Rizzo's Fire

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

LATER THAT AFTERNOON, Rizzo and Jackson arrived at Lauria’s apartment just as the two plainclothes CSU officers sent by Detective Schillings were leaving. The officers held fiber samples from the victim’s wardrobe labeled and packaged in clear plastic evidence bags.

Once inside the apartment, Priscilla opened some windows and let the cold November air breeze through, further dispelling the lingering odor of rotting flesh.

“Let’s start in the bedroom,” Rizzo said. “Anything you find of cash value, make a note of it. Maybe this cousin of his can tell us if anything he owned is missing.”

“What exactly are we looking for?” Priscilla asked.

He shrugged. “Don’t worry. What ever it is, we’ll know it when we find it. We gotta get to know this guy, Cil. If it turns out he was killed by a burglar, this is just a waste a time, but, if it was premeditated, or the killer was somebody he knew, maybe there’s somethin’ in here that’ll point us somewhere. Maybe the guy was a closet case-gay, pedophile, s and m dude, somethin’ like that. Maybe he was a skell gambler. What ever. If he had a secret, if there’s somethin’ more to this guy than just a sad-sack loser life rolled over, we have to find it.

“And when you’re tryin’ to find somebody’s secrets, remember this: start lookin’ in the bedroom.”

Yesterday’s search of the apartment had been cursory, surface deep, a search for the clues and debris of the crime itself. Now the two detectives methodically went through drawers, rummaged through bundled stacks of paid bills, legal papers, books and magazines. After a while, Rizzo moved to the large closet at the far wall. He slid open one of the doors and looked in.

Some moments later, he called to Priscilla.

“Hey, come check this out.”

She came to stand beside him as he knelt on the worn, brown carpeting, “What you got there, Joe?”

He looked up at her. “It’s a typewriter-in the original case. Friggin’ thing’s gotta be thirty years old. It’s an old IBM Selectric. Years ago these were standard issue in all the precincts. It’s a goddamn antique.”

Priscilla shrugged. “Okay, so what?”

Rizzo stood, wiping carpet lint from his hands. “Take a look at it,” he said. “A close look.”

She knelt, eyeing the machine carefully. “What am I lookin’ at here, Joe?”

“Fuckin’ thing looks like it came outta the factory last week,” Rizzo said. “Look at the ball-the letters have hardly any ink buildup. Check out the cartridge, it’s been used, but it isn’t very old. And look under the cover-freshly oiled parts, no dust stuck all over everything. This machine was worked on and very well maintained.”

Priscilla examined the machine. “Yeah, okay. So what?”

Rizzo shrugged. “So… I don’t know. But like I said, we gotta get to know the real Robbie Lauria. And since we can’t go have a few beers with the guy and shoot the shit, this is how we gotta do it. By pokin’ around his life and finding stuff like this.”

Priscilla pursed her lips. “So okay, the guy has a functioning thirty-year-old typewriter. What does that mean?”

“I don’t know yet. See, we detect stuff. That’s why they call us detectives.”

“Okay, Joe, I got it. We keep looking.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Let’s.”

Against the inside wall of the closet stood a large, green Samsonite hard-shell luggage case.

“This guy liked old stuff,” Rizzo said. “I had a Samsonite just like this, same color and everything. Me and Jen used it on our honeymoon. I think it’s up in our attic somewheres full of the girls’ baby clothes.”

Priscilla leaned into the closet, brushing against Rizzo, and grabbed hold of the handle of the suitcase.

“Wonder if he’s got some of his stuff in here,” she said, tugging on the case. She stumbled forward against its unexpected weight. “Wow, goddamn heavy.”

“Easy,” Rizzo said, as he took hold of her arm to stabilize her. “Let’s get it out here.”

Once they’d wrestled the case out of the closet, Priscilla placed it down flat on the brown rug and opened the two clasps securing it.

“What the fuck is all that?” Rizzo asked from over her shoulder as she lifted the top and they looked in.

“Looks like manuscripts,” Priscilla said. “Typewritten manuscripts.”

Rizzo crouched beside her, reaching into the suitcase and taking hold of a stack of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch papers, tightly bound by thick rubber bands. He thumbed through the first few pages, nodding his head.

“Yeah, that’s what it looks like.” He rubbed at his eye, examining the pages. “Must be five hundred friggin’ pages in this one alone.”

“This one, too,” said Priscilla, holding a second bundle.

The two detectives sat on the floor, rummaging through the contents of the case. It held six separate, book-length manuscripts, each carefully typed and double-spaced, apparently on the old Selectric. Each bundle was secured with multiple rubber bands, and each contained a title page with Lauria listed as the author, his address and phone number beneath his name. There were one or two duplicate copies of each manuscript and nearly a thousand pages of shorter works, each dated in ink with a neat, precise hand.

Rizzo shook his head. “This guy’s been writin’ this crap for over twenty years.”

Priscilla looked up from the page she had been reading.

“This isn’t necessarily crap, Joe. From just what I’ve read, the guy’s got the basics down pat. He may even be pretty good.”

