Robert B. Parker’s Blood Feud

Thirty-Six

There was no way of knowing, and might never be a way of proving, if the Burkes had ordered a hit on Dominic Carbone. Or if they had even determined that he was the man who had been stalking them. No way to know, at least not yet, if Carbone had some kind of relationship with the Cataldo family, or what was left of it, and had any real skin in this game.

And if it had been someone other than Desmond or Felix Burke who had ordered a hit on Carbone, who had? And why?

I also had absolutely no idea what was going to happen when Desmond found out that Maria had died in Providence, and that Albert Antonioni had been the one to make sure she got a proper burial.

Other than all that, the gods were smiling on me.

What I mostly knew, at least in the world of objective facts, was that Albert Antonioni’s name kept popping up more regularly than old girlfriends did with the president, even though he’d led me to believe he had hardly anything to do with Desmond Burke anymore, whether the subject was guns or anything else.

“He’s probably had more guys killed than Vladimir Putin,” Spike said before I left the restaurant. “But he might have enough of a heart to have done right by Maria Cataldo.”

“I still need to know why he was the one to whom it was left to have her buried,” I said. “And why she died at Rhode Island Hospital.”

“Why would he tell you that?”

“Sucker for a pretty face?”

“Okay,” Spike said. “You’ve obviously been overserved.”

“I’d like to find a way to head off a war between him and the Burkes, if that is what’s looming,” I said. “But it’s not as if I can ask Felix to set up a meeting.”

“Richie doesn’t even want you to cross the state line,” Spike said.

“I might have already asked Mike Stanton to call the guy we used last time,” I said. “But he said the guy’s number was no longer in service.”

“So how do we get back to see him?”

“We’ll think of something,” I said.

“Is that the literary we?” Spike said. “Or does that mean me?”

I smiled at him.

“Had a feeling that’s where this was headed,” he said.

It was time to go. Spike said that just because somebody had shot a guy from Rhode Island didn’t mean that I should suddenly stop looking over my shoulder. He insisted on standing with Rosie and me on the street in front of the restaurant until we were not only in the Uber I’d ordered, but also verifying that it was in fact that Uber I’d ordered before I gave the driver my name.

When Rosie and I got to Melanie Joan’s, I saw nothing suspicious on the street, waited until Rosie performed her last ablution of the night, went inside, locked the front door, set the alarm, decided to take a hot bath before I went to bed.

When I got out of the bath, I checked my naked self out in front of the full-length mirror in the bathroom. Front first. Then, looking over my shoulder, back.

“Older my ass,” I said out loud, winking at myself. “And I do mean ass.”

It had been over an hour since I’d finished nursing the second martini I’d had at Spike’s. I went to the kitchen and fixed myself a Jameson, neat, and got into bed with a ballpoint pen and a yellow legal pad and wrote down everything that had happened, both everything I thought and everything I knew. Trying to make things linear this time.

Lists always help me. I never wrote them up on a laptop. I wrote them out in longhand, in my Catholic school handwriting. I thought better with a pen in my hand, the way I did with a brush in my hand.

I wished it were easy to make things take shape now.

I wrote and occasionally sipped whiskey.

It was late. I knew I should be tired, and just slightly overserved. I was neither. Maybe I could hold my liquor better as I got older. I thought of an old line from Winston Churchill, the one about how he liked to drink alcohol before and during and after meals, and often in the intervals.

It had never bothered me to drink alone. I never drank in excess when drinking alone, which meant alone with Rosie. This Rosie and the one before her. It was past midnight now. Another old line came to me, though I couldn’t remember who’d written it or said it, about this being the hour when people told each other the truth. If I were with Desmond Burke right now, would he tell me the truth? Would Albert Antonioni?

Would they tell me truths about themselves, or each other?

If Richie were here with me right now, in Melanie Joan’s big bed, and asked for the truth about us, what would I tell him?

Maybe I had been overserved after all.

Would I tell Richie that I preferred being alone? Maybe that was the real truth, from me, to me, at this time of night. I had been unable to work for others and with others when I was still a cop. Now I worked alone. I had been unable to succeed as a wife. So now I lived alone.

The most stable relationships of my adult life, other than the one with my father, had been with two miniature English bull terriers, both female, and a gay man.

My relationship with Richie, I knew in my heart, was both stable and unstable at the same time.

I checked what I had written one more time, still found more questions than answers, finished my drink, turned out the lights.

At least I did have Spike and Rosie.

Yeah, girl, I thought, before sleep came far more quickly than it usually did.

Who’s got it better than you?