and Richie are still together. If they came for the others, they might come for you.”
“Not a Burke, Daddy.”
“Not to me,” he said. “But to them.”
I pulled back from him, smiling.
“Mishegoss!” I said in a loud voice.
“God bless you,” my father said.
TWENTY
I CALLED RICHIE, and was sent straight to voicemail. No shocker there. He frequently had his phone turned off, even in times like these. Richie Burke was not one of those people who believed he risked seizure if he didn’t check his phone every five minutes.
I knew I could have gone on the Internet to read more about the Winter Hill Gang but took a walk over to the Boston Public Library instead, having decided to go through ancient copies of the Globe. It was detective work out of the past, without search engines, and had always seemed to suit me. But I was often happier living in the past, even when it involved murder and general mayhem and more questions than I was currently equipped to answer.
It was late afternoon by the time I left, having learned a lot about the bad old days without learning anything that really helped me. After I’d gotten home and fed Rosie and walked her, Spike called and asked if I wanted to come over and have dinner with him at the restaurant. I told him I just wanted to whip up one of my specialties in the space-age kitchen Melanie Joan had inherited, then curl up with a good book.
“This might sound mean,” Spike said. “But you don’t have any specialties.”
“You take that back.”
“Name one.”
“Spaghetti and broccoli.”
“That’s not a specialty,” Spike said. “That’s spaghetti and broccoli.”
“I wasn’t aware that I was talking to a special counsel,” I said.
I didn’t make spaghetti and broccoli. Instead I heated up a pizza from Whole Foods that I’d been saving. That would show him. When I finished I took Rosie for another walk, up Charles and over to the Common tonight. The dog trainer I’d briefly hired told me to always have treats with me and then say “Leave it” as soon as she spotted another dog and commenced growling and barking.
Tonight had been another total breakdown in theory.
The first dog she saw was a chocolate Lab, up in the corner of the Common near the playground. I assumed that you could hear Rosie’s subsequent barking in Kenmore Square.
“Sorry,” I said to the Lab’s owner, a young guy in a Harvard hoodie.
“We never felt unsafe,” he said, grinning. “Have you ever tried a trainer?”
* * *
—
WHEN I GOT HOME I poured myself a glass of wine and read a book Wayne Cosgrove had recommended, Citizen Somerville, Bobby Martini’s account of growing up in the Winter Hill Gang. It was about guys with names like Rico and Tony Blue, and about how somebody near the pizza stand always seemed to be watching as Bobby or Rico or Tony got themselves shot.
Somehow, the man who was my ex-husband’s father had come out of that world. The father of someone I loved and always would love, perhaps as much as any man I would ever know.
Me, I thought.
Honorary Burke.
The doorbell rang. I wasn’t expecting anyone. Richie never dropped in unannounced, nor did Spike. Nor did my father. As I walked across the living room I reached into the top drawer of my desk and grabbed a Beretta Pico my father had purchased for me. He’d asked me after the Spare Change case how many guns I had in my house. I told him two. The next day he brought over a couple new ones, including the Pico, and said, “Make it four.”
Before I opened the door, I slid open the peephole.
Desmond Burke was standing there, Buster and Colley right behind him.
I palmed the gun as I opened the door.
“I’m sorry I didn’t call first,” he said.
“How’d you know I’d be here,” I said.
“Intuition,” he said.
He turned to the men behind him and said he wouldn’t be long. I briefly wondered if he and Felix had been those young men once, working strong-arm, as foot soldiers, and dreaming of bigger things.
Somehow Rosie didn’t make a sound in Desmond’s presence. Perfect. Even dogs were afraid of him.
“Can I get you something to drink?” I said.
As he walked ahead of me I put the gun back into the open drawer and quietly shut it.
“A beer would do me fine,” Desmond said.
I went to the refrigerator and came back with a bottle of Samuel Adams. I wasn’t a beer girl. I stocked it for Richie and Spike. I asked Desmond if he wanted a glass. He said the bottle would do him fine as well.
“I’ll get to the point,” he said.
“When have you ever not?” I said.
I smiled at him. He did not smile back. But then he rarely did. Everything about him, his entire taut-coiled self, was all business.
His business.
“I have always treated you, after a fashion, as the daughter I never had,” he said.
“And I have been grateful for that,” I said.
“But I simply cannot have you interfering in this,” he said. “This isn’t about Richie or Peter or what happened at Felix’s. I simply cannot have you challenging my authority.”
