Shallow Graves

by Jeremiah Healy

  “That’s a tough one, Mo.”

  “Huh. Tell me about it. Another thing. The little bugger costs like a thousand dollars, and I’m not completely covered by insurance.”

  “How come?”

  “Because it’s not from an accident. Can you believe that? I tell the guy, ‘What, you can’t see your way clear to reimburse me for all the years I’ve been on this planet?’ ”

  “I’ll bet that shut him up.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, it did. I got to admit, though, it is a clever piece of machinery. I mean, it’s got this little wheel, you can adjust it for noise, even while you’re wearing it. The audiologist says to me, ‘Mr. Katzen, you can even turn it off completely, should say a motorcycle start up next to you.’ And I say to him, ‘Doctor’—I don’t know, is he a doctor, but I figure, it doesn’t hurt to be polite, right?—‘Doctor, I’m not sure how to tell you this, but my Wild One days are behind me, you know?’ ”

  “Good comeback, Mo. I—”

  “So then he tells me the battery lasts six months and the aid itself is built for a lifetime. He says, ‘It’s got the Manhattan Project in it.’ And I say, “Great, my age, I have to have an atomic bomb in my ear,’ and he says, ‘No, Mr. Katzen, the Manhattan Circuit’ and that’s when I realize, John, I got to have the thing.”

  “I think you’re right, Mo. Listen, I wonder if—”

  “’Course, the little bugger does have its drawbacks. I told you about the phone business?”

  “Yes, Mo.”

  “Well, it’s no picnic riding in the car, either. Oh, it closes out the engine noise just fine, but you put the directional signal on? Because it’s inside the cabin with you, the thing sounds like a Mongol gong. Also, if it falls out or you can’t remember where you put it, there’s a homing device inside, makes this sound to let you know where it is. But, surprise, surprise, guess what?”

  “You can’t hear it.”

  “On the button, John. On the button. You need a hearing aid to start with, how’re you supposed to find the little bugger from a homing sound you can’t hear without the little bugger in your ear?”

  “Speaking of finding things, Mo.”

  “What?”

  “I said, speaking—”

  “I heard you, John. You’re sitting not four feet away from me, right?”

  “Right, Mo.”

  “No need to repeat things, right?”

  “Right, Mo.”

  “So, what’d you come over here for. Spit it out.”

  I took a breath. “I’m working on a case. It involves somebody I’d like to talk with you about.”

  “Who?”

  “Thomas Danucci.”

  “Thomas … Tommy the Temper?”

  “Yes.”

  Mo shook his head, fired up the dead cigar with a war memorial lighter. “John”—puff—“I don’t think”—puff-puff—“working on a case”—puff-puff-puff—“involving Tommy Danucci is such a great idea.”

  “I’m inclined to agree with you. But I’m already in it, and for a lot of reasons, it’s easier to keep going than to bail out.”

  “Your decision.” Mo blew a smoke ring. “Tommy Danucci, Tommy Danucci. One of the last of the old ones, John. The ones who made their bones before the war—WWII, I mean. He stayed in the background, always the gentleman, I heard. Like he ran one of those Renaissance city-states with the Borgias and whatever.”

  “Do you know much about his family?”

  “You mean his relatives or his organization?”

  “Good point. Start with his organization.”

  “He came up through the Buccola crowd, late thirties. Heard a little bit about him, here and there during the war. Loan-sharking, barbooth games, something with the Teamsters. Nothing unusual. Then around the early sixties, he really hit his stride with the sharking. You were still in school then, John, but Boston started getting a reputation.”

  “What kind of reputation?”

  “As a place where deadbeats got beat dead.”

  “Catchy.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure Tommy intended it that way. He wasn’t all that big, but boy he was tough. And blind to the pain if he was in a fight. I have this friend who’s Italian—grew up with me in Chelsea. My friend says he saw the Temper take a knife in the shoulder from a deadbeat when Tommy was doing some collection work in the old days. Knife and all, my friend says Tommy was able to punch the guy senseless.”

