Robert B. Parker’s Blood Feud

Five

The last thing Richie had told me was that he wanted to sleep. So I didn’t call him until late the next morning, to ask how he was feeling. He said that, all things considered, the biggest being that he’d been shot, he felt all right. I asked him if he was armed. He said that he was, with pain meds, and that he was going back to sleep.

An hour later I was sitting in Tony Marcus’s back office at Buddy’s Fox, his club in the South End. He had briefly changed the name to Ebony and Ivory. But now it was back to Buddy’s Fox, and was as I remembered it, booths along both walls as you walked in, bar in the back. There were a handful of customers when I walked in, some in booths, some eating lunch, some seated at the bar. All of the customers were black. As always at Tony’s place, I felt whiter than the Republican National Convention.

A new bodyguard of Tony’s, who introduced himself as Tayshawn, was waiting for me at the bar. He did not ask to pat me down, just simply said, “Gun?” With the firepower on the premises, Tayshawn had clearly decided we could go with the honor system.

“Not to Tony’s?” I said, and opened the Bottega Veneta bag that Richie had paid far too much for last Christmas to show him.

He walked me back to Tony’s office. Tony’s two main sidemen were back there with him. One was a small, jittery young guy of indeterminate age named Ty Bop. He was Tony’s shooter. Today he was wearing a black baseball cap with a yellow P on the front, and the skinniest pair of skinny jeans I had ever seen on a man or woman. Even those hung down off his hips. His high-top sneakers were bright white. We had met plenty of times before, but he gave no sign of greeting or recognition, just leaned against the wall and swayed slightly from side to side, as if listening to music that only he could hear.

Ty Bop was to my right. To my left, opposite wall, was Junior, Tony’s body man, one roughly the size of Old Ironsides. The threat from both of them was palpable. There had been a time, with two badass men in pursuit and fully intending to shoot me dead, that I had come running into Buddy’s Fox, where Tony’s guys had dissuaded them.

Tony ran prostitution in Boston, and was involved with other criminal enterprises when they suited his interests, much like a street venture capitalist. He was as much of a badass as anybody in town, no matter how much he liked to present himself as a gent. He had always reminded me of what Billy Dee Williams looked like when he was young, a light-skinned black man with a thin mustache, bespoke tailoring at all times, day or night, a soft-spoken manner that was nothing more than a front.

Tony Marcus had his cut in Boston, and the Burke family had theirs, and the Italians, what was left of them, had theirs. Eddie Lee still controlled Chinatown. Two of the old bosses, Gino Fish and Joe Broz, were long gone. Joe had died of old age. Gino had not.

Tony and I were not friends. Tony didn’t have friends, unless you counted Ty Bop and Junior. But we had managed to do favors for each other from time to time when our interests had coincided. I still trusted him about as far as either one of us would have been able to throw Junior. I was sure he felt the same about me.

He did not get up from behind his desk when I entered the office, just studied me up and down as if I were auditioning to be one of his girls.

“Sunny Randall,” he purred. “You are still one fine-looking piece of ass, girl.”

I sat down in the chair across from him and crossed my legs. The black skirt I was wearing was already short enough to show off my legs. Crossing them showed off more. Tony noticed, in full. But that had been the point.

“Don’t make me file a complaint with Human Resources, Tony,” I said.

It made him laugh.

“Girl, in my world, I am Human Resources,” he said.

“How’s business?” I said.

“Busier business than ever, Sunny Randall,” he said. “Tryin’ to keep up with the modern world. Lookin’ to do some of that di-ver-si-fi-cation shit.” Then proceeded to give me more information than I wanted or needed about how he planned to do that, with what he described as his “new fucking business model,” and his plans for expansion out of state. As always, he went back and forth between talking street and trying to sound as if in training to become Warren Buffett.

He was wearing a gray pinstriped suit, a pale lavender shirt, a lavender tie just slightly darker than the shirt, and a pocket square that matched both. But he was looking older than he had the last time I saw him, softer underneath the chin, his face a lot puffier than I remembered, as if he had put on weight.

“So,” he said, “to what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Somebody shot Richie Burke on Portland Street last night,” I said.

“So I heard,” Tony said. “Back-shot him, I heard.”

“Before the shooter left him there,” I said, “he told Richie it was about his father.”

Tony nodded.

“I was wondering,” I said to him, “if you know what might have precipitated such an event.”

Tony chuckled. “I do love listening to you talk, Sunny Randall,” he said.

“I’m just trying to get a handle on why somebody would not just make an aggressive move like this on the Burkes, but on the Burke who has nothing to do with the family business,” I said.

“So ask them.”

“I wanted to ask you,” I said, and smiled. “Didn’t you once tell me that you know everything in Boston except why the Big Dig took so long?”

“Was just being modest,” Tony said. “Knew that, too. The Italians just asked me not to tell.”

He leaned back in his chair now, made a steeple with his fingers and placed them under his chin.

“Is this a professional matter with you,” he said, “or personal?”

“Both,” I said.

“But more personal.”

“Yes.”

He nodded. “And knowing what a hard people Desmond and Felix Burke are, even though they old as shit, we can assume that if there is some kind of dispute going on that they would prefer to a-ju-di-cate it theyselves, and for you to keep that fine ass of yours out of it.”

“Listen to your own bad self,” I said. “A-jud-i-cate.”

He shrugged modestly. “Lot of layers to me, Sunny Randall, even the way I talk and all. You ought to know that by now.”

“Lot of layers like an onion,” I said. “But you haven’t answered my question. Is there something going on that would make somebody ballsy enough to shoot Desmond Burke’s son?”

Tony shook his head. There was still the faint smell of cigar in this room, even though Tony had told me the last time we were together that he had quit.

“Haven’t heard anything, much as my ear is always to the ground,” he said. “Got no idea why somebody would involve your ex. There’s always been an understanding with the rest of us at the table, so to speak, that your man Richie had been granted diplomatic immunity. Not like in the past, when Whitey Bulger’s crew didn’t give a fuck who they took out. Sometimes it wasn’t no more than Whitey waking up on the wrong side of the fucking bed.”

“Until now,” I said.

“But they didn’t shoot to kill,” Tony said.

“Guy knew what he was doing,” I said.

“Even from point blank, you could make a mistake.”

“He didn’t,” I said.

“If he wanted him gone, he’d be gone,” Tony said.

“That’s what everybody’s saying,” I said, “all over town.”

I stood up.

“You’ll ask around?” I said to Tony.

“What’s in it for me?” he said.

“What about a good deed being its own reward?”

He laughed again, more heartily and full-throated than before, slapping a palm on his desk for emphasis.

“Gonna be like always,” Tony said. “If I do for you, you do for me. Cost of doing business.”

“Think of it this way, Tony,” I said. “Maybe this time I’m the one pimping your ass out.”

“I see what you did there,” he said. “You ask me, it sounds like somebody wants old Desmond to know they coming for him, through people close to him.”

“Nobody closer than Richie.”

Tony nodded. “Best you be careful, too,” he said.

“Always,” I said.

“’Fore you go,” Tony said, “how’s your boy Spike?”

“As you remember him.”

“Toughest queer I ever met,” he said.

I told him he was going to make Spike blush.

Then I told him not to get up. Tony said he had no fucking intention of getting up. At the door I turned to Ty Bop and grinned and pointed and pulled an imaginary trigger with my thumb.

In a blur, he had pulled back the front of the leather jacket he was wearing and showed me the .45 in the waistband of the skinny jeans, without changing expression.

Oh, Sunny, I thought to myself, the places you’ll go.