The newcomer was a little older than Tarantino but far slimmer. Slimmer in a way that suggested he had been a big man who, through illness or injury, had lost a great deal of weight which was only slowly coming back on. His shoulders were broad but his long face was pasty and just this side of haggard. He had thick hair that was more gray than black and which he wore combed back and parted high. He moved into the room slowly, almost delicately, and silently. He was in full dress uniform: gray pinstripe suit, high-gloss black wing tips, yellow power-tie, horn-rimmed glasses. Ralph Lauren frames was my guess. He negotiated the single step down into the living room with some noticeable uncertainty, then crossed the room unsmilingly toward us.
Tarantino stood and so did I, albeit reluctantly, my tortured muscles all protesting in unison.
I expected Tarantino to make introductions, but he remained still. There was a subtle but definite shift in the atmosphere of the room. Thirty seconds earlier, or less, Paul Tarantino was clearly in command; now, although there had been no noticeable change in Tarantino’s demeanor, power or authority or droit du seigneur, or whatever it was had undoubtedly transferred to the newcomer.
And no wonder. I recognized the unhealthy-looking one as Tarantino’s boss, and lots of bosses’ boss, one of those “reputed Mob leaders” you read so much about and one of the top three bosses in the country. His unrobust appearance he owed to someone having served him five .38-caliber slugs for dessert in one of his favorite restaurants nearly eighteen months ago. The news reports said he wasn’t expected to live. The way he looked and moved today, I wondered if he had.
He stopped five feet from where I stood and sized me up with dark, liquid eyes behind slightly tinted lenses. While he did that, I did the same thing to him. Despite his resemblance to the picture on a bottle of iodine, he was a strong man. Not physically, maybe, not now, but with what the books call “inner strength,” which is perhaps more important. I realized two other things as well. The first was that there was no point in letting Elmo Lammers continue to beat his brains out trying to track down that telephone number in Area Code 312. The second was that I was about to meet Meredith Berens’s father.
“Michael Berenelli,” he said on cue.
He didn’t extend his hand and neither did I.
For a long moment it looked like we were going to have a stare-down; then Berenelli turned and glanced at Tarantino. The two men exchanged little half-nods and some kind of unspoken or previously spoken message passed between them. Then Berenelli slowly seated himself at the other end of the sectional on which I had been sitting, at a right angle to my location, and Tarantino silently evaporated from the room.
They called him “Baron Mike”—I suspect these monickers exist more to please reporters than because mobsters are enamored of them—and, meeting him for the first time, I realized that the handle derived not just from his surname but also from his bearing, his carriage. Sick as he was, he still comported himself like a baron or a duke or something. I sat again and waited.
“Now you know why I wanted to meet you.” The voice didn’t fit the frail frame: It was deep and strong, although a ragged, congested kind of rattle rested on top of it.
“Yes and no,” I said. “I know who you are—I don’t just mean that I recognize you from your pictures; I know who you are. I’m sorry about your daughter. I assumed that’s what’s brought you to town. But I don’t see what it has to do with me.” I told the truth when I told him I was sorry about Meredith. Not for his sake; for hers. A man like Michael Berenelli deserves whatever he gets, but Meredith Berens was an innocent.
“My daughter …” the Baron said ruminatively, as if he was hearing the word for the first time and trying it out on his tongue. “Someone I never knew. Her mother … Her mother and I separated when she was very young. You know this?”
His eyes had been resting unfocused on a heavy glass ashtray on the coffee table that sat between us, diagonally. They came to my face when he asked the question. I nodded.
“They moved back here,” he continued in a kind of monotone, as if delivering a synopsis he had rehearsed too often. “I tried to keep in touch, I wanted to, but Donna was very good at shielding Meredith from me. She turned the girl against me, filled her daughter with her own hatred for me.” His shoulders went up and down in a mechanical imitation of a shrug. “Eventually I stopped trying. It seemed better for everyone. I almost forgot I even had a daughter.” The black eyes bored into me from behind their glass walls. “Almost.”
