“Just so I’m clear, even if it was her grandfather who wreaked havoc on the Byrne family, why would they take it out on Yolanda?”
I hadn’t thought that far ahead, but revenge wasn’t unheard of in family lore. I said as much, citing as many movies as I could think of in the godfather genre.
“I don’t mean to be hard on you and Rose, but that’s flimsy.” Hearing no comment on my part, Matt continued. “Or maybe we should discuss this further, in person.”
I hadn’t told Matt about the tire incident, and didn’t relish the thought of exposing my vulnerability. I kept it simple. “My car is in the shop.”
“I know. Michelle Chan saw it in Florello’s lot. Anything you want to tell me about that?”
The city of Revere seemed to have shrunk since my school days, its multicultural network in high gear. “I assume Michelle or Ching-Liang filled you in.”
“Two slashed tires. Should I be worried?”
“It was just a prank.” I hoped my voice stayed at a normal pitch.
“Glad to hear it.”
“So, are you coming over?” I asked, part flirting, part challenging.
“I’m already over.”
For a moment, I was confused. Then I heard the blare of a car horn. I went to the window. Matt was leaning against his car, across Tuttle Street. It was still light enough for me to make out his crooked grin.
“HERE’S ANOTHER ANGLE,” I said when Matt refused to get enthused about Yolanda’s possibly being a Scotto on her mother’s side. Happily, he had been enthusiastic about seeing me, delaying our work session for more than an hour. “Dorothy Leonard claims to have documentation that the property behind the library is not consecrated ground, that it has always been city land, and never a cemetery.”
“And?”
I sighed. “You’re making me do all the work. What if that’s what Yolanda was researching, not her family history? And what if she found out something that favored one side or the other in the controversy over the expansion? Leonard seems determined to get this project under way, probably in part because it was her late husband’s dream. Suppose Leonard forged the documents and Yolanda found out about it. That would give Leonard a motive to kill her. And Councilman Byrne is equally determined to stop the plan, so if Yolanda found the documents were not forged … never mind, that doesn’t work as well.”
“And why would Yolanda be interested in this?”
“It’s a reporter-thing.”
My phone rang, letting me off the hook before I had to justify John Galigani’s phrase.
“Is it too late?” Rose asked, sounding wide awake.
“Not at all. It’s not even nine o’clock.” And even if it were midnight, I wouldn’t have been able to curb Rose’s excitement. “And Matt’s here.”
“Oh. Then should I wait till tomorrow? I have this chart to show you. The family trees.”
“Already? Bring it over, by all means.” I assumed she wasn’t calling from below my window.
“They’re connected, Gloria. Yolanda was a Scotto. I’ll be right over. For once I’m glad I’m not interrupting anything.”
IT HADN’T TAKEN LONG for Rose to reconstruct the genealogy of the Fiore and Scotto families, as far back as we needed them. She arrived at my apartment, chart in hand.
“How did you do this so quickly?” Matt asked her.
“As I always tell Gloria—”
“I know, you’ve lived here all your life,” I said. “You know everyone. And everyone’s grandfather. What a memory.”
She shrugged. “A good enough memory. Plus, Frank helped. Plus, plus, I made a few calls.”
Though it weighed on my mind, I didn’t ask why John still hadn’t participated. Evidently he’d suspended his reporter-thing persona, not applying it on his own behalf. No one else brought it up either.
The three of us bent over Rose’s trees. She’d used paper from a newsprint pad and thick markers to generate the histories of two families.
The couple at the top left were Sabatino Scotto and Celia Pallavo, both born in Italy, and married there in the late 1920s. The couple then came to the United States, traveling directly from Ellis Island to Revere, under the sponsorship of relatives who had preceded them. They had four children: Vincent, Michael, Mary, and Clara. Rose had followed the convention of genealogy charts to put rectangles around males, and ellipses around females.
