The Dog Killer of Utica (21 page)

“He did.”

“How?”

“Somehow.”

“ ‘Somehow’ is where maybe Tino Mendoza comes in—you know Tino? I think you’d like him. An obsessive like your man Melville. Tino is a mess. Pretty much sleepless since Tuesday when he caught the Barbone murder. He goes back through a year and a half of Freddy’s credit card receipts and sees that you, ‘Mr. Johnnie Walker,’ he says, purchased a bottle of Campari last October. He thinks this is strange because you’re strictly a Johnnie Walker man, the receipts make that clear, two bottles per week. Sometimes three or four a week. He sees that Coca is a Campari man exclusively. He can’t recall that many Campari buyers in the receipts, so he goes through them all again. Tino is relentless. You just once, Coca frequently, and only four others—that’s it. Two are octogenarian women, who he eliminates as persons of interest. The other two are dead. He’s intrigued that you bought Campari out of the blue, he says, and Don, who can’t abide him—who never, by the way, shared the ballistics with Tino that link Barbone with the dog killing in Troy—which is wrong, I told Don, a professional scandal, I told him—Don says fuck that glory hound Mendoza, Catherine, I’ll solve the Barbone case too—Don says to Tino, Why is this Campari crap important? What’s your so-called point? Tino says back to him, You only know the point when you’re almost at the point of an arrest. Until then, he says to Don, almost everything is pointless. I have nothing, he says, except those Campari receipts plus the fact that whoever did it was a known customer or Freddy doesn’t open the door after closing. Conte and Coca are known customers, he says. I’m just reaching in the dark, he says, so I got in touch with Coca’s wife.”

“Denise.”

“ ‘Because,’ Tino says, ‘no use talking to Coca, he’s totally mental.’ Do you know what Denise tells him? That just after Michael was released from the psychiatric ward last February, the first thing he says to her as she drives him home, which convinced her that he was not right yet, was that someone had tampered with his Campari and this someone was none other than you. He told her you drugged him. So she asks him, ‘Why do you think Eliot would do such a terrible thing?’ He told her that Freddy Barbone said that he, Michael, and you, Mr. Johnnie Walker Black himself, were now, in Freddy’s words, ‘both girlie men because you bought a bottle of Campari.’ Now, of course, she thought he was nuts and Tino has no idea,
at this time
, he emphasizes, what the Campari connection really means, but he knows it has a meaning along with the fact of the broken Johnnie Walker bottle near Barbone’s body, and he intends to question you, he says. Don told me after the meeting you had a thing for Denise and vice versa. Did anything go on? Jealousy a secret factor here? Don says Denise once told Millicent Robinson she had a dream about going to bed with you—this apparently got around. Maybe it got back to Michael? Maybe this is the motivation?”

“Nothing went on, believe me. I bought the Campari because I needed to experiment with it. My plan was to break into Coca’s house while he’s at work, lace the bottle with chloral hydrate—”

“What’s that?”

“Something to knock him out so Bobby and I could do what we had to do. And did. I bought the Campari in order to determine if the color would change after I dosed it. It didn’t.”

“What exactly did you do to Coca?”

“The only other detail I’ll ever give you, Catherine, is that as we brought him to consciousness we played at the highest volume the big tenor number from
Trovatore
. That’s what he heard. Which is what Maureen heard when the dog was shot. She identified it today at The Galaxy. Geraldine Williams also heard something operatic when Kovac was killed, but she doesn’t know opera.”

“You think he had the bottle tested?”

“No, because we dumped the remaining contents in the toilet, which in retrospect wasn’t smart. Because the bottle was three-quarters full when he took the drink that put him out. It was my one mistake. I should have brought an untampered bottle and exchanged it for the dosed one. He must have put it together. The drugging, the empty bottle, my girlie purchase, which Freddy alerted him to, and came up with—”

“You.”

“Yes. That’s how he must have made the connection. Someone tampered with his Campari, he speculates me, and he was right. Which is how all the violence began. I’m the cause. Never the target. He wanted a living death for me and he gets his wish. Michael Coca was waiting for me to come home in order to execute Angel in my presence. But he hadn’t planned on Geraldine Williams because nobody can plan on Geraldine Williams. I tortured him, he tortured me. He won.”

