Seven

I called Richie when I got back home and knew immediately from the thickness of his voice that I had awakened him.

“Not gonna lie,” he said. “Getting shot isn’t for sissies. I told myself I’d just close my eyes for a little while and slept until now.”

“I won’t tell Spike what you said about sissies,” I said. “I think he could take you in a fair fight today.”

“Maybe not just today,” Richie said, “not that I’d ever admit that to him.”

He told me that Danny Kiefer, the detective who’d caught the shooting, had called before he fell asleep to tell him that the whole thing was still clean, no cameras, no bullet, no witnesses. The neighbors who’d heard the shot thought it might be a tire backfiring. Kiefer, Richie said, seemed less interested in Richie getting shot than why he’d gotten shot, and kept bringing the conversation back to the Burke’s family business.

“I told him,” Richie said, “that it has always been my policy to mind my own business.”

“Which,” I said, “is not technically true,” and I reminded him of the meeting he had brokered between his father and Albert Antonioni once.

“Didn’t think that was any of his business,” Richie said.

“Even if you might possibly know something that would help him identify the shooter?”

“I don’t,” Richie said, “even if.”

“Kiefer is a good detective,” I said.

“I know how tough a grader you are when it comes to detectives,” Richie said. “It must mean he’s great.”

“Takes one to know one,” I said.

“My father told me that he had asked you to stay out of this,” Richie said. “But I told him that if you listened to me, we’d still be married.”

I asked if he’d eaten anything, assuming that he had not. He told me he had not.

“Maybe later,” he said.

I told him to check out the menu from Spike’s and text me an order and I’d deliver.

“Are all of the good restaurants closed?” Richie said.

“Would you like me to tell him that you said that?”

Richie said that if I was such a great detective I’d figure it out.


Spike and I sat at a table for two in his back room, at a little after seven. The chef was cooking up veal chops for Richie and me, and chopped salads. Spike insisted on adding two orders of apple pie.

I told him I was dieting. He told me to shut it.

“You lied when you said it was his idea to get takeout from here, didn’t you?” Spike said.

“Absolutely not.”

He raised an eyebrow. Not everyone could carry that off. Spike could.

“More likely,” Spike said, “he made some kind of snippy remark about the cuisine at what Boston magazine recently called the hottest restaurant in the entire Quincy Market area.”

“For me to say anything more would be a violation of client privilege,” I said.

“So he did make a snippy remark.”

“Totally.”

Spike was wearing what I was sure was a Brioni suit that might have cost more than my car, with an open-necked white shirt. All in all, he looked good enough to take the big town for a whirl. Spike wasn’t handsome in any sort of classic way. But the sum of him, the combination of looks and fun and physicality and danger, is what did make him attractive to men and to women.

No woman more than me.

“So he is a client,” Spike said.

He made no attempt to make it sound like a question. Just a simple declarative sentence. A statement of fact.

“In theory,” I said. “Just without any money changing hands.”

“There is more than one way for him to pay you,” Spike said, and raised the eyebrow again.

“Don’t be coarse.”

We each sipped some Whispering Angel, my favorite rosé and Spike’s, too, as much for the name as for the taste.

“Play this out,” Spike said. “Say this is some bill being presented to Desmond Burke because of something he did in the past. And say Richie is only the first in the family this guy’s going to come after. What makes you think he won’t come after you, too?”

“I can take care of myself.”

“To a point, girlie. But if they can hit Richie they can hit you.”

“I am ever vigilant.”

“But when you start poking around, you will eventually annoy this guy, or whomever sent him, if somebody sent him.”

“That will involve finding out who the guy is, or the whomever.”

“Sins of the father,” Spike said. “I mean, what the fuck?”

“Excellent point.”

“I’m not just eye candy,” Spike said.

“It’s amazing how often I manage to forget that,” I said.

One of the waitresses had stopped by the table to tell us that the food was being bagged up. Spike and I talked a bit more about Desmond Burke. He asked how much I really knew about his past. Most of it, I said, had come from Richie, who I knew had never told me as much as he knew. As complicated as my relationship with his father had always been, I knew that theirs was far more complicated than I would ever possibly know. As much as Richie Burke was his own man and had forged his own path in life, with me and the saloon business and everything else, he was still Desmond Burke’s son.

“You have to be aware that the detecting in this case is going to be more about Richie’s father than anything else,” Spike said.

“Profoundly aware,” I said.

“And that you will likely uncover inconvenient truths,” Spike said.

“And not Al Gore’s,” I said.

“I’m being serious,” Spike said.

“I know,” I said.

“Richie may have spent a lot of his life compartmentalizing,” Spike said. “You’re not going to have that luxury.”

“Aware of that, too.”

“He’s a fucking gangster,” Spike said, “no matter what kind of manners he has. And will most likely not want you poking around in his affairs, even if it means finding out who shot his son.”

I sipped more wine.

“The irony,” I said to Spike, “is that Richie had been telling me that his father and Felix and Peter, the youngest brother, have basically been downsizing the past couple years, mostly because they’re so goddamn old and so goddamn tired. He said that he’d heard his father say more than once that he had come to find the illegal gun trade as distasteful as he’d always found drugs.”

“Hasn’t made him quit it, from what I hear,” Spike said.

I felt as if I raised a pretty saucy eyebrow of my own.

“I know people,” Spike said. “Who know people.”

“Forgot.”

“And probably forgot that one of the biggest gangsters in town was gayer than Greenwich Village.”

“Gino Fish.”

He nodded.

“I’ve always wanted to ask you,” I said. “You never hit that, did you?”

“Don’t be coarse,” Spike said.

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