The market was a sprawling complex of indoor and outdoor stalls. On the sidewalk outside the high-windowed arching edifice
fishmongers, wearing woolen gloves with the fingers cut off, woolen caps pulled down over their ears, and bloodstained white
smocks over layers of sweaters, stood hawking their merchandise while potential customers picked over the fish as if they
were inspecting diamonds for flaws.
It was a clear, cold, windy, sunny Monday morning.
“Where do we start?” Georgie asked.
He was hoping to discourage her. He did not want her to meet the man who’d dropped off that key to the bus terminal locker.
He did not want her to learn that nobody had been in that locker except him and Tony here, who was backing away from the fish
stalls as if his grandmother had cooked fish for him whenever he visited her on a Friday, which she had, and which he’d hated.
He learned after her death that
she’d
hated fish, too. His mother, on the other hand, never had to cook fish in her entire lifetime because the church changed
its rules. His mother was a staunch Catholic who practiced birth control and didn’t believe in confession.
Priscilla looked bewildered.
She had never been to this part of the city before, certainly never to a fish market here, had never seen so much damn fish
ever,
and could not imagine how she could even
hope
to find a tall blond man among all these men wearing hats and smocks and gloves.
The bitter cold did not help.
Priscilla was wearing a mink, dark and soft and supple in contrast to the ratty orange-brown coat her grandmother had been
wearing when someone shot her. The fur afforded scant protection against the harsh wind blowing in over the river. Georgie
and Tony were wearing belted cloth coats and woolen mufflers, their fedoras pulled down low on their foreheads, their hands
in their pockets, just like movie gangsters. Wind wailing around them, the three walked the four dockside blocks, studying
the men behind each of the outdoor stalls and ice bins, searching for telltale blond sideburns at the rolled edges of obiquitous
woolen caps.
At the end of twenty minutes of close scrutiny, they were happy to be entering the long enclosed market. After the howling
wind outside, even the indoor din seemed welcoming, fishmongers touting pompano and squid, sea bass and flounder, mackerel
and shrimp, sole and snapper. They were coming down the center aisle, tall windows streaming wintry sunlight, stalls of iced
fish on either side of them, Georgie blowing on his hands, Tony wearing a pained look in memory of his grandmother, Priscilla
holding the collar of the mink closed with one hand because to tell the truth it was almost as cold inside here as it was
outside, when all at once …
Behind the stall on the right …
Just ahead …
They saw a hatless man with muddy blond hair …
Standing some six feet two inches tall …
Wearing a white smock over a blue coat and a red muffler …
Bearing a marked resemblance to Robert Redford, and lifting a nice fat halibut off the ice to show to a female customer.
Hawes and Carella were just pulling up outside.
“Blond hair and blue eyes,” Hawes said.
“Must be from Milan,” Carella said.
“Or Rome. Rome has blonds, too.”
“Redheads,” Carella said.
A gust of wind almost knocked Hawes off his feet.
“Which first?” Carella asked. “Inside or out?”
Ask a stupid question.
Hawes reached for the doorknob.
At the downtown end of the enclosed market, four city blocks from where the detectives went in, Priscilla was just asking
Lorenzo Schiavinato if he knew her grandmother Svetlana.
“Non parlo inglese,”
Lorenzo said.
Thank God, Georgie thought.
“He doesn’t speak English,” he translated for Priscilla.
“Ask him if he knew my grandmother.”
“I don’t speak Italian,” Georgie said.
“I do,” Tony said, and Georgie wanted to kill him.
“Ask him if he knew my grandmother.”
Tony’s
grandmother was from Siciliy, where they did not exactly speak Dante’s Italian. The dialect Tony now used was the one he’d
heard at Filomena’s knee while she was cooking her abominable fish. First he asked Lorenzo his name.
“Mi chiamo Lorenzo Schiavinato,”
Lorenzo said.
“His name’s Lorenzo,” Tony translated. “I couldn’t make out the last name.”
Small wonder, Georgie thought.
“Ask him if he knew my grandmother.”
“Where are you from?” Tony asked.
“Milano,” Lorenzo said.
