I knew he wasn’t referring to the weather.
Danucci emptied his glass, then brought it down hard on the bar. “Tina was my daughter, Cuddy. We had our problems, she was always more her mother’s daughter than her father’s, but that happens, right?”
He didn’t seem to need my answer.
“Girl hits a certain age, she’s got to rebel. Okay, fine. She goes off on her own. Fuck, we did the same thing when we were eighteen, right? Only I made sure she was safe, get me? Primo, he checked out the modeling agency. No porno, no kinky shit. She flopped at my brother’s apartment a while, then into a family building, my cousin Ooch there in the basement. Guy was a tiger in the ring, Cuddy. One fight he had, undercard in the early sixties, he takes enough punches the first two rounds to kill a horse, then knocks the guy out middle of the third. Know what I do now?”
I didn’t like Danucci being so erratic, jumping from one topic to the next. I’d seen grief like that in Vietnam, the kind of strobe-light emotion that turned into violence. Easily.
The cold stare. “I said, know what I do now?”
“No, I don’t.”
“I build strip malls. Not strip joints. The little eight- or ten-store things, with maybe an anchor like a supermarket or a discount house one end. Lay down an apron of asphalt, paint some white lines, you got yourself the American Dream. One-stop shopping. All the guys ten years ago put up the highrise office buildings, they’re in bankruptcy court now, twenty guys’ hands in their pockets. Me, I never had a mall go bad. Never, not one. Hard times, they might not make me a fortune, but every week, every year, people got to buy food and clothes, Cuddy, and they stop at my malls to do it.”
For something to do, I drank a little beer.
“That’s where I am, I get the call. I’m in a meeting, we just came back from the site, a new one down near Philly. It was a tough deal to put together, and I was doing it, getting it through this guy’s skull that it’s going forward, no matter what he thinks. I’m in this meeting, I still have my hard hat with me, and this guy’s secretary comes in and he fucking near bites her head off. She’s probably been there three hours on her own time by then, but she looks kind of sick and says to me, ‘Mr. Danucci, it’s your brother on the phone.’ And so I say, ‘I’ll call him back,’ and the guy starts to chew out his secretary some more, and she says, ‘I think it’s very important.’ I got to remember that girl, she stood up without letting on. Doing her job. I tell the guy who’s ragging her to shut the fuck up, I can take the call. So here I am, in this conference room with a view of some dirty river they got down there, and my brother Vinnie tells me over the telephone that my Tina is dead.”
Danucci squeezed his eyes shut. He reached over the bar, grabbed the Scotch bottle itself and just slugged from it until I thought he’d drown. Then he kept hold of the bottle by its neck and coughed once.
“I took that hard hat, Cuddy, and I tried to throw it through the window. The glass didn’t give, so I tried it with the phone. Then the guy I’m with figures he’s next, he don’t get me a seat on the first plane.”
Danucci drew a breath, the hard, roaring kind he’d taken earlier. “You were a cop, right?”
“Just in the Army.”
“Same difference. You know what the cops in Boston think about this?”
I pictured Holt, smugly feeding me little chunks like a seal. Keeping me from seeing the file and the name “Danucci” appearing somewhere in it, maybe all over it.
Joseph Danucci said, “They think, ‘What do you know, there is a fucking God.’ They think, ‘We been trying to crucify Tommy the Temper for sixty fucking years for twenty different rackets, and we couldn’t, and now his granddaughter’s a corpse, and we don’t got to do shit about it.’ ”
This wasn’t the time to bait him.
Danucci said, “They think it’s like ‘poetic justice,’ Cuddy. The capo’s grand-kid gets strangled by some fucking junkie cat burglar.”
He took another drink, less now that the level in the bottle was lower. Subconsciously, he seemed to want it to last, though I bet myself there was a case of it in a closet somewhere nearby.
Danucci gestured toward the door. “Primo says you’re working for some insurance outfit?”
“I’m private. The modeling agency your daughter worked with took out a policy on her to protect themselves. The company asked me to look into things.”
