Criminal Conversation

5: June 2–June 9

The owner of the Ristorante Buona Sera was a seventy-three-year-old man named Carlo Gianetti, who had migrated from Puglia some fifty years ago, but who still spoke English with a marked Italian accent. He told reporters he had no idea who the slain man was. When informed that he was almost certainly a known gangster named Andrew Faviola, he shrugged and said he didn’t know this, but he hoped someone would by the way pay for the damages to his place.

He did not know who the dead woman was, either, and he had no idea whether they’d come in together or not. When one of the reporters suggested that the woman had possibly come there to dine, with the murdered man, Gianetti said he supposed they might have been there for dinner, though five-fifteen was a little early to be eating; normally, they didn’t start serving till six. In any event, he was sorry this had happened here in his restaurant.

The cashier told them that the man had come in first, and was waiting for the woman when she came in. A black town car had dropped her off at the curb, but the cashier hadn’t noticed the license plate. It seemed to her she’d seen these two before, though, seemed to remember them coming here, some months back, she couldn’t remember exactly when, and sitting at that same table.

The investigating detectives tossed the dead woman and found in her handbag a current New York State driver’s license that gave her name as Sarah Welles. A laminated ID card with her picture on it stated that Sarah Fitch Welles was a member of the teaching staff of the Greer Academy on East Sixtieth Street in Manhattan.

They did not learn until later that day that she was the wife of an assistant district attorney.

The New York Post headlined it DEADLY IRONY.

The inside story raised more questions than anyone in the District Attorney’s office was willing to answer “at this point in time,” as Chief Charles Scanlon of the Organized Crime Unit was quoted as saying. There was no question but that Sarah Fitch Welles was the wife of the unit’s deputy chief, a man named Michael Welles, who was responsible for sending away the Lombardi Crew, which before his successful investigation and prosecution had been a powerful arm of the selfsame Faviola family run by the murdered hoodlum. Apparently, Mr. and Mrs. Welles had planned to meet at the restaurant for an early dinner. She’d arrived before him, and was caught in the deadly hail of bullets as she passed Faviola’s table on her way back from the ladies’ room.

The Post asked why the reservations book showed no listing for a party of two in the name of Welles. The Post asked why the cashier seemed certain the two murder victims had been sitting at the same table. The Post asked why one of the waiters thought he’d seen the murder victims holding hands and in deep conversation shortly before the gunmen came in. The Post asked why one of the busboys thought he’d seen Faviola trying to yank the woman away from the table as the two assassins approached. The Post asked whether the District Attorney’s office was in the habit of sending town cars to pick up and drop off the wives of salaried employees.

In the coverage of Sarah’s funeral two days later, a good photograph of Luretta Barnes appeared on the front page of the Times’s Metro Section. It showed her coming out of the funeral home, weeping. The caption under it read: GRIEVING STUDENT LEAVES CHAPEL.

Up where Luretta lived, nobody read the Times.

The meeting had been called for the Monday following the sumptuous funeral given Andrew Faviola. Bobby Triani called the meeting, and it was held in a place they all knew to be absolutely clear of any eavesdropping devices. This was the notorious Club Sorrento on Elizabeth Street, which was so full of bugs you’d have thought it was a mattress.

The two detectives assigned to the wiretap were working under a re-up court order granting permission to listen for yet another thirty days. They did not know the voices of all the wiseguys gathered here, so they listened very carefully for mention of identifying names.

Bobby Triani, they knew.

“This is a terrible thing that has happened here to the family,” he said, “the loss of this great man, especially in a time of increased activity and prosperity.”

“He sounds like a fuckin’ banker,” one of the detectives said.

“Shhh,” the other one said.

“I want to promise each and every one of you here today,” Triani said, “that we won’t rest till we find out who did this, and till this murder is revenged. Not only to prove this won’t happen again while I’m around, but also out of respect to the man who was killed.”

“May he rest in peace,” someone said.

