by Mike Lupica
“What,” he said.
“Make sure to tell Albert that a girl got the drop on you,” I said.
Then he smiled. It did absolutely nothing to soften his features.
“You a good shot?” he said.
“Good enough,” I said.
“I’m better,” Joseph Marchetti said.
When he had disappeared around the corner, I got behind the wheel of the Prius and started the engine and was thrilled that it didn’t blow up.
Then I once again got the hell out of Rhode Island, checking my rearview mirror all the way home.
FORTY-EIGHT
PETE COLAPIETRO, Providence cop, seemed to know where most of the bodies were buried from Narragansett to Woonsocket, both literally and figuratively.
Talking to him was a little bit like talking to Frank Belson, except that Pete was funnier than Frank, not that I would ever tell Frank that.
I called Pete when I got back to Boston and asked him about Joseph Marchetti.
“Told he’s worked his way up to midlevel-goon status,” Pete said. “Kind of guy Antonioni would use if he wanted to scare somebody he hadn’t sufficiently scared himself. But Joe’s not like family, if that’s what you’re asking. By all accounts, though, he is supposed to be some shooter.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.
“Protect and serve,” Pete said.
“Does Albert have any other family?” I said. “Wasn’t there a son?”
“Allie,” Pete said. “Dead, as Casey Stengel used to say, at the present time.”
More baseball. I was starting to believe that guys thought about baseball more than sex.
“Natural causes?” I said.
“Considering his line of work and who his old man was, yeah,” Pete said, “I guess you could put it that way.”
“If Albert wanted somebody to be gotten,” I said, “would Marchetti be his man?”
“One of many,” Pete said. “But yes.”
I thanked him.
“Sunny?” he said before I ended the call. “Just from the little I know, Joe Marchetti is not somebody on whom you put a gun and then he just lets it go.”
“Figured.”
“They either have eyes on you,” he said, “or somebody in the neighborhood made a call.”
I thought back to the day I thought I had been followed from Susan Silverman’s office.
“Aware of that, too, Pete.”
“Maybe you need to have somebody good to have eyes on you, too,” Pete Colapietro said.
I told him I would also keep that in mind, thanking him again. Then I texted Connie Devane the picture of Joseph Marchetti I had taken on my phone. We had exchanged numbers before I’d left her house.
She called me after she got the picture.
I said, “Is that the guy who used to come alone and visit Maria Cataldo?”
“No,” she said.
“Shit,” I said.
“You want me to keep watching the house for you?” she said. “It would make me feel useful.”
“That would make one of us,” I said.
FORTY-NINE
RICHIE AND I were having dinner at the Capital Grille on Boylston, next door to the Hynes Auditorium. The restaurant had originally been on Newbury, right before you got to Mass Ave. But they’d decided they needed a bigger space and found it the next block over. Blessedly, the steaks hadn’t gotten any smaller, nor the side dishes or desserts. Nor had the big pours for their wine.
Sometimes you just needed red meat and red wine, as diligent as you were about maintaining a girlish figure. Tonight was one of those nights.
“You pulled a gun on this jamoke?” Richie said.
“I did.”
“And you thought this was a prudent decision . . . why?”
“There was just something about him that pissed me off,” I said. “The casual way he thought he could harass me in broad daylight, and that I was just supposed to take it.”
Richie smiled.
“He fucked with the wrong Marine,” he said and raised his glass. I touched his with mine. We both drank.
Richie said, “I could tell my father to once again urge Albert Antonioni to leave you alone.”
“I think we are well past that,” I said. “Albert told me that your father had run out of favors.”
“Maybe Desmond still has things that Albert wants.”
“You mean business things,” I said.
“Who the hell knows?” Richie said.
Garrett, our waiter, brought Caesar salads for both of us. When he was gone, Richie said, “I’ve been thinking: It’s still a possibility that Maria might only turn out to be a side actor in this.”
“I know I could be wrong about her,” I said. “But I don’t think I am. I think she’s the star.”
“You hate being wrong,” he said.
“You’re the same way,” I said. I smiled sweetly. “Look how angry you were at yourself after so badly remarrying.”
“I know you like to play this game,” Richie said. “But I don’t.”
“Change of subject?”
“If you do, I’ll pay the check,” he said.
“You’re doing that anyway.”
He smiled. I liked it when he smiled.
I said, “Your father knows more than he is telling about her.”
“I’ve continued to ask about that in different ways,” he said. “To no avail.”
“Ask again when you get the chance,” I said. “I’m willing to offer sex in return.”
Richie Burke smiled then, and I felt the way I did when he smiled at me that way on our first date.
“As if I need to negotiate to get that,” he said.
And, as it turned out, he did not.
