Robert B. Parker’s Blood Feud

Fourteen

When I got home I walked Rosie, locked up, got back in the car, put Vinnie’s address into Waze. I thought about calling in advance to tell him I was coming and decided to surprise him instead, even knowing that someone who’d begun his professional career as a trigger man for Joe Broz and then moved up to bodyguard Gino Fish probably liked surprises about as much as the Secret Service did.

When I was on my way back to Cambridge, my father called back.

“I should have mentioned that the bowling alley is just a front with Vinnie,” he said.

I told him that I had come to that same conclusion on my own.

“I hear he’s got his own crew now,” Phil Randall said.

Who knew, I thought, that Vinnie, of all people, had always wanted to direct?

There was a solitary bowling pin outlined against the sky, looking as if it belonged in another time, in a much older Boston. There was a guy behind the counter inside who looked as big as Tony Marcus’s man Junior, just white, almost to the extreme, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and halfheartedly cleaning the outside of some bowling shoes. I wanted to suggest perhaps working on the insides of the shoes but thought better of it.

The man had a huge shaved head that somehow seemed perfectly proportional to the rest of him, or perhaps to the place, as if you could take it off his shoulder and roll it down the lane to convert a difficult split.

“Vinnie around?” I said to the man.

“Who wants to know?”

“Sunny Randall.”

“He know you?”

“Do any of us ever really know anyone?” I said.

“Is that supposed to be funny?” he said.

“Apparently not,” I said.

There was a phone and intercom set on the counter in front of him. Something else out of another time. I pointed at it. “Would you mind terribly telling him I’m here?” I said.

He picked up the phone, turned as he spoke, turned back around and said, “Upstairs.”

Vinnie Morris, by both reputation and results, had always been known as the best shooter in Boston, though a record like Vinnie’s wasn’t something you could find the way my father loved to find baseball records. He had, as far as I knew, operated at various times on both sides of the law. There had even been times when he had acted as a sideman for an old boyfriend of mine — Boyfriend, Sunny? How old are you? — named Jesse Stone, the chief of police in Paradise.

Vinnie was waiting for me at the top of the stairs. He was as I remembered him, small and whippet thin, gray hair short and parted almost military-style on the side, looking as if he’d just stepped out of the Brooks Brothers on Newbury Street: blue blazer, gray slacks, white shirt with pinpoint collar, thin rep tie. As I made my way up the stairs, I could see the shine on his cap-toed black shoes. There was no sign of a gun interfering with the sleek lines of his clothes. But I knew at least one was on him somewhere, one that could be easily accessed if necessary.

He looked as out of place in a bowling alley as my mother would have at a rap concert.

“So,” he said, walking behind me into his small office.

“Nice to see you, too, Vinnie,” I said.

“Yeah.”

Then: “Have a seat.”

There was a desk, a single chair across from it, a couch, a flat-screen television mounted on the wall, a small refrigerator. On one of the other walls was a shooting-range target, the outline of a man black against white, featuring a series of concentric circles with numbers inside ranging from 7’s to 9’s.

“A target, Vinnie?” I said. “Seriously?”

“Whatsa matter?” he said. “Got no sense of humor?”

“I do,” I said. “I just didn’t know you did.”

“Yeah,” he said.

Then: “You want a Coke? I got some of those small bottles in the fridge.”

I said that sounded delicious, and that just the bottle would be fine, no ice.

He went and got two bottles, uncapped them, set one down in front of me on a coaster.

“Old school,” he said. “Like me.”

He went back around the desk, sat down, drank some Coke, put the bottle down carefully on the coaster in front of him. Calling Vinnie Morris a neat freak didn’t even begin to tell the story.

We sat looking at each other until he said, “Richie and Peter, huh? Some fucking thing.”

“Kind of why I’m here.”

“Figured.”

“What do you hear?” I said.

“I got nothing.”

“You’re being far too modest,” I said.

“All due respect to your ex,” Vinnie said. “But in what world do I care about Burkes getting shot? I’m out of that shit.”

