Robert B. Parker’s Blood Feud

Twenty-One

My father and I were in front of a nursing and rehab facility called Sherrill House, on Huntington Avenue. He was explaining to me that it was one of the top places of its kind in Boston, providing both short- and long-term care.

“Long-term care, of course,” Phil Randall said, “is the same as God’s waiting room. Just without magazines.”

He shook his head, as if delaying going inside for as long as possible. But then smiled, as if another private joke were being told by him, to him.

“Every time I ask your mother where we should go when we’re no longer able to care for ourselves,” he said, “she gives me the same stock answer.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “She tells you she doesn’t want to discuss it.”

“Bingo,” he said. “Then she asks me to fix her another bourbon.”

“Does bourbon fall into the category of short-term or long-term care?” I said.

“Both,” my father said.

Then we were finally on our way inside and into the part of the place where people in what they called the Special Care Program lived, if you could call it living. It was where they put Alzheimer’s patients, or those suffering from what were described as “related disorders.”

“His son was reluctant to call it Alzheimer’s,” my father said. “But the way he described things, if the old man isn’t officially there yet, his exit is coming up fairly rapidly.”

“But you said he still has good days and bad days.”

“So I was told by the son.”

“So we hope this is one of the good days.”

“If there really is such a thing.” My father sighed. “When you reach my age,” he said, “you’d rather stare down an AR-15 than a place like this.”

“You don’t have to go into the room with me if you’d rather not,” I said.

“I’d rather not,” he said. “But I shall.”

We checked in at the front desk and were directed to the elevators that would take us up to the designated floor. Tim Leonard, the son, was waiting for us at the nurses’ station. He was slightly overweight and had thinning hair and a wide, Irish face and was a successful State Street lawyer, despite being the descendant of a strong-arm foot soldier himself.

“Like Richie, then,” I’d said to my father. “The honest son of a profoundly dishonest man.”

“Well,” Phil Randall had said, “if you can call a lawyer honest.”

Tim’s father, Billy Leonard, had come up on the streets at the same time as Desmond and Felix Burke and their brothers. Somehow along the way Billy managed to leave Buddy McLean’s crew and get with the Burkes without getting himself shot in Scollay Square, where my research told me a lot of old Mob guys had ended up extremely dead.

Billy is someone who had become an honorary Burke over time, mostly working as a body man for Felix, collecting for Desmond in their loansharking business, or doing the same for Peter when he was still making book. The legend was that he’d officially become part of the family when he took a bullet intended for Felix one night when they were coming out of the old Boston Garden after a fight card. Billy Leonard recovered. Desmond and Felix never forgot.

We were here because Phil Randall said Tim Leonard owed him a favor. I’d asked how big. My father said big enough that we were here.

“And you believe he might know some of Desmond’s secrets,” I said.

“Knew Desmond’s secrets,” he’d said.

Billy Leonard was in a wheelchair facing the window when we walked into the sunny room. He was still a big man and made the chair look small, hands folded in his lap. He wore a faded red flannel shirt and faded cords and the kind of sneakers that had Velcro on top.

If he heard us come in, he gave no sign.

It was Tim Leonard who spoke first.

“Dad,” he said as he turned the wheelchair around so Billy Leonard was facing us. “You remember Phil Randall. This is his daughter, Sunny.”

Billy stared at us, frowning, focused on my father.

“I know you,” he said.

It was somewhere between question and answer.

My father smiled as if he were here to get a donation for the Police Benevolent Association.

“Only from all the times I tried to put you away,” Phil Randall said.

And then Billy smiled back at him.

“Phil Fucking Randall,” he said.

“Not the middle name with which I was baptized,” my father said. “But considering our history, I’ll wear it, as the kids like to say these days.”

Billy said, “You’re not dead yet? Jesus.”

“Mary and Joseph,” my father said.

“You knew Phil was coming, Dad,” Tim Leonard said. “I told you what he and Sunny wanted to talk to you about.”

“Tell me again.”

“They want to ask you some questions about Desmond Burke,” Tim said.

“Is he dead?” Billy said.

“No,” I said. “But someone seems to be trying.”

Billy focused his rheumy eyes on me.

“Who are you?”

“Phil’s daughter.”

“Cop?”

“Was until I wasn’t,” I said. “I’m private now.”

Billy nodded, as if the old man were trying to process new information.

“Ask you something?”

“Sure?”

“Your ass as good as your legs?”

“Dad!” Tim Leonard said.

“It’s okay,” I said. And to Billy I said, “The answer is an unqualified yes.”

“I was always an ass man,” Billy Leonard said. “Give me a good ass over big tits anytime.”