Where they spoke
Florentine
Italian, and where the Sicilian dialect was scarcely understood. Lorenzo was, in fact, squinting his very blue eyes in an
effort to understand Tony’s Italian, which itself was a bastardization of the dialect his sainted grandmother had spoken.
It occurred to Georgie that the so-called “Italian” conversation between them was taking place in a fish market reputedly
run by the mob, whose Italian was limited to a few basic words like
“Boff on gool,”
which itself was a bastardization of the time-honored
“Va fa in culo,”
better left uninterpreted in the presence of a fine lady like Priscilla Stetson.
Who now said, rather impatiently this time, “Ask him if he knew my goddamn
grand
mother.”
In Sicilian Italian, Tony asked if Lorenzo perchance had known Priscilla’s grandmother.
In Florentine Italian, Lorenzo asked
who
perchance her grandmother might have been.
“Svetlana Dyalovich,” Tony said.
And Lorenzo began running.
From where the detectives were coming down the center aisle of the indoor market, checking out the men selling fish from stalls
and barrels and bins and ice chests on either side of them, they saw a tall blond man running toward them, chased by Svetlana’s
granddaughter and the two goons who’d braced them at the club on Saturday night.
If the tall runner was, in fact, Lorenzo Schiavinato, then he was the one who’d bought the gun that killed Priscilla’s grandmother.
Despite what was known in the trade as “background”—the number of innocent bystanders at any given scene—the fact that Lorenzo
had purchased the murder weapon was justification within the guidelines for Carella and Hawes to draw their own guns. Besides,
the man was running. In this city, unless you were running to catch a bus, the very act was suspicious.
The guns came out.
“Stop!” Hawes shouted. “Police!”
“Police!” Carella shouted. “Stop!”
Lorenzo wasn’t stopping.
A hundred and eighty pounds of muscle and bone plowed right through them, knocking Hawes off his feet, tossing Carella back
onto a stall of very nice iced salmon, and causing a mustached man in a brown derby to throw his hands over his head in fright.
Both detectives recovered at once, Carella first, Hawes an instant later.
“Stop!” they shouted simultaneously.
Hawes was in a crouch, pistol leveled, holding his gun steady in both hands.
Carella was standing beside him, gun extended in both hands, ready to fire.
“Stop!” he shouted.
Lorenzo kept running.
Hawes fired first. Carella fired an instant later. Carella missed. Hawes did, too. He fired again. This time, his shot took
Lorenzo in the left leg, sending him tumbling. Everywhere around them, the background was screaming. The mustached man in
the brown derby was running in the opposite direction, away from the shooting, waving his hands hysterically in the air. He
tripped over Georgie, who had thrown himself flat on the floor the moment he’d heard shots, the way his uncle Dominick had
taught him to do. Lorenzo was trying to crawl away, dragging his wounded leg behind him. Hawes kicked him and then stepped
on his back, holding him down while Carella cuffed him.
“Ask him if he knew my grandmother,” Priscilla said.
“Few things we’d like to ask you, too,” Carella said.
Everyone was breathing very hard.
Fat Ollie Weeks was asking the computer for any tri-state area high school, prep school, parochial school, Christian academy
or so-called alternative school whose name began with the letter P.
There were fifteen such private schools in the metropolitan area alone.
Thirty-eight in the entire state.
Of the public schools, there were a hundred and forty-six, thirty of them beginning with the word “Port.” Port This, Port
That, more damn coastal towns than Ollie knew existed.
In the two neighboring states combined, there were thirty-nine private schools and a hundred and ninety-eight public schools
that began with the letter P.
All of the public schools in this city were designated with the letters P.S. before the name, and so the computer belched
out what looked to Ollie like more high schools than he could possibly cover in ten years of investigation. He limited the
search to proper names alone and came up with sixty-three schools that had the letter P in their names.
Some of these schools were named for areas of the city, like Parkhurst or Pineview or Paley Hills. Others had been named after
people. The computer did not differentiate between given names and surnames. The letter P appeared in Peter Lowell High, but
it also appeared in Luis Perez High. But Ollie had been born and raised in this fair city, and he knew that kids never said
they went to Harry High or Abraham High, but instead said they went to Truman High or Lincoln High. So he figured if the letter
on those parkas stood for a person after whom a school had been named, then it sure as hell was the
surname
. Running down the printed list by hand, he limited the city’s sixty-three public schools to a mere seventeen. He was making
progress.
