Robert B. Parker’s Blood Feud

Eighteen

Richie’s mother had died in her thirties, from uterine cancer. Desmond had never remarried. If there had been women after his wife died, Richie knew nothing of it. Or it was just more of Desmond Burke’s secret life.

Felix had never married, despite what Richie said had always been an extremely active romantic life for his uncle until he just stopped giving a shit about women. According to Richie, the only meaningful and enduring relationship of Felix Burke’s adult life had been his marriage to the family business. Felix now lived in a condominium at the marina in Charlestown, Charlestown being the second-oldest neighborhood in Boston, and more Irish than St. Patrick’s Day. But it had become gentrified over time. The city had not only expanded the residential life of the marina, it had developed the Navy Yard as well.

As much as Charlestown always had been, and always would be, associated with the Bunker Hill Monument, there were so many lovely parts of it, located as it was on the banks of Boston Harbor and the Mystic River. So it was both a historic Boston address and a fashionable one these days, particularly if your address was on the water. I remember how surprised Richie had been when he’d learned Felix was moving out of the home he had lived in for forty years to a newer and much trendier one.

“Next he’s going to get an electric-powered car,” Richie said.

That morning Felix had met Desmond, as always, for seven-o’clock Mass at St. Frances de Sales Church on Bunker Hill Street, before they would have breakfast at the Grasshopper Café, on the same street. Desmond and Felix each had two bodyguards with them, as they had since Richie was shot.

And sometime after the black Lincoln with Felix and his men inside had left for church, someone had walked up to Felix Burke’s condominium on the water side and blown out the ground-floor windows with a shotgun. No one saw who did it. There was the thought that he might even have come by small boat. All the neighbors heard the blast, muted slightly by the loud wind and rain that was blowing off the water at the time.

When those with the same view as Felix’s looked out their own windows to see what had caused the commotion, all they saw was the water.

Richie was the one who called me, saying over the phone, “You would’ve found out. And I wouldn’t have been able to keep you away.”

I told him I would meet him there, which I did forty-five minutes later. There were two police cruisers at the end of Felix’s block. Another, lights flashing, was directly in front of the condominium. There were onlookers in the street, even in the rain, the crowd of them roped off by cops. Richie was waiting for me near the entrance to his uncle’s place. By then the cops knew he was Felix Burke’s nephew, and let us both pass. Richie didn’t even take me inside, just walked me around to the back.

Desmond and Felix were both there, both wearing tan, half-raincoats and the same kind of scally caps I imagined them wearing on the boat that brought them to America in the first place.

Frank Belson was with them. No one had died, but Felix was a Burke and his brother had already been shot dead this week, after Richie had been shot in the back. What had happened here was a part of all that, clearly. But the randomness of it all, I thought, continued. Richie had been wounded. Peter had been murdered. Now it was only a residence that had been hit. Felix’s residence.

Belson, as he often did and without greeting or salutation, made it sound as if we were halfway into a conversation when I went walking over to him.

“Shotguns are good,” he said, “even though you have to get close to do any good damage with them. Usually no rifling or markings that can be traced or give you anything consistent enough for a match. Maybe my guys will find something we can trace back to a manufacturer. But it won’t do shit.”

“Another warning shot,” I said.

“More than one, from the looks of the place,” Belson said.

He took a small cigar out of the corner of his mouth, both he and it oblivious to the rain. Or perhaps impervious.

“Somebody,” Belson said, “wanted to make a big, loud fucking statement to get somebody’s attention. As if they didn’t have it already.”

Felix had come up next to me, like a ghost appearing.

“They wanted me to know that they could come to my house,” Felix said. “They wanted me to know and my brother to know.”

Belson said, “You saw nothing before you and your men left for church?”

“Marty and Padraig take shifts in the night,” he said. “A way to make sure the perimeter is secure. But once it’s time to leave for Mass, they just walk me out and into the car.”

Belson nodded. At the same time he was focused on what Felix was telling him he was taking in everything around him, even the water in the distance.

He turned to me.

“Drip, drip, drip,” he said.

“I am assuming,” I said, “that is not an assessment of the current weather.”

“You miss nothing,” he said.

He walked over to Desmond Burke. I walked with him. The rain came harder. I tried not to imagine what my hair looked like.

“I am going to ask you again if there is anything you wish to tell me, Desmond,” Belson said. I had seen this before with him. Nothing about his posture or tone had changed, and yet it had become more aggressive anyway. “For fuck’s sake, is there anything that you know and I do not that might help me put an end to this?”

Desmond looked at him, his face impassive. I knew he wasn’t used to people talking to him this way. But Frank Belson had because he could and Desmond knew that he could, whether he liked it or not. It was as if all the animosity that had always existed between Boston cops and the Burkes was now in the air between these two men, even in a moment like this, when their interests should have been aligned.

“If I knew,” Desmond Burke said, in a voice that seemed to be made of razor blades, “I would have already ended this myself. For fuck’s sake.”

Felix was behind him. I saw him reach into the pocket of his khaki pants, the parts of them below the knee not covered by his coat splotched with rain.

He came out with his phone, brought it closer to his face, squinted as he stared at it. Then he wordlessly handed it to his brother.

Then Desmond handed it to Richie.

I looked at the text message on the screen as he did.

“Ask Desmond,” it said, “how he likes it when it’s ones he loves.”

Belson reached over, without asking, took the phone from Richie, read the text himself, put the phone in the pocket of his raincoat, and told Felix he would return it after his people looked at it.

“Probably came from a burner,” he said.

“The way to bet,” I said.

“Gotta check anyway.”

Belson turned to Desmond again.

“You got any idea what that means?” he said.

Desmond’s answer was to simply walk away from Frank Belson and the rest of us toward the water.

“He seems to be having some difficulty processing the fact that we are on the same side here,” Belson said.

“Gee,” I said, “you think?”