Robert B. Parker’s Blood Feud

Twenty-Three

I met Felix Burke at 10:30 the next morning at the Warren Tavern on Pleasant Street in Charlestown.

I knew for a fact that the Warren Tavern, with its American flag hanging outside and cobblestone sidewalks in front of the place, didn’t officially open until eleven. But this was Charlestown, and Felix was Desmond’s No. 2 and I assumed that if he’d wanted to meet me there for breakfast, they would have opened as early as a Starbucks.

He had two young men with him, neither one of whom I recognized. Maybe there was just an endless supply of young, hard-looking gunnies, all of them wanting to grow up to be Desmond and Felix someday, provided they lived long enough.

We sat in the bar area. The two young men stood on either side of the entrance. I knew there was another young man outside in Felix’s Escalade. Because of the shooting at Felix’s house, there might be more men outside, ready to invade Marblehead if Felix gave the word.

Felix and I both had coffee cups in front of us. He asked if I wanted to add anything besides milk and sugar, because he already had. I told him it was a little early in the day.

“I told Desmond I was coming to meet you,” Felix said.

“Bet that put some extra pep in his step,” I said.

“He told me he has given you more latitude than he would anyone else because of Richie,” Felix said. “But his patience with you has clearly grown thin.”

I smiled at Felix. “I’ve gotten that reaction from a Burke before.”

“You have,” Felix said. “But with Richie, it never really stuck.”

His voice, raspy as ever, always made me think that he’d taken too many punches to the throat when he was still a boxer. But there was a salt to Felix Burke that I had always found endearing. I liked him and he liked me. He had done professional favors for me over the years, all of them with Richie’s blessing, some at Richie’s request. I had frankly always considered him more family than Desmond.

“I need to ask you questions about Desmond that I cannot ask him, or ask Richie,” I said. “Questions that you might not feel comfortable answering. And I just want you to know that you won’t insult me or hurt my feelings — or hurt our friendship — if you choose not to answer them.”

He squinted at me. Or smiled. With Felix it was sometimes almost impossible to differentiate. I knew how dangerous he was, perhaps more dangerous than Desmond. But there had always been a humanity about him, at least when he was with me. I still found it amazing that he and Desmond had once looked as much alike as they had.

There was something else about him that I found appealing: I’d always thought he’d done more fathering to Richie than Richie’s own father had.

“Sunny,” Felix said, “you know how fond I am of you. But I’ve far more important things to worry about these days than your feelings.”

“Duly noted,” I said. “Will you relay everything about which we speak to your brother?”

He shrugged.

“I told Desmond you weren’t gonna quit on this,” Felix said. “I even told him he shouldn’t expect you to quit after that gumball shot Richie.”

“What did he say?”

“He told me to mind my own fucking business,” Felix said.

Sometimes it came out “fooking” with him, too, as if a breeze from the old country had blown into a room, the way it occasionally did with his brother.

“But,” Felix continued, “I reminded my brother that this is everybody’s business now. They hit Richie. They hit me in a different way. They murdered Peter. I told Desmond we should welcome all the goddamn help we can get.”

I took a deep breath and told him about my visits to Vinnie Morris and Albert Antonioni, and finally about the one to Billy Leonard, and what Billy had told me about Desmond and women.

“Guns and women,” Felix said. “Like turning the pages in a scrapbook.”

“For the time being,” I said, “I am going to proceed under the assumption that one or both has something to do with the shooting.”

He nodded and sipped coffee. I did the same. It was good, strong coffee even without a shot of whiskey added to it.

I said, “Can you tell me anything about the gun deal that might be useful?”

“So you can tell your father?”

“Felix,” I said.

It was an admonishment, my way of telling him that he knew me far better than that.

“Sorry,” he said.

“So about the gun deal?”

“There’s a gun deal, and it’s a honey,” he said. “All you need to know. With enough money involved it moves Desmond and me closer to closing things down for good.”

I asked him then what I’d asked Vinnie Morris.

“Might this honey of a gun deal have pissed off one of your competitors enough to precipitate all this shooting?” I said.