It was as I had guessed. Quite a few months earlier, from out of the blue, Meredith had called her father. “Of course, the first thing I think is that something has happened to her mother,” Berenelli said. “But no, she’s just calling to talk. To talk. After so many years …” So they talked. And talked, and talked. The call grew into many calls, into an exchange of letters, into Meredith visiting Wilmette. She had never known her father, and she had known her mother perhaps too well. Now she was making up for lost time, or trying to—blissfully ignorant, as are we all, of how finite our time really is.
“She was such a little girl when her mother took her away,” Berenelli was saying. “Now she was all grown-up. Grown-up and pretty.” The eyes swiveled to my face. “She was a very pretty girl,” he said, not argumentatively but informatively.
I agreed. But the picture in my mind had been taken in the morgue.
The Baron sighed. “And so, after so many years—a little girl’s whole lifetime—I had my daughter back. My little girl. Someone had taken her away from me, but she had come back. On her own, because she wanted to come back.” He turned his face from me, suddenly interested in a three-panel print on the south wall. “Now someone has taken her away from me again, and this time she will never come back. Do you have any idea how that feels?”
I didn’t, of course, so I kept silent.
“I understand Donna hired you to look for Meredith,” Berenelli said, as if switching gears. “That was a bad idea.” He looked at me expressionlessly. “Nothing personal, you understand, but it should have been kept … internal. She should have called me. If she didn’t want to talk to me, she should have called Paul.” He cocked his head toward the archway through which Tarantino had disappeared at the beginning of the audience. Then he gave me a look I didn’t get, a half-amused, half-knowing kind of look. “But I guess you’ve shown you can be trusted.”
“That’s what Mrs. Berens, or Berenelli, I guess—”
“Berens,” he said with some distaste. “She had it changed after the divorce.”
“—said. That’s what everyone says. I didn’t understand her then and I don’t understand you now. How does she know me? How do you, or Tarantino, except second-or third-hand?”
The mobster smiled. Either that or he grimaced in pain. It was hard to tell. “She didn’t tell you?” he said. “Well, she wouldn’t, that one. Too worried about her ‘image.’ She always was. How would it look, what would people say. Her image, her daughter’s image—what good does any of it do anyone now? What people think, who cares? What people do, that’s all that’s important.” He had worked himself up a little; now he calmed himself with an obvious effort. “Before Donna’s name was Berens, it was Berenelli. You know that now. And before it was Berenelli it was Gunnelli. When I first met her she was Donna Maria Gunnelli, straight out of school, a cute little Italian stringbean with big brown eyes and the shiniest, blackest hair you’ve ever seen.”
“Not to mention an old man who just happened to be running this town for the boys back in Chicago.”
The Baron shrugged.
Much was clear now. Why Donna Berens had been so elusive on the subject of her ex-husband, why she had been coy about how she knew me, about the “favor” I had done her “friend” years ago, why the telephone number on Meredith’s Rolodex had had no name against it, why pages were missing from her diary, why the man who answered it when I called—not Berenelli—had been so unhelpful, why Elmo Lammers couldn’t track down the number’s owner. Man
y questions remained—near the top of the list, who killed Meredith Berens and why—but many had been answered.
Berenelli was still talking. “… people in my organization who could have handled it, and should have. But since she saw fit to turn it over to an outsider …” He shrugged fatalistically. “I want you to continue your investigation.”
“There’s nothing to continue,” I pointed out. “My job was to find Meredith. I found her.”
“Now your job is to find her killer.”
I had seen that one coming from way up in the stands. “I may already have a client,” I said. “Your former wife.”
“I thought you said your investigation was over.”
