by John Moss
“The gunman worked for the Ciccone family, but he was from Italy, an Albanian refugee, right?” Morgan looked at Spivak for agreement.
“Yeah. Who told you he was from Albania?”
“I heard it around.”
“Who from?”
“I called a friend.”
“Just a guy you know.”
“A friend, we went to school together, Jarvis Collegiate.”
“No shit! I went there too.”
“Before my time.”
“How old are you!”
“Younger than you, Spivak.”
“Everyone’s younger than me. Look at this guy.” He nodded toward Eeyore Stritch. “I knew his father.”
“I thought you were Jamaican?” said Morgan, turning to the other man. “You’re living a lie.”
“I’m not Jamaican, man. I keep telling you that,” he said in a rolling West Indian cadence. “You guys can’t tell an accent.”
“Maybe if you shaved your head,” said Spivak as he started coughing.
“That’s racial stereotyping,” said Stritch. “I don’t call you a slap-head Slovak —”
“The shooter,” said Morgan. “He had no connections with the local community, he was taken on by Ciccone as a favour.”
“To whom?”
“We don’t know. Nobody knows. That’s the thing, nobody knows.”
“So where are you going with this?” said Spivak, between hacking and trying to breathe. “Goddamn it,” he said. “I gotta quite smoking.” He took a slow, shallow breath. “You’re saying what?”
“Well,” said Morgan, “if it wasn’t the bad guys who killed Vittorio Ciccone, then maybe it was the good guys.”
“Shit, Morgan,” exclaimed Spivak. “It’s one thing to set him up for a fall, if that’s what those bozos in Hamilton were doing, but killing him, man, that’s nowhere, that didn’t happen.”
“Why not? If Miranda’s testimony was gonna get him off —”
“Then why not kill Miranda?”
“Because she’s a cop. I’m saying, if cops were in on this, they’d go for the direct hit. There’d be heavier repercussions if they killed another cop, a good cop, than if they exterminated a bad guy.”
“No, Morgan. Any cop devious enough to hire a hitman knows there are an infinite number of replacements for Ciccone, just waiting for their turn to step up to the plate.”
“It sounds plausible to me,” said Stritch.
“I’m not saying it’s not plausible, for Chrissakes, I’m saying it didn’t happen.” Spivak glowered at his partner.
In the background, the rows of chairs were filling with Ciccone family and close associates. A solemn hush spread through the cemetery as a priest stepped up to the head of the casket. They could not hear what he was saying. Then he nodded to Frankie Ciccone and she nodded to someone else, and a hundred white doves were released from the shadows behind the mausoleum to rise in a fluttering melee of feathers and thumping air into the bright June sky. There was a gasp from the crowd expressing amazement, amusement, and an outpouring of grief.
“Be hard to top that,” said Spivak.
Just then a bugler hidden from view inside the crypt started playing Taps, which echoed within the stone chamber and emerged in a resounding cacophony of thunder and brass. Without a break, the bugler switched to Reveille and as he did so emerged from the shadows to stand full-throated in the doorway of the tomb, engulfed in flowers, and the notes rang out as crisp and clean as a prayer.
“Yeah,” said Morgan, “or that.”
The service proceeded, but instead of the obsequies ending with the casket being lowered into the ground, it was hoisted on the shoulders of six burley pallbearers who stood waiting as a passageway was cleared through the flowers, then started to carry it into the crypt, but stopped when someone realized their load was being carried too high to clear the lintel. Excessively efficient attendants had already removed the satin-covered gurney, and the pallbearers had to lower the casket from above their shoulders, a more cumbersome task than might have been expected as they struggled to avoid the indignity of allowing Vittorio’s head to rise higher than his feet. One of the pallbearers stumbled but the other five recovered equilibrium and he sheepishly rejoined them as they disappeared with the casket into the dark shadows of the mausoleum.
