“Where is your husband, Mrs. Rosselli?” the detective asked.
“Why?”
Sevilla’s face was stone, and an edge was in her voice. “Mrs. Rosselli, if you keep answering my questions with questions, we’re never going to get anywhere.”
“You think so?” A hint of a smile returned to the woman’s lips.
Finally, Caine stepped forward and offered his own smile, as warm and charming a one as he could muster.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Rosselli. I’m Horatio Caine with Miami-Dade Criminalistics and this is Calleigh Duquesne from my office. Please don’t get the wrong impression. We’d just like to talk to your husband.”
Mrs. Rosselli shrugged. “Well, that may be, but he’s not here…and I don’t expect him for quite a while.”
Nodding, Caine asked, “Might we come in and talk to you, then?”
“Certainly, young man.” Then Mrs. Rosselli glared at Sevilla in the fading light. “A little civility goes a long way, Detective.”
“I apologize if I seemed rude, Mrs. Rosselli,” Sevilla said.
The woman held the door open for them, her attention now on Caine and Calleigh, Sevilla all but dismissed.
Mrs. Rosselli showed them into a good-sized family room with a green leather sofa and two matching loungers arranged in a loose semicircle facing a thirty-two-inch flat-screen Sony television. The cream carpeting was plush, and maple tables and shelves scattered around the outside of the room held various cat sculptures that had a Beatnik-era feel to them. Family photos and two impressionist paintings of cats adorned the cream-colored walls.
Mrs. Rosselli gestured with a hand for Caine and Calleigh to take the couch while she sat in the nearest chair, leaving Sevilla to walk to the far end to the other chair.
“All right, then,” Mrs. Rosselli said, businesslike. “What is it you think my husband can help you with?”
Caine said, “We’re investigating a murder.”
She frowned. “Here in the neighorbood?”
“No.”
“Because things are getting terrible, you know. A decent person can’t walk down the street anymore. We’ve had break-ins right on this block—in broad daylight!”
“Yes, Mrs. Rosselli, but that’s not, uh—”
“But I’m a trusting person. You saw how I opened the door for you. You might have been thieves—murderers!”
“Well…we’re not. We’re police investigating a murder.”
“I wish you’d get to the point, then.”
Caine felt like he was on the wrong end of an Abbott and Costello routine. He said, “Our murder victim was shot with bullets that match a murder in Trenton.”
Mrs. Rosselli frowned in confusion. “Trenton? Why, we haven’t lived there for…I don’t know how long.”
“Fifteen years,” Caine said.
“Well—yes. That sounds about right.”
“This particular murder took place prior to your husband leaving the Trenton area. His friend and, I believe, business associate—Vincent Ciccolini?—was the major suspect in that crime.”
She seemed to shrink in on herself; her voice was still confident, but smaller than before. “I suppose you think that because Vincent and Anthony are friends, Anthony was mixed up in that.”
“The Trenton authorities, at the time—”
“There was no arrest, was there? No, Vincent wasn’t arrested, and neither was Anthony, or for that matter…Abraham.” Her voice had choked, right before the last word, and she paused to withdraw a tissue from her sleeve and dab at her nose.
Did Abraham Lipnick have something to do with why Mrs. Rosselli had been crying today?
She was saying, “I’m sorry, Mr., uh, Caine, was it? But I don’t see why something we weren’t even involved in fifteen years ago has anything to do with us in Coral Gables today.”
Caine said, “I’m not sure it does, Mrs. Rosselli. It’s likely a coincidence. But we have to follow up. Procedure.”
“Well, I’m sure you’re required to do these things, I do understand, but you shouldn’t really bother my husband and me. If Vinnie was the—suspect—then, I suggest you talk to Vinnie.”
“We tried.” Caine nodded in the direction of the Ciccolini home. “He’s not home, either. Perhaps he and your husband are together…. What about Abraham Lipnick, Mrs. Rosselli? Do you know where he and Mr. Ciccolini are? Are they with your husband…?”
A tear trickled down Rebecca Rosselli’s cheek.
Caine exchanged glances with Calleigh and Sevilla. What was this woman upset about?