“Last night she asked me to help her. I’m uncertain what she meant, and I haven’t spoken with her today. Until I know what kind of help she wants, or whether she still wants it, it’d be unethical for me to take on another client connected with the same investigation. Plus, as I seem to always be telling people, the police are experts at this sort of thing. They have the resources, both in manpower and facilities. Me, I just have these clean-cut good looks, an eleven-year-old Chevrolet, and a bottom-of-the-line telephone-answering machine. Plus, you yourself must have resources that are pretty impressive. You’ve as good as said so yourself. Surely your people …”
Berenelli raised one hand. The shirt cuff around his wrist was too big. “You’re right, you’re right. About everything. But you must understand …” he paused, allowing himself a meager, cadaverous smile “… the police and I, we don’t have a great deal of fondness for one another.”
“Even so—”
“I want this sonofabitch for myself!” He didn’t shout, he didn’t even really raise his voice, but he cut me off with a sudden vehemence that was as good as a shout, as effective at shutting me up. “I want him,” he continued more easily. “I. For me. Not for some white-livered judge, some overpriced defense lawyer, some bleeding-heart jury. For me.” He tapped his sunken chest, hard, with a forefinger. It thudded emptily.
The sick man got to his feet. He had to pull his legs to one side and roll onto one hip and lift himself by using his arms on the back of the sectional, but he got to his feet and moved with shuffling, uncertain steps to the French doors at the far end of the room. Beyond the doors was a patio that had been covered and enclosed since my last visit there. Beyond the patio the yard, or grounds, if you like, stretched halfway to Wyoming. Berenelli looked off into that distance.
“Word has gone out,” he said after some time. “Word has gone out that the bastard who did this is to be found. But there are other matters, matters of business, that must be handled. I can’t afford to devote one hundred percent of my people’s resources to a … a personal matter. It wouldn’t be right. It wouldn’t be wise.” He half-turned, his hands clasped behind him, and glanced at me. “It could be dangerous, you understand? There are people—rivals—who do nothing but wait for the moment that I am distracted.” He turned to the doors again. “Salvatore Gunnelli had many friends. They will want justice for his granddaughter’s murderer. Still, however … business is business.”
The Baron moved away from the French doors and circled the room haltingly. I wished he’d go and sit down again. His moving around made me nervous. I was afraid he was going to take a tumble. He didn’t, though, and ultimately wound up standing behind me, his hands resting on the back of the sectional, one on either side of my shoulders.
“As far as your current client is concerned,” he said, “you will hear from her later today. She will either instruct you to continue your work for her, with your assignment now being to find Meredith’s murderer, or she will terminate her agreement with you and pay you, in full, in cash, immediately. In which case you will be free to accept my offer of employment.”
I remembered what Donna Berens had told me last night: When he beat me up he always made sure the bruises didn’t show.
I said, “Must be nice to be so sure of one’s persuasive skills.”
Berenelli said nothing for a long time. I couldn’t see his face, even if I could have read what was going on behind those dark eyes. “It’s easy to be persuasive when you narrow a person’s choices before you present them,” he said slowly, instructively. “Donna will be given a choice. In or out. If she chooses to remain in, she will follow my instructions. I have let her have her way for too many years. Twice it cost me my daughter. Now I have my way.”
The ball was in my court. About the last place I wanted it. There are two outfits that I make a point of never playing games with. One of them is the Mob. The other is the IRS. I try to stay out of their respective paths for one reason: Either of them can flatten you flatter than you ever thought a person could be flattened. It doesn’t pay to be cute with either of them.
It occurred to me that I hadn’t had a vacation in a long time. Maybe now would be a good time for one. As I had told Dianna Castelli, you make choices. I could choose not to be involved in what had all the markings of a full-blown vendetta in the making. Couldn’t I? Sure. But then everything would be even between me and the mob—Paul Tarantino had made that pretty clear—and the next time I found myself painted into a corner with them … well, time would tell.
On the other hand, if I strung along with Michael Berenelli I would have not only the Omaha people in my debt but also one of the Chicago, and therefore national, big shots. That didn’t sound like such a bad idea, for a guy in my line.
Then, too, there was the picture of Meredith Berens. Not the one I carried in my pocket, the one I carried in my head, the one of her bruised and shattered and lifeless on a slab. The picture would stay with me for a long time. Maybe it would never go away, maybe it would join all the other pictures up there in the dark, cold attic of my mind, always there, ever-present. But maybe I could stand to look at it more if I knew I had at least tried to do something about it.