I started to ask him what year he thought this was but restrained myself. It wouldn’t get either one of us anywhere.
“I don’t work for you, Desmond,” I said. “I don’t work for Felix. I don’t even work for Richie. I work for me.”
He took a long pull of his beer. Tonight he was a man in black himself, black sports jacket, black knit shirt. It made him look even more pale than he usually did.
“You saw Albert Antonioni day before yesterday,” he said. “With your friend. The gay man who owns the restaurant.”
“I know I wasn’t followed to Providence,” I said. “So how exactly do you know that?”
It was as if the question had gone unasked. He took another pull on his beer and quickly wiped his lips with the back of his hand.
“I know Richie asked you to stand down,” he said. “Obviously it did no good. So tonight I came myself.”
“Is your current situation somehow tied up with a gun deal so many think you are in the process of making?” I said.
Now he off
ered me the barest hint of smile.
“Generally, or specifically?”
“You know what I’m asking,” I said.
He looked down at the coffee table, at Bobby Martini’s book.
“Are you reading that?” he said.
“Are you changing the subject?”
“I am.”
“Research,” I said.
He nodded. “Funny kid, Bobby,” he said.
“I know you don’t want help from the cops,” I said. “But let me help you, Desmond. I’m good at this kind of work.”
“I have never needed anyone’s help,” he said. He nodded at the book. “Not theirs, not yours, not anyone’s. Not ever.”
He abruptly stood.
“Thank you for the beer,” he said.
Then: “Richie told me I was wasting my time.”
“We have to agree to disagree on this,” I said.
“I am generally not one with whom to disagree,” he said.
I told him I was well aware.
“You are either with me or against me,” he said.
He walked out the front door without saying another word. Rosie and I watched him go. Neither one of us said anything. I walked across the room and locked the door behind him and bolted it.
“Leave it,” I said.
Rosie and I both knew I wasn’t talking to her this time.
TWENTY-ONE
MY FATHER AND I were in front of a nursing and rehab facility called Sherrill House, on Huntington Avenue. He was explaining to me that it was one of the top places of its kind in Boston, providing both short- and long-term care.
“Long-term care, of course,” Phil Randall said, “is the same as God’s waiting room. Just without magazines.”
He shook his head, as if delaying going inside for as long as possible. But then smiled, as if another private joke were being told by him, to him.
“Every time I ask your mother where we should go when we’re no longer able to care for ourselves,” he said, “she gives me the same stock answer.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “She tells you she doesn’t want to discuss it.”
“Bingo,” he said. “Then she asks me to fix her another bourbon.”
“Does bourbon fall into the category of short-term or long-term care?” I said.
“Both,” my father said.
Then we were finally on our way inside and into the part of the place where people in what they called the Special Care Program lived, if you could call it living. It was where they put Alzheimer’s patients, or those suffering from what were described as “related disorders.”
“His son was reluctant to call it Alzheimer’s,” my father said. “But the way he described things, if the old man isn’t officially there yet, his exit is coming up fairly rapidly.”
“But you said he still has good days and bad days.”
“So I was told by the son.”
“So we hope this is one of the good days.”
“If there really is such a thing.” My father sighed. “When you reach my age,” he said, “you’d rather stare down an AR-15 than a place like this.”
“You don’t have to go into the room with me if you’d rather not,” I said.
“I’d rather not,” he said. “But I shall.”
We checked in at the front desk and were directed to the elevators that would take us up to the designated floor. Tim Leonard, the son, was waiting for us at the nurses’ station. He was slightly overweight and had thinning hair and a wide, Irish face and was a successful State Street lawyer, despite being the descendant of a strong-arm foot soldier himself.
“Like Richie, then,” I’d said to my father. “The honest son of a profoundly dishonest man.”
“Well,” Phil Randall had said, “if you can call a lawyer honest.”
Tim’s father, Billy Leonard, had come up on the streets at the same time as Desmond and Felix Burke and their brothers. Somehow along the way Billy managed to leave Buddy McLean’s crew and get with the Burkes without getting himself shot in Scollay Square, where my research told me a lot of old Mob guys had ended up extremely dead.
Billy is someone who had become an honorary Burke over time, mostly working as a body man for Felix, collecting for Desmond in their loansharking business, or doing the same for Peter when he was still making book. The legend was that he’d officially become part of the family when he took a bullet intended for Felix one night when they were coming out of the old Boston Garden after a fight card. Billy Leonard recovered. Desmond and Felix never forgot.
