The Man In Milan Page 2

  He looked at me, then turned away. He knew I knew.

  Muro’s address book in hand, I made a few calls. It was near 11 pm. Reached a lot of answering services until Dorothy Hochman, who said she was Muro’s wife. She confirmed his Milan address. She paused and added ex-wife, because they had separated. I told her we needed to see her tonight about Muro, ask some questions, but couldn’t say why. She said she’d been at a party all evening. Plenty of witnesses, she said, though I hadn’t asked her. She didn’t seem too upset. Maybe annoyed. She didn’t want us to come over right then. It was late, she said. I told her we had to.

  “Is he dead?” she asked.

  Smart one. “We’ll have to come over,” is all I said. She gave in.

  I had to stop for a minute after that call. I took a second look at the ID, hoping to find something new in it. Anything. Encased in plastic, the reddish-brown cover looked like it had weathered several decades. It was embossed with the letters GM in gold in the upper right corner of the cover, small and just barely noticeable. The G and M were so intricately intertwined amid tiny trellises of flowers that without knowing the owner’s name, it would be nearly impossible to figure out the initials.

  Felt sorry for Muro all over again. Not a good emotion in my line. My folks were from much further south, at the bottom of the boot. Still, we were practically paisans. I hoped he wasn’t just another thieving scumbag who met with the ultimate payback.

  I’d seen an ID like this one before, from an Italian model killed by her boyfriend a few years ago, a lowlife masquerading as a performance artist. Barry Mayew. Turned out his “art” was eating people and boiling the leftovers into his paints. Then he’d strip, smear himself with the stuff, and roll around on a canvas on his studio floor. He’d film the whole thing and show that, not the canvas, to a bunch of googly-eyed eggheads, who fawned over the shock of the new. I had guessed he tossed the canvases to get rid of evidence. I found one in the trash and that’s how we nailed him. The paint had traces of her blood. Got medaled for it. Mayew didn’t last six months upstate. His prison daddy shivved him one less than amorous eve, unhappy with the quality of Mayew’s blowjob.

  Turner got off the phone and swiveled his chair in my direction.

  “It’s in the pocket,” he said, cracking a half smile. It was a toothy grin to be sure, full of big white, straight teeth. But when the corners of his mouth turned up to a point—like devil tails—they were so mischievous that you had to give in. He reserved the full treatment smile for special occasions. People broke out into song when he flashed The Full Crescent.

  “What?” I said. I pulled the ID out of its leather protector. It was soft, a thick, cloth paper. I felt the barely raised letters of a very official looking stamp in red on the back of the document. Commune di Genova, it said.

  “I said, It’s in the pocket.”

  “Do I know her?” I rubbed my face with one hand and tossed the ID onto my partner’s desk with the other.

  “Alicia, the writer,” he said with glee. “You met her at that party last week. The Madrid chick, so it’s pronounced Al-i-th-ia.”

  “The one with the funny left eye. Looked like she had that thing. Whaddaya call it, wandering eye, right?”

  “There is something fishy about her eye, but I’d say it is moderately divergent strabismus. Anyway, the rest of her is fine, very fine,” Turner said. He picked up Muro’s ID.

  “Too brainy for you,” I said, feeding blank paper into the printer. Out would come an NYPD UF61, the initial report, which went over to the coroner, who would ready the death certificate.

  Turner seemed to appreciate the leather of the ID, too, turning it over and over in his hands. “She wants me to make her dinner,” he said. “Diiiiin-huuuuuh,” he repeated, heavily accenting the second half of the word. “You know what that means.”

  “Yeah. You diiiiin-her, you win her,” I said, parroting Turner’s way of saying it, and typing away. His theory was that if a woman asked you to cook for her, she wanted you to make love to her.

  “Who’s Muro?” he asked.

  “Was,” I said, not looking up. “You’d know that if you’d come with me tonight.”

  “Dunne was busting me. They’re still bugging out about that skinhead cracker I arrested a little too passionately two months ago,” Turner said.

  “That took two hours?”

