TONY MARCUS WASN’T answering his phone. Either he was sleeping even later than usual or he didn’t want to talk to me today. I said in my message that I had spoken to Lisa and to call me when he could.
When I had worked cases in the sex trade before, everything had started with the victim. Once it had been a teenage girl named Millicent Patton. In the Paradise cult it had been Cheryl DeMarco. Was Lisa, a grown woman who’d existed in Tony’s world for a long time, the victim here? Or had I simply defined her as one as a way of justifying my search for her?
I had taken a car back to River Street Place. I had just shut the front door behind me when Richie called and asked if he could stop by.
“It’s important,” he said.
He never said it was when it wasn’t. Neither did I.
“What?” I said.
“Kathryn doesn’t know if she wants to stay,” he said.
“Meaning stay here,” I said.
“Yes,” he said, then said he would tell me more about it when he arrived. Twenty minutes later he walked through the door and I kissed him even before Rosie did, and told him I had put on the strongest tea I had.
“Wish it was stronger than that,” he said. “Maybe, as my father likes to say, just a wee bit of Irish.”
“Pretty early in the day,” I said.
“Not in Ireland,” he said.
I poured enhanced tea for both of us and brought it to the living room. He asked how the case was going. I didn’t think he was merely being polite. He seemed genuinely interested. So I quickly caught him up, without telling him about my dinner with Jesse Stone. Richie had never known the complete extent of my relationship with Jesse. Just that there had been a relationship that had persisted, before we finally drifted away from each other. But today was not the day to travel back to that stretch of road.
“So Kathryn has now decided she doesn’t want to put roots down in Boston?” I said.
“It’s more than that,” he said. “She says she wants to be alone for a while.”
“Alone meaning without her son?”
Richie nodded.
“Wait,” I said. “She wants to leave the boy with you?”
“She does,” he said. “She actually referenced you as she tried to explain her feelings to me. She spoke of how self-sufficient you are, and how envious she is of that.”
“Oh, ho,” I said.
“‘Oh, ho’?”
“It’s an expression my therapist uses,” I said. “She says she got it from the man of her dreams.”
“I’ve maintained that status with you?” he said. “Even with everything that’s going on?”
“Yeah,” I said. “You have.”
“She says she tried to define herself through me,” he said. “Then through our son. Then through the next man in her life. And then said she needed to be by herself.”
“You won’t be by yourself,” I said.
He sipped tea.
“He’s my son,” he said. “I’ve always wanted him in my life. She was the one who removed him from it.”
“And now she wants to remove her own self-absorbed self from it,” I said.
“At least temporarily.”
“She was originally going to London temporarily.”
He sipped more tea. He wasn’t usually a tea guy. I was pretty sure it was the enhancement, even though I hadn’t overdone it. Usually when Richie Burke drank in the afternoon, he wanted to go somewhere and take a nap.
“Are you ready to be the single parent now?” I said.
“I don’t have much of a choice,” he said. “And he’s such a spectacular kid.”
“I know,” I said. “Already got a little sneaker going for him myself.”
“He really likes you.”
“Think he likes Rosie more.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Richie said.
“I can’t control the power I have over men,” I said. “Of all ages.”
“Tell me about it,” Richie said. He gave me a long look and then said, “I can’t do this alone.”
“I will help you,” I said.
“Gonna need some kind of nanny, too,” he said. “Can you help me pick one?”
“As long as she doesn’t look like the one Tiger Woods married back in the day,” I said.
“Thought you didn’t follow sports,” he said.
“I followed that one,” I said. “Mostly checking out at the supermarket.”
“I thought looking for apartments was the beginning of the process,” Richie said. “Then she changed the process.”
He sighed and leaned back and closed his eyes, as if he suddenly did need a nap. I felt myself smile at the sight of him in repose. Things really had been better between us than they’d been at any time since he had married Kathryn. Even though Richie would occasionally raise the idea of us once again trying to live together, and even raised the subject of remarriage once or twice, we had stopped obsessing about the future. The experience of saving his father, even if we couldn’t save his uncle Felix, had only reinforced our bond. Or perhaps made us stronger than ever at what had once been broken places.
Richie said, “We can do this.”
“I’m not looking to be a mom,” I said.
“He already has one,” Richie said.
“Not if she goes off on a journey of spiritual fulfillment,” I said.
Now I drank tea.
“My father raised me after my mother died,” he said.
“Felix raised you,” I said.
“Neither one of them had you,” Richie said.
“Goddamn her,” I said, “all to hell.”
“We can do this,” he said again. “You know I love you. And I know you love me.”
“And if we’d wanted to have a child together,” I said, “nobody was stopping us.”
There was another silence between us. But, as always, all the way back to the time when we were first in each other’s lives, it was as if the conversation were continuing.
“Is this a done deal?” I said. “Her leaving, I mean? She’s changed her mind before.”
“She says she wants to have the chance to find out what her life is like unencumbered by the past,” he said.
“She said that?” I said. “For real?”
“She did.”
“Sounds like shrink talk to me,” I said. “Or a fortune cookie.”
“She’s not as bad as you think.”
“Low bar.”
“Maybe when you get some free time, you and Richard and I can go off and do something together,” he said.
“As I mentioned before, things are starting to percolate somewhat with this case of mine,” I said.
“Can I help?” Richie said. “Or can Desmond?”
“If it comes to that,” I said, “you will be the first to know. Then him.”
“Any chance at even a quick dinner tonight?” Richie said.
“Tonight,” I said, “I will be doing something you would not want me doing.”
“Any point in me asking what that might be?”
“Nah,” I said.
We stood. He hugged me. I hugged him back. Yesterday it had been Jesse. Today Richie. I couldn’t unencumber myself from my own past with a court order.