At the top right, a new tree started with Corrado Fiore and ? Miliotti—Rose apologized for not being able to determine Signorina Miliotti’s first name—bom in Italy, married in Detroit, Michigan, around 1930. This couple had three or four children, one of them named Luigi. Rose explained that she didn’t have as many sources for the Detroit family.
After Sabatino Scotto escaped to Italy, the remaining Scottos moved away from Revere, to Detroit, where their youngest daughter, Clara, met and married Luigi Fiore.
Rose had drawn a red line connecting Clara Scotto and Luigi Fiore. Under them were two large ellipses: Yolanda Fiore, and her sister Gabriella.
“This is nice work, Rose,” Matt said. “I’m going to have to get you a police consultant contract.”
She laughed. “For genealogy-related cases?”
I shook my head. “And all this without the benefit of the Internet,” I said.
I heard a humph from both Matt and Rose.
We took off from the chart. Sabatino Scotto, his family settled in Revere, goes into the moonshine business. Like many, he continues the operation long after the end of Prohibition. The councilman’s parents, who are among his customers, drink from a bad batch. One is blinded, the other dies.
Sabatino would have been a man in his thirties at the time of his trial, Councilman Byrne a teenager. Old enough to want to do something to avenge his family.
“And then, all these years later, he gets his chance. The granddaughter of the man he’d always wanted to kill comes into town.” Rose was into this saga.
“Very Italian,” Matt said.
Rose and I growled, and gave him looks that told him it was a good thing he was Italian himself.
“We could have figured this out a long time ago, if only I’d been more careful about which city the Scottos had moved to,” Rose said.
“Don’t blame yourself. All the cities out west look alike,” I said. “Chicago, Detroit, Des Moines, San Francisco—”
Rose nodded, oblivious to my attempted joke. “So, what’s next? I’m starting to see why Gloria likes police work.” She looked at Matt. “Besides you, of course.”
Blushes all around.
“All I can do is give this to Parker and Berger,” Matt said, picking up the newsprint. “See if they want to requestion Derek Byrne, find out if he knew Yolanda was a Scotto, or if he even knew what the Scottos did to his family fifty years ago. As for the councilman—” Matt shook his head. “It’ll be up to the department whether to talk to him, too.”
“You mean he might be exempt, just because he’s a city official?” I asked.
Rose sat back, appearing to know the answer.
Matt shook his head, but only slightly. “I’m not saying that, exactly. Just that it takes more than this to question someone like that, officially.”
I had “unofficially” in mind, as soon as I had my car back.
BEFORE ROSE LEFT, Matt volunteered to dig into the old police files on the Scotto case. This cheered her up a bit, but she left considerably less thrilled than when she arrived. Still, it was clear that Rose was happy to be part of the investigation—much more appropriate to her personality than sitting around waiting for others to clear her son’s name. And if any case was especially suited to her skills and experience, it was one involving the history of Revere.
“I THINK IT’S TIME,” Matt said when we were alone again.
A nervous wave went through my body, so strong that I was amazed I stayed firmly seated.
“You’re right,” I said in a weak voice, resigned to a conversation about our future living ar
rangements. Matt stood, and I expected him to join me on the couch. Instead, he walked past me, to my computer.
“It’s about time I learned how to use this thing. Let’s see if the Internet is all it’s cracked up to be. Shall we start with Prohibition?”
“The Internet! You want to learn the Internet.” I hoped my exuberance didn’t give me away. No confrontation about our relationship. No ultimatums. Just an Internet lesson. I let out a deep breath and smiled.
“What did you think I meant?”
“Let’s go on-line,” I said.
I pulled up a second chair and sat to the side of the computer, placing Matt directly in front of the monitor, a new fifteen-inch flat-screen model that I’d bought with my last check from the RPD.
I led him through the steps to access a search engine, where he typed in PROHIBITION. “Whoa,” he said, jerking his head back when he got more than half a million hits. “What’s this? The prohibition of chemical weapons, homosexuality, and marijuana, and the home page of the National Prohibition Party.” Matt’s first lesson in narrowing a search.
