Robert B. Parker’s Blood Feud

Forty-Six

I went alone to Providence this time. The only person who knew I was going was my father. He had asked if I wanted him to tag along. I told him that as much as I always welcomed the pleasure of his company, I was going it alone today.

“I know how much you hate baseball expressions,” he said. “But you are some tough out.”

“For a girl,” I said.

“Hey,” he said, “nobody’s perfect.”

It turned out that Albert Antonioni had done well by Maria Cataldo. I had no idea how long Maria had lived on Pleasant Valley Parkway. But according to the Providence recorder of deeds, the two-story brick home with white pillars forming an archway in front had belonged to Albert Antonioni since 1975.

I had no idea if there was still a Mrs. Albert Antonioni. Perhaps he had lived here with Maria. Maybe he moved around, from one property to another, as a way of making himself a moving target. What was the Italian expression for mistress? Goomara? Goomah? One of those. Or both. Maybe Maria, when she was back in Albert Antonioni’s life, had become his goomara.

But there was nothing on this tree-lined street, with obviously expensive homes, that spoke of the Mob. It looked like a street where young professionals could live more cheaply here than they would up in Boston in suburbs like Chestnut Hill or Wellesley. I had read all the stories in the Globe about how more and more people were commuting all the way to Boston from neighborhoods in Providence exactly like this.

My father’s friend from the Providence cops, Pete Colapietro, had told me over the phone that Pleasant Valley Parkway was just far enough away from Providence College to make it a desirable location.

“You get closer to the college,” he said, “you’ve got these absentee owners and a bunch of triple-deckers where they have loud parties and puke out the windows.”

“Kids today,” I said.

“Future hedge-funders,” he said, “and other white-collar criminals.”

I stared up at 140 Pleasant Valley Parkway and thought: Lot of house for an old woman.

I went up the front walk and rang the bell, not knowing if anyone still lived there, or had ever lived there with Maria Cataldo. There was no sound from inside, everything about the house as quiet and still as the neighborhood.

I tried the front door. Locked. The shades for the first-floor windows were drawn. I thought about how easy it would probably be to walk around the back and pick a lock and get inside, but then imagined alarms going off and the police coming for me before goons working for Albert Antonioni did.

I turned and looked at what was obviously a well-maintained front lawn. The white pillars on either side of me had been freshly painted. There was no “For Sale” sign, but that didn’t mean that Albert didn’t have the house on the market. Or was still living here himself.

One more thing I didn’t know, added to a long list of things I didn’t know, as I continued to wander through a deep, dark forest.

Knock on some doors, my father had said.

I went to the house to the right. No one home. Then to the house to the right of that. No one home. So no chance yet to use the cover story I had created for myself, about a long-lost relative of Maria Cataldo’s hiring me to find out as much as I could about her final days.

The third house I tried was one directly across the street from 140. I heard a voice from inside call out “Just a second,” and then a tall, attractive woman with silver-blond hair opened the front door. I introduced myself. She introduced herself as Connie Devane.

I quickly provided my cover story in an earnest, friendly way, apologizing for bothering her.

“Could I see some ID?” she said.

I reached into my bag and showed her my license, which had my picture underneath “Bureau of Investigative Services.” If Connie Devane knew that you could get one of these from the same people who made up fake IDs for college kids, she did not let on.

“Please come in,” she said.

We sat in her sun-splashed living room. She wore jeans and a white button-down shirt and sandals. I told her I would try not to take up too much of her time. She said she had just taken a break from her writing. “Oh,” I said, “you’re a writer?” She said she was trying to be.

I asked how long she had lived in the neighborhood. She said fifteen years, the last five after her husband was gone.

“Did he pass away?” I said.

She smiled. “Sadly, not yet,” she said.

“Oh.”

“Are you married, Sunny?”

“Divorced,” I said.

“Good divorce or bad?”

“Good,” I said.

I knew this was a conversation that could take me all the way down a rabbit hole, but there was no way to politely avoid it if Connie Devane was the ex-wife who wanted to tell me all about it.

“Lucky you,” she said.

I smiled back at her. “Maria Cataldo,” I said.

Connie Devane said, “I didn’t even know that was her last name. The first time I met her she just introduced herself as Maria.”

“How long did she live across the street?”

“I can’t tell you exactly,” she said. “I think it was right before Mr. Wonderful moved out on me. But I never even saw any moving vans. One day she was there, and the lights were on at night. I think the house had been empty for years before that.” She put out her hands. “Maybe five years ago?”

“You said you met her.”

“I was starting a run one day,” she said. “She was working in a small garden on the side of the house. Just to be friendly, I walked up the lawn and introduced myself. Welcome to the neighborhood, blah, blah, blah. Around sixty, maybe? But you could see she must have been some kind of great beauty when she was younger. She was polite but made it clear she had no desire to make a new friend.” Connie Devane closed her eyes, as if trying to see Maria Cataldo better. “One thing I remember is that the shovel in her hand was shaking badly, the way her head was,” she said. “Remember what Katharine Hepburn was like when she was old?”

“Maria Cataldo died from Parkinson’s complications,” I said.

“I remember thinking it had to be that at the time,” she said. “It was around the time that Muhammad Ali died. He had it, too, right?”

I nodded.

“The last couple years,” she said, “I never saw her outside, in the garden or anywhere else.”

“Did she ever have visitors?”

“Hey,” Connie said, “it’s not as if I was on a stakeout.”

“Wasn’t suggesting that you were,” I said. “Just looking for anything that might help.”

“My writing room is upstairs,” she said, “facing the street. So, yeah, I did see some people from time to time.”

“Can you describe them?”

“An old man would show up every few days,” she said, “right up until the end. Town Car. Driver. The whole works. Even a good-looking young guy who’d walk the old man to the front door.”

“Like a bodyguard?”

“Not like one,” Connie said. “One.”

“And you say they showed up fairly regularly?”

“They did,” she said. “And while I don’t want to sound ethnically, ah, insensitive, that they might be Mob guys of some kind. This is Providence, after all. I’m pretty sure people like that have their own baseball cards.”

“Always the same man walking him to the door?” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “I remember that because occasionally the younger man would come alone at night, carrying what I assumed to be food.”

I nodded again. She held up a finger. “Seriously?” she said. “I don’t want you to get the idea that all I do is sit and stare out the window at the neighbors.”

“It honestly hasn’t occurred to me,” I said.

“Then one day the ambulance came,” she said.

She shrugged.

“It was almost as if she’d never been here at all,” Connie Devane said.

I had nothing to add to that.

“Maybe people will say the same thing about me someday,” she said.

I stood and thanked her for her time.

“I hope I helped,” she said.

“More than you know,” I said.

There was an air about her that she was sorry to see me go, that she had liked having the company, if even for a few minutes. Divorced woman, observing other people’s lives.

That wasn’t me someday, I thought, on the way to my car.

That was me now.