Robert B. Parker’s Blood Feud

Forty-One

I had the feeling that my car was being followed on the way back from Susan Silverman’s office.

There was a black car making the turns that I made off Linnaean to Humboldt to Mass Ave. I wasn’t good on car makes but thought it might be a Taurus.

The car stayed with me to 2A to Eliot Street to John F. Kennedy. It was gone when I got to North Harvard, and then to Cambridge, but it meant little if whoever was following me, if somebody was following me, knew where I lived.

So instead of taking Soldiers Field Road and then Storrow Drive to my usual exit, I headed down Commonwealth Ave toward Chestnut Hill, before circling around to the entrance to the Mass Pike in West Newton. By then there was no black car behind me. I had called Spike and put him on speaker before I got on the Pike, and he told me to drive straight to his place if I thought the tail was still with me. I told him I would. He told me that even if I didn’t spot anybody, he was going to meet me at Melanie Joan’s, and bring food with him, and wasn’t going to take no for an answer.

“Who says no to you?” I said.

“Gary,” he said.

“May I ask who Gary is?”

“No you may not,” he said.

By the time I had gotten off the Pike at the exit for Copley Square and the Prudential, I had lost the tail, if it had even been a tail in the first place.

I took Rosie out when I got back, fed her, changed into jeans and a sweater, and opened a bottle of wine and thought about Maria Cataldo, and how little I still knew of her life. I did not know if she had ever married, I did not know if she had had children, I did not know where she had gone after her father had sent her away, or if she had simply left on her own. Tomorrow I would call Wayne Cosgrove, who liked to brag that he was better at finding out things than I was, and never had to point a gun at anybody to get information.

But Maria Cataldo was dead, that was now part of the world of objective facts. So was Dominic Carbone. And Peter Burke. And poor Buster. Somebody had shot at Richie, and shot up Felix’s house, and beat me up. Somebody was coming for Desmond, that much remained clear. It could have been Dominic Carbone who did all the shooting, but it if had been, what grudge had he been settling?

And if it wasn’t the late Dominic Carbone, then we were right back where we started, with a gun still pointed at the Burkes.

And what did any of this, or all of this, have to do with guns suddenly going missing?

I looked at Rosie at the other end of the couch and said, “Rosebud, maybe it’s not too late for med school.”

She picked up her head, quickly ascertained that there was no food anywhere in the area, put her head back down, and was soon snoring. Some sidekick.

The wine was in the ice bucket next to the dining room table, which I had set. I had already lighted the candles. Romantic dinner for two, just without the romance.

Spike arrived a few minutes later with a big bag full of food: Caesar salads with extra anchovies, veal Milanese, which he assured me traveled extremely well, a side order of french fries. I told him I didn’t recall french fries being served with veal Milanese at Spike’s and he said, “Have you ever turned down my french fries?”

I said I had not, nor would I ever.

“Didn’t think so,” he said.

When we were finished eating and on the couch drinking coffee laced with Jameson, Rosie between us, I said to Spike, “This thing really is a hairball.”

Spike nodded. “Usually we’re able to think a couple moves ahead,” he said.

“We’re able to think a couple moves ahead?” I said.

“Yup,” he said. “Me and you, kid. A team. Like Nick and Nora.”

It was just one more thing to love about Spike. He loved old Thin Man movies as much as I did. A lot of snappy patter and a couple pitchers of martinis before they finally figured out who was responsible for that stiff in the drawing room.

“Let’s say that killing Carbone was just a head fake, which is what Frank Belson called it,” I said. “Why, though? Whoever’s behind this wanted Desmond to know he was closing in on him. He wanted to tighten the noose. Why would he plant the gun on Carbone and do everything except hire a skywriter to make the cops and the rest of us think the thing is over?”

I sipped coffee that tasted more like whiskey than coffee and was lip-smacking good.

“Maybe,” Spike said, “it is you he is trying to throw off.”

“Why me?”

“Because this person, whomever he is, has clearly done his homework,” Spike said. “And if he has done his homework, he knows that you may be a bigger threat to him than Desmond or Felix or even the cops, whom he may have surmised aren’t kept up at night worrying about bad guys shooting each other up. You should be flattered, if you think about it. All those bad guys and he’s worried about a girl.”

“I’m convinced a girl started this,” I said.

“Say it’s Albert,” Spike said. “If he waited this long to get even with Desmond over Maria Cataldo, he’s got nothing but time now.”

“Maybe not,” I said. “You hear that cough the other day? It sounded like your basic death rattle. And roll.”

“You know what I’m saying,” Spike said. “The game of cat and mouse continues.”

“Eek,” I said.

“Wouldn’t Desmond have known if Albert had been one of Maria’s potential paramours?” Spike said. “And if he’d done more than lust after her from a distance?”

“Paramours?” I said. “I think that expression was old when Nick and Nora were young.”

He toasted me with his coffee cup.

“Look at it this way,” Spike said. “If the shooter did pop Carbone as a way to throw everybody off, maybe you’ve got him on the run and you don’t even know it.”

“Or maybe we’re giving this guy too much credit, and he’s out of control in a controlled sort of way, and capable of anything.”

“Including making another run at you,” Spike said. “Which is why you thought you might have been followed out of Cambridge.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I could stay the night,” Spike said.

“Nah,” I said. “Would make me feel like a girl.”

“Can’t have that.”

“Marry me,” I said.

“Right,” he said. “Who needs sex?”

I laughed and said, “We do!”

“You decide when you’re going to tell Desmond all you know about Maria?”

“No,” I said. “I’m holding back for now. But so is he. I just don’t know what, or how much.”

Spike said he was going to walk home. He’d recently purchased a new condominium in an area on the other side of the Common that used to be called the Combat Zone but had now been gentrified in a pluperfect way over time.

I put on a short leather jacket, grabbed Rosie’s leash off the table along with my .38, and told him I’d walk him as far as Charles Street. Spike leaned over and kissed me on the top of my head.

“This was fun,” he said.

“Best. Wingman. Ever,” I said.

“You’ll figure this out,” he said.

“You sure?”

“Always have,” Spike said.

“Blah, blah, blah,” I said.

“Well,” Spike said, “there’s the old fighting spirit.”

I opened the front door, letting Rosie lead the way. I had the handle of her leash and my keys in my right hand. But as I took my first step outside, I dropped the keys, which fell to the concrete with a clatter that only sounded so loud because the street was so quiet.

“Shit,” I said.

Everything happened at once then, me turning just slightly to look down at where the keys had fallen and Spike saying “I’ll get ’em” in the split-second before we heard the unmistakable crack of a gun firing from somewhere at close range in front of us and the bullet hitting the front door between us.