Danucci’s nostrils flared. “Oh, you’re gonna look into things, all right.”
He took a step toward me. Pretty steady for the booze he’d put away. I didn’t get up.
“You’re gonna find out who aced my daughter, pal.”
I didn’t say anything.
Another step. “And when you do, you’re going to tell me. You’re going to fill out whatever fucking forms the company makes you do, and you’re going to shrug your fucking shoulders when the cops come around asking questions.”
A third step. “But you’re going to tell me who aced my Tina.”
I said, “No.”
Danucci telegraphed the swing of the bottle by a full second. I was up and blocking the sweep of his right arm with my left, the bottle flying and smacking into a leather chair before it boloed to a stop, some Scotch gurgling onto the leather cushion.
Danucci’s breathing was almost deafening. “You … You …”
Then he turned away, starting for the bar before sinking into a chair without a bottle on it. He rubbed his face with his hands, then clasped them in front of him, a soldier assuming an unfamiliar stance in a chapel. “Should have been the happiest day of my life, Cuddy. I talked to my father that morning. The Order of the Cross, like a Holy Name Society thing, it was making him president or whatever. All his life, Pop wanted that. To have some kind of … recognition besides the rackets. The next night, Claudette and me were going in town, have dinner with Tina for her birthday, stay over at the South End house. My brother—Vinnie?—he did such a good job representing my company, they made him a partner at this old-line law firm in Boston wouldn’t have let him take out the garbage twenty years ago. The business was going good, like the deal in Philly coming together. It was like everything was coming together. Sinatra in the song, ‘a very good year,’ you know? Then that phone call, looking at the filthy river from this guy’s office. …”
I went over to the chair with the Johnny Walker Black, picking up the bottle and setting it on the counter of the bar.
Behind me, Danucci said, “Our ways, they don’t work so good for this kind of thing, Cuddy. Somebody gets hit, you can usually trace it back up the line, figure out who ordered the contract. Something like this, this … random kind of thing, we got feelers out on the street. But they should have turned something by now, and they haven’t given us shit.”
I said, “I’m not going to give you a name so you can kill the guy.”
Danucci looked up at me now, the dead-eyed stare, his tugged-down tie the only part of him moving. “What, you think, you give the name to the cops and they lock him up, he’s some kind of safe from us?”
“I might not get that far. My job is to be sure the people at the agency didn’t have her killed to collect on the policy. I decide they didn’t, I can stop.”
Danucci thought about that. “We pay you to keep going.”
“No.”
“You see The Godfather?”
“Yes.”
“That Coppola, he got a lot of it right. Not everything, but a lot. We pay you with your life.”
An offer I couldn’t refuse. “I already have my life.”
“Not if I decide otherwise.”
“You decide otherwise, send two of your best. They don’t come back when you expect them, don’t call anybody, don’t even pack. Just run for your life.”
Danucci grinned, the big jaw jutting. Not a pretty sight. “You don’t scare, huh?”
“I scare. I just don’t change my mind.”
Danucci sat there, maybe thinking what he was going to say next, may
be deciding which two of his best he was going to send. Maybe just remembering his daughter. Finally, he said, “You find out who killed Tina, you tell the cops?”
“Probably.”
“Then we can compromise here. You don’t got to tell me the guy’s name, but you stay on the thing till you find the cock-sucker who done this. Then you give him up to the cops. We’ll take it from there.”
“And if I don’t stay on the case?”
The grin again. “Life is sweet, Cuddy. Do yourself a favor, taste it a little longer.”
When I didn’t say anything more, Danucci said, “Okay, we got a deal, and you got our cooperation. One hundred percent. Anything you need, Primo’ll be right there.”
“I work alone.”
“Fine. You need something, you give him a call.”
Danucci seemed calm, almost rational. I tried to figure how much of what I’d seen with the bottle was an act. I thought, not much. He just went in and out like that. At least over his daughter’s murder.
“I don’t expect to be calling him.”
