St. Albans Fire (21 page)

“Calm down,” she said quietly. “We’re going into that house.”

She worked him backward out of the car and handed him over to Willy, who switched to an armlock as Lil dug the building’s keys out of her pants pocket. Joe killed the engine unhappily and joined the three of them on the front stoop. Even given the success of Lil’s plan so far, he hated being a part of this.

Massi was simply repeating in a small, plaintive voice, “Oh, please, oh, please.”

Lil opened the door and ushered them into a small, dusty hallway, lit only by what moonlight managed to seep through the dirty windows alongside the front entrance. She led the way into a side room and backed off, her job done. This was Joe and Willy’s interrogation. It was time to become merely the escort.

In the filtered half-gloom, Willy steered Massi into the room’s middle and hooked an upright chair with his foot and dragged it over.

He sat Massi down hard in it and stepped back so their quarry could see all three of them standing before him, their faces shrouded in darkness but their body language clear.

Massi was weeping by now, his alcohol-and-drug-racked mind succumbing to the terror of finally being on the receiving end of the kind of interview he’d only nervously witnessed before. His brain filled with the pleas and screams and crying of those memories, he fell from the chair onto his knees and held his clasped hands out to Willy in supplication. “Just tell me what you want. I’ll tell you everything. I swear I will.”

Joe watched him with his throat dry. He’d seen such scenes before, in combat long ago, when military officers applied whatever they deemed necessary to get what they were after. Of course, none of that would happen tonight. Even having lost the argument, he was in fact running this interrogation and was thus guaranteed that all of Massi’s terror would be entirely self-induced. Nevertheless, it was unsettling not only to see this pathetic man’s disintegration but to realize how it stimulated in Joe an unwelcome, unpleasant, but undeniable adrenaline rush. As a far younger man, he’d been more like Willy Kunkle than he liked to admit, and had put people through the wringer simply because he didn’t have the patience to pursue the truth less violently.

For a moment, wrestling with all this, it was all he could do not to leave the room. Instead, he chose to get the whole thing over with as quickly as possible, hoping some rationalization would help later on.

Feeling like a hypocrite, he stepped forward, crouched down, and took Massi’s hands between his own, in a grotesque parody of a priest receiving confession.

“Look at me, Santo,” he said in a quiet voice.

Massi was still switching his attention from Willy to Lil, both of them now standing back to either side of Joe, looking as if they were but one command away from unleashing holy mayhem.

“Look at me,” Joe repeated.

Massi’s eyes briefly settled on Joe’s face.

“You had contact with John Gregory recently. Tell me about that.”

A small crease appeared between Massi’s eyebrows. “Johnny? I haven’t talked to him in years.”

Joe hesitated. Not only had they assumed Santo Massi to have been the most reasonable conduit between John Gregory and Gino Famolare, but he’d all but admitted to seeing Gregory earlier.

Joe tried a more oblique approach, gently releasing Massi’s hands and using his voice to cut through the man’s terror. “But you know what Johnny’s been up to.”

Massi’s expression opened up hopefully. “I know he called Dante for advice.”

Joe relaxed a bit. “Dante Lagasso?”

“Yeah, yeah. Lagasso. I was in the room when Dante told Tito about how Johnny called him up a few weeks ago.”

“What was Johnny after?”

“A torch. Dante finally gave him Gino Famolare, after everybody’d agreed to terms.” Massi was speaking fast, his eyes eager to please.

“And what were those?” Joe asked, feeling the relief that accompanied a long-sought-after reward.

“Forty grand total, with twenty percent going to Dante for making the connection.”

“Isn’t that high?”

“Yeah, but it was an out-of-town job, in unfamiliar territory. It was like an eight-grand surcharge.”

Joe leaned forward on the balls of his feet, getting his face as close as possible to Massi’s and cutting off the latter’s view of the two others. Massi stared into Joe’s eyes, as riveted as if he’d been hypnotized by a snake charmer.

“Was there any explanation,” Joe asked, almost whispering, “why Johnny wanted a torch?”

But here Santo Massi proved a disappointment. “Money?” he asked hopefully.

Joe persisted. “Good guess. How many fires was this contract supposed to cover?”

