A Few Drops of Blood (9 page)

It never failed to annoy Natalia the way the dons and
madrinas
added wings to their overstuffed mansions, gold toilets to their boudoirs and Ferraris to their car fleets, while Neapolitan monuments crumbled, and museums and cultural institutions cut staff and hours.

A black woman pulled out of the garage in a white Mercedes. She was a vision in pink: pink jacket, pink scarf, pink sunglasses. And a black chiffon blouse. A large topaz and a silver
cornetto
hung from a thick pink gold chain around her neck.

“The girlfriend?” Angelina said.

“Who knows? Doesn’t look like the African in the file pics.”

A young man opened the front door before they rang the bell.

“Paolo,” Natalia exclaimed, as they stepped into the white marble foyer. “My God.”

The once slim boy was beefed up, heavily muscled.

“Natalia! Natalia Monte,” he said.

“Paolo.” She took his hand.

“It must be twenty years, easy. You haven’t changed.”

“Oh, Paolo. Tell me you’re not working for him?”

“Yeah … well. How’s Mariel?”

“Still beautiful. In fact, your name came up the other day.”

“Don’t bullshit me.”

“No, really. But Paolo, you hated this … business. What happened?”

“Kids happened. Unemployment happened.”

“Paolo.”

“What? I should have swept streets like your father? Hawked newspapers like my old man when his leather shop failed? Christ—a news
boy
at sixty? I wasn’t smart like
you. No scholarships here. No wealthy parents to pick up the tab like Mariel’s.”

Natalia said nothing.

“He’s out back by the pool. You’ll have to walk around.

He doesn’t like uninvited visitors.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Be careful … Captain. He’s already pissed.”

“We’ll try not to spoil his afternoon.”

“The path is there.” Paolo stepped back into the entry and resumed his post.

A few things Natalia knew about Scavullo: He was a sun worshipper, had a thing for gold jewelry and worked out religiously to maintain his boyish figure. Not only that, he obsessed over every bite of food, every sip of drink that went into his mouth. The obsession with his physique might have had to do with the fact he’d been fat as a child. Rumor had it he’d taken care of more than one boy who’d teased him back when they were kids.

Angelina and Natalia circled the huge house. Sprinklers worked their arc over a perfectly manicured lawn. There was a terra cotta deck near the back of the house, but the white leather banquettes were devoid of occupants.

They found the don face up on a black massage table beside a sapphire infinity pool. Several gold chains looped around his neck, glinting among his chest hair. A gold snake with sapphire eyes stared at them from his enormous wrist. An open yellow terry cloth jacket revealed taut stomach muscles.

He reminded Natalia of a photo she’d seen in one of the beefcake magazines Lola kept on her night table. But that porno actor had not posed with an intravenous line stuck into his arm. It dripped clear liquid into his veins from sealed plastic bags hung on a stainless steel rack.

Beside him: a glass-topped table with a cell phone, a small arrangement of miniature white roses and his morning protein shake in a yellow tumbler alongside a glass of orange juice, freshly squeezed.

A gorgeous black woman in shorts and a turquoise halter occupied the recliner beside him. He whispered something to her as Natalia and Angelina circled the pool and approached. The woman rose and strutted toward the house. A duo in matching bikinis rose from the other side of the pool and walked toward the sliding glass doors of a fully equipped gymnasium. Natalia wondered if they were twins.

A bird eyed them quizzically from its perch.

He took a sip of the chilled juice. “You’re interrupting.”

“Looks important,” Natalia said.

“I never liked a smart-ass.” He looked her over. “Maybe you should take a page from my book.”

“You know what a
lupara
is?” Natalia asked.

“A shotgun, yeah. How could I not?”

“Have you operated one recently?”

“No, why?”

“We have in our possession a small, antique
lupara
likely used in a double murder, and it has your fingerprints on it.”

“Those faggots on the front page the other morning?”

“Those two men,” Natalia said, “yes.”

“I don’t know anything about those bum-fuckers—alive or dead.”

“Your mother, Renata Scavullo, attended the funeral.”

“Well, bravo for her. Go ask her if she gunned them down. Why are you wasting my time?”

Angelina said, “We think this shotgun with your print is the weapon used in the crime.”

“Do you own a
lupara
?” Natalia demanded.

