Scratched

by JJ Partridge

  “Did you ask anyone? Ginger?”

  “No, too embarrassed.”

  “So what about tonight?”

  “Huh?”

  “Are you playing tonight?”

  “No.” Then, he added less somberly, “Because I get introduced on ESPN. Before the finals. And I stay for the party afterwards. It’s a big deal for me. The guys who run ESPN Pool invited me. Could be an opportunity. I hit it off with Seifert, too. Never know, right? Anyway, I’m beat to shit! The Club will be open, Ginger will run it, but I’m not playing.” He paused, shaking his fork at my reflection in the mirror. “But here’s the thing. Guys are talking about me, how I’ve been winning, who I beat. If I do good in the interview, there’ll be even more buzz. You know how they focus on who you beat.” He turned to face me; those blue eyes seemed magnified. “I’ve been shaking them all up. Me, after all these years. Can you believe it?”

  I didn’t want to rain on his parade but what are friends for. “What you win, it’s going to pay off Zito’s loan, right? And he’s got a cut of the house action?”

  “Who said?”

  “Words out.” I had to ask, “Why not me?”

  “Because I didn’t want to owe you.”

  “All you have to do is ask.”

  With a shrug, he returned to his coffee. “We just ran out of money when we had to put in all the fire-code upgrades. I told Maria Catarina not to worry, that I had it all covered. But I didn’t. She doesn’t know how tight it got … that I had to go to Zito.”

  “You know he’s a bad guy …”

  “A long time ago, Zito worked for one of my sweaters. I knew he knew pool. He’s always been all friendly like and when I asked, he said, ‘Sure, sure, no problem,’ and I signed what the SOB gave me to sign. I was goddamn crazy to do it. Now, he owns me until I pay him off. Ginger’s working the house for him.” His head moved closer to mine. “I’m into him for two hundred grand, thereabouts.” He shook his head wearily, his voice wrapped in despair. “He’s got me by the balls. I make the payments to the bank on the first mortgage and then I still have to pay him. Nothing left for Maria Catarina and me. That’s why I gotta win big when the pros roll into town next weekend. They’ll bring in the whales. I’ll get backers by then plus my own cash. What I win, I keep. I play, I pay down Zito, we refinance, we’re home free.”

  Never happen. Not with Zito and his merry band of knee crushers. I didn’t say that of course. “If Zito, or Ginger on his behalf, is backing you or lays down money on you, as an underdog, and the other player dumps, he wins twice, on his bets on you and when you pay him down. You’re the gift that keeps giving.”

  “I’ve gotta do those matches. I’m gonna finish this off.”

  “Suppose you lose. Suppose Zito wants you to dump a match. What do you do?”

  “I’m not. Can’t.”

  “If Tuttle finds out, he’ll be all over it, and Maria Catarina.”

  “She doesn’t know how deep I’m in or that I played last night. I’m not going to tell her.”

  “She’ll find out.”

  “I’ll cross that bridge when I toss a roll of cash in her lap.”

  He was wishful and dead wrong. But there was more to his situation than a loan payoff. I saw expectation in his face. I said, “You … want to play, don’t you?”

  “After the Gala and who I beat, by the time the pros roll in, the news on me coming back will be everywhere. I’ll keep a low profile, practice up, I’ll get backers, some fat matches. My last chance, you know what I’m telling ya?”

  I persisted. “Even if you want to, you can’t back out?”

  “Are you crazy? On Zito?”

  He swallowed the last of his coffee, stood, found loose bills in his jeans pocket and tossed them on the counter. Breakfast was no longer my treat. He stared at me with eyes that were tired and worried. “Algy, I need you to stay out of this. I mean it.”

  He left.

  He was drowning and didn’t know it.

  37

  I DROVE BACK HOME, thinking this was the day summer became fall, when the wind and wet whittled away at the ash and plane trees on Congdon Street, took down the first of the maple leaves, leaving only the oaks with their browning foliage. I picked the plastic-wrapped Journal off the front walk and took it out to the den.