“But how do we explain why Bobby was hit first? How could Michael Coca have known Bobby was involved?”

“He may not have. We know that Coca, when he was assistant chief, had knowledge of the incident in Troy and that you and Bobby took me in. We also know Antonio was aware
we’d been going down to Troy regularly to see the Rintronas. Did Antonio mention this to Milly? Who in turn mentions it to her best friend, Denise Coca? Who in turn lets it drop innocently to Michael? Who then concludes someone from out of town was my accomplice in his torture? That it was Bobby? Or is it enough that he knows Bobby and I are friends? Pointless speculation. Too many questions. Either way it comes back to me. Makes no difference.”

She rises and walks over to Conte. He remains seated. Puts her hand on his shoulder, stroking it, “Angel is alive, El. He’s going to need you.” He looks up at her. Takes his hand and places it on her abdomen: “El, I’m pregnant.”

A week after the shootings on Mary Street, Antonio Robinson called a press conference. He connected the Barbone killing with the shootings in Troy and the murders of Florencio and Elvira Moreno. He spoke of ballistic evidence. He spoke of the car rental in Syracuse, which pointed, in his words, “almost definitively,” to Michael Coca. “ ‘Almost’ is the word,” he said. Asked about motive, he said he would not speculate except to say that “insanity was a good guess.” Asked about the shotgunning of Dragan Kovac and the deliberate hit-and-run killing of Billy Santoro, he said he had “nothing at this point.” Asked about the killing of Coca himself, and the witness on Mary Street who “claimed” (Robinson’s word) to have seen a black Cadillac SUV speeding away at the time of the killings, he replied that eyewitness accounts are notoriously unreliable, and at any rate this one was contradicted both by Eliot Conte and a detective from Troy, Robert Rintrona, who saw no such vehicle. Asked by a minor CNN producer (the events grazed the national media) to account for the difference in ballistics of the bullets that killed the Morenos and the single bullet that killed Coca, Robinson said the significance was obvious. Two different guns. When the producer said, “That certainly points to two different gunmen,” Robinson responded, “Yes, it does, ‘points’ is the word, points, but we have no information at this
time to pursue that possibility, strong as it seems,” and referred the producer again to the testimony of Conte and Rintrona.

Three days later, CNN ran a story resuscitating the history of Utica in the 1950s, when major crimes, including Mafia hits, were blanketed by cover-ups assumed to be of political origin. The CNN segment concluded with noting (“We note, for what it’s worth”) that the witness on Mary Street given most credence by Utica’s chief of police was “none other than the son of legendary upstate New York political boss Silvio Conte, and the Chief’s oldest friend, a ‘virtual brother,’ many Uticans say. Just why the crazed killer chose to execute his last victims in the home of Eliot Conte is a question no Utican, not even Chief Robinson, is willing to address, not even anonymously.”

Ten days after the shooting on Mary Street, Catherine takes Angel to his first therapy session, Conte sits alone nursing his manuscript on Melville, when the phone rings. An area code he does not recognize:

“Yes?”

“Professor Conte.”

“Can it be you, Mirko?”

“It is.”

“My God, Mirko, I’m so sorry—where are you? Will you return to Utica?”

“I will not.”

“How can I help you? Please tell me.”

“If you would be so kind, Professor Conte, to listen, this will be how you can help.”

“I’m happy to listen—I don’t mean I’m happy. I am not happy. I mean—”

“Sir, I understand your meaning. Thank you.”

“May I ask if you are with Delores?”

“You may, but I’ll not answer. What Mr. Martello said in his press conference. It is almost all true.”

“Almost?”

“Our Imam is not in contact with radical clerics anywhere. This is true. My parents are innocent. This is true. There was no plot to do something terrible on Sunday. This is also true. He said Mirko Ivanovic is innocent. This is not true.”

“What can that possibly mean? I don’t believe it.”

“The Imam was in communication with someone here. A citizen. A Bosnian Muslim living in Salt Lake City for many years as a Mormon. To do something not on Sunday, but on Monday.”