  “I had to get some Aida tickets,” he said quietly, then quickly and loudly added, almost with a whoop, “Hey, this guy’s E-taliano. Fresh?”

  “Two hours old. Diplomat from Milan.”

  “Sorry, Paolino.” He grinned.

  “Fuck you,” I said. “He’s not my cousin.”

  “Give me the Cliff notes.”

  He put the ID back on my desk, open. He had long, slim fingers, sinewy, like those of a gymnast. The left hand had a brown, drumstick-shaped blotch on it. He insisted the birthmark was the shape of Mother Africa. He was a Redbone, light-skinned with a reddish tint to his hair and freckles. Some white in him somewhere.

  “You are staring at my hands, Paolino,” he said in a tone just a bit higher than normal.

  I recounted the particulars, noting Dunne’s resistance. There was something protective about those hands. It was strange that I noticed that just then.

  “Sounds delightful. I hope you’re not calling this a robbery-murder,” Turner said.

  “Ask Dunne.”

  “Fuck him. Sounds like Muro got himself whacked. You said he’s Italian, right?”

  I turned to Turner, my head down slightly, eyes glancing over the tops of my reading specs, like a disappointed John Jay college prof. Fucking reading glasses. Forty-five and I was all going to shit real quick.

  “Okay,” Turner said, putting up his hands in surrender. “We will not assume Mafia. Any kin?”

  “Wife. Gold band on his left ring finger. I just talked to a lady who claimed said title. They were separated, not yet divorced. I think,” I said, finishing up the preliminary file. “Got a call into State and the Italian Consulate. You know how good their twenty-four-hour desks are.”

  Turner rubbed the whiskers of his thin goatee, another source of contention with Dunne. The first time our great leader saw Turner, he said, “Great. Just what we need. A black beatnik detective.”

  “Dunne wants it dropped.” I ripped the preliminary from the printer and threw our copy on his desk.

  “What else you got?”

  “His phone book,” I said. I grabbed an envelope, stuffed the second UF61 copy in it, and stood up. “Come on, I have to drop this with Dunne. We’re off to see the wife…or whatever she is. She said they’re legally separated and it’s too late to come over. By the sound of her voice, you’d think maybe that her ice cream cone had melted.”

  Turner smirked.

  “Even if we had something to give a judge—and we don’t—by the time the warrant came down it would really be too late,” I said.

  Turner grabbed the address book. “I’ll take A through M, you take N through Z,” he said, following me. He fanned through the book as we walked.

  We dropped off the prelim on the night clerk’s desk. Little Jimmy—our resident paper pusher, or The Archivist, as he liked to call himself—typically wasn’t around most of the time. He had a day job running Circle Line tour boats out of the West Side, so most of the time, at night, if you wanted Little Jimmy, you had to check the couch in the infirmary. Outside the captain’s office, it was the only cushioned spot in the precinct house not worn to shreds.

  Turner almost stumbled into the water cooler. “Oh, snap,” he yelled, so loud that a couple of our law enforcement colleagues looked up from their desks. Turner snorted, the kind that comes out of a smiling crocodile as he invites you to dine with him. “I don’t believe it,” he said, and pushed the booklet at me splayed open to the Bs. “My friend Elena is in this goddamn book. She used to work at the Consulate. Look. Her number is right here,” he said, one long finger under her name.

  “You remember the number?” I said.

  “Plenty of reasons to memorize it.”

  “Well, if she worked at the Consulate…he probably knew her. Maybe a girlfriend of his?” I said, hoping to raise a little jealousy out of my partner. Nothing. “Maybe Muro and his wife had an arrangement. Talk about taking things in stride. I know it was late, but this new widow told me she had a headache and insisted she couldn’t see us until tomorrow. I told her we had to come over tonight.”

  I could tell my partner looked forward to meeting Dorothy Hochman, or Mrs. Muro, or whoever she was.

  “You know, if I thought for a minute she did it,” I said, “we’d have been at their apartment already. Not too many women executioners around.”

  “Maybe she did him for his dalliances,” Turner said.

  He seemed intrigued rather than upset by that thought.

