The Black Door

by Collin Wilcox

  “I’m Mrs. Dominic Vennezio. You’ve probably heard about my husband.”

  “Dom—” I swallowed, looking at her with what I realized was transparent amazement. “Dominic Vennezio? The … the …” I groped for the word.

  Her dark eyes never wavered as she answered, “The gangster. Yes.”

  Vividly, I could still see the headlines: Crime Czar Slain in Beach Hideaway. Dominic Vennezio Murdered in Secret Love Nest.

  Dominic Vennezio, the Syndicate’s man in California—the overlord of crime in Southern California—a member in good standing of organized crime’s ruling council. It had been less than a month since the murder. And now, in my own living room, the widow sat in her plain blue coat. Watching me. Waiting.

  Did she want me to help her? It had been a gangland slaying. To find the murderer would mean a Mafia death sentence, beyond the slightest doubt.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Vennezio,” I said lamely. “I know it must’ve been a—a terrible shock for you. Your husband’s murder, I mean.”

  She didn’t reply. There was something in her implacable silence that made me ill at ease. Or perhaps it was her dark, expressionless eyes, never leaving my own. I realized that I was shifting uncomfortably in my chair.

  “You’re a crime reporter, too,” she said in the same abrupt voice. “Is that right?”

  I nodded. “Yes. That’s how I got into—into clairvoyance in the first place. In looking into crimes, you see, I discovered that—”

  “Then you know about Dominic,” she interrupted. “You probably even wrote about him, in the newspaper.”

  “Well, yes, I have. But—”

  “You know about the Outfit, then.”

  “The Syndicate, you mean?”

  She shrugged. “Call it whatever you want to. But you know what I mean.”

  “Yes,” I answered in a low voice. “Yes, I know what you mean.”

  “Good.” She nodded, as if satisfied. Then, deliberately, she said, “My husband wasn’t murdered by the Outfit, Mr. Drake. Everyone thinks so, but he wasn’t.”

  “But …” I shrugged, then helplessly shook my head. There was nothing I could say. It was a certainty that Dominic Vennezio’s murderer would never be prosecuted in the normal course of events. Surely she didn’t expect me to find Vennezio’s murderer, turn him over to the police and then calmly wait for a bullet in the head.

  “It wasn’t the Outfit,” she repeated. “I know it wasn’t.”

  “That’s just your opinion, Mrs. Vennezio. I’m sure they wouldn’t admit it to you if they’d killed him. They’d probably be afraid you’d—”

  “They aren’t afraid of anything,” she interrupted in a low, tight voice. “You’re a crime reporter. You know I’m right. If they aren’t afraid of the police, why should they be afraid of me?”

  “Still, assuming they had him killed, you couldn’t expect them to admit it to you, could you? Any more than you’d expect them to admit it to the police—or to anyone else, for that matter. It doesn’t mean they’re foolish, just because they aren’t afraid.”

  “They’d admit it to me,” she said doggedly.

  “But why? Why would they admit it to you, when they wouldn’t admit it to anyone else? It’s not logical.”

  “They’d admit it to me because they’ve been trying to make up their minds for two years whether to kill me. So, if they killed Dom, the first thing they’d do is tell me about it, as a warning. About half the time they kill someone, it’s a warning to someone else, too.” She said it matter-of-factly, as if discussing the tactics of an unscrupulous loan shark. Something about her monotonous, uninflected voice, with its trace of an old-country accent, gave a chilling weight to her words. There was a kind of stoic resignation in her manner, too—as if she didn’t really care whether they killed her or not.

  “Do they know you’ve come to me, Mrs. Vennezio?” I asked.

  “They know everything.”

  “Let me put it differently, then, Do they approve of you coming to me?”

  “If they didn’t approve, I wouldn’t be here. I’d be with Dom.”

