“What have we here?” Matt asked. He pointed to a young man, isolated from the group, leaning on a lamppost on Broadway. A sullen, troubled look marked his long, narrow face. It was a close shot, and even with the grainy, old newsprint you could tell his eyes were a light, penetrating hue. The caption read, YOUNG BRENDAN BYRNE, VICTIMS’ SON, RECOMMENDS NO MERCY FOR SCOTTO.
“Hmmm.” The syllable came out of both our mouths, and we sat back, as if we both had enough to think about for a while.
TWENTY-THREE
ROSE RACED US UP Broadway through rush-hour traffic, under the overpass, and into Chelsea.
“Cappie’s ready,” she’d said, unannounced, standing on my threshold at eight o’clock on Wednesday morning.
For the second time in two days, she’d skipped the phone call that usually preceded her visits. Even if she was only one floor below my apartment in the Galigani Mortuary, Rose would use the intercom first if she felt like coming up for a coffee break.
“You never know, Gloria. You could be entertaining,” she’d say with a wink that meant, I can only hope.
Apparently her son’s predicament had caused her to change her habits. Including her driving habits, I noted with alarm, as she whipped around an enormous Stop & Shop truck.
I’d expected to find Rose’s man, Cappie, between a checkcashing office and a bail bondsman, all establishments with bars on the windows and doors, so I was surprised when we pulled up to a new two-story office building with attractive landscaping. I brushed past pink roses, pansies, and orange and yellow flowers I couldn’t name. Day lilies, Rose informed me. Her look said she’d expect anyone who could recite the elements in the periodic table to know the name of a simple flower.
Cappie, I learned, was short for Caporale. Christopher Caporale was an expert in a field I didn’t even know was a field, authenticating documents. He had a boyish face, though I could tell from his posture and his gait that he was my age or older. His brown eyes seemed extra wide, as if he needed all the lens aperture he could get to inspect the fine print on documents.
His office was a treat to behold—more like a lab. Cappie’s table had graduated cylinders with brushes, styluses, and out-of-the-ordinary pens. Neat shelves with beakers and microscopes in all sizes, lighted magnifiers, lenses, calipers, filters, diffraction gratings, stacks of cotton swabs. A row of liquids in many hues—a viscous blue, thin reds and purples, a yellowish suspension in a gel. Something about the arrangement reminded me of Frank Galigani’s embalming prep room with its jellies and creams, and wax—for filling in deep wounds, Frank had told me gratuitously.
Instead of New Age posters like the ones that papered Tony Taruffi’s walls, an enormous periodic table adorned the space behind Cappie’s workbench. One side of the room was dedicated to a state-of-the-art computer system with the largest scanner I’d ever seen. I felt at home.
“I’m glad to finally meet you, Dr. Lamerino,” he said, drawing my attention away from the photo of a hunk of titanium that filled the 22 block of the chart.
He led us to a corner with a round table and upholstered chairs—his conference area, kept neat for visitors like Rose and me, I guessed.
I ran my eyes over a column of framed certificates, lined up vertically next to the window. Cappie was named as a member of the National Association of Document Examiners, a statecertified document examiner, an instructor to police personnel in eighteen states, a lecturer in statement analysis. And he’d done a stint with the Democratic Party, investigating voter fraud. As long as his credentials were authentic, we were in good hands.
“Did Rose ever tell you about the forgery ring she and Frank were in?” Cappie asked me, pouring coffee from a blackringed dewar.
I looked at my friend, my eyes wide. “Forgery?” We’d taken seats around a table that was clear except for the manila envelope with the documents I’d received from Derek Byrne.
“I told you about it, Gloria,” Rose said. She nudged my arm as if to jog my memory. “It was about ten years ago, maybe more. A block of five hundred blank death certificates was stolen from the old Revere General Hospital, which of course isn’t there anymore.”
“I got the police to work with Rose and Frank.” Cappie sounded like a proud mentor. “The Galiganis pretended to want to buy some certificates, and they roped in the guys.”
“We really didn’t have much to do with it,” Rose said. “The police just used our name and the mortuary to lure the crooks, but they wouldn’t let us be in the building.”
I had only a vague recollection of the police taking over the Galigani Mortuary, an incident well before the Revere Police Department and Sergeant Matt Gennaro had piqued my interest in matters of law enforcement. I found myself wishing I’d been there for the bust.
“Matt wasn’t involved,” Rose said, as if I’d asked. “The police put the word out through their informers, and then they were waiting in Frank’s office when the guys came. They used undercover people that sort of looked like me and Frank. One of them was Rusty Nigro’s daughter, if you remember her, just in case anyone had seen us. It was pretty exciting, even if we didn’t get to see it go down. That’s it, isn’t it, Cappie? Go down?”
Cappie smiled. “You’ve got it, Rose.”
“I can see why blank death certificates might have some value to a criminal, but why would a funeral director want to buy them?” I asked.
Cappie pushed up the sleeves of his light denim shirt, revealing smooth-skinned, nearly hairless arms. His face, too, seemed to be preadolescent, as if he hadn’t needed his first shave yet.
