“After you’ve seen Papa,” Anthony told us, “please, join my sister and the others in the library for a moment or two.”
Through the open door of the library, I could see the back of the girl’s head and shoulders as she sat in her wheelchair. People were standing around her, bending to whisper, to kiss her cheek. At this point, I wasn’t sure what the hell was going on: was the old man still alive or was this the beginning of a wake?
Before I could ask anyone, our little group was escorted to Alfredo Veronne’s bedroom. The scene would have done justice to the last hours of a medieval lord of the realm. The massive, ornate bed was covered by a beautiful pearly-white satin cover, underneath which, in the smallest possible mound, propped up by four-foot-wide satin pillows, was Alfredo Veronne, very much alive. His scrawny arms, inside red satin pajama sleeves, were neatly placed outside the cover, and his swollen fingers moved restlessly, clutching and releasing the cover. All around the room, at respectful distances, were the heirs and inheritors of the still-breathing and alert padrone. I scanned the room quickly, but didn’t spot Lorenzo.
A young priest stood at the bedside and acted as a sort of go-between for the host and his guests, and one after the other the visitors bowed reverentially to kiss the slightly extended left hand offered them by Veronne. Finally there was no one behind me; my group had left; the next group hadn’t arrived. The priest nodded at me; he had a very glassy-eyed look and I wondered how long he’d been standing at Veronne’s bedside.
“He is conscious, isn’t he, Father?”
“Oh, yes. Indeed, yes. Won’t you approach Mr. Veronne now. There are so many others waiting to pay their respects.”
Veronne looked dead, but he was just resting his eyes. I grabbed his hand and squeezed and leaned close and spoke directly into his left ear.
“It’s Joe Peters, Veronne. You’re going to tell me, right now, about the killing of the Keeler kids.”
The small watery eyes snapped open; the loose mouth pulled back with a gasp. He tried to pull his hand from my grip, but I leaned in close again and said, very quietly, very directly, “Because if you don’t, the minute you’re dead, old man, I’m going to tell your daughter how you kept her a cripple all her life, just so you could keep her close to you. And I’ll get five doctors to back me up.”
Again, a gasp; again, an attempt to pull his hand from mine. The young priest smiled questioningly.
“Mr. Veronne just said he wants to talk privately to me,” I said. The priest kept smiling, but he was looking around for someone to intervene. He wasn’t used to making decisions like this on his own.
Veronne’s voice cracked through the carefully hushed, soft voices as another group of visitors approached the foot of his bed.
“Get out,” Veronne said sharply. With great effort, he waved an arm at his son, Anthony. “Get them out of here,” Veronne ordered. “Goddamn it, do what I tell you and take him with you. I got something to discuss. Get out, get out!”
In less than forty seconds, we were alone. “My daughter,” Veronne began in a croaking voice, “only the best for her, always, always. For her protection, to prevent her from suffering, to ...”
“I don’t give a goddamn why you kept your daughter a cripple, Veronne. Tell your reasons to your priest. All I’m telling you is this: we trade. Now. My silence for your talking. You tell me about that night or I’ll see to it your daughter spits on your grave.”
His hands leaped up, one on either side of his narrow body. It was an involuntary movement, spasmodic. He tried to shrug; he coughed, then passed his tongue dryly over his dry white lips. His head slipped to one side; his profile was that of a broken-down, decaying mummy.
“Kitty called you that night. Because she knew you’d help her.”
“Yes, yes.” He spoke into the pillow, but I could hear every whispered word. “It was an accident. Truly, an accident. She did not mean to hurt the child. The child was so fragile.”
“I know that. Go on. Talk.”
“And she gave the second child the sleeping pills to quiet him because he was so frightened, so hysterical. It was all a sad and terrible accident.”
“So you sent Lorenzo?”