  “Yes, but that—that’s another assumption you’re making, Mrs. Vennezio. How can you be sure—absolutely sure—they know you’re here? They aren’t omnipotent you know. They have their contacts, I admit. But they’re not—”

  “Reggie tells them.” She moved her head toward the plate glass window. “The one that came in with me. Reggie Fay. It’s his job.”

  “Do you mean that it’s his responsibility to report everything you do to the Outfit?”

  She nodded.

  “But why?”

  “I already told you: because they’ve been trying to decide whether to kill me or not. For two years, now.”

  Feeling a sense of baffled frustration, I looked at her for a long moment before finally saying, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Vennezio, but none of this makes any sense to me. If we’re going to get anywhere, you’re going to have to tell me the whole story, from the beginning. Otherwise, there’s no point in our—”

  “I moved out on Dominic just about two years ago,” she said in her expressionless voice. “He started playing around with another woman, and I moved out.”

  “And Dominic Vennezio let you go?” I was surprised. The Syndicate’s first concern is for the probity of its leaders. The executives of organized crime live more proscribed lives than their counterparts in big business. Divorce, perhaps, was tolerated. But never a scandal.

  “I wanted to leave him,” she said, “and I did. There wasn’t anything he could do about it.”

  “But—”

  “Before I did it, I first of all wrote down things I know. Things about Dominic. I made four copies and put two of them in two separate safe-deposit boxes and gave the other two to different lawyers. And I told Dom that if anything happened to me, those letters would go to four different people: the President, J. Edgar Hoover, the governor of California and the head of the California Crime Commission.”

  I thought about it for a moment before saying, “From what I’ve heard of the Outfit, Mrs. Vennezio, I don’t think those four letters would’ve permanently stopped them if they really wanted you dead. Something like this happened several years ago, and they simply tortured the man until he told them where the incriminating material was hidden. Then the man turned up dead.”

  “But Dominic would never’ve let them do that” she answered doggedly. “He wanted his freedom, all right. But not that bad. Besides, I never told anyone else about those letters. Only Dominic.”

  “You just finished saying, though, that they knew everything. You also said they’ve been considering murdering you for two years. So they must have known.”

  She thought about it, then indifferently shrugged my mere logic aside. “Maybe so. I was only talking about Dominic. But he’s not the only one, you know. The others, back East, they tell him what to do. Besides, the way I felt when I moved out, I didn’t care whether they killed me or not. Maybe Dominic did, but I didn’t.”

  “Did he still have some feeling for you, then, when you moved out? Is that what you mean?”

  “We were married thirty years and we had two kids. Even someone like Dominic, he don’t forget things like that.”

  “What kind of a man was he, Mrs. Vennezio? Aside from this—this indiscretion, what kind of a man was he?”

  Her hands tightened on her handbag and her voice dropped to a huskier note as she said, “Dominic was a good man—a good husband. In his business, he was hard on people. It’s all he knew; it’s the way he learned. But he never treated me mean. Even after he met that—that woman, he never treated me mean. It just happened to him like it happened to a lot of men when they start getting old. They start wondering about their manhood, and once they start wondering they can’t stop. Most of the time, with Dominic, it was a girl he’d find on a trip. He had to go back East every six months or so, for meetings. And he’d find himself a girl, and that would be that. I—I knew about it. I never
said anything, but I knew. But this thing—this woman, that was something else. He paid her rent, and everything. And bought her a car. And—and …” Her voice trailed off. For the first time she lowered her eyes.

  “What about a divorce?”

  Slowly she shook her head.

  “We’re Catholic. Both of us. Besides, we—we’d been together for thirty years. That’s a long time.”

  I thought about it before deciding to say, “Let me ask you this, Mrs. Vennezio: If I were able to find out who murdered your husband, what would you do with the information?”

  She raised her eyes. “That’d depend on who did it. I just want to know. I’ve got to know. And no one will tell me anything.”

  “Have you gone to the police?”

  “No.” She seemed almost primly shocked, as if I’d suggested a gross impropriety. After thirty years as the wife of a Mafioso, I reflected, it wasn’t surprising.