I looked at Michael Berenelli, who had returned to his place on the sectional. He was looking at me.
I didn’t like the man. I didn’t like what he did for a living. Not that I was all that keen on what I did for a living, either, but at least I didn’t make my miserable salary on the misery and degradation of other people. Or if I did—for when do people turn to someone like me except when they’re miserable—at least I wasn’t the cause. And not only did I not put women on the streets, or take and sell dirty pictures of runaway girls and boys, or feed on people’s compulsions and addictions, or skim money from the tops of countless otherwise reputable undertakings, I also didn’t whine about it when someone did something shitty to me and mine.
No, I didn’t like Berenelli. I wouldn’t have liked him if he had been a florist or a traffic cop or a high school principal. I didn’t like his type. I didn’t like his veneer of civility, the cloak of decency that he put on and took off like his expensive suit whenever it was convenient. I would rather he had been a thug. I wouldn’t have liked him any better, but I would have had more respect for him.
I said, “If I have any luck identifying this maniac, I’ll have to tell the police.”
Berenelli said, “Everyone does what he has to do. Do you have anyone in mind? Suspects?”
The answer was yes but I said no. I had seen how these people work, and I didn’t want either or both of the Waynes found in a lonely ditch somewhere with bullet holes in the backs of their heads.
I recalled my meeting, years ago, with Salvatore Gunnelli in that same house. Out on the back patio. I had a stack of blue pictures, blackmail photos, that Gunnelli wanted to buy. I wasn’t selling. He wanted to buy my assurance that I wouldn’t sell them to his rival, Al Manzetti. I wasn’t selling anything, I told him. But he pressed a thousand-dollar note on me and I was too gutless, or greedy, to refuse it. I made a big deal of keeping the “filthy” lucre separate from my nice, clean, hard-earned lucre, and blew the wad on a horse the first chance I got. I swiped the idea from a Ross Macdonald novel, I think. Now I had at least tacitly agreed to take on a job for a
man who was far worse than Sal Gunnelli ever hoped to be. I must have mellowed in my old age. Or maybe I’d just grown less naive.
Of course, Gunnelli wanted me to do something that was patently and obviously wrong and which would have injured an innocent girl. Now, in this instance, the innocent girl had already been injured, beyond all redemption, and there was nothing inherently wrong with what the Baron was asking me to do. Just with what he wanted to do if I succeeded. That didn’t make Berenelli’s money any cleaner than the money I wouldn’t sully myself with years ago. But if I’ve grown less naive, I’ve come to realize dirty money is all around. The tentacles of organized crime, to say nothing of the unorganized and disorganized varieties, are all around us. That’s not to say, What the hell, I’m getting mine. It’s just to say, Don’t be such a Boy Scout all the time. Like it or not, we all traffic with the criminal world on some level, to some degree. You buy a stick of furniture that’s delivered by men whose union is controlled by organized crime. You buy a “gray market” camera or computer. You shop at a market whose supplier is a front for the Mob. We won’t even talk about the little dime bag of recreational goodies you buy from your friendly neighborhood dealer, who’s only a step or two removed from the you-know-what. If that much.
Cynicism. The beginning of apathy. But Swift—Jonathan, not Tom—said, “Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.” As I’ve gotten a little older, I hope I’ve gotten a little smarter. I hope I can see some of those things invisible. Not so that I can avoid them, necessarily. Not so that I can embrace them, either. Just so I can see them.
I could see Michael Berenelli plenty clear. I could see what he wanted. He wanted me to find his daughter’s killer, sure; but he also wanted some of his minions to keep an eye on me. That’s why he didn’t fuss when I said I’d turn Meredith’s killer over to the badges if I found him. He figured that when I found him he’d find him too, and there’d be no time for the cops to get involved.
Things invisible.
Things Invisible (A Nebraska Mystery Book 4) Page 19
