“Stern’s a trained soldier. What kind of rifle was it?”
“The M.E. thinks an Army M-16. Not Israeli, but M-16s aren’t so hard to get. Charley Albano was playing cards—with two hoods.”
I finally asked the question. “What about Hal Wood?”
“Would the guard have let him close? Didn’t he want her back?”
Hal Wood had wanted Diana back, it had sounded like that anyway. But if she wouldn’t come back? His perfect woman?
“Anyway,” Gazzo said, “I thought of him first, right? He’s got the only real alibi. Had been out of town for two days, on vacation up near Woodstock. Not alone. A girl named Emily Green was with him. They had a cabin.”
I felt a weight lift off me. The husband is always the first suspect. Now I could stay out of it. Or could I?
“You thought about Irving Kezar and his wife?” I said.
“Sure. No alibis, but no visible motives yet. Nothing new on Sid Meyer. If he was in some deal, it doesn’t show.”
I started for the stairs down. “If you need me, call.”
“We’ll badger them all, look for the rifle, wait for one of our informers to tell us who did it,” Gazzo said. “Like always.”
I stopped. “You know, one person could have gotten past Bagnio and walked right up to the guard here with a smile.”
“Who?”
“Little Max himself.”
“We’re looking for him,” Gazzo said.
I went down and caught a taxi. Little Max Bagnio had been with Andy Pappas most of his adult life. A loyal retainer, without ambition. Only maybe Max had found ambition, or maybe he’d found a new loyalty. In the taxi going to my office, the winter light fading thin and cold into night, I wanted no more part of the mess, but I went on thinking about it. Curiosity? Habit? Call it anything, damn!
John Albano was waiting in my office. I thought about John Albano. He wanted to hire me—but where had he been when Andy was shot down? What if Andy had been some danger to Mia Morgan?
I swore at myself. What did I care? A police job. They get paid for it. But I went on thinking.
CHAPTER 12
The broad old man sat in the gloom of my office. He hadn’t put on the light, as if darkness felt better to him. His white hair stood out above his swarthy face lost in shadow.
“So?” he said.
I sat down, lit a cigarette. “The police don’t think it was a gang killing, either. At least, Captain Gazzo doesn’t.”
“What does he think it was?”
“He’s working on it.”
“Mia?”
“She’s on his list. No one has an alibi except Hal Wood.”
“You like that, right? The underdog.” His snapping eyes watched me in the twilight office. “You’re something of a sentimentalist, Dan.”
“The last refuge of the liberal.”
Only Albano’s eyes smiled. He took a long, thin cigar from his pocket, lit it. A special cigar, expensive. I knew the aroma and the look, and all at once it filled in my picture of John Albano. An engineer in remote places because that way he could work alone without the complications of other people, of values he had no use for. A man who had rejected the needs and paths of those he’d grown up with, as remote inside as the places he went. A solitary, with a special cigar for company instead of family or community.
“So Wood’s okay,” he said. “You can work for me.”
“You wouldn’t want me to. I can’t help.”
“You can help find the truth, clear Mia clean.”
“I’d ask the wrong questions,” I said. “Like where were you when Pappas was killed?”
“Home in bed. I usually am at two A.M. Not very good, but the best I can do. Ask your questions, find out.”
I couldn’t see his face well, but I knew it wouldn’t tell me anything anyway. I wanted the gloom in the office, it separated us. It made me feel detached. Somehow, if I put on the light, that would be taking the case, joining Albano.
“Did Mia want more than proof Andy was cheating on her mother, something else?” I said. “Maybe doing something Andy wouldn’t have liked, tried to stop? Mia and Captain Stern?”
“Like what?”
“She has wide contacts abroad. So does Stern. She’s Andy’s daughter, would know contacts here. An ex-con and hustler named Sid Meyer was murdered. I asked you about Meyer before, because he’d tried to see Mia just before he got killed.”
Albano smoked his cigar. “Dope, you mean. One of Andy’s enterprises, but not Mia’s. She hated Andy for that filth.”
