by J. D. Griffo
“And yes I know that was a poor choice of words, but I’m short staffed here today and I’m cranky.”
“Then stop acting like my sister and get over here before the park gets too crowded,” Alberta commanded. “In fact, Helen and Joyce are on their way over so we might have some answers for you by the time you show up.”
Alberta disconnected the call but wasn’t quick enough, and they heard Vinny shout something about them meddling in official police business. It was probably because Alberta had grown up surrounded by a large, and very loud, extended Italian family, but the shouting didn’t bother her. Other than when she felt Vinny was attacking her personally for not being physically fit to jog a mile or so every other day, of course. Otherwise she was used to the loud volume. It’s how Italians have communicated for centuries, whether they were angry, happy, or feeling some emotion in between. Even now in her seventh decade she could still hear the cacophony of sounds that accompanied almost every dinner while growing up and the endless high-decibel chatter that lasted throughout every family holiday. She was grateful for the peace and quiet she now had, but there were times when she found herself feeling sentimental for the raucous Sunday dinners of her past.
Jinx, on the other hand, had only experienced a small sampling of the loud Italian family lifestyle before her parents moved her to a very unItalian part of Florida to live, so she was a bit more unnerved by Vinny’s reaction.
“I don’t think Mr. D’Angelo, I mean Chief D’Angelo, likes us very much,” she conceded.
“Oh lovey, don’t let the sound of a man’s voice fool you, especially an Italian man,” Alberta replied. “They yell, that’s what they do. Instead, listen to his words.”
Jinx was more confused than ever. “I did listen to his words, and it’s his words that make me think he doesn’t like us very much.”
Shaking her head and smiling, Alberta was amazed that as mature as Jinx could be, she was still a baby in so many ways. “That’s because you’re just listening to the words themselves and not the feeling that lies underneath them,” Alberta explained. “Your generation likes to say everything that they feel and think, and they have this crazy need to share every single thing that they do and every thought they have with the entire world because they think that what they have to say is so incredibly important. But older people, we sometimes don’t always say what we mean, but if you listen hard enough you’ll hear what we’re trying to say.”
Jinx felt as if Alberta had just recited a very moving piece of poetry . . . in Greek. She didn’t follow a word of Alberta’s insight. “So what exactly was Vinny trying to say?”
“O dio mio! That he cares about us and doesn’t want anything bad to happen to us so we should stop this crazy detective work before one of us gets hurt.”
Amazed, Jinx replied, “You got all of that from his ranting and raving?”
“Sometimes it really does pay to be an old lady,” Alberta gathered. “And speaking of one, here comes Joyce.”
From a distance, Joyce looked nothing like an old lady and exactly like a runway model. It was only 7:30, but Joyce was perfectly dressed and accessorized, and looked like she was going to attend an early morning business meeting. Having spent so many years working in the male-dominated financial industry, Joyce had learned two things: the importance of always being well dressed and the importance of always appearing feminine. When she was part of the workforce, some women felt the need to confirm and adhere to a no-frills, almost masculine, dress code, but Joyce recognized early on that as a woman, and an African American woman at that, she was going to stand out and be marginalized by her white male colleagues regardless of how conservatively she dressed. And for the first two decades Joyce worked on Wall Street, all of her colleagues were white men so there was very little chance that she was going to blend in.
She hadn’t tried to be defiant, only honest to her own fashion sense, so she wore tailored business suits in a bevy of bright colors and always adorned them with jewelry, scarves, and whatever other accessory was trendy at the time. In her retirement she didn’t attend many occasions that required her to don a business suit, but whatever she wore she continued to maintain her fashion philosophy.
Walking toward Alberta and Jinx, Joyce was an explosion of color. She wore pink cropped pants and matching pink pumps, a plaid pink and black cape made out of angora wool, and pink leather gloves. Hanging from her ears were her trademark gold hoop earrings.
“Don’t you look beautiful, Joyce,” Alberta enthused. “I always loved that cape.”
