The Man In Milan Read online

  THE MAN IN MILAN

  Vito Racanelli

  The following is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in an entirely fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Vito Racanelli

  Cover and jacket design by 2Faced Design

  ISBN 978-1-951709-11-2

  eISBN: 978-1-951709-27-3

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2020944552

  First hardcover edition October 2020

  by Polis Books, LLC

  44 Brookview Lane

  Aberdeen, NJ

  PolisBooks.com

  For Lisa, Giovanni and Giuseppina

  Chapter 1

  Friday

  In the gutter lay a man, face up, between two parked SUVs on Sutton. He wore a pale gray suit with impossibly thin pinstripes. It was Zegna, because I’d seen one on my partner, Detective Hamilton P. Turner. The suit was still in good shape, a testament to its workmanship, but the man was not.

  I squatted and looked at him in the evening of an April day. I put on my latex and turned him gently. Our fashionable boy wore no tie and his pink shirt had a large red-brown blotch right where his heart used to beat. His suit was ruined in the back, an exit hole right through the trapezius. That’s what the coroner’s report would probably say.

  He was about six feet, one inch. Skinny, with fine brown hair, blue-gray eyes, glauco, they say in Italian, which is what the body turned out to be. My grandfather was called Glauco for his eyes. This guy was good-looking. Once. No sign of a struggle. Two wounds: a dime-sized hole punched through the back of the head and one more straight into the chest—probably the second shot as he lay prone—to make sure he stayed all the way dead. Below, burrowed halfway into the asphalt, was a slug.

  The blues who’d found him already radioed for the NYPD photogs and CSU.

  I walked back to my car to call my partner, who’d hadn’t told me why he couldn’t come along to

  the party. “I’m good,” I said to Turner. “You’re missing a beautiful spring evening in New York City, marred only by one dead body.”

  His voice crackled over the radio: “Just the one? Gonna rain later. Meet you back at the precinct, Paolino,” Turner said.

  I tossed the receiver back into our Crown Vic’s front seat and walked back to the body. Turner liked to call me little Paul because I was taller than him. The photogs showed up and cordoned off the area around the body.

  “Any other bodies, Detective Rossi?” the photographer asked me.

  “I told you, one. Why does everyone think there’s more than one?” I said.

  “Yeah, but you know, sometimes you think there’s one and then other bodies just start showing up when you look around. They’re like rabbits.”

  I smiled at our photographer, Joe Rinn. He had a nice sideline doing weddings. “You never tell those brides what you do, do you? That you flash dead bodies all day. That your work graces medical school books about fatal wounds?”

  “Nah,” he said, smiling back at me, then turning to the job at hand. “I tell ’em I’m an artist.”

  I stood back and let the artist work. I tugged my right ear, tilted my head to get another look at this guy, and wondered what this poor fucker had done to deserve a dog’s death.

  Rinn circled the body like a vulture. “The geeks’ll be here in a minute. And hey, a Post guy is comin’, too. He asked me to keep the bodies fresh.”

  “A body. One body. We’ll try to oblige, but if the fourth estate doesn’t show in time, tough,” I said.

  After they took the first set of photos, the CSU geeks began. Hair, blood, and nail samples. They scraped his jacket, pants, and shirt with tape to pick up foreign elements, like someone else’s hair or blood.

  I looked around to figure some possible MOs. There was a small service alcove down a few steps and a few feet away. Our hunter knew his rabbit’s habits. Maybe tailed him for a few days. He waited in the alcove and calmly skipped up to the victim as he walked between a Range Rover and an Escalade. That gave the shooter some tall cover, and then he did him. Bang. Bang. Or rather Ping, Ping, with a silencer. The killer had probably taken care after the first shot to lay the body down, so that they were partially obscured, on Sutton near 54st. And that’s when he—or they—popped him a second time. His head, inches from the curb, was near enough that his blood had drained into the sewer nearby. Just when you think you’ve seen it all.