“Oh they’re together, all right,” Mrs. Rosselli said. “At least as much as they can be. You see…Abraham has passed away. Anthony and Vinnie are at the funeral home. They were the only family he had left.”
Another round of glances was exchanged between the CSIs and the detective—understanding, now.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Caine said softly. “Can you tell us which funeral home, please?”
The dark eyes flashed at him. “Why? So you can intrude on their grief, and make a scene in front of God and everybody?”
Caine shook his head. “No, so we can straighten this out, and leave all of you alone…to your grief, and your privacy.”
“You sound sincere, young man. Are you?”
“You have my word, Mrs. Rosselli—we’ll be discreet. But the bottom line, ma’am, is a man was murdered recently with the same gun as in that long-ago Trenton case. And I have to find out what if any significance there is to that.”
Sounding defeated, Mrs. Rosselli said, “They’re at Longo’s Eternal Rest in Coconut Grove. Visitation’s on right now.”
Not hiding her irritation, Sevilla said, “You might have told us that sooner.”
Mrs. Rosselli shot her a look. “I might have…but cops like you have been trying to pin things on Anthony for the last fifty years. Why? Because our name ended in ‘i’ and we lived in a nice home? In Trenton, we came to expect it. But not here. Here, things have been different. Fifteen years, and this is the first time you cops have come around.”
“We’re aware that your husband has been an upstanding citizen,” Caine said, noting to himself that earlier she’d reacted to their presence here as all too typical.
“Oh really? Then why are you turning up on my doorstep?”
“Because the evidence led there, ma’am. And as I say, it’s probably just a coincidence.”
She stared at nothing. Suddenly Caine realized the woman had been drinking before they got there. The lack of a tumbler in her hand or anything had fooled him.
She was saying, to no one in particular, “I don’t deny that Anthony had his share of trouble when he was younger, but not anymore. We’re retired. Retired!”
“Yes, Mrs. Rosselli,” Caine said.
“We moved here because it was impossible to live in New Jersey anymore. Every time someone got shot, you cops came nosing around us. We couldn’t take it anymore. We’re old, we’re tired.” Another tear ran down her cheek. “My children, my grandchildren all back there…my home? Gone. This is a nice house”—she gestured around her—“but Trenton was my home. I grew up there, we all did, and now we can’t even go back there for a visit, ’cept under a cloud of suspicion.”
The speech seemed to use her up and she folded in on herself.
All three officers were on their feet now.
“Thank you for your time, Mrs. Rosselli,” Caine said. “And again, we’re sorry for your loss.”
Mrs. Rosselli nodded without looking up from her tissue.
Calleigh—who’d been silent through all this, just watching, weighing the woman’s words—hung back. “May I ask you one more question, ma’am?”
The calm voice with the southern accent seemed to soften Mrs. Rosselli, who said, “Of course.”
“Why aren’t you at the funeral home as well?”
Mrs. Rosselli shook her head slowly. “I was there all morning, helping make arrangements…but I couldn’t take it anymore. Abraham l
ooked so small, so powerless, I couldn’t stand to see him that way. So—so—shriveled. Every time I looked at him, I started to see…to see my Anthony.” She sniffed a little. “I don’t know what I’ll do if I ever lose him.”
Stepping forward now, Calleigh laid a comforting hand on the woman’s shoulder. “Hopefully that won’t happen soon,” she said.
Mrs. Rosselli returned Calleigh’s sympathetic smile and showed them out; but as they were leaving, the woman’s eyes tightened, as if something ominous in Calleigh’s words had finally occurred to her.
7
Simple Send-off
LONGO’S FUNERAL HOME was a long, low-slung, one-story brick building just off the South Dixie Highway in Coconut Grove. Horatio Caine figured it for a smaller business—formerly a little dry cleaner’s, maybe, or restaurant—that had undergone some renovation, the two wings on either side of the main section looking added on, some time in the last twenty years perhaps, the mortar a significantly lighter gray than the older part.
Such observations on Caine’s part were automatic by now—he’d been a detective too long to think any other way.