“Several but mine are in the country in a glass case.”

“May we see yours?”

“I told you. They’re not here. They’re there.”

“Where is there?”

“You can see them when I’m ordered to produce them.”

“We’ll get an order for you.”

“Do what you gotta, Natalia Monte. Waste of time—your job, you know? You came up in the neighborhood. Could have done better.”

“Right. You think you should be running the place instead?”

“We’ll do a better job when we get a few more senators elected.”

Natalia informed him they were not done with him. He started to answer when his cell phone buzzed.

Scavullo didn’t greet the caller by name. “Yeah. A couple of bitches … about the faggot thing.”

Natalia and her partner exchanged glances.

“Let’s get out of here,” Natalia whispered.

Arrogant bastard, Natalia thought as she and her partner walked away. Far enough away not to be seen but close enough to follow Ernesto’s conversation, they paused.

“Yeah. Listen. I might need you to drive a van someplace. A thousand euros—you interested? No. You come here. Noon? I’ll have my cook fix us something. You like chicken? I’m not eating much red meat. Pasta either. Gotta lose ten more.”

There was a pause.

“Yeah, I heard,” Scavullo chuckled. “It doesn’t work that way. I think we need to have a meeting over this. Tomorrow night? Yeah. I told him. I warned ’em. He starts screaming and yelling, and we’re gonna have to teach ’em one last time.”

Quietly they retraced their steps back to the street.

Natalia could see Paolo watching them from a window at the front of the mansion.

“Nasty,” Angelina said, exhaling loudly as they walked
through the massive iron gates and returned to the street. “I’ve dealt with lowlifes in Palermo, but this man gives me the creeps. Like he’d do his
nonna
and party after. And what’s up with that place? Looks like a harem.”

They moved down the block. “So what’s his story?” Angelina said, walking toward the hill tram.

“Ernesto Scavullo. Mean as they come. Left school to work on the docks when he was twelve. Even though his father ran the waterfront, he expected his son to prove himself. Young Scavullo unloaded refrigerators stuffed with heroin, crated up counterfeit handbags, hid guns in cargo shipments. Ernesto worked hard and kept his eyes open. His father got busted because his son had left a tainted revolver in the glove compartment of his car when he lent it to dad. An ordinary traffic stop bagged Scavullo senior and the murder attempt perpetrated with the weapon. He stood mute and got sentenced to fifteen years. Mama Scavullo took over her husband’s criminal enterprises, and young Ernesto’s apprenticeship accelerated. Her husband gets out soon.”

“Ernesto looked tough,” Angelina said.

“He is. At thirteen he slit the throat of a stevedore. Said he didn’t like the way the guy addressed him, said it was disrespectful. When he was eighteen, Mama set him up in an air-conditioned office on Via Chiaia, where he coordinated shipments of heroin from Africa, Turkey and the Middle East. No more dirt under his fingernails but plenty of blood, certainly. When his father was halfway through his sentence, Ernesto took control of the clan. Six years later he’s built this. He has a villa outside Naples, too. That’s where the guns live.”

“A search doesn’t require permission in the case of murder, drugs or suspected Camorra crimes,” Angelina said.

“True. But I don’t hold out much hope when it comes to the shotgun we recovered. There’s no bullet when you fire a shotgun, just pellets. There are no striations to identify the weapon that fired them, as I’m sure Ernesto Scavullo knows. Which makes the fingerprint just a fingerprint—nothing to connect it to the crime. It’s not like we found the weapon at the scene.”

“You make it sound like he left his print on the weapon on purpose.”

“Very probably.”

“Why would he do that?” Angelina said.

“Why? Because he wants it known he did it and is capable of doing even worse.”

“What if we could listen in on a phone call or two?” Angelina asked as they walked.

“We have. But the bastard’s clever. Talks in code. Changes phones constantly. Last time we tried a tap, the press was making a big deal about protecting people’s privacy.
We
have to protect that scum’s privacy?”

“Right,” Angelina said. “In Palermo we usually worked around it.”

“Here, too.”

There had to be strong evidence that someone had committed a serious crime before permission for a tap was acquired from the magistrate. Officially if there was no authorization, any evidence gathered as a result of the tap would not be admissible in court. But often the rules were bypassed, and it was common knowledge the magistrate postdated authorization documents if necessary.

