Shallow Graves - Jeremiah Healy

by Jeremiah Healy

  Zuppone and his coat made themselves more comfortable in the chair.

  I dialed the Boston police, making a point to ask for "Homicide" and "Lieutenant Robert Murphy" instead of Holt. Murphy wasn't in, so I left Harry Mullen's name and telephone number at Empire, then Zuppone's name, address, and plate number. Then I called my answering service and left the same information with them.

  When I hung up, Zuppone said, "You want to call your friend, the assistant D.A,, we got time."

  I spoke to the half-smile. "That's okay. She needs you, she'll find you."

  Zuppone said, "You carrying?"

  "At least one."

  He said, "Okay. Let's go."

  I said, "What if I'd said no?"

  "What, about carrying?"

  "Yeah."

  The leather squeaked its last as he got up. "I wouldn't have believed you."

  * * *

  "This road's a fucking disgrace, ain't it?"

  We were driving out of the city on the Southeast Expressway, more typically known as the Distressway. Originally named after Boston mayor "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, his famous descendants should be ashamed of its current condition.

  Zuppone continued. "I was one of the Kennedy kids there, I'd kick in a coupla bucks from the trust fund, get these potholes fixed."

  The holes were more like craters, but Zuppone's Lincoln Continental ate them up, just a slight "whump" noise from the tires.

  "We were in my Prelude, our heads'd be through the moon roof by now."

  Zuppone rolled the toothpick. "Never could see them foreign jobs, myself. Uncle of mine had a Lincoln back in the fifties, and I always promised myself one." He caressed the wheel lovingly. "And the stereo system's dynamite. Watch."

  Or listen. When we'd gotten in the car, his starting the engine brought some soft, solo piano music. Now Zuppone pressed a few buttons that made the sound bounce all over the cabin, front to back and side to side.

  I said, "That a radio station?"

  "Uh-unh. Tape, but it's a homemade jobbie, forty-five minutes a side, so you don't have to change it so often."

  "Easy listening."

  Zuppone glanced at me, to see if I were kidding. "George Winston."

  "Never heard of him."

  "Guy records for Windham Hill, New Age stuff."

  "Hot tubs and healing crystals?"

  "I gotta tell you, I don't know from nothing about the philosophy side of the shit. I just know, I put in the tape, and I feel good, you know?"

  We rode for a while, Zuppone taking the Route 3 prong instead of 128. The traffic petered out, but he kept the Lincoln at a steady fifty-five, the tires barely slapping the junctions of the asphalt in a way you felt rather than heard over the music. The leather upholstery was the same color as Primo's coat and supple to the point of buttery. But a cold softness, not the way I'd want my last car ride to feel.

  Zuppone picked up the telephone nestled between us and hit a button. After no more than one ring, he said, "It's Primo . . . Yeah . . . Ten minutes . . . Right."

  He hung up, looked at me. "You were in Vietnam, right?"

  I said, "Right."

  "One of the people you're going to meet, he was there, too. Let him talk about it, he wants to, but don't like . . . encourage him, okay?"

  My turn to look at Zuppone. "Okay."

  He noticed me looking and shrugged. "You made it easy on me, coming along. I make it easy on you. One hand and the other, you know?"

  "Can you tell me where we're heading?"

  The toothpick changed sides again. "You ain't figured it out yet?"

  I thought back to Sinead Fagan being emphatic about not discussing "family" with Mau Tim Dani. "I figure the super at an apartment building this morning called the owners, and now I'm going to meet them."

  Zuppone nodded. "You're close."

  * * *

  We left Route 3 and started winding through suburban intersections with three gas stations and a convenience store on the corners. After a couple of turns, the retail areas gave way to narrow streets with small homes, which in tum gave way to wide streets with large homes. One of the wide streets matured into a boulevard, the center strip less impressive than Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, but with big shade trees far enough south and close enough to the ocean to be showing the full leaf stage of spring.

  Zuppone eased the Lincoln into a long driveway that curved gracefully past high hedges toward a white Greek Revival mansion, fluted pillars supporting the roof over the main entrance. He parked behind a Mercedes and a Volvo, the piano music dying abruptly as he turned off the engine, the air vibrating inside the car.

  Primo got out before I did, the door thunking solidly against the frame as he closed it. He made sure I was still with him, then walked up the flagstone path to the side entrance. He rang the bell but pulled open the door without waiting for anyone to say or do anything.

  I followed him through and into a huge kitchen, the pans all copper and polished. They hung from rings in their handles over tiles the color of dried blood. The tiles covered the work areas of the counters as well as the floor.

  As Zuppone stepped behind me to close the door, probably the tallest Vietnamese woman I'd ever seen stood up from a stool. There was a cigarette burning in a crystal ashtray in front of her, at least half a dozen smoked ones in the base of the tray.

  The woman self-consciously touched her hair, swept up in a bun with jewelry combs. Her cheekbones were high, her lipstick light. She wore a bac dai, the traditional long, slitted dress of her country, but the slit was conservative and the dress itself was black, not a gay print. A mother in mourning.

  She said, "My husband and the brother of my husband are in the den."

  As we went by her, I said, "I'm sorry for your loss."

  The woman dropped her gaze toward her feet. Her eyes started to close, but the left lid went only halfway down as the right closed completely. As she looked back up, I realized the left eye was gone, the brown and white egg in its socket a beautifully wrought piece of glass.

  I felt a chill as Zuppone led the way through the first floor of the house.