Rizzo dismissed her assessment with a disinterested shrug. “Yeah, well, anything sittin’ inside a closet for twenty years in a thirty-year-old suitcase is crap, far as I’m concerned.”

He stood, dropping the bundle he held back into the Samsonite. “I’m gonna take a look around the living room. Why don’t you finish checkin’ this closet.”

“Okay,” Priscilla said, barely looking up from her reading. “In a minute.”

Rizzo entered the small parlor. Its floor was covered with the same worn, brown carpeting as in the bedroom. An old sofa sat against one wall and faced a small wooden table that held a nineteen-inch television. A stereo turntable stood on a second small table in the corner. He opened the lid and looked in. A Frank Sinatra Reprise LP sat on the turntable, the black vinyl shining against the light of the room, its surface unmarred by scratches. It looked as if it was brand new.

“Fuckin’ guy,” Rizzo said to himself. “More of a dinosaur than me.”

He crossed the room, dropping into a battered easy chair beside a small lamp table. He switched on the light and slid open the table’s lone drawer. He looked in, poking objects aside with his pen and examining them-a three-week-old TV Guide, an old popular Mechanics magazine, a nail clipper set in a cheap black plastic case, an empty Dr. Scholl’s bunion pad package, a clear plastic vial of toothpicks, a New York Times crossword puzzle book, three Bic pens, and a short number-two pencil.

Rizzo slid the drawer closed, then took out what he firmly believed would be his very last pack of Chesterfields. He lit a cigarette and sighed.

“Come on, Robbie,” he said softly. “Help me out a little. Give me somethin’.”

He rubbed a forefinger at his eye.

“Any goddamned thing.”

LATER, THE two detectives sat at Lauria’s kitchen table, glancing at the dark bloodstains and yellow coroner’s chalk marks on the pale green vinyl flooring.

“I got a feelin’ this guy spent a lot of time putzin’ around this apartment in his pajamas,” Rizzo said, drawing on a second cigarette. “So your theory ’bout Lauria getting killed making himself a cup a tea in the morning or late night doesn’t necessarily hold. If it was a burglar, though, and the perp did come in through that back window, we can probably figure it happened at night. Too many houses and windows lookin’ down on that backyard to take a chance breaking in during daylight.”

“If it was a burglar, and if that’s how he got in,” Priscilla said.

“Okay, let’s hear it,” Rizzo prompted.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. This is making less and less sense to me, this burglar angle.”

“Tell me,” he said.

“Let’s walk through it. Possibility one: It’s nighttime, Lauria is in his kitchen getting some tea. Perp breaks the rear window and climbs in. Why doesn’t the vic hear it? Why doesn’t he go see what happened? How does he wind up rear-strangled in the freakin’ kitchen?”

“I don’t know,” Rizzo said.

She went on, “Okay, possibility two: Lauria is in bed, asleep. Perp breaks in, somehow Lauria doesn’t wake up. Perp searches the bedroom, quiet as a mouse, ransacks it like we found it. Then he starts checkin’ out the rest of the place. Suddenly, Lauria wakes up, goes to investigate, and gets his ass choked to death in the kitchen.”

Rizzo challenged her. “So the perp searches the bedroom, but he don’t see the big prize, the watch on the nightstand?”

“Exactly,” she said. “The bedroom was ransacked, either before or after the killing. But the watch was left.”

He nodded. “So our burglar perp is either the most incompetent asshole in the business, or he found somethin’ else. Something better’n that watch, something so valuable he couldn’t believe his luck, and he was content to leave with it-get the fuck outta Dodge.”

Priscilla’s lips pursed. “Or, he found exactly what he was looking for. What he had come for.”

Rizzo looked at her. “Like what?”

“Beats me, boss, beats me good,” she said. “From the looks of this place, Lauria didn’t have anything worth stealing. What could this poor dude possibly have had that was worth killing over?”

Rizzo dragged on the cigarette, then expelled smoke away from Jackson, rubbing his eye.

After a moment, he spoke again. “That shoe store dame, the manager. She said she paid Lauria a week’s salary plus commission and eight days’ severance. Annasia told us Lauria paid his November rent in cash on October twenty-eighth. I saw a bank passbook in the bedroom. It showed no deposits made around the twenty-eighth. Last entry was back in mid-September, a hundred-dollar withdrawal.”

Priscilla frowned. “A passbook, did you say?”

“Yeah, a passbook. Guy still had a friggin’ passbook account. Like my seventy-eight-year-old mother’s got. He’s a freakin’ fossil. Makes me look like a today kinda guy.”

Priscilla reflected, then spoke. “So the guy cashes his paycheck, takes his dough, and pays the rent.”

Rizzo dipped his head to the side. “Yeah, but the rent wasn’t much. I came across the receipts. He’da had lotsa cash left.”

“So where is it?” Priscilla asked. “It’s not in this apartment.”

Rizzo shrugged. “In the burglar’s pocket. You know, the burglar neither one of us seems to feel was here.”

Priscilla took a breath and said, “Joe, this isn’t getting us anywhere. It could go nine different ways. If the guy that killed him wanted it to look like a burglary, he’da tossed the place, grabbed the cash, and left.”

