Dying for the Past

by T. J. O'Connor

  “We can’t confirm the letters.” Bear stared at the floor. “No one seems to know Stephanos or Bonnie. And if they don’t know them, how could they know they were going to the gala last night?”

  “Someone’s lying. Maybe André.” Angel’s voice was a whisper. “Oh, God, he lied about the affair. It’s going to look like André wanted Stephanos out of the way. This looks like—”

  “Bad news,” Bear said, reaching for his bourbon. “André Cartier has the oldest motive in the world for murder.”

  thirty-eight

  Bear left to meet Spence for their stakeout of the Vincent House and Angel disappeared upstairs. I went in search of Doc again, hoping to have a few quiet words about Benjamin and this mysterious book.

  “Doc? Come on, quit hiding. Come out and talk to me.” He was starting to irritate me. “You’re acting like a baby.”

  Nothing.

  “Doc?” I wandered the house for ten minutes and he was nowhere. Of course, for the ghost of a surgeon long dead, nowhere could be anywhere—or really nowhere. He could also be walking behind me and I wouldn’t know. I relied on Hercule to warn me if he was. Hercule followed me on my first patrol around the house. Halfway through the second, he disappeared and I found him in my den napping.

  “You avoiding me, Doc?”

  Angel returned from upstairs. “Who is avoiding you? Hercule?”

  “No. Doc.” I told her about my meeting with Vincent.

  “He wants Doc?” she said. “What did he do to Vincent?”

  “I don’t know, Angel. I want to hear from Doc. He knows all about the book, too. Doc’s involved up to his stethoscope with Vincent Calaprese of the New Jersey Calapreses.”

  “Maybe it’s not just about Doc, but the Vincent House, too.” Angel went into the kitchen and returned with two large photo album books and several long, rolled-up documents. “Nicholas’ driver, Bobby, dropped these off earlier.”

  “Did you offer him tea or a safe to crack?” She ignored me so I asked, “What are they?”

  “Something that might help.”

  She unrolled one of the documents and spread it out open on my desk, using items on my desk to hold down the corners. They were architectural drawings of a huge building and three surrounding structures. The building plans were old and worn and the legends faded and hard to read. But I didn’t have to read them. I knew what the plans were on sight.

  The Vincent House estate.

  “Nicholas told me the estate was built back in the late 1800s.” Angel turned on the desk lamp to brighten the faded plans. “When the Calaprese families moved in and took over the block, they did a significant amount of renovations.”

  “They bought the entire block?”

  “Most of it.” She opened one of the large photo albums and flipped to some early twentieth-century photographs. “Remember, it’s in the old section of town. Those are antebellum homes with large lots. There used to be a narrow street running between them, but it was lost when the properties were combined into one large estate compound.”

  “Did Nic say why they combined them?”

  “Yes, he had some ideas. They purchased two properties and combined them into the one main estate called the Vincent House. The property spans about a half block. They also purchased two other homes beside it to take up the majority of the remaining block.”

  One of the photographs was a map of the area on which someone had sketched the placement of the Calaprese properties. There was the main Vincent House on the west side of the estate, a carriage house just to the east of it, and two other large homes farther east of the carriage house along the eastern-most estate wall. The culmination of the properties formed a virtual fortress.

  “The properties are surrounded by stone walls and iron fences. It’s a fort.”

  “It was all about business.” She tapped her finger on the second photo album and opened it to a page she had bookmarked. It was a family photograph from 1933. There were at least twenty family members all standing around the Vincent House’s front veranda. The women wore long, elegant dresses and hats. The men were in expensive, wide-lapelled suits and fedoras. At least ten children knelt in the front row. Everyone was centered around one man sitting in a tall-back chair in the center of the veranda.

  Vincent Calaprese.

  “Where did Poor Nic get these, Angel?”

  She shrugged. “They’ve been in his library for years—passed down by family. He never explained.”

  “So, this was their mob-vacation home,” I said. “Nifty.”

