Columbo: The Hoffa Connection Page 14

  “He paid cash.”

  “Well, thank you, signora. You’ve been very helpful.”

  6

  Galeazzo Castellano offered to drive Columbo back to Malpensa Airport on Thursday morning, but Columbo thanked him and accepted Adrienne Boswell’s offer to drive him in her Alfa Romeo.

  To catch their flight they had to leave very early in the morning, and she drove on highways obscured by morning fog.

  “What did you find out?” she asked.

  “Nothing much,” said Columbo glumly.

  “C’mon, Columbo, open up! I found out something, and I’ll give it to you, but you’ve gotta share with me.”

  “Well… The old man who lived with Regina in L.A. is the same old man she lived with here. He was just as mysterious a figure here as he was in Los Angeles. He did all his business with cash. The people don’t want to talk about him.”

  “I can understand that,” said Adrienne. “I found out something about him.”

  “Anything interesting?”

  “I think so. Marino di Bardineto has just two distinguished citizens: the priest and a Signor Ruggerio Abbatemarco. Abbatemarco owns the villa where Capelli lived. The villa, it seems, is a little too conspicuous for Abbatemarco’s taste. He rents it. He’s a very distinguished citizen, very weighty.”

  “Why? Who is he?”

  “He’s the local capo, the local godfather. I figured he’d know more than any other man in town, so I went to see him. He’s an engaging, patriarchical type; he made me think of Big Daddy. Happy to meet me. Happy to talk to me. Happy to lie to me.”

  “So, what did ya find out?” asked Columbo.

  “He said Capelli had been a distinguished businessman in Sicily, a successful dealer in automobiles and trucks, but was in failing health and retired. Someone in Sicily had sent him word that Capelli was his cousin and had reminded him how the two used to roam the hills together as boys. So he sent Capelli an invitation to come to Marino di Bardineto and be his guest in his villa. When Capelli arrived, the two of them soon figured out they were not cousins and had never met each other before. Both of them thought it was a big joke, and Abbatemarco offered to rent Capelli the villa on very favorable terms. He rented it until he left for the States in 1988. They became friends. Knowing that Capelli was lonely, he went up to the villa to dine with him once a week. He also arranged for girls to visit. He sent Regina Celestiele Savona.”

  “You say he was lying to you?”

  Adrienne smiled. “Through his teeth. I telephoned Palermo. The police in Sicily never heard of Capelli. Certainly he was never an automobile dealer there.”

  “So that makes him probably a member of the Honored Society,” said Columbo.

  “I figure it that way,” she said. “A big drug dealer, likely as not.”

  Twelve

  1

  The nonstop Alitalia flight landed at Los Angeles International not long after noon.

  Martha Zimmer was waiting for Columbo. “I hope you got some sleep on the plane,” she said. “Things are moving fast here. Was your trip worthwhile?”

  “Worthwhile? Yeah, I guess so. I gotta have something to report, so I can report that Signor Capelli was almost certainly Mafia-connected. Which would explain why he disappeared so easy. I figure he was already a ‘disappeared’ guy when he was living at Marino di Bardineto.”

  “You think he’s alive, then?” she asked.

  “Why not? The question is, what did he have to do with the death of Reg,ina?”

  “You were on television,” she said.

  “How come?”

  “Because you were there, is all I can figure out. Hey, the raincoat looks good on TV. Captain Sczciegel says to tell you to get a new raincoat.”

  “Yeah, I gotta do that sometime. No hurry. This one’s got a lot of good wear left in it.”

  “Like another ten years?”

  “Well… another year or two. Who knows? Anyway, you say things have been developin’ here?”

  “Right. Immigration and Naturalization got back to us again. And guess what? Angelo Capelli entered the United States on August 17, 1988—”

  “Aha! The very same day as Regina Celestiele Savona.”

  “Exactly. On an Alitalia flight from Milan. The same flight. He entered on a tourist visa and disappeared. Immigration and Naturalization never heard from or of him again.”

