“Which book did he take?”
“The Face of Battle by John Keegan.”
“Valuable?”
“To me,” I said. “It’s a signed first edition, made out to me. And he’s been dead for a couple of years.”
“Damn,” Felix said. “All right, I’ll make sure I get that back.”
“Felix …”
“What, did I say something wrong?”
I smiled. “Come on, Felix. With all that’s going on, you’re going to get my book back?”
“What, you don’t think I can multitask?”
“I have no doubt of any of your talents.”
“All right, then,” he said, and then he stared out my sliding glass doors to my first-floor deck. “Funny story Pepe told you.”
“Didn’t seem funny at the time.”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t mean funny in the hah-hah sense, but funny in the peculiar sense. He and his gang of drug dealers show up at Maggie’s home … ready to be her dealer. Things go badly, and away they go. But at some point, Maggie is visited again by a killer who tears the place apart, and blows her head off.”
“That’s about what they said. You believe them?”
With a sharpness in his voice, Felix said, “Many, many years ago, probably about the time you were trying to save America from the godless communists, I learned something important. Never, ever, trust drug dealers or drug users. Never. No matter how sincere they sound, no matter how proper and smooth and good-looking or educated, never trust anybody involved with drugs.”
“You want to tell me more?”
“No,” he said.
A moment passed, and I caught a glimpse of something in Felix’s past that he didn’t want to share. A rare experience, but not one to be savored.
“So you can see why I doubt Pepe’s sincerity.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Still, he made a strong case that they didn’t have anything to do with your silver.”
“Maybe,” he said, and Felix rotated his wrist so I could see the bandage there. “Now he wants to talk. His folks didn’t want to talk earlier.”
“Everybody makes mistakes now and then.”
“Sure,” Felix said. “Still … then who killed Maggie?”
“Maybe it was another visitor, right after Pepe left. Maybe one of Pepe’s crew came back and things got out of hand. Or …”
I hesitated, but Felix wouldn’t let me hesitate for long.
“Go on.”
“You know there was one other person in the vicinity, somebody with a criminal record.”
“I do?”
“Felix. The man you had conducting a surveillance in the neighborhood. What, was he a Boy Scout leader? A church deacon? He was working for you.”
“But—”
His eyes narrowed. I could tell Felix wasn’t happy, and I sensed it was for two reasons: one, I had pointed out something he had missed, and two, the idea that someone under his hire might have been the one who had killed Maggie Branch.
When I thought it was safe, I said, “Who is he?”
“Rudy Gennaro.”
“What’s his background?”
“From my old haunts, until he went south to Providence. A dumb move. The North End gets all the news while Providence keeps its head down and focuses on business. Rudy thought that because he had the North End heritage, that gave him some weight and muscle when he went to Rhode Island. It didn’t.”
“You rescue him?”
“As a favor.”
“For whom?”
Felix’s face relaxed a bit, like he was recalling a fond memory. “An old girlfriend,” he said. “Evie. She begged me. So I said yes. And now the knucklehead stays on the North Shore, does some errands and jobs for me.”
“What’s his criminal background?”
“This and that. Burglary. Loansharking. Passing on TVs and computer equipment that fell off someone’s truck.”
“But anything violent?”
That caused another pause from Felix, and I could sense he was working behind those cold brown eyes.
“Once,” he admitted. “He was set to go on an armored car heist, set up by a crew from Charlestown. In Charlestown, that’s pretty much a local business, like a town that has a coal mine or paper mill. That and robbing banks. Their proud community heritage. Thing was, Rudy wasn’t part of the crew. He was an add-on, because one of the other crew members got his skull beaten in at some tavern.”
“Occupational hazard,” I observed.
“Always,” he said. “Anyway, they did this job in Connecticut. Went well for all concerned. Guards were tied up, weren’t even shoved around much. Nice little chunk of change. But when it came time to divvy up the loot, Rudy ended up with the short end of the stick. There were three others in the crew. Ten percent was sliced off the top to pay tribute to whoever was in charge that month, before the Feds snagged him. Rudy was expecting the rest of the haul to be split four ways. But in the end, he only got ten grand.”
“And ten thousand dollars wasn’t a quarter of what was left?”
“Not even close. Rudy tried to sweet talk his way into getting a bigger cut, and the head of the crew basically told him that he should be happy with the ten grand. That Rudy was hired as a one-off, that he wasn’t part of the regular crew, and that he should be grateful he was getting money instead of two in the back of the head.”
“What do you think?”
“I think Rudy should have negotiated the payoff before the show commenced, but anyway, things escalated real quick. There was some fighting, some gunshots in the air, and it was only by the slimmest of all margins that Rudy and the other three walked away with most of their blood supply intact. And he told me something later.”
“Like what? To ask you to help with the negotiating next time?”
“No,” Felix said. “Rudy told me, ‘Felix, the next time I’m next to a major score and I’m in a position to take it, I’m gonna take it. Period.’”
Outside, the sky was slowly becoming overcast, and a fog bank was slowly obscuring the Isles of Shoals.
“How long did he do that surveillance for you?”
“A week.”
“Long enough to