We were here because Phil Randall said Tim Leonard owed him a favor. I’d asked how big. My father said big enough that we were here.
“And you believe he might know some of Desmond’s secrets,” I said.
“Knew Desmond’s secrets,” he’d said.
Billy Leonard was in a wheelchair facing the window when we walked into the sunny room. He was still a big man and made the chair look small, hands folded in his lap. He wore a faded red flannel shirt and faded cords and the kind of sneakers that had Velcro on top.
If he heard us come in, he gave no sign.
It was Tim Leonard who spoke first.
“Dad,” he said as he turned the wheelchair around so Billy Leonard was facing us. “You remember Phil Randall. This is his daughter, Sunny.”
Billy stared at us, frowning, focused on my father.
“I know you,” he said.
It was somewhere between question and answer.
My father smiled as if he were here to get a donation for the Police Benevolent Association.
“Only from all the times I tried to put you away,” Phil Randall said.
And then Billy smiled back at him.
“Phil Fucking Randall,” he said.
“Not the middle name with which I was baptized,” my father said. “But considering our history, I’ll wear it, as the kids like to say these days.”
Billy said, “You’re not dead yet? Jesus.”
“Mary and Joseph,” my father said.
“You knew Phil was coming, Dad,” Tim Leonard said. “I told you what he and Sunny wanted to talk to you about.”
“Tell me again.”
“They want to ask you some questions about Desmond Burke,” Tim said.
“Is he dead?” Billy said.
“No,” I said. “But someone seems to be trying.”
Billy focused his rheumy eyes on me.
“Who are you?”
“Phil’s daughter.”
“Cop?”
“Was until I wasn’t,” I said. “I’m private now.”
Billy nodded, as if the old man were trying to process new information.
“Ask you something?”
“Sure?”
“Your ass as good as your legs?”
“Dad!” Tim Leonard said.
“It’s okay,” I said. And to Billy I said, “The answer is an unqualified yes.”
“I was always an ass man,” Billy Leonard said. “Give me a good ass over big tits anytime.”
Tim sighed, shook his head, told his father he’d be outside, and left us there. My father and I pulled up the two folding chairs in the room so that we were facing Billy.
“Somebody is shooting at the Burkes again, Billy,” my father said, as if he were still the lead detective on the case. “First Desmond’s son, Richie. He lived. Peter Burke was not as lucky.”
“What about Felix?” Billy said. “I worked for Felix, mostly. Took a bullet for him that time. You remember that, Phil? Stepped right up there like a fucking champion.”
“Everybody remembers,” my father said.
“Showed them all some rope that night,” Billy said.
“Somebody shot up Felix’s house this time,” I said. “Ju
st without him in it.”
“Always liked that house,” Billy said. “We had some times there.”
There was, I knew, no point in telling him that Felix had long since moved to the water. I remembered what my father had told me about people in Billy’s state, that you should talk to them like they were drunk.
“I didn’t know Desmond had a daughter,” Billy said to me.
“Only by marriage,” I said. “To Richie.”
“Billy,” my father said, leaning forward, “what we’re trying to determine is who might have a beef out of the past that might make them move on Desmond now.”
Billy’s eyes seemed to brighten suddenly. “Trouble was our business!” he said.
“Wasn’t it, though,” Phil Randall said.
“We used to joke, we did, that Desmond’s real profession was pissing people off,” Billy said.
“Tell me about it,” my father said.
Billy shook his head but was smiling again. “Girls,” he said.
“Desmond had a thing for the ladies?” my father said.
What began as a laugh with Billy Leonard quickly became a terrible-sounding cough.
“He was some cock hound back in the day, I’ll tell you that,” Billy said when he was able to speak. “You didn’t know that? What the fuck kind of detective were you?”
Billy Leonard reached down now without embarrassment, grinning at my father as if I weren’t there, as if this were just old boys being boys.
Then he grabbed his crotch.
“I used to tell him this business going to get him killed before our real business ever did,” Billy said.
“While he was married?” my father said.
Another laugh. More coughing, even worse than before. When Billy was able to catch his breath again he said, “Before, during, after. They’ll probably have trouble closing the casket someday, he’ll probably have one last hard-on.”
I knew little of Richie’s mother other than what he’d told me. He always made her sound like a living saint, and her romance with his father something that could have been imagined only by Irish poets, before the cancer took her. Coupled with what I knew about Desmond Burke, I found it difficult to imagine him tomcatting around Boston as a much younger man.