They couldn’t find out much about the Bianchis’ love life, but they could look into the household’s finances. Erin and Vic started slogging through the dead man’s files without much hope. Lorenzo was retired Mafia. After Al Capone had gone down for income tax evasion, the Mob had wised up and gotten good at laundering money. Accordingly, when Lieutenant Webb arrived, they had nothing to show for their labor. The visible part of the Bianchis’ finances was completely innocuous.
“Interesting theory,” he said when they explained what Levine had said. “You thinking the wife tried to poison him with the chocolate, failed, and tried again with his medication?”
“Why not?” Erin replied.
“Why’d she want to kill him?” Webb asked.
“Besides the obvious?” Vic interjected.
“Enlighten me,” Webb said.
“You were there,” Vic said. “Those two hated each other. It was just bitch, bitch, bitch the whole time.”
“Reminded me of my second marriage,” Webb said. “But I didn’t kill my wife.”
“You’re not in a Mafia family,” Erin said.
“If you’re right, and the food was poisoned, there’s only one way to prove it,” he said.
“We gotta get our hands on the dishes,” Vic said.
“She’ll have washed them by now,” Erin said.
“And we’d need a warrant to retrieve them anyway,” Webb sighed. “Which we won’t get. It was a thought.”
“I’m wondering something, sir,” Erin said.
“I’m listening,” Webb said.
“If this was a marital thing, a personal murder, then where’s Vinnie the Oil Man in all this?”
“Vinnie the who?” Vic asked.
“Moreno,” Webb said, nodding. “Did your CIs give you anything useful on him?”
“He’s a big player in the Lucarelli family,” Erin said. “According to a couple guys I talked to, he basically runs things for them in Manhattan, since their old man’s in jail.”
“It doesn’t make sense,” Vic said. “Big guys don’t usually sweat the small shit. He shouldn’t have been there in person.”
“It could be that he knew Bianchi,” Erin said. “They might’ve been close. I haven’t had a chance to look into their dealings.”
“Make that your next step,” Webb said. “There’s a connection, I’d bet three packs of smokes on it. Moreno stuck his neck out for this.”
“So did that dirty doc,” Vic said. “Seems like they went into panic mode. Crazy, really. I mean, if all he had in his bloodstream was prescription meds, what the hell were they worried about?”
“Maybe they didn’t know what killed him,” Erin said. “And they assumed it was something that would cause trouble if we found it.”
“Like what?” Webb asked.
“I don’t know,” Erin admitted.
“See if you can find out.”
So Erin went back to her computer. While Vic kept going through bank records, she pulled Vincenzo Moreno’s police jacket. It was thinner than it ought to be for such a senior figure in the Mob. He wasn’t called the Oil Man for nothing. Vinnie had slipped out of the DA’s clutches more than once. He’d done some time in his youth, eighteen months for assault. He’d been busted for a weapons charge once, twice for possession of heroin. None of it was unusual for a young gangster. Once he’d grown up, he’d either gotten more careful or gotten luckier. He’d kept his head down and his nose clean while quietly accumulating power and influence. He’d avoided the big cleanup of Mafiosi during the ‘90s, somehow dodging all the big RICO cases. When the dust had cleared, Vinnie the Oil Man was the tallest guy left standing amid the wreckage. Now the NYPD knew he ran the Lucarelli rackets in Manhattan; they just hadn’t been able to prove it.
Once she had a sense of the guy, she checked Vinnie’s file against Lorenzo’s, looking for points of contact. She’d only just started looking when she got a hit.
“Hey, guys,” she called. “Come over here.”
“What’s up?” Vic asked. “Let me guess. They killed Jimmy Hoffa, and you found out where he’s buried.”
“Not quite,” Erin said. She wondered in passing whether Corky might have a story about what had happened to the infamous union leader. He’d just been a kid, still in Ireland, when Hoffa had vanished, but he did know lots of Teamsters bigwigs. General consensus was that the former Teamsters’ president had been murdered by Irish hitman Frank Sheeran, but it had never been proven. She filed the thought away for future reference and brought her mind back to the current task.
“When Bianchi was running the Mafia’s garbage business on Long Island, Vinnie worked for him,” she said.
“Doing what?” Webb asked.
“On paper, he was a driver,” Erin said, clicking through the pages of the file the NYPD had built on the garbage racket. “But it looks like he might’ve been into heroin distribution. The Narcs tried to build a case on Bianchi. They got some tips that his garbage business was a front for a drug network.”
“What happened?”
“Insufficient evidence,” Erin said. “Three of Bianchi’s trucks got destroyed on their lot. Ammonium nitrate fuel oil explosives.”
“Like the Oklahoma City bomb,” Vic said.
“Or the IRA,” Webb said, giving Erin a sharp look.
Erin didn’t say anything. She was pretty sure her current boyfriend had built at least some of those bombs.
“So the Narcs gave up on it?” Vic asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “Bianchi was out of the trash business after that. Anyway, he may have been some kind of mentor to Vinnie while the Oil Man was coming up through the ranks. And it sounds like both of them may have been in the drug trade.”
“What, so he thinks Lorenzo died from shooting up heroin?” Vic demanded. “That’s crazy. I’ve seen plenty of hop-heads, and Bianchi was clean. Cleaner than he should’ve been, you ask me. That guy could’ve used a little pick-me-up.”
Erin was trying to think like a mobster. What would Carlyle say? He’d
