Investigation (44 page)

One of the basic rules when concocting a false story is to keep it loose; keep it easy; keep it fluid; avoid too many precise details; incorporate your surroundings; use what you see at the moment to reinforce your claims.

Like garbage cans on the edge of the sidewalk late at night.

Kitty. Kitty.

When I switched on the television, I was surprised to catch the eleven-o’clock news. It felt more like three o’clock of a very bad morning.

None of the international horrors made any impression; too far away, remote, impersonal.

On the national scene, some poor dope tried to hold up a bank in Cleveland, using a little gun he’d carved out of
soap.
A bright-eyed grandmother-type bank teller laughed into the camera when praised for her courage in standing up to the would-be bandit: “Why, for heavens sake, the paint was coming off all over his hand. It wasn’t anything but a cake of Ivory soap and that’s pretty much what it looked like.” Laugh-laugh. “I’m not about to hand over my day’s receipts to someone who waves a bar of Ivory soap in my face!”

I must have nodded off for a minute or two when the newscaster’s voice cut through my dulled exhaustion with the words “... Alfredo Veronne has been in seclusion for most of the last three or four years, living quietly at his estate in Kensington, the most exclusive enclave in exclusive Great Neck.”

The overvoice described what was being shown: old news clips dating back to the days of the Kefauver hearings. A younger, steel-faced Alfredo Veronne respectfully declining to answer. A straight-backed, Homburg-wearing Veronne deferring to his attorney as he bolted from court steps to waiting limousine. A quick rundown of some of his more sensational arrests, illustrated by shots of Veronne being escorted in handcuffs from squad car to precinct for booking; follow-up shots of Veronne hurrying, head down and face concealed in time-honored gangster fashion, from Criminal Courts Building to a taxi while his attorney expressed indignation over “excessive bail.”

Then a live shot to outside the Veronne mansion; quick interviews with guarded, reluctant neighbors: “I really never met the family. We all tend to stay pretty much to ourselves in this community.” A woman caught off guard: “A gangster? You’re kidding. I always thought he was a retired European film director. Now, where could I have gotten that?”

The live shot picked up on several nuns being hurried from a station wagon to the front door and then inside the mansion. Attempts were made to identify them: from what order? for what purpose?

Finally a young priest stepped outside the door and responded to the persistent questioning: “Look, gentlemen, Mr. Veronne has personally contributed millions of dollars, literally millions of dollars, to so many charities, I doubt if he could remember them all himself. Because of his charity, thousands of children with deforming diseases have been restored to a useful life. Elderly indigents have been guaranteed dignity and protection in several homes financed solely by Mr. Veronne. There are many, many people, in religious orders and outside of religious orders, who want to offer prayers on his behalf this night.”

The priest smiled, nodded, ignored questions and disappeared back inside the Veronne home.

“And so, Jim,” the newsman on the spot said, “we have the strange and conflicting picture of this man Alfredo Veronne. On the one hand, the vicious and feared crime lord, known for his brilliance and ruthlessness; on the other hand, philanthropist and benefactor to untold numbers of helpless. His family and friends and beneficiaries from religious orders all over the country arrive at his fortresslike home in Kensington, Great Neck, Long Island, to keep the watch through the night, as Alfredo Veronne prepares to face that final, ultimate judge, who will not accept the plea of the Fifth Amendment....”

I switched to another channel and caught another wrap-up of the career of Alfredo Veronne: an interview with Paul Sutro, who stated that in his estimation Veronne had one of the most brilliant, Machiavellian minds he’d ever encountered. That, given the opportunity and the education, in a different setting Veronne would have been able to move mountains or arbitrate the most complex international disagreements to the satisfaction of all concerned.

As Paul Sutro’s voice droned on, repeating almost verbatim what he had already told Tim Neary and me about Alfredo Veronne’s brilliant, problem-solving mind, I began to dig through pages and pages of reports, then remembered that I hadn’t typed up what I was looking for: it was still just a series of cryptic notes in one of my notebooks.

I read it over carefully.

Jamaica Hosp. 12/23/70; Dr. J.Lattimore-neuro-surg. R.Mogliano—contusions/abrasions; C.Mogliano—possible concussion; X-ray work-up; curious re condition—why girl cripple? why no past corr.surg. & therapy? Lattimore opin: girl should have had surg. 8–10 yrs. ago; too late now; patient transf. via priv. ambul.