  “He wasn’t Vittorio Savona, and he wasn’t Angelo Capelli,” said Columbo. “So who was he?”

  “Unfortunately, he came into the States on an apparently legal passport and visa,” said Martha. “Which means they didn’t take his fingerprints.”

  “Which he knew they wouldn’t,” said Columbo. “The man had experience in movin’ around the world, never getting identified. And he had money. It takes money to be on the lam like that. This guy wasn’t nobody, Martha. This guy was somebody.”

  “Which is gonna make him that much more difficult to trace,” said Martha.

  “We don’t have a picture of him, do we?”

  She shook her head. “I’d guess he was careful not to get his picture taken.”

  Columbo sighed and scratched his head. “Maybe I can do something with a police artist. We let the narcs see a drawing. We get the newspaper and television guys to run it—”

  “Also,” she interrupted, “you ought to get in to see Doc Culp as soon as possible. He’s got the results of the DNA tests and wants to talk to you PDQ.”

  “Am I allowed to call Mrs. Columbo first? I promised to call her from the airport, to tell her I’m home safe. She’s already upset with me because I went to Italy and didn’t take along a camera. I gotta call her and promise her I’ll tell her everything over dinner tonight. That okay with you, Martha?”

  “Yeah, so long as you don’t jaw too long.”

  2

  Dr. Harold Culp sat behind his small steel desk in his office just off the autopsy room. He was eating a ham sandwich. Columbo wondered how a man could cut open a human body and then sit down in his office and eat a sandwich. Maybe you could get used to anything. At least he’d taken off his white coat. Columbo had sometimes seen those stained with blood.

  Martha had come with him to the medical examiner’s office. She was very much interested in the results of the DNA testing, even though Columbo had suggested maybe she’d have to listen to things she wouldn’t want to hear.

  “Well, Columbo, it’s kind of surprising,” said Dr. Culp. “Maybe it won’t be to you, but it is to me.” Columbo turned to Martha. “You sure you wanta hear this?” he asked. “It’s kind of… delicate, you know.”

  “Columbo… C’mon!”

  Columbo shrugged and smiled at Dr. Culp.

  “The easy part first,” said the doctor. “The sample found on the sheet in the guest room. That came from Robert Douglas. No surprise?”

  “No. They admitted it. At first they said they went to sleep right off, as soon as they got to their room; but since then they’ve admitted they had a high time before they went to sleep.”

  “Okay. The semen found in Regina’s stomach—” Dr. Culp paused as if for dramatic effect. “The DNA test proves conclusively it came from Johnny Corleone, the houseboy. She’d given him oral sex within the last hour or so of her life.”

  Columbo squinted and shook his head. “Doesn’t figure, does it?” he said to Martha.

  “Why not? She was a tawdry bimbo.”

  “Let’s don’t speak ill of the dead, Martha,” said Columbo. “It doesn’t surprise me that she did it. Everybody says she did. What surprises me is that she did it with him. ’Course, I didn’t really think he was a houseboy.”

  “Puts a little different complexion on things, doesn’t it?” Martha said.

  3

  Mickey Newcastle was clean. He felt rotten, but he was clean. From time to time he tried it: to go cold turkey, on his own, without help. He thought that if he ever was going to make it, it had to be on his own. If he could just get over a single week witho
ut a boost, he might make it.

  He wasn’t out of stuff. There was some in the bathroom. For three days, almost seventy-two hours now, he’d fought off the craving. He’d thought it would begin to diminish by now, but it hadn’t; if anything it was worse.

  He’d thought maybe eating would help. Digestion demanded much of the body, he reasoned, and it filled the body with nutrients that might substitute for stuff. He’d eaten sandwiches hourly, washing them down with beer. It didn’t help. He’d tried to sleep, thinking he could get past some of the hours by sleeping through them. He couldn’t sleep. He woke constantly, sweating, hungering.