EIGHTEENTH AMENDMENT got better results. Ratified on January 16, 1919, effective one year later, and the law for thirteen years. Matt read from the screen. “The National Prohibition Act covered alcohol, brandy, whiskey, rum, gin, beer, ale, porter, and wine, plus spirituous, vinous, malt or fermented liquor, liquids and compounds, whether medicated, proprietary, patented or not, containing one-half of one percent or more of alcohol.”
“Thorough, if unenforceable.”
We scanned through a mountain of interesting information, Matt’s right hand gaining agility with every click and move across the mouse pad. We looked at lists of biographies—of rumrunner Bill “The Real” McCoy, Al Capone, Eliot Ness, Bugsy Moran, Carrie Nation, and “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn. Matt paused over the details of the 1929 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.
“This is great stuff,” he said, still adjusting his head to find the best focal distance. “High drama.”
I was thrilled that he’d taken to one of my own interests. For me, the Internet provided fascinating reading, far beyond the attractions of the fiction section of a library.
“Listen to this,” he said, reading from a commentary by a local reporter. “The thirteen years of the noble experiment were seen by some as our greatest attempt at being a moral nation, and others as an enormous failure that only fueled organized crime, immoral behavior, and disrespect for the law.’”
“Interesting. You see why I love to surf.”
“Mmm.”
Not a ringing endorsement, but I had time to work on him.
We bounced from site to site, and although I knew Internet statistics were not the most reliable, I got hooked on the numbers the sites offered. In 1929 alone, it was estimated that Americans brewed nearly 700 million gallons of beer in their homes, and between 1925 and 1929, 678 million gallons of homemade wine were drunk.
“Why would anyone take a chance like that—drinking unregulated booze?” Matt asked.
“We’re not the ones to ask, I guess.”
Matt and I were both teetotalers. At so many social functions, I was asked if I had religious or moral objections to the consumption of alcohol, and I guessed some people didn’t believe me when I said I just didn’t like it. Not the smell, not the taste, not the texture of any drink I’d tried. On a regular basis, Matt and I heard, “You don’t know what you’re missing. You should try a good wine.”
We’d smile, and shake our heads, neither of us inclined to add another fattening, potentially unhealthy habit to our list. And even more expensive by the ounce than cappuccino.
We tried to think of an analogy to the bootleggers’ business. What if cannoli were outlawed?
“Would we find ourselves sneaking around with mascarpone not approved by the FDA, baking shells in the middle of the night?” A silly moment, wonderful to share.
A reference to San Ramon, California, a city very close to Berkeley, where I’d lived, caught my eye. Inspectors from the DA’s office patrolling a canyon staged successful raids over the course of several months. They determined where the stills were by the absence of frost on barn roofs—heat generated by a gasoline-fired still would keep a roof frost-free.
I loved it when science came to the aid of law.
We learned that while speakeasies earned a lot of press, most bootleggers lived in the communities where they made and sold alcohol, so they were not thought of as criminals but as “Uncle Sal,” the family friend, bringing the makings of a party. I wondered if the Byrne family of Revere had welcomed Sabatino Scotto as their deliveryman on a regular basis, like the milkman, the iceman, and the insurance man who came to collect the monthly premium.
Apparently, for people like Scotto and his customers, the convenience of backyard stills and homemade hootch was too strong to end with the Twenty-first Amendment, which repealed Prohibition in 1933. I was surprised at the many references to the current cases of illicit liquor production and sale.
“Look at this,” Matt said. “If we want to, we can make moonshine ourselves, right from these recipes.”
I nodded. “There are at least as many as I have for lasagna.”
The first step in one recipe was go to the woods and find a good place to hide your still, near a good source of water.
Quite a hobby.
Matt stood up to stretch. “Midnight,” he said, checking my clock on the living-room wall, one of the world’s most accurate, receiving its signal from Fort Collins, Colorado. “This stuff can keep you up all night.”
