“How did your husband feel?”
“He did not like it, too. The city is … not safe, he say.”
“Your daughter stayed for a while with her uncle?”
“Yes, but then my husband say, Tina, you must stay in the house of my father on Falmouth Street. Cousin Ooch, he protect you there.’ ”
“Tina agreed to that?”
“Yes. She even say that is better. Vincent apartment is not so large, and in Falmouth Street she can live for no money.”
George Yulin had said Mau Tim had lived for a while with Oscar Puriefoy, too, but after Claudette Danucci’s experience with black soldiers, I wasn’t about to bring it up. “When did your daughter change her name?”
The good eye wandered, the glass one staying fixed on my left shoulder. “She all the time ask me about Vietnam. About what we do there, names we have for things. She asked me Vietnam word for ‘violet,’ for her eyes. I tell her ‘mau tim.’ ”
Everyone else so far had pronounced it “mahow tim.” Danucci said it more like “maw teem.”
“When my daughter was little girl, I would call her mau tim when only she and me there because my husband want her to be all-America. Then she ask me last year, Vietnam word for model, but she already know it is ‘mau’ because she say, she look it up in dictionary. It is same word, but say different.”
Claudette Danucci looked up at me. “She decide to use that name, not Amatina or Tina. My husband not like this, too.”
“Why did she change her last name to Dani?”
The good eye closed, the glass one’s lid again only halfway down. “I think she want to … break away. In Vietnam, when girl decide to leave village to go to city, her mother say, ‘That is my Saigon daughter.’ My daughter want to break away from family, live alone in city.”
“The way her uncle did?”
Both eyes opened. “The brother of my husband is a lawyer. He decide his name to be different for business.”
“Mrs. Danucci, I’m sorry to have to ask you these—”
“Ask.”
“Did your daughter ever mention someone named Shawn to you?”
“Shawn?”
“Yes. Maybe a boyfriend from school?”
“No. My husband very strict with our daughter when she live here.”
“How about after that?”
“After?”
“Did you speak with your daughter much after she moved to Boston?”
“Yes. I talk with her on telephone all the time. I see her sometime for lunch when I drive to Boston.”
“Did she mention any boyfriends then?”
The head lifted. “No.”
“Did she seem happy to you?”
Reluctantly, I thought, Claudette Danucci said, “Yes. Pretty happy.”
“She enjoyed modeling?”
“She say, ‘It is boring. You must hold things and stand stupid.’ But yes, she most of time like the things she do, the people she know, her friends.”
“Did she seem happy at the agency?”
Claudette Danucci cocked her head.
“I mean, was she satisfied with Lindqvist and Yulin representing her?”
“Oh.” Danucci seemed to think about it. “She say, people tell her she must go to New York for modeling.”
“Visit there, or live there?”
It was obviously a question Danucci had already thought about. “Live, I think.”
“Did your daughter talk with you about that?”
“No. But I think …”
“Yes?”
“I think maybe she decide to go there.”
“To New York?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because on phone …” For the first time, the good eye completely filled, and she reached into the cuff of her dress for a hankie. She sobbed very quietly into the cloth for a moment, then wiped that eye. The glass one stayed at half-mast, the more hardened mourner at a funeral.
“I am sorry, Mr. Cuddy.”
“I understand.”
“The day … the day she die, we talk on phone. She seem excited.”
“What did you talk about?”
“The trip of her father to Philadelphia, the dinner my husband and I take her to the next night in Boston. She was very busy on a … shoot somewhere that week, so I must catch her up on all family things. She tell me she have something exciting to say at dinner. Something she decide to do.”
“Move to New York?”
The hand fluttered. “I am afraid yes.”
“Afraid?”
“The dinner is suppose to be happy time. A birthday for our daughter and her father and me. I do not want her to … destroy the happy time with her … news.”
Suddenly fierce, Claudette Danucci passed the handkerchief across her face. “Mr. Cuddy, in Vietnam, I am call ‘Viet Kieu’ because I am Vietnam woman who come here to America. In Vietnam, the children eat sand to fill their belly with something. In Vietnam I cannot hope to work in a house one-half beautiful like the one I live in here with my husband. I have beautiful car my husband give me. I have five hundred dollar to spend on beautiful handbag that maybe go with three dress I wear. Five hundred dollar, a whole family live for year in Vietnam. Whole family, wait in Vietnam office, sleep on floor, on dirt outside, for month, two month, to come here to America.”
Her voice surged. “I tell you these things so you will understand, Mr. Cuddy. I see hard things in my life. But nothing so hard like when I sit in my living room and the telephone ring and the brother of my husband from Boston tell me my daughter is dead. I give up all I have, I give my other eye, for my daughter to live again. Do you understand this?”
She was riveting, the good eye on me and the glass eye on me, too. “Yes.”
“When I sleep, I dream. Before my daughter die, if I dream of things in Vietnam, bad things, hard things, I dream of these things in Vietnam words. When I dream of things here, in America, good things, beautiful things, I dream in America words. Now my daughter is dead, and I dream in Vietnam words, all things in Vietnam words.”
