A Death In Calabria

by Michele Giuttari

  Just before leaving, having given their fingerprints to be compared with those found inside the doorman’s booth, they both asked the same question.

  ‘Will you get him?’

  ‘That’s what we’re trying to do.’

  ‘Please find him.’

  It was almost a prayer.

  When the last witness had left the office, Lieutenant Reynolds called his men together.

  He listened patiently to all the reports, but nothing he heard sounded particularly useful, though his men had made a thorough search of the area for possible leads. No one had seen anything, not even a suspicious car. It wasn’t the first time. In these cases, fear kept mouths firmly shut.

  Bernardi, just back from the search of the victim’s apartment, stuck his head round the door, and Reynolds motioned him to come in. To the rest of the men, he said, ‘What are you waiting for? Keep your eyes open. Check all surveillance cameras in the area. We can’t afford to waste time. We’re dealing with an unpremeditated homicide here. So let’s get going!’

  Once the men had gone and Reynolds was alone with Bernardi, he grabbed the bottle of water, filled two paper cups and said, ‘Hold on a moment, Mike.’ Then he lit yet another cigarette, possibly the last of the day, and took a few drags. Clouds of smoke formed in the air, making it smell even mustier than before.

  Bernardi sat down opposite Reynolds and brought him up to date on the search of the victim’s apartment and on the answers they’d obtained from the other precincts in New York. No squad car or police officer had been called to the building on Madison that evening. No one from that address had phoned 911 or any of the precincts to request assistance.

  Reynolds threw his now empty cup into the waste bin. ‘So none of the witnesses we’ve questioned so far has mentioned a police officer. Except Denis . . .’

  ‘I know what you’re thinking, Lieutenant. A kid with a vivid imagination, who wants to be a detective . . .’

  Reynolds nodded. Then his mind went back to the testimonies of the victim’s colleagues, and he mentioned to Bernardi what they had said about Bill Wells’s confrontations with neighbourhood punks. At these words, Mike pulled a face, as if to say, That’s it! There’s our confirmation!

  They switched out the lights and left the office. Reynolds glanced at his wristwatch. It was 3.50 in the morning on what should have been his day off. He said goodnight to Bernardi, lifted the collar of his raincoat and got into his grey Ford Crown Victoria next to the driver, who had already started the engine. ‘Take me home,’ he ordered. ‘Home’ was Battery Park, at the southern tip of Manhattan, on the western side looking towards New Jersey.

  And so they drove through the night, in a city now wrapped in a blanket of fog.

  6

  It was an unusually mild morning for the time of year.

  The fog had lifted as suddenly as it had settled. The weak, grey-pink light of dawn had given way to a clear blue sky tinged with gold. The air had been swept clean by the wind from the ocean. But still the usual smog and poisons clung to the façades of the skyscrapers.

  It was 8 a.m. and already New Yorkers, tourists and athletes were pouring out on to the streets.

  The newspapers carried page after page devoted to the marathon. The murder of the doorman, on the other hand, merited only a few brief mentions on the inside pages, which merely reported that the previous evening, in an apartment building in midtown Manhattan, a doorman named Bill Wells, sixty-one years old, had been shot dead. There were no eyewitnesses, and as yet no indication of the identity of the perpetrator or his motive.

  Only the New York Times gave the news a little more space.

  In the concluding lines of his article, the reporter lingered over a detail ignored by all the other papers:It appears that, shortly before the murder took place, a resident of the building saw the victim in the company of a police officer inside the doorman’s booth. When quizzed about this, the NYPD press office declined to comment. But we have reason to believe that there has been definite corroboration. Is this yet another embarrassment for the NYPD?

  Detective Bernardi read the article on the way to Kings County Hospital mortuary. His tired face flushed with anger. He looked for the name of the journalist who had written the piece. It was David Powell, a crime reporter who had a history of coming up with excellent sources, some inside the NYPD itself.

  Bernardi folded the newspaper and tossed it angrily onto the pile of papers on the back seat.

  ‘What’s the matter, sir?’ the driver asked.

  ‘Nothing, Raymond, just the usual press crap.’

  ‘Right!’

  ‘Some son of a bitch looking for a scoop and not caring what damage he causes along the way. The stuff he’s written shouldn’t have been made public yet.’

  ‘Journalists are scum, sir. I’m with you there.’

  ‘We’ll make this one pay sooner or later . . . same goes for whoever it is who’s giving him his information.’

  The driver shook his head. Knowing Bernardi’s dogged determination, he was sure that David Powell would be feeling the heat sooner or later. For the rest of their short journey, they spoke little, and soon reached their destination.

  After walking down a series of cold corridors, Bernardi took the stairs that led to the basement where post mortems were carried out. In this part of the hospital all the hours of the day were the same, it was a place with no windows, untouched by daylight. Even the smell never changed: that characteristic stench that greeted him now and became even sharper as soon as he walked through the door of the autopsy room.

  A shiver went down his spine.

  The body lay naked on a stainless steel table in the middle of the room.

  An orderly was washing it down with a hose.