I nodded. I felt I would have made more progress if I’d done the Internet search alone, but I wouldn’t have had as much fun. But how did this help with the Fiore murder case? As a way of understanding the era, and perhaps Yolanda’s murderer, I decided. That is if they were related at all. Another complete circle of reasoning that got me no further in helping John Galigani.
Before he left, Matt showed me tickets for “Cooling Off,” a jazz group he liked.
“Fourth of July weekend? Sounds wonderful,” I said.
I hoped by then John Galigani would be a free man. Maybe when that happened, I’d feel free to concentrate on my own future. As a permanent resident of Revere. As a police consultant.
As a police wife? Maybe Tony’s wife, the wedding coordinator, could help me plan the event.
I choked on a piece of almond from the biscotti Matt and I had been nibbling on.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“I’m fine.”
TWENTY-ONE
A CALL FROM ROSE GALIGANI on Tuesday morning saved me from going back to the Internet for doctoral-level research on moonshine. There wasn’t too much more I could do anyway, until I saw whether Matt had uncovered any useful information from the old department files.
“This police work is all-consuming, Gloria. I have so many things I want to look up and find out and interview.”
I smiled—I’d learned a long time ago to enjoy Rose’s unique syntax.
“I don’t know what to do next,” she said. “How can you tell which clue to follow? Now I see why you get into this.”
“And I’m so glad to have you as a partner,” I said. Police talk among girlfriends. “Did you come up with anything else since last night?”
“Just Miliotti’s first name—it’s Rose, if you can believe it. But I have an idea about those papers concerning the library property. If you can get a copy of the documents, I can have them checked out.”
“How?”
“I know people,” she said, her voice deep and serious before it erupted in a laugh. “There’s this guy in Chelsea—we use him when we have an issue about documents—death certificates, immigration papers, you’d be surprised what we have to deal with some”
“Rose, I meant how am I supposed to get a copy of the documents?”
“Well, I can’t do everything, Gloria.”
THERE WAS A POSSIBILITY that John, as a member of the press,
would have easier access than I would to a copy of the ownership documents. But I remembered Derek Byrne’s saying the papers were recently discovered by the Historical Society and hadn’t even been filed with the city records office yet.
John was also the one who could get me into the Journal records on the Scotto trial, but he still hadn’t offered to help. It worried me that John was being very passive about his own case. I dared not ask Rose if she’d noticed or if she knew why. I needed a little more time—or John’s exoneration—before I’d feel on completely solid footing after our falling out. I made a note to ask John about it, after I figured out the right way to phrase it. I couldn’t remember when I’d had such trouble communicating with the Galigani family.
As I saw it, there were two ways I might acquire a copy of the land use documents—from either the pro- or the conexpansion side. Either way, I’d have to lead the person to believe I could help, perhaps by implying I had a way to prove the papers true or false, depending on whom I approached. Would it be Derek Byrne, Dorothy Leonard, or Frances Worthen? Or maybe I’ll interview the cardinal. I laughed at my own joke.
Of the three serious options, Derek seemed likely to be the most easily won over. I couldn’t say why, but I considered the two women impenetrable. I was willing to absorb some of the blame for that feeling, but I suspected also that women who reached high levels of power needed to cultivate a certain mettle that ate away at their approachability, perhaps more than men did.
And if I talked to Derek again, I might find out how much he knew about his grandparents’ tragedy, and about Yolanda Fiore, whose mother was née Scotto.
THE LIBRARY WAS becoming a familiar place, inside and out. This time I parked my car, with its two new tires, on a busier street, surveying the area before unbuckling my seat belt. Circling the building was an old stone wall, topped with a row of gray stones that had been ground into sharp points. I was sure they were meant to form a decorative edge, but I saw them as a row of weapons, ready to impale their next victim. Perhaps my tires. Perhaps me.
Boric Acid Murder, The Page 16