  “Danucci still in the rackets?”

  Mo shucked some ash from the cigar. “Who can say? Those guys, I assume they got the equivalent of profit-sharing after they retire, even if they’re not still active. Seems to me I heard Tommy had a heart attack a few years back, not much since.”

  “How about his relatives?”

  “Tommy married a little late as I recall. Beauty from the old country, real ethnic name. Couple of sons, but I think one went to Vietnam like you, and the other … I don’t know, doctor or lawyer, maybe?”

  So far things checked out pretty well. “There’s an obituary I’d like to see, if I could.”

  “Obit?” Mo’s brow furrowed. “John, the hell you got yourself into here?”

  “Between us?”

  “You mean off the record?”

  “I mean between us, Mo.”

  A glacial sigh. “Okay. My word on it.”

  I told him about what happened with Mau Tim Dani when I was out of town.

  Mo fumed. “Well, I’ll tell you, John, I wasn’t the fuck out of town and I don’t remember anything about it. Hold on a second.” He picked up his phone, pushed a button, and hit three numbers. Then he cursed, pushed another button, and hit three more. He rasped at whoever answered, and whoever answered read him something. Mo asked whether there were any accompanying pieces, and he cursed some more, then hung up without saying thank you.

  “Well, John. It seems your Mau Tim Dani died on a Friday night, and being only murder number forty-seven in a year that ought to break the record set last year, which should surprise nobody, there was a story without a victim’s name in the Saturday paper. A follow-up with ‘Dani’ but not ‘Danucci’ got pushed to page sixteen of Sunday’s, and then nothing but ‘Dani’ in the obit. Nobody else ran this, print or broadcast?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Mo sucked on the resumed-dead stogie. “It’s possible Tommy still has enough juice to get people to sit on something like this, John. I wouldn’t have bet on it, this day and age, but it’s just barely possible. So I have some advice, you can take it from a man needs a hearing aid in his head.”

  “Say it, Mo.”

  “Tread softly, John. Muffle the drums and tread very, very softly through the jungle.”

  “What are you doing back here?”

  “Nice to see you, too, Lieutenant.”

  “Cuddy, what?”

  “I was driving home and a parking space opened up across the street. I figured it might be an omen.”

  Robert Murphy reached for a sheaf of phone messages on the corner of his desk and started riffling through them. Finding the one he was looking for, he held it up to the light from the window behind him. “Says here, ‘John Cuddy called. He is going for a ride with Primo Zuppone.’ ”

  “He likes you to pronounce it ‘Zoo-po-ny.’ ”

  “You take a ride with a wiseguy, you’re lucky the M.E. didn’t have to pronounce you.”

  “How did you know he was connected?”

  “His name’s cropped up over the years.”

  “In what kinds of cases?”

  “Various gentlemen we’ve pulled out of the harbor.”

  Lovely. “I thought maybe you looked him up special.”

  Murphy made the phone message waffle in the air. “Account of this?”

  “Made me feel safer, thinking you were watching out for me.”

  “Cuddy, the fuck you into?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  He put down the slip of paper. “Why not?”

  “The other
name there.”

  Murphy looked back at the phone message. “Harry Mullen?”

  “Right.”

  “Who’s Mullen?”

  “He’s with the insurance company I used to work for.”

  A memory worked its way across Murphy’s forehead and jumped for its life. “Not Holt’s case.”

  “That’s why I can’t tell you.”

  Murphy closed his eyes. “Get out.”

  “If Holt screws up, I want you to haunt him for me.”

  “Cuddy, you screw up with the Danucci family, you’ll be able to haunt him yourself. Now—”

  I got out.

  Fourteen

  OSCAR PURIEFOY’S ADDRESS ON Boylston was past Mass Ave, almost to the Fenway. Inside the glass entrance door, a mailbox on the wall had its lock staved in and his name over it. I climbed four flights of stairs past a palm reader, a discount travel agency, a total health consultant, and a CPA before I reached Puriefoy’s studio door. I knocked, and a deep bass voice said, “Yeah?”