  “Well, not a vacation home, although Vincent’s family came here a few weeks a year. It became the Calaprese’s main headquarters. It was out of the way but still not too far from DC. A good, rural area where they could be safe and away from the city. Nicholas told me Vincent would bring his family here a few times a year by hiring two entire Pullman cars from the railroad—one for his family and one for his men.”

  I studied the photograph. “Nice, if you go in for goons and guns.”

  “Yes, a very safe hideout.” She ran her finger over the plans. “The families lived in two of the homes, Vincent and his gang used the others. When the families weren’t around, they used the homes as a retreat for other mobsters.”

  “Club Thug? I bet the towels and bathroom soap were stolen.”

  “And it didn’t come cheap. He charged big money for a night at his estate. Big money—and the guests paid. Nicholas said it was a very profitable operation.”

  Vincent didn’t look like the bed and breakfast kind of guy to me. “What else did Poor Nic tell you? There has to be more.”

  She pointed to sections of the building plans where parts of the floor plan were void of details or architectural annotations. “See here, where there are no draftsman’s marks?”

  “Yes, so?”

  “Nicholas says the missing information is on purpose. Vincent renovated the homes like speakeasies and didn’t annotate any of the changes. He obtained the original blueprints and changed them to hide the details.”

  “Speakeasies? Like the secret bars and joints from the roaring twenties?” I knew Vincent had some class. “I like it. We should do that here.”

  She rolled her eyes—she must have dust in them. “Yes, hidden entrances, secret escape routes, hidden rooms. All of those.” She slid another drawing out. “The local police and FBI often watched the property. When they raided the houses—and that was rare—they were never able to find anyone they were looking for.”

  Disappearing gangsters right out from under the copper’s noses? Hmmm, sounds familiar—like Stephanos Grecco’s murder.

  I looked over the building plans again one-by-one. The drawings of the attic and basement levels were similar to the other floors—the standard draftsman annotations for plugs and wiring and even the doors and windows I knew to be there were missing. In fact, other than the outline of the rooms, there were no other architectural annotations recorded. The last document was a county planning map of the entire estate.

  “Angel, who owns all the other parts of the properties today? I mean, your historical foundation bought just the Vincent House, right?”

  She nodded. “Yes. The carriage house and the other two connecting properties are still held in trust.”

  “The Calaprese family trust?”

  “Yes, and the trust is under the control of the elderly matriarch of the family, Frannie—as in Francesca Calaprese-Masseria. She lives outside Charlottesville in a retirement community. I met with her over the sale of Vincent estate grounds and to purchase many of the original antiques for the home.”

  “Antiques?”

  “The house had sat empty for a very long time. She was in the process of selling off the antiques and valuables when I approached her for the Foundation. She’d had some trouble on the grounds—”

  That sounded interesting. “What kind of trouble?”

  “Vandalism and some break-ins,” Angel said. “A few months back, she had several bre
ak-ins. The last one was terrible, someone smashed antique furniture, broke up the hardwood paneling in two of the rooms, and slashed the backs of three portraits hanging in the dining room. When I heard about it, I arranged for private security until we could complete the transfer to the Foundation.”

  Vandalism? Break-ins? Someone was looking for something. “All this started around the time you were buying the estate? You stirred something up.”

  “Like what? You can’t think my Foundation’s interest in the Vincent House caused Grecco’s murder.”

  Maybe yes. Maybe no. “I think we may have to go see Frannie. But we better check with Bear first. There’s something about the Vincent House that’s about more than just Grecco’s murder and your missing money. Vincent Calaprese is all fired-up and someone is vandalizing his home. Then, there’s a murder in it. Too coincidental.”

  “You think it’s about the house?”

  Was it? “Well, every gangster movie I ever liked had some hideout where the bad guys hid loot and secrets. And every ghost movie I ever saw had a haunted house with some secrets. This case has both.”

