recognize him was if he did something, and what he would have to do to identify himself was to kill someone else.
Elizabeth started to move her eyes down the list again, but now Richardson was standing over her desk. “You know what I think is going on?” he asked. “I think this is a cleansing ritual.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Who was Tony Talarese? He was about forty-five years old, a capo at the time of his life when he should have been out there scrambling. But what was he doing? He wore fancy clothes, spent lots of money, had a house that Al Capone would have thought was too ostentatious. But the main thing was, he was corrupt. He’d been schtupping the waitresses in his brother’s restaurant, the wives of at least two of his soldiers and his brother’s wife’s niece, which in those old-time families is incest. But most of all, he’d been robbing his boss while he was in prison, and he was wearing a wire for the FBI. Think about it.”
Elizabeth rested her head on her fist. “Okay, I’m thinking about it. What conclusion am I supposed to be reaching?”
Richardson frowned and churned his hand in the air to conjure the next example. “Peter Mantino. He was about the same age. He’d been in charge of the western operations for a while. Was he in Las Vegas robbing the suckers? No. Was he in L.A. cutting into the drug trade? No. Was he in Portland or Seattle trying to organize the ports? No. He lived in Santa Fe like a retired homosexual art dealer. He did nothing to increase his family’s stake in the richest, fastest-growing region in the country. He was lazy and corrupt.”
Elizabeth squinted her eyes and tilted her head to look up at Richardson. “It’s been a long time since you actually prosecuted a case, hasn’t it? I mean in front of a jury.”
“Angelo Fratelli.” Richardson stopped for a moment. “You’re not buying this, are you?”
“Go on, Angelo Fratelli,” she prompted. “Corrupt.”
“What I’m getting at is this. We suddenly get three killings, at least two of them done by a very special professional exterminator. Forget everything else we think we know about him. In fact, forget him completely. One correspondence that we seem to have overlooked is that these three people were lousy specimens, and that raises the possibility that their deaths were purchased by reformers.”
“What sort of reformers were you thinking of?”
“Two kinds come to mind. One is the old men at the top—the last generation, who came to power before World War Two. They see that the next generation has grown up into a bunch of slobs, and they don’t like it. They decide, in effect, to replace all of middle management.”
“Okay,” said Elizabeth. “That’s possible. But you said two kinds.”
“The other one is conservatives.”
“Somebody out there who’s older than the old men?”
“In a way. An ultra-neoconservative movement.”
“This is something you know about, or are you making it up?”
“A little of each. You’ve got the generation that’s coming up now, in their twenties and thirties. All over the world—in the Middle East, in Europe, in this country—you have a big stampede toward the past. Every last one of them is dirt-ignorant, and more conservative than their great-grandmothers. Why should the Mafia be immune?”
“No reason that I know of. So what would these people be after?”
“Power. They’re old enough now to have seen a little action and done some dirty work. When they see the degenerate jerks who are in charge they become instant reformers.”
“Okay, then what?”
“They get in touch with a hit man.”
Elizabeth thought about this for a moment. “No, I don’t think so. That’s not the way it works.”
“What do you mean?”
“Reformers have to pull the trigger themselves. If they think the generation that’s in power is fat and lazy, they have to prove that they themselves are not by killing them personally. I can see the old dons hiring some messenger to go out and clean house, but I can’t see a revolution by proxy.”
Richardson paused. “No,” he said. “I guess I can’t either. What are the other alternatives?”
“I don’t know,” said Elizabeth. “I can’t prove that the lieutenant in Buffalo was wrong. It makes perfect sense that with Carl Bala in jail, somebody might kill his caretakers and take over his holdings. And what you were saying about the three victims makes it seem more likely. If you have a business with terrific potential but inefficient management, you have unfriendly takeovers, right?”
“Okay, let’s start with what we know. Tony T was killed by the Butcher’s Boy. He waltzed in there alone and flew out on the next flight. Is that how you’d do an unfriendly takeover?”
Elizabeth shrugged. “It wouldn’t be a bad start. You hire somebody who’s supposed to be the most efficient and reliable at that kind of work but who has no known connection with you. He spends a couple of days decapitating the hierarchy and disappears again. That leaves the field clear, with Carlo Balacontano locked in jail, his lieutenants dead and his troops presumably in disarray.”
“Is that what’s happened?”
“I don’t think so, but if the information we’ve been treating as factual is accurate, then it’s possible.”
“You mean we still haven’t started at zero? We have to go back further?”
“I’m just saying that we shouldn’t get too attached to our facts. We both listened to the tape recording of Tony T getting killed. He says, ‘You?’ Big bang, lots of screaming and scuffling. Then Mrs. T says, ‘He’s wearing a wire!’ Nobody says, ‘Hey, wasn’t that the Butcher’s Boy?’ or words to that effect. Not on the tape, when they were alone. Only Mrs. T says it later, and what she says is that her brother-in-law told her, but she’d never seen the man before in her life.”
“Why would either of them lie?”
“I don’t think they did. But do you remember what it was like ten years ago? When Dominic Palermo came to me in the middle of the night looking for protection, he told me all this stuff about a hired killer. He’d never seen him, just heard about him. The people who were talking about him just referred to him as the Butcher’s Boy. What if there is no such person? What if it’s just a name for a whole lot of men who have done murders for money? Nobody knows who it was, so it all gets attributed to somebody whose exploits are, by this time, mostly imaginary like Buffalo Bill’s, or maybe even attributed to a completely imaginary person, like Paul Bunyan.”
“You’re leaving out the best evidence we have—Carlo Balacontano. He told you about him.”
“He told me that the Butcher’s Boy was the man who really committed the crime he’s spending his life in prison for. I mentioned him first.”
“But you believed him.”
“I still do. I think Carlo Balacontano was framed for the murder of Arthur Fieldston, and I think this department was so eager to put him away that people forgot to ask a lot of questions they were being paid to ask.”
“Did you say anything at the time?”
“You mean you didn’t hear? I said it until everybody got tired of listening, and then I said it again until they decided I wasn’t a team player. That’s what got me my vacation in Europe.”
“No …” Richardson looked genuinely shocked. Elizabeth couldn’t tell whether he was lying, but how could he not be? He had been here in those days. “I thought … They said you’d just sort of burned out, because of the killings …”
She wondered if he was figuring out the rest of it, and hoped he wasn’t. He had at least the right to assume that he had his job because he had earned it, and not because all the competition had turned it down. “It’s not as bad as it sounds,” she said. “I did all right. Jim came over and joined me there, and that’s how I got him to marry me.”
Richardson accepted the escape route gratefully. “Really? That sounds romantic.”
“Oh, Jim was a romantic guy.” She smiled.
But she could already see Richardson’s youngest analyst hurrying toward them with the morning’s list of disasters. He followed her eyes and saw her too. “Lana,” he said. “What have you got?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. She glanced at Elizabeth, and seemed to wonder if she should acknowledge that she knew the older woman was somehow above her in the department, so she said, “I wondered if one of you had time to look at this.” She laid the printout on Elizabeth’s desk, and hovered while Elizabeth and Richardson read it.