  Inside the room, a teddy-bear black man was on his knees, bending over a set of toy railroad cars on a black velvet blanket. The cars were made from blocks and dowels of wood, all enameled in primary colors. The man consulted what looked like a polaroid photo, then used the thumb on his large hand to nudge the caboose a quarter of an inch.

  There were bright umbrella lights over the cars and a camera on a tripod, but from there any comparison to the studio where I’d met Sinead Fagan was unflattering. Puriefoy’s place was maybe four hundred square feet, with only a door to a half bath and no windows. Exposed pipes wended through the original stamped tin ceiling, which itself looked fifty years the worse for wear. The wallpaper curled over the chipped and gouged wainscoting, painted an uneven white. A couple of plastic chairs and two TV trays were the furnishings.

  “Help you with something?”

  The voice really was sonorous, like a Shakespearean actor. His complexion ran to medium brown. Puriefoy was mostly bald, with a beard that seemed to ride up and over his ears into the fringe of hair remaining on his head. He wore hiking khakis with button pockets on the thighs and an old chamois shirt, stained down the front like a mechanic’s overalls.

  I said, “My name’s John Cuddy. I’m a private investigator.”

  Puriefoy made a face as he stood up, rising to about six feet. “You got some ID?”

  Taking out my leather folder, I walked over to him.

  He examined it, shook his head, and handed it back to me. “I can’t help you.”

  “You haven’t heard what I’m here for.”

  “Don’t matter.” He turned back to the train set. “I don’t know anything about it.”

  “I’m looking into the death of Mau Tim Dani, and I’m guessing Sinead Fagan already told you I spoke to her about it.”

  His head came up as he stopped and turned to me again. “She said you were working for some insurance outfit.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why?”

  “Why insurance, you mean?”

  “Yeah. Her family, they own the building. Who’s getting sued?”

  “Nobody yet. Everybody helps me, maybe nobody will.”

  A cynical scowl. “Yeah. Right.”

  “I understand you were the one who scouted her.”

  Puriefoy looked like he was trying to decide which would be less trouble, to throw me out or talk with me and get it over with. Then he said, “How long you gonna be?”

  I dropped my head toward the train. “Tell your models to take their lunch break.”

  A laugh. “I’ll tell you, man, these here be a lot easier to work with than the prima donnas in this trade.”

  “How so?”

  “Aw, these girls, they hook up with an agency, they figure they’re movie stars. They get to wear hot clothes, go to big parties, everybody coming on to them. Then they find out modeling’s just standing around for an hour, hour and a half, same leg set, same perfume or wine or whatever the fuck product in their hand. They cop an attitude, you know?”

  “Was Mau Tim like that?”

  A more cautious look. “They’re all like that. This strictly product work, like I’m doing here? This is easy money. You do good work, it shows. How your work looks don’t depend on some model’s got a hair across her ass, you know?”

  “How did you discover her?”

  Puriefoy took a deep breath, went over to a chair, and slumped into it. “You want to sit?”

  “Thanks, no.”

  Puriefoy rolled his shoulders, then crossed his arms, feet flat on the floor. “Mau Tim—she was calling herself ‘Tina’ then, by the way—Mau Tim I spotted in a cafe over in Copley Place. She had this bag from Neiman’s next to her, and she was checking it, maybe figuring somebody’d try and walk with it. I watch her, eating this croissant. She takes a little nibble, like a rabbit, you know? Then she sends out her tongue after the little bits around her lips. Man, I watch her for like a minute, I know she’s a natural. You know about scouting, you know what a natural is?”

  “Naturally photogenic?”

  “Yeah, but more than that. See, Mau Tim, she was perfect being herself. Like they used to say about that actor dude, Spencer Tracy. I mean, you don’t have to pose a girl like that, you don’t have to like direct her, you just tell her the theme for the shoot, and she does it and you click away at her. They say somebody with grace, it shows when they move? With Mau Tim, it showed even when she didn’t move. It showed through the lens and on the paper. I printed a galley sheet for her test shots, I couldn’t decide which ones ought to go in her mini-book, they were all that good.”