  On Saturday mornings, I look forward to Journal columnist Bill Reynold’s potpourri of wry comments on the week’s sport news and jibes at politicians and the famous for being famous. He led off with a zinger aimed at his alma mater. Hey, Bunky, don’t forget, in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Further on, he asked, Will Carter University sponsor a Native American float in the Columbus Day parade? and Is Carter University digging trench lines and fox holes on The Green? Fair enough.

  More Columbus Day noise came in two side-by-side Op Ed pieces, one from a faculty senate member in favor of the name change, the other a rebuttal by the president of the Italo-American Society. The first was condescending babble; the second had the ring of ‘falsetti.’ The dialogue reminded me of opera, maybe Verdi’s ‘Sicilian Vespers,’ two tenors on either side of the stage engaged in wild gesticulations and high-pitched threats. Our Columbus Day controversy had all the theatrical traits of opera: it was tragic, illogical, and famously emotional.

  In the next two hours online in my office in College Hall, I booked travel arrangements on Alitalia to and from Italy and engaged the concierge service in Rome that the Temple family often used for hotel and transportation in Italy. The schedule was tight, leaving Sunday night and returning Thursday night if no hiccups. I rated accomplishing anything significant in Rome as fifty-fifty but worth the effort; as to getting anyone to talk to us in Basilicata, I had to rely on Benno’s enthusiastic assurance of last evening that through his relatives—“my family is all over Puglia”—arrangements would be made if at all possible. That was enough encouragement to play Palagi’s recording to obtain the name of Maria Ruggieri’s village—Gianosa d’Acri—in Basilicata and book a continuing flight from Rome to Bari, the seaport capital of Puglia, which had the closest airport to the village. According to the online il grande carta stradale d’Italia published by the Touring Club Italiano, Gianosa d’Acri, a dot on the map, was about forty kilometers over the provincial border.

  Then, I e-mailed Brunotti and the senior administrator of the Institute’s campus in Rome. I would be there sometime on Tuesday; that if Brunotti could not make himself available to me, there would be consequences. I also directed his office to attempt to make an appointment with Vittorio Ruggieri’s lawyer in Rome— Avvocato Maurizio Musumeci, according to the demand letter I had received—on Wednesday or Thursday morning for “discussions.” As to the remittance bank in Rome, a call to the Bursar’s Office produced the name, Banco di San Paolo; I would need the Provost’s assistance to arrange a meeting. If these efforts to meet at the bank and the lawyer failed, I intended to arrive at both unannounced with sufficient self-importance to force interviews. Almost as an afterthought, I e-mailed Father Pietro, by now in Rome, hoping that he had not changed his college e-mail address, and invited him to meet me for a morning coffee on Wednesday at my favorite café near the Piazza Navona.

  I felt rather pleased with myself. I was moving forward, and got further encouragement when my friend at the Medical School texted me “Appointment at two pm at ME office. Dr. Fritz Savage. Good guy. Luck.”

  Benno waited for me outside Corliss Landing; he carried a valise under his arm as we walked to its archway entrance. A dank southeast wind off the Bay beat against us, carrying a whiff of petroleum from the fuel depots in the harbor. The rain had let up but the sky remained a sullen gray. Proudly, I told Benno I had an appointment at the Medical Examiner’s Office that afternoon and asked how he did in shanty town across the river. “Later,” he said and I was told, rather self-importantly, that his contact in Bari had proved to be very helpful. Likely, we would be set. He would know for sure tomorrow.

  I slid the plastic key car
d given to me by Claudia Cioffi through a slot, was gratified by a buzz and the snap of the lock, and the iron gate slowly swung open. We climbed the stairwell immediately to our right and Benno pointed to security cameras on the second and third floor landings. Two angled corridors got us to the South Water Street side of the building and the door to Palagi’s condo. Benno handed me latex gloves and we each put on a pair. I used the key and followed him into the kitchen where he opened the refrigerator. “Somebody’s cleaned up,” he said. “Empty.” He checked the dishwasher. “Full and clean.”

