Invasion of Privacy

young broad did. We had ourselves a hell of a weekend.” Zuppone glanced over again. “Climbing in the car here, you looked a little tender.”
    “Actually, that’s what I wanted to talk about.”
    The half-smile faded. “Maybe you oughta get to it, then.”
    “I had some visitors an hour ago. Two guys, starting rough then tapering off.”
    The smile disappeared altogether. “Let me guess. Ital-ian-looking, am I right?”
    “Could have been.”
    “Could have been? You didn’t see them?”
    “Dark hair, slicked back, only I don’t think it was cut to wear that way. Olive-skinned.”
    A nod. “What about clothes?”
    “Long-point collars, open buttons, gold chains.”
    “And that’s what makes you think they’re connected?”
    “They tried to play the role, Primo. Only they overplayed it, like out of the movies.”
    “How?”
    “They said ‘capisce.’ ”
    Zuppone winced.
    “Twice,” I said.
    We made a left turn. “These guys, they were the first people talked to you?”
    “And they didn’t start out by talking.”
    Zuppone shook his head. “It don’t sound right to me. You stepped in something, we’d send like an emissary first, you know?”
    “Like you.”
    The half-smile came back. “Yeah, like the way I handled it with you the first time. Nice-nice till nice-nice don’t work no more.”
    “That’s what I thought.”
    “You got any idea what you might have stepped in?”
    “They were pretty clear on that. I’d been asking questions about a real estate management company, and they told me to butt out.”
    “What kind of questions?”
    “How good a company it was, as though I had a client that was interested in hiring them.”
    “You were doing like a reference check?”
    “That’s right.”
    Another shake of the head. “What’s the name of this outfit?”
    “Hendrix Property Management, out of Marshfield .”
    “ Marshfield , down on the South Shore there?”
    “Right.”
    Zuppone said, “It don’t ring a bell, but then that’s No Man’s Land.”
    “Sorry?”
    After making another turn, Primo checked his mirrors. “You know how that guy Sammy ‘the Bull’ Gravano turned rat down in New York there?”
    “Testifying against John Gotti?”
    “Right, right. It’s happening every-fucking-where, but that cocksucker Gravano, he gets a reduced sentence of five years—five fucking years, now—for being involved in nineteen killings he admits to, and even then, the feds’ll give him the witness protection thing when he gets out. Meanwhile, he’s nearly destroyed three of the Five Families down there with his testimony.”
    “And?”
    “And that’s kind of what’s happened up here too. The destroying part, anyways. Back when the Feebs—the FB-fucking-I—wired the Angiulos’ place and put them all away, things around Boston were kind of up for grabs, you know what I mean? One family, it runs most of the operations for twenty, twenty-five years, then it gets brought down, the operations, they have to be... ‘redistributed’ would be a good word for it.”
    “And Marshfield didn’t get ‘redistributed’ to anybody in particular.”
    “Not much there to work with, kind of a summer resort that’s going year-round. Still...” A shrug.
    “Still?”
    “Maybe somebody’s trying to establish some kind of presence there. But it don’t have to be from the North End, you know.”
    “Meaning they could have come up from Providence .”
    “Maybe. Or to tell you the truth, the La Strada guys from East Boston or some of your Irish friends from the Winter Hill Gang. That’s assuming, of course, that it’s us.”
    “Us?”
    “White people. You got the Jamaicans, or the fucking Dominicans, now, Christ knows what the hell they’re doing.”
    Tángela Robinette said she was born in Haiti of a father from Jamaica , but that seemed a pretty slender thread.
    “Go on.”
    “Only those crazy bastards’d make more sense in Rox.” Roxbury, a substantial minority neighborhood of Boston . “Actually, Primo, I was thinking that part of the Danucci family lives on the South Shore not so far from Marshfield .”
    Zuppone chewed on the toothpick. “One of the brothers lives down there, he ain’t gonna piss in his own soup.”
    “How about if he just lives close?”
    “No. No, it don’t feel right, even to you. The family sent me to talk with you the first time when I didn’t know you. Now I know you, if they’re in this, they’d for sure send me to talk with