He nodded; sighed. “I sent Lorenzo. It took me a long time to find him. He had been visiting in his brother’s home out on Long Island. That was my mistake, sending Lorenzo. He never ... trusted women. He trusted no one but me. All his life, he has been with me. Devoted, all his life to me.” Veronne jabbed a bony hand at his temple. “He is a simple man, Lorenzo. He has always done exactly, exactly what I tell him to do. When Kitty called, she said they were both dead, both of her boys. So I told Lorenzo to go, take the bodies, drop them somewhere nearby, maybe in a park. And to put a bullet into one of the kids’ heads, so it would look like a kidnap-murder.” Veronne coughed, a dry hacking scraping sound. He shook his head. “Kitty called me as soon as Lorenzo left. She was hysterical. She said that the second boy hadn’t been dead after all, from the sleeping pills. That when they were in the car, the child cried out. She tried to save him, to tell Lorenzo, ‘No, don’t shoot this child,’ but ... but Lorenzo, he pulled the child away from her. Because he would do what he had been told to do. Exactly, exactly what I had told him to do. There was nothing Kitty could do. Nothing. It was all so terrible, so sad, the whole thing, all a terrible, terrible accident.”
“So you told her to go to bed. To say nothing. Until you thought up a good story for her?”
“I told her to trust me. She could always trust me. Don’t you see how I felt? That it was my fault, my responsibility, the death of this second child. Because of Lorenzo, who all his life did only what I told him to do and nothing else. My poor Kitty, my beautiful, beautiful Kitty. What a tragedy.”
I stared at Veronne, and a strange idea began to form. This old, dried-up, dying and powerless man had not always been old and dried-up and powerless. Not too many years ago, he had been strong and healthy and dynamic: an ugly man whose known charm and courtly manners and attentions had made him attractive and sought after by women from many levels of society. My first thought in coming here was that Kitty had used what I was using: knowledge of his daughter’s condition. She could have gotten that from Ray Mogliano. But Veronne was smiling, whispering to himself: “My beautiful Kitty.”
Slowly, carefully, Veronne confirmed for me what I had all but figured out: he had told Kitty how to make use of George’s confession. It had been almost a game for him: so easy, so easy, he said. You make up a good story, you get witnesses to confirm what you say. Witnesses were easily come by.
“Billy Weaver was dead; in his whole life, he never done nothing good for nobody. Why not let him do a good deed for Kitty in his death?”
Benjamin the Cuban: “For money, for a good suit of clothes, a good pair of boots, Benjamin would swear to anything.”
And Mrs. Deluca?
There was a strange gagging sound working its way up Veronne’s throat; for a second, I thought he was dying, but he wasn’t. He was laughing.
“Ah, ah, Mary. She was always the tough one in her family, that Mary. Her husband, Salvatore, he handled the numbers. Penny-ante stuff, but he was loyal and a goodhearted slob, from the old days, you know? He could be trusted. But when he died,” Veronne tapped his chest, “bum ticker, ya know, but then, when he died, his wife took over. A clever woman; clever, clever. Could trust her with anything, anything.”
Danny Fitzmartin: Veronne’s thin lips turned down into a sneer. Every man had his price. In a year, two years, the pub would be his; free and clear.
“But a hypocrite, ya know,” Veronne said softly. He winked and tapped his nose with an index finger. “He tells Kitty he’ll go along only because of George. Because George was willing to give his life for Kitty and it wasn’t up to him to spoil George’s story. Hypocrite.” Veronne made a dry, hacking spitting sound. “Hypocrite.”
“But just to be on the safe side, after all the scheming and plotting, after all the gam
e-playing, you had Martucci hit anyway?”
The bright eyes froze; the thin lips pulled back into a wolflike grin. “Vincent was a dead man all along. It was only a matter of time. He knew that.”
“Then why all this? Why drag me into all this?”
Veronne shrugged. “Why not?”
Quietly, two of his sons had entered the room with a third man, the doctor. Veronne looked past me and gestured vaguely for the doctor to approach.
“Mr. Veronne, you’re exhausting yourself, sir. Have you finished speaking? All of this, all of these people coming to visit, it is all too much for you.”
