by Mike Lupica
In the distance there was the sudden crack of what was clearly a gunshot, and then another. Two minutes later, the front door opened and the blond guy shoved Felix Burke into the room ahead of him.
“Gang’s all here,” Marchetti said.
* * *
—
JOSEPH MARCHETTI went into the kitchen, came back with a chair, then shoved Felix Burke down onto it.
“He shot Padraig,” Felix said to Desmond.
Padraig Flynn was one of Felix’s body men, and had been for as long as I had known him.
“How did you find us?” Richie said to his uncle.
“Tony told me about the meeting at the diner,” Felix said. “I told you I would stand down. I lied, but it was about something important this time.”
He smiled a sad smile.
“You thought you were looking out for me,” Felix said. “I was looking out for you.”
I casually crossed my right leg, the one that had the gun underneath the boot, over my left.
“What is this about?” Felix said, as if talking to everyone in the room.
“Ask him,” Bobby Toms said again, pointing his gun at Desmond. “Ask him what he did to my mother. How he started killing her a long time ago.”
And then I saw fully all the steel and the rope in Desmond Burke, everything in him that had taken him off the streets of Southie and had separated him from all the others who wanted what he wanted, all the ones who thought they’d end up kings of the hill. Saw everything in him that had enabled Desmond Burke to outlast and outlive them all.
“You can shoot me where I sit, boy,” he said. “You can fucking well shoot all of us. But I will never admit to the lie you were told about me and the lie you are telling. I never forced myself on a woman in my life, and I certainly did not force myself on your mother.”
Bobby Toms walked back over to him and put the gun above the bridge of his nose and said, “For the last time, you stop lying to me.”
“He’s not,” Felix Burke said then.
Turned and looked at his brother, something profoundly sad behind his eyes, and then looked up at Bobby Toms and said, “You’re pointing your gun at the wrong one.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Bobby said.
“He’s not your father,” Felix said. “I am.”
SIXTY-EIGHT
JOSEPH MARCHETTI CONTINUED to point his gun at Richie and me, which gave me no opening or opportunity to reach for my own, as Felix Burke seemed to be talking to himself as much as he was talking to his brother, or to the rest of us.
“It wasn’t just Albert who loved her,” Felix said. “So did I.”
I remembered the night in his brother’s living room now, when he had practically begged me to walk away from it all. I remembered the photographs I had seen about how much Desmond and Felix had looked alike when they were younger.
In this room now, Felix could no longer hold his brother’s gaze and so stared out the window closest to him instead, at the night or the water or the dark nowhere.
“It was just the one time, that spring,” he said to Desmond. “The two of you had broken it off. She called me, hysterical, already a little drunk, to tell me she was leaving Boston forever. She came over to my apartment. And I swear on your own son’s head that it was my intent to console. But then more drink was taken, by both of us.” He ran out of words then.
“And you betrayed me,” Desmond said, finishing the thought for his brother. “The both of you.”
“I loved her first,” Felix said.
I wondered what Desmond would have done in the moment if his hands were not bound behind him.
“She called me a few months later, without telling me where she was,” Felix said. “She told me she was pregnant, and that it had to be my child, and that her father was making arrangements. I didn’t ask what the arrangements were, and she didn’t tell me. What she did tell me was that she never wanted to see me, or you, ever again.”
“You’re all lying!” Bobby Toms shouted now.
“I’m not,” Felix said.
In a much quieter voice, Bobby Toms, talking only to himself now, said, “Fuck it. Time to end this.”
“Yeah,” Joseph Marchetti said, and turned away from Richie and me and shot Bobby Toms in the forehead.
Marchetti took a step back then, slightly away from the window, so he could see us all at once and said, “The old man told me to tie up as many loose ends as I had to.” He grinned. “Starting with the loose cannon.”
He looked at Desmond and Felix and said, “Now who wants it first?”
Then everything seemed to happen at once, Joseph Marchetti pointing his gun at Desmond and Felix throwing himself and his chair sideways to put himself in the line of fire, in the instant before Marchetti pulled the trigger. Then I was clearing my own gun and rolling off the couch as the window behind Marchetti and behind Richie and me shattered, and a bullet from outside hit Marchetti in the back of his head and he went down next to Bobby Toms.
Richie was already across the room, kneeling next to his uncle Felix, the one who’d raised him more than his own father had, the one who’d just taken a bullet intended for Desmond Burke in the back.
Then Vinnie Morris was kicking in what was left of the shattered side window and stepping through it, saying, “I didn’t have a clear shot because the two of you were in the way, but I figured I couldn’t wait no longer. Then the guy moved just enough.”
Richie was holding his uncle Felix in his arms. I went and got a kitchen knife and cut loose the rope tying Desmond’s hands, and then Desmond was lying next to his brother on the floor, saying something that I could not hear and feared Felix could not hear.
Blood was blood.
I called 911, and then Pete Colapietro.