“You knew about this?”

“Yes.”

“You and the Imam were conspiring? Can this be true? What are you saying, Mirko?”

“I must confess all to you because I respect and I love you and cannot keep this thing inside me any longer. We had a plan to do something on Monday.”

“What something?”

“Congressman Kingwood was to announce his bid for the Senate on Monday, at City Hall, at noon. At which time he would be assassinated.”

(Silence.)

“Professor Conte, are you there?”

(Silence.)

“Professor, I think we have a phone problem.”

“Are you the gentle Mirko who sat in my class on Hawthorne and Melville? You at least have his voice.”

“We are not animals, sir. There never was a plan for a suicide bomb on Monday, if this is your thought, to slaughter the innocent. But then we heard that the announcement was moved to Tuesday, and to Kingwood’s home, where he would be surrounded by his family and his dogs and bodyguards. Only TV cameras and two pool reporters permitted inside. At City Hall it was to be surgical—an up-close shooting of an evil man by a fake reporter with fake credentials, who would take his own life to ensure his lips would be forever sealed. There was no possibility to do this after the change of venue.”

(Silence.)

“Professor Conte?”

“Why are you telling me that you conspired to do murder? Why would you tell anybody?”

“I do not tell just anybody. Only you.”

“The Mirko I know—impossible.”

“Two Muslims murdered in Phoenix, another castrated in Tucson, acid in the face for one in Dallas, a Muslim lady in New York City, in traditional dress, pushed onto the subway tracks, mangled beyond recognition. All in the last eighteen months, since Kingwood became chair of the House Committee on Homeland Security.”

“What exactly was your role?”

“To bring the shooter an untraceable revolver.”

“How did you acquire the weapon?”

“I will not tell you.”

“What was the need for
you
to do that?”

“Very few are willing to do such a disgraceful thing.”

“Couldn’t the Imam have gotten someone else? Why you?”

“He trusted only me because he knew my views on Kingwood. We Muslims are decent, though I am not.”

(Conte is silent.)

“Truthfully, Professor Conte, I wanted to be instrumental in the removal from life of the congressman.”

“You speak of murder so matter-of-factly. This is not Mirko.”

“Not matter-of-factly. My parents are dead, and I don’t believe it was a double suicide. It was double murder caused by Kingwood. I’m a few days married and my grief makes me unreachable to my wife. She knows nothing of what I tell you. I am in ruins, Professor. I am slowly dying at a young age. You must now go to the police. Tell them I am in Louisville, Kentucky, at the YMCA and will stay until they arrest me. Please tell them. I accept your judgment. This city you would love, Professor Conte, so many parks, such greenery. Did the authorities look into the computer? Did I bring them to my parents and their death? I am responsible?”

“Your computer, you left it behind. Why?”

“It was not mine. It was the family computer. My e-mail was password protected. No documents in the hard drive, sir.”

“Ah. I assure you it wouldn’t have mattered if you’d taken it with you. Martello’s people could easily hack your e-mail, and no doubt did. The other thing I can assure you of, had you succeeded in killing that bastard, you would’ve brought more anti-Muslim violence than we care to imagine. Nevertheless, an evil man, as you call him, and I agree, would’ve
been removed from our midst. But now he’s removed anyway. Legally. In either case, fuck him.”

“You won’t tell the authorities because you hate Kingwood too and wouldn’t have shed a tear at his death?”

“I intend to keep your conspiracy to commit murder to myself. Were I still drinking, and had his assassination gone down, I’d lift a toast in celebration.”

“We must not talk this way, Professor.”

“I agree.”

“It is unhealthy, Professor. A bad sign about us.”

“I agree.”

“You forgive me out of mutual hatred of Kingwood and the harm he does? Is this the reason?”

“Who am I to forgive anyone? I’ll shield you from the police because I care for you as if you were my son. It’s that simple in my moral universe.”

“Then you are in danger too. You are complicitous.”

“There are many ways to do the right thing, Mirko. This is my way.”

“Like Mr. Melville’s Ahab, we both hate evil.”

“Mirko, Ahab was insane.”

“Professor Conte, have we gone insane?”

“Without question. This is our bond.”