What Dr. Lattimore had told me was that the young husband had been puzzled by his questions; had assumed the girl had been hopelessly crippled as a very young child. When Ray had approached Alfredo Veronne with questions about the lack of corrective treatment of the girl’s condition, Veronne had made it very clear that the matter was not open for discussion in any way. Lattimore’s educated guess, without any other information, was that Veronne had deliberately neglected therapy for the girl, possibly as a means to keep her close to him, dependent on him.

Before I left my apartment, I gave myself the onceover in the bathroom mirror: freshly shaved, clean-shirted, dark-suited and necktied, I looked as respectable and respectful as any other “family man” coming to pay my last visit to Alfredo Veronne.

I parked a couple of streets away from Veronne’s mansion. I didn’t want my Chevy to stand out among all the Continentals and Cadillacs and Mercedes.

Small quiet groups of people were being admitted as other small quiet groups were leaving the mansion. I just walked along, right past the uniformed private guards, the television and newspaper cameramen; just kept my head down sadly, stepped back politely so that the lady next to me could enter first. We were all ushered into the dimly lit marble reception hall. A tall slightly graying, beautifully tailored and well-tanned guy thanked us all for coming and shook each hand. Apparently he was one of Veronne’s sons; I heard someone call him by name, so that when he took my hand I just said, “Anthony, Anthony. Terrible, terrible.” He agreed with me and we both looked sad.

“After you’ve seen Papa,” Anthony told us, “please, join my sister and the others in the library for a moment or two.”

Through the open door of the library, I could see the back of the girl’s head and shoulders as she sat in her wheelchair. People were standing around her, bending to whisper, to kiss her cheek. At this point, I wasn’t sure what the hell was going on: was the old man still alive or was this the beginning of a wake?

Before I could ask anyone, our little group was escorted to Alfredo Veronne’s bedroom. The scene would have done justice to the last hours of a medieval lord of the realm. The massive, ornate bed was covered by a beautiful pearly-white satin cover, underneath which, in the smallest possible mound, propped up by four-foot-wide satin pillows, was Alfredo Veronne, very much alive. His scrawny arms, inside red satin pajama sleeves, were neatly placed outside the cover, and his swollen fingers moved restlessly, clutching and releasing the cover. All around the room, at respectful distances, were the heirs and inheritors of the still-breathing and alert
padrone.
I scanned the room quickly, but didn’t spot Lorenzo.

A young priest stood at the bedside and acted as a sort of go-between for the host and his guests, and one after the other the visitors bowed reverentially to kiss the slightly extended left hand offered them by Veronne. Finally there was no one behind me; my group had left; the next group hadn’t arrived. The priest nodded at me; he had a very glassy-eyed look and I wondered how long he’d been standing at Veronne’s bedside.

“He is conscious, isn’t he, Father?”

“Oh, yes. Indeed, yes. Won’t you approach Mr. Veronne now. There are so many others waiting to pay their respects.”

Veronne looked dead, but he was just resting his eyes. I grabbed his hand and squeezed and leaned close and spoke directly into his left ear.

“It’s Joe Peters, Veronne. You’re going to tell me, right now, about the killing of the Keeler kids.”

The small watery eyes snapped open; the loose mouth pulled back with a gasp. He tried to pull his hand from my grip, but I leaned in close again and said, very quietly, very directly, “Because if you don’t, the minute you’re dead, old man, I’m going to tell your daughter how you kept her a cripple all her life, just so you could keep her close to you. And I’ll get five doctors to back me up.”

Again, a gasp; again, an attempt to pull his hand from mine. The young priest smiled questioningly.

“Mr. Veronne just said he wants to talk privately to me,” I said. The priest kept smiling, but he was looking around for someone to intervene. He wasn’t used to making decisions like this on his own.

Veronne’s voice cracked through the carefully hushed, soft voices as another group of visitors approached the foot of his bed.

“Get out,” Veronne said sharply. With great effort, he waved an arm at his son, Anthony. “Get them out of here,” Veronne ordered. “Goddamn it, do what I tell you and take him with you. I got something to discuss. Get out, get out!”

