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“Bobby?” I asked.
“Sit down, Hunter,” he said. “You’re going to want to be seated for this.”
“What’s going on?” I asked. “Where did you send Julia?”
“Home,” he said. “I sent her home. I told her you wanted her to take a half day and come back in after lunch. She thought it was very sweet.”
He said that as if it was literally sickening to him. It was weird seeing him be so rude about her. Normally, he was very complimentary of her, even though he thought our relationship was a bad idea.
“Bobby, what is happening? Why would you send her home?”
“Because when she comes back, she’s going to have one hell of a wake-up call,” he said.
He tossed something onto my desk, and at first, I couldn’t figure it out. It was a newspaper, but it wasn’t the Globe or the Times or anything like that. It was a community newspaper. One clearly from Boston, but a paper I’d never seen before. A headline on the front was talking about a new McDonald’s opening up, and how Sam Adams’ Brewery had won some award again.
“A newspaper?” I asked.
“A local paper,” he said. “From Southie.”
He was practically growling. What got him so worked up?
“Alright,” I said. “So, what the hell does this have to do with Julia? Other than it being from where she’s from?”
“Open the fucking thing up and look at the article on the second to last page on the bottom right.”
“Is this some kind of joke, Bobby?” I asked. “Did someone hide porn in the newspaper or something?”
“Just fucking look,” Bobby said.
“Fine, fine,” I said, opening the paper.
My eyes skimmed over several short articles, mostly grievances about gentrification and potholes that never seemed to get fixed. I passed them and found what I assumed was the article he was referring to. It had to be.
“McGrath’s burned to the ground,” I said. “A bit hyperbolic, isn’t it? It only burned half the bar, I thought.”
“Just read it,” he said, standing and beginning to pace.
“… arson is suspected as the cause of the fire, and we here at the Beagle are unafraid to name names. Unlike someotherpapers that shy away from powerful people, this reporter is willing to state that he has it on record that Mr. McGrath had known ties to both the Italian and Irish mobs. That he was even friendly, and possibly dealing, with the Russians as well. It is this penchant for dealing with the criminal underworld that surely brought tragedy to the McGrath Pub. And with the mysterious death of its owner, now we may never know the truth.”
I put the paper down on the desk and stared at it. My heart was thumping in my chest and I felt my jaw clench. It couldn’t be true. Could it?
“Okay, so it’s a theory,” I said.
“It’s not just a fucking theory, Hunter!”
“Lower your voice, Bobby,” I said.
That seemed to anger him even more, but when he spun toward me, I could see he was holding back. He wasn’t going to yell, but he was going to get his point across. Forcefully.
“That pub was known in the area for being a place that mobsters hung out, Hunter. Known for it. Her father ran it, not because it was profitable and a cozy little spot to get a drink and watch the game, but because it was a front for the fuckingmob.”
“Which one?” I asked. “It says he was friendly with all three of the ones we got running around.”
“Does it really goddamn matter, Hunter? Really? It’s themob.”
“Bobby, you are taking a rumor printed in a community paper as fact,” I said.
“No, no the hell I am not,” he said. “I did some research on my own. I went down to that cesspool of a place and asked around. You know what people said? They said, ‘Of course, the mobsters went there. Everybody loved Old Man McGrath!’ And when I asked if they thought the fire was caused by mobsters, every one of them, to a person, blamed one of the groups. Some of them blamed Italians, some of them blamed Irish, but every goddamned one of them blamed the mob.
