The Dogfather

who understood the unspoken command and moved in on either side of Favuzza.
    Never a man to disappoint a dog, Guarini said, “Miss Winter, you got liver on you? Give ’em some.”
    I complied. Then 1 unhitched the dogs one by one and crated them in Steve’s van.
    “Get him in my car,” Guarini told the twins. To me, he said flatly, almost pleasantly, “Like you’re always writing, if loyalty’s what you want, get a dog.”
    Reaching into my pocket, I removed the puppy-chewed treasure that Sammy had found in the Suburban. I handed it to Enzio Guarini. “What started it,” I said, “was my article. That’s what gave him the idea. He read it, but I wrote it, so in a way, it’s my fault.”
    Sammy’s treasure: a glossy brochure from the mummification company I’d written about together with a letter to Alphonse Favuzza confirming the arrangements for his mummification. Al Favuzza’s visit to the Museum of Fine Arts? The Boston MFA has room after room of outstanding exhibits from ancient Egypt. Favuzza’s reaction when Joey’s coffin was lowered into the earth? Favuzza wasn’t grieved; he was sickened at the thought of bodily decay. He’d killed Joey and stolen Guarini’s money to make sure that decomposition never happened to him.
     

CHAPTER 30
     
    I’d seen enough Mafia movies to know what to expect next: Enzio Guarini and his associates would take Al Favuzza for a ride that would end when the concrete-shod Count took a plunge into Boston Harbor. As to me, the Dogfather would repeat what he’d said on the night Favuzza had killed Joey: He’d inform me that nothing had happened, and he’d tell me take my dogs and go home. I intended to take my dogs and leave, but my destination this time was going to be Cambridge Police Headquarters.
    Anticipating Guarini’s orders, I started to open the van door, but Guarini stopped me. “Stick around,” he said. “I’ll be right back. Carla, you get over here with Miss Winter, and you stay here. No matter what, you hear? No matter what.” Dog person that he was, he smiled at me and said, “Yeah. Stand. Stay.” Then, accompanied by Zap and his bodyguards, he walked the short distance to the limo. Zap held the door for him, and he vanished behind the tinted windows. Zap got into the driver’s seat and closed the door. The headlights came on. The beams shone across the asphalt toward the cars parked near the front of the mall. If the engine started, I didn’t hear it, and the limo didn’t pull forward toward the front of Loaves and Fishes and the road beyond.
    “Enzio’s up to something,” Carla said. “You can always tell. He gets that funny smile. He’s cute, huh? Old. But cute. Don’t you think he’s kind of cute?”
    Abandoning my dog-person abhorrence of cattiness, I said, “Generous, too.”
    “Generous to a fault,” Carla agreed. “Enzio’s had a hard life, you know. His wife passed away, and then his daughter, breast cancer, and—Oh, Jesus! Holy Jesus, look at that!”
    From Enzio Guarini’s distinctive limousine emerged a man wearing Guarini’s trademark hat and carrying Guarini’s trademark walking stick.
    Carla repeated herself. “Jesus!”
    “I doubt it,” I said. Anyone less Christlike than Al Favuzza was hard to imagine, and it had been Favuzza’s face I’d seen when the limo door had opened.
    “What’s he doing? Look what Al’s doing! That’s Al, you know. That’s not Enzio. He’s walking in the headlights. Where’s he going? Why’s he doing it? Enzio must’ve—”
    “We’re staying right here,” I said. “Remember? No matter what. This is the what."
    With Guarini’s hat on his head and Guarini’s stick in his hand, Favuzza moved in the beams of the headlights across the wide, empty stretch of asphalt at the side of the mall toward the cars parked in the front lot. Just as he was about to pass beyond the range of the headlights, he broke into a gawky sprint. Simultaneously, I not only heard but counted six gunshots that came not from Guarini’s limo but from the opposite direction. In making a desperate, awkward attempt to run from death, Al Favuzza seemed to hurl himself head-on into the barrage of bullets, as if he were eagerly committing a grotesque form of suicide. His body spun, and before it had even hit the blacktop, I spotted a figure just beyond the distant row of parked cars, a familiar figure and, here in Cambridge, an ordinary one: a woman on a bicycle. Earlier this same evening when