“No matter what time of day, Aunt Joyce, you always look like you walked out of a magazine.”
“Hopefully Vogue and not AARP!” Joyce replied. “But look at the two of you! You’re the ones who look beautiful.”
Surveying their outfits, Alberta commented, “Hon, we’re wearing jogging clothes.”
“There is nothing more beautiful than a healthy woman!” she cried. “And Berta, I am so proud of you for starting to jog. When you get to our age you cannot take your health for granted.”
Alberta nodded in agreement. “You can’t take your health for granted at any age. Right there is a perfect example.”
Joyce turned to where Alberta was pointing and for the first time noticed the dead man lying on the grass. With just one look she proved that she knew more about him than either Alberta or Jinx who had been in his company far longer.
“Oh, poor Jonas!”
“You know him, Aunt Joyce?”
“Everybody does,” she answered. “That’s Jonas Harper, he’s lived in Tranquility his entire life.”
Now that the man had a name, his death took on an even deeper meaning. He was no longer an unknown corpse lying on the ground, he was a man with an identity and, therefore, a history. Sadly, he might have a past, but his future was over. Alberta didn’t really know anything more about this man than she had a few moments ago, but somehow hearing his name spoken out loud made the sorrow she felt for him deepen.
“I don’t remember ever hearing his name before,” Jinx remarked. “Did he do anything important in town?”
“He lived in this town,” Joyce chided. “I think that’s important enough.”
Humbled by Joyce’s tone, Jinx attempted to explain her comment. “I didn’t mean that he, you know, himself wasn’t important, I just meant did he do something that with me being a reporter I should’ve known about, like was he a councilman or a store owner?”
Alberta grabbed Jinx’s hand to calm her. She loved her granddaughter and as independent and adventurous and confident as she was, she was still an inexperienced young girl who had a lot to learn about life. “We know, honey,” Alberta said. “But just because you don’t know someone’s name, doesn’t mean they’re unimportant.”
Before Joyce could explain who Jonas Harper was, Vinny arrived, marching toward the women like he was about to enter the battlefield. Which, in a way, he was.
“Get away from the dead body, ladies,” Vinny barked. “I don’t want you messing up my crime scene.”
“Technically it’s our crime scene, Vinny,” Alberta affirmed. “We got here first.”
Stopping a foot from the women, Vinny raised a finger in the air and was about to unleash another scolding before Alberta defused the situation. “I’m joking. And don’t worry, we little ladies haven’t touched a thing. Jonas is just the way we found him.”
Turning around to face the corpse, Vinny’s entire demeanor changed when he saw who was lying on the grass. His shoulders dropped and he let out an audible sigh. Clearly, he also knew who Jonas was and he was greatly affected by seeing his body unmoving on the ground.
For a moment no one spoke a word and allowed Vinny some time to catch his breath and regain his composure. With his hands on his hips and his head bowed, he didn’t make the sign of the cross or kiss a crucifix, but Alberta could tell by the way his lips were moving, almost imperceptibly, that he was offering his own prayer for Jonas’s soul. More proof
that people might be different, but in many ways they’re all the same.
“Why didn’t you tell me it was Jonas Harper?” Vinny asked, his voice much quieter than it had been earlier.
“We didn’t know who it was until Joyce showed up and identified him,” Alberta explained.
A strong wind blew by lifting up and ruffling Jonas’s untucked shirt. It looked odd to all of them to see activity on a dead man. A dead man, who while living, had his share of demons.
“Jonas worked for the Department of Public Works,” Vinny informed. “And among his many duties was taking care of the park.”
“Which could easily explain why he’s here,” Alberta commented. But then she noticed Joyce and Vinny share a quick conspiratorial look and realized that she had been too quick to form an opinion. “Unless there’s another reason why he liked to be in the park early in the morning.”
“It’s hardly a secret,” Joyce began. “But Jonas liked to drink a little . . . every now and again.”
