I had the feeling he might have forgotten what he was saying.
'So what do you want to talk about?' I said.
Joe frowned at me.
'You want to say what the problem is with Gerry and Rich Beaumont?' Vinnie said to Joe.
'He wearing a wire?' Joe said.
'No, Joe.'
'You checked him before?'
'Like always, Joe. Every body, every time.'
'Good,' Joe said. 'Good.'
We were quiet for a moment.
'Richie Beaumont,' Vinnie said.
'Yeah. Richie.' Joe shifted a little in his chair so I could see his profile against the rain-translucent picture window. 'Him and Gerry were associated in a deal we had going.'
'What kind of deal?' I said.
Joe raised the fingers of his left hand maybe two inches. 'A deal. We have a lot of deals going.'
'And Gerry's involved in all of them,' I said.
Joe's shoulders shrugged. The movement was minimal, maybe a half an inch.
'He's my son,' Joe said.
'So what makes this deal special?' I said.
Joe shrugged again. His shoulders hunched higher this time.
'Nothing special, just another deal we were doing.'
I looked at Vinnie. He shook his head. I sat still and waited.
'Gerry's my only kid,' Joe said.
I nodded. He was silent. On the window the rain twisted into thick little braids of water in places.
'I'm seventy-one.'
I nodded some more.
'Like anybody coming into a business, he needs some room. Some room to make mistakes, unnerstand? Some chance to learn from the mistakes. How we all…' Joe made a little vague circle with his right hand. 'How we all learned, got to be men. You and me, Spenser, we're men. You know? Vinnie too. We know how men do things. Because we learned. We made our mistakes and we survived them and we…' He made the gesture again with his right hand. 'We fucking learned is all.'
'Gerry made a mistake,' I said.
'Sure,' Joe said. 'Sure he did. Everybody does when they're starting out.
You can tell them, and tell them. But it's not the same, they got to do it themselves, and fuck it up. Like we did.'
'Sure,' I said.
Out across the harbor I could see a DC 10 angling down out of the overcast, slanting in through the rain toward Logan Airport. Joe was looking down at his hands spread on the desk top. Then he looked up at me, and for a moment the staginess was gone. For a moment there seemed to be something like recognition in his face and his eyes were, briefly, the eyes of an old man, tired, with time running down.
'We gotta let Gerry straighten this out himself,' he said.
'So he can learn?'
'So he can feel like one of us, Spenser. So he can be a fucking man.'
Broz got up suddenly and turned and stared out the picture window at the rain coming down over the harbor. To my left Vinnie was motionless. In the stillness I could hear the sound the rain made as it sluiced down the window, barely two inches from Broz's face.
'I don't care much about what Gerry becomes, Joe. I'm worried about the kid
I know.'
'The Giacomin kid.' Joe didn't turn around.
'Yeah. He wants to find his mother. I told him we'd find her. We figure she's with Beaumont.'
'Vinnie says you been with that kid a long time.'
'Un huh.'
Joe looked out at the rain some more.
'Tell him about the deal, Vinnie,' Joe said. 'And make me a drink. You want a drink, Spenser?'
'Sure,' I said.