By the time he was ready to begin making his phone calls, his trimmed-down list seemed like a reasonable one.
Sort of.
The way the joke goes, a woman is telling another woman about her son in medical school, and she keeps referring to him as
a doctor. The other woman says, “By
you
, your son is a doctor. And by your
son
, your son is a doctor. But by a
doctor
, is your son a doctor?”
By Byrnes, Carella was Italian. And by Hawes, Carella was Italian. But by an
Italian
, was Carella Italian?
Lorenzo Schiavinato asked for an interpreter.
The interpreter’s name was John McNalley.
He had studied Italian in high school and college because he’d wanted to become an opera singer. He never did get to sing
at La Scala or the Met because he had a lousy voice, but he did have a certain facility with language, and so—in addition
to interpreting for the police and the courts, he also worked for many publishers, translating worthy books from the French,
Italian and Spanish.
He still wanted to sing opera.
McNalley informed Lorenzo that he was being charged with murder in the second degree. In this state, you could be charged
with Murder One only if you killed someone during the commission of a felony, or if you’d been earlier convicted of murder,
or if the currently charged murder was particularly cruel and wanton, or if it was a contract killing, or if the victim was
a police officer, or a prison guard, or a prisoner in a state pen, or a witness to a prior crime, or a judge—all of whom,
according to one’s personal opinion, might deserve killing.
Murder Two was killing almost anybody else.
Like murder in the first, murder in the second was also an A-1 felony. In accordance with the new law, Lorenzo was looking
at the death penalty at worst, or fifteen to life at best, none of which added up to a tea party on the lawn.
Naturally, he asked for a lawyer.
He was an illegal alien in the United States of America, but, hey, he knew his rights.
Lorenzo’s lawyer was a man named Alan Moscowitz.
He was a tall angular man wearing a brown suit and vest, looking very lawyerly in gold-rimmed spectacles and shiny brown shoes.
Carella disliked most defense attorneys, but hope springs eternal so maybe one day he’d meet one who wouldn’t rub him the
wrong way.
Moscowitz didn’t understand Italian at all.
The melting pot realized.
They read Lorenzo his rights in Italian, and he said he understood them, and Moscowitz ascertained, through back-and-forth
interpretation, that his client understood Miranda and was willing to answer whatever questions the detectives posed. The
questions they posed had to do with shooting an eighty-three-year-old woman at close range in cold blood. Lorenzo didn’t much
look like a man who’d committed murder, but then again not many murderers did. What he looked like was a slightly bewildered
Robert Redford who spoke only basic English like Me Tarzan,You Jane.
The back-and-forth, in English and Italian and then English again, went this way.
“Mr. Schiavinato …”
Very difficult name to pronounce. Skee-
ah
-vee-
nah
-toe.
“Mr. Schiavinato, do you know, or did you ever know, a woman named Svetlana Dyalovich?”
“No.”
“How about Svetlana Helder?”
“No.”
“Her granddaughter told us … did you know she had a granddaughter?”
“No.”
“We’ve been talking to her. She told us several things we’d like to ask you about.”
“Um.”
“Mr. Schiavinato, did you deliver to Miss Priscilla Stetson at the Hotel Powell the key to a pay locker at the Rendell Road
Bus Terminal?”
“No.”
“Delivered it on the morning of January twenty-first, didn’t you?”
“No.”
“Miss Stetson says you did.”
“I don’t know who Miss Stetson is.”
“She’s Svetlana Dyalovich’s granddaughter.”
“I don’t know either of them.”
“Locker number one thirty-six. Do you remember that?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Where’d you get that key?”
“I don’t know what key you’re talking about.”
“Did Svetlana Dyalovich give you that key?”
“Nobody gave me a key.”
“Did Svetlana Dyalovich ever come to your stall at the Lincoln Street Fish Market to purchase fish for her cat?”