“Our stations have techies who can install listening devices, with or without authorization. But it’s dangerous as hell,” Natalia said. “They’re more of a threat to the gangsters than a
pentito
, a snitch. Last year one of our techs was
enjoying a Sunday outing with his wife at San Martino monastery. It’s on top of the hill. A woman approached and asked him to take a photo of her. Thirty-five or forty, good-looking, wearing jeans with a rhinestone patch and a black T-shirt. She held up her Blackberry, asking if he would mind, and stepped back. The techie pressed the button. A bullet slammed into his brain, and she sauntered away into the crowd.”

“Yeah,” Angelina said. “Sounds too familiar.”

After dealing with Scavullo, the streets of the fancy neighborhood seemed genteel. Women in tasteful dresses carried shopping bags with upscale designers’ names emblazoned on them. A man with grey, tufted hair who, despite the heat, had a blue cashmere sweater draped around his neck, sniffed a pot of yellow fresia in a terracotta pot outside a tile shop. His russet fluff of a dog pranced toward the officers, pulling on its leash.

“Leonardo!” he called. “Sorry, ladies. He’s such a flirt.”

“So adorable!” Angelina crouched down and started talking baby talk to the dog.

Another one, Natalia thought. Was she the only one exempt from the charm of these miniature beings? Oh, well. She smiled at the man over her partner’s body. No need to advertise herself as a misanthrope.

“He’s the prince of the house,” the man said. An aristocrat, his face plump and florid, nails manicured.

Angelina stood as the dog tugged him forward. “Sorry. Puppies are my weakness.”

“That’s okay. There are worse things.”

They stopped to sit on a bench in the park that surrounded the grand
palazzo
.

“Water?” Angelina held out a bottle.

“You are prepared,” Natalia said.

“You work in Palermo … let’s just say the hottest day in Naples is spring compared to there.”

People lounged on benches under the thick shade of trees. Children ran around on the grass. Natalia took a drink from the water bottle as a young man passed, his arms around two girls. He was muscled, a ring of tattoos on his biceps.

“If I ever found out another man had fucked my wife, I’d kill him,” he said. One of the girls laughed.

Angelina raised an eyebrow. “He thinks it’s so easy.”

They bypassed the office, got their unmarked car from the tiny lot and drove to the tabloid. It had offices in the financial district located in the eastern part of town. It was a neighborhood without a soul. Carpet bombing during the war had flattened its original architecture and inspired the Camorra to embark upon the lucrative building trades from excavating foundations to pouring concrete and the final wiring of high-rises. Normally Natalia avoided the area.

Large
For Rent
banners appeared on many of the buildings. Some looked like they’d hung there for years. Large businesses had run out their leases and left, clearing the way for accountants and dentists and other lone practitioners. Natalia and Angelina were waved through the lobby’s security by a guard sucking on his soft drink, engrossed in a graphic novel. They got on the first elevator and pushed the button for the tenth floor. It shot them up ten stories in seconds.

The doors opened on a slight man draped with cameras: two 35-millimeter digital Nikons and a beautiful old Leica. “Captain,” he said.

“Luca!” Natalia exclaimed and reached out to touch the ancient Leica. “You’re shooting actual film?”

“Somebody’s gotta,” he laughed, then pinched his fingertips together in front of his face.

“You take those shots of the two murder victims astride the horse sculpture?”

“I wish,” Luca sighed. “I’d be in Majorca on the beach right now.” He stepped past them into the elevator, hand raised in a wave as the doors closed.

Rivelare
’s offices were even more institutional than the Carabinieri station’s at Via Casanova. Dropped ceilings made of flimsy insulation tiles that may once have been white. Fluorescent overhead lights that bathed everything in a vaguely green tinge that went well with the brown industrial carpeting and tan cubicles spread out in all directions.

Young reporters in the work stations scrolled their Blackberries and talked on phones, feet up on desks next to their computer screens. Some tapped away at laptops, others stared into their monitors as if hypnotized.

A secretary appeared to lead them to the managing editor’s glassed-in window office at the end of an aisle. Natalia flashed her ID, but he had already recognized her. “Should I call my lawyer?” he joked as he ushered them in.