SIXTY-NINE
RICHIE AND DESMOND rode in the ambulance with Felix on the way to Rhode Island Hospital, the same one in which Maria Cataldo had died.
Then it was just Vinnie Morris and me. Before Richie and I had left Jake’s, I had told Vinnie that if he didn’t hear from us within an hour after we left him and Spike at the diner that he needed to come after us.
Spike had asked why I didn’t want him to be the one to come after us.
“Because Vinnie is a better shot than you,” I’d said.
“Better than anybody,” Vinnie had said.
Before he left, Vinnie had apologized again for not getting a clear enough shot before Marchetti shot Bobby. I told him that it had finally become a moment, as embarrassed as I was to say it, when he needed to shoot first and ask questions later.
“Yeah,” he said. Then he said, “That expression you always use about the balloon going up? That fucker had gone up.”
“There was more I wanted to know,” I said.
“It was them or you,” he said. “And Richie.”
I knew it hadn’t been an ethical choice for Vinnie, even though I knew he operated by a code he had constructed for himself, one where he wasn’t a criminal, just the people who hired him. And Vinnie knew when I had enlisted him to help tonight that I wanted Bobby Toms arrested, not shot. But what had ended in this room, Bobby is the one who had started it all. Until it had been him or us.
Then Vinnie was gone, almost as if he hadn’t been there at all, on his way back to Jake’s to pick up the men from his crew with whom he had originally driven down from Boston. Somewhere between Jake’s and his bowling alley, I knew his long gun would disappear forever.
Pete Colapietro lived close enough to Black Point that he managed to beat what seemed half of the Providence Police Department to the scene. When he arrived I told him that Bobby Toms, likely with the assistance of Joseph Marchetti, had kidnapped Desmond Burke and brought him here. That Marchetti had walked Richie and me into this room. That shortly thereafter, shooting had commenced.
&
nbsp; Colapietro listened. By now I knew he was the kind of cop Belson was. And my father had been. He would be able to pretty much remember what I was telling him, word for word.
“So Marchetti shot Bobby Toms first,” Pete said.
“Yes.”
“Pretty much at the same time that another shot came from outside and put down Marchetti,” he said.
I could hear the first sirens in the distance.
“Must have been a sniper,” I said.
He gave me a long look. “You know I like you, Sunny,” he said. “I’ve been pulling some strings for you. I kept the Taunton cops away from that diner tonight. I rode around with you the other day on my own time. But I’m a cop. And a goddamn good one. And even both of us knowing that a couple of no-good guys came off the books tonight, I know there’s a lot of shit you’re not telling me here. Starting with who the outside shooter was who shot Antonioni’s shooter.”
The sirens were getting louder.
Pete nodded at the window.
“Guy who could make that kind of shot in the night, from a distance,” he said.
“Maybe Albert thought these guys were making too much trouble for him,” I said. “Maybe he hired somebody. Who can know these things?”
He gave me another long look. “You know anybody who can make a shot like that?” he said.
“Only heard of them,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “Me, too.”
“I just got caught up in the middle of a Mob war,” I said. “All the way to the end.”
“That’s your story,” Pete Colapietro said.
“And I’m sticking to it,” I said.
Pete said, “I’m gonna need you to come to the station and make a statement. And answer some questions that I might not be the only one asking.”
I told him Richie and I had left the car up the road a bit.
“We’ll go now,” Pete said.
“Understood,” I said.
By now the cavalry had arrived, lights flashing, cars making plenty of noise on the gravel driveway. Pete badged everyone in sight, telling them that I was with him. We got into his car. He drove me to my car.
On the way to downtown Providence Richie called and told me that Felix Burke had died not long after they’d gotten him inside the hospital.
Sins of the father, I thought.
Felix being the father.
SEVENTY
WE HAD SAT up long into the night after Felix Burke’s funeral, Desmond, Richie, me. We had been drinking whiskey for some time. Irish, appropriately enough. Midleton Very Rare. Desmond was finally ready to tell some of the things Bobby Toms had told him after Bobby had taken him from this house in the night, things about his mother and the life they had shared in Arizona, in a house in the name of one of Vincent Cataldo’s shell companies, about how when the money she had inherited from her father had finally run out, she had decided to call Albert Antonioni.
“Somehow Albert had convinced him that he was the only one who had ever truly loved his mother,” Desmond said. “There had been something between them before we took up together. She honestly did never tell me. In the world in which we existed, she clearly thought there was enough bad blood, and did not want to be responsible for more.”
He looked at Richie and said, “I’ve always known how much Albert hated me. I just did not know how much he loved her.”
He drank. We all did.
“Why do you suppose Albert pointed him at you?” Richie said.
“Maybe someday,” Desmond said, “I will get to ask him that myself.”
Desmond took in some air slowly, and held it, and then let it out as slowly as he had taken it in. Then drank more Irish whiskey. I had watched him drink a lot. And show no signs of being drunk in any way.