“People can change fast when opportunity knocks,” I said. “Did she know Sid Meyer? Did you? Or Irving Kezar?”
“I told you I didn’t know any Sid Meyer.” He shifted in his chair, uncomfortable. “Kezar I’ve met. I’ve met men like Kezar all over the world—Saigon, Africa, every South American capital. Playing all sides for themselves. Parasites, leeches on every good work. You can’t build a dam or dig a well without paying them a share. Mia wouldn’t have a damned thing to do with a man like that. She’s defiant and conceited, thinks too much of herself sometimes, but she’s a builder, not a destroyer.”
Anger in his voice, a judgment of iron. I sensed that he thought a lot of himself, too, he’d gone his own way a long time, but I liked him. Only he was an old man now, no matter how young he acted, and Mia Morgan was his whole hope for tomorrow.
“It looks like the guard in the corridor knew the killer,” I said. “Have you heard anything about Max Bagnio? What the brotherhood thinks? Have you talked to your daughter?”
“We’ve talked,” Albano said. “I haven’t heard much. They’re being very quiet. Some think Bagnio is underground after the killer, others think maybe he did it himself.”
“Why? Little Max’s been close to Andy for years?”
“Who knows, Dan?” Albano said.
In my dark office his cigar glowed. I could barely see him now, his shoulders only a wide shape against my air-shaft window, the white hair seeming to float by itself. His voice was hard:
“You have to understand them, Dan—the Mafia brotherhood. They’re basically peasants, with all that means in the ancient European sense. No matter how modern they look now, they still have the minds of medieval European peasants. Even the third-generation sons, because it’s an ingrown, closed community. It’s one key to who they are and what they do.
“You know what a peasant mind is, Dan? A medieval peasant mind from a poor, harsh land? It’s a cunning mind, shrewd, but very narrow, very basic, very practical. Money, women, religion, the seasons, the family, the village. Period. The people in a village a mile away are outsiders, and any outsider is less important than your own pig!”
Passion in his voice, and violence. He’d thought a lot about them, his countrymen, and he hated them.
“To kill outside your own family isn’t murder to a peasant. A fact of life, even a tool. A French peasant kills the English family camped on his land just for their clothes, a few dollars, and sees nothing wrong. An opportunity, what practical man wouldn’t take it? It’s proper to kill an enemy, an outsider who has something you want, a friend who insults your family. And it’s more than proper to eliminate a leader you’ve lost faith in. It’s a necessity.”
The office was all dark now. A darkness that seemed to rest on the whole world, to be everywhere as I listened to John Albano. The distant street sounds of the city weren’t real, a tape recording from some other time, some other place.
“You mean Max Bagnio lost faith in Andy because of Diana Wood, the divorce?” I said. “Maybe someone else lost faith, and Little Max changed sides, followed a new leader?”
“Divorce is against the religion, and the religion is part of the code. Andy broke the code.”
“You think Max Bagnio is religious? Any of them? Today?”
“Not religion in the spiritual sense, no. But a kind of magic, a totem, the rules. Peasants don’t care about substance, what a religion means, but only a
bout form. To a peasant the golden rule makes no sense, except in reverse—do to him before he can do to you. Yet he goes to church every Sunday, is a fierce Catholic. The code, Dan, rigid custom. A sign of being normal.
“And a leader has to act normally, keep the code, or how can he be considered reliable? To a peasant mind a leader who breaks custom loses reliability. How can he be trusted? What custom will he break next, what will he try to change next? Who will be hurt by some change? Peasants hate change, Dan, it scares them.”
The passion in his voice was almost too strong, maybe because he saw part of himself in them and hated that, but he was right about peasants, and roots go back far and deep. In the darkness I could feel the thick tentacles reaching out from the medieval dark of Sicily, the blood codes, the violence.
“Family honor, too,” I said. “That’s part of the medieval peasant code. Sicily, Corsica—the vendetta, honor avenged. A divorce could be dishonor, injury. To Stella Pappas, to your son Charley, to Mia. Maybe to others, their friends.”
“Not to Mia, no!”
