Robert B. Parker’s Blood Feud

Twenty-Two

I was still at Spike’s, with Spike. My father had polished off a quick whiskey, neat, and left for home, saying my mother had prepared meat loaf for dinner and to wish him luck.

“So Desmond liked girls, that pervert,” Spike said.

“Billy seemed pretty fixed on the notion,” I said.

“Another old perv,” Spike said.

It was between afternoon and evening. There was an older couple in the back room having an early dinner. A group of young guys, clearly biggies-on-the-go, were drinking and laughing at the bar, likely celebrating the money they’d moved today from one pocket to another.

Spike and I were sipping dirty martinis, extra olives.

“It’s not as if you can now request a sit-down with Desmond so you can ask him how much he was getting back in the day,” Spike said, “and with whom.”

“At which point, incidentally, I would be operating off the ramblings of an old man in the throes of dementia,” I said.

I sipped some of my martini. There were times when a perfect martini tasted so good it made me want to burst into tears. Or song.

This was one of them.

“The thing is,” I said to Spike, “that Billy actually seemed pretty stuck on this one girl, even if he couldn’t remember her name.”

“You know it proves nothing,” he said.

“It does not,” I said. “But how much of everything in this crazy old world comes back to sex or money?”

“Much,” Spike said.

“I want this to be a clue,” I said.

“I can tell.”

“Maybe the story isn’t Desmond fucking around with a gun deal,” I said. “Maybe it’s just Desmond having fucked around on Richie’s mother back in the day.”

“There was probably a more elegant way to put that,” Spike said.

“My father likes to tell people I’m where sailors go to learn to swear.”

Spike said, “Tough to talk to Richie about his father and other women.”

“Gee,” I said. “Ya think?”

I looked over at the bar. One of the young guys, with one of those haircuts shaved close on the sides but with a fade in front, extremely good-looking even if he might be trying too hard with the hair, was staring at me. Now that he’d finally caught my eye, he raised his glass and smiled. I raised mine and smiled back.

You still got it, kid.

“Who would you even talk to about Desmond’s, ah, romantic endeavors?” Spike said.

“It would have to be Felix,” I said.

Spike said, “Even the thought of a conversation like that makes me want another drink.”

“Same,” I said.

It was, after all, why God had invented Uber.