  And now… now the worst was coming: nausea and chills and hallucinations—and the vivid sense that creatures were crawling on his skin. He recognized this stage of withdrawal. He’d reached it before. He knew there was no point in fighting on. He couldn’t make it. He’d tried before.

  Still, he lay on the couch in the living room and held out as long as he could. Maybe he could get over a hump. Maybe in another hour—

  No! No! He couldn’t make it! He couldn’t…

  He tried to stand and fell back on the couch. He vomited. He trembled. He crawled to the bathroom, where he pulled himself up and with shaking hands opened the one vial of stuff he had left. He picked up his needle, pulled it open, and poured it full of distilled water. The next step was to—

  Christ! He dropped everything. The needle fell to the floor. The bottle of water hit the vial where it sat on the edge of the basin and knocked it into the toilet. It sank and filled with water. All the stuff he had in this world dissolved in the toilet.

  He didn’t have enough money to cop. Mickey sank to the bathroom floor and sobbed.

  4

  Johnny Visconti was sobbing at the same hour. He was in the warehouse where they had packed the body of the old man in a steel drum. Johnny was stark naked, and his hands were handcuffed behind his back. Sal and Frank fixed lazy smiles on him and watched him rush around the warehouse after Carlo, who was constantly on the move, going here for a tool, there for something else, always a few paces ahead.

  “Carlo! Please! Man, you can’t blame me for everything! I’m a soldier. I do what I’m told.”

  “You don’t do anything right, Johnny,” Carlo snarled over his shoulder. “Nothing at all. Douglas is out of the hospital and walking around. Shit, man! You can’t even shoot a guy in the back. Not even with the clean biscuit we gave you.”

  “Carlo, I shot him point-blank!” Johnny sniveled. “Through a car seat. And a Mercedes at that. What you think a car seat is made of, dummy? Vinyl and kapok?”

  Carlo strode off through the garage, toward the back where the fifty-five-gallon drums stood in a rough line.

  Johnny ran after him. “Carlo, man… You gotta give me another chance! I’ll get Douglas. I swear I’ll get him.”

  “Whatta you think with, Johnny? Not with your brains, for sure. Douglas wasn’t the witness you saw in the doorway. Neither was Christie Monroe.”

  “It had to be?” Johnny protested.

  “Think, you stupid bastard! You shoot Douglas in the back. The detective comes to the hospital. The broad comes to the hospital. If either of them had anything to spill to the homicide dick, they’d have spilled it then and there. Neither one of them was your eyewitness. You didn’t even have that right. You shot the wrong guy.”

  “Then it had to be the Gwynnes. One of them,” said Johnny. “There was nobody else in the house.”

  “Yeah? Then why are they holding out on the homicide dick? Face it, Johnny. You imagined your eyewitness.”

  Johnny didn’t respond. He knew he hadn’t imagined the eyewitness, but he knew also it would be better for him if Carlo thought he had.

  “How about the Englisher?” Carlo asked. “He’s more important. He knows way too much. Did you at least take care of him?”

  “He’s dead. I gave him the stuff Monday. If he was alive he’d be calling me, asking for money to cop another fix.”

  “You haven’t seen the body?”

  “I can’t go near that place! The cops are going to find a stinking corpse in there!”

  Carlo gave one of the drums a hard shove, to hear if it was empty or if oil sloshed around inside. “You remember how we broke the old man’s back so’s he’d fit in one of these?” he asked Johnny. “You remember that, Johnny. You keep that in mind.”

  Johnny whimpered.

  “I’m gonna tell you one thing that you’d better get damned straight. If that goddamned detective finds out who the old man was, you’re a dead man—and you’re not gonna die fast and easy like he did.”

  “Carlo— Nobody knew who he was. Nobody but Regina and you and me. I don’t know about Sal and Frank. If you told them, that’s your business. But nobody else knew.”

  “You see the homicide dick on television?” Carlo asked. He strode back toward the front of the warehouse, and Johnny scurried after him. “He was in Italy. What’s he trying to do?”