  Together, we looked through a serving counter from the kitchen into a dining room–living room. I expected it to be overstuffed with a scholar’s hoard of Italian antiques, artifacts, rare books, and artwork; instead, the room had about as much charm and lived-in feel as a model apartment: fake floral arrangements on a table, drawn beige curtains, four chairs set primly in front of place mats and settings at a dining table, Persian design rugs over a yellow pine plank floor, a suite of dark leather couches, a Bose CD player and a rack of CDs in a cabinet holding a large-screen television. Over an enclosed glass fireplace was a reproduction of a Carravaggio masterpiece Boy with a Bowl of Fruit. If I remembered my art history, the model was the artist’s lover.

  “Has to be a study, where he worked,” Benno said, and we walked down a hall with three closed doors. The first opened to a spacious bedroom with adjoining bathroom, a double bed neatly made, with the telltale silk pajamas on its spread. Another Carravaggio, a print of the same boy model as Bacchus, was over the bed. A large walk-in closet was set with rows of suits, jackets and trousers, shelves and drawers of neatly arranged socks and underwear, mock turtleneck shirts Palagi fancied, and a rack of slip-on shoes. Benno searched a night table, found nothing of interest, then entered the bathroom and opened a mirrored cabinet filled with the usual bathroom needs, its top shelf of prescription medications in brown and red plastic vials. He inspected the containers, all without caps, reading labels aloud—no obvious opiates among them—and put them back. “All from CVS. Different docs,” he said, and closed the cabinet.

  The second door was the entry to the bathroom from the hall. The study behind the third door was crowded by a chair by a reading lamp at the window, a plain desk with an oversized computer monitor, a desk chair, a file cabinet, books lining three of the walls from floor to ceiling, and a beat-up leather valise on top of a side table. Only then did I realize there wasn’t a trace of family or personal touches in the apartment, no photographs, for instance.

  I sat at the desk; Benno went to the file cabinet. The desk top was clear and the right pedestal drawer was empty except for a plastic ziplock bag containing smudgy copies of both sides of a funeral card bearing the name of Maria Ruggieri, either typed or printed, and its envelope. Benno placed the bag in his valise for later inspection. The drawer on the left held pads of lined paper and two spiral notebooks with hard covers in a floral design I would characterize as Florentine. Neither had been used. I snapped on his computer and waited for its monitor to brighten.

  At the file cabinet, Benno riffled through the top drawer. “Correspondence going back … years…” and he held up a folder taken from the rear of the drawer. “This one for ’07.” He closed the drawer and opened the second, where he flipped through files. “Bills. Looks like Palagi has a mortgage on this place. Bank RI. Balance is one sixty-seven. Bank statements,” he said as he removed one from the rear of the drawer. “Five years ago, he had almost four hundred thousand in Bank RI in checking and CD’s.” And then, one in front. “Last June. Bank RI shows direct deposits from Social Security, payroll and pension payments from the University, and a couple of hundred wired from an account at Bank of America. So, maybe eight thousand in total coming in. Get this, a balance of about ten in savings. From four hundred to ten thousand?” He went back into the drawer. “Whoa!”

  “What?”

  Benno took a folder to the chair by the window. “You’re not gonna believe this. It’s a copy of a promissory note. From Heritage Finance! Two hundred and fifty grand!”

  “When?”

  “June 5 of this year.”

  “Terms?”

  “Payments due monthly,” he said, reading and talking. “Interest rate is … fifteen percent. Payable on demand.”

  “Fifteen percent? Wow!”

  Benno gave me the note and returned to the June bank statement. “Whatever he did with the money from the loan, he didn’t put it in his Bank RI account.”

  “Had to be the pay off of the vendetta!”

  “The vigorish on two hundred fifty thousand times fifteen percent is … around thirty-seven grand and change per year divided by twelve is … about three thousand a month. Almost half his income goes as interest to Heritage?” Benno dug into the drawer and found the August statement for July which included a page of facsimiles of coded checks much reduced in size. “One for three grand and change to Heritage Finance on July 14. So, he was paying on the loan. But where’s the proceeds?”

  He handed me the statement. The signature on the July check to Heritage Finance, like all the others, was barely legible. “That loan file was just right there, in the front of the drawer. Couldn’t be missed. Kinda strange.”