Massi was clearly confused. “One… I guess. I mean, forty Gs is fat for one, like I said, but it’s cheap if you got more, and Gino isn’t cheap.”

“Do you recall the date of this conversation?”

“Are you kidding?”

Joe let that pass. “Did you meet with, or do you even know, Famolare?”

“No, but he’s kind of famous, if you’re into that kind of thing.”

“Do you know if he was paid for the job?”

“Yeah. But later, I heard Tito say somebody died in it. Tito said Gino would probably be pissed when he heard that, ’cause he’s such a perfectionist.”

“Tito is connected to Gino in some way?”

“He knows him, is all. Tito’s kind of like Dante’s secretary, not that I’d say that to his face.”

“Do you know Tito’s full name?”

Massi looked at him blankly. “No. It’s Tito.”

Joe stood back up and glanced over at Lil and Willy. “I think we’re done here.”

Without comment, they both left the room to return to the car.

Massi stared up at Joe with his eyes wide and pleading again. “What’re you going to do?”

“What we said we were,” Joe answered him, reaching into his pocket and extracting his wallet. “Pay you off and thank you for your time.”

He handed Massi a hundred-dollar bill, more by far than he normally would have paid—a surcharge to assuage his own guilt.

Massi held the money as if he might be asked to read aloud from it. “That’s it?”

Joe had already moved to the door, and now turned back. “What do you mean?”

“You’re not gonna kill me?”

Joe scowled at him, irritated at what the man’s life choices had forced Joe to do to him. “That what you want?”

Massi held up both hands, still holding the bill. “No, no. I’m sorry.”

You are that, Joe thought, wondering if he should even react. Finally, he couldn’t resist. “The way I see it, you’ll kill yourself fast enough anyway.”

Massi nodded. “Yes, sir. Sure will.” After a pause, during which Joe just stared at him, Massi added, “How’m I gonna get home?”

Joe nodded toward the hundred-dollar bill, as disappointed in himself as disgusted at Massi. “Take a cab.”

WITH THE OVER-SIZED DESK HIDING
most of his body, Ben Silva’s head floated just above the wooden sign labeled “Director” perched on the table’s edge, at least from Joe’s slouched and bleary perspective. It made him think of the Wizard of Oz, which in turn reminded him of how little sleep he’d just had. He tried to concentrate on the conversation.

“From Lil’s report,” Silva was saying, “it looks like we have enough probable cause to rub Gino’s hair the wrong way. At least, we can access his trucking company’s logs and find out if and where he was driving on the days those fires broke out. It’s a limited search—I doubt a judge would give us more leeway than that, based on what we’ve got—but it’s a start. Plus,” he added with a tired smile, “it’ll let him know we’re looking at him.”

“He’s gotta know that by now,” Lil told her boss. “The Vermonters staked out his house and followed him to his girlfriend’s love nest Down Neck. If everybody on his block hasn’t already called him by now, I’d be very disappointed in the Brotherhood.”

Silva raised his eyebrows questioningly at Joe and Willy.

“You didn’t know about her before we did your job for you,” Willy said in his usual diplomatic mode.

“Peggy DeAngelis,” Lil intoned, reading from a sheet of paper and covering any potential awkward silences. “Aged twenty-two, a couple of years of community college, does temp work typing and some modeling. Father is Augustin DeAngelis. He works on the docks, is definitely connected, did some time years ago for extortion and assault, but has been clean ever since. Peggy’s digs are worth about four hundred grand, and they’re owned by a holding company I didn’t have the time or energy to try tracing. Suffice it to say that she is showing no financial distress.”

Lil folded the paper and looked over at Willy, adding, “And no, it doesn’t look like her name appears in any of our or anyone else’s files.”

“Well, there you have it,” Silva said brightly. “We owe you one, Agent Kunkle.”

Willy didn’t do well with this sort of reverse psychology. “Whatever,” he growled.

“I should warn you both, though,” Silva went on, “that the truck logs probably won’t do us much good. That particular company is Mobbed up enough that whatever we find will be whatever they want us to.”

“Then what’s the point?” Willy asked.

“Mostly to apply heat,” was the answer. “It’s cat-and-mouse. We get ’em when we can, but otherwise, we mostly pressure them in the hopes they’ll either quit or make a mistake. Also, just as you did in finding Santo Massi, every once in a while, you fall over someone who’ll actually tell you a few things.”

