Robert B. Parker’s Revenge Tour

Thirteen

Rita Fiore, red-haired she-devil, might be the best lawyer in Boston, as reluctant as I was to admit it to myself.

But if Rita was the best, Joe Doyle of Doyle and O’Meara truly was still the most powerful and most feared. By my count the only Mob guy he hadn’t defended was Richie’s father, Desmond, and that was only because Desmond Burke had always been cagey enough and elusive enough never to be arrested for anything, including jaywalking. But if it had ever looked as though Desmond might go down, I was certain his first phone call would have been to Doyle.

Joe Doyle didn’t discriminate. MeToo guys formally charged with sexual assault. Men and women up to their eyeballs with SEC trouble, which simply meant a different class of gangster. And an assortment of people, over time, who had been charged with murder in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He didn’t get them all off. But my count, he kept more out of jail than not.

But he hadn’t been able to save Joe Jr. from Phil Randall.

The problem for Joe Doyle Jr. was that he had aspired to only one big thing: growing up to be the kind of thug his father might someday have to defend in court. He first began to build a thriving business for opioids when he was still at Harvard, and had grown it into a small local empire.

“A combination of daddy issues,” my own daddy had once said, “and being a rich, entitled punk.”

As the market for painkillers exploded, things had gone well for Joe Doyle Jr. until my father, in one of his last acts as a truly great detective for the BPD, had arrested him for being the point man in a criminal conspiracy. It resulted in the death of a rival drug kingpin — I’d often wondered how many queenpins there might be out there — found floating in the Swan Boats pond at the Public Garden.

It took years of appeals and a lot of behind-the-scenes arm-twisting from Joe Jr.’s father for the kid’s case to grind its way through the system. But the son had finally ended up as a permanent guest of the state at MCI–Concord, doing twenty-five-to-life.

That was until somebody shanked him in the prison yard about ten days ago.

Joe Doyle Jr., around my age as I recalled, had proclaimed his innocence to the end, claiming that he had been set up. At the time of his death his father had just mounted another appeal, based on what he said was new evidence.

Evidence he said that Detective Phil Randall had ignored, because of what Doyle described as a vendetta.

“Only if vendetta means getting the guy who did it,” my father said.

The death of Joe Doyle Jr. had been big news for a couple days. But once it was out of The Globe and largely off social media and television, I assumed that the story had played itself out.

I was about to find out how wrong I had been about that.

I met my father at the French Press Bakery & Café in Needham, twenty minutes or so from the house in which I had grown up. We sat at a long window table. I knew from experience he would tell me what had happened at his own speed. And he did, first telling me that he was certain he’d seen Joe Doyle watching us the night we’d been at The Street Bar, but hadn’t wanted to worry me.

Then when he was walking to the lot where he’d parked the car on Newbury, he thought he noticed two men following him. When he let them know that he’d spotted them, they turned and walked away toward Commonwealth. But when he got to the corner of Comm Ave. and Dartmouth, they were gone.

“Maybe I’ve lost a step,” he said.

“Unlikely,” I said.

“Happens.”

“Are we getting anywhere near the part where Joe Doyle threatened to kill you?”

“Are you going to let me tell this?” he said.

This morning, after he did his morning walk on the track at Newton High School and was on his way to his car, Doyle had stepped out of a black Lincoln SUV. With him were the same two men my father had spotted after he’d left The Newbury that night.

The conversation was brief. According to my father, Doyle began by asking him if he was a religious man. My father said he was, not that it was any of Doyle’s business. Then Doyle asked if he was familiar with the twenty-fourth chapter of Leviticus, and my father said he was not.

My father handed me his phone then. He’d taken a snapshot of the relevant passage in his own Bible when he’d gotten home.

I read out loud. “ ‘If anyone injures his neighbor, whatever he has done must be done to him. Fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth. As he has injured another, so must he be injured.’ ”

I started to hand my father his phone back when he said, “Read all the way to the end.”

“ ‘Whoever kills a man must be put to death.’ ”

“Doyle quoted it to you,” I said.

“He certainly did.”

I slid the phone across the table to him.

“I told him that I didn’t kill his son,” Phil Randall said. “And Doyle said, ‘You might as well have. And now you need to pay for that.’ ”

“Pay how, exactly?” my father had said.

And Doyle had said, “What part of an eye for an eye didn’t you understand, Detective?”

Then he got back into the SUV, which drove away.

“He’s an officer of the court,” I said. “You need to report him.”

“For what? Quoting the Old Testament?”

“It’s like you’re one of his witnesses he’s trying to intimidate,” I said.

“I picked up on that fact myself,” my father said.

He’d ordered two blueberry muffins. It was an implied-type thing that they were both for him. The only things left now on our plates were crumbs. At least Joe Doyle hadn’t adversely affected his appetite. But from experience I knew hardly anything could.

“Maybe you and Mom should get away for a few days,” I said. “Or more than a few.”

“I don’t run,” he said. “From entitled punks of any age.”

“Had to give it a shot,” I said.

“Mr. Doyle and me, we’re about the same age,” he said. “He doesn’t want to spend the rest of his days behind bars because he had me killed the way his kid killed that bum.”

“Maybe he doesn’t think that way,” I said. “Man’s got a lot of friends in low places.”

My father said, “You make a good point.”

“Tony Marcus told me one time that the best way to act on a grudge is to wait,” I said.

“Speaking of friends in low places.”

“I could pull Spike off Melanie Joan,” I said.

Phil Randall said, “She’s a paying client.”

“Ish,” I said.

Suddenly we were the only customers in the place. My father went quiet now, staring past me and out the window. He had always been as confident, in his own quiet way, as anybody I had ever known, and as comfortable in his own skin. Like Richie that way. And Jesse Stone, too. I could hear the voice of Dr. Susan Silverman inside my head, asking me if I could detect any sort of pattern.

“Maybe I could go to see him,” my father said.

“You could,” I said, “but you’re not going to. At this point, poking the bear would only escalate the situation, not that you asked.”

“I didn’t ask.”

“Didn’t have to.”

“I hate not knowing,” Phil Randall said.

“I know the feeling.”

“Inherited trait,” he said.

“One of many,” I said. “Starting with stubbornness.”

“Tell me about it.”

I sipped cold coffee.

“He’s not being reasonable,” I said.

“You think?”

“His son did what you arrested him for doing. And it wasn’t you who found him guilty. As I recall, a jury did.”

“But in his mind, it’s like I’m the one who handed whoever killed him the knife,” Phil Randall said. “Then he got done the way Leo Morales did.”

The rival drug dealer whose people, I was certain, had somehow managed to eye-for-an-eye Joe Doyle Jr. in the prison yard.

“I need to find a way to keep you and Mom safe,” I said.

“I’ve always been able to look out for myself,” my father said.

“Dad,” I said, “you wouldn’t have called if you didn’t want my help. So let me help.”

He smiled again, as if trying not to look like what I knew he was at this moment, even if I’d never say that to him, and he’d never admit it to me:

A frightened old man.

“Help how?” he asked.

“I actually have an idea,” I said.

“One I bet I’m going to hate.”

“Possibly even more,” I said, “than you’ve always hated the Yankees.”