Robert B. Parker’s Blood Feud

Thirty-Seven

I left the Albert Antonioni negotiations to Spike and tried to find out everything there was to know about Dominic Carbone.

He had been born in Cranston, as it turned out, dropped out of high school there, been raised, according to a couple classmates I was able to track down, by a single mother who worked as a cocktail waitress at various local establishments that were never confused with the bar at the Four Seasons.

The father, according to Pete Colapietro, had been a midlevel thug in Antonioni’s operation until he was found dead one night, shot in the head, in the front seat of a car parked at the Red Sox’s minor-league ballpark in Pawtucket. Despite having been estranged from his father for most of his hardscrabble life, by then Dominic Junior had already gone into the family business.

I called Richie about Carbone. Richie said his father had assured him he had nothing to do with the guy ending up the way Dominic Senior had. I asked if Desmond had bought into the notion that Carbone had been the one shooting at the Burke family.

“He’s like you, and Belson,” Richie said. “Suspicious of how insanely neat it all seems.”

“But might there now be an escalation of the bad blood between him and Albert?” I said.

“My father says no,” Richie said.

“Do you believe him?”

“I do not,” he said. “But if there is the kind of escalation you’re talking about, I’d sort of like you to stay out of the crossfire.”

“You know I can’t,” I said, “even if your father is having a difficult time accepting that fact.”

“He doesn’t think you can’t,” Richie said. “He thinks you won’t.”

“All part of getting to know me,” I said. “Just not as well as you do.”

“And what a lucky boy I am for that,” Richie said.

“Neither your father nor Albert Antonioni is the type to let bygones be bygones,” I said. “I just find it counterintuitive to believe that this is over just because a stiff in Boston had the right gun in his possession when he died. I frankly think someone planted it on him.”

“Counterintuitive,” Richie said. “You continue to sound remarkably unlike a private cop.”

“And you,” I said, “sound remarkably unlike a child of the Boston Mob.”

The second morning after they had discovered the body of Dominic Carbone, Spike called before my run and told me that, almost like a Christmas miracle, Albert Antonioni had agreed to once again meet with us.

“I think you and Albert are kind of in the same place,” Spike said. “You want him to show you his, and he wants you to show him yours. So to speak.”

“Where is this happening?”

“Joe Marzilli’s Old Canteen,” Spike said.

“It’s practically become our place,” I said.

Spike was dressed in what he called gangster chic for the occasion: black pinstriped suit with wide chalk stripes and wider lapels than I’d ever seen on him, white shirt, silver tie, ankle boots with zippers on the sides.

“You do look like a gangster,” I said. “Unfortunately, it’s Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls.”

“I see what you did there,” he said, as I slid into the front seat next to him. “Played the Broadway-musical card on the gay guy.”

“Stereotypes are ugly,” I said. “Just not as ugly as that suit.”

“You no longer seem concerned about being followed,” Spike said.

“I look at it this way,” I said. “Desmond gonna be Desmond.”

“Did you just say that?”

I giggled.

We hit little traffic on I-95 and ended up with a parking spot about a block away from the Old Canteen. I left my gun in the glove compartment. So did Spike. Our operating theory was that we would once again be patted down. A larger theory was that if Albert wanted to shoot both of us today, he could, but likely would not.

It was the same table as before, with what looked to be the same lineup of sidemen posted around the room.

There were no coffee cups on the table, no offer of anything to drink, nothing social about the gathering, which had all the charm of a parole board hearing.

“I don’t have a lot of time,” Albert Antonioni said when Spike and I were seated.

He sounded like Desmond.

“Maria Cataldo,” I said.

“What about her?”

“Why did you pay to have her buried?” I said.

“Who says I did?”

“Albert,” I said. “You said you didn’t have a lot of time. Let’s not either one of us waste it.”

He leaned back in his chair, clasped his hands across a truly ugly polka-dot shirt.

“Why’re we talking about her?” he said.

“Because she was Desmond Burke’s great lost love,” I said. “Because she was sent away in her youth, or left on her own, thus ending her illicit affair with Desmond. And at the other end of her life, when she dies, you are the one who pays for her final resting place.”

“I promised her father I’d be there for her if she needed me, whenever she needed me,” he said. “I kept the promise even after she died.”

“Desmond says you were the one who had her father killed as a way of assuming full control of the business,” I said.

“Desmond Burke is a liar,” he said. “I wasn’t the one who capped Vincent. He was. And you can fucking well tell him that I said that.”

Antonioni started coughing then, making him sound like a lung patient. Or sounding the way Billy Leonard had that day at Sherrill House. The young handsome guy I remembered from our last meeting was at the table in a flash with a glass of water. Antonioni drank enough to stop the coughing.

“We done here?” he said.

“Not quite,” I said.

“What else?”

“Who’s Dominic Carbone?” I said.

“Guy used to do some things for me,” Antonioni said, “before he went off on his own.” Antonioni shrugged. “I heard what happened to him,” he said. “Life’s hard. Then somebody shoots you.”

“Did you send Carbone after the Burkes?” I said.

“Fuck, no,” he said.

I said, “The gun they found on Dominic happened to be the same one used to shoot my ex-husband and kill Peter Burke and Desmond’s bodyguard.”

“I got nothing to do with any of that shit.”

“You do have to admit that it’s a bit of a coincidence, somebody who you say used to work with you ending up with that particular gun in his pocket,” I said.

“Your problem,” he said. “Not mine.”

I smiled a killer smile at him. He managed to keep himself under control.

“How well did you know Maria Cataldo when she was a young woman?” I said.

He said, “We were friends, nothing more, nothing less. I had too much respect for her father. And too much fear of the old man.”

“You’re sure?”

“Listen to me,” he said. “You know who wanted Maria in those days? Everybody did. Irish, Italians, everyfuckingbody. But the rest of us were smart enough to do our wanting of Vincent’s little girl from a distance. Just not Desmond.”

He leaned forward now in his chair.

“Can I give you a piece of advice?”

“Am I obligated to take it?”

“Walk away from this,” he said. “I’m telling you for the last time. Go tell Desmond I got no problems with him anymore except if he makes problems for me. Then we all live out however many days we got left. But you stay with this, you’re going to get into things you don’t want to get into. And something could happen you don’t want to happen.”

I had more questions but knew they weren’t going to get me where I wanted to go with Albert Antonioni, not now and probably not ever.

I stood up. So did Spike. Albert Antonioni watched both of us with the malevolent indifference of a snake.

“Stay out of my business,” he said.

“What business?” I said.

“All of it,” he said. He waved a dismissive hand at us. “Now go,” he said.

Spike and I walked out of the Old Canteen and into the sunlight of Federal Hill. Neither one of us spoke until Spike’s car was in sight. We both resisted the temptation, once outside, to look over our shoulders.

“He’s hiding something,” I said. “Or lying his ass off. Or both.”

“I’m thinking he might have had a bigger thing for Maria than he’s letting on,” Spike said.

“He said everybody wanted her,” I said.

Spike pressed his key, unlocked the car doors. We both got in.

“He did kind of blow your theory about him being a sucker for a pretty face all to hell,” Spike said.

I said, “Albert didn’t last this long without having an iron will.”

Then Spike put the car into gear. We then got the hell out of Rhode Island.