by J. D. Griffo
“I’ve been meaning to come over and say hello, but . . . well, you know how it is,” Vinny replied apologetically. “Sorry it took police business to get me to visit.”
“Regardless of the circumstances, it’s wonderful to see an old friend.”
“Grandma,” Jinx started. “Seriously . . . you know the chief of police too?”
“Know him?” Alberta replied, letting out a huge laugh. “I babysat him and his little brat of a sister.”
“Correction,” Vinny said. “You babysat my bratty sister, Frannie, and I just happened to be in the house at the same time.”
“That’s true, you were the good one,” Alberta confessed. “Francesca was such an istigatore . . . a troublemaker! The second I turned my head she was trying to burn down the house.”
“She wanted to cook like you?” Jinx asked.
“No! She liked to play with matches,” Alberta replied.
“My sister had a thing about fire,” Vinny added. “Luckily she grew out of that phase once she discovered boys.”
Vinny took a moment to rediscover Alberta and smiled. “It’s good to see you again.”
Alberta smiled back. “It’s good to see you, too, Vinny. Even if this is an official visit.”
At the same time all four of their heads snapped to look at Lucy, who of course was still sprawled out on the grass, awaiting the arrival of some other members of the Tranquility police force to escort her to the morgue.
“Loda il mare e tienti alla terra,” Vinny whispered.
“What was that, Chief?” Kichiro asked.
Nodding her head, Alberta answered, “A little Italian saying. It means, ‘Praise the sea, but keep on land.’”
Vinny bent down closer to Lucy, and the shadow of his hulking frame seemed to swallow up her lifeless body. Although his career was spent mostly giving tickets to speeding drivers and hunters trying to get a jumpstart on deer season, he, of course, had seen a few dead bodies up close and personal. He was grateful that it never got easier, he didn’t want to lose that part of himself to the job that had already taken so much of his life.
He wanted to close Lucy’s eyes so she would look as if she was sleeping, but he wasn’t wearing gloves and didn’t want to tamper with the body. He doubted it would make any difference to the medical examiner, but he was a cop, after all, and cops had to follow the rules. “No matter how beautiful a body of water looks, the sea, the ocean, a lake, it’s still a dangerous place,” Vinny muttered almost to Lucy’s spirit, “Better to keep your feet planted firmly on the ground.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” Alberta said, holding Lola closer to her chest.
Standing up, Vinny turned to the others to announce, “Looks like a pretty simple case of drowning to me.” Looking at his detective, he asked, “But any witnesses, Kich?”
“Just Mrs. Scaglione,” the detective answered. “She called 911 when she saw the body floating in the lake.”
“Mrs. Scaglione,” Vinny scoffed good-naturedly. “Not for nothing, but you’ll always be Alfie to me.”
“And you, Vinny D’Angelo, will always be wrong.”
“Wait a minute . . . Alfie?” Jinx asked.
“Vinny thinks he and everything he says is clever,” Alberta said. “Always has.”
“It is clever and so am I,” Vinny replied, laughing. “The first two letters of your grandma’s first and last names, A, l, f, e . . . add it up, it’s Alfie.”
“That’s such a cool nickname, Gram,” Jinx declared. “I love it!”
Still laughing, Vinny admitted, “Alfie doesn’t share your opinion.”
“Please, I don’t care what you call me,” Alberta said waving a hand in front of her face. “I meant you’re wrong about Lucy.”
Confused, Vinny lifted his chin and scrunched up his forehead. “What are you talking about Alfie?”
“Just what I said, you’re wrong about Lucy.”
“I am not wrong about Lucy.”
“Yes, you are!” Alberta implored. “Just like you were wrong when you said Peter Lemongello was gonna be the next Sinatra.”
“Peter fooled a lot of us, Alfie,” Vinny said. “He had an amazing voice.”
“That might be true, but you want to know what else is true?”
“What?”
“Lucy didn’t drown, she was murdered,” Alberta announced. “And not for nothing, I can prove it.”