Tim sighed, shook his head, told his father he’d be outside, and left us there. My father and I pulled up the two folding chairs in the room so that we were facing Billy.

“Somebody is shooting at the Burkes again, Billy,” my father said, as if he were still the lead detective on the case. “First Desmond’s son, Richie. He lived. Peter Burke was not as lucky.”

“What about Felix?” Billy said. “I worked for Felix, mostly. Took a bullet for him that time. You remember that, Phil? Stepped right up there like a fucking champion.”

“Everybody remembers,” my father said.

“Showed them all some rope that night,” Billy said.

“Somebody shot up Felix’s house this time,” I said. “Just without him in it.”

“Always liked that house,” Billy said. “We had some times there.”

There was, I knew, no point in telling him that Felix had long since moved to the water. I remembered what my father had told me about people in Billy’s state, that you should talk to them like they were drunk.

“I didn’t know Desmond had a daughter,” Billy said to me.

“Only by marriage,” I said. “To Richie.”

“Billy,” my father said, leaning forward, “what we’re trying to determine is who might have a beef out of the past that might make them move on Desmond now.”

Billy’s eyes seemed to brighten suddenly. “Trouble was our business!” he said.

“Wasn’t it, though,” Phil Randall said.

“We used to joke, we did, that Desmond’s real profession was pissing people off,” Billy said.

“Tell me about it,” my father said.

Billy shook his head but was smiling again. “Girls,” he said.

“Desmond had a thing for the ladies?” my father said.

What began as a laugh with Billy Leonard quickly became a terrible-sounding cough.

“He was some cock hound back in the day, I’ll tell you that,” Billy said when he was able to speak. “You didn’t know that? What the fuck kind of detective were you?”

Billy Leonard reached down now without embarrassment, grinning at my father as if I weren’t there, as if this were just old boys being boys.

Then he grabbed his crotch.

“I used to tell him this business going to get him killed before our real business ever did,” Billy said.

“While he was married?” my father said.

Another laugh. More coughing, even worse than before. When Billy was able to catch his breath again he said, “Before, during, after. They’ll probably have trouble closing the casket someday, he’ll probably have one last hard-on.”

I knew little of Richie’s mother other than what he’d told me. He always made her sound like a living saint, and her romance with his father something that could have been imagined only by Irish poets, before the cancer took her. Coupled with what I knew about Desmond Burke, I found it difficult to imagine him tomcatting around Boston as a much younger man.

But I also knew something else: how often men thought with what Billy had just called their “business.”

“Those were the days,” Billy said, as if he was much happier back there than he was here.

“Was there possibly one girl more than the others who might have gotten him into trouble?” my father said.

Billy closed his eyes, rubbed a big hand over them, hard. But he was nodding.

“I forget her name.” He took his hand away and looked at my father and said, “You forget things?”

“Every day, Billy,” my father said. “Every goddamn day.”

“What was that big musical back in the day,” Billy said. “The one with the spics doing all that singing and dancing?”

“West Side Story?” Phil Randall said. “Sharks and the Jets and great to be in America.”

“West Side Story!” Billy Leonard said, slapping his thigh with his right hand. “It was like that. Shit, I thought them fighting over her was going to start a fucking war.”

“Desmond was fighting for this girl from another outfit?” my father said.

But Billy was no longer listening to him.

“So you’re Desmond’s daughter?” he said to me.

Before I had a chance to answer, he was suddenly shouting.

“Didn’t you hear me?” he said. “I asked you a fucking question.”

“Sure,” I said, “I’m Desmond’s daughter.”

“Goddamn it!” Billy said, trying to get up out of the chair, fear in his eyes now or anger or both. “Both of you stop talking to me now!”

He was wringing his hands now, rocking in the wheelchair, eyes darting around the room, having turned into a different person.

Which I knew he had.

“Both of you get the fuck out of here and leave me alone!” he shouted.

The door opened and Tim Leonard came hurrying back in.

“Get them out of here!” he shouted at his son. “I don’t know them!”

My father and I stood. I said to Tim, “I’m not sure what touched this off.”

“Air,” he said.

Neither one of us said anything in the elevator, or until we were back outside.

“You think the girl he was talking about is real?” I said to my father.

“I do,” he said.

“Same,” I said.

“He also said there were a lot of girls,” he said.

“He didn’t say the boys were fighting over a lot of girls,” I said.

“How do you plan on finding out who she was?” my father said.

“I’ll use all of my feminine wiles,” I said. “Look how well it worked with Billy.”

“I need a drink,” my father said.

“Same,” I said, and called Spike and told him we were on the way over.