Danucci pinged the chalice in front of him. “White or red?”
“Whatever you recommend.”
A pleased smile. “I like a man knows how to be a good guest.” He said, “Primo,” then a string of Italian.
Zuppone crossed to the low cabinet, taking a cut crystal decanter from it. Lifting the crystal stopper gently, he crossed back to me, pouring ruby-colored wine into my chalice, jewels embedded in geometric patterns on both its bowl and stem. When Primo finished with me, he did the same for Danucci.
The old man raised his chalice, closed his eyes, and intoned something that sounded more like Latin from the Old Mass than Italian from the old country.
Danucci opened his eyes. “That was, ‘With thanks to God and to good health.’ You get a little older, you go back to the things from when you’re a kid. Even start believing in them again, eh?”
He gave a curt nod, and we drank together. The wine was spectacular, a mix of a dozen flavors that tumbled around the mouth before finishing with a dying fireworks glow at the back of the tongue.
I said, “The best.”
Danucci said, “It is.”
This time he just looked at Zuppone, who nodded and headed toward a door that turned out to be the kitchen.
“I gotta say, I’m lucky, Mr. Detective. I can still enjoy the wine and the food. I just gotta drink and eat a little early. Otherwise, I taste the spices a second time in my sleep, you know?”
“Actually, I’m not a detective, Mr. Danucci.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Detectives are on police forces. I’m just a private investigator.”
The blood rose up his neck, stopping just as it flushed his jaw but not his cheeks. Very quietly, Danucci said, “I’m an old man, Mr. Detective. Indulge me, eh?”
I decided I would not much like Tommy the Temper to get mad at me.
Zuppone came back in with a course of sausage and pasta in small bowls, one for each of us.
Danucci said, “I cook for myself, now. My Amatina was alive, I never thought about it. But I talked with her friends, they told me some of her secrets in the kitchen. I tried this and that, found a couple that reminded me of her.”
I sampled the sausage first. Sweet, delicate. Then the pasta. Like cotton candy melting in the mouth.
I said, “Your daughter-in-law told me she learned a lot from your wife.”
Danucci paused, his fork not quite lifted clear of his bowl, then put it back down. He paused again, then drank the rest of the wine in his chalice, Primo refilling without needing to be prompted.
When Zuppone had set the decanter back on the counter, Danucci said, “You and me, we don’t know how to talk to each other, do we?”
I stopped eating.
“What I’m saying here, you don’t want to say nothing wrong, you don’t want to offend me you don’t have to, but you just don’t know what’s what, am I right?”
“That’s right.”
“Can’t blame you, Mr. Detective. I was in your shoes, I wouldn’t know what the fuck’s going on, either. Enjoy your dinner, the hospitality of my table. You don’t got nothing to worry about. You might be the only detective in the city got nothing to worry about. Let me talk to you some, you don’t even got to worry about answering, eh?”
“All right.”
Danucci did another curt nod, but more to himself than a signal to Zuppone.
“Here’s the way it is. Twenny years ago, my son comes back from the war, he has this—what I thought at the time, this pregnant squaw, only she’s Oriental. He has this Oriental with him, he says to us, ‘This is my wife.’ Just like that, no letter, no phone call, just cold fucking conks us with it. My Amatina, she’s a saint, she says to him, ‘Joey, your wife is my daughter,’ like that. I can’t see it, I can’t see the mixing of the blood, what it’d do to Joey’s prospects. In the business, I mean. Our business.
“What I’m doing here, Mr. Detective, I’m collecting the story—no, fuck, that’s not it. Primo?”
“Like ‘collapsing the story,’ Mr. Danucci?”
“Right, right. Like making a long story short. Well, six, seven years ago, my Amatina gets sick, Mr. Detective, bad sick, never-get-better sick.” Danucci reached for the wine glass. “Primo says you lost your wife young.”
“Primo’s right.”
“I don’t know what that must be like. Losing your wife before you have the life that gives you memories. But I know what it’s like to lose her after the memories, after all the things you done together, you thought you’d be talking about them forever. So, anyway, my son, he comes back from the war with this wife and then she has the baby, and you only got to take one look …”
Danucci’s voice caught. I glanced at Zuppone, who just watched the man, no expression. I looked back to Danucci and waited him out.
