The Sleeping Beauty Killer

31

Tiro A Segno looked nothing like any gun club Laurie had ever seen. Tucked within a series of three nondescript brownstones on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village, the club seemed more like a private home, noteworthy only for the Italian flag flying proudly at the entrance. Even when she stepped inside, Laurie was greeted by leather furniture, mahogany wood, and a pool table-not a gun in sight. The smells were of garlic and oregano, not gunpowder.

“Not what you pictured, is it?” her host asked. “I never get tired of seeing the look of surprise on the face of a new guest.”

“Thank you so much for letting me pop in like this, Mr. Caruso.” She’d called the club after she left Jason Gardner’s office, just a few blocks away. “As I mentioned, my production team learned that your club was one of Hunter Raleigh’s favorite places to target practice.”

“Please, call me Antonio. And I was happy to help. You tell me, ‘TV show’-my response is ‘aaah, we don’t like cameras so much.’ But then you say you want to know about Hunter Raleigh. He was a good man, a real gentleman. Then to top it off, you are the daughter of Leo Farley. Of course, you are welcome here. Your father is an honorary member for life.”

With the exception of perhaps the perpetrators he arrested throughout his career, everyone who’d met her father considered him a friend.

She’d come here with questions about Hunter and Casey, but now that she was here, she understood why Grace had suggested it as an ideal location for footage. “I can see why your club is so beloved, Antonio.”

“It’s transformed over the years, to be sure. We didn’t used to be quite so elegant. Some of the old-timers still complain about losing the bocce court. These days, it’s more about the food and wine and socializing, but of course we still have the range downstairs. We’re strictly target shooting, as you may know. And no handguns, just rifles.”

“Did Hunter ever bring his fiancée, Casey Carter, here?” Laurie asked.

A momentary darkness fell over Antonio’s face. “Yes, of course. What a terrible ending. Of course, he brought many women here before he was engaged,” he added.

“But being with Casey changed his bachelor ways?”

“So it seemed. The second time I saw them together, I said to Hunter, You should have the wedding here, and he just smiled. Do you know the saying, Chi ama me, ama il mio cane? It translates to ‘Whoever loves me, loves my dog.’ But what it really means is ‘Whoever loves me, loves me as I am, warts and all.’ That’s how Hunter felt about Casey.”

“Forgive me if I’m reading too much into this, Antonio, but it sounds like you’re saying Casey had warts.”

He shrugged. “Like I said, it was a terrible ending.”

Laurie could already tell that it was going to be impossible to get an unbiased depiction of Casey as a young woman out of anyone. Everyone’s recollections had been permanently transformed by the fact that she’d been convicted of killing Hunter.

“I heard that Casey was quite skilled at target shooting in her own right,” Laurie said.

“You heard correctly. Hunter joked that the only reason she tried was because she was the most competitive person he knew. She was an athlete at some point, as I recall.”

“Tennis,” Laurie clarified. “In college.”

“That’s right. Hunter said she cleaned the court with him. And not to be bested, she certainly was catching up to him at his own sport. She was a very good shot.”

“The police found bullet holes in the walls of Hunter’s living room and bedroom, where he was actually killed. Does it strike you as odd that Casey would have missed twice?”

“That’s hard to say. We only use still targets here. I never saw her shoot skeet or at another moving target. It’s much harder than people realize. That’s why in self-defense classes, they say you’re better off running from a gunman, especially if you run in an unpredictable pattern. Plus, adrenaline and, as I understood it, intoxication, may have affected her skills. So the fact that she missed is not a smoking gun one way or the other,” he added with a smile.

Laurie thanked Antonio again for his time and promised she’d tell Leo he said hello. As far as her show was concerned, some photographs of this Greenwich Village treasure might be worth a few seconds of local color, but she was no closer to knowing who killed Hunter Raleigh.