Robert B. Parker’s Blood Feud

Forty-Eight

Pete Colapietro, Providence cop, seemed to know where most of the bodies were buried from Narragansett to Woonsocket, both literally and figuratively.

Talking to him was a little bit like talking to Frank Belson, except that Pete was funnier than Frank, not that I would ever tell Frank that.

I called Pete when I got back to Boston and asked him about Joseph Marchetti.

“Told he’s worked his way up to midlevel-goon status,” Pete said. “Kind of guy Antonioni would use if he wanted to scare somebody he hadn’t sufficiently scared himself. But Joe’s not like family, if that’s what you’re asking. By all accounts, though, he is supposed to be some shooter.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.

“Protect and serve,” Pete said.

“Does Albert have any other family?” I said. “Wasn’t there a son?”

“Allie,” Pete said. “Dead, as Casey Stengel used to say, at the present time.”

More baseball. I was starting to believe that guys thought about baseball more than sex.

“Natural causes?” I said.

“Considering his line of work and who his old man was, yeah,” Pete said, “I guess you could put it that way.”

“If Albert wanted somebody to be gotten,” I said, “would Marchetti be his man?”

“One of many,” Pete said. “But yes.”

I thanked him.

“Sunny?” he said before I ended the call. “Just from the little I know, Joe Marchetti is not somebody on whom you put a gun and then he just lets it go.”

“Figured.”

“They either have eyes on you,” he said, “or somebody in the neighborhood made a call.”

I thought back to the day I thought I had been followed from Susan Silverman’s office.

“Aware of that, too, Pete.”

“Maybe you need to have somebody good to have eyes on you, too,” Pete Colapietro said.

I told him I would also keep that in mind, thanking him again. Then I texted Connie Devane the picture of Joseph Marchetti I had taken on my phone. We had exchanged numbers before I’d left her house.

She called me after she got the picture.

I said, “Is that the guy who used to come alone and visit Maria Cataldo?”

“No,” she said.

“Shit,” I said.

“You want me to keep watching the house for you?” she said. “It would make me feel useful.”

“That would make one of us,” I said.