“Thank you for not burdening me with the truth,” he said. “I prefer a knowing silence.”
He picked up his lighter and handed it to Kaz, who took Brackett’s letter and lit it over the ashtray on the inspector’s desk. It flamed quickly, the words disintegrating into ash.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
I hadn’t gotten much sleep during the past thirty-six hours. None was more like it, and it had caught up to me. O’Flaherty informed us we could see Montini at nine o’clock in the morning. Kaz said he was going to walk in the gardens with Nini, to discuss the case, of course, and ask her about what she knew of Severino Rossi and the Genoa connection, since he’d come through there while Corrigan and others had been in that city as well. I thought that was a fine story, and wished him well. I grabbed some quick chow in the refectory and then hit the sack. I was bone tired, but my mind wouldn’t stop working the details. What did we know about Rossi? Or Brackett and his late-night bedroom visits? And what about Corrigan, Zlatko, even stand-up guys like John May and Hugh O’Flaherty? Why did Monsignor Bruzzone disappear for one night? For that matter, why had he not left the Vatican for months prior to that?
May and O’Flaherty were involved in the black market. Had they unknowingly brought in a deadly partner?
But the biggest puzzler was still Corrigan himself. Why had he been murdered? By all accounts he was one of the good guys. Even with his college connections to Wild Bill Donovan of the OSS and his unwitting intelligence work for Remke, he was a straight arrow who’d done good works. It made sense that, as an American at the Vatican, he’d responded to the phony Rudder the way he had, passing along tidbits of information. So why was he killed?
Money. Corrigan, Bruzzone, and O’Flaherty had all carried money to Genoa, along with forged identity papers, worth a small fortune. Worth a life. Money and papers equaled hope. There it was again. Those three carried hope with them, bearing it as a gift to Jews and other refugees in Genoa. Had they crossed paths with Severino Rossi in Genoa? Had hope passed him by, and was he seeking revenge?
My eyelids felt heavy, and I thought I was still going over the case, but suddenly I was watching Rossi walking the streets of Boston, down in the Dorchester Hill neighborhood. In threadbare clothes he shuffled along the street-it looked like Blue Hill Avenue, with its tailor shops, meat markets, and dry goods stores-his neck craning at the signs in English and Yiddish. I couldn’t quite make them out, the words evaporating as I tried to focus on each one.
The Hill was a Jewish neighborhood. Mostly Polish Jews, those who had escaped the pogroms in Russia and Poland and settled in Boston and Chelsea. I followed Rossi, turning down a side street lined with two-family houses and three-deckers. I wanted to ask him what he was looking for, but I never could quite catch up to him. He disappeared, and I turned around to find myself in South Boston, miles away.
I was with Dad, at M Street Park. We were in uniform, me in my bluecoat and Dad wearing his brown suit, hitching up his pants the way he did when his badge, cuffs, and revolver began to weigh him down. It was a cold day, the wind flapping his jacket and stinging our faces. The old brownstones behind us hid the sun, and in front of us a dead man was slumped against a tree.
I awoke with a start. I’d been dreaming, confused images of home and Rossi roiling my unconscious. I’d liked the memory of home, and I recalled the case at M Street Park. I remembered Dad didn’t speak when we first arrived. It was always that way when he brought me along to a crime scene. I was there for crowd control and to get coffee when the detectives wanted it. Plus the overtime, sure. But his real reason was to teach me.
I circled the body. His legs were stretched out on the ground. His head lolled to the left. A gunshot to the right temple had blasted bone, brains, and blood against the tree trunk. A. 38 revolver lay on the ground near his right hand. The question was, suicide or murder? Dad never assumed suicide, preferring not to rule out foul play even in the most obvious situations. To me, it looked obvious at first glance. But Dad always said a detective doesn’t glance.
I didn’t touch anything but knelt near the body and looked for clues. Dad had pounded that one into my thick head. Anything is a clue. The clothes on a corpse can tell you what the guy planned to do that day. The wear on the soles of his shoes could tell you if he drove for a living or walked with a peculiar gait. I looked at his hands. No ring on the left hand. Powder burns on the right. I leaned in closer. There was a yellow nicotine stain between his first two fingers. I sniffed, hunting for the aroma of smoke. It was there, despite the wind and the smell of blood and gunpowder. I stood, studied the ground. I looked at the horizon.
“He was murdered,” I said.
“Tell me more, sonny boy,” Dad said.
“He’s a heavy smoker. But there are no matches on the ground, no last cigarette. Maybe he had his last smoke elsewhere and came here to kill himself, but that doesn’t feel right.”
“Why?”
“This is a nice park. Nice buildings on three sides. But the way he’s facing, toward East First Street, there’s a power plant and waterfront buildings. The way I figure it, a suicide would sit facing the other direction, have a cigarette, take in a view of the trees and the park, then do the deed.”
“So what happened here?”
“The killer grabbed him, brought him here. I can’t tell for sure, but I don’t see a pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket, which he probably was never without. Plunked him down here, facing away from the houses so no one would notice right away.”
“And then told him to shoot himself?”
“No. The killer shot him, then put his hand around the weapon and fired a second round into the ground to get those powder burns on it.”
“Good thinking, Billy. Now bring that boy over here. The lad who found the body.”
The kid was maybe twelve or thirteen. He was gangly, shivering in the cold wind.
“You touch the body?” Dad asked him.
“Wouldn’t touch a dead guy,” he said, staring at the ground.
“Don’t blame you,” Dad said. “You’re a good lad, I can tell. Some folks would have rolled him over and taken his wallet. You did the right thing.” Dad clapped him on his bony shoulder, but didn’t let go. He pulled him closer and patted him down, producing a pack of Raleighs from his jacket pocket, Sir Walter himself staring at us. “The lighter, boy.”
“It was on the ground, honest,” he stammered as he dug a Zippo out of his pants pocket. “The smokes too. I figured nobody’d want ’em anyway.”
“Were there butts on the ground?”
“Yeah, two. I cleaned ’em up so no one would take notice of the missing pack.”
“You’re too young to smoke, kid. I ought to tell your folks,” Dad said. He let the kid beg and promise never to take anything again before telling him to shove off.
“You had a good theory, Billy,” Dad said as we both looked out toward the harbor. “But Walt Hogan here, he worked across the way. Owned one of them warehouses. So he did have his last smoke here, looking out at something that was important to him.”
“Why’d he kill himself?” I asked, as we walked out of the park, past rows of narrow houses.
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe money problems, maybe trouble with the law we don’t know about yet. We’ll find out. What’s important to remember, aside from not trusting whoever finds the body, is that there are more reasons for killing than you can shake a stick at. Makes little difference if it’s your own death or another’s.”
“Is hope a reason?” I asked.
Before Dad could answer, the front door of a house opened and Severino Rossi stepped out. He opened his mouth to speak, and then I awoke with a sharp gasp, only to see Kaz shutting the door in our darkened room. Somewhere along the line I’d fallen asleep again, and Rossi had found his way back into my dream.
“What time is it?”
“Almost midnight,” Kaz said. He pulled the blackout curtains tight and lit a lamp. “Did I wake you?”
“Yeah,” I said, planting my feet on the floor and untying my shoelaces. “I was dreaming about a case my dad
