Robert B. Parker’s Blood Feud

Seventy

We had sat up long into the night after Felix Burke’s funeral, Desmond, Richie, me. We had been drinking whiskey for some time. Irish, appropriately enough. Midleton Very Rare. Desmond was finally ready to tell some of the things Bobby Toms had told him after Bobby had taken him from this house in the night, things about his mother and the life they had shared in Arizona, in a house in the name of one of Vincent Cataldo’s shell companies, about how when the money she had inherited from her father had finally run out, she had decided to call Albert Antonioni.

“Somehow Albert had convinced him that he was the only one who had ever truly loved his mother,” Desmond said. “There had been something between them before we took up together. She honestly did never tell me. In the world in which we existed, she clearly thought there was enough bad blood, and did not want to be responsible for more.”

He looked at Richie and said, “I’ve always known how much Albert hated me. I just did not know how much he loved her.”

He drank. We all did.

“Why do you suppose Albert pointed him at you?” Richie said.

“Maybe someday,” Desmond said, “I will get to ask him that myself.”

Desmond took in some air slowly, and held it, and then let it out as slowly as he had taken it in. Then drank more Irish whiskey. I had watched him drink a lot. And show no signs of being drunk in any way.

“He had always wanted to beat me, in everything,” Desmond said. “Now he saw a chance to take my guns and so take my money, and tell himself he didn’t have to be the one to kill me in order to beat me.”

“Blood money,” Richie said.

“Felix’s blood,” Desmond said.

“Do you think Albert ever suspected that Bobby might be Felix’s son?” I said.

“Maybe I can ask him that, too,” Desmond said, “if the occasion arises.”

Public lives, I thought, private lives.

Secret lives.

Two weeks later, there were two stories played on the same page of The Boston Globe, as if of a piece.

One was about the body of Albert Antonioni, described as a notorious Rhode Island crime boss, found floating in the water of Narragansett Bay, between Antonioni’s own home at Black Point and the Bonnet Shore Beach Club, two bullet holes in him, one in the forehead, one more in the back for good measure. Providence police, the story said, had been notified that the body was there by an anonymous call made to their Crimestoppers tip line.

The other story was about two Cranston, Rhode Island, warehouses filled with illegal guns — most of them automatic weapons — being raided by ATF agents. The estimate for the value of the guns was two million dollars. The story said it was the biggest raid of its kind in the history of New England. The warehouses, now abandoned, had once been owned by the Palomino Vending Company, owned by the late Albert Antonioni.

It was, I knew, the interesting place where Felix had stored their guns.

I was still at the kitchen table reading my Globe and drinking my coffee and occasionally feeding Rosie some of my blueberry scone from Starbucks when my phone rang.

I saw the name come up and so was smiling as I answered.

“You’re welcome,” I said to Charlie Whitaker.