  “It’s the Outfit, then, who won’t tell you. Is that right?”

  She nodded, once more dropping her eyes. And now she sighed deeply. For the first time I realized how much it must be costing her to talk so candidly about her husband’s transgressions. And with the realization, I felt a small pang of guilt. I was titillating my curiosity, with no real intention of doing as she asked. So, as gently as I could, I said:

  “I can’t help you, Mrs. Vennezio. You must know that. You say the Outfit didn’t have him killed, but that’s just another assumption you’re making. If you’re wrong and I go sniffing around, I’ll find myself in the river. Besides, even if they didn’t kill him, they probably don’t want anyone sniffing around.”

  For perhaps a full half-minute she stared at me, and during the interval I saw her eyes harden and her mouth tighten. Watching her, I realized that the image of the cleaning woman had faded, replaced by that of an Italian peasant woman in her ritual black shawl, stolid and silently long-suffering—yet capable of a hot-eyed, white-knuckled passion.

  She was rummaging now in her handbag. I was aware of a little lift of excitement as I realized she was counting money. Finally she neatly tapped together a small sheaf of bills, which she placed on the coffee table before her.

  “There’s one thing I learned from Dominic,” she said evenly, “and it’s that everyone has his price.” She pointed to the stack of bills. “That’s a thousand dollars, Mr. Drake. It’s not for finding Dom’s murderer. It’s just for taking the time to go down and see Frankie Russo. He’s the man who’s taking over Dominic’s job. That’s all I ask: just take the thousand dollars, and talk to Russo. If he doesn’t want you around, he’ll tell you, and you’ll still have the thousand dollars. If he says you can help me—” she lifted a thicker sheaf of bills from inside her handbag “—there’s nine thousand dollars more if you can find out who murdered Dominic.”

  I swallowed. Twice.

  “But what’ll you do with the information, assuming I can find the murderer for you? You can’t go to the police, especially if someone from the Outfit is involved. Not unless you want to spend the rest of your life locked up in protective custody.”

  She didn’t answer the question directly, but instead said, “I’ve already told you, I have to know.” She glanced almost contemptuously around my living room before saying quietly, “You didn’t come from the old country, Mr. Drake. Probably your folks didn’t either—or even your grandparents. But I was born in Sicily. I can still remember it, living there. And Sicilians never forget it, when something like this happens. We …” She shrugged, then shook her head. Plainly she herself didn’t understand the dim, almost primitive instincts driving her. In a lower, baffled voice she said, “I just can’t think of anything else, Mr. Drake. I’ve just got to know who killed him. It—it’s all I care about. It’s all I think about, anymore. When it first happened, I thought I didn’t care. I even thought I was glad, when I first heard about it. I—I started laughing, and I couldn’t stop. Then I realized that I was really crying. I thought I’d got my revenge, but I was wrong. And now I can’t think about anything but finding out who killed him. Maybe it’s something bad I’m doing. The priest says it is. But I …”

  She stared down at her handbag, blinking rapidly. “Please help me, Mr. Drake. I can’t go to the police, and I can’t go to a private detective, except the crooked ones. When I read about you, I just—just thought you were the only one who could help me. I guess maybe I’m superstitious. When I was a little girl, I used to think I could see things, like you do. I used to think I could see the Virgin, and I used to talk to her. I was even examined once by four priests, like they used to examine saints. So when I heard about you, I …” Her voice trailed off. As she sat with head bowed, fiddling fretfully with the clasp of her handbag, the image of the vindictive peasant woman faded, along with that of the humble cleaning woman. She was simply a grieving middle-aged housewife, sitting forlornly on my sofa.

  I looked at the small pile of bills on the coffee table—a thousand dollars, for taking a trip to Los Angeles. I would be a thousand dollars richer, just for talking with Frankie Russo—and for obeying his instructions not to help Mrs. Vennezio find her husband’s murderer. It was, I realized, a cynical calculation. Yet, almost beyond doubt, that’s the way it would happen.