  “Sounded like she didn’t do him at all. We’re going uptown. The missus lives on 85th near Park Ave.” We headed to the front door, speeding up as we passed the chief of detectives’ office.

  “Paolino, uptown is above 110th,” Turner said, laughing, as if he were sorry for me. “How many times do I have to tell you before it gets through that thick white head?” He grabbed his raincoat from the rack.

  I slipped on my shoulder holster. I could never type with the damn thing on. Never gave me a problem otherwise. I could sleep with it, but typing was something else altogether. I slipped the little phone book into my right pocket and automatically grabbed for my cigarettes, but they weren’t there. I’d recently quit, sort of. Was tougher than booze. I took off my reading glasses and stuffed them back into the case.

  Chapter 2

  Friday

  On the wa
y to Hochman’s home, I drove and with the windows down Turner blasted his Tosca CD, the first big solo by Scarpia, the Roman chief of police. I liked C&W music, the whinier the better, beer-soaked tales of infidelity, ex-wives, alimony unpaid, and drunks. It vaguely outlined my life, even if I was from Brooklyn instead of Nashville. Tosca was bigger than life, and bogus. Revolutionaries, barons, and Roman churches weren’t for me. And as for the great Tosca, none of the women I had ever known would have thrown themselves off a parapet for me.

  The church bells clapped louder and louder out of the car speakers, first majestically, then like a black mass, Scarpia crying “Tosca” over and over. People on the street were staring at an obviously unmarked police car with opera blaring out of its open windows.

  When the music faded, Turner asked me again if I thought she’d done it.

  “She said she was at a dinner party earlier, charity thing,” I said. “She said she wasn’t feeling well and went home early and has witnesses. Lots. Anyway, she’d have to be a pretty good actress—nobody can fake ambivalence like that. If she were behind it, she would have been bawling, right?”

  As we reached Third and 85th, and I made a left, Turner said, “Diplomat. Bullet in the head. Damn. Next thing you know, the Consulate will tell us that they’ve never heard of him.” Turner stared out the passenger side window as we double parked. “Just a simple execution.”

  The doorman eyed us, particularly Turner, who generally didn’t like it when doormen stared at him, particularly those on the Upper East Side. Today for some reason my partner didn’t give any lectures, or worse. This guy looked a lot like the poor fucker we ran into on the first day we did a shift together two years ago, when Turner gave me his take on doormen. “Even white doormen have got this plantation house slave look on them. Like they were with the rich folk, you know, and not just hired serfs who could be turned out faster than you coughed.”

  That day, I saw him put his revolver—safety on—to the temple of a doorman who had made the serious mistake of assuming Turner worked for me. He advised him very nicely that he should never make that kind of assumption about a black man again. The doorman pissed his pants. Turner was appeased.

  That’s when I first noticed that in addition to the department-issue Glock 19 automatics we all wore, my partner liked to carry a spare, a barrel-fed Smith & Wesson Model 10, the heavy metal John Wayne would wear. How he lugged that fucking weight around all day, I could never figure. But I knew why. Any old timer could tell you the score: automatics can jam, but wheel guns are forever. They always gave you six bangs. If you need more than that, you’re in trouble big anyway.

  This Hochman doorman was smart enough to keep his mouth mostly shut. He knew we were coming. The missus had warned him. “Ms. Hochman is 12A,” he said, waving us in after we flashed our shiny business cards. Turner asked him what hours he’d been on duty, if he’d seen Mrs. Muro leave or enter tonight, and if he was sure he could identify her.

  “Yes, I am recognizing her. Ms. Hochman, you mean?” said the general of No. 47, East 85th St., one of those huge, ugly white brick apartment buildings dotting the Upper East Side. He spoke with a heavy Russian accent.

  “Did she leave the building tonight?” Turner asked.

  “Yes,” the doorman repeated. “She is leavink six thirty and comink back at nine.”

  “You certain she returned at nine? Were you at the front door at all times?” I asked.

  “Yes, I am sometimes taking break. I go side room here when I do that. I no sleep, so still I am seeink ere-wee-budyi.” He pointed two fingers at his eyes.