After they came out, the priest and Frankie Ciccone and her stepchildren, who were adults, their mother having died when they were in their teens, went into the dark chamber. One by one, the priest and then each of the four grown children came out and, after a considerable time, the widow emerged and the great door, molded in the manner of one of the Ghiberti doors on the southernmost side of the campanile in Florence, was swung shut with a heavy clang and the giant key turned to lock it in place until the necessity should arise for another Ciccone to join Vittorio. His first wife, who had been born in Toronto, was buried in Tuscany where her people originated, outside the town of Arezzo.
Morgan walked down to where the last few guests were mingling, some of them reading the cards on the floral arrangements and hoping to have a word with Frankie Ciccone, although she was being shielded by the cluster of pallbearers who now acted as a barricade, letting though one or two at a time as the widow indicated by the most subtle of eye movements. Morgan stood off to the side, surveying the scene. Spivak and Stritch had gone back to Headquarters. The remaining police presence had vanished.
Frankie Ciccone was sitting on the edge of her folding chair, comforting an elderly woman dressed in habitual black. Her children had gone back to the house where immediate family was gathering for a small reception. She glanced through the barricade and caught Morgan’s eye. She dropped her eyelids in a subtle gesture and allowed the hint of a smile to compress her lips.
Morgan tilted his head to the side in a restrained expression of sympathy.
Her entourage knew Morgan was a homicide detective. He was seldom involved directly in the family’s affairs. In the interpenetrating worlds of crime and the law, people know each other. No one was surprised when the widow rose to her feet and walked in his direction. In fact, the others fell away to let the two of them converse in private, off the record, on a one-to-one basis.
“David,” she said.
“Francine. Sorry for your loss,” he said.
“Are you here professionally?”
“Yes and no.”
“For the no part, thank you.”
“I am sorry, Frankie.”
“Me too. He was a bastard, Morgan, but he was a great man.”
He smiled at the grieving widow. She truly believed her husband could be ranked in death with bishops and senators and business tycoons. While alive, it had been enough that he lived in their neighbourhood. Now she envisioned him as their peer. By the fact of his death, if not the manner of his dying, she as his widow had been moved up the social scale. From here on she would be concerned with family philanthropies, not business.
“He did a lot of good things, David.”
Morgan shrugged without rancour. This was not the time for aspersions. “You’ve come a long way since J.C.V.I.,” he said.
“Jarvis Collegiate and Vocational Institute, rah rah rah. Yeah. Do my roots show? Just thinking about it makes you want to burst into songs from Grease.”
“You spend more time at Les Mis and Phantom and Cats, I hear.”
“Yes, David, I do, or I did. Vittorio loved those shows. Myself, I’d rather watch John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John, over and over, but there you are.”
“There you are,” he agreed. “Are your people any closer to finding the Albanian?”
“My people? No, they’re not. And yours?”
“No leads.”
The pallbearers were standing in a cluster, making a show of not paying attention to the widow and the detective. They were at a level in her husband’s organization where it would not have occurred to them it was anything but business.
The remaining mourners had wan
dered off, some to spend a contemplative hour among the graves, complimenting themselves on being alive, reading tombstones and monuments, enjoying the flowers and trees, most to pursue the daily details of their lives.
“How’s your partner?” asked Frankie. “I heard Vittorio was the second murder on her watch in a week.”
“Yeah, plus two down in the Niagara Peninsula. You know about them?”
She looked up at him and smiled at his apparent naiveté. There was a hard line between gossip and business — especially gossip that concerned the execution of her husband. She did not answer.
Morgan for the first time noticed the rawness around her eyes and recognized her genuine grief, obscured by her composure and the elaborate funeral rites she had orchestrated.
“Let’s meander for a bit,” she said to Morgan, taking his arm.
They walked along a winding pathway up out of the mausoleum quarter and into more modestly occupied terrain, talking quietly. The six pallbearers followed in a cluster behind them at a discreet distance.
“Do you hear from Lucy?” she asked.
