Robert B. Parker’s Blood Feud

Eleven

I’d met Wayne Cosgrove of The Boston Globe when I was still with the cops.

My father had always trusted him, which was about as much of an endorsement as Wayne could ever have expected from a member of the force. Like most Boston cops, Phil Randall had always viewed most reporters as a life form just slightly higher than the New York Yankees.

We stayed in touch after I got my PI license, and he’d occasionally helped me out on cases, mostly because of what was, in a simpler time, known as an encyclopedic knowledge of the city and its players, good guys and bad guys. Especially bad guys, from Desmond Burke and Joe Broz and Gino Fish and Eddie Lee and Tony Marcus and the DeMarco family all the way to the politicians in the State House. Eventually the newspaper had been smart enough to give him his own column.

Every time I would run into him, I would hear versions of the same complaints about what had happened to the newspaper business. But he was still at it, two days a week, appearing on local television as a talking head, and occasionally on MSNBC and CNN and even Fox News, where he said he felt safest, knowing they wouldn’t use words that were too big for him.

He had looked like the last hippie when I first met him, dressing as if the sixties were still in full force. But by now he had cut his hair, telling me that guys his age who still wore their hair too long made him think of Howard Fucking Hughes. When I’d see him on TV, he’d be wearing blazers and a white shirt and skinny dark silk ties, like a real grown-up, even though I knew that below where the camera was shooting him he was still wearing jeans and beat-up Doc Martens boots.

In a world where you heard such an amazing amount of bullshit about Fake News, Wayne Cosgrove was as real as the dust on library books.

I was having a drink with him the night after Peter Burke had been shot. We were in the bar facing out to Arlington Street in the Taj Boston. My father still called the place the “old Ritz,” even though it now had absolutely no connection to the much newer Ritz-Carlton on the other side of the Boston Common. The only connection here was to the past, because the bar remained unchanged, and one of the very best on the entire planet.

We had managed to score a table by the window. I had decided that it was a civilized enough hour in this civilized place to have a dirty martini, with extra olives. Wayne was nursing a glass of Pappy Van Winkle bourbon, which I knew was a rare and expensive brand only because of him. He had been coming here long enough that they kept one bottle of the stuff for him, and off the drink menu.

We were talking about Desmond Burke. Wayne had written a column published in that morning’s Globe about Peter Burke’s death. The headline read “Casualty of War We Thought Was Over.”

Wayne told me he had missed me at the reservoir by about fifteen minutes.

“In the old days,” I said, “you would have beaten me there.”

“Operative word being old,” he said.

“Be happy you’re in a game where it doesn’t matter if your legs go,” I said. “Because the words never do.”

We clinked glasses.

“Problem is,” he said, “words matter less and less and the game is more and more about page views and the president’s last fucking tweet. Not the business I entered.”

“You sound like a Burke talking about days gone by,” I said.

He said, “But their business, as far as I can tell, is still lucrative, if less than it used to be.”

His gray hair was still a bit on the longish side, but he carried it off. He was, I thought, still handsome in his sixties, in an aging-rock-star sort of way.

“It has occurred to me as I’ve done my reading over the past couple days,” I said, “how little I really knew about Desmond’s career over there on the dark side.”

“I always wondered how much Richie really knew,” Wayne said.

“Spike says Richie has always been able to compartmentalize.”

“Got him good and shot anyway.”

It had begun to rain, the first umbrellas appearing on Arlington Street, people waiting under the awning as Jesse and Ray, the two guys out front, hailed them cabs. I liked this bar anytime. I particularly liked it on rainy nights like this one, with good company right across the table from me and nowhere I needed to be.

“Richie was shot to scare Desmond,” I said. “Hundred percent.”

“Maybe the only thing that would scare the old bastard,” Wayne said.

“First put one in his son, then kill one of his brothers,” I said. “This is starting to feel like the Mobbed-up version of Ten Little Indians. Why I don’t think Peter is the end of it.”

“Fuck, no,” Wayne Cosgrove said.

He gave me a tutorial about what he knew the Irish Mobs were like when Desmond and Felix and their brothers were first coming up. Some of it, the edges of it, I knew from my reading the night before. Wayne knew a lot more. I stopped him at one point and asked why he’d never written a book about any of it. He grinned at me and said, “Because it has always been my fervent hope not to write something that would have me end up like Uncle Peter.”

“Point taken,” I said, and we clinked glasses again.

He sat and took me through the old wars and grudges and all the blood that he said was once on the street as the rain came down harder. He told of the Charlestown Mob, run by the McLaughlin brothers, and about Winter Hill, before Whitey Bulger was in charge, when the bosses were Buddy McLean and Howie Winter and a different McLaughlin than the ones from Charlestown.

“Wait,” I said. “I think I know how the trouble is supposed to have started between Charlestown and Winter Hill. I read about it last night.”

“Look at you,” Wayne said, “still trying to be the smartest girl in class.”

“Almost as smart as you in this subject,” I said.

“Georgie McLaughlin,” he said, “tried to make a move on Bobo Petricone’s girl. Bobo was with Winter Hill. So Bobo and some of the other boys go over and beat the living shit out of Georgie. And his brother Bernie, as you can imagine, didn’t take that so well. You can’t imagine how much of this shit started with beefs about women.”

“I’ll bet,” I said.

“So one thing led to another,” Wayne said, “and poor Bernie ends up dead in the middle of Charlestown Square. And that was the beginning of the end of the Charlestown Mob as anybody knew it at the time. What was left of it was folded into Winter Hill.”

Finally Whitey Bulger was in charge of consolidating Charlestown and the Killeens and the Mullens. And somehow Desmond Burke ended up with a lot of the loansharking that had been run by the Killeen Gang, with Whitey’s blessing, even though no one actually ever could figure out why.

“Every time I think about Whitey I think of Johnny Depp playing him in that movie,” I said.

“Well, the reality of Whitey Bulger was much worse, of course,” Wayne said. “But somehow he steered clear of Desmond. Maybe Desmond did him a solid at some point, and made that stand up until Whitey finally went on the run. No one was ever quite sure why. Maybe he decided he liked killing the Italians and the Chinese more than killing other Irish. Who the fuck knows? But somehow he allowed Desmond to start building his own empire, even though I’m sure your ex’s father would be resistant to the notion that anybody ever allowed him to do shit.”

“Then Whitey goes on the run and Desmond is the last Irishman standing,” I said.

Wayne had his glass nearly to his lips. He stopped now and looked at me.

“Maybe not for long,” he said.

“Manifestly,” I said.

“I think I’ve mentioned before that you sound hardly anything like a private dick,” he said.

“Watch your mouth,” I said.

“Little late for that,” he said, and grinned, and drank.

“You forget I was a fine arts major.”

“Who now has a license to pack a gun.”

“Fine arts majors with guns,” I said. “Sounds like a pitch for a new TV series.”

The bar was beginning to fill up. The rain continued to come down. The people moved faster on Arlington Street, with and without umbrellas. But I felt safe and warm in the bar at the Taj, even as we talked about Mob killings out of the past, and the killing of Peter Burke the day before.

“Maybe the answer is back there somewhere,” I said.

“Maybe there’s someone who worked with one of those Mobs who’s not dead or in prison who still has a score to settle with old Desmond,” Wayne said. “You know the joke about Irish Alzheimer’s, right?”

“I thought it was Italians.”

“Either way,” Wayne said. “You forget everything except the grudges.”

We drank to that. Wayne asked if we should have one more for the road, or old times’ sake, or just for the fuck of it.

I said, “We’d be fools not to.”