Robert B. Parker’s Blood Feud

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.”