  And, besides the money, there was the professional advantage of actually contacting a member of the Mafia elite. Few crime reporters ever got the opportunity.

  There seemed little risk, yet it was difficult to be sure. I’d been a crime reporter for five years, and I knew the vast power organized crime could wield. True, most reporters had a certain immunity, as did most police officers. But private investigators weren’t always so lucky. As for clairvoyants …

  I sighed and lit a cigarette. There could be no harm in hearing her story.

  “Tell me about it, Mrs. Vennezio. Tell me everything that happened.”

  She raised her head.

  “You’ll do it, then?” She didn’t smile, nor did her voice betray any emotion.

  “I might. Tell me, though, what happened. Start with your husband’s relationship with this woman.”

  She drew a deep breath, then took the purse from her lap and placed it on the couch beside her. She clasped her hands and gazed off across the room. Something in her slow, wooden speech and tightly clasped hands reminded me of the confessional. This was how she must sound to her priest, I was thinking.

  “It all started almost two and a half years ago,” she was saying. “Dom hired this—this woman away from someone else. She was working for one of the real estate companies that Dom used. Dom was very interested in real estate. He was always buying and selling houses and apartment houses. So then, one day, he told me that he was going to start his own real estate business. He said it’d make him a lot of money if he had his own real estate office.”

  “This was his own private business,” I interrupted. “It had nothing to do with the Syndicate.”

  “That’s right, just his own. But really, see, it was all a—a front, to get this woman to work for him. I heard later that he offered her twice the salary she was getting.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Faith Hanson.” She pronounced it with difficulty.

  “Did she have a husband?”

  “Her husband drank, I think.”

  “Children?”

  She nodded. “She has a boy. A teen-ager.”

  “Was she actually a real estate broker?”

  “No. She was just a secretary. Dom hired a broker, too. And before they were done, they had three or four salesmen working, too. It turned out to be a good business. I have to give Dom that: he could make money. Even on the square.”

  “And this real estate business was on the square?”

  She nodded.

  “Do you think Dominic had been seeing this woman before he hired her?”

  Again she nodded. “They’d been seeing each other for two, three months.”

  “Then what happened, after she went to work for
him?”

  “Well, they—they started seeing each other all the time. It got so, once a week, Dom wouldn’t come home. He’d always say it was business, but we both knew he was lying. So, one day, I asked him right out whether he was keeping another woman.”

  “Did he admit it?”

  “Yes.”

  “What explanation did he give?”

  “He just said that he loved her, and couldn’t help himself. It didn’t have anything to do with me, he said. He still loved me, he kept saying. It was just that he couldn’t help himself.”

  “How old is this Hanson woman, Mrs. Vennezio?”

  “She’s about forty.”

  “And how old was Dominic?”

  “He’s—he was fifty-nine.”

  “What about her husband? What happened to him?”

  “He drank, like I said, but that’s all I know—except that, just after Faith Hanson went to work for Dominic, her husband disappeared.”

  “You mean …” I didn’t quite know how to put it.

  “No, it wasn’t like that, I don’t think. I never knew, but I don’t think it was like that. I’d’ve heard.”

  “Was the husband ever seen again?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  I sat for a long moment regarding her—trying to decide whether she was evading the question. In assessing her mannerisms, it was difficult to separate guilt from embarrassment.

  “You’ve got to tell me everything, Mrs. Vennezio,” I said finally. “Otherwise I can’t help you.”

  “I know.”

  “And you’re certain Dominic didn’t—do away with Mr. Hanson?”

  “I don’t know one way or the other. I told you.”

  “What about Mrs. Hanson’s son? Is he living with her?”

  “He lived with her for a year. But then, last year, she sent him to a private school. One of those fancy schools in the Ojai Valley.”

  “When the boy left, did Dominic actually move in with the Hanson woman?”