Shallow Graves - Jeremiah Healy (11 page)

This time Danucci stared at me. That cold, dead-eyed
stare Tom Berenger captured so well in Platoon. "Fucking A. That
rain starts, you couldn't hear nothing moving, nothing. It started to
rain, didn't matter I wasn't pulling guard duty, I couldn't sleep."

The palm went through the hair again. "Like
now."

I knew he wasn't referring to the weather.

Danucci emptied his glass, then brought it down hard
on the bar. "Tina was my daughter, Cuddy. We had our problems,
she was always more her mother's daughter than her father's, but that
happens, right?"

He didn't seem to need my answer.

"Girl hits a certain age, she's got to rebel.
Okay, fine. She goes off on her own. Fuck, we did the same thing when
we were eighteen, right? Only I made sure she was safe, get me?
Primo, he checked out the modeling agency. No porno, no kinky shit.
She flopped at my brother's apartment a while, then into a family
building, my cousin Ooch there in the basement. Guy was a tiger in
the ring, Cuddy. One fight he had, undercard in the early sixties, he
takes enough punches the first two rounds to kill a horse, then
knocks the guy out middle of the third. Know what I do now?"

I didn't like Danucci being so erratic, jumping from
one topic to the next. I'd seen grief like that in Vietnam, the kind
of strobe-light emotion that turned into violence. Easily. The cold
stare. "I said, know what I do now?"

"No, I don't."

"I build strip malls. Not strip joints. The
little eight- or ten-store things, with maybe an anchor like a
supermarket or a discount house one end. Lay down an apron of
asphalt, paint some white lines, you got yourself the American Dream.
One-stop shopping. All the guys ten years ago put up the highrise
office buildings, they're in bankruptcy court now, twenty guys' hands
in their pockets. Me, I never had a mall go bad. Never, not one. Hard
times, they might not make me a fortune, but every week, every year,
people got to buy food and clothes, Cuddy, and they stop at my malls
to do it."

For something to do, I drank a little beer.

"That's where I am, I get the call. I'm in a
meeting, we just came back from the site, a new one down near Philly.
It was a tough deal to put together, and I was doing it, getting it
through this guy's skull that it's going forward, no matter what he
thinks. I'm in this meeting, I still have my hard hat with me, and
this guy's secretary comes in and he fucking near bites her head off.
She's probably been there three hours on her own time by then, but
she looks kind of sick and says to me, 'Mr. Danucci, it's your
brother on the phone.' And so I say, 'I'll call him back,' and the
guy starts to chew out his secretary some more, and she says, ‘I
think it's very important.' I got to remember that girl, she stood up
without letting on. Doing her job. I tell the guy who's ragging her
to shut the fuck up, I can take the call. So here I am, in this
conference room with a view of some dirty river they got down there,
and my brother Vinnie tells me over the telephone that my Tina is
dead."

Danucci squeezed his eyes shut. He reached over the
bar, grabbed the Scotch bottle itself and just slugged from it until
I thought he'd drown. Then he kept hold of the bottle by its neck and
coughed once.

"I took that hard hat, Cuddy, and I tried to
throw it through the window. The glass didn't give, so I tried it
with the phone. Then the guy I'm with figures he's next, he don't get
me a seat on the first plane."

Danucci drew a breath, the hard, roaring kind he'd
taken earlier. "You were a cop, right?"

"Just in the Army."

"Same difference. You know what the cops in
Boston think about this?"

I pictured Holt, smugly feeding me little chunks like
a seal. Keeping me from seeing the tile and the name "Danucci"
appearing somewhere in it, maybe all over it.

Joseph Danucci said, "They think, 'What do you
know, there is a fucking God.' They think, 'We been trying to crucify
Tommy the Temper for sixty fucking years for twenty different
rackets, and we couldn't, and now his granddaughter's a corpse, and
we don't got to do shit about it.' "

This wasn't the time to bait him.

Danucci said, "They think it's like 'poetic
justice', Cuddy. The capo's grand-kid gets strangled by some fucking
junkie cat burglar."

He took another drink, less now that the level in the
bottle was lower. Subconsciously, he seemed to want it to last,
though.

I bet myself there was a case of it in a closet
somewhere nearby.

Danucci gestured toward the door. "Primo says
you're working for some insurance outfit?"

"I'm private. The modeling agency your daughter
worked with took out a policy on her to protect themselves. The
company asked me to look into things."

Danucci's nostrils flared. "Oh, you're gonna
look into things, all right."

He took a step toward me. Pretty steady for the booze
he'd put away. I didn't get up.

"You're gonna find out who aced my daughter,
pal."

I didn't say anything.

Another step. "And when you do, you're going to
tell me. You're going to fill out whatever fucking forms the company
makes you do, and you're going to shrug your fucking shoulders when
the cops come around asking questions."

A third step. "But you're going to tell me who
aced my Tina."

I said, "No."

Danucci telegraphed the swing of the bottle by a full
second. I was up and blocking the sweep of his right arm with my
left, the bottle flying and smacking into a leather chair before it
boloed to a stop, some Scotch gurgling onto the leather cushion.

Danucci's breathing was almost deafening. "You .
. .You . . ."