“The minute we find out...” Triani said, and there was a sound that resembled zzsstt. The detectives figured he was running his finger across his throat like a razor, indicating what would be done to the assassins the moment their identity was known. Too bad you couldn’t show an unseen, unheard gesture in court.

“As you know, “he said, abruptly switching gears, “the stuff arrived from Italy a week ago,” never once mentioning what stuff, even though the club was as sacred as the Vatican when it came to anybody listening, “and is already being distributed to our various people throughout the city. In short, Anthony Faviola’s plan is in motion. The stuff is here and will be hitting the streets any day now. Our hope is to retail it for a dollar, attract new customers that way. Very soon, thanks to Anthony, and thanks to Andrew, too, who made sure the original plan got the legs it needed, there’ll be more money pouring in than we know what to do with. This will require new thinking, new ideas. I’m hoping this new leadership will be able to come up with plans that will be acceptable to all of us. Me, Petey Bardo as my second, and Sal Bonifacio under him. I think you all know...”

There was a round of applause.

“Thank you,” a new voice said.

“Grazie mille,” another new voice said.

“Okay, okay,” Triani said. “Thank you, okay. I think you all know what kind of experience these two men have had, and what kind of people they are. I want you to know...”

“Yeah, they’re fuckin’ hoodlums,” one of the detectives said.

“... first order of...”

“Shhhh.”

“... business will be to find the two bastards who did this murder. I promise you we will not rest till our honor’s been...”

“Bullshit,” one of the detectives said.

“Shhh,” the other one said, and grinned. “Pay a little respect here, huh?”

Mollie could not understand how the man who’d saved her life last December happened to be in that same restaurant where her mother was killed last Wednesday. Six months since they’d seen him, and all at once he pops up in the same restaurant where catastrophe is about to happen. This was some odd coincidence, it seemed to her, something she’d have surely asked her mother about, if only her mother were still alive.

She could not believe all the things the newspapers were saying about Andrew, whose name it now turned out wasn’t really Farrell, but was instead Faviola. How could the person they’d had dinner with shortly after Christmas last year be the leader of a powerful crime family, a person the newspapers were calling the “Boss,” as if he were Bruce Springsteen? The Boss having an early dinner in a little Italian restaurant in Brooklyn, where coincidentally, mind you, her mother and father were also meeting for dinner. Small wonder that all the newspapers were just full of speculation and innuendo as to what the ADA’s beautiful young blond wife was really doing in that place last Wednesday.

What the newspapers did not know was that Sarah Fitch Welles — they kept adding her maiden name, as if she were Hillary Rodham Clinton — had met Andrew Faviola six months earlier. Only Mollie knew this. Well, her father knew it, too, but in a slightly different way; they had told him all about Andrew Farrell, the nice young man who’d saved her life. So what the hell was her mother doing in that restaurant with him last Wednesday?

Well, with him, who says she was actually with him?

Her father insisted he’d been on the way to meet her there, so Mollie had to believe the restaurant employees were mistaken about her mother sitting there with a gangster, holding hands with a gangster, in deep conversation with a...

Was Andrew really a gangster?

That was his picture in all the papers, unmistakably his picture.

The Boss.

Who the DA’s Office was saying had been sitting there alone when her mother accidentally walked past his table into a “deadly fusillade,” as the Daily News called it. But wouldn’t her mother have recognized Andrew on the way to the ladies’ room? Wouldn’t she have yelled “Andrew! How nice to see you again! Do you remember saving Mollie’s life, do you remember saving my darling daughter’s life?” Wouldn’t she have recognized him, for Christ’s sake? I would have recognized him in a minute.

Mom, she thought, Mommy, she thought, what were you doing in that restaurant last Wednesday?

She thought maybe she should ask her father if he really had been on his way to meet her when this thing happened. When her mother got murdered last Wednesday. Instead, she asked him if all the stuff they were saying about this Andrew Faviola person was true.

Her father said, “Yes, Mollie, it’s all true.”