“I’ll tell you what is too much for me,” Veronne said in a hard, strong voice. “You. You’re too much for me, coming in here and telling me what I am able to do and not able to do. Get out of here, you’ll get me soon enough. But for now, get out. Tell my friends I want them to come and see me. Send them in, send them in, it’s too damn quiet in here.
“And you ...” Veronne grabbed my sleeve and pulled me toward him. “Look, Peters. What I done for my daughter—all her life, the best, the best of everything in the world.”
“Except the surgery she really needed.”
The small clawlike hand tightened its grip. “That’s not for you to say, bastard,” he hissed at me. “What do you know of it? It’s not for you to judge.”
I leaned in close again, so that the people who had come into the room could not hear anything that I said to him. Only Alfredo Veronne could hear, which is exactly the way I wanted it.
“I’m not going to judge you, Veronne. I’m going to tell your daughter the truth the minute you’re dead. Then, let her judge for herself.”
His hand fumbled up my sleeve as I pulled back and plucked his fingers from me. He made a terrible, strangling sound, and two of his sons and his doctor rushed toward the bed. He looked right past them, trying to find me. I just stood back, mingled with the rest of the observers.
Somehow, he found the strength to shove the doctor aside, to pull himself upright in his bed and to turn his head from side to side, trying to find me. He looked around wildly, his eyes bulging slightly as they found mine and he realized that he had no way of controlling the situation.
Veronne sat absolutely rigid; then he raised one arm and pointed in my direction. “Jesus Christ,” he gasped, “Jesus Christ, you ...”
Then he fell over back onto his four-foot-wide pillows, and the doctor leaned over to confirm what we all knew. There was a general sighing, a muffled, soft sort of grief, a whispering: get the daughter, get the grandchildren.
Then, over all the polite, controlled sounds, a woman, some heavyset, black-clad old aunt, screamed out, “He saw God. Did you hear? He called out the Savior’s name with his last breath!”
The woman fainted and was carried away. In the general commotion, I backed out of the room, stood back carefully as the daughter was wheeled into her father’s death scene. I mixed with the rest of the company; kept my face down after I spotted Lorenzo Pellegrino approaching Veronne’s room, his long dark face streaked with tears.
It took me about five careful minutes to slip out of the house via a side door. After that, it took me about one minute flat to get to my car and head for home before someone decided to ask questions about old man Veronne’s last private conference.
CHAPTER 15
THE VARIOUS DOCUMENTS AND statements and notes and street maps and reports were still scattered all over the surface of the extension table, just where I had left them. I collected everything, tapped edges of papers into some semblance of order, then ended up just shoving and stuffing all of it into the red manila accordion file folder. I wrapped the frayed red string around the folder, then dumped it into a top drawer of the bedroom bureau.
Then I went to bed and fell into one of those unbelievably deep sleeps that don’t leave you feeling rested, just confused and disoriented: the kind of sleep usually accomplished with sleeping pills or booze, neither of which assisted me. I imagine the lack of proper food, irregular habits and exhaustion had plunged me right past the supposedly therapeutic r.e.m. and into the void.
It was nine-thirty the next morning when I woke up; I called the office, asked Gelber if anyone was looking for me. He said no; I said fine, I’d keep in touch; he said okay, fine.
I showered, shaved, got dressed. Then I packed a few things into an overnight suitcase; just a few things.
Then I called Kitty and told her I was corning over to see her. She sounded very soft, very vague.
She looked fragile and beautiful and delicate and pastel in a long pink cotton robe. She had just a touch of moist pink lipstick on; no other makeup. Her long beautiful thick light hair was pulled back from her face. Her cheekbones gleamed like fine polished porcelain.
She went through a ritual with coffee cups and a plate of biscuits. The coffee was fresh perked and we both drank it black; neither of us touched the biscuits. For the first time since I’d met her, she was wearing no jewelry: none of the clittering silver bracelets, none of the intricately twisted silver rings.
“Are you all right, Kitty?”