CHAPTER 4
Il cuor non spaglia.
Alberta was not a violent person. Loud, argumentative, disagreeable, and frustrating, but never violent. It’s just not what good little Italian girls did. And Alberta was a good little Italian girl who had grown up to become a good little Italian woman. Violence was a man’s territory. Whether that be joining the mafia or manhandling a woman, Alberta detested such glorifications of violence and, luckily, physical brutality had never been a part of her life. Explosions of emotional strife and struggle were like landmines in her world, inescapable and never where you’d expect to find them, but she considered that to be normal. Families fight, but people shouldn’t kill, that could be Alberta’s motto.
And yet standing over Lucy’s dead body forced Alberta to face violence head-on as she was certain that Lucy’s body was lifeless for only one reason: murder.
Alberta shivered and let her cheek press against the warmth of Lola’s fur. She had been living here for less than a month and already brutality had visited her doorstep. Was it an omen? Did Carmela’s unexpected gift carry with it some curse like King Tut’s tomb and was Alberta destined to find herself in the eye of some violent storm for the rest of her life just because her aunt showered her with such wealth? If this was going to be the price she’d have to pay, Alberta was ready to give it all up. First, however, she needed to answer one very important question.
“What do you mean you can prove that Lucy was murdered?” Vinny asked.
Startled back to reality, Alberta handed Lola off to Jinx so she could speak with her hands as well as her mouth. “Just look at her,” she answered, spreading her hands wide apart and gesturing at Lucy’s unmoving body. “It can’t be any clearer than if she had a sign pinned to her forehead that said, ‘I’m a Murder Victim’ written in her own blood.”
Vinny placed his hands on his hips and puffed up his chest so his upper body looked even broader and more powerful than it actually was. It was one of the pieces of body language that he had perfected over the years to intimidate suspects and untrustworthy witnesses. Since Tranquility wasn’t a hotbed of crime, he didn’t get to use it very often, but he was happy to know that this particular physicality was still part of his bag of cop tricks. Towering over Alberta’s five-foot-five frame, he could see the gray roots on top of her head refuse to disappear completely underneath her dyed black hair. He didn’t want Alberta to cower in his presence, but he did want to remind her that he was in charge.
“Alfie, I think you’ve watched one too many episodes of Law & Order,” Vinny said dismissively. “I can’t believe you think this is a murder scene.”
Even though it had been many years since they were last in each other’s company and to the untrained eye Vinny did look borderline menacing, she knew the man far too well and for far too long for familiarity to be replaced with fear. “And I can’t believe you can’t see the truth, Vinny,” she continued. “This is the corpse of a murdered woman.”
Vinny and his detective shared a look of frustration that neither one of them tried to conceal.
“How can you tell that just by looking at her?” Kichiro asked.
“Madonna mia!” Alberta exclaimed. “Because she’s wearing a navy blue suit, that’s why!”
Frustration was quickly replaced by bewilderment. And the feeling wasn’t exclusive to Vinny and Kichiro, Jinx shared it as well.
“Gram, it’s a nice suit and all,” Jinx said in a placating tone, “but I hardly doubt someone would kill her for it.”
Alberta sighed and realized that her granddaughter as well a
s the two men in the blue uniforms looked at life primarily with their eyes and not with their minds. For a moment she was reminded of her husband and she felt her chest tighten. She had spent her entire married life with a man who could only see with his eyes, and it was not always a pleasant experience. Smiling, but shaking her head dismissively, she tried to explain. “Il cuor non spaglia.” It was not a very well-received explanation.
“Again with the Italian!” Kichiro shouted, raising his arms in the air so he looked very Italian himself. “Is it too much to ask you to keep confusing us in only one language?”
“Trust your instincts,” Alberta translated. “Don’t they teach you that at the police academy?”
“They teach us to trust evidence and the facts,” Vinny said, trying not to make the tone of his voice sound as condescending as he knew it did. Alberta might be trying his patience, but she was still an old friend and deserved his respect. Alberta didn’t feel quite the same way.
