The Return of Gianni Falcone: Chapter 7
By: Kirsten Porter
Tags: Fiction, Mystery, Mafia, Serial, Novel

Image from Pixabay

It was about five o’clock when I got to her place, out of breath and still drunk. I pounded on the door first with my palm, then the heel of my hand, then finally my fist, before I heard the deadlock switch and the lock turn. She was wearing a pink bathrobe and had curlers in her hair, and her brown eyes blinked dumbly at me from under smudged mascara. I put myself in front of the door jamb so she couldn’t close it and put my hand on her arm. That seemed to remind her who I was, and all of a sudden she went from sleepy to terrified.

“I have a gun,” she said. “Get out or I’ll shoot you, you…”

She searched her brain for a word bad enough to describe me but couldn’t find one.

“You don’t have a gun, Leigh. Trust me, I would have fucking found it.”

“There’s no need for language like that. What kind of person — ”

“Just listen, please. To paraphrase Carlyle, there’s nothin’ to say that ain’t better than shutting up.” I rested my head on the doorpost, suddenly overwhelmed by the fact that I hadn’t slept since I was last with Dolly, and then only for a few hours, which I didn’t want to think about anyway, because that way led thinking about Dolly’s fingers broken, her throat bruised, a bullet in her head.

Leigh was looking down, shaking as hard as an earthquake, but she let me stumble past her and collapse onto the couch where O’Brien had been. I hadn’t the stomach or strength to move, so I stayed where I was. She slid into the chair opposite and looked at me sort of as I had always imagined Cleopatra looked at…well, everyone except Antony when he was on her good side. All of a sudden I understood why women like that seem to be all over the place in literature. Nothing makes you so eager to be loved as a beautiful woman who holds so little love for you.

“So you have something important to tell me.” No question, just the gauntlet of the sentence landing between us. She didn’t even pay me the compliment of sarcasm.

I swallowed hard. My throat was dry, between the drinking and the weeping and the running. I coughed a couple times, then said, “I need some water.”

She made a sound between laughing and crying, then got up and ran the tap into the glass. I drank it down like my throat was a desert and asked for more. Three glasses it took before I could talk, and by then I found I was out of words. I handed her the newspaper.

Leigh read the front page in silence, while I drank down a fourth glass of water. I could feel the liquid seeping back into my muscles.

“Did you know her?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“A friend?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry.” She poured me another glass of water, but I let it sit.

“That’s not why I came. The last time I was here you said some things to me, asked me some questions, and I handled it badly.”

“No, don’t mention it now. You just lost someone, this isn’t the time to talk about it.”

“The last place I was at after I left you was Dolly’s. I spent the night there.”

“You…” She shook her head. “I don’t know what you’re telling me.”

“Just listen. I slept there, left around dawn. When I left, I ran into Detective O’Brien.” She still didn’t seem to be understanding it, so I went on. “Leigh. He must have followed me from your apartment.”

“I don’t think so. I don’t think I understand. I think you’re trying to tell me too much. I didn’t even want you to come back. God, I need a drink.” She sloshed scotch into a glass and gulped it down, then set the glass down shakily on the kitchen counter. “So, let me try to understand. Not a few hours after you left my apartment, Detective O’Brien followed you to a friend’s house…and that friend is now dead.”

“Yes.”

“In the same manner as Victor Blausch.”

“Yes.”

“That’s insane. That can’t be… Are you telling me that Daniel O’Brien — Detective Daniel O’Brien, of the New York Police — is Gianni Falcone? The mob killer? That can’t be. God, a week ago I didn’t even know who Gianni Falcone was. Now listen to me, talking like I’m some sort of expert. I don’t even know why that’s crazy. For all I know Gianni’s just some sort of police fall guy for people they don’t want to fill out incident reports for. My god, do you think that’s it? They’re just killing prostitutes now?”

“No.” I took the scotch from her and took a mouthful straight from the bottle. “Trust me, that ain’t it. At least — Gianni’s a person, all right?”

“I don’t even want to know how you know that.”

“Good, because I ain’t telling you.”

We stared each other down, she sitting straight up like a queen on a throne, me slouched belligerently on the couch.

“You going to drink all my scotch that way?”

I took another swig from the bottle.