  “Okay, Tuck, gangsters and haunted houses.” She rolled her eyes. “Just remember, you live here. And there’s no hidden treasure or secrets here.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Your imagination is getting carried away.” She opened one of the photo albums and began flipping through the pages. “And don’t get me started on Doc.”

  I looked over her shoulder. “And Poor Nic had these lying around for no reason?”

  “Yes, he said as much.”

  “He’s lying.”

  She shook her head. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because he said they were just lying around for no reason.”

  She shrugged.

  In several old, scratchy black-and-white photographs, dozens of workers were posing with pickaxes and shovels. In one shot, a large, early-model bulldozer was parked beyond the estate wall almost out of camera shot.

  “What kind of renovation requires so much digging and heavy equipment? The property didn’t have a swimming pool and didn’t add any buildings, right?”

  She studied a few photographs. “None I know of. What are you thinking?”

  “Look at all these workers and the layout of the properties.” I tapped the drawing which showed the positions of the Vincent House and the surrounding properties. “You don’t need a lot of manpower like this to do normal renovations. And back then, using a bulldozer was still very new—and expensive.”

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  “Poor Nic said they renovated it like a speakeasy, right? Maybe they were putting in escape tunnels. You know, in case any G-men came-a-knocking, they could scram.”

  “G-men? Scram?” She flipped the page. “You sound like Elliot Ness.”

  “No, not quite, Angel—Elliot Ness was after bootleggers.” I looked down at another hazy photograph of construction around the Vincent House. “Vincent says it’s all about the Ruskie spies.”

  thirty-nine

  “Are you sure this is a good idea?” I wasn’t. But then again, Angel didn’t ask me. She just packed up a small knapsack, grabbed the building plans for the Vincent House, and headed for her Explorer with Hercule trotting behind. “Shouldn’t you at least call Bear, Angel?”

  “No.” She opened the rear door and waved Hercule into the seat. “He’ll just tell me to wait until tomorrow.”

  “It’s almost ten at night. Bear’s on a stakeout with Spence at the Vincent House already. You need to call him. You can’t go blundering into his stakeout.”

  “I’ll call when we get there.” She started the engine and I popped into the passenger’s seat. Hercule was in the back. “Besides, we’re not going to the Vincent House. We’re going to the other homes on the estate to look around. If we find anything, I’ll call him. Okay?”

  “No.”

  “You’ve turned into such a worrywart since you died.”

  “Do you know how ridiculous you sound?”

  Woof.

  “See, even Hercule agrees with me,” I said. “He thinks you should call Bear.”

  She huffed and hit a speed dial number on her phone. She waited about three seconds and ended the call. “He’s not answering.”

  I wondered if she called his speed dial or my old phone in our kitchen drawer. “Okay, but I’m going to find him when we get there. You know, because I’m dead. Not because it’s the smart thing to do.”

  A half block from the Vincent House estate, Angel pulled up to the curb beneath some monstrous oak trees. If I recalled the building plans, we were outside the estates’ second home on the southeast corner.

  “All right, Angel. Now what?”

  She gathered up her knapsack and the plans. “No one has lived in these homes for decades. Let’s go exploring.”

  “Go where … wait, look.” Someone emerged from the darkness a hundred yards ahead walking toward us along the sidewalk. “Maybe it’s Bear.”

  “He’s too thin to be Bear,” she said. Then, her face flashed surprise. “I don’t believe it.”

  André Cartier crossed the street twenty yards ahead of us. Angel rolled down her window and called out. “André, what are you doing here?”

  For a moment, he froze and stared back. He looked behind him down the block and then jogged over to us, stopping at the passenger’s side door where Angel rolled the window down.

  “Angela,” he said out of breath. “Thank God I found you.”

  “Found me?”

  “Yes, of course.” He opened the passenger’s door and slid in. I vamoosed to the back seat with Hercule. I liked André, but not so much I’d let him sit on me. “I’ve been looking for you.”