  * * *

  From across the den, they looked like twins standing in front of adjoining mirrors at the fun house. One was stocky, with coarse black hair in clots that didn't stay put. His jaw seemed about one generation removed from cracking bones around a cooking fire. He wore a shirt and tie, but the tie's knot was wrenched almost halfway down his chest, and the sleeves were turned up twice, revealing forearms thatched with black hair. As he drained a glass of what looked like Scotch, he made you think of why Webster put the word "guzzle" in the dictionary. The other guy was slim and five inches taller, maybe six one. The tide on his hair was going out, front to back. His features were more delicate, like the altar boy who goes on to play guard for the CYO basketball team. I guessed the suit to be in the seven-hundred range at Brooks Brothers, a Repp tie still knotted tightly at the collar. There was no drink in his hand or anywhere nearby.

  As Zuppone and I got closer, I realized the stocky one was about my age, the slim one a little younger despite the hairline. The stocky one said, "This him, Primo?"

  "Yes, Mr. Danucci."

  I thought, Jesus Christ.

  The stocky one put down his glass. "The name registers with you, don't it."

  My eyes went to the slim one. He seemed mildly amused but not inclined to show it much.

  The stocky one said, "Look at me, Cuddy."

  I did. "I thought you'd be older."

  The slim one said, "You're thinking of our father."

  I said, "Tommy Danucci was your father?"

  The stocky one said, "Is our father."

  Tommy Danucci. Tommy the Temper. One of the mob bosses you heard about but never saw, directing things quietly from the backroom instead of splashing across the front page. I remembered whiffs of him coming up during the media coverage of the Angiulo cases, but I thought he'd died in the mid-eighties.

  The slim one
said, "I think you're entitled to an introduction, Mr. Cuddy. This is my brother, Joseph Danucci. My name is Vincent Dani."

  I said to Dani, "You were Mau Tim's — — "

  "Tina! " thundered Danucci. "My daughter's name was Tina! Use it."

  Nobody said anything until Primo said, "Boss, can I freshen that up for you?"

  Danucci was breathing through his mouth. The sound was like a hurricane blowing through a lantern. It wasn't hard to see which gene he got from Tommy the Temper. "Yeah. Yeah, Primo. Thanks."

  "Chivas?"

  "No. The Johnny Black tonight."

  Zuppone crossed to the wet bar in a corner of the room. The paneled walls were covered with framed prints of different Boston athletes. Dom DiMaggio and Rico Petrocelli from the Red Sox, Gino Cappelletti from the Patriots, Phil Esposito from the Bruins. It took a minute to realize they all had Italian surnames. Danucci accepted his drink and downed half of it. He ran the back of his hand across his mouth, then ran his palm over his head, scattering the clots of hair into a different pattern.

  He said, "I'm not dealing real well with this shit," and inhaled the rest of his drink.

  This time Primo didn't offer to get another.

  Around the empty glass, Danucci said, "I want to talk with the guy alone a couple of minutes."

  His brother said, "Joey?"

  "I'll be okay, Vinnie. You guys try the TV or something, huh?"

  Vincent Dani looked at Primo, who looked at me. Then Primo said, "Right, boss," and left the room, Dani taking two short steps, then striding out behind him.

  Joseph Danucci said to me, "Take a seat, Cuddy."

  I tried one of several leather easy chairs across from the leather couch. All the cowhide, including the tufting on the bar and stools, was royal blue, held in place by brass tacks.

  Danucci circled over to the bar, setting his glass on it. "Get you something?"

  It was a little early, but I said, "Beer, if you have it."

  He disappeared behind the bar. "What I don't got, you don't need." His voice echoed a little as he spoke into what sounded like a refrigerator.

  Using a church key, Danucci opened the bottle of Sam Adams the way a busy bartender would, the top arcing through the air like a tossed coin.

  He brought the bottle over to me. "Primo said you were in the 'Nam."

  Danucci pronounced it to rhyme with "Mom." As he moved back to the bar, I thought about what Zuppone had told me in the car.

  I said, "One tour."

  "When?"

  "Late sixties."

  Danucci poured himself more Scotch. "Where?"

  "Mostly Saigon."

  He started to raise his glass, then said, "Tet?"

  "Yeah."

  Danucci swigged two fingers of the Johnny Walker. " 'Who owns the night?' "

  " 'The night belongs to the 101st Airborne.' "

  He watched me. "You were a Screaming Eag1e?"

  "No. Ran into them from time to time."

  "What outfit you with?"

  "Military Po1ice."

  Danucci came around the bar. "Fucking Mike-Papa?"

  "That's right."

  "Ever out in the boonies?"

  "Once in a whi1e."

  Danucci started pacing back and forth. "Yeah, well I fucking lived in the boonies, man, seventy into seventy-one. I never minded so much the assaults, even on a Huey going down into a hot LZ. And on search-and-destroy, you got so you could see the booby traps, especially old ones. At least you were doing something, going after Charlie where he lived. What I couldn't take was standing down on a firebase some fucking general named after a mission from World War II, guarding some fucking artillery against Charlie probing us at night."

  My host kept pacing. "Sweating on top of some fucking bunker because it was crawling with rats inside. Waiting. All the time just waiting for Charlie to hit. You can hear a lot further at night than you can see."

  Danucci stopped in front of me. "Know what was the worst part?"

  Without thinking, I said, "The rain."

  This time Danucci stared at me. That cold, dead-eyed stare Tom Berenger captured so well in Platoon. "Fucking A. That rain starts, you couldn't hear nothing moving, nothing. It started to rain, didn't matter I wasn't pulling guard duty, I couldn't sleep."

  The palm went through the hair again. "Like now."

  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 tile 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 — Virmie? — 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 .... "