  The body came conveniently with docs, a small black address book and an Italian identity card wrapped in a soft, dark brown leather case—Gaetano Muro, forty-six years old and a Milan address, so immediately I thought Mafia. Even the stupidest perp knows not to leave docs in a fixit job. The killer must have been spooked immediately and had to run. This was a botched execution. Two kill shots to rob someone? Not likely.

  The address book had names and phone numbers but little else. No addresses. The ID was diplomatic, Capo Servizio something or other, Consolato Generale d’Italia, it said, with an embossed little star inside an olive branch and a mechanical gear wheel. My Italian wasn’t bad thanks to my grandfather. Muro was a diplo and Signore Muro from Milan came all the way to New York City and found unexpectedly that this late April evening would be the least lucky night he was ever to have, and he was dropped in the gutter on Sutton Place. I suppose there are worse streets to die on.

  I’d bet it wasn’t the way he thought it would go. Nobody ever does.

  Muro had no time to argue with his Angel of Death. I bent down again, to touch his still warm face. TOD? About 10 p.m., I guessed, pending confirmation by the geeks at CSU. Then a little surprise. The distinct smell of fresh urine on him.

  I did a quick walk-through with the Crime Scene Unit guys, and then I shut the poor bastard’s eyes, still open and staring heavenward. Even after eighteen years on the job, I hated to see them with their eyes open. I’d seen plenty but it still gave me the creeps. I expected the body to speak up suddenly, to ask “Why me, Detective Rossi?” The eyes had registered the moment his spirit had been shoved headlong into the al di la. It sounds so much better in Italian, as if there were no heaven or hell but just a nice airy place in the mountains. The al di la…just over there. That’s what my nonno, Glauco, used to say to me when he was dying. That he wasn’t really going to die but go to the al di la. He was actually dying most of the years that I knew him, in his eighties. He was dying of this, dying of that. Finally, one day, he did die. In the middle of a handball game. Heart attack. Infarto. Even that doesn’t sound so bad in Italian.

  Just the one bullet was found initially, in the street under Muro. The other slug? Likely somewhere in his skull since there was no exit wound in his face. The CME boys were going to have to dive in and get that one, since the mashed-up slug in the street probably wouldn’t be much use as evidence.

  The doorman up the street, a grandfatherly guy with a German accent, kept repeating, “I saw nuss-zing.” Another doorman across the street should have had a perfect view of the whole thing but claimed he was attending to a tenant in the foyer.

  The body had been discovered by an older woman, maybe sixty-five, a Suttonite with sparkling green eyes and expensively taut skin, walking her dog. We sat in plush leather chairs in the foyer of the building closest to where Muro was gunned down. She’d noticed a tall blond guy in a nice suit walking down the street quickly, passing her by the Escalade. She looked back over her shoulder at him because he “looked like he didn’t belong,” and didn’t notice her Wheaton terrier pissing on Muro’s head. She apologized. “I hadn’t expected a body to be there,” she said.
br />   Of course. Nobody would on Sutton. Her thick gold bracelets shook and clinked against each other as she trembled.

  But why had the body and docs been left? Didn’t feel like a robbery to me. There had been a patrol car nearby when it happened, behind a doubled parked car on the corner of Sutton and 56th. One of the blues from that car stepped out to write a summons. When I asked him earlier—he and his partner were first on the scene—he remembered seeing a big blond guy looking in their direction just for a moment. But he couldn’t give more than that.

  “Excuse me, Detective Rossi, there are fucking blond guys everywhere,” he’d said.

  Maybe the patrol car scared our killer off before he could clean up the mess? Then I had a blue run the Escalade and Range Rover plates. Both owners lived nearby.

  “Want me to grab the owners?” the blue asked me.

  “Get a statement,” I said.

  “You think the owners are involved?”

  “Nah. That would be too messy. They’ve already left the body. They’re not gonna leave the car, too.”

  The blue was a rookie. “But I’ll get a statement just in case?”

  I just nodded and sat on the hood of my Crown Vic.