  His voice drifted away as Windows gonged from a pair of speakers by the monitor. I had come prepared with Palagi’s birth date, social security number, and father’s and mother’s first names, and his birth place. I tried to log on without success with I-T-A-L-O and P-A-L-A-G-I, and then added numbers, and lucked out with I-T-A-L-O with the year of his birth. Icons were arranged in a single row on the screen’s left side. I checked his site use history and a list filled the screen. The names were dead giveaways: homosexual pornography sites. Geezus!

  I opened a few sites that seem to have been favorites and most involved young men. Benno, over my shoulder, exclaimed, “Look at that shit!” I felt like a voyeur. Further down the list were two gambling sites based in Antigua; each had a sub-site linked into Italian football betting. A separate PIN was needed to gain access.

  “So …” Benno mused, “Palagi’s into queer porn and betting on Italian football. What a guy!” he said, his sarcasm mixed with disgust while I focused on our mission. I was thinking: How did the loan proceeds get to the ‘Ndrangheta? By a Heritage Finance check to him endorsed over to some front? A cash payment to the New York cell? A direct payment by Heritage Finance to the ‘Ndrangheta account at Ravensford Capital?

  Benno returned to the filing cabinet as I turned off the computer and emptied the contents of Palagi’s valise on the desk. Pens, pencils, a pad, and a notebook, like those in the desk drawer, fell out. The notebook’s cover evidenced usage with the word Montecristo raggedly printed in ball pen. I flattened it out on the desk and opened to lined pages with wobbly columns of numbers left to right across pages, monthly dates beginning six years ago, credits and debits by months, and totals on an annual basis at the bottom of each page, repeated at the top of the next page. The printing was crabbed and shaky, with transpositions, cross outs, and corrections in different inks, even pencil on occasion. The last page of numbers indicated a balance of €1721.06, but no date. The prior page, from a year ago, had a balance of €35,601.70.

  “Can you decipher any of this?” I asked.

  He took the notebook, thumbed through the remaining pages, and showed me a page with Brunotti spelled out in a rough cursive and holes smeared with ballpoint stabbed through the name on the thick paper, like what an angry kid might do with a ball pen. The following pages contained numbers and dates, most within the last two years, in barely legible writing.

  “What do you make of it? ‘Montecristo’?”

  “His record of Brunotti’s fraud,” Benno answered matter-of-factly. “Brought it home when he learned that Brunotti had been in his files.”

  Benno’s solution was elegant. The timing would be right with the first set of columns of numbers starting just after Brunotti becoming Direttore; the meaning
of the second, more recent set of numbers less clear.

  “Anything else?”

  “Nothing. I …”

  His response was interrupted by a loud rap on the condo’s door. Then another, louder, more impatient. Benno looked at me, put the notebook, a handful of bank statements, the file containing the copy of the promissory note, and the latest correspondence pack into his valise, which he slipped under his arm. I turned off the computer, closed desk drawers, and with a last look around, we left the office with our latex gloves stuffed into our pockets. I shouted “hold on” as a key from the outside was turned in the lock.

  The door opened and I was brushed aside by a uniformed security guard. “What are you guys doing in here? Hey, didn’t I see you the other night?”

  I identified myself, showing my driver’s license and University ID card. Benno opened his wallet to display his PI license. The guard grunted, “So, what’s the story? This place is off limits until somebody tells me differently.”

  “Well, it isn’t to us,” Benno said confidently. “This condominium is part of Mr. Palagi’s estate. The University is his beneficiary. We’re doing an inventory on behalf of his estate.”

  “That cuts nothin’ with me.” The guard fingered the cell phone on his belt. “Until somebody tells me you’re authorized, you’re not. I’m gonna take a look around and you’re comin’ with me.”

  “Sure,” Benno said loudly to the guard’s back as we followed him down the hall, “good idea.” Benno’s expression indicated I was to play along. To me, he said loudly, “As far as I’m concerned, Mr. Temple, the condo and its contents are protected. I don’t see any reason why you need any special security here. It appears that Mr. Riley”—that was the name on the plaque over the guard’s left blouse pocket—“has everything under control.” At the door to the office, Mr. Riley turned to stare at Benno. “Did you say Bacigalupi? Have I heard of ya?”

  “Could be. State police for twenty-five years. Yourself, retired from …?”