Robert B. Parker’s Blood Feud

Fifty

Before Richie left in the morning I said, “Please do not look for a way to engage with Joseph Marchetti.”

“By ‘engage,’” he said, “I assume you mean do not go down to Providence and find him and beat the living shit out of him.”

“It doesn’t get us any closer to an answer,” I said.

“It would make me feel better about everything,” he said.

“You can’t beat up everybody who’s mean to me,” I said. “It would become a full-time job.”

I spent a lot of my morning trying to do another Google search on Maria Cataldo, an even deeper dive than before, hoping there had been something I had missed. But there was not. I called Pete Colapietro, who said I wasn’t required to check in with him daily.

“How does somebody disappear from radar the way she apparently did?” I said. “Before and after the invention of the Internet?”

“She must have had money,” he said, “because for the life of me I can’t find credit card information on her anywhere. Or a home she ever owned. Or driver’s license. Or anything.”

“Give me the simple life,” I said.

“Must have been a lot of money,” he said.

“Mob money is often like that,” I said.

“Daddy’s money,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“So far what I’ve mostly got is bupkus,” Pete said.

“Join the club,” I said.

I made myself more coffee and then fell back on one of my rock-solid foundations for first-rate crime detecting:

I made another list.

I painstakingly wrote it all down again, from the start. No supposition this time. Just facts, in an orderly timeline, as accurate as I could make it. I wrote down all the names, from Richie and Desmond and Felix and the late Peter Burke. Buster. Billy Leonard. Vinnie Morris. Charlie Whitaker. Tony Marcus. A bad sport named Joseph Marchetti.

Albert Antonioni.

Connie Devane.

Maria Cataldo.

Who Desmond had loved and lost. Who maybe Albert Antonioni had loved, too. A girl named Maria: who had lived in a house that Albert owned, and had often been visited by him.

And by a younger man.

Who was that younger man?

I looked at my list, and when the beating I had taken off Exeter Street had occurred. I thought about the recklessness of that, and the further recklessness of coming to my house and trying to shoot me and shooting Spike instead. It reminded me of something I had read in a novel once, Baja Oklahoma by Dan Jenkins. It was a book I’d picked up in college, one about a spunky waitress who dreamed of making it as a country songwriter, and who wouldn’t allow herself to ever believe she couldn’t do that in a man’s world.

A woman who wouldn’t take any shit from anybody.

In it there had been a list of the Ten Stages of Drunkenness, and I’d always thought the last two were the best:

Invisible.

Bulletproof.

Maybe that’s where our shooter was now. Maybe he thought nobody could catch him, or touch him.

But he was wrong.

I was going to catch him.

I just needed a little boost.

So I called the best booster I knew, Ghost Garrity, a thief who could disable any alarm and who could pick a lock while wearing oven mitts, and asked if he wanted to make a run down to Providence with me.

There was the brief feeling that perhaps I was the one thinking she was invisible, and bulletproof.

Fortunately, the feeling passed.