Danucci went to the desk and used a pen to scribble some lines on a business card. Standing tall, his hair was about level with my chin. “This is Primo’s apartment number, best way to reach him. This one’s my home number here, you need it.”
I took the card.
“You want to see the place in the South End?”
“It would help.”
“I’ll call Ooch right now.”
“It won’t be tonight.”
“Fine. Whenever. What else you need?”
“I’d like to talk with your wife and your brother.”
“Claudette and Vinnie? Why?”
“They knew your daughter. I didn’t.”
“You think it’ll help, okay. When?”
“Now would be good.”
Joseph Danucci nodded once, the developer who could be decisive. “You got it.”
Nine
SHE WAS DEFINITELY THE tallest Vietnamese woman I had ever seen.
At least five and a half feet in just slippers like a ballerina, Joseph Danucci’s wife must have seemed a giant in her home country. She came into the den haltingly, taking a step before returning to the door and closing it, as though she were the guest in my home and wanted to make a good impression.
She stopped a body length away from me. “I am Claudette Danucci. My husband say I speak with you.”
The good eye wandered a little over me, the glass eye steady, its lid coining down only halfway as she blinked.
“Again, Mrs. Danucci, I’m sorry about your daughter.”
A brief nod. “You will drink?”
I’d pitched the beer. “No. Thank you.”
“You will sit?”
I took the unstained chair. Danucci lowered herself into the couch as though a glass of water were balanced on her head. If Mau Tim had half her mother’s grace, I could understand her success as anything, model included.
“Mrs. Danucci, I’m investigating the death of your daughter for an insurance company.”
Another brief nod.
“It would help me if you could tell me something about her.”
She waited a moment. “I could tell you many things about her. I could tell you her first word to me when she is one year. I could tell you how many time I brush her hair when she is five year. I could tell you how there is a knife in my heart because I must think of these things to tell you them.”
I dropped my head.
Her voice changed. “I am ashame, Mr. Cuddy.”
I looked back up at Claudette Danucci. A large tear glided down along her nose from the good eye, nothing from the glass one.
“I am ashame because I embarrass the man my husband tell me will find the killer of my child.”
“Mrs. Danucci, you have every right to be upset.”
She turned her face, both eyes fixing on me. “You were in Vietnam?”
“Yes.”
“In Vietnam, the life of a woman is her children. I can have one child only, and now she is take from me.”
I decided to go with her. “You met your husband in Vietnam?”
“Yes. I was … You know what ‘tea girl’ mean?”
“I do.” It was slang for a bar girl who got GIs to buy her drinks, usually iced tea masquerading as liquor.
“When my husband meet me, I am tea girl. Do you know why I am tea girl?”
“Mrs. Danucci, you don’t—”
“I am tea girl because I am rape by your black soldiers. I am good Catholic girl, Mr. Cuddy. I hear stories from the French time, about the Morocco black French. They rape and kill peasant girls in the village. Stories say, that not happen in the city, but it happen to me. I am too tall for Vietnam man. I think, I find America man to love me. America black soldiers find me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No. I want to tell you these things. You will see. I am tea girl because my family not want me after the America black soldiers have me. I am lucky. I am pretty and I am different because I am tall. I not have to eat rats or snakes, to steal to live. I get many gift from PX. I have many America white soldiers. I get ma tuu, the marijuana, to help forget.
“Then I meet my husband. He is different. He want to buy dinner, not drink. He bring me flowers to my apartment. He is honorable man, my husband. He walk with me in the streets. The old women say things in Vietnam words, names they have for the America invaders and women like me with them. My husband know these things, and still he walk with me.
“One day, I find out, I am pregnant. With my daughter. The other tea girls, they say, ‘Claudette, you take this herb, it make the baby go away quick. Quick, before the America soldier see the baby inside you.’ I do not want abortion, Mr. Cuddy. I want the baby of the man I want to be my husband. You know what happen to the children of America soldier and Vietnam woman in Vietnam?”