“I—”
“You promise me, Mr. Cuddy. You find the one kill my daughter.”
“Mrs. Danucci—”
“You find him, you tell me.”
“Mrs.—”
“You promise!”
I promised.
Ten
THERE WAS AN AWKWARD moment as Claudette Danucci stood and moved toward the door to the den. Awkward, because Vincent Dani had knocked and then come in without waiting for an answer, saying “Claudette?” His brother’s wife just shook her head, stumbling a little as she passed. Dani gripped her at the shoulders, steadying her. His hands lingered a beat longer than necessary, his eyes a beat longer than that as she patted his left hand and went out the door, shutting it gently behind her.
Turning to me, Dani had the look of a cat caught drooling at the family canary. He stiffened, saying, “If I were you, Mr. Cuddy, I would not upset my brother’s wife.”
I was thinking, funny how “upset” almost rhymed with “covet.”
Dani came all the way into the room, taking the part of the couch that his sister-in-law had used, then shifting his rump a little, perhaps in reaction to her residual warmth on the seat. “My brother said you’d like to speak to each of us?”
“I would, thanks. What law firm are you with, Mr. Dani?”
“Winant, Terwiliger, and Stevens.”
Joseph Danucci had said that his brother had made partner at an old-line firm. “Old-line” didn’t quite do Winant, et al., justice. A hundred and fifty years in Boston, principal tenant of a harborside skyscraper, the firm was one of the five premier hives for attorneys in the city.
“How long have you been with them?”
“Since law school.”
“Which was?”
“Eight years ago.” Dani crossed his legs. “Is this line of questioning headed somewhere, Mr. Cuddy?”
“I don’t know. I
guess I was wondering why your brother decided to join the family business and you didn’t.”
Dani bridled. “My brother has an ‘i’ at the end of his last name and pictures of Italian-American athletes in his den and that makes him Mafia, right?”
“Your brother’s the son of Tommy Danucci and sends a guy like Primo to see me, there’s a presumption.”
Dani’s lips auditioned a smile. “Primo said you’d had a year of law school.”
I was impressed. “Primo found out a lot in the time he had.”
“Primo’s what my father would call a ‘situation guy.’ ”
“Maybe he ought to be doing this instead of me.”
“No. No, you send in somebody like Primo to assess things, report back. He lacks what my father would call ‘ambition.’ ”
“Takes some ambition to aim at Winant, Terwiliger as a target and hit the bull’s-eye.”
Dani’s lips found the smirk line and held it. “I thought you were looking into my niece’s death.”
“I am. What can you tell me about it?”
“Nothing beyond a profile of the man who did it.”
“I’m listening.”
“Young, poor, probably on drugs, and not well versed in the lore of organized crime.”
Dani seemed awfully cool about Mau Tim’s death. Almost detached. “Why is that?”
“Hitting a building that’s ‘connected,’ Mr. Cuddy.”
“I thought you were one of the trustees, counselor.”
“I am.”
“And you filled out the property report.”
“Yes.”
“I’m wondering about the necklace.”
“The necklace?”
“The purple one. Made out of iolite?”
Dani maintained the even expression. “And gold. What about it?”
“Where’d it come from?”
Dani watched me for a moment. “It was a gift.”
“From?”
“After my mother died, my father had a bad spell, Mr. Cuddy. Heart attack, morose. I’d never … nobody had ever seen him like that. Tommy the Temper in a state of weakness.”
“And?”
“And my brother made him comfortable here. I couldn’t do that much … I was living in a one-bedroom apartment in Cambridge, and my father needed round-the-clock care but didn’t want nurses and so on. Claudette was like a slave to him.”
“Which changed his mind about her?”
Dani’s face stayed neutral. “What do you mean?”
“I was under the impression he wasn’t too pleased about his son’s war bride.”
Dani sat back, weighing something. “My father saw Joey following him into the business. Claudette … clouded that.”
“How?”
“Mr. Cuddy, my brother loves Claudette. Once my brother gives his love for something, there’s no holding back, no … tempering of the emotion. He loved her, he married her, he was staying with her. Beyond that, there are some things you really don’t want to go into here.”
“Why not?”
“Let me make it clearer: there are some things you should butt out of.”
More the ring of the streets than the boardrooms. “Okay. Fair to say that Claudette’s helping your father changed his mind about her?”
Dani said, “Yes.”
“Then how come the necklace went to his granddaughter?”
“Mau Tim helped, too. Before and after school.”
I was thinking that Vincent Dani used her professional name instead of “Tina,” when he continued. “Also, my father gave that necklace to my mother on their twenty-fifth anniversary. It matched the color of her eyes.” Dani bit his lip for a moment. “You’ve noticed Claudette’s … eye?”
“Yes.”
“Well, my father obviously couldn’t give a gift with that … connotation to Claudette. Through some quirk of the gene pool, Mau Tim’s eyes were exactly the color of my mother’s. And the necklace was also, I think, like a peace offering. A symbolic way of welcoming them into the family.”
“When they weren’t originally.”