“Remember, it’s usually the undertaker who obtains the death certificate from the hospital or nursing home or whatever, and files it with the Board of Health. They can’t get a burial permit until then. Also, the certificates have the official seal on them, so all someone has to do is fill in the form, and the person is dead.” Cappie snapped his fingers, snuffing out a life. “Say, it’s a criminal-he can come back as someone else.”
“You never know what’s valuable,” I said, amazed at this world I’d never lived in.
Cappie nodded. “Even with all this new Internet stuff, there’s still a lot of checkpoints that require paper. There’s a big market for blank birth certificates, too. And immigration forms, marriage licenses, military discharge papers—you name it.” He ticked off the desirables on long, graceful fingers that seem out of proportion to his short, stubby body, as if they’d been specially designed for fine penmanship. “People use the blanks to steal an identity or create a new one, or—and this is big business—to claim benefits like VA and social security.”
“Imagine,” Rose said. She shook her head in distaste at an invisible criminal seated in our midst.
“And don’t think there aren’t some funeral directors out there, among others, who wouldn’t blink an eye at helping someone do this, if the price was right,” Cappie added.
Rose’s face took on a sad expression. The way mine did whenever I learned of a scientist who wasn’t a pillar of integrity.
Cappie spread the contents of our envelope over his table. “Yep, there’s still a lot of paper crime. Speaking of which …” He tapped our documents with his index finger.
“Paper crime?” I asked, my body responding with an excited twinge.
“I’ll say. These papers have been altered, no question. Where did you say you got them?”
I explained what little Derek had told me of the papers having been found among material the library was storing for the Historical Society.
“It’s no surprise that they haven’t been filed. It’s a pretty crude job of doctoring, I must say. Let me show you.”
Cappie smoothed out one of the folded line drawings of the land bordered on three sides by Lowe Street, Library Street, and Beach Street. On the fourth, the south side, was the new Immaculate Conception Church, its parking lot butting up against the library lot. He’d selected the one with a simple outline of the library building, showing not much more than th
e shape of the building and its position on the lot.
“See this number right here. It says the existing lot is 26,572 square feet. Well, that’s enough to include the proposed extension. Pretty handy, isn’t it? But with my EUV machine—never mind what that is—and a few years’ experience, I can show you a dotted line that’s been erased.”
Rose and I leaned on the table, on either side of Cappie. We both squinted, as if we could make our eyes as keen and probing as a licensed document examiner’s equipment. I had to admit it was difficult to see the line under Cappie’s stylus, but my eagerness to believe it was there added a dimension. I expect it was the same for Rose, and we both made appropriate Eureka noises.
Cappie set aside his thick lens and stylus. “I was able to determine the original numbers, at least approximately. It’s my belief that the lot below the deleted line is only a little more than twenty thousand square feet, and above the line is another six thousand or so square feet.”
I sat back and took a breath. “And they’ve made it look as though the whole lot was one piece, all of which has belonged to the library from the beginning.”
Cappie nodded. “Or at least as far back as has ever been recorded. They erased the two numbers, and put in the total. I didn’t even try to date the ink on the new number, because the rest is so obvious.”
“What are the chances that someone would be taken in by this?” I asked.
“If you ask me, it’s a piece of cake to figure this out. Ordinarily I’d have to scan in the document and use some fancy image-processing software to detect writing that might have been erased. But I didn’t need anything that sophisticated for this, just that instrument in the corner.” Cappie pointed to what looked like an elaborate microscope with appendages of light sources and calibrated staging areas. “It uses infrared light and filters to differentiate inks and papers and bring out hidden material. It’s pretty standard equipment.”
“So the Church’s experts will probably also know these documents are forged?” Rose asked.
Cappie seemed to nod and shake his head at the same time. “I’d like you to think I’m a genius, but I can’t imagine anyone but an amateur being fooled by this. It’s as if they weren’t really serious about it.”
“Well, we can’t thank you enough, Cappie,” Rose said. “You’re the best.”
Cappie brushed away her compliment. “Nah, the right light, plus a few chemicals and a touch of photographic artistry. That’s all you need to do this job.”
“Right,” Rose said, winking elaborately. She discreetly placed an envelope where the documents had been. I guessed they’d agreed ahead of time on a fee for services.
I wasn’t quite finished with our expert. “If it’s such an amateur job, then why do you think they bothered to do this at all?”
Cappie shrugged. “They probably hired this out, and being unacquainted with the criminal element, they got gypped,” Cappie said.
I tried to imagine the meticulous Dorothy Leonard getting “gyped.”
Cappie continued. “Maybe it’s a stall, while they get some other paperwork through. Some deadline they had to meet, and this buys them time.” A slight grin formed on Cappie’s blemish-free face. “Or maybe they’re just stupid. Criminals usually are, you know. Did you hear the one about the bank robber who slipped a GIVE ME ALL YOUR MONEY note to the teller, written on the back of one of his own deposit slips?”
It was an old story, but we all laughed. I remembered similar stories from Matt. But I didn’t for a minute think Derek Byrne and Dorothy Leonard were stupid.