  “Back door?” I said.

  “We got cameras. I didn’t see nobodyi. But you can check vit da tape.”

  When 12A swung open, the woman behind the door was wearing black, though I got the distinct feeling it wasn’t for poor old Gaetano. It was a cocktail dress. And it looked like Mrs. Muro still had her party paint on and was about to go out. The large living room had wraparound views, dotted with furniture of mostly white leather or shiny black metal.

  She pointed at the couch and without looking at us said, “Look, I know I should have a lawyer here, but as I said, I’ve nothing to hide. Guy’s dead, right?” Dorothy Hochman or Muro was about five foot nine, with shoulder length, straight light brown hair. I guessed forty, a very good forty.

  Turner and I exchanged glances. I nodded. I told her our names, began to tell her we were sorry for her loss, but she was already walking down the two steps into the living room.

  She turned. “I know it looks bad, but I’m not crying because I’m not sad. I mean, I loved Guy at first. Then he got difficult to live with. You know how it is.”

  Yes, I knew how it was. “He’s a diplomat?” I said.

  “You fell for that too?” she said, smiling. “He’s no fucking diplomat.”

  Then she apologized for the fuck and lit a cigarette as she moved to the couch. She was twirling her hair, like a teenager.

  “Hey, I like Italian men as much as the next girl,” she sighed. “He wanted to move to this country and take care of me. Not that I needed that. I’ve got money, but a woman likes to hear it. He was nice the first few years, but then he started to get paranoid, said Italian special agents were following him. Christ, I didn’t think Italy even had special agents,” she said, taking a drag. “Three years ago, the late night calls started—one in the morning, two o’clock. I would have gotten mad at him, but I could tell that the caller was a man, and the same one, too.

  “Then he would disappear for days at a time. I never knew where he was. At first, I was sick with worry, but eventually it was too much for me to take. Guy said he had to hide. From what, he wouldn’t say. But I don’t know what he was up to. Maybe he was finocchio, for all I knew about Gaetano.”

  She looked at us as if she expected understanding.

  We said nothing.

  She sighed again and plopped herself down on the couch. “At a certain point I didn’t care anymore.” She looked to the windows.

  Turner sat at the other end of the couch and I remained standing, looking the place over as discreetly as I could.

  The tears were going to come eventually, I knew.

  She went on. “I’m embarrassed to tell you that I don’t even know what my husband actually did for a living. Oh, he gave me some bullshit about managing his family’s money. When I first met him, he said his family had hundreds of millions of lira. Later, I found out that wasn’t much money,” she laughed. “This is my apartment, by the way. Not his. And I was at a benefit for sick children in Bosnia tonight with three hundred people. And right now, I’m not feeling well, so can we make this snappy?”

  I almost winced at that one. I saw Turner mouth, “That’s cold,” to himself.

  “Did he still live here?” I asked.

  “Do I have to answer your questions, Mr. Officer-whatever-your-name is?”

  “It’s Paul Rossi, ma’am. And as I said when we came in, it’s Detective,” I said. “And my partner here is Turner, Hamilton P., also a detective.” I nodded in his direction. Mrs. Muro looked at Turner for more than a second. “And no, technically, you don’t have to answer my questions.”

  Turner rolled his eyes.

  “But it would probably be better if you did.”

  “Better for whom, detective?” she shot back.

  “For Gaetano, at least, and possibly you,” I said.

  “Look,” she said. Her face tightened up. “This…marriage was over. We just never got around to an official divorce. I let him occasionally stay here because he had nothing—no money, nobody else to go to. But six months ago, I’d had enough, so I asked him not to come back. He dropped by here a few days ago, just for a minute. We spoke for literally two minutes, he used the bathroom, and he left. I felt bad. He looked terrible. And that was very unlike Guy. He liked to look good. That was one of the things I loved about him. He’d look so good in gabardine, like a model.”

  She stopped, rubbed her temple lightly. “Anyway, he wasn’t taking care of himself, started jabbering about ghosts he was seeing at night. La verita, he kept mumbling.”