Smirking at Joyce’s attempt to romanticize the recent past, Vinny contradicted her, “Jonas liked to drink period. No way to sugarcoat it, he was a drunk. And a tree house is no place for a drunk.”
“Albero della morte,” Alberta muttered.
Before Jinx could translate the phrase in her head, Joyce beat her to it. “True, but it’s the most beautiful tree of death I’ve ever seen.”
And Joyce was right, the tree was beautiful. Its thick trunk measured about eight feet around and at its full height it reached almost twenty feet. Its branches extended from its center like powerful arms greeting the world ready to offer it comfort and protection, and the tree’s crown was a robust cluster of leaves, a few still green, but most had already turned a deep orange and yellow. No one knew how old the tree was, but it could definitely be considered mature as some of its roots were exposed above the ground to create a carved, dynamic landscape at its base.
While the women discussed the juxtaposition between something so pretty being the cause of something so ugly, Vinny’s tone was getting uglier by the second as he tried to get in touch with his deputy.
“Kichiro! Where the hell are you?” Vinny yelled into his phone.
When he continued to scream and not wait for an answer, it was obvious that he was leaving a voice message and wasn’t having a heated conversation. “I need you at the tree house in Tranquility Park, and I need you here now!”
Now this kind of yelling was a reason for concern, Alberta thought. Squabbling among family members even in public was normal Italian fare, but public-display squabbling with coworkers was different. Then again, Alberta reminded herself, cops were a close-knit group of people, the nature of their profession and the need to trust each other implicitly with their lives leads them to create their own family so maybe there wasn’t anything peculiar about Vinny’s bellowing. Something, however, didn’t sound right to Alberta, and once again it wasn’t the words Vinny spoke, but how he spoke them.
“Trouble with the underlings, Vin?” she whispered.
“No,” Vinny answered immediately. He didn’t look at Alberta but was still engrossed in trying to communicate with Kichiro and was texting him, presumably to repeat the message he just left for him on his voice mail. When Vinny was finished, he turned to face the women, and Alberta thought he looked a bit more tired than usual.
“No,” he said again, a bit softer this time. “Everything’s fine with Kichiro, he’s a good man, but lately . . . I don’t know, he just hasn’t been himself.”
A stronger wind blew past them and some of the leaves that had fallen onto the ground became airborne. A few landed on top of Jonas’s body, and when Vinny squatted, Alberta thought he was going to remove them, but he only wanted to get a closer look at his friend. “Maybe if Jonas had been a bit more like Kichiro, he wouldn’t have gotten himself killed.”
“What do you mean?” Jinx asked.
“It doesn’t take fancy detective work or a bunch of amateur lady sleuths to see what happened here,” Vinny replied. “Jonas was up in the tree house, got drunk, and accidentally fell out. Case closed.”
Rolling her eyes and shaking her head, Alberta couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “You, Vinny D’Angelo, should know better. Jonas Harper was murdered and we can prove it.”
CHAPTER 4
Ciò che sale deve scendere.
Looking at Vinny, Alberta was transported to the past once more and marveled, yet again, how some things never changed.
Almost half a century ago, Alberta had been Vinny’s babysitter. Even as a boy, Vinny was respectful, introspective, and quiet, but he was also a man-in-training, which meant from time to time he would rebel and try to undermine Alberta’s authority. She would sometimes let him feel as if he won a battle by letting him stay up past his bedtime or have a few more ricotta-cheese cookies, which were his favorite, but most often she reminded him that she was in charge. Good-natured and nonaggressive at heart, Vinny would usually retreat to acting like the quiet, obedient boy he was. But that was then. Now as the chief of police Vinny was used to being the head honcho, and as even-keeled as he could be, he didn’t like anyone questioning his rank.
“Let’s not get carried away, Alfie,” Vinny snapped. “We need to take this one step at a time.”
“Di preciso!” Alberta exclaimed. “Where are the steps?”
“What?” Vinny asked.
“Ah madon! There’s no ladder!” Alberta pointed out. “By the way the poor man’s body is twisted, he obviously didn’t fall from running through the park so he must’ve fallen out of the tree house.”
