Invasion of Privacy

pulled the fucking trigger.”
    “Some somebody.”
    “Yeah, but preferably not me.”
    Zuppone couldn’t quite make the tone light enough.
    I said, “DiRienzi is the only candidate who comes to mind.”
    “Even that’s gonna be a tough sell, he was only a paperwork guy, not muscle.”
    “And why weren’t you around when he was shooting your out-of-town guests, who ought to be checking in with their people in Milwaukee soon.”
    Zuppone made a careful left turn. “I’m glad you appreciate my situation.”
    “It gets worse. I wasn’t going to hand DiRienzi over to Junior, I’m not going to help you bundle him on a plane back to the Midwest .”
    “Even if you knew where DiRienzi is, right?”
    “That’s right.”
    Another glance. “You really don’t fucking know?”
    “Primo, you just killed two guys proving it.”
    Zuppone brought the Lincoln slowly to the curb outside a furniture store shuttered for the night. Always the careful driver, he seemed to be concentrating even more on the little tasks, something I remembered doing after having to take a life. Or lives.
    He left the engine running. “Cuddy, I never done anything like this before.”
    I looked at him.
    Primo shook his head. “No, I don’t mean whacking somebody, for chrissake. Or even somebody in the organization, for that matter. I mean doing a hit on my own, something that wasn’t authorized.”
    “Especially if it was somebody you were told to protect.”
    “That’s right. That’s exactly right. Those guys, they were my responsibility. Ianella, he might have been the worst prick I met in ten years, but him and Coco were my responsibility, and I didn’t... Aw, shit.”
    He rubbed his right palm over his eyes, like he was trying to wake up from a dream. A bad one. “What I’m saying here, I never did anything I wasn’t told to. I always been faithful to my oath, the one I took when they made me a member. You read in the papers about how the ceremony is all mumbo jumbo, like some kind of witch-doctor shit. But it’s real, Cuddy, the realest thing I ever went through. I’m a made fucking member of our organization, and for twenty-two fucking years I always stood up for it. And now I’m so fucking bummed out, I can’t even think straight.”
    “Primo?”
    “Yeah?”
    “Just one question.”
    “What is it?”
    “There any doubt in your mind that you did the right thing today?”
    Zuppone looked at me steadily, the eyes moist but not filling with tears. “No. No fucking doubt whatsoever. You were telling them the truth, and Ianella was going to kill you for it, and Coco couldn’t have stopped him.”
    “Well, then, you shouldn’t feel bad about that.”
    “I won’t, you can explain to me one thing.”
    “What’s that?”
    “How you going to get us off the hook with my people and Milwaukee ?”

    Primo dropped me at my car in downtown, and I drove toward the condo, nagged by what Cocozzo had said back in the slaughterhouse. “Andrew Dees” really didn’t have any reason to run on Thursday night. He might have been madder than hell at Olga Evorova for having me check into his background, but that didn’t explain his leaving the Witness Protection Program, with or without her. Especially since DiRienzi knew the marshals’ service would have relocated him again if he had any real reason to fear that his current identity had been compromised. It just didn’t make sense.
    I thought about what I’d been told by Norman Elmendorf and the Stepanians, the argument from unit 42 they all overheard, Steven Stepanian seeing “ Dees ” loading luggage into the Porsche. If Stepanian was lying about what he saw, then he and his wife could have been the couple dropping off Olga’s car in Elmer’s lot at the airport. But why would the Stepanians want to impersonate DiRienzi and Evorova? To help with some escape plan that a neighbor they hardly knew didn’t really need?
    And if Steven Stepanian was telling the truth, then did somebody else hijack DiRienzi and Evorova before they got to Logan ? Most of the other males I’d seen were probably “tall” enough for Elmer’s description of the driver. But none had any motive I knew about, and besides, Boyce Hendrix was part of the cooperating witness program, Norman Elmendorf wasn’t very mobile, and Jamey Robinette was attending a band concert with his mother on Thursday night.
    Things were making even less sense to me as I parked the Prelude behind the brownstone.