Robert B. Parker’s Blood Feud

Thirty-Two

We drove back to Melanie Joan’s in Richie’s Jeep. Two of Desmond’s troopers were in a car right behind us.

Richie found a parking spot on River Street. He’d always had great parking karma, there was simply no explaining it. The troopers double-parked halfway up the block and shut off the engine. I tried to imagine the fun that might ensue if one of the good ladies from the neighborhood told them to move it.

We went inside. Richie immediately sat on the floor and Rosie jumped into his lap and began lapping his face. Whatever reservations she’d once had about Richie were clearly melting away, at an increasingly rapid rate. I asked Richie to take her out and he did. When he came back he locked the door behind him, gave Rosie a bone, walked across the living room and kissed me, hard and for a long time, with absolutely no resistance from me. When we finally pulled back, our faces were still very close.

“Lost love seems to be the theme of the day,” Richie said.

“Not here,” I said.

“Meaning you don’t want us to do it in the middle of the living room?” he said.

“No,” I said. “Not here and not in front of Rosie.”

“Where to?” Richie said. “Place is full of possibilities, according to Melanie Joan.”

“Bedroom,” I said.

“I could carry you up the stairs,” Richie said.

“Would be a bad time to lose you,” I said.

“You will never lose me,” he said.

We headed for the bedroom, both of us resisting the urge to run. I asked him to undress me. He did. There had been multiple times in our life together when Richie had struggled, and mightily, getting my bra off. Not today.

“Have you been practicing on the bras of others?” I said.

“Please stop talking,” he said.

I did.

And somehow this time, even after all the other times, was like the first time, with the room in shadows, as if day had suddenly been transformed into night, at least in here, with the shades drawn and door locked and the two of us as together as two people could be, with a coupling informed by fierceness and gentleness and want and need. And love. Eventually I exploded and then he did. Or perhaps it was the other way around, in a moment where it was impossible to know where I ended and he began, in the big bed that Melanie Joan said had seen more traffic than the T.

It was Richie who finally spoke.

“I think you might have scared the baby,” he said.

We were on our backs, on top of covers that had not been pulled back or down. The throw pillows from the bed were scattered around the room as if the place had been tossed.

Which, in point of fact, it had been.

My breathing had not yet returned to normal. Richie’s had. I often joked with him that his standard resting pulse rate was just slightly north of dead.

Then Richie said, “Holy fucking fuck.”

“An apt description,” I said. “If not a terribly poetic one.”

“Either way,” he said.

He turned and reached his head over enough to kiss me above an eye. When I turned back, I saw him smiling.

“Did you know this would happen after we left your father’s house?” I said.

“Ever hopeful,” Richie said.

“Do you think the boys outside are concerned that I may be holding you hostage?” I said.

“They’ll figure it out.”

“You think they may have heard me in the car?”

He smiled again.

“Pretty sure,” Richie said, “that they could hear you in Braintree.”

I punched him in the arm.

We remained side by side in the big bed, in the dark room. Neither of us made any attempt to cover ourselves.

“Do you think I’m starting to look older?” I said.

Richie propped himself up on an elbow and made a big show of turning his head, as if inspecting every inch of me.

“Hey,” I said. “This isn’t a show.”

“Speak for yourself, blondie.”

Then we commenced to do our level best to toss the place again.

Later, much, I said to Richie, “We have behaved like horny teenagers.”

“Redundant,” he said.

He was in a Dropkick Murphys T-shirt that he kept here for sleepovers, and a pair of black Boston Bruins sweatpants with gold trim. I was in jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt. We had made our way out of the bedroom, at long last. It was, after all, the cocktail hour. Richie had made us both martinis.

“How much do you think your father held back?” I said.

“No way to know,” Richie said.

“I need to find out a lot more about Maria Cataldo.”

“Like working a cold case,” Richie said.

“I have before,” I said.

“Where do you suppose she went?”

“For me to find out,” I said.

“A lot trickier for me,” Richie said.

“Tricky being you right now.”

“What do you mean right now?” he said.

The martini was perfect. I couldn’t tell whether or not Richie had actually added vermouth, or just opened the bottle so our glasses could catch a whiff.

I said, “He said the Cataldos are all gone.”

“Doesn’t mean they are.”

“You’re saying your father lies?”

“Only to stay in practice,” Richie said.

Richie said he’d cook dinner. I told him that was fine with me, we both knew he was a far better cook than I. And had more specialties than just spaghetti and broccoli. He checked the freezer and refrigerator for possibilities. Found a steak I had bought the day before at DeLuca’s and some mushrooms and a package of onion rings.

“Steak O’Shrum it is,” Richie said.

“Yippee,” I said.

I fed Rosie and took her out for a walk while he cooked. Outside I gave a smile and one-fingered salute to the boys in the car.

Richie and I ate steak and mushrooms and onion rings at the kitchen counter and drank a Chianti Classico we both liked. When we were finished and had cleared the plates, because Richie Burke never left plates unclean the way my father never did, we both took Rosie out for her last walk. When we came back, Richie and I made love again.

“I feel like a sailor on leave,” he said.

“Don’t leave, sailor,” I said.

“Not tonight,” he said.

In the morning Frank Belson called and said he might have found the shooter.

“Shot,” he said.

“Dead?” I said.

“Oh, my, yes,” Belson said, and told me where I could find him.