FIFTY
BEFORE RICHIE LEFT in the morning I said, “Please do not look for a way to engage with Joseph Marchetti.”
“By ‘engage,’” he said, “I assume you mean do not go down to Providence and find him and beat the living shit out of him.”
“It doesn’t get us any closer to an answer,” I said.
“It would make me feel better about everything,” he said.
“You can’t beat up everybody who’s mean to me,” I said. “It would become a full-time job.”
I spent a lot of my morning trying to do another Google search on Maria Cataldo, an even deeper dive than before, hoping there had been something I had missed. But there was not. I called Pete Colapietro, who said I wasn’t required to check in with him daily.
“How does somebody disappear from radar the way she apparently did?” I said. “Before and after the invention of the Internet?”
“She must have had money,” he said, “because for the life of me I can’t find credit card information on her anywhere. Or a home she ever owned. Or driver’s license. Or anything.”
“Give me the simple life,” I said.
“Must have been a lot of money,” he said.
“Mob money is often like that,” I said.
“Daddy’s money,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
“So far what I’ve mostly got is bupkus,” Pete said.
“Join the club,” I said.
I made myself more coffee and then fell back on one of my rock-solid foundations for first-rate crime detecting:
I made another list.
I painstakingly wrote it all down again, from the start. No supposition this time. Just facts, in an orderly timeline, as accurate as I could make it. I wrote down all the names, from Richie and Desmond and Felix and the late Peter Burke. Buster. Billy Leonard. Vinnie Morris. Charlie Whitaker. Tony Marcus. A bad sport named Joseph Marchetti.
Albert Antonioni.
Connie Devane.
Maria Cataldo.
And by a younger man.
Who was that younger man?
I looked at my list, and when the beating I had taken off Exeter Street had occurred. I thought about the recklessness of that, and the further recklessness of coming to my house and trying to shoot me and shooting Spike instead. It reminded me of something I had read in a novel once, Baja Oklahoma by Dan Jenkins. It was a book I’d picked up in college, one about a spunky waitress who dreamed of making it as a country songwriter, and who wouldn’t allow herself to ever believe she couldn’t do that in a man’s world.
A woman who wouldn’t take any shit from anybody.
In it there had been a list of the Ten Stages of Drunkenness, and I’d always thought the last two were the best:
Invisible.
Bulletproof.
Maybe that’s where our shooter was now. Maybe he thought nobody could catch him, or touch him.
But he was wrong.
I was going to catch him.
I just needed a little boost.
So I called the best booster I knew, Ghost Garrity, a thief who could disable any alarm and who could pick a lock while wearing oven mitts, and asked if he wanted to make a run down to Providence with me.
There was the brief feeling that perhaps I was the one thinking she was invisible, and bulletproof.
Fortunately, the feeling passed.
FIFTY-ONE
GHOST GARRITY had a bad toupee, which presupposed the notion that there were actually good toupees. He usually walked around in sports jackets and ties that seemed to be the color of various sorbets. He was small and whippet-thin and jittery, except when he wanted to steal something, or execute a successful break-in. Tonight he wore a black nylon windbreaker and black jeans and a black ball cap with the “G” logo for The Gap on the front.
“Ghost,” I said, “you shop at The Gap?”
“Lifted it,” he said.
We had waited until dark and parked a block away from Maria Cataldo’s house on an adjacent street.
“Tell me again what we’re looking for here,” Ghost said.
“Something.”
“That narrows it down,” he said. “You never told me who owns the place, by the way.”
We were making our way across the backyard. I told him who owned the house. Ghost stopped.
“The fuck,” he said. “You want me to filch a house belongs to Albert Antonioni?”
“I do,” I said.
Ghost said, “The price I gave you? Double it.”
“If we live,” I said.
“You’re not funny.”
“Am, too,” I said.
We made our way across the rest of the backyard to the back door. Ghost gently tried it, just in case. Locked. Then he reached into his gym bag and came out with two pairs of night goggles that looked as if they’d been borrowed—or lifted—from Navy SEALs.
“Put these on when we get inside,” Ghost said, “unless you want the whole freaking neighborhood to see the lights go on.”
Before he picked the lock, he held up what looked like an oversized version of an iPhone and tapped it a few times with his finger and finally said, “Deactivated the alarm.”
“You were able to do it with that thing?” I said.
“You wouldn’t believe how many of these alarm companies use wireless,” Ghost said. “Takes the challenge out of this shit.”
“Now what?”
“Now I work my magic on the door,” he said. “Want to time me?”
Even with a dead bolt, it took him about a minute, and then we were inside, putting on the goggles, Ghost going around the kitchen and closing the levered blinds, the room now weirdly lit by the night vision, as if we really were Navy SEALs about to go room to room hunting for bin Laden.