“We’ve already established that, Alfie,” Vinny stated, his patience growing thin.
“But if there’s no ladder,” Alberta remarked. “How in the world did he get up into the tree house in order to fall out of it?”
Jinx and Joyce, flanking Alberta on either side, beamed with pride. “Gram’s right about that.”
The group looked at Jonas’s dead body and then up to the door of the tree house in search of an alternative route that could get a man from the ground to about ten feet in the air without the use of a ladder. Unless the person had stilts, was freakishly tall, or had a pet giraffe, the only real possibility would be to climb the tree itself. But that would be a difficult feat for any person and almost impossible if that person were drunk.
“It might be an impossible task for you, Alfie,” Vinny claimed. “But not for a guy.”
Shocked to hear Vinny utter such a misogynistic statement as fact, Alberta felt a chunk of anger rise up to her throat. Sure, Vinny was a man of a certain age and had spent his career in law enforcement, a male-dominated profession despite the attempts to diversify, but still it was a surprising proclamation. One she was going to enjoy watching her old friend prove.
“Oh really, hot stuff?” Alberta asked. “Why don’t you show us how easy it is?”
And just like that, Alberta and Vinny were no longer senior citizens having a conversation but were teenagers having a confrontation. Like most teenagers, Vinny knew that the smart choice would be to apologize and confirm that Alberta was right, but like most teenagers the smartest choices were often the most elusive so instead Vinny succumbed to the peer pressure and accepted the challenge.
“Stand back,” he declared, waving his arms so the women would back away from the tree.
“This should be good,” Alberta mumbled.
“Even though I was born in a casino, I’m not a betting woman,” Jinx announced. “But if I were, I’d put down a C-note on the tree.”
“I happen to have one in my purse in case anyone would like to place a bet,” Joyce shared.
Vinny shot Jinx and Joyce a glance that spoke volumes about how men feel when being teased by women. It was such a deadly glare it was enough to make Jinx feel bad for making her comment, but not enough to keep Joyce silent.
“Are you wearing your medic alert bracelet, Vinny?”
“Will you all stop jabbering?!” Vi
nny shouted. “And watch how it’s done.”
Angry, Vinny slammed his foot onto the trunk of the tree and reached up to grab hold of a bulbous, knotty growth. He took a few seconds to maintain his footing, but when he tried to lift himself up, the growth turned out to be loose bark and he tore it off with his hand. Caught off guard by this unexpected glitch, his body swung to the right, causing him to wobble. He reached out to try and grab the side of the tree, but the trunk was so big that he couldn’t make any kind of secure connection and only succeeded in slamming the palm of his hand into the tree. At the same time his foot slipped down the side of the trunk and landed with a thud on the ground.
“Careful,” Alberta advised.
Vinny muttered something under his breath that Alberta couldn’t understand, but she understood by the look on Vinny’s face that he hadn’t said, “Thank you.”
For his second attempt he took a different approach. Vinny placed his foot onto the tree trunk like he did before, but this time he jumped up to grab hold of a low hanging branch. Less confident after his first failure, Vinny tugged on the branch a few times with his left hand to make sure that it wouldn’t break and would hold his weight. When convinced that he wouldn’t fall once again, he lifted himself up and started to climb the tree with his feet gripping the sides of the trunk until he was high enough for his right hand to reach another, sturdier-looking branch. So far, so good. Unfortunately, when Vinny lifted his left hand to reach up and grab another branch, his fingers were at least a foot away.
He tried again, this time shifting his weight as far to the left as possible, and while his fingers got a little closer to the branch, he was still unable to grab it. Ignoring the chattering from the women below him, both nervous and nurturing, Vinny swung himself to the left and became airborne, which reminded Alberta of her favorite childhood comic strip—Tarzan. Unlike Tarzan, however, Vinny lacked the jungle man’s agility and grace, and never made his destination. Unless that destination was to be lying flat on his back on the ground.