  The medical examiner, Robert Cabot, standing by a counter with the instruments, had already put on a white coat, green rubber gloves and a mask. His long chestnut hair peeked out from under his cap. He was ready. He and Bernardi exchanged a brief greeting, then Bernardi, too, put on a white coat and mask, omitting only the gloves. Then he stepped closer to the table to observe the post mortem. Although he knew by heart every movement Cabot would make, he was always surprised by the ME’s meticulous precision.

  Dictating to a tape recorder, Cabot carefully examined the corpse and described its external appearance, then began cutting it open. As he worked, he filled the test tubes on the steel cart beside him with urine, blood and other bodily fluids for subsequent analysis. Finally, he started the circular saw, breaking the grave-like silence with its roar.

  He opened the scalp and pulled it back, sawed through the skull vault, and examined the brain. With a long pair of tongs, he extracted two bullets and placed them on a little tray. Bernardi took a few steps forward to get a better look.

  Now they were sitting on two visitors’ chairs in front of the desk, slowly sipping hot coffee.

  ‘There are a number of significant factors,’ Robert Cabot said, with the self-satisfied air of someone who is in a position to demonstrate his own skill for the umpteenth time. ‘Three for certain, I’d say.’

  Bernardi put his cup down on the desk, and took his ubiquitous notebook and pen from his briefcase. ‘Go on, Doctor.’

  ‘Just a minute!’ Cabot said, and drank down the rest of his coffee before proceeding. ‘First: the time of death. Between eight and ten last night. Give or take a few minutes either way. This can be inferred from the absence of hypostatic stains, from the rectal temperature, and from the fact that his dinner was fully digested. Second: there are no signs of physical attack. Third: the two bullets. They entered behind the ear, went through the cranium, and lodged in the right lower jaw.’

  Bernardi nodded. The first two factors confirmed what they had already surmised. The third, on the other hand, was new and required further explanation.

  As if reading the detective’s thoughts, Cabot jumped in before Bernardi had even opened his mouth and said, in an even more professional tone, �
�The route the bullets took runs from the back to the front, with a slight inclination from top to bottom, which suggests that the victim was sitting when he was shot, and that the killer, at the moment he fired, was in a higher position, probably standing to his left.’

  Bernardi nodded, pleased with the results.

  Cabot handed him two small plastic bags containing the bullets. They were .22 calibre, like the cases discovered on the floor of the doorman’s booth. Bernardi put them in his briefcase. Then he asked when the report would be ready.

  ‘In a few days,’ Cabot replied. ‘But I’ve already told you my most significant findings.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Bernardi closed his notebook, took off his white coat, said goodbye and left. But he didn’t go back to the precinct house. On the spur of the moment, he decided to pay a visit to the Crime Scene Unit’s ballistics lab.

  And there he would learn something unexpected.

  Something really unexpected.

  The killer’s gun had been fitted with a silencer.

  The tips of the copper-coated, round-nosed bullets had been found to have semicircular dents, caused by the bullets making contact with one of the metal diaphragms of the silencer which was not perfectly aligned with the axis of the gun barrel.

  ‘A silencer, Lieutenant! They’re sure of it. No doubt whatever. ’

  Bernardi had rushed straight from the ballistics lab to the precinct house and was now sitting facing Reynolds, leaning forward with his elbows on the desk.

  ‘This changes everything. The theory that this was an unpremeditated murder by some street punk is starting to look very shaky. We’re going to have to think again.’

  ‘Are the dents on both bullets?’ Reynolds asked.

  ‘Yes, although they aren’t perfectly identical, but that’s quite normal, according to ballistics. The similarities are significant. Every mark on the two bullets was compared through an optical microscope.’

  There was a long pause.

  The sun, now high, flooded the room and flared off the lieutenant’s nameplate.

  In an investigation everything could be useful: preliminary reports, interview transcripts, post mortems, expert analyses, sometimes just a routine door to door. But solving the case depended on reading and interpreting the material evidence correctly. Both Reynolds and Bernardi knew how important it was not to rely on intuition alone. What they had just learned was the first piece of concrete evidence they had, the first piece in the jigsaw.

  ‘How about prints?’ Reynolds asked, breaking the silence.

  ‘All the prints found at the crime scene belonged to the victim and his colleagues,’ Bernardi replied.

  ‘No one else?’

  ‘No one else, Lieutenant. Unfortunately.’

  ‘And on the bullet cases?’

  ‘No prints on them.’

  Which meant that the killer must have been wearing gloves when he loaded the gun - a precaution usually taken by hit men.

  ‘So the killer was a professional!’ Reynolds said. ‘Everything we have right now points to that.’

  The theory of a professional hit was also supported by the weapon: the .22 was the weapon of choice for hit men. It was easy to conceal, and with a silencer it produced no sound other than the noise of the mechanical parts.

  But there were details that didn’t fit this picture. Why would a professional hit man have killed the doorman at his place of work when there would surely have been other, less risky, opportunities? Why would a hit man take the victim’s wallet? And why on earth had the doorman not reacted? Had he known his killer? Did he have a secret life, unknown to his colleagues, the residents of the building, and his neighbours?

  That made for a lot of questions. So far, there were no answers.