“Like the girl,” Joe said softly.

There was a momentary stillness in the room. Silva smiled. “You want to talk to the girl?”

“Why not?” Joe asked. “Seems like she would be the ultimate pressure point for Gino, at least. She may also tell us something. But talking to her would show him we know what’s up. That screws him up professionally and personally. Especially,” he added with a slight smile, “when we interview his wife and kid afterward.”

Silva laughed. “Ouch—hardball.” He nodded toward Lil. “Okay. Set it up.”

· · ·

Tito Malossini came up behind Santo Massi with a stealth belying his enormous bulk. Santo was at the bar, as usual, at one of the city’s dozens of so-called social clubs, where only certain people were welcome.

Tito slipped a large hand onto Santo’s shoulder and held it there purposefully.

“Hey,” he said in greeting.

Santo looked up nervously, spilling some of the drink he had halfway to his mouth. “Hey, Tito. How’s things?”

“Good.” Tito’s voice was flat and uncompromising. “Come on back.” He tugged at Santo slightly in encouragement.

“Now? I haven’t finished my drink.”

Tito merely looked at him.

“Right,” Santo conceded, replacing the glass on the bar. He slid off his stool and accompanied the big man through the large, plain, undecorated room to a narrow door in the middle of the back wall. There were only about four men in the place, and none of them so much as glanced in their direction.

Tito opened the door and stood aside.

Feeling much as he had the night before, when that car door had opened up and its dark interior exerted its force on him, Santo followed the invitation with dread. He hadn’t really figured out who those three were last night.

This man, on the other hand, he knew.

“Does Dante want to see me?” he asked hopefully, crossing the threshold.

The answer was flat and curt. “No.” Tito gave him a little shove before following him into the dark room.

· · ·

Joe Gunther was old enough by now that his concept of female beauty had shifted away from the universal norm. To him, the youthful denizens of catalogs, magazines, mall displays, and TV shows had all become a little surreal, as if the majority of them—at least from a distance—ran the gamut from animated mannequins to overendowed, asexual children. Beautiful young women weren’t something he encountered very often, in any case, and the women he did see regularly, like Gail and Sammie Martens, were too practical, business-minded, and lacking in vanity to qualify as models. Also, he’d come to cherish the lines he saw in those faces and the experience he could see in their eyes.

All of which made meeting Peggy DeAngelis with Willy and Lil in tow a shock, in spite of his having once seen her from a distance. When she opened the front door to his knock and stood three feet away from them, he felt rooted in place, his mouth half open in greeting but speechless.

“Yes?” she asked them.

“We’re the police,” Willy said, his voice tense. “We need to talk to you.”

Joe cut him a glance, having seen this kind of reaction before. Whether it was his deformity, bad luck as a teenager, or simply his usual orneriness, Willy had his own way of responding to aesthetic wonders.

Real concern furrowed DeAngelis’s forehead. “What happened? Is everything all right? Is it Gino?”

“Oh, it’s Gino, all right,” Willy said bluntly, “but not the way you think.”

He stepped up onto the threshold, forcing her to either yield or get pushed back. Still smiling politely but looking worried, she yielded. Willy led the way into the front hall.

“Gino’s fine, Miss DeAngelis,” Joe said quickly. “We just need to ask you a few questions.”

Peggy was by now looking thoroughly confused. “I don’t understand.”

Now acting eccentrically even for him, Willy was almost bristling. “We’ll use simple language,” he said caustically.

Joe shook his head wearily. He touched Peggy’s shoulder lightly to reassure her. “Don’t mind him. Bad day. It is true, though, that Gino’s gotten himself into some legal trouble. We do need to talk.”

Her fingers hovered at her mouth. The gesture somehow made her look almost coltish. “I don’t know,” she said doubtfully.

“Could go harder for him if you don’t talk to us,” Willy said.

“But I don’t
know
anything,” she protested. “What do you think he’s done?”

Willy’s response was rich with an overstated puritanical resentment. “He’s screwing around with you, for starters.”

Her mouth dropped open as Joe finally swung around to face him from inches away, his expression grim. Willy muttered, “Okay, okay, fine,” before Joe could say a word, and went to stand behind Lil.