  An ambulance arrived and took Muro for his last ride in the Big Apple, a short trip to First Avenue and the Office of the County Medical Examiner. A small crowd of locals had gathered behind the police cordon, and from a distance they sounded like excited finches. Mostly Old Money WASPs around here, that’s the 19th precinct, with a sprinkle of nouveau riche to create some frisson. There are 217,063 people in the One-Nine, which covers less than two square miles, and lots of these folks make more in a month in what the accountants call passive income than I earn in a year. I wouldn’t mind some passive income.

  As the EMS guys eased the stretcher into the back of the ambulance, the taller one let out a cackling kind of laugh, as if he’d heard the biggest howler of his life. No sense of respect for the dead these days. Who dies in peace in New York City?

  His short, fat partner asked me with an imploring look, as if I, the cop, were the arbiter, the court of last resort, “Hey, the Yankees beat the Sox tonight, right? Our radio’s busted, and we been real busy.”

  “Yeah, three to two,” I said, looking down the street, as if the perp were still hanging around.

  They slammed the back door shut and high-fived each other. The flashers went on, but no ee-wah, ee-wah siren, no urgency. Muro wasn’t coming back. Poor fucker. I don’t know why I felt for the guy but I did. Most times, bodies are bodies. Half of ’em deserved what they got, anyway. This guy Muro was a real Italian, not like me. Like my grandfather.

  The EMS rolled away. Just another spirit in the night.

  “Ciao,” I said aloud.

  All of my grandparents had come from a little town in Basilicata. They’d come all the way to this country but nobody offed them. Both my parents worked and my nonni raised me. Gave me the language.

  I was being sentimental. Muro could have been a drug dealing dirtbag, a murdering pimp, for all I knew, but he had me. I tugged my ear again, a habit so old I don’t remember when it started.

  I called my sponsor. I usually felt better after I talked to Harry. Harry Alimont. It used to be Alimonte, but on Ellis Island, his great-grandfather had somehow lost the E.

  “Hello,” Harry said.

  “It’s me,” I said.

  “Where are you?” he asked.

  “On a job. Sutton Place.”

  “Nice,” he razzed. Harry lived in Bensonhurst, where I grew up. I needed a neighborhood guy to help me. “So?”

  “Haven’t touched a drop in two years, nine months, four weeks, and two days, Harry.”

  “Good. Now make it two years, nine months, four weeks, and three days. Talk to you tomorrow.” His dog barked in the background.

  “Copy that, Harry.” I hung up and got in the car to go back to the One-Nine. It was just as hard today as it was two years, nine months, four weeks, and a day ago.

  It started to rain lightly, just as Detective Hamilton P. Turner predicted.

  * * *

  As I sat at my desk writing out the particulars on the latest recipient of New York City hospitality, I realized that my very favorite part of detective duty, informing the next of kin in person, had to wait as Muro’s ID was not the kind we were used to. DMV found no driver’s license in his name. I looked at the ID more closely. Inside the fold was a black-and-white picture, with his name, physical characteristics, home address in Milan, nationality, age, and occupation. Colonnello, AMI, Aeronautica Militare Italiana. The Air Force.

  No criminal priors, at least in New York. We had a line out to the Feds, but nothing had come back yet. On Friday nights the Bureau always took its time. No social security number, no home phone, nothing else. I had no idea if this guy had a place in town or was just passing through.

  There were seventeen Muros listed in the Manhattan phone book alone, none of them Gaetano. I tried Google. I’d read recently that the company had just gone public on the stock market, the IPO thing, and the shares shot up. Probably every resident in our lovely precinct had bought some. I didn’t.

  Some stuff came up in Italian but I was too tired to read it right then. My Italian is good but I make mistakes when I’m run down. Anyway, who knows how many Gaetano Muros there are in the old country. The Italian Consulate and the State Department were no help at this hour. In Muro’s personal address book, which I found in his vest pocket, there were just a bunch of foners. So I would have to make calls to his friends, assuming he had some, and fish something out of them without telling them he was dead.