So she didn’t tell him Andrew Faviola was the same Andrew Farrell who’d once saved her life a long time ago, when she was just a kid.

Michael found the pages while he was going through Sarah’s effects. He found them in an envelope in her attaché case, along with several other papers she’d been carrying home from school last Wednesday.

The pages were typewritten, double-spaced on good bond paper.

They had been written by someone named Luretta Barnes, whom Michael recalled Sarah mentioning every now and then, one of her best students, wasn’t she?

Typed onto the first page was the title What I Will Do This Summer.

Sitting on the French lieutenant’s bed in the den where first he’d played the incriminating tapes for Sarah, the grandfather clock ticking noisily down the hall, he thought at first that this was an assignment Sarah had given the kids. But he knew her well enough...

Had thought he’d known her well enough...

Had once, long ago, thought he’d known Sarah better than any woman on earth...

Still...

Knowing her...

... this did seem a somewhat simplistic assignment to have given any of her classes, even the youngest ones. So he had to assume the student, this Luretta Barnes, had come up with the title herself and was using it to put spin on all the “What I Did Last Summer” papers she’d been forced to write ever since kindergarten.

Her intent became immediately apparent the moment Michael began reading:

Michael was suddenly sobbing. Alone on the cast iron bed, he wept uncontrollably, until at last he was able to catch his breath again. Drying his eyes, still clutching the pages in his hand, he went to find his daughter in the empty apartment.

Luretta kept wondering if Mrs. Welles had ever got around to reading those pages she’d given her. She guessed maybe she hadn’t. Probably, planned to read them sooner or later, maybe after she got home from dinner with her husband one night, walked instead into something worse than any drive-by.

Up here where Luretta lived, the drive-bys were a common thing, you learned to live with them, same as you learned to live with a junkie chasing after you all the time, trying to get in your pants, she’d kill him next time. She had sworn that in church on Sunday, she would kill him the next time he came at her. Mrs. Welles had taught her April was the cruellest month, but she’d been wrong. June was really the month that got you. June was when you had to face it, girl.

Luretta walked through this evening spread against the sky, seeing this place where she lived with laser-beam eyes. White-hot laser cutting through the jiveass dealers on every corner, pushing their six-bit hits off of crack pipes. White-hot eyes burning through hookers no older than herself strutting like movie stars in high heels and silk, selling blowjobs to cruising motorists for twenty bucks a throw. Her ears tuned out the incessant word fuck that rang on the air like a one-note call-and-response. Her ears closed to the screaming police sirens, and the screaming fire engines, and the rapping of the automatic pistols, and the rage everywhere, the white-hot rage reduced to cold dead ashes by her white-hot eyes and her indifferent ears. She wished to be Eliot’s hyacinth girl, her arms full, her hair wet, speechless, neither living nor dead, looking into the heart of light, the silence. He had written of a heap of broken images where the sun beat. He had written of a cry of fear in a handful of dust. Walking alone and breathing deeply of a night turned suddenly gentle by the first flush hint of summer, Luretta wished with all her heart that Sarah Fitch Welles was still alive to show her what roots might clutch, what branches grow out of this stony rubbish.

On the ninth day of June, the day before Hanover Prep and most of the other private schools in the city were scheduled to close for the summer, Winona Weingarten took the M-11 bus uptown from where she lived on Seventy-Fifth and West End, and then walked through Morningside Park on her way to the old stone building behind the cathedral.

It was a beautiful day, the kind New York City was often blessed with in early summer, the sky a piercing blue, the air crisp and clear. Winona was wearing the school uniform with the short pleated skirt and the white blouse and blue jacket with the crest over the pocket.

“Hey, kid,” the voice called.

She turned to look.

A black man was sitting on one of the park benches.

“Wanna try suppin’ new,” he said, “fly you to the moon?”

“No, thanks,” Winona said.

“Coss you on’y a dollah,” the man said, and flashed a wide entreating grin.

Winona shook her head, and hurried past.

But her heart was pounding.

And she wondered if he’d be there again tomorrow.