“Well they’re teaching you how to be tonto . . . stupid is what they’re doing,” she replied.
Just as Kichiro was about to say something that was definitely going to be interpreted as disrespectful in more than one language, Vinny held up his hand to silence him. Part of being a cop meant listening to comments from the public, even if those comments weren’t necessarily positive or constructive. But regardless of how strongly he believed in the value of the police – citizen relationship, even he was beginning to lose his calm demeanor.
“Alfie, if you have something to say, will you just please say it?” Vinny demanded.
“From the time we started kindergarten at St. Ann’s until the day we graduated from Immaculate Conception High School, Lucy and I wore the same uniforms. They were practically identical . . . white shirts with navy blue crisscross ties, navy blue vests, navy blue skirts, and navy blue socks. The only other color was a little gold patch on the vest,” Alberta finished by throwing her hands into the air like an animated maestro. “Capisce?”
No capisce, only crickets. Alberta paused, confident that once this information sunk in, she would be applauded for her clever deduction. But when she saw the baffled looks on the faces of her three audience members, she knew she would have to resume her performance.
“Lucy hated navy blue, hated it with a passion!” Alberta exclaimed. “I remember her telling me once in twelfth grade that after she graduated she was never, ever going to wear navy blue again. Then of course she had to tell me that I shouldn’t wear it either because it didn’t go with my olive complexion. . . which is a complete lie because I look very good in navy blue, thank you very much, but Lucy hated the color.”
Once again Alberta’s reasoning was met with silence and bewilderment and not the path to understanding she had hoped it would. Vinny didn’t have to confer with the group to take on the role of their spokesperson.
“So help us understand, Alfie, just how do you go from Lucy hating navy blue to Lucy being murdered?”
Once again Alberta was reminded of her husband. How many times had he stared at her with a blank face, unable to figure out what she was talking about even when she was speaking in plain English? Or plain Italian, which was Sammy’s native tongue. It was frustrating then and it was frustrating now, the only difference being that then she had to keep her mouth shut in order to maintain order in her marriage; widowhood had helped her find her voice.
“Lucy never wore navy blue, for Crise sake!” she shouted. “So if Lucy committed suicide or had an accident, she changed her clothes after she died because there’s no way she’d be caught dead in that outfit she has on right there.”
They all looked at Lucy dressed in her navy blue business suit and the irony of Alberta’s words was not lost on any of them, even Alberta. However Lucy died, she was indeed caught dead wearing the color she loathed. But could that fashion faux pas possibly have been fatal? Could the color of her outfit be a clue to how she really died? Or could Alberta simply be projecting her own personal and vicious desires as to how the deceased became deceased?
“Maybe it just makes you happier to think that Lucy was brutally murdered.”
“Like I said, Vinny, I never liked Lucy Agostino,” Alberta admitted. “But that doesn’t mean I wanted to see her dead by accident or by murder.”
Backtracking a little from his rather blunt comment, Vinny replied, “Well I’m not saying you had anything to do with it . . .”
“You better not be accusing my grandmother of anything like that,” Jinx interrupted.
It was wonderful to be protected even if it was unnecessary. Alberta wrapped her arm around Jinx’s waist and felt her warm skin next to hers. “He wasn’t implying anything, lovey, he’s just trying to assert his power. But he forgets that I could rattle off several examples that would prove that Vinny wasn’t Lucy’s biggest fan either.”
Embarrassed, Vinny forgot about trying to look intimidating and tilted his head to the side, putting his hands on his hips like an overgrown boy and pouting because he wasn’t allowed to stay up past his bedtime. “Now come on, Alfie, that’s not true and you know it.”
“Class field trip to Philadelphia in 1970,” Alberta said, raising her eyebrows suggestively. “Ring a bell?”
“What happened in Philly in 1970?” Kichiro asked, more than a little interested. “And just what kind of bells did you ring?”
“None of your business,” Vinny barked. “And if you open your mouth any further Alfie, I swear to God . . .”