It came out sharp. I waited, but that was all he said.
“But ‘yes’ for Stella, Charley, and their friends?”
“Maybe.” His voice was stone. His children, Stella and Charley, but they had broken his code. He cared only about Mia now.
“Max Bagnio and all of them?” I said. “Or one of them?”
“I don’t know. They talk to me, but they say nothing. The old men I grew up with are polite, but tell me nothing. They’re worried, all of them. I can smell it. Mia could be hurt.”
“Worried? About what?”
His cigar glowed in the dark. “People wonder why judges, mayors, officials betray their duty for the Mafia. Money, sure, for outsiders. But for officials who’re members, brothers, the answer is simpler—they’re not betraying their duties to America because they don’t serve America. They serve another country.
“The Mafia is a country, a nation, and that’s where their first loyalty is. The way Robert E. Lee gave his first loyalty to Virginia, not to the U.S. When Luciano worked for the U.S. Army in Sicily it wasn’t patriotism to America, it was an alliance between two countries with the same enemy at the time. They’ll fight for America—second. First they’re Mafia soldiers.”
He was silent for a time. “They came to a big, alien world that had rules and methods they didn’t understand, couldn’t succeed with, were lost in. So they stayed with the country they knew, the brotherhood, and they still serve it. Their private nation that gives them security and success. Now I smell worry here, they’re looking over their shoulders. Something’s wrong, unknown. Maybe an enemy among them, hidden? They’re as afraid of an unknown danger around them as anyone.”
“You can’t be sure of that,” I said. “They don’t trust you. It could be an act for you, a cover-up.”
“It could be.”
“Then it’s too big, Mr. Albano. Let the police—”
“Make it John, okay?”
I didn’t want to make it John. “I’m sorry. I can’t help—”
Someone ran out in the corridor, up the stairs and stopped at my door. From the silhouette against the half glass, a woman. She hesitated, the office dark. John Albano stood up. Was it Mia? I switched on the light, opened the door. A young woman, tall, with a round face, short brown hair, and a plain black coat.
The girl from Hal Wood’s office—Emily Green.
“Mr. Fortune? Hal’s been shot! He wants you to come. He’s being followed, his apartment’s been searched, and he’s just been wounded! He was afraid the telephone might be tapped, so he sent me to get you!”
I got my duffel coat from the chair. John Albano went out with us.
CHAPTER 13
Albano drove us to St. Marks Place. I saw no one suspicious on the winter night street. We went up. The apartment was a wreck. Even the kitchen had been searched, the rugs pulled up and piled in corners, the closets turned out, the furniture knocked over.
Hal Wood sat on a cot among the paints and mess of his studio. He held his left arm, the shirt torn but little blood. His ruddy face was drawn, and his eyes were tired. Wary eyes, the liveliness gone behind a brittle surface as if he didn’t want anyone to see the shock in them but couldn’t hide it because he couldn’t forget. He almost looked his near-forty years, the gray in his hair no longer a contrast to his young face. I took his arm.
“A scratch,” he said. “I’ve been shot before. It’s okay.”
He was right, a graze. I dropped his arm. He looked up at me, his eyes like cloudy plastic.
“She’s dead, Dan. He killed her. He got her killed.”
“She wanted him,” I said. The hard detective. We all hide ourselves one way or another.
“But—” he said. “I mean … Just because she was there? No real … I mean, just—”
His mouth went on moving for a moment without sound. Almost four days. Talking to himself, thinking, and he was thought out, numb. Emily Green went to stand over him, her hand on his shoulder. He covered her hand with his. She smiled. Not at him, at me. He was hers now. John Albano stood near a wall, silent.
“Maybe not for no reason,” I said. “What happened here?”
Emily Green said, “We came home about a half hour ago. When we opened the door, we saw the mess, and Hal heard a noise in the bedroom. Hal ran into the bedroom, and the man shot him!”
“I just got to the doorway,” Hal said. “He was at the front window with a gun. I did a dive backwards, he only nicked me. I hustled Emily out, but when he didn’t come after us, I went back slow and he was gone. Out the fire escape. He must have come in that way, too. The window was open.”