Now that we had the facts on the documents, I struggled to tie the crime to Yolanda’s murder. Neither John nor Derek thought she cared at all about the expansion, but it was possible that she discovered the fraud and decided to cash in on it. Anyone capable of dumping John Galigani could do anything, in my biased view.
Rose had begun to pace, her rhythm interrupted by obstacles common to a laboratory environment—a small centrifuge, power supplies, tanks of chemicals. I had the feeling our project was minuscule on the scale of things Cappie usually handled, and that he did it so quickly as a favor to the Galiganis.
“But assuming it was the library director and/or the assistant director—they’re intelligent people,” Rose said.
“Doesn’t mean they don’t do stupid things in a time of crisis,” Cappie said.
“I hope that’s it,” Rose said. “Otherwise, if they weren’t serious, they also wouldn’t be likely to kill someone to keep from being exposed.”
“Good point,” I said.
And bad for John’s case, I thought.
ON THE WAY TO HER CAR, Rose and I linked arms. We walked in silence, until I inadvertently shared my thoughts. “I wonder if John knows about the forged documents?” I mumbled the words to myself, then caught my breath when I realized I’d spoken aloud. “Rose, I didn’t mean to imply that John …”
“Don’t worry, Gloria, I’m not going to snap at you. I hope I never do that again.”
My jaws relaxed. I could see the deep shades of fatigue around Rose’s eyes, the untended pallor of her cheeks. “It was perfectly understandable. You’re doing very well considering all that’s happened.”
Rose shrugged. “Not really, but thanks for saying that. And I don’t know why John hasn’t offered to help—like on TV when reporters or cops are accused of a crime they go out on their own investigating, and then duke it out with the real guilty one. I don’t know whether to be glad or sad he’s not doing that. He sits around the house playing with his laptop all day.”
I nodded. “People react differently.” Gloria, the insightful friend to the rescue.
“Frank is the really calm one, of course. Who knows where we’d all be if it weren’t for him? You know that’s one of the reasons he wanted to go into mortuary science, besides for the chemistry and, you know, biology. He knew it was partly a counseling job. He’s so good at it.”
I’d let her ramble on, barely listening. I was busy trying to determine if the information we’d just learned had anything to do with Yolanda’s murder. I should be pleased about the result, since it seemed to narrow down the list of likely perpetrators. Why else had we chased a forgery? Just because it was there? Were we getting sidetracked?
Rather than pursue that depressing line of reasoning, I made a chart in the air over Cappie’s day lilies. Until this meeting, I’d have bet on either of the Byrnes as Yolanda’s killer, principally over the moonshine tragedy. I wrote Brendan and Derek Byrne on my retina. With the new information from Cappie, the top candidates were Derek Byrne and Dorothy Leonard, whose project was furthered with the fake documents. It wasn’t too hard to keep track. Derek’s name overlapped both lists. I wondered if real law enforcement personnel used pseudo-Venn diagrams to solve murders, and how often they worked.
Rose chattered on. I tuned in in time to hear, “ …and where would we be without you, Gloria?”
I squeezed her arm and blinked back a tear, happy to have my friend back.
TWENTY-FOUR
“ANY PROGRESS?” Elaine asked. I’d rushed into my living room to take her call. Rose had dropped me off after a leisurely breakfast at our favorite bakery across from City Hall.
“We just came back from a meeting with a document specialist,” I said. “Those land ownership papers I told you about were definitely doctored. So it looks like—”
“Gloria, I’m not talking about the case.”
“Oh.” Matt and me. Not that I’d forgotten. I was nearly ready to tell Matt my decision. I thought of the hundreds of photographic plates I’d developed in my spectroscopy research. The thin glass plates needed to soak for a critical number of minutes in the developer fluid before they’d be ready to be lifted out and dropped into the fixer solution. I saw my answer through the murky liquid, the words taking shape, becoming more clear each second. “We’ve all been pretty busy,” I told Elaine.
A deep sigh from California. I pictured Elaine in her orangefa
bric cubicle at Berkeley University Laboratory—BUL, as we fondly referred to it. She’d be sitting in front of a monitor ringed with yellow adhesive notes, dressed in a classy summer outfit while engineers and scientists came and went all around her in cutoffs and T-shirts.
“I wish I were closer.”
“What would you do?” I asked her.
“Trick you two into a candlelight dinner with soft music and—”
“Neither of us likes candlelight. We can’t see well in low light and, besides, candles are a fire hazard.”
“OK, I give up. Tell me about the murder case.”
I briefed Elaine on the newest information, even before I’d had a chance to tell Matt, I realized.
“So, your victim could have uncovered this fraud, or she could have just been there in the library and overheard something about the forgery.”
“It looks that way.”
“Nothing to do with all that moonshine research you’ve been doing?”
“I guess not.”
Beep. A call-waiting signal.
“That’s me,” Elaine said. “I’d better get back to work. Think romance!”
I laughed and hung up. And went back to thoughts of murder.
BY NOON, I’d outlined a plan of action. Step one—talk to Matt about Cappie’s analysis—was thwarted when I had to leave a message on his machine. Step two—confront Dorothy Leonard—met an impediment when my phone rang.
Boric Acid Murder, The Page 18