The generous parking lot on the west side of the building—had another business building been torn down to make way?—was full, accommodating both visitors’ cars and a small fleet of hearses.
Adele Sevilla found a spot for her Lexus, and the redheaded CSI, the blonde CSI and the dark-haired detective clip-clopped across an asphalt lot even as several older people in non-funereal-looking pastels were wending toward various vehicles, many of which were big-as-a-boat Cadillacs and Buicks.
As the law enforcement trio rounded the corner onto the sidewalk, they almost bumped into another old couple; the man going bald, wearing a blue blazer with gold buttons over a crisp white shirt and equally crisp white slacks—striking Caine as a geriatric purser from some cruise ship—and the man’s apparent wife, only a few years his junior, wearing a floral print dress and brassy blonde hair of a color unknown to God but familiar to beauty parlors. The couple nodded to them as the officers moved off the sidewalk to let them pass.
“Coral Gables all the way,” Sevilla said, once the pair was out of earshot.
Two wide-shouldered guys in dark suits lumbered toward them, each in their late thirties, both looking like anger-management-class flunkees, one of them giving Caine a sideways glance when the CSI refused to surrender an inch of the sidewalk this time. They reluctantly paused and allowed Caine and the two women to pass.
After the duo was well away, Calleigh quietly inquired of Caine, “Emissaries from Don Venici?”
“Could be,” Caine said.
Calleigh meant, of course, Peter Venici—the Don of Miami, the local Mafia crime boss who’d succeeded his retired father and was now left on his own to deal with the waves of competition who looked upon Miami as an open city ripe for the taking.
Caine felt sure that some time in the not too distant future he and his team would find themselves working the crime scenes of one of the biggest gang wars the United States would ever see; but today he had simpler crimes on his mind—like a double murder in Miami Beach comprising a torsoless corpse and a duct-taped chauffeur.
For now that would hold Horatio’s attention just fine.
He held the door open for his two associates and then they were inside, where the floral scent was immediate and almost overwhelming. The muzak was nondenominational organ, a shade too loud; and the anonymous lobby—cream-color indoor-outdoor carpet and lighter cream wallpaper with framed floral studies—was home to a few knots of older people chatting, most of them not even bothering to look up as new blood entered.
One of the ancient greeters habitually hired by Miami funeral homes approached them, a reed-thin old man in a dark suit that had started to outgrow him. His hair dangled in limp white wisps around ears that extended from his head as if trying to jump ship, his glasses seemed determined to slide to the very tip of his nose, and his brown eyes were dim behind a milky haze. Only the smiling dentures were of a recent vintage.
Sevilla had her hand in her jacket pocket to pull out her badge, but she changed her mind and simply said, “Abraham Lipnick visitation?”
“Room H,” the old boy said softly, and gestured to their right, like the Ghost of Christmas Past pointing out Scrooge’s own gravestone.
“Thank you,” Sevilla said civilly.
With Sevilla in the lead, they moved off down a wide hallway that led into one of the wings. The rooms on either side had placards next to their doorless entries, each designated with a letter—F on the right, G on the left, then H back on the right side. The room itself was long and narrow, twenty by ten, Caine estimated.
A surprisingly—even shockingly—simple wooden coffin lay open at the far end of the room, two older men standing to one side, greeting the mourners in a line of twenty or so. Overstuffed chairs and sofas lurked on the periphery, while several shallow rows of folding chairs faced the floral arrangements. Perhaps a dozen mourners—all elderly—sat talking quietly among themselves.
Calleigh leaned in close to Caine. “Why the wooden coffin? These Coral Gables residents all look like they could afford more.”
Caine replied, softly, “Jewish law—nothing that impedes a return to the earth. No embalming—hence the rush to burial. ‘For dust art thou and to the dust thou shalt return.’ Genesis.”
Sevilla gave him a look, and Caine, feeling a little embarrassed, shrugged. He half-expected the detective to charge up to the old men and start popping questions; but Sevilla got into the receiving line, Calleigh and Caine dropping in behind her. The line moved quickly enough, but still provided Caine time to study the two men they had come to interview.
