Robert B. Parker’s Blood Feud

Forty-Four

Belson sent Spike home in a squad car. He drove me home himself. On the way he asked me for all the information I had previously withheld from him.

“You know pretty much everything I know,” I said.

“Bullshit,” he said.

“Not sure I can even remember every single thing I’ve told you so far,” I said.

“I can,” Belson said.

I honestly couldn’t remember everything I’d told him. So I told him now about all the guns going missing all of a sudden. I told him about Desmond and Albert and about Maria Cataldo, and about her dying in Providence and living in Providence for some period of time before that. I told him about my theory that Albert might have been jealous of Desmond and Maria and waited a very long time to get even with him.

“You’re telling me this all might have started because this Maria wouldn’t go to the prom with Antonioni back in the day?” Belson said. “And went with Desmond instead?”

“It has to be more than that, if Albert is the one behind all this,” I said.

“Which we are only surmising that he is.”

“Correct.”

“When did she go away?” Belson said.

We were sitting in the car in front of the house by then.

“Desmond believes it was April of 1980,” I said. “When she was in her early twenties.”

“Where’d she go?”

“Unclear,” I said. “All I know is that at the other end of her life she ends up in Providence.”

“Near Albert,” Belson said. “Who buried her. Where was she living when she died?”

“It was on the death certificate,” I said. “I don’t remember the exact address.”

“She own that house?” Belson said.

“Don’t know that yet,” I said.

“Worth knowing,” he said.

“In the morning,” I said.

“You think Desmond was aware his long-lost love was living an hour away in Goombah Central?” he said.

“I’d ask him, but Richie said he’s out of town for a couple days.”

“Where?”

I shrugged. “Maybe stealing more guns.”

Belson said, “I’m putting a car out here tonight.”

I grinned. “For me?”

“For your old man,” he said. “It would fuck up our friendship if you got clipped on my watch.”

“You old softie.”

“You know who we really need to talk to?” Belson said. “Maria Cataldo.”

He waited while I went into the house and got Rosie and walked her halfway up the block and back. His car didn’t pull away until an unmarked pulled up in front of the house.

I brushed, washed up, moisturized, put Rosie at the end of my bed and my .38 on the nightstand next to me. Shut off the lights and thought about Maria Cataldo, who’d left and gone away, hey, hey, hey.

In the morning, I called the tax assessor’s office in Providence, Rhode Island, and the third person to whom I spoke, a pleasant woman named Mrs. Krummenacher, informed me that the house in which Maria Cataldo was living on Pleasant Valley Parkway at the time of her death was owned by Mr. Albert Antonioni.