I’d seen the kids wandering Saigon, though there weren’t so many of them when I was there. Stringy, sallow girls with blue eyes that didn’t slant quite right. Husky, mocha boys with broad noses and ripply hair. Ostracized, even beaten or stoned by the relatively homogeneous Vietnamese.
“The children of the mothers who stay in Vietnam, they have nothing. The America soldiers are fathers but not husbands. They come to Vietnam and leave, but the mothers stay and the children stay and they have nothing.
“But my husband find out I am pregnant, he is happy. He say, ‘I will marry you, Claudette. I will take you back to The World in the plane.’ The other girls, they say, ‘Claudette, all the soldiers say that, so you will still bum-bum with them until near time baby come.’ But my husband is different. He find out I am pregnant, he take me out to big dinner. Celebration. We coming home to my apartment, we see two QC.”
“QC” was short for “Quan Canh,” the South Vietnamese military police.
“My husband, he want to tell them how he is happy. They curse at him in Vietnam words. He know some words, he hear other girls use. He get mad, he punch one QC. The other hit him with stick and break stick. I scream and use my”—her hands fluttered up—“nails to scratch his face. QC use his stick that is broke to hit me in face. My … ” This time her hand fluttered toward her glass eye, but stopped and came back to her lap. “They run away from us. I get other America soldier to stop, get ambulance, to get … ”
She stopped, took a breath. “I am in hospital. I do not lose my baby, but my eye is … gone. Not in my head. My husband come see me. He have bandage around his head, and he cry. My husband cry for my eye, Mr. Cuddy. He is honorable man, and he ‘sponsor’ me. I must see government officials, Vietnam men and America men, every day for many day. I must give some money, then same ones more money. But I get out, my daughter still inside me. I come to The World. And you know what I find?”
“No.”
“I find The World is strange place. In Vietnam, new wife go to house of the mother of her husband and work for mother. Work hard. What the mother want new wife to do, new wi
fe must do, no questions. Here, the father of my husband is not please with new Vietnam wife. The friends of my husband not please with new Vietnam wife. But the mother of my husband is a beautiful woman. I have so little English, I say to her, ‘What need you done?’ She say, ‘You talk like I do, I first come to America. You pregnant, Claudette. You … eye. You sit. I work for you.’ I love my husband, and I love the mother of my husband, who make me call her ‘Amatina.’ Her name from Italy. So when my daughter is born, and she has the beautiful eyes, the violet eyes, we give her name ‘Amatina,’ too.”
Claudette Danucci swallowed with difficulty. “We call my daughter ‘Tina,’ because the mother of my husband say she cannot tell who we want when we call ‘Amatina.’ The mother of my husband teach me the things of Italy my husband like. In Vietnam, I learn to cook with mint and basil, cilantro and nuoc mam from the fish. From Amatina, I learn to cook with mozzarella and oregano, but also the fish, the anchovy, they use too. From Amatina, I learn to behave for the father of my husband, and even he start to like Vietnam wife of his son. And daughter of his son, with the eyes of his wife from Italy. Six, seven year ago, when Amatina … get sick, my daughter and me, we take care of her here, in this house. When Amatina … die, we take care of the father of my husband, who has the heart attack in his house and cannot care for himself. We are family, Mr. Cuddy. Like in Vietnam, I teach my daughter respect for the family of her father.”
“Even though her father’s family was a crime family.”
Claudette Danucci fired up. “What is crime, Mr. Cuddy? What is crime when you are rape by America ‘protectors’ and beat by your own police and rob by your own government? What is crime when your whole country is victim?”
I didn’t have an answer for her. “When did your daughter move to Boston?”
She lost the fire. “Year ago.”
“Why?”
“She …” Danucci stopped, thought, and started again. “She want to be model in pictures. Many people in Boston tell her she is beautiful for model.”
“How did you feel about that?”
“I did not like it. A daughter stay with her family until she find a husband. That is still the best way.”
Shallow Graves Page 8