“My Lucy? No.…” The two women had met at university, where all three of them shared a class in forensic psychopathology. Morgan and Lucy did not get together until after they graduated, after Morgan returned from nearly two years in Europe, finding and losing himself, and had briefly enrolled in graduate school, before dropping out, taking a diploma in criminology, and joining the police force.
When he and Lucy were married, they received a sterling silver tea service from Vittorio and Francine Ciccone, which they returned with a conciliatory note. Ciccone was still on his way up then, and a newly remarried widower. Jarvis Collegiate and their Cabbagetown childhood were a long way behind both David Morgan and Francine Ciccone. Lucy had grown up safely in Scarborough.
From time to time, he and the gangster’s wife crossed paths — not that they were in the same social circles. They were always polite and quite formal with each other, meeting in the foyers of theatres, amid the bustle of significant public events — and invariably there was an exchange between them, flashed in a glance, that acknowledged they might have been lovers, might have been married, had things been different. Even in grade nine, there was chemistry between them. Morgan was a loner — that’s what she found attractive — and she was poised for success, and he found that exciting. But what attracted them to each other was what kept them apart.
She talked about her stepchildren. She and Vittorio never had any of their own. That would have been an insult to his first wife. When Frankie explained this, Morgan was baffled. She said it matter-of-factly and went on to claim that was the only way he held back. She had never felt, otherwise, anything but the best — she was his absolute true love. It was her he wanted to spend eternity with, in their mausoleum. He had no desire to join his first wife in Arezzo.
“I must leave in a minute. There is a reception at the house.”
She stopped, drawing Morgan back in mid-stride. Reaching into her purse, she withdrew a card and handed it to him.
“It has my number on it. Call me.”
“Unlisted, I imagine.”
She looked up at him and smiled, and then her eyes turned hard. “I can’t help you on this, David. But you can help me. I want Vittorio’s killers. I know who they are. I want them dead. Then I will be a Rosedale widow, which in this world is not such a bad thing to be.”
“The Albanian connection?”
“Nothing, David. I can say nothing more.” She leaned up and kissed him on the cheek. “You may not be a great man, David Morgan, but you are a good man.”
She released his arm, turned, and walked over to her burly entourage without looking back. He watched as they disappeared among the rows of tombstones, down into the valley of the dead, where the mausoleums were clustered side by side, as close as houses in suburbia.
Back at his desk, Morgan found himself ruminating about what Frankie Ciccone had said. He was not sure whether to feel insulted by her compliment, with its implied limitations, or flattered by what some might take as an insult, coming as it did from a mobster’s widow.
No, he thought, I have never aspired to greatness. God knows I am a humble and sensitive man. He chuckled to himself. As for being good, I think that’s something someone does, not what someone is. By that measure, sometimes I’m good, sometimes not so good.
The telephone rang. It was Miranda.
“How’s New York?”
“Fine, they want us around for a bit.”
“Doing what?”
“Waiting, mostly.”
“You still at the Best Western?”
“No, I’ve moved in with Elke. She lives in the Village, a loft. She’s doing all right for herself.”
“You sure that’s a good idea?”
“You mean, her life might still be on the line?”
“Yeah, that too. I meant maybe you’re too close for your own good.”
“I don’t think she’s in any danger. The wine scam’s over and done with. Anyway, I’m off duty, remember.”
“And living with a prime suspect.”
“Staying with! And she’s not a suspect.”
“About as close as you can get, come on.”
“Morgan, there’s more than you know.”
He backed away. He trusted her judgement, especially in matters like this. If she knew things he didn’t, then her call was okay.
“Is the NYPD aware you’re on leave?”
“Yes and no. My friend, Captain Clancy, he’s running the investigation on the ex-boyfriend’s execution. He knows. Everyone else in New York assumes I’m working.”
“And he doesn’t think it’s strange you’re staying with Elke?”