  One-Nine’s detective squad leader came by, Lieutenant Patrick Dunne. Grand poo-bah, as the detectives called him behind his back, among other things.

  “Whaddaya got?” Dunne said. He was a short-sleever and had a sheaf of folders under his arm, which was fair-skinned and blotched that way redheads are prone. Even in the dead of winter, the only shirt I ever saw him wearing was a white short-sleeved number, not much different from the kind worn by a Catholic school boy, which he—like me—once was. It was a walking advertisement that he never spent a second outside our house on business. My partner and I called him the “two stepper.” Two steps to the precinct front door from his car and in, two steps back and out.

  “Dead white male. As usual, our particular precinct’s criminals give much too much attention to these privileged types.”

  “I repeat, Rossi. Whaddaya got?” he said, standing over me as I sat.

  “Age, forty-six. Bullet to the back of the head and one to the chest. They probably used a tiny, but final determination of weapon and caliber still pending from FID. No witnesses so far. No wallet. Apparent robbery but believe that’s a cover.”

  “A small bore gun? Cover for what?” Dunne grunted. He had this wonderful habit of wearing truly ugly ties. The one he wore that evening was a pretty unappealing mix of Jackson Pollock-like drips streaked across a background of small N.Y. Giants football helmets. Awful.

  “Don’t know yet,” I said.

  “Bullet to the head?” he said, looking up from the files he was leafing through. “What the fuck is that?” When he got excited, you could hear a bit of Irish brogue left in him. One March 17th he’d enjoyed himself a little too much and at the morning’s St. Paddy’s Day toast, he revealed with a tear that he’d left Old Eire when he was just six. It was the only thing I liked about him.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Looks like an execution. We don’t know who this Gaetano Muro is.”

  “He’s a Wop?”

  My neck muscles tensed. He thought he was being funny again. “He’s the real thing,” I said. “Italian diplo. Works at the Consulate. From what I can make out in the ID, he might even be in their military.”

  “Christ, a foreigner,” he said, making brief eye contact with me, something he avoided as much as possible. He knew he wasn’t much liked. The blues hated
him, too, and years ago the Patrolman’s Benevolent Association managed to unseat Dunne from a desk command. And he landed, legs down like a cat, among us detectives. I figured he had an Irish uncle way upstairs at 1 Police Plaza.

  He eyed the brown ID I held in my hand. “Is this case doable?” he asked and started scribbling on a pad now.

  “Italian national. Diplomat. Do-ability? No witnesses. No home address. Doubtful at this point,” I answered.

  “Drop it,” Dunne said out of the side of his mouth, and he walked away. That meant fill out the papers, tell the next of kin, wave your hands to look like you did something, and move on to the next case, preferably one that could be solved and publicized, bringing him glory and vindicating the taxpayers’ support for more cops.

  “I still have to tell his wife, assuming he has one.”

  He stopped and turned. “You said you have nothing. How do you know that?”

  “Ring on his left hand.”

  “Fine. Diplos don’t pay taxes. Hell, they don’t even pay their fuckin parking tickets. Don’t bother with a 5. Fuck ’em,” he said, meaning not to do a DD5, a complaint follow up and record of detective’s investigation. He was already out of the squad room.

  I had just barely registered the “’em” out of his mouth, but I could tell this was already out of his brain.

  I glanced left, at my partner, Detective Hamilton P. Turner, sitting at the next desk. He’d been on the phone, with his back to us, and missed the Dunne act. When the case came up earlier, he’d begged off, saying he had something important to attend to. I went along, as always.

  His rib cage was moving slightly under his shirt, as if he were holding back a soft laugh. He was giving his mellow-throated routine to a woman. I couldn’t hear what he was saying but I knew because he was using his late-night disc jockey voice, low and full, yet weightless and honey-covered at the same time. It was as if his tongue had managed to smooth the edges of the nastier Anglo-Saxon consonants. He never seemed to lack for the company of women.