Then he turned away, starting for the bar before
sinking into a chair without a bottle on it. He rubbed his face with
his hands, then clasped them in front of him, a soldier assuming an
unfamiliar stance in a chapel. "Should have been the happiest
day of my life, Cuddy. I talked to my father that morning. The Order
of the Cross, like a Holy Name Society thing, it was making him
president or whatever. All his life, Pop wanted that. To have some
kind of . . . recognition besides the rackets. The next night,
Claudette and me were going in town, have dinner with Tina for her
birthday, stay over at the South End house. My brother — Virmie? —
he did such a good job representing my company, they made him a
partner at this old-line law firm in Boston wouldn't have let him
take out the garbage twenty years ago. The business was going good,
like the deal in Philly coming together. It was like everything was
coming together. Sinatra in the song, 'a very good year,' you know?
Then that phone call, looking at the filthy river from this guy's
office .... "

I went over to the chair with the Johnny Walker
Black, picking up the bottle and setting it on the counter of the
bar. Behind me, Danucci said, "Our ways, they don't work so good
for this kind of thing, Cuddy. Somebody gets hit, you can usually
trace it back up the line, iigure out who ordered the contract.
Something like this, this . . . random kind of thing, we got feelers
out on the street. But they should have turned something by now, and
they haven't given us shit."

I said, "I'm not going to give you a name so you
can kill the guy."

Danucci looked up at me now, the dead-eyed stare, his
tugged-down tie the only part of him moving. "What, you think,
you give the name to the cops and they lock him up, he's some kind of
safe from us?"

"I might not get that far. My job is to be sure
the people at the agency didn't have her killed to collect on the
policy. I decide they didn't, I can stop."

Danucci thought about that. "We pay you to keep
going."

"No."

"You see
The Godfather
?"

"Yes."

"That Coppola, he got a lot of it right. Not
everything, but a lot. We pay you with your life."

An offer I couldn't refuse. "I already have my
life."

"Not if I decide otherwise."

"You decide otherwise, send two of your best.
They don't come back when you expect them, don't call anybody, don't
even pack. Just run for your life."

Danucci grinned, the big jaw jutting. Not a pretty
sight. "You don't scare, huh?"

"I scare. I just don't change my mind."

Danucci sat there, maybe thinking what he was going
to say next, maybe deciding which two of his best he was going to
send. Maybe just remembering his daughter.

Finally, he said, "You find out who killed Tina,
you tell the cops?"

"Probably."

"Then we can compromise here. You don't got to
tell me the guy's name, but you stay on the thing till you find the
cocksucker who done this. Then you give him up to the cops. We'll
take it from there."

"And if I don't stay on the case?"

The grin again. "Life is sweet, Cuddy. Do
yourself a favor, taste it a little longer."

When I didn't say anything more, Danucci said, "Okay,
we got a deal, and you got our cooperation. One hundred percent.
Anything you need, Primo'll be right there."

"
I work alone."

"Fine. You need something, you give him a call."

Danucci seemed calm, almost rational. I tried to
figure how much of what I'd seen with the bottle was an act. I
thought, not much. He just went in and out like that. At least over
his daughter's murder.

"I don't expect to be calling him."

Danucci went to the desk and used a pen to scribble
some lines on a business card. Standing tall, his hair was about
level with my chin. "This is Primo's apartment number, best way
to reach him. This one's my home number here, you need it."

I took the card.

"You want to see the place in the South End?"

"It would help."

"I'll call Ooch right now."

"It won't be tonight."

"Fine. Whenever. What else you need?"

"I'd like to talk with your wife and your
brother."

"Claudette and Vinnie? Why?"

"They knew your daughter. I didn't."

"You think it'll help, okay. When?"

"Now would be good."

Joseph Danucci nodded once, the developer who could
be decisive. "You got it."
 
 

-9-

SHE WAS DEFINITELY THE TALLEST VIETNAMESE WOMAN I HAD
EVER SEEN.

At least five and a half feet in just slippers like a
ballerina, Joseph Danucci's wife must have seemed a giant in her home
country. She came into the den haltingly, taking a step before
returning to the door and closing it, as though she were the guest in
my home and wanted to make a good impression. She stopped a body
length away from me. "I am Claudette Danucci. My husband say I
speak with you."

The good eye wandered a little over me, the glass eye
steady, its lid coming down only halfway as she blinked.

"Again, Mrs. Danucci, I'm sorry about your
daughter."

A brief nod. "You will drink?"

I'd pitched the beer. "No. Thank you."

"You will sit?"

I took the unstained chair. Danucci lowered herself
into the couch as though a glass of water were balanced on her head.
If Mau Tim had half her mother's grace, I could understand her
success as anything, model included.

"Mrs. Danucci, I'm investigating the death of
your daughter for an insurance company."

Another brief nod.

"It would help me if you could tell me something
about her."

She waited a moment. "I could tell you many
things about her. I could tell you her first word to me when she is
one year. I could tell you how many time I brush her hair when she is
five year. I could tell you how there is a knife in my heart because
I must think of these things to tell you them."

I dropped my head.

Her voice changed. "I am ashame, Mr. Cuddy."

I looked back up at Claudette Danucci. A large tear
glided down along her nose from the good eye, nothing from the glass
one.

"I am ashame because I embarrass the man my
husband tell me will find the killer of my child."

"Mrs. Danucci, you have every right to be
upset."

She turned her face, both eyes fixing on me. "You
were in Vietnam?"

"Yes."

"In Vietnam, the life of a woman is her
children. I can have one child only, and now she is take from me."

I decided to go with her. "You met your husband
in Vietnam?"

"Yes. I was . . . You know what ‘tea girl'
mean?"

"
I do." It was slang for a bar girl who got
Gls to buy her drinks, usually iced tea masquerading as liquor.

"
When my husband meet me, I am tea girl. Do you
know why I am tea girl?"

"Mrs. Danucci, you don't — "