  Bernardi stared down at his notebook. Better to get back to concrete facts. He brought the lieutenant up to date on the cause of death, the supposed time of death, the bullets and their trajectory.

  ‘Mike,’ Reynolds said when he had finished, ‘we need to find out more about Bill Wells’s past.’

  Bernardi nodded, although he had his doubts. Having seen the man’s apartment, he thought it unlikely that such an anonymous existence could hold any secrets.

  ‘Oh, one more thing, Mike.’

  ‘Yes, Lieutenant?’

  ‘The case is yours. You call the shots, but I’d be grateful if you’d keep me informed of what’s happening as it happens. You know what I mean.’ He rubbed his chin with his hand.

  Bernardi nodded. ‘Sure, Lieutenant. I know you like to follow certain cases personally.’

  John Reynolds smiled - his first smile of the day. As head of the squad, he could supervise and coordinate his detectives’ activities without necessarily being involved personally. But everyone at the 17th precinct knew that wasn’t how he worked. He had always had a particular interest in homicide - not to mention the fact this would, in all probability, be his last case.

  From the street, they could hear shouts and cheers from the marathon spectators. It had been shortly after ten when a cannon shot had given the signal for the race to start from Verrazano Bridge.

  Reynolds was about to get up from his chair when the telephone started ringing. It was 1.46 according to the clock on the desk. He was late, he knew. He had promised Linda that he would be home by one. That morning, when he had left, she had been asleep and he had not wanted to wake her. At the third ring he picked up.

  But it wasn’t his wife.

  It was the switchboard.

  And he suddenly had to change his plans.

  7

  ‘Get your coat, Mike,’ Reynolds said, grim-faced, as soon as he put down the phone.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Same building as last night. East 42nd Street.’

  Bernardi did not ask any more questions.

  Reynolds grabbed his coat from the stand and put it on, and they went out.

  The streets were packed with people cheering on the runners. The atmosphere was festive and chaotic. The driver turned from East 51st Street on to Lexington Avenue. Although he had his siren on, it took him nearly ten minutes to drive nine blocks.

  ‘It’ll be like this till the last runners have crossed the finishing line,’ he said. ‘The whole route, all the way to Central Park. It’s like this every year.’

  ‘Yes,’ Reynolds replied. ‘Today’s a special day, but not for us.’

  When they finally reached East 42nd Street, the driver double-parked and let them out.

  Reynolds looked around. There wasn’t a single journalist about. The sidewalk had already been cordoned off. An officer lifted the tape and let them pass. As they made their way into the building there was a disturbing silence in the lobby. The elevator took them up to the nineteenth floor. The police sergeant who was standing outside the door of the last apartment at the end of the corridor came to meet them.

  ‘What happened?’ Reynolds asked.

  ‘A massacre.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Six bodies, in there.’ He pointed to the door, which was standing wide open. ‘It’s a mess.’

  ‘Did you find the door open?’ Reynolds asked.

  ‘Yes, but there are no signs of forced entry.’

  ‘You mean it was left like this?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘She opened the door with her key,’ the officer said, indicating a young woman at the other end of the corridor.

  Reynolds looked at her for a moment. She was a pretty girl, wearing a pair of tight-fitting jeans with a low waist, a black leather coat, and shiny high-heeled boots. She had dark chestnut hair, cut fashionably short. She was sitting, and next to her a police officer was taking notes.

  ‘Who is she?’ Reynolds asked.

  ‘The niece of the guy who owns the apartment. She was the one who phoned 911. She already gave a statement, but she seemed pretty vague.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘Tha
t she let herself into the apartment with her key, saw a body and was so scared, she ran straight out again.’

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Maria Pre . . . Just a minute, it’s an Italian name.’ The officer looked through the notebook he had in his hand. ‘Prestipino, that’s it, Lieutenant. Prestipino.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Do you want to speak to her?’

  ‘No, I want to take a look inside the apartment first.’ Then, as if he hadn’t understood correctly, he asked, ‘You did say six bodies?’

  The officer looked at him. ‘That’s right, Lieutenant. Five men, one woman. All adults.’

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘Right now, we don’t know. One of them could be the owner of the apartment. They seem to be Italians, apart from two of them, the man in the hallway and the woman in the dining room.’

  ‘OK, I need gloves and overshoes. We can’t afford to waste time on this one.’

  The officer took the things out of a small case and handed them to him.

  ‘Mike,’ Reynolds said, putting on the latex gloves, ‘find out who’s available and get them over here.’

  Bernardi nodded.

  Reynolds walked in through the open door.

  Alone.

  An unmistakable smell, sickly and nauseating, different from any other, immediately hit him so strongly that his breath died in his throat.

  The stench of death.

  The first thing he noticed was the card his men had slipped under the door the previous evening. Then he saw the body near the door, and the dried brown blood. Everything looked cold, frozen.

  He took a deep breath and walked on. The door to the dining room was wide open. He went in. The stench struck him again like a wave, even more fetid and nauseating than before. He looked around. The room was large and filled with light. The rays of the sun, filtering through the windows with the curtains pulled back, made it even brighter. In addition, the crystal chandelier on the ceiling was still lit.