Shallow Graves

at my brother’s apartment a while, then into a family building, my cousin Ooch there in the basement. Guy was a tiger in the ring, Cuddy. One fight he had, undercard in the early sixties, he takes enough punches the first two rounds to kill a horse, then knocks the guy out middle of the third. Know what I do now?“
    I didn’t like Danucci being so erratic, jumping from one topic to the next. I’d seen grief like that in Vietnam , the kind of strobe-light emotion that turned into violence. Easily.
    The cold stare. “I said, know what I do now?“
    “No, I don’t.“
    “I build strip malls. Not strip joints. The little eight- or ten-store things, with maybe an anchor like a supermarket or a discount house one end. Lay down an apron of asphalt, paint some white lines, you got yourself the American Dream. One-stop shopping. All the guys ten years ago put up the highrise office buildings, they’re in bankruptcy court now, twenty guys’ hands in their pockets. Me, I never had a mall go bad. Never, not one. Hard times, they might not make me a fortune, but every week, every year, people got to buy food and clothes, Cuddy, and they stop at my malls to do it.“
    For something to do, I drank a little beer.
    “That’s where I am, I get the call. I’m in a meeting, we just came back from the site, a new one down near Philly. It was a tough deal to put together, and I was doing it, getting it through this guy’s skull that it’s going forward, no matter what he thinks. I’m in this meeting, I still have my hard hat with me, and this guy’s secretary comes in and he fucking near bites her head off. She’s probably been there three hours on her own time by then, but she looks kind of sick and says to me, ‘Mr. Danucci, it’s your brother on the phone.’ And so I say, ‘I’ll call him back,’ and the guy starts to chew out his secretary some more, and she says, ‘I think it’s very important.’ I got to remember that girl, she stood up without letting on. Doing her job. I tell the guy who’s ragging her to shut the fuck up, I can take the call. So here I am, in this conference room with a view of some dirty river they got down there, and my brother Vinnie tells me over the telephone that my Tina is dead.“
    Danucci squeezed his eyes shut. He reached over the bar, grabbed the Scotch bottle itself and just slugged from it until I thought he’d drown. Then he kept hold of the bottle by its neck and coughed once.
    “I took that hard hat, Cuddy, and I tried to throw it through the window. The glass didn’t give, so I tried it with the phone. Then the guy I’m with figures he’s next, he don’t get me a seat on the first plane.“
    Danucci drew a breath, the hard, roaring kind he’d taken earlier. “You were a cop, right?“
    “Just in the Army.“
    “Same difference. You know what the cops in Boston think about this?“
    I pictured Holt, smugly feeding me little chunks like a seal. Keeping me from seeing the file and the name “Danucci“ appearing somewhere in it, maybe all over it.
    Joseph Danucci said, “They think, ‘What do you know, there is a fucking God.’ They think, ‘We been trying to crucify Tommy the Temper for sixty fucking years for twenty different rackets, and we couldn’t, and now his granddaughter’s a corpse, and we don’t got to do shit about it.’ “
    This wasn’t the time to bait him.
    Danucci said, “They think it’s like ‘poetic justice,’ Cuddy. The capo ’s grand-kid gets strangled by some fucking junkie cat burglar.“
    He took another drink, less now that the level in the bottle was lower. Subconsciously, he seemed to want it to last, though I bet myself there was a case of it in a closet somewhere nearby.
    Danucci gestured toward the door. “Primo says you’re working for some insurance outfit?“
    “I’m private. The modeling agency your daughter worked with took out a policy on her to protect themselves. The company asked me to look into things.“
    Danucci’s nostrils flared. “Oh, you’re gonna look into things, all right.“
    He took a step toward me. Pretty steady for the booze he’d put away. I didn’t get up.
    “You’re gonna find out who aced my daughter, pal.“
    I didn’t say anything.
    Another step. “And when you do, you’re going to tell me. You’re going to fill out whatever fucking forms the company makes you do, and you’re going to shrug your fucking shoulders when the cops come around asking questions.“
    A third