Robert B. Parker’s Blood Feud

Sixty

Pete had shown the pictures I sent him to his buddies at Organized Crime, and was informed that the driver’s name was Bobby Toms.

“Short for Bobby Tomasi,” I said.

“Would be the way I’d bet.”

“What’s his story?” I said.

“That’s the weird part,” Pete said. “He has none. Isn’t in the system as Bobby Tomasi or Robert Tomasi or Robert Toms or Bobby Toms. They say that all of a sudden, and nobody can remember exactly when, he was a fast-tracker with Albert. Who, they say, treats him like a son.”

“Maria’s son,” I said.

“Who you now think is the one trying to start a Mob war with the Burkes,” Pete said.

“Hard to believe he could do that without Albert knowing,” I said. “Or without Albert’s say-so.”

“But if he wants to take out Desmond, or he and Albert want him to take out Desmond, why not just do it without all this fucking around?”

“Maybe the fucking around is part of it,” I said.

Pete said he’d call if he found out any more fun facts from Goombahville. I told him I’d been meaning to ask if it was politically correct for one Italian to call another one a goombah. He said he was pretty sure there were rules in the handbook that covered it.

What I really needed to do was find a way to talk to Bobby Toms. I imagined myself driving back down to Providence, walking up to Albert’s front door, ringing the bell if somebody hadn’t already shot me, and hoping Bobby answered the door.

“Hi,” I could say in a cheerful voice, “I’m conducting a survey about your mother,” and see how things went from there if he didn’t try to shoot me in the eye.

“Oh, and by the way, you sonofabitch,” I could say, “are you the one who shot my ex-husband in the back and smacked me around on Exeter Street that time?”

I was close now. I could feel it. Bobby Toms had to be the son and Desmond Burke had to be his father, because nothing else made sense and because as a boy he really did look like Richie’s twin, evil or otherwise.

But what could Desmond Burke have possibly done to Maria Cataldo to make their son start shooting up Boston this way?

And how did guns somehow figure in to all of this?

The only way to get all the answers I wanted and needed was to close this case. Which I told myself I would. Because I always had in the past. Maybe if I did, I could go back to working on a case that would actually pay me a living wage.

I was so lost in the fog and the moment and all the questions I still had that I didn’t hear the ring of my cell phone right away.

I looked at the caller ID. “Richie.”

“Hey, you,” I said when I answered.

“Desmond’s been taken,” he said.