“There’s nothing else worth stealin’ in this place except that watch,” Rizzo said. “Lauria never even got as far as the eight-track stage, he’s still playin’ vinyl records. If it was me tryin’ to make this look like a burglary, I’da tossed the place, too. And grabbed the cash so the cops wouldn’t find it. But I wouldn’t be lookin’ for anything else. What the hell could have been here, Cil, Ed Sullivan’s fuckin’ autograph?” He leaned forward.

“And that could explain the watch. The guy missed it ’cause he really didn’t care about finding anything of value. He broke in specifically to kill Lauria. Assuming, of course, that he did break in. If he came in the front door and then staged that broken window, the whole thing coulda been unplanned, just a fight between two screwballs.”

Priscilla shook her head. “A guy walking in and out the front door just to pay a visit woulda left prints, Joe. Or wipe-downs. If the murder was unplanned. And besides, you heard Annasia. Lauria only had one person visiting him over the years. His cousin.”

“Yeah,” Rizzo said.

She frowned. “You think it was her coulda killed him?”

“Doubtful,” he said. “Women don’t strangle-they poison, they shoot, they stab. They’ll even push you out a fuckin’ window if the need arises. It takes a lot of strength and a cold heart to strangle somebody. And you usually cut your hands up pretty bad. If Lauria’s neck bled, so did the killer’s hands, unless he wore real heavy gloves. Remind me to tell Dr. Rum ’n Coke-mon to check for multiple blood specimens from the body and floor samples.”

“Yassa, boss, I’s surely gonna re-member dat,” Priscilla said in a high pitched singsong.

“Don’t start with that shit again, Priscilla. I already explained my doubts about the guy, remember?”

“Yeah, Joe, relax. Just kiddin’.”

They sat quietly, each reviewing the case at hand.

“So,” Rizzo said after a while, “what have we got?”

“What ever we want,” she said with resignation. “We got a burglar, we got a pretend burglar, we got an invited guest, an uninvited guest, a premeditated murder or a spontaneous spat between two nerds arguin’ over who’s cooler, Superman, Batman, or Captain fuckin’ Kirk. Take your pick.”

“You know, this reminds me of some wisdom once passed on to me from my uncle Jim,” Rizzo said.

“Yeah? What’s that?”

He stood and moved to the sink. He ran water over the stub of his cigarette, then dropped it into the trash. Leaning against the small refrigerator and crossing his arms, he smiled at Priscilla as he spoke again.

“It was the day of my Confirmation. I was lined up outside the church wearin’ my new shiny blue suit with a red arm ribbon, me and all the other kids and their sponsors. My uncle Jim, he was my godfather, he christened me, so he served as my sponsor. Well, we’re waitin’ outside, and I’m startin’ to squirm around, gettin’ all nervous. So Uncle Jim asks me, ‘What’s the matter, Joe?’ and I tell him, ‘Well, the nuns said the bishop’s gonna slap us. They said we gotta kneel down at the altar, and then he’s gonna slap us across the face. And I don’t wanna get slapped.’ ”

Priscilla shrugged. “Sounds reasonable to me.”

Rizzo nodded. “I thought so. Anyway, Uncle Jim kneels down right on the sidewalk in his good suit, probably the only one he owned. He puts his hand on my shoulder and gets real serious, looks me right in the eye. ‘Kid,’ he says. ‘Relax. This is just to make your mother happy, that’s all. So just relax. At the end of the day, it’s all just bullshit.’ ”

“What an upliftin’ Christian message of hope,” Priscilla said.

“Wasn’t it, though? But this here Lauria case. It brought old Uncle Jim to mind.”

Priscilla’s brow furrowed. “Why? I don’t get it.”

Rizzo reached for a third Chesterfield. “I dunno, Cil, maybe ’cause that’s what this case looks like. Maybe, at the end a the day, it’s all just bullshit.”

He lit the cigarette, eyeing her through the smoke.

“All just bullshit,” he said again.

AT SEVEN o’clock Tuesday evening, Jennifer Rizzo took a seat next to her husband on the double recliner in the den of their Brooklyn home. She turned and smiled into his dark brown eyes, noting the TV listings in his hand.

“I’m very proud of you, Joe,” she said.

He looked puzzled. “Proud of me?”

“The invitation,” she said. “To Priscilla and Karen for Thanksgiving. You’ve come a long way, baby. You’re maturing nicely.”

“Maturing? I’m eighty friggin’ years old.”

Jennifer shook her head. “Not quite. Let’s not rush things, time is flying by fast enough. But I am proud of you. And impressed with your bravery.”

“Bravery?”

“Yes, Joe, bravery. The girls and I will welcome your guests with open arms. But we will also disavow any and all responsibility for their presence. As far as my mother and your mother are concerned, this will have been your idea and yours alone.” Jennifer paused, smiling again. “It takes a very brave man to face that. Just remember: there’s a difference between bravery and stupidity.”

Rizzo wrinkled his brow. “What?”

Jennifer raised a pointer finger as she replied. “Inviting them was bravery,” she said flatly. “Not checking with me first-that was stupidity.”