“You want to do this together?” Ghost said. “Or you take one room and I take another.”
“We separate,” I said.
“And I’m looking for something, I just don’t know what,” he said.
“Anything she might have left behind,” I said. “Anything that might tell me more about who she was.”
“She was somebody living at Albert Fucking Antonioni’s house,” Ghost said, “that’s who she was.”
“Nobody likes a whiner,” I said.
It seemed that all that had been left was the furniture. No paintings on the wall, no photographs, no books in the wall shelves, nothing on the antique coffee table in the spacious front room, nothing on the mantel above the fireplace. No clothes in the master bedroom upstairs, nothing in the drawers of the nightstand next to the old four-poster bed. No toiletries left behind in the bathroom. The two spare bedrooms were the same. It was as Connie Devane had suggested to me, as if Maria Cataldo had never been here at all.
The goggles were uncomfortable, too tight around my eyes, as I carefully searched the closets and the shelves in them and under the beds, looking for any trace of her. But it seemed every trace of her was gone, the way she was.
I quietly made my way downstairs.
Ghost said, “I checked the basement. It’s so clean it’s like they’re fixing to sell.”
“It’s like they didn’t just clean out everything except the furniture,” I said. “It’s like he had somebody sweep the place.”
“I’ll take one more look upstairs,” he said, “’case you missed something.”
He went silently up the stairs. It occurred to me, and not for the first time, that they didn’t call him Ghost for nothing.
There was a den next to the main living room that I had already checked, with a huge vintage desk with brass handles on the drawers. I pulled them out again, one by one, and checked underneath them, feeling like an idiot to even think that the old woman had taped something to one of the drawers, or had some kind of secret compartment. The desk was pressed up against a side window. It was a bear to move it away from the wall, but with some work I managed to at least move it forward a couple of inches.
When I did, I heard something gently fall to the carpet.
And there it was.
It was easy to see how anybody who had cleaned out the house could have missed it. How even Ghost had missed it. It must have fallen halfway down behind the desk and just stayed there, until now.
A small, slender picture frame.
With a color photograph inside, slightly faded, of a beautiful, dark-haired woman who I assumed was a younger version of Maria Cataldo.
She was smiling, and had her hand on the shoulder of a boy who looked to be about nine or ten, in front of a sign for the Grand Canyon National Park.
A boy who looked amazingly like a young Richie Burke.
FIFTY-TWO
WHEN WE WERE back in Boston I dropped Ghost on Tremont Street. He said it was close enough to his apartment. I had pointed out to him, more than once, that I was a private detective by trade and could find out where he lived if I really wanted to. But this was the way we’d always done it, just as I’d always paid him in cash.
He said he had to get out of his cat-burglar clothes and get dressed up to go out.
“One of the jackets from your Fontainebleau collection?” I said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he said.
I smiled and thanked him again for doing me a solid.
On the sidewalk he shook his head and said, “I just knocked over Albert Antonioni’s house.”
“But you didn’t steal anything.”
“Yeah,” Ghost said, “that’ll get me over if he ever finds out it was me did it.”
It was a little after eleven. I called Richie from the car and asked if he might want to come over.
“Is this
about romance?”
“Not tonight, dear,” I said. “Too tired.”
“Shit, I was afraid of that,” he said, and said he was on his way.
* * *
—
“CUTE KID,” Richie said. “But it’s not me.”
“He looks just like you,” I said. “And didn’t you tell me you went to Arizona when you were a boy?”
Richie nodded.
“Felix took me,” Richie said. “My father had promised me a spring-break trip. Then something came up, the way it always seemed to. But Felix didn’t want to disappoint me, so we did go to Arizona. But not to the Grand Canyon. We went to Sedona. We hiked the red rocks and rode horses. I liked the riding better than the hiking. Made me feel like a cowboy.”
“You never went to the Grand Canyon?” I said.
“Good Christ,” he said. “Just how stuck are you on this?”
“He looks just like you,” I said.
“But he,” Richie said, “is not me.”
He took in some air, let it out.
“My father and my uncle may lie to you,” he said. “I do not.”
He had always exhibited an almost eerie self-control. I had told him once that he was a good sport until he wasn’t. But when he did stop being a good sport, no matter what the setting or the circumstances, something would change. In his eyes, mostly. It had always reminded me of the flash of lightning.
It wasn’t happening now. But it was clear that my line of questioning about the photograph was beginning to annoy him.
“I had to ask,” I said. “I’m not looking for a fight.”
“Gee,” he said, “there’s good news.”
“I’m guessing that we could probably find a lot of pictures of a lot of dark-haired kids that age who look like that, too,” he said. “But they’d remember the goddamn Grand Canyon, and so would I.”
“Well, maybe you got me there,” I said.