“Like I said, there’s more than you know. He thinks I’m acting as her bodyguard until we can head back. He’s grateful.”
“Did you say execution?”
“When?”
“Just now. You said the boyfriend was executed.”
“That’s part of what you’re not caught up about. I told you he was gunned down outside his brownstone, and that Elke wasn’t implicated, that I covered for her. Well, we figured the ex was picked off by a sniper setting off a police barrage — it was a major shootout, no one would have paid much attention to a guy with a smoking gun. But the dead man never fired a shot. He was riddled like a sieve — by the time they got him to the morgue most of his blood had drained out, even without a heartbeat. The medical examiners had a hell of a job sorting out the slugs in the guy’s body, but they found one that didn’t match.”
“It was a professional hit.”
“Looks that way, for sure.”
“And Elke? They buy that she wasn’t the hostage-taker?”
“No reason not to. I’m the only living witness. Elke and I had time to talk and, Morgan, I’m convinced the ex-boyfriend was behind her abduction and the attempt on her life.”
“You’re doing a lot of that these days.”
“What? Talking?”
“Being a witness. I just came back from the Ciccone funeral.”
“How was it?”
“Big.”
“Vulgar?”
“Extravagant. I’d say opulent bad taste. I was talking to Francine Ciccone.”
“How’s Frankie?” said Miranda, who was acutely aware Morgan had known her in high school.
“She’s holding up well. It becomes her, being a widow. She was born to grieve with a smile. She’s doing fine.”
“Morgan, I can tell. You never told me! You used to date, didn’t you? It’s in your voice. Didn’t you?”
“No way. But we thought about it. That was a long time ago. She’s okay, I like her.”
“Talk about dangerous company.”
“So when are you coming back?”
“Clancy wants us to hang around. Did it register, what I told you? I think the ex-boyfriend set Elke up to be killed.”
“Yeah, I’ve been thinking it over. Who wo
uld want to take out a high-living accountant? He must have been on the Mafia’s payroll.”
“You’re on the right track, Morgan. I didn’t believe it at first. His face didn’t show enough character to be a bad guy. Turns out he did the personal tax returns for a bunch of mobsters. Nothing illegal. He moonlighted doing the accounts for some very tough people. He wasn’t breaking any laws. But he screwed up; he tried to sell some wine he had received as a legitimate payout. He sold it the wrong way. Big trouble. His ex-girlfriend, Elke, was about to expose the scam.”
“Blow it up.”
“So to speak. He thought he could squeeze out of it by offering up Elke as a sacrificial lamb. Some lamb! She had already broken off the romantic side of their relationship when she discovered whose taxes he was doing, and because he was, in her words, shallow as a mirror and dull as a dildo.”
“Very precise. I wonder why she took up with him in the first place.”
“Yeah, well, she didn’t associate the confusion about the ChâteauNeuf-du-Pape with his mob connections, she took him at his word that it came from an estate his insurance company was settling. When she couldn’t sort out the provenance, she went north on the ex-boyfriend’s insistence to track it through your friend at Millennium Wines. She never got beyond their parking lot. By the time she did her escape back to New York, she had it figured out. She was not happy with the guy, Morgan. He had set her up to be killed. She didn’t flinch when he died. It hardly seemed to register.”
“I want to tell you about the funeral. There was no one not there.”
“That’s appropriately cryptic.”
“No, there’s something going on. It wasn’t a hit by the mob, I’m sure of that, and it wasn’t our guys, but it was a professional job.”
“Do you think the elusive Mr. Savage is involved? You once suggested Ciccone might have deadly enemies in the wine trade.”
“Yeah, you’re not the only connection between Philip Carter and Vittorio Ciccone. Since the mob in New York has a lethal interest in the Ninth Chateau, almost certainly the Ciccone family does as well. Mr. Savage is pivotal. But he seems to be independent from either New York or Toronto. Bonnydoon, maybe that’s where I should be looking, in the ashes, sifting the debris —”