“You only got to take one look at Tina, you see the eyes. My Amatina’s eyes. I don’t know how it’s possible, but there they are. So I don’t accept that too good. And the child grows up in my son’s house as my granddaughter, the best because my Amatina, she’s so in love with the grandchild, her only one, you see what I’m saying here? Tina gets everything, but me, I’m siciliano, eh? I can’t accept her.”
“Then my Amatina, she gets sick. And the ‘Oriental,’ the one I thought was a ‘pregnant squaw,’ she takes my wife into her home, because Claudette says, ‘It is not right for the mother of my husband to be in the hands of strangers.’ This woman, she lost an eye because of fighting for my son in some fucking chinktown over there, she lost an eye and she still acts like a daughter to my Amatina. There were times, I gotta tell you, there were times I could barely stand to be in the same room with my wife, Mr. Detective. Times the look on her face, or the smell … But Claudette, she was always there for her, and then Tina, too. Tina loved her nana—my Amatina. Loved her like an Italian girl would. They did everything they could, make her comfortable. Then, when my wife … after the funeral, I’m walking back up the stairs down there, where you just come up. If Primo here isn’t with me, I’m dead, because I have a heart attack, it feels like five fucking linebackers, they’re driving a battering ram through my chest. Primo, he calls my doctor—we call him Doctor T, he’s kind of on retainer to us, but he’s so famous now, he don’t want everybody to know that. Anyway, Primo gets me to the hospital, and Doctor T and the others, they do their thing and I’m still alive, but I can’t do nothing, nothing for myself. And the ‘Oriental,’ she’s just got my Amatina out of her house, and she takes me in. Primo looks after things here, but Claudette and Tina, every day they take care of me down at Joey’s house when I can’t fucking lift my head or … clean myself up.”
Danucci looked at me, the eyes blazing. “Then she grows into a beautiful young lady, my Tina Amatina, and some fucking louse, some fucking lowlife colored drug fucker kills her. My son Joey, he’s out of town, so her mother, she has to call me. And ever since, it’s like a blister on my heart. Every hour I think about it, and it’s like you rubbing that blister, it don’t get better. The best ones, Mr. Detective, we bury the best ones in shallow graves, shallow fucking graves. So you go ahead. You ask your questions, and I’ll answer them.”
The old man gave that curt nod again, then went back to his fork.
Primo said, “Mr. Danucci, let me warm that up a little for you?”
Danucci started to shake his head, then pushed the bowl three inches toward Zuppone, who scooped it up gracefully, did the same with mine, and hustled into the kitchen.
I said, “Your granddaughter give you any idea there was any problem in her life?”
“Problem? No. She kind of broke away from the family, year, year and a half ago. Go out on her own, be a model or some kinda shit. Just her age, every kid goes through that. But I’ll tell you something, she still remembered to call me. She needed something, she didn’t want to ask my son for, she asked me.”
Danucci’s hand doted on the stem of the goblet. “You know, she talked to me the
day she died?”
“You saw her?”
“No. Just on the telephone. She called me, told me how happy she was about going to some party, about me and the Order of the Cross and all.”
His son had mentioned it. “You’re some kind of officer in it?”
Danucci looked at me sharply. “Not some kind of. I’m gonna be the next president, you hear that? Thomas Danucci, Tommy the Temper Danucci, he’s gonna be number one in the most honored Italian Catholic society there is for laymen.”
Danucci swung his head around the room. “You’re wondering, even with all the paintings, the icons, you’re wondering how come they let a guy like me in period, am I right?”
“That’s what I was wondering.”
Danucci softened the look a little. “You’re okay, Mr. Detective. You get asked a question, you answer it.” The rhythm of his speech changed. “When my Amatina got sick, I started to get the religion again. It happen to you, with your wife?”
I started to say no, then Zuppone came back in with our bowls. After he served us, I said, “Not so much.”
“Well, you were young. I was—this was six years ago, I was coming up against seventy. The Office—that’s what we call it, you know?”