Their New Jersey cop contact, Irv Brady, had furnished a photo of Ciccolini, who Caine made as the man on the left. Tall, his back rigidly straight despite his age, Vincent Ciccolini stood next to the coffin, at the moment shaking hands with a stubby man in an ill-fitting suit.
The reputed assassin’s own suit was black with a light gray pinstripe, his shirt gray, tie black, shoes shiny and black and expensive-looking. He still had a full head of straight gray hair, parted on the left and swept right. His wide, bright brown eyes came up from the man in front of him, surveyed the room, paused for a second on Caine, then moved on until he was looking at the next person in line.
On Ciccolini’s left stood a shorter, balding man with a brown goatee and a wreath of short brown hair around the back of his head. Caine took the goateed man to be Anthony Rosselli. He had bigger ears, a slightly smaller nose, fuller lips, and kinder brown eyes than Ciccolini. Rosselli also wore a dark suit, with a white shirt and striped tie; his black wingtips looked far less comfortable than Ciccolini’s Italian loafers. Rosselli shook the hand of the man in the ill-fitting suit and where Ciccolini had used just one hand, Rosselli used both, making the gesture seem warmer, more personal.
Only two people remained now between Sevilla and Ciccolini, and Caine gave the two head mourners a hard study. He had little doubt that they had been the assassins the police authorities back east believed them to be. Or that is, to have been—fifteen years ago. Had they forgotten their trade, left business behind, for a world of shuffleboard, bargain matinées and early bird specials? Or, like some retirees, could they not let go of their trade?
Caine wondered.
Sevilla stepped forward and discreetly showed Ciccolini her badge. “We’re sorry to intrude and have no desire to embarrass you.”
In the somber mourning mask, Ciccolini’s eyes sparkled. “How could an attractive young girl like you ever embarrass an old man like me?”
Sevilla frowned. “Is there somewhere we can talk?”
Ciccolini whispered to Rosselli, they exchanged nods, and Ciccolini excused himself to those nearest him, after which he ushered the trio of cops through a door behind them. For a second they were in the wide hallway again, but Ciccolini took the lead and, walking briskly for a man of any age, moved up a short corridor on the
other side. In less than a minute, they were standing outside the back of the funeral home in the diminishing sun of late afternoon.
“I’m Detective Sevilla. This is Lieutenant Caine and CSI Duquesne.”
Ciccolini smirked. “And I guess I don’t need to introduce myself,” he said as he withdrew a pack of Camel cigarettes from the pocket of his jacket. “Hey, no problem—I been dyin’ for a coffin-nail.”
“You seem to be holding up well,” Caine said dryly, “where the death of your friend is concerned.”
Smoke dragoned from Ciccolini’s nose and his smile was tobacco yellow, the only liability in the asset that was his still handsome face. “One thing I never share with cops is my feelings about my friends and family. That’s private. I’m willin’ to talk business with you guys…and gals. Comes with the territory.”
“But you’re retired,” Caine said, with a droll smile.
Ciccolini took a long drag from the smoke. Then he said, “Fifteen years, straight and narrow—and yet still there’s something so important that the Miami Police have to interrupt the middle of my friend’s wake?”
“Is a wake part of Jewish burial rites?” Sevilla asked with a frown.
Ciccolini shrugged. “Hell, I don’t know. Just tryin’ to do right by Abe somehow. We did the wooden coffin routine, I know that much.”
“But you didn’t speak to any of his Jewish friends,” he noted.
Ciccolini made a V with fore-and middle fingers. “Abe had two friends down here—me and Tony. But I figured he’d want a kosher burial. Gotta be quick too…the guy here says he’s gotta be in the ground twenty-four hours after the fact.”
Caine lifted an eyebrow, then nodded toward Calleigh, who stepped forward and handed Ciccolini a photocopy of the top page of the Trenton police report from her pocket.
“We’ll see if this jogs your memory,” Caine said.
Ciccolini scanned it for only a few seconds. “This? You interrupt our mournin’ for this stale shit? That was last century, guys—I was cleared of that before Blondie here hit puberty.”
Calleigh frowned—not offended, Caine didn’t think; she was probably doing the math.
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