“Any competitors of ours know that shooting Richie in the back would result in death penalties,” Felix said. “Several.”

My cup was empty. So was his. Felix simply looked at one of the boys at the door. He walked past the bar and into the kitchen and came back a few minutes later with a fresh pot of coffee. I had absolutely no doubt that he had watched whoever was in the kitchen brew the new coffee. It was perhaps overly cautious, because those at the Warren Tavern were as interested in Felix Burke’s well-being as the boys at the door. But these had quickly become desperate times for the Burke family.

“What about Desmond’s women?” I said.

Felix Burke folded thick, gnarled fingers on the table in front of him. Put his head back and closed his eyes. I had always thought of Felix as being the same age he’d been when I met him. But he was not. It was as if he were aging in front of my eyes over the last week, as if he were as old as Charlestown or the church he attended in the morning or the Bunker Hill Monument or the river or the ocean.

“We were all young once,” he said.

“I’m aware.”

“I had my day as well,” he said, “back in the day.”

“Aware of that, as well,” I said. “But you weren’t married.”

He closed his eyes, and for a moment when he opened them, the old man looked young. And somehow sad at the same time.

“They were always Desmond’s weakness,” Felix said, almost sadly. “Mine, too. But not like him. I never saw my brother drunk. Never saw him touch any more of a drug than aspirin, and not even much of that. But women, Sweet Mother of God. They could make him lose his fucking mind.”

It came out “fooking” again.

“Does Richie know?” I said.

Felix shook his head.

“Richie and me have always shared a lot,” Felix said. “But he never gave me a hint that he knew what his father had been like when he was Richie’s age. I think it would dim the light he’s always shone on his late mother, and her marriage to his father.”

“It’s why I can’t ask him,” I said.

“He knows his old man wasn’t perfect,” Felix said. “But he believes his parents’ union was.”

“Only it wasn’t.”

“Desmond felt he was faithful when he was with her,” Felix said.

“I’ve heard that defense before,” I said. “It wouldn’t even stand up in the court of one of those TV judges.”

Felix shook his head.

“The lies we tell,” he said, “starting with the ones we tell ourselves.” He closed his eyes again and said, “As we’re remembering things the way we wanted them to have been.”

He reached into the side pocket of his windbreaker, pulled out a silver flask, and poured some of its contents into his coffee cup.

“The problem with Desmond in the old days,” Felix said, “was that he didn’t just stray out of his marriage, he strayed out of the faith, so to speak.”

“Meaning with women from other crime families? Billy Leonard mentioned spics and West Side Story, for whatever that’s worth.”

Felix shrugged.

“That was the one about Romeo and Juliet, am I right?” he said. “Maybe my friend Billy was just talking about a girl from the wrong side of our tracks.”

“Italians?” I said.

“Could have been anyone in those days,” Felix said. “Desmond was never a reckless man, except when he’d see another skirt and all the blood would rush out of his brain and end up in his trousers.”

“Was there ever one relationship that made you feel as if he were endangering the family business?”

He rubbed his mouth, hard, with his right hand.

“One?” he said.

“One he loved more than all the others,” I said.

Something changed now in his eyes. I didn’t know why. I didn’t know what I saw in them. Something.

“No,” he said finally.

“Can you give me as many names as you can remember?” I said.

He sounded almost in pain now as he said, “I cannot. Because that would feel like a betrayal. And trust me on something: any kind of betrayal, especially with family, eats away at your soul.”

He started to say something and stopped. He was holding back and he knew it, and perhaps knew that I knew it.

“Did he hurt someone?” I said.

“We all hurt people,” Felix Burke said.

“I can help him,” I said to Felix. “I can help you both before somebody else gets hurt.”

“Don’t you get hurt, Sunny,” he said. “Or go to a place where we can’t help you, because you’ve hurt people.”

Felix stood up abruptly, nodded at the boys at the door, leaned down and kissed me on the cheek. When the old boys with whom I had been spending company were done, they were done, just like that.

“I’ve always loved you, Sunny,” he said, and left.

He didn’t make it sound like a good thing, all things considered.