  I thought the mini-book decision was up to the agents. “You sent her over to Lindqvist/Yulin?”

  The photographer pulled back a little. “Yeah. Why?”

  “Just checking something. Why that agency?”

  A shrug. “They were a little hungry. They did okay by a sister I sent them, got her good fashion bits, even a couple of runways for the lah-di-dah boutiques. See, Mau Tim was exotic, man. She needed a little bringing along before she hit the big time, and I figured Erica could do that.”

  “But not George?”

  “George? Man, George is like a booker, not a creative guy. Erica’s got the vision, George’s got the rolodex, you know?”

  “According to Yulin’s rolodex, you and Mau Tim were pretty good friends.”

  Puriefoy pulled back a little more. “You could say that.”

  “Lovers?”

  “The fuck difference does it make?”

  “I have to follow through on anything that might help me find out who killed her.”

  “Who killed her? The fuck you talking about? I was there, man. Some burglar done it.”

  “Back up a step, all right? Mau Tim lived with you for a while?”

  Puriefoy waited a moment before answering. “Yeah. She was overage, man, her decision to check out on the family. Only I didn’t know about … her family, you know?”

  “She didn’t tell you she was connected?”

  “Shit, no. I walk over to her—at that cafe with the croissant?—and I say, ‘Hey, lovely lady, you a model?’ And she says, ‘No,’ but not like ‘Get-the-fuck-lost’ no, just kind of a ‘not yet.’ And I like her more as a natural, and she tells me her name is Tina and we go around on that for a while, and pretty soon we’re back at my place for a little sweetness in the dark.”

  “Where’s your place?”

  “Apartment, over in JP.”

  Jamaica Plain, the farthest west of the Boston neighborhoods. “How soon after that did she move in with you?”

  “Like a week, maybe two. Didn’t tell me her last name that first time. But when she did, she said it was ‘Dani,’ and I should start calling her ‘Mau Tim,’ on account of that was her name in Vietnamese, only not exactly.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it wasn’t her name, translated like. It was more a description.” Puriefoy closed his eyes. “
It meant like, ‘purple flower,’ or something. For her eyes. She was always doing that.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Making up names for things. She was at my place one night, and we’re watching one of the Star Wars videos, I forget which one. But when that Darth Vader comes on the screen, she—you know whose voice they used for him?”

  “James Earl Jones.”

  Puriefoy looked disappointed, like I’d spoiled a punch line. “Yeah, old James Earl with that voice comes up from his high tops somewhere. Well, we’re watching the screen, and in walks the guy all dressed in that black outfit, and Mau Tim jumps on me and says ‘Your voice is just like his, and you’re a big brute, too. I’ll call you Grute Vader from now on.’ ”

  “Why ‘Grute’ Vader?”

  “Account of it rhymed with ‘brute,’ maybe. But it could have meant something in Vietnamese, too. Mau, she was into that kind of thing.”

  “What kind of thing?”

  “People’s backgrounds.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, like she really enjoyed Sinead on account of Sinead had a real ethnic name. Irish.”

  “Right.”

  Puriefoy looked a little sheepish. “Right. And she was always asking me about my roots.”

  “Your family, you mean?”

  “Yeah, like that genealogy shit. I read that out to Chicago, man, it is a thriving business, black folks trying hard to trace themselves back just a couple generations to Mississippi, and from there all the way to the slave times. I told Mau Tim I wasn’t so interested in my past as my future.”

  “A future that didn’t include her?”

  “Shit happens.”

  “And now you’re involved with her girlfriend?”

  “The fuck difference does that make?”

  “I’m just wondering who broke it off, you or Mau Tim?”

  No response.

  “Was it because she moved on to other photographers?”

  Puriefoy’s molars worked inside his mouth. “This part have to go outside this room?”

  “Probably not.”

  “That ain’t good enough.”

  “All right. Between you and me.”

  “I just don’t want it getting back to her family.”

  “Sinead’s?”