“You saw him?” John Albano said from the wall.
“I saw him,” Hal said. “A runt, but stocky, like a featherweight. Broken nose, puffed up around the eyes. He could shoot.”
“Bagnio,” Albano said.
“Yeh,” I said. “Little Max, all right. You called the cops?”
Hal shook his head. “I wanted to see you first.”
“Call Captain Gazzo,” I said to Albano. “Centre Street.”
Albano went to the phone out in the living room. Hal sat and held his arm, but it wasn’t the arm that hurt. Emily Green’s eyes were big, soft, happy. The same way Diana had looked at Andy Pappas. The turn of the wheel. Good and bad in everything. The girl looked up, saw me watching, and flushed. But she didn’t flinch. A proper girl, even prim, she couldn’t have had a lot of men, and she wanted this one.
“What was he after, Hal?” I said.
He shook his head. “Not a damned idea. Who is he?”
“Pappas’s top gunman, or was,” I said. “You went on vacation two days before Diana and Pappas were killed?”
“To Woodstock. A painter I know has a cabin up there, he let me and Emily use it. We read the … story in the paper, I called the police right away, we came home. I had to identify her, Dan. They made me … look.”
He was building it, flogging himself, suffering. Maybe because he’d turned to Emily Green so fast. He would settle for what he could have. Most of us do. But we don’t like to face that.
“Who saw you up there?” I said.
Emily Green said, “A lot of people did! In the village!”
“At two A.M.?”
“We were in bed then! Both of us!” the girl said, blushed.
Hal smiled at her. “He has to ask, Em.”
“I’m sorry, Miss Green,” I said. It couldn’t have been easy for her, in Hal’s bed. “All right, what were you doing the last four weeks, Hal?”
He leaned forward, intense. Wallowing in it, the tragic love. Well, why not, if it helped in the end? Purge it, get it out.
“She moved out two days after you saw us last. Pappas could do anything, I guess—get an apartment, furnish it, in two days. He got her a lawyer, too. She filed for the divorce. Mental cruelty, or whatever. I wouldn’t fight her, you know? I took your advice, started seeing Emily. It h
elped.”
Emily Green touched him, mothering. Albano came back.
“Pappas filed for divorce, too?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t know,” Hal said, hard against Pappas.
Albano said, “In Nevada. He’s got residence there, power. Stella didn’t fight him, either.”
“Not that way anyway,” I said. “What else, Hal?”
“That’s all,” he said. “Worked, saw Emily, drank a little.”
I knew he was lying, had to be. Not because it showed, but because I’d been down the same road more than once.
“Damn it, Hal, tell it! You followed her again, watched her, couldn’t keep away. Doorways across the street from that apartment, in the shadows when they went out, phone calls at midnight. Tell me, Hal, I’ve got to know what Max Bagnio thinks he wants!”
He nodded, miserable. “You know how it is, Dan.”
I knew. “You hung around, watched. What did you see?”
“Nothing, Dan, I swear. I didn’t even know she’d gone to Miami until three days after she went!”
“There has to be something. Bagnio is looking for something, Hal. What he thinks you have or thinks you know.”
John Albano said, “Maybe the girl knew something, Dan. Diana. Maybe Max thinks she told Wood, talked too much.”
“She never talked about Pappas,” Hal said. “Not even his name until after that night Dan was here.”
“There has to be something,” I said. “Think, Hal.”
He shook his head. His mind would have been on Diana.
“There was this older woman at her office,” Hal said. “They had lunch. Diana didn’t talk much. Small woman, dressed up, fat.”
“Stella?” I said to Albano. “She met Diana, went to her?”
Albano said, “She’d try. Andy had girl friends before.”
“Did this woman go to Diana’s new apartment, Hal?” I said.
“No. Some men did, when … Pappas was there. A short, paunchy guy with bad skin and a lot of rings. I remember the rings. Dunlap, too. I guess Dunlap’s her friend, he lied for her.”
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