I wasn’t sure how much of this I wanted to hear. “It?”
Danucci attacked his food. “Come on, Mr. Detective, don’t disappoint, eh? The organization. Here in Boston, we call it the Office. In Chicago, they called it the Outfit. Till everybody got bit with the RICO shit. You know what that means?”
“I know it stands for ‘Racketeer’ something or other.”
“Well, let me tell you, so you’ll know. It stands for ‘Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations.’ That’s what they called it down in Washington. Sound like a good name for a law to you?”
“Kind of cumbersome.”
“Yeah, cumbersome. So they decide they’re gonna shorten it, call it by the letters, the initials. Fucking coincidence, guess what they spell?”
Danucci looked at me like he expected an answer.
I said, “RICO.”
“That’s right. RICO. Like the name of that guy Edward G. played in the Bogey movie. The one in the hurricane.”
“Key Largo.”
“Yeah, Key Largo. Only you get the idea, maybe they thought of using ‘RICO’ first, then come up with the words to fit later. RICO, it’s got that nice ‘wop’ sound to it. Give the boys at the station a good laugh, they pull in a friend of ours, they get to say to him, ‘You’re under arrest for RICO, Rico.’ Fucking assholes.”
Danucci finished his course, then took some wine. Primo cleared the bowls and disappeared into the kitchen.
“So, like I said, I got religion again after my Amatina got sick, and I started getting back to the church. Not since I’m eleven I go to Mass, but I start now every day, every fucking morning. My heart attack, that took me out of the loop. The rest of the Office—my friends, they understood, no problem, but I couldn’t do nothing from that bed. Just as well, tell you the truth. Wasn’t much after that, story broke that the Feebs, they had the Angiulos bugged over on Prince Street, they got them all, big falls.”
Danucci leaned into the table but more in my direction. “I tell you something else, so you’ll know. Almost sixty years in the business, sixty fucking years, I never once got arrested. I’m not talking convicted, I mean not even arrested. You know why? I copied this man, I fucking idolized him, Mr. Detective. You ever heard the name, Filippo Buccola?”
“No.”
“You should read more. Buccola was a man, you saw him in the street, you woulda said, ‘there goes a doctor,’ or ‘there goes a lawyer.’ Guy wore little wire glasses and a bow tie. And he was a gentleman. He was the capo before Ray Senior down in Rhody. And he knew when to get out. He moved back to Sicily, he lived to be a hundred and one, Mr. Detective. He let me in on a secret. There are three things you gotta have, be a success in this business. You gotta have heart, you gotta have brains, and you gotta have ambition.”
Primo brought in another course, this one veal in a wine sauce. Halfway through, I’d eaten more calories than I usually throw down in a week.
Danucci rested his fork. “You know, in the old days, you had a problem with some people, you could talk to them, eh? You couldn’t settle it, sometimes you had them play a little Guts.”
I said “Guts?” before I thought to keep my mouth shut.
“Yeah. Some of the old guys, they had these chrome revolvers, custom-made by gunsmiths back in Italy. A lot of guys had a pair of them, used to keep them in a box.” Danucci gestured at the glass cabinet behind him. “Like my Amatina’s jewelry box up on the shelf there. A couple of your boys had a problem and they come to you with it, couldn’t talk it out, you took these revolvers. You put one bullet in each cylinder, then you put a spin on the fucking thing and closed it.”
“Like Russian roulette?”
“Yeah, yeah. Like that. Then you gave one gun to each guy, they’re standing maybe ten, twelve feet apart, and they point their pieces at each other. And the only other guy involved would be you, doing the calling. When you called out ‘One,’ they each got to pull the trigger once. Nobody’s gun went off, you let them think a little, then said, ‘Two.’ Nobody got shot, you let them think a little more. I tell you, Mr. Detective, a lot of problems got settled, before they let you get to three.”
I said, “Any chance one of your people could be involved in Tina’s death?”
Emphatic shake of the head. “No way. No fucking way. Family’s off limits. We’re siciliani, not like the fucking Camorra back in Napoli, wasting little kids on street corners. The colored do that over the drugs here, not us. Besides, I got a son in the business. Somebody wants to send me a message, they go after him.”