In less than forty seconds, we were alone. “My daughter,” Veronne began in a croaking voice, “only the best for her, always, always. For her protection, to prevent her from suffering, to ...”

“I don’t give a goddamn why you kept your daughter a cripple, Veronne. Tell your reasons to your priest. All I’m telling you is this: we trade. Now. My silence for your talking. You tell me about that night or I’ll see to it your daughter spits on your grave.”

His hands leaped up, one on either side of his narrow body. It was an involuntary movement, spasmodic. He tried to shrug; he coughed, then passed his tongue dryly over his dry white lips. His head slipped to one side; his profile was that of a broken-down, decaying mummy.

“Kitty called you that night. Because she knew you’d help her.”

“Yes, yes.” He spoke into the pillow, but I could hear every whispered word. “It was an accident. Truly, an accident. She did not mean to hurt the child. The child was so fragile.”

“I know that. Go on. Talk.”

“And she gave the second child the sleeping pills to quiet him because he was so frightened, so hysterical. It was all a sad and terrible accident.”

“So you sent Lorenzo?”

He nodded; sighed. “I sent Lorenzo. It took me a long time to find him. He had been visiting in his brother’s home out on Long Island. That was my mistake, sending Lorenzo. He never ... trusted women. He trusted no one but me. All his life, he has been with me. Devoted, all his life to me.” Veronne jabbed a bony hand at his temple. “He is a simple man, Lorenzo. He has always done exactly,
exactly
what I tell him to do. When Kitty called, she said they were both dead, both of her boys. So I told Lorenzo to go, take the bodies, drop them somewhere nearby, maybe in a park. And to put a bullet into one of the kids’ heads, so it would look like a kidnap-murder.” Veronne coughed, a dry hacking scraping sound. He shook his head. “Kitty called me as soon as Lorenzo left. She was hysterical. She said that the second boy hadn’t been dead after all, from the sleeping pills. That when they were in the car, the child cried out. She tried to save him, to tell Lorenzo, ‘No, don’t shoot this child,’ but ... but Lorenzo, he pulled the child away from her. Because he would do what he had been told to do. Exactly,
exactly
what I had told him to do. There was nothing Kitty could do. Nothing. It was all so terrible, so sad, the whole thing, all a terrible, terrible accident.”

“So you told her to go to bed. To say nothing. Until you thought up a good story for her?”

“I told her to trust me. She could always trust me. Don’t you see how I felt? That it was my fault, my responsibility, the death of this second child. Because of Lorenzo, who all his life did only what I told him to do and nothing else. My poor Kitty, my beautiful, beautiful Kitty. What a tragedy.”

I stared at Veronne, and a strange idea began to form. This old, dried-up, dying and powerless man had not always been old and dried-up and powerless. Not too many years ago, he had been strong and healthy and dynamic: an ugly man whose known charm and courtly manners and attentions had made him attractive and sought after by women from many levels of society. My first thought in coming here was that Kitty had used what I was using: knowledge of his daughter’s condition. She could have gotten that from Ray Mogliano. But Veronne was smiling, whispering to himself: “My beautiful Kitty.”

Slowly, carefully, Veronne confirmed for me what I had all but figured out: he had told Kitty how to make use of George’s confession. It had been almost a game for him: so easy, so easy, he said. You make up a good story, you get witnesses to confirm what you say. Witnesses were easily come by.

“Billy Weaver was dead; in his whole life, he never done nothing good for nobody. Why not let him do a good deed for Kitty in his death?”

Benjamin the Cuban: “For money, for a good suit of clothes, a good pair of boots, Benjamin would swear to anything.”

And Mrs. Deluca?

There was a strange gagging sound working its way up Veronne’s throat; for a second, I thought he was dying, but he wasn’t. He was laughing.

“Ah, ah, Mary. She was always the tough one in her family, that Mary. Her husband, Salvatore, he handled the numbers. Penny-ante stuff, but he was loyal and a goodhearted slob, from the old days, you know? He could be trusted. But when he died,” Veronne tapped his chest, “bum ticker, ya know, but then, when he died, his wife took over. A clever woman; clever, clever. Could trust her with anything, anything.”

Danny Fitzmartin: Veronne’s thin lips turned down into a sneer. Every man had his price. In a year, two years, the pub would be his; free and clear.