“He had always wanted to beat me, in everything,” Desmond said. “Now he saw a chance to take my guns and so take my money, and tell himself he didn’t have to be the one to kill me in order to beat me.”
“Blood money,” Richie said.
“Felix’s blood,” Desmond said.
“Do you think Albert ever suspected that Bobby might be Felix’s son?” I said.
“Maybe I can ask him that, too,” Desmond said, “if the occasion arises.”
Public lives, I thought, private lives.
Secret lives.
* * *
—
TWO WEEKS LATER, there were two stories played on the same page of The Boston Globe, as if of a piece.
One was about the body of Albert Antonioni, described as a notorious Rhode Island crime boss, found floating in the water of Narragansett Bay, between Antonioni’s own home at Black Point and the Bonnet Shore Beach Club, two bullet holes in him, one in the forehead, one more in the back for good measure. Providence police, the story said, had been notified that the body was there by an anonymous call made to their Crimestoppers tip line.
The other story was about two Cranston, Rhode Island, warehouses filled with illegal guns—most of them automatic weapons—being raided by ATF agents. The estimate for the value of the guns was two million dollars. The story said it was the biggest raid of its kind in the history of New England. The warehouses, now abandoned, had once been owned by the Palomino Vending Company, owned by the late Albert Antonioni.
It was, I knew, the interesting place where Felix had stored their guns.
I was still at the kitchen table reading my Globe and drinking my coffee and occasionally feeding Rosie some of my blueberry scone from Starbucks when my phone rang.
I saw the name come up and so was smiling as I answered.
“You’re welcome,” I said to Charlie Whitaker.
SEVENTY-ONE
RICHIE AND ROSIE and I had walked along the river for a bit and were now sitting on the dock facing Cambridge. It was the second week of October, an Indian-summer afternoon, and the scene across the Charles looked pretty enough to paint. Maybe even by me someday. Just not until I finished, finally, my small stone cottage from Concord. I was close now, and happy with it. Just not totally happy. So it went.
“For the last time,” I said, “do you believe Desmond somehow shot Albert himself?”
“The last time?” Richie said. “You promise?”
“Well, maybe last time today,” I said.
Before he answered he fed Rosie a treat from his pocket. She was on a leash but at rest between Richie and me. Because of the treats. And because she liked being between Richie and me.
“I think he did it,” Richie said. “I don’t know how he got to him. I don’t want to know. But yes, I believe he would do it himself. His own sense of justice, and vengeance.”
“Always been a lot about him you didn’t want to know,” I said.
“And look what it got me,” Richie said. “Now I know more about him than I ever wanted to.” He paused and said, “About both of them.”
“You miss Felix,” I said.
An answer, not a question.
“It’s odd, if you think about it,” Richie said. “I looked up to him the way he always looked up to Desmond.”
He fed Rosie another treat. We had been discussing where to have dinner. I had even promised to watch a Red Sox playoff game with him later. I had suggested cooking dinner myself. Richie had smiled when I made the offer and said, “No, thank you.”
“Desmond loved her,” I said now.
“Probably more than he loved my mother,” Richie said. “But that’s something he’ll probably only admit to God. If he even admits it to Him.”
“And Felix loved her,” I said.
“Maybe more than Desmond did.”
“Albert loved her,” I said.
“She must have really been something.” He turned to look at me. “Like you.”
“Taking care of her at the end may have been Albert’s
one true thing,” I said.
“Won’t be enough to get the old bastard into heaven,” Richie said.
“How Catholic of you.”
“Comes and goes,” he said.
“The ironic part of this,” I said, “if irony even applies here, is that Albert wanted Bobby to take out Desmond. But in the end, Albert and Bobby really ended up taking out each other.”
Rosie roused herself, briefly, having noticed another dog, a pug on a leash being walked by a pretty young redheaded woman. But we both knew Rosie was only bluffing. If she didn’t know there were more treats, she sensed it.
Richie said, “It’s interesting, what Bobby told my father about Maria working at the church.”
“I wonder if she saw her greatest sin as having gotten pregnant outside of marriage,” I said, “or that Felix was the one who’d gotten her pregnant.”
“Maybe both,” Richie said.
“Powerful force, guilt.”
“That and grudges,” Richie said.
“Make the world go ’round,” I said.
He reached over and took my hand and held it in his.
“Dr. Silverman,” I said, “thinks that in a vastly complicated way Albert convinced himself that not directly punishing Desmond himself was a form of respect, even if a subordinate did the shooting and the killing.”
“I think it just makes him a coward,” Richie said. “Who fucking well got what he deserved.”
The Burke in him coming out, the way it did sometimes.
“There’s so much we’ll never know,” I said.
“That bother you?”
“No,” I said.
“Liar,” he said, and squeezed my hand.
“So what do you want to eat tonight?” I said.
He turned to look at me again. “Not Italian,” he said.
We held hands and stared at the water.
I received the first of two phone calls then, one right after another, by sheer chance.
Or not.