Robert B. Parker’s Blood Feud

Fifty-One

Ghost Garrity had a bad toupee, which presupposed the notion that there were actually good toupees. He usually walked around in sports jackets and ties that seemed to be the color of various sorbets. He was small and whippet-thin and jittery, except when he wanted to steal something, or execute a successful break-in. Tonight he wore a black nylon windbreaker and black jeans and a black ball cap with the “G” logo for The Gap on the front.

“Ghost,” I said, “you shop at The Gap?”

“Lifted it,” he said.

We had waited until dark and parked a block away from Maria Cataldo’s house on an adjacent street.

“Tell me again what we’re looking for here,” Ghost said.

“Something.”

“That narrows it down,” he said. “You never told me who owns the place, by the way.”

We were making our way across the backyard. I told him who owned the house. Ghost stopped.

“The fuck,” he said. “You want me to filch a house belongs to Albert Antonioni?”

“I do,” I said.

Ghost said, “The price I gave you? Double it.”

“If we live,” I said.

“You’re not funny.”

“Am, too,” I said.

We made our way across the rest of the backyard to the back door. Ghost gently tried it, just in case. Locked. Then he reached into his gym bag and came out with two pairs of night goggles that looked as if they’d been borrowed — or lifted — from Navy SEALs.

“Put these on when we get inside,” Ghost said, “unless you want the whole freaking neighborhood to see the lights go on.”

Before he picked the lock, he held up what looked like an oversized version of an iPhone and tapped it a few times with his finger and finally said, “Deactivated the alarm.”

“You were able to do it with that thing?” I said.

“You wouldn’t believe how many of these alarm companies use wireless,” Ghost said. “Takes the challenge out of this shit.”

“Now what?”

“Now I work my magic on the door,” he said. “Want to time me?”

Even with a dead bolt, it took him about a minute, and then we were inside, putting on the goggles, Ghost going around the kitchen and closing the levered blinds, the room now weirdly lit by the night vision, as if we really were Navy SEALs about to go room to room hunting for bin Laden.

“You want to do this together?” Ghost said. “Or you take one room and I take another.”

“We separate,” I said.

“And I’m looking for something, I just don’t know what,” he said.

“Anything she might have left behind,” I said. “Anything that might tell me more about who she was.”

“She was somebody living at Albert Fucking Antonioni’s house,” Ghost said, “that’s who she was.”

“Nobody likes a whiner,” I said.

It seemed that all that had been left was the furniture. No paintings on the wall, no photographs, no books in the wall shelves, nothing on the antique coffee table in the spacious front room, nothing on the mantel above the fireplace. No clothes in the master bedroom upstairs, nothing in the drawers of the nightstand next to the old four-poster bed. No toiletries left behind in the bathroom. The two spare bedrooms were the same. It was as Connie Devane had suggested to me, as if Maria Cataldo had never been here at all.

The goggles were uncomfortable, too tight around my eyes, as I carefully searched the closets and the shelves in them and under the beds, looking for any trace of her. But it seemed every trace of her was gone, the way she was.

I quietly made my way downstairs.

Ghost said, “I checked the basement. It’s so clean it’s like they’re fixing to sell.”

“It’s like they didn’t just clean out everything except the furniture,” I said. “It’s like he had somebody sweep the place.”

“I’ll take one more look upstairs,” he said, “’case you missed something.”

He went silently up the stairs. It occurred to me, and not for the first time, that they didn’t call him Ghost for nothing.

There was a den next to the main living room that I had already checked, with a huge vintage desk with brass handles on the drawers. I pulled them out again, one by one, and checked underneath them, feeling like an idiot to even think that the old woman had taped something to one of the drawers, or had some kind of secret compartment. The desk was pressed up against a side window. It was a bear to move it away from the wall, but with some work I managed to at least move it forward a couple of inches.

When I did, I heard something gently fall to the carpet.

And there it was.

It was easy to see how anybody who had cleaned out the house could have missed it. How even Ghost had missed it. It must have fallen halfway down behind the desk and just stayed there, until now.

A small, slender picture frame.

With a color photograph inside, slightly faded, of a beautiful, dark-haired woman who I assumed was a younger version of Maria Cataldo.

She was smiling, and had her hand on the shoulder of a boy who looked to be about nine or ten, in front of a sign for the Grand Canyon National Park.

A boy who looked amazingly like a young Richie Burke.