  “I thought you’d be home in DC. Bear told me you were released today.”

  “Yes, thank God. I don’t know what Bear was thinking—”

  “What Bear was thinking? Are you kidding me?” Angel jabbed at him with an accusatory finger. “What have you been thinking? My God, André, you’re having an affair with Bonnie Grecco. And you lied to us.”

  “Yeah, André,” I said, leaning over the seat. “And she’s not even half your age. Any other time, I’d congratulate you. But murder sort of rules out a slap on the back.”

  “Angela, listen to me—”

  “You lied to us, André.” Angel’s voice was curt—part anger and part hurt. “You told us you met Bonnie the night of the gala. Now, you’re a murder suspect. I think I have an explanation coming, don’t you?”

  “I didn’t lie to you, Angela. Not really.” André’s face was sad. His eyes showed pain. “I hadn’t met Bonnie Grecco before the gala. She told me her name was Bonnie Chase. So, I wasn’t lying—”

  “Semantics? Come on, André, do you hear yourself? You’re having an affair with her—Bonnie Grecco or Bonnie Chase, it’s the same person.”

  “But I didn’t know.” He looked up at the car roof and closed his eyes. Then, with slow, deliberate effort, he turned in the seat to face Angel. “It wasn’t an affair, Angela. Not the way you think.”

  “Oh? Either you’re sleeping with a married woman half your age or you aren’t.”

  “No, no, you don’t understand. I was dating her over a month before I learned she was married—I swear to you. So, what was I to do?”

  Angel didn’t have to think. “End it.”

  “I tried, but—”

  “But what?”

  His face fell with the weight of embarrassment and defeat and I wasn’t sure which was more painful to watch.

  “I was in love with her, Angela. I tried to end it, but I couldn’t.” He reached across the seat and tried to take Angel’s hand but she withdrew it. “Angela, please. Listen to me. There’s more—something I cannot tell you—not yet. You just have to believe in me. I’m involved here, yes, but I didn’t kill Stephanos. Please. Give me time to prove it to you.”

  There’s something he can’t tell us? “Angel, what’s h
e holding back?”

  She asked him.

  “I can’t say anymore. Please, just trust me.”

  “Trust you? You refuse to explain yourself and you want me to trust you?”

  I said, “Angel, I’m pretty sure Bonnie lied to him about Stephanos at first. We’d just gotten out of bed and I remember the look he had when she told him she was married.”

  “Excuse me?” Angel ignored André and snapped her head at me. “Just gotten out of bed?”

  Oops.

  “Angela? You’re not talking to him again, are you? Please, I don’t have the patience for your silliness right now.”

  André was not a believer.

  “All right, André, then tell me what is going on. Start with what you’re doing here.”

  “I came looking for you.” His face lightened—no doubt thankful to be off his affair with Bonnie Grecco. “I wanted to clear the air with you before I returned to DC. I’m headed home tonight and I had to speak with you. I knew you’d be worried.”

  “I am worried, André.” She threw a death-ray into the rearview mirror and turned to him. “And you thought to look for me here?”

  “Yes, I saw you drive away from home and I followed you here. I parked around the block.”

  I said, “Around the block?”

  “Why around the block?” Angel pressed. “No matter. You found me.”

  His eyes dropped. “Does my sleeping with Bonnie change your opinion of me? Do you think me a murderer, too?”

  “I don’t know what to think.” She held his eyes for a long time—hard and angry static crackled between them and no words were needed. When he looked away, she breathed a heavy sigh, reached out, and took his hand. “No, no, of course I don’t think you killed Stephanos. But you should have told us—Bear and me—about Bonnie. It makes you look guilty. You’re in love with a much younger woman and her very rich older husband is murdered.”

  “I would have told you if I thought Stephanos was the target. Angela, I’m certain the bullet was meant for Bonnie.”

  “Maybe it was. Although Bear never found the threatening letters. The shooter could have been aiming for her on the dance floor.”