“How about somebody who’s after your son?”
“Same thing. They’d come after me, they got balls for brains. Anyway, I can see you don’t understand. They want to send a message, they don’t break in like some fucking sneak thief. They send a clear fucking message, they want to send one.”
“Could the necklace be a message?”
The blood rose right past the jaw and cheeks, the vein at the temple pounding as he worked on his food and swallowed hard. “That necklace was my gift to my Amatina. Her gift to me was her eyes and her love, Mr. Detective. My gift to her was that necklace. One of a kind item, stones had to come from Madagascar, down by Africa there. With the gold and the craftsmanship went into it, that necklace cost more to make than this fucking house cost to build. But after my Amatina died, I gave it to Tina, for nursing my wife and me. To show her she was really part of the family, mixed fucking blood, she was still my blood. The necklace shows up on the street, we go back up the line, snatch the guy and spend some time with him.”
“Maybe the guy who has it knows it’s too hot to peddle.”
“Guy breaks into houses, especially one of my houses, he’s a junkie, a fucking crackhead got shit for brains. He don’t know enough not to hit a connected property, he don’t know enough to check out a piece of merchandise before he fences it.”
“It’s been over a week. Kind of a long time for somebody to sit on it.”
Danucci gave me a long look. “Sometimes you got to be patient, Mr. Detective.” The old man glanced at Zuppone, who left us without a word to go into the kitchen.
Danucci squared around, his fingers playing with the goblet in front of him. “You remember what I told you before, about what you got to have to make it in this business?”
“Brains, heart, and ambition.”
“You met my son Joey tonight. What do you think of him?”
I didn’t like this. “What do you mean?”
The spotlight look came into the old man’s eyes. “You know what I mean.”
I took a sip of wine. “Heart and ambition to spare. Enough brains to do fine, moneywise.”
“Moneywise. Let me tell you something, Mr. Detective. There’s only two ways to mak
e money in this world. One, you steal it from somebody. Two, you inherit it from somebody who already stole it from somebody else.”
Danucci’s brow went toward the kitchen door. “So, how about Primo?”
I put down the goblet. “Brains and heart, but no ambition.”
Danucci closed his eyes and smiled a little. “Primo, Primo. He’s got what it takes, but he don’t want it. I can’t understand that, Mr. Detective. He don’t want nothing past the leather coat and the Lincoln car and that elevator shit he puts on the radio.”
The eyes suddenly opened again, the spots stronger than before. “And what about Mr. Vincent Dani, Esquire?”
“Brains and ambition, but no heart.”
The eyes reached laser level. “You know what burns me about the fucking lawyers with their fucking RICO laws, looking down their noses at guys like me? What I offer, Mr. Detective, is protection. Protection so’s a guy can turn a profit. You tell me, what do lawyers offer? I’ll tell you. They offer protection, same as me. I keep somebody from getting ripped off by a coupla guys with guns in their hands and nothing between the ears. The lawyers, they keep somebody from getting ripped off by guys with pens in their hands and plenty between the ears. We both take our cuts off the top, the lawyers and me, and we ain’t so different you’d notice it.”
Except for the body count. I said, “Mr. Danucci—”
“Mr. Vincent Dani, Esquire. He never told you that, did he?”
“What he told me, Mr. Danucci, was that you two were like oil and water. I imagine he was telling me that while Primo was on the car phone, giving you his read of me as a situation.”
Danucci weighed things. He took a slug of wine, then replaced the chalice with delicacy on the tablecloth. “You learned a lot of things in a little time, Mr. Detective. You want to go through the apartment house over on Falmouth?”
“Eventually. I think I’d rather talk to everybody else first, then go through it with their stories in mind.”
Danucci looked up at me with sad, tired eyes. “You got brains, Mr. Detective. My son Joey, he don’t got real brains, but he’s got real heart, maybe too much heart. He’s the kind, he might do something rash. Joey’s got too long a life ahead of him for that. You find the guy did this, you come to me first, eh?”
Shallow Graves Page 11