St. Albans Fire

Chapter 18

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.

Joe returned to Peggy. “I’m sorry. Maybe we should start over again. My name’s Joe Gunther. I’m from Vermont. The cranky guy’s Willy Kunkle, and that’s Lieutenant Lil Farber, from the Essex County prosecutor’s office. You are Peggy DeAngelis, right?”

“Yes. Why are you from Vermont?”

Joe was grateful for Willy’s lack of a response. He gestured to the living room behind her as he spoke. “Mind if we sit down? It’s a bit of a long story.”

“No, no,” she said immediately, which automatic courtesy he’d counted on.

They all settled on a sofa and a couple of armchairs.

“What exactly do you know about Gino?” Joe asked in his best fatherly tone.

She concentrated as if she’d been asked a test question. “He works at the docks as a trucker, drives an eighteen-wheeler, and”-here she shot Willy an angry look-“I know he’s married, which is something he’s trying to end.”

“Does he tell you about the trips he takes?” Joe continued.

She smiled, which suffused an already perfect face with a sunny radiance. “He sends me postcards sometimes.”

“Could I see them?”

She half rose from her chair before shaking her head. “I’m not sure I should do this. I don’t think he’d like it.”

Joe looked up at her, his elbows on his knees, trying to appear relaxed and casual. “Why’s that? You want to help him, don’t you?”

She frowned. “Of course. That’s what I’m saying.”

“We’re here already,” Joe explained pointedly. “You do realize that not cooperating will just turn a small investigation into a big deal-attract a lot of attention and involve lots of people.”

“Aren’t you supposed to have some piece of paper you have to show me?”

Joe and Lil both laughed. He explained, “That’s only when we’re about to search a place or arrest someone. We’re just here trying to make sense of a few things.”

“What things?” she asked, still standing.

“It’s a bit complicated, Peggy, and we’re figuring it out, but my colleague’s tough-guy imitation notwithstanding, we may end up finding Gino’s got nothing to do with any of it. You could help us with that and make this go away twice as fast.”

“Clearing him of suspicion?”

“We just want to know the truth,” Joe equivocated.

She hesitated one last time and then nodded slightly. “All right. I’ll be right back.”

She left the room, and they heard her climbing the stairs two at a time with rapid, light footsteps-still a kid inside that fully adult body.

Lil waited until she was sure Peggy was out of earshot. “So,” she asked, “you two always work this well together? You ought to write a how-to book.”

“Cute,” Willy growled.

Joe rose suddenly, holding his hand up for silence, and moved to the hallway door, listening to something upstairs.

“Stay put,” he said over his shoulder, before following the girl’s example and heading for the second floor.

On the top landing, he could more clearly hear Peggy’s voice speaking in an urgent whisper, down a short hallway and behind a partially closed door. He approached it quietly and pushed it open.

Before him, sitting on the edge of her bed, Peggy was talking into a phone. She raised her eyes to his as he filled the doorway, her expression so much like a child’s in trouble that he had to smile.

“Calling Gino?” he asked.

She paled visibly. For a moment, he thought she might even try to hide the phone behind her back. Instead, she ducked her head slightly, as if for privacy, said, “Never mind. No message,” into the receiver, and reluctantly hung up.

“I couldn’t get him,” she admitted.

Joe leaned against the doorjamb. “You didn’t have to come up here to do that. We wouldn’t have stopped you making a call. For that matter, we can leave, if you want.”

She seemed on the verge of tears. “How much trouble is he in?”

Joe decided to play it straight, within limits. “It’s looking pretty bad.”

“Did he kill someone or something?”

“Why do you ask that? Has he ever been violent around you?”

She shook her head. “No, not ever. He’s always very sweet.”

“But…” Joe suggested.

“No, no. No buts. It’s just that I could see him getting angry at someone if he was pushed.”

“He has,” he reassured her. “I think you already know that in your heart.”

He crossed the room and sat beside her, leaving a couple of feet between them. She was dressed in a skirt and a white button-down blouse, but as utterly sensual as that had made her appear downstairs, it now enhanced her seeming innocence.

Joe reached out and squeezed her hand briefly. “We’re not here to hurt you, Peggy, but I also don’t want to lie to you.”

She wiped a tear from her eye. “I’ve never loved anybody so much.”

“It happens a lot,” he said philosophically. “People are rarely all bad or all good, and they rarely reveal themselves entirely to the ones who love them. I guess maybe sometimes they’re being self-protective, but it can be the other way around, too-they just don’t want to hurt who they care about the most. But whichever way it is with Gino,” he added, looking directly into her eyes, “the fact remains that he’s broken the law and brought some real heartbreak to others. I’m not here to judge him, Peggy, and I’m sure not here to wag my finger at the two of you. But make no mistake about it-I will do everything I can to hold him accountable.”

She was crying openly by now, making him feel at once guilty and hopeful.

“Do you have those postcards?” he asked gently.

Without a word, she reached into her night table drawer and withdrew a small bundle of glossy cards. She was still holding them when the phone rang.

As she leaned over to answer it, he relieved her of the cards.

“Hello?” she asked in a tremulous voice.

Joe could hear a man’s voice on the other end, although not what he was saying. He began nonchalantly leafing through the cards, a collection of unremarkable nature shots, for the most part-mountains, animals, a few with historic buildings. They were from all over the eastern seacoast.

“The police are here,” she said. “They say you’ve done something bad… I don’t know. They haven’t told me… Yes, they’re still here… No, no… Gino, I haven’t told them anything. I don’t have anything to tell them. I don’t even know what they’re talking about… I’m sorry, I’m sorry… I’ll do it right now… Can you come over? Please. I’m really upset… Okay, okay.”

She covered the phone with her hand and looked apologetically at Joe. “I’m really sorry, but you all have to leave.”

Joe put the postcards down on the bed and stood up. “Can I ask you one favor?”

She was clearly unhappy with that, but he spoke anyway. “It’s only to be careful. People in love do things they sometimes regret. Please, next time you two are together, ask him what’s going on.”

The voice on the phone squawked again, and now looking confused, she turned toward it and answered, “I did, Gino. They’re leaving now. I told them.”

She looked up at Joe. “He wants me to see you out-make sure you’re gone.”

Joe nodded. “Fine with me.”

She put the phone down on the bed and escorted him back downstairs to the entranceway, where he stuck his head into the living room and announced, “Gino’s on the phone upstairs. We’ve been officially thrown out.”

The other two silently got up and filed out the front door. Joe hesitated on the threshold and looked back at Peggy. “Think about what I said, okay? You’ve got a full life ahead of you.”

She smiled sadly, as if she was already beyond believing such things. “Thank you. You’re a nice man,” she said, and closed the door on them.

Willy leered at him. “Ooh. Got lucky?”

Joe ignored his most obvious meaning. “Yeah. One of Gino’s postcards was mailed from Vermont.”

The cell phone clipped to Lil’s belt went off. She answered it, exchanged a few sentences, and hung up.

“That was Silva. He thought we’d like to know: Santo Massi was just picked up in a Dumpster with a bullet in his head.”

“Gee,” Willy reacted. “That didn’t take ’em long.”

“Gino?” Lil asked Joe.

Joe pushed his lower lip out thoughtfully. “Could be. Santo broke the cardinal rule, talking to us. Could be it was just an example.”

“Still,” she suggested, “we could roust him and play Twenty Questions, just to keep him off balance.”

Joe gazed up the street for a moment. “If you’re talking about getting under his skin, we might as well stick with the plan: Let’s have a chat with his wife next.”