She nodded without looking at me. Her hands rested motionless on her lap. Her face was turned toward the sunlight which cut from the window in a wide band along the carpet and across her feet. Her profile showed a clear-cut perfect beauty. She turned without expression and I studied the fragile face marked with the anguish and pain of too many deaths, too much grieving; too many losses. There was something puzzled, a bewildered innocence and remoteness which made it nearly impossible to form the connection between this Kitty and all the things that happened because, on one long, sticky, unpleasant, exhausting and disappointed night in April, a sick and irritable little boy had thrown up one time too many. And that had led to the death of two little boys; to the death of their father; to the death of Vincent Martucci; to the “retirement” of Marvin L. Schneiderman; to the guaranteed election of Jeremiah Kelleher; to the appointment of Tim Neary as Police Commissioner. And my own future? Whatever I wanted, I guess.
Finally she blinked and regarded me with a patient faint smile. “What is it, Joe?”
“When’s the last time you spoke to Jay T. Williams?”
She frowned and tapped a finger along an eyebrow, a trick she used sometimes when she was trying to remember something; or trying to decide why she was being asked to remember something.
“Jaytee. I guess it was last Monday night. When he and Jeff Weinstein and I got together.”
“Monday. That was the day of Vincent’s funeral.”
Her dark-blue eyes took on a strange intensity: a kind of listening, a sharpness of concentration. “Yes, Joe, that’s right.”
“And that was when he told you that you’d plead not guilty when you go to court next Monday. And that then you’d just ride out all the delays and postponements until such time as the D.A. feels it would be politically feasible to let the charges against you drop.”
“Yes, Joe. And I told you that I wanted him to force the D.A. to bring me to trial. That I want to be tried and acquitted, once and for all.”
“Do you remember, Kitty, a couple of weeks ago, when we were up in my cabin, you told me that Jaytee had passed along a deal to you? That the D.A. offered to reduce the double murder-one charge to manslaughter, one count. And promised you wouldn’t serve more than three to five years. In return for the name of your accomplice?”
She leaned forward slightly, alert and wary. “Yes, Joe, I remember telling you about that offer.”
“Do you know where Jaytee Williams is right now, Kitty?”
“Why?”
“Do you know where Jaytee Williams is right now, Kitty?”
“Yes, Joe. He’s in his New York office.” She came over to the couch, reached down for my hand, turned her head to one side to look at my wristwatch. “He’s probably at his desk right now.”
I caught her hand, which still rested lightly on my wrist; studied the long white fingers, the wounded nai
ls; held her hand to my mouth, pressed the knuckles against my lips, against my teeth, tasted lightly with my tongue the sweet flower taste of her soap, held her hand in both of mine and, not looking at her, said, “Call him, Kitty. Call him and tell him you’ll take the District Attorney’s deal.”
She slid her hand from my light hold and stepped back to get a better look at me. There was a steady, quiet demand in her voice, “Why, Joe? Why should I do that?”
The jagged-edged knife point stabbed and twisted at the raw, untreated ulcer with a pain that shot both down and through my body before it subsided into a familiar dull throb that I could hold with my hand.
“Because, Kitty, if you give him Lorenzo, then you still got a pretty good deal going. If I give him Lorenzo, then the double murder-one charge will stick and you’ll risk the next twenty to thirty years of your life as against a guaranteed three to five with a probable early parole.”
I don’t know exactly what I expected: hysteria, maybe; indignation, protest, denial. At least questions, a demand to know how, what, why. Not this quiet acknowledgment of what she’d been denying for all these weeks.
“What would be the point, Joe? What difference would that make, to anything? To anyone?”
I tried to see beneath this calm unsurprised surface. She repeated softly, almost encouragingly, “What difference would it make, Joe? To anyone?”
I shook my head, because I really didn’t know. She reached out and pressed my arm in some strange, irrational gesture of sympathy. As though I was the one who needed support; needed someone to lean on.
“It won’t change anything, will it, Joe?”
“I guess not.”
“I know not.” She spoke with a quiet certainty; a calm, steady assurance. “The boys will still be dead. George will still be dead. Vincent will still be dead. I loved my sons, Joe. I really loved them.”
“I know that, Kitty.”
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