“Look, I told you to butt—”
“Okay, okay. You listed the necklace as missing in the property report.”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“It just seems like the kind of thing the son of Tommy Danucci might leave out to keep him from becoming involved in it.”
The lips seemed to be the only part of Dani’s face that reacted in any way. This time they lost their color. “I put the necklace in the report in the hope that it might lead the police to the killer before my brother’s contacts found him.”
“Your brother seems to think that police custody isn’t exactly absolute sanctuary.”
“If the police arrest the perpetrator, he has a chance. If my brother …”
Dani didn’t go on. I said, “Did you know anything about your niece’s life in modeling?”
He sat back. “Not much. She’d call me from time to time, we’d talk or have lunch.”
“I thought she lived with you for a while?”
“Briefly. About a year ago, when Mau Tim first came to Boston. But I think she found that … confining.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, I put in rather long hours at the firm. When I get home from work, I tend to stay there. I don’t have a great deal of time for social engagements.”
“Did you know much about Mau Tim’s social life?”
“No.”
“Boyfriends?”
“No,” again, a little more pointedly.
“I was under the impression that she might have lived with a photographer for a while before moving to Falmouth Street.”
Dani’s lips narrowed. “That is another thing I wouldn’t mention to my brother, Mr. Cuddy.”
“All right. How about her life in the Falmouth Street apartment?”
“Mau Tim was young and attractive. I assume that once she had her own place, she was … active.”
“I notice you call your niece ‘Mau Tim.’ ”
“That was the name she wanted to call herself. I respected her wishes.”
“Why did she change her last name to yours?”
“You have a problem with people changing their names, Mr. Cuddy?”
“No.”
“I didn’t Anglicize mine, you know. I kept the ethnicity, just changed the … recognition factor for professional reasons.”
“That your niece’s reasoning as well?”
“I assume so.”
“She never told you?”
“Mau Tim was at the age where people rebel against family. I was the one in the family who broke away, who did something different. She wanted to do the same. I changed my name, she changed hers to my new one. Simple.”
Maybe. “How is it you came to be trustee of the building?”
“Limit the liability. It’s done all the time.”
“That’s the reason for putting the building into a realty trust, Mr. Dani. What was the reason you’re the front man?”
Dani’s lips narrowed again. “My mother asked me to.”
“The ‘A and T’ stands for?”
“ ‘The Amatina and Thomas Danucci Realty Trust.’ ”
“And your mother asked you to be trustee?”
“My father wanted to buy another building. They already owned a number of properties in the North End. My mother thought it would be a good idea to have some things in different parts of the city. So, my father bought the place on Falmouth Street.”
“With you as trustee.”
“Correct.”
“How long ago was this?”
“Six, perhaps seven years.”
He reminded me of something Claudette Danucci had mentioned. “Just before your mother died.”
“Yes.”
“I thought you said before that you kind of broke away from the family by going to law school.”
“Look, Mr. Cuddy—”
“I’m jus
t wondering, why did you decide to be a trustee of a family building when you’d already broken away?”
“Not that it’s any of your business, but my mother asked me, and as a son I was happy to do it for her. She wasn’t too well … By then, my mother had an idea she was going to die, and she thought my being a trustee of the building would bring my father and me a little closer.”
“Did it?”
“I’ve told you twice there are some things you shouldn’t look into, Mr. Cuddy. Let me give you an answer that might save you some pain later on. My brother and I get along fine. Despite what you think, he runs a legitimate business enterprise and I represent him legally on it. My father and I are oil and water. Have been for a long time, no hope of reconciliation. That’s family business, not yours, and if I were you, I’d stay out of it.”
When a lawyer like Vincent Dani tells me some things aren’t my business, and especially when he tells me three times, I wonder why he explains things at all. “After your mother died, how come you stayed on?”
“What?”
“After your mother died, why didn’t you resign as trustee of the building?”
“Because she’d wanted me to serve. Besides, it always seemed like a sleeping dog.”
“Until now.”
Dani’s lips glared at me and left the room.
Eleven
“THIS ONE HERE’S CALLED Shadowfax.”
The music came over the Lincoln’s stereo system in a series of sounds, each from a different instrument until all had blended into chords I’d never heard before and couldn’t even characterize. There was something about it that made you want to merge into the upholstery. Then I thought that might be why Zuppone was playing it for me.
I said, “How come you’re not checking to see if we’re being followed?”
Primo turned to me, then glanced at all the mirrors to be sure he was still aware of his car’s position on the highway back to Boston. “Who’d be tailing us?”
“The FBI?”
That got a grunt. “The Feebs, I’ll tell you something, they signed off on us a long time ago. Oh, they still root around, accountants and tax guys mostly. But once that task force busted the Angiulos and got their citations and all, they started looking for other fish to fry. Besides, they can’t push their luck too far, asking for too many taps or warrants. Sooner or later, some judge starts adding up how many times he signed his name and starts thinking, ‘Hey-ey-ey, no more for a while, okay?’ Naw, the Feebs, they ain’t a factor anymore.”
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