I tilted my head to the side and in a singsong voice said, “Are you?”

“I just said. In what world does this involve me?”

“Theirs,” I said. “Yours. Mine. Ours.”

Then I told him what the shooter had said to Richie about his father.

“Maybe I did hear something about that,” Vinnie said.

“So you do have a bit more than nothing.”

“Hearing things is not knowing things,” he said.

I felt as if I were on the other side of Cambridge and back to sparring with Susan Silverman. I sipped some of my old-school Coca-Cola. It defied explanation that it had always tasted better in the small bottles. I placed the bottle carefully on the coaster, afraid that Vinnie might put one between my eyes if I left a ring on the surface of his desk.

“You really want to know what I know?” Vinnie said. “I know that I need the Burkes in my business or me in theirs like I need a fucking hole in my head.”

“Words to live by.”

“Operative word being live,” he said.

“I hear that you’ve become a bit of an entrepreneur yourself,” I said. “Criminally speaking.”

“This business is legit,” he said. “I’m legit now. Like I said, I got no time for the other.”

“So you’re saying you haven’t become, uh, entrepreneurial?”

“Fuck that.”

“Just making conversation.”

“Same.”

“Can’t lie, Vinnie,” I said. “But sometimes it’s hard to tell with you.”

We sat. There must have been customers downstairs, because I would occasionally hear the crash of pins. Despite the setting, I knew I was in the presence of a Boston legend, at least if you were looking for a better shot than Annie Oakley, and idly wondered when was the last time that Vinnie had shot somebody for hire.

“Who would come for Desmond?” I said.

If I asked the question often enough, maybe somebody would finally give me an answer I could use. It was a variation of one of Spike’s fundamental theories of detecting: Annoy enough people and eventually something will turn up. More words to live by.

“Why am I even talking to you?” Vinnie said.

“You like me?” I said. “You like my father?”

“That frankly ain’t enough.”

“Because I’m eye candy?” I said.

Vinnie almost smiled.

“Listen,” he said, “it ain’t a big secret that Desmond is moving toward the door. Looking to get out once and for all. He’s old and he’s tired and he’s made his.”

“But his,” I said, “is not exactly the kind of profession where you cash out on your 401(k) and then retire to Arizona or Florida.”

“Why not?” Vinnie said. “Pretty much everybody Desmond came up with is either dead or in prison. He retires now, he retires with the fucking trophy.”

“But for now he’s still actively in the life,” I said.

“People say he wants to make one last big score.”

“People,” I said.

He nodded.

“And in what realm would that big score be made?”

“Guns,” Vinnie said. “If I heard anything, which I’m not saying I did, what I maybe might have heard is that Desmond has figured out a way to make some real money bringing guns up here. Which frankly ain’t easy, just because of the volume you need to move.”

Just get them talking, Phil Randall had always told me.

Vinnie shrugged. “All this is above my pay grade. As much gun work as I used to do, I never got involved in all that supply-and-demand. But since we’re just talking here, if Desmond has figured out a way to make real money, it might piss off some people who haven’t. Figured that out, I mean.”

“Piss them off enough to start shooting Burkes?” I said.

“I didn’t say that,” Vinnie said. “And I got no idea what Peter would have to do with that. Peter has always run the book, nothing else.”

Before I could say anything, Vinnie said, “Ask you something?”

“Anything.”

“You can’t ask your ex about this without coming up here?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Tell me about it.”

“What does that mean?”

“Something else for you to figure out,” Vinnie said. “I just run a bowling alley.”

“Has anyone ever told you how opaque you can be?” I said.

Vinnie shrugged. “Not my color,” he said.

I stood up. I asked what he wanted me to do with the Coke bottle. He said he’d take care of it. I thanked him for seeing me. He said, “Yeah.”

Then I said, “You’ll be hearing from me.”

“You think you can just come up here and threaten me like that?” he said.

I told him that was a good one. He said, see, he did have a sense of humor after all. I walked down the stairs and made sure not to make any sudden movements as I walked past the guy in the Hawaiian shirt, just to be on the safe side.