Robert B. Parker’s Revenge Tour

Fourteen

While Spike and Melanie Joan dined together at Spike’s, I drove to Charlestown.

“Where are you going?” Melanie Joan asked before I left the house.

Somehow our détente had lasted until the dinner hour. But the night was young.

“To see a gangster,” I said.

“May I ask which one?” she said.

“Mine,” I said.

My former father-in-law, Desmond Burke, lived at Flagship Wharf, part of the old Navy Yard in Charlestown. From his house you could see the Bunker Hill monument as well as the USS Constitution. The movie Married to the Mob had come out long before I married Richie Burke. But the facts, insofar as I knew them, were that Richie had never been a participant in the family business with his father and his uncles. It didn’t change the fact that I had been a member of a Mob family at one point in my life.

My father had opposed the union, rather strenuously, as fond as he became of Richie over time, and as fond of him as he remained after the union dissolved. But with Phil Randall it had never been about Richie and was all about Desmond, whom he had never managed to arrest. In so many ways, Desmond Burke had been his white whale. And likely always would be.

And if he had even a whiff that I was going to ask Desmond Burke, his nemesis, to help keep him safe from Joe Doyle, it would have made Phil Randall’s head spontaneously combust.

And yet here I was.

Desmond Burke was as thin as a knife, hair completely white, the tough Irish kid up from the streets still clinging to power, even outlasting Whitey Bulger, another Boston hoodlum who ended up getting killed in prison. Even the elderly Desmond Burke was still dangerous enough, and everyone in town knew it. But he looked even older than his years now, wounded by time and by loss. His brother Felix was gone. So was his brother Peter. Desmond had recently been betrayed, a case in which I was involved, by one of his troopers, in what turned out to be an ambitious but doomed grift. When it ended, I didn’t turn Jalen Washington, the trooper, in to the authorities. I handed him back over to Desmond Burke. There was no need for me to ask what had happened to him, simply because I knew the code of street justice that had always informed Desmond’s business, especially when it involved betrayal.

Tonight he was wearing a heavy shawl cardigan, despite the time of year. He had already had his dinner by the time I arrived, and had what I knew was Midleton Very Rare in the glass next to him. He offered me a glass of my own. I accepted.

Two of his men had been stationed in front of the house. I didn’t recognize either, but it had been a while since I’d paid a visit to Flagship Wharf.

He had a fire going. It was as if what was left of his life was one long winter, even with Richie’s son, Desmond’s grandson, now fully back in that life in such a meaningful and, for the old man, happy-making way.

“I sometimes feel as if I only see you when you have run out of other options,” he said.

“Not true,” I said. “You know how fond I am of you, Desmond.”

“And I you,” he said. “And not only because you once saved my life.”

Another old case.

“Richie and I saved your life,” I said.

“You and my son make a good team,” he said. “You should still be together.”

His voice was as low and harsh-sounding as ever. It was his brother Felix who had been a boxer as a young man. But Desmond sounded as if he was the one who had taken too many punches to the throat.

“You sound like my father now,” I said.

“Somehow,” he said, “I doubt that.”

I smiled at him. He nearly smiled back. He raised his glass and I raised mine.

“Slainte,” he said.

“Slainte agatsa,” I said in response.

To my health, and his.

“So now that we are still in agreement about our affection for each other,” he said, “tell me what you need.”

I told him about Joe Doyle.

“That prick,” Desmond Burke said.

I smiled again and told him we could agree to agree on that.

“His boy died in a box,” he said, “and now it sounds to me as if the father wants to put your copper father into a different kind of box.”

Copper. An old man from another time reaching back for an expression from that time.

“I’m hoping that as a favor to me,” I said, “you can have a couple of your men watch my father until I can figure out a way to make Joe Doyle back the hell off.”

He shook his head.

“Men like Doyle don’t do that,” he said. “It is all about face with them, a hard world in which they only see two options. Looking strong or looking weak. Nothing in between.”

“He’s being irrational, blaming my father for his son’s death,” I said.

“Old men often are irrational,” he said, “when they are looking to settle old scores.”

He drank some Midleton.

“I could talk to him,” he said.

“I plan to talk to him first,” I said.

“Of course,” Desmond said.

Now I drank. The whiskey went down smoothly. An old and familiar feeling. I imagined it making its way through my system, every part of it, like warm running water.

“Can you do this for me?” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “And no.”

“Not sure I understand.”

“Yes,” he said, “I will do this because it is you asking me to do it. In my mind, you are still my son’s wife.”

“Ex.”

“Not to me,” he said. “And certainly not to him.”

Nothing for me to say there, so I just waited for him to explain himself.

“There is just one condition,” he said finally.

I waited again.

“Your copper father comes here and asks me himself,” he said.

“Let me talk to him about that,” I said.

“Do,” Desmond Burke said.

But that conversation, as uncomfortable as it would be for my father and me, would have to wait, as it turned out. Because it was right about that same time, I would find out later, that Phil Randall’s car was being sideswiped on Storrow Drive.