“I’m not going to say a word,” she replied, relishing her ability to make an old friend squirm. “All’s I’m gonna say is that by the time we got back on the school bus to come home, you wanted to see Lucy dead too.”
It was Kichiro’s turn to whine. “That’s not fair! Tell us what happened.”
“Go see what’s taking so long,” Vinny instructed. “It’s time to get Lucy to the morgue.”
Once again Alberta was ripped from the past and planted right smack-dab in the present. Lucy Agostino was dead, and she somehow died in Alberta’s lake, the lake she looked at every night before going to bed and every morning when she got up. The expansive Memory Lake was more than just a body of water to Alberta, it was a symbol of how peaceful and bountiful her life could be. After years of stagnating and moving through life as if she were wearing cement blocks for shoes, she had now been given the opportunity to float and glide through life, like a lightweight boat skimming over the water’s surface. But thanks to Lucy, that image was marred. Now when Alberta looked out at the lake the first thing she’d see wouldn’t be promise and hope, but the floating dead body of a longtime nemesis. She had to hand it to Lucy, she got the last laugh. She was able to annoy Alberta throughout her life, and found a way to do so even after death.
* * *
The next day after the medical examiner performed the autopsy on Lucy, Vinny was forced to use the same accolade about Alberta.
“You were right, Alfie,” Vinny said on the phone. “You’re a very clever girl.”
Since Alberta was cooking dinner, her focus was on her recipe, so Vinny’s words didn’t make much sense, as she didn’t know what he was referring to. “What are you talking about? I’m in the middle of making gravy, there’s nothing clever about that.”
“You were right about Lucy.”
Few things could distract Alberta from her cooking, Vinny’s comment turned out to be one of them.
“What did you find out?”
“Well the first thing I learned was Il cuor non spaglia,” he replied. “Trust your instincts.”
Letting out a deep breath, Alberta looked out the window over the kitchen sink. A soft breeze filtered into the room making the yellow and white gingham curtains flutter. In the distance was Memory Lake, the lake that just yesterday had a dead body floating on top of it. The body was no longer there, but the lake contained its stain, was contaminated by it, and would be for a long time to come. Suddenly Alberta became very nervous and wasn’t sure she wanted to as
k what else Vinny had found out, because once you hear something you can’t unhear it, you can’t forget about the truth no matter how hard you try, but she knew she had to ask.
“And what’s the second thing you learned?”
“Lucy didn’t commit suicide, nor did she die from an accidental drowning,” Vinny announced. “She was stabbed once right through the heart.”
“Dio mio,” Alberta said softly.
“Lucy Agostino was definitely murdered.”
CHAPTER 5
Il frutto cade non lontano dall’albero.
“Should we really be eating at a time like this?” Jinx asked, her mouth full of chicken cacciatore.
“Just because somebody’s dead, we’re not supposed to eat?” Alberta asked rhetorically. “Mangia! And that goes double for you, Lola, you’re getting too skinny.”
Whether Lola purred in defiance or agreement no one knew, but at least she didn’t turn her nose up at her meal like she normally did. One whiff of the cut-up chicken Alberta prepared and the cat started to devour her plate. Jinx, however, was proving to be a much more finicky eater.
“Well, Gram, somebody didn’t just die, somebody was, you know, murdered.”
Alberta still couldn’t believe that a woman she’d known since childhood, her longtime nemesis, the one and only Lucy Agostino had actually been murdered. People die all the time, it’s a natural course of life that nobody can escape regardless of how hard they try, because in the end death always wins, whether it be from disease or an accident, but murder? That’s just not how it’s supposed to be, especially in an idyllic lakeside community like Tranquility.
It would’ve shocked Alberta had she only read about Lucy’s death in the newspaper or overheard it as a piece of local gossip on the checkout line at the ShopRite, but she had been a witness to Lucy’s death. No, she didn’t see the murder itself take place, but she was presumably the first person, after whoever killed Lucy of course, to see her dead body, and that was close enough to have rattled her nerves.