“Right.” She sighed, her fingers wrapped in her hair, tugging gently at the roots under the curlers, which were a shade more brown than the rest of her hair. I hadn’t noticed before, which just went to show how distracted she had me. I sure as hell wasn’t going to keep making that mistake. “Look, I have something to tell you.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah, I’ve been thinking all day about what…about whatever that was last night. I haven’t heard from you in more than twenty-four hours.” It sounded accusing, and I sat up, as much as I could after two more drinks of scotch than I really needed.

“You told me I wasn’t welcome.”

“I…I know.”

“You threatened to shoot me not five minutes ago.”

“Look, I’ve been thinking, alright? About what you said after O’Brien left. So I decided to do a little bit of extra digging about the Falcone murders. It wasn’t easy. Someone’s done a lot of work to keep him out of the papers.”

She paused a moment, waiting for a response, but I wasn’t going to give her one without knowing where this led. After a moment, she went on.

“Still, there’s no way to keep everything out of the papers. There are a few leads. Some as old as maybe fifteen years. Wait, I’ll show you.”

She shuffled in her slippers over to her purse where it hung on the doorknob and pulled out a stack of mimeographed newspaper clippings. She sat on the far end of the couch and dropped them between us, and I began to sort through them. Giacomo Rossi, shot twice through the heart, throttled, ears slashed. Jacob Bergman, shot twice, throttled, tongue cut out. Federico Bonangelo, shot, throttled, fingers broken. Nero Volpe, tongue. Charlie Richards, fingers. And so on.

“So not an isolated incident. Is that what you’re telling me?” I reached for the scotch again, and she pulled it away, her eyes boring into me, waiting for me to see something I couldn’t find.

“Look harder,” she said. “Impress me.”

She was so beautiful I couldn’t breathe and look at her at the same time, her face hard and focused, all her mind centered on something other than me. I grasped the pile of clippings instead of her swinging dishwater-to-golden curls, stared at them instead of the swell of her breasts under her pink bathrobe. Each body a new thing to solve. I focused in on what the papers said. A stack of faces, each of them peaceful in death — like Blausch. None of them looked like a murder victim. None of them seemed even to have anticipated their deaths. And the tongues — the faces were bright and clean, the mouths pale and white. Maybe they had been cleaned after death? But no — no blood at the scenes. Ears were the same. Ears and tongues may not seem to have much in common, but they both bleed. A lot, if the heart is pumping like you’re about to get shot. If there’s no blood, that means either a clean-up job or no heartbeat. Which jived with what I knew about Blausch, but not Gianni. Once you were dead, Gianni was gone — or at least that’s how the stories went.

But then, that was the best way to control a legend, wasn’t it? No survivors. A conspiracy of whispers, meant to keep people in line. The private family boogeyman, Gianni Falcone, with as little proof as to what really happened to that string of dead bodies as any other boogeyman. And on the subject of those dead bodies…

“Bergman and Richards. Huh.”

Leigh was quite literally on the edge of her seat, smiling with her eyes, breathing slow for fear of missing the next thing. I smiled back.

“You remember what I said to you that first day.”

She nodded enthusiastically. “It’s exactly what I thought when I saw this list. Looks like we have a copycat on our hands. Maybe he doesn’t know Gianni’s been gone.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “You make a hell of a Watson, you know that?”

“I’m not sure that’s a compliment.” But she laughed anyway. “Alright, Sherlock, what’s the answer here?”

“Being honest with you, I’m not sure I know. But I do notice that these people ain’t all Italian.”

“Yes, I noticed that as well. I was surprised, since I had thought you were saying, or at least implying, that these were mob hits.”

“Well, yeah, I mean, that’s what I thought at the time. This…doesn’t rule that out necessarily, but I’d like to know a little more about these two here. About all of them, I guess. We need to see what they have in common, if the answer isn’t the family.”

Leigh produced a notepad from a side table and started scribbling. Then she stopped.

“Maxine?”

“Yeah?”

“What’s your real name?”

“Ah.” Right. “That would be Colazzo.”

“Maxine Colazzo?”

“Massima in Italian. But my friends call me Maxie.”

She sucked at her front teeth and nodded slowly. “Nice to meet you, Maxie,” she said at last.