  “Hey, he’ll never trace the old man down that way,” said Johnny, trying to inject confidence and optimism into his voice.

  “Yeah? Well, Don Abbatemarco called me. A newspaper broad went to see him, askin’ all the wrong questions.”

  “And the don gave her all the right answers, I bet,” said Johnny.

  “Yeah, but she’s no dummy. She figured it out, probably. The don’s a Mustache Pete. He probably figured she couldn’t possibly be any threat, bein’ a woman. Johnny—The secret’s too damned important for any of us to take any risks with it. You go see if Newcastle’s really dead.”

  Sal unlocked Johnny’s handcuffs and stood smirking while he dressed. After he was gone, Carlo shook his head.

  “The guy’s gotta go,” Sal said.

  “I’ll have to ask,” Carlo said grimly. “We can’t do it on our own say-so.”

  5

  Mickey’s whole body shook as he waited just outside the red neon light from the beer sign in the window of a bar called Teddy’s. He pulled from his pocket an old and corroded .32 caliber revolver, not a good enough gun for a biscuit, rather what some people would call a Saturday-night special. About a year ago a guitarist had begged him for some rocks of crack and had shown him the pistol, saying he’d have to use it to mug someone if Mickey couldn’t tend him the price of a fix.

  He knew little about firearms, but he knew enough to know he’d be lucky if it didn’t explode in his hand if he had to fire it. He had no intention of firing it. He had thought about unloading it. The trouble with that was, a person looking at it closely could see there were no bullets in the chambers.

  Drunks came out of Teddy’s. He’d been waiting half an hour for the right one, and he was not sure he could wait much longer. Chills racked his body.

  Now— There they were. Two Hispanics, a young man and a young woman. They staggered as they reached the street, then laughed and walked west. They laughed again as the man fumbled with his keys and had difficulty unlocking his car.

  Mickey came up behind them. “All right,” he muttered, trying to conceal his English accent. “I don’t want any trouble. Just empty your pockets on the ground. You”—he said to the young woman—“drop the purse.” The young man turned, grinned, and shook his head. “Hey, man, you crazy?”

  Mickey brandished the gun.

  “Geef heem wha’ he wants!” the young woman shrieked at the young man.

  “I’ll give him what he wants.”

  The young man stepped back to set himself to throw a punch. He staggered as he jabbed at Mickej and caught him only with a glancing blow along his left ear. Mickey pulled the trigger. The revolver exploded as he had feared it would, but the explosion drilled a bullet into the young man’s right leg.

  The young woman tore money from her purse and tossed it at Mickey’s feet. She did not see that Mickey’s hand was burned and bleeding and did not understand that the gun was now useless. She knelt sobbing beside the young man and pulled money from his pockets. She tossed tha
t on top of hers.

  “Leef us ’lone now!” she begged. “Leef us ’lone. Look what you done!”

  Mickey was horrified. Even so, he stooped and gathered up the money. He thrust the wreckage of the gun into his pants pocket and hurried away.

  Two blocks away, he stopped to count the money. He’d got $116—enough for two fixes and cab fare downtown and back.

  6

  Johnny hated Carlo Lucchese! He would kill him. Sooner or later he would kill Carlo, if it was the last thing he ever did. Carlo had humiliated him! Him, Johnny Visconti, Johnny Discount! The image of himself, naked and begging that arrogant bastard, burned in Johnny’s mind. He’d shoot him in the balls.

  And how would he explain that back in Cleveland? Well, he’d say that Carlo knew who the old man was and that Carlo wasn’t a guy you could trust with an important secret. The don would buy that. Or would he?

  No, he wouldn’t. He’d want to know why Johnny had taken it on himself to whack out a made man without getting permission first. The Regina hit was one thing. He could do that on the old man’s say-so. But a made man, a member? The don would say, “What you tryin’ to do, start a war?” Of course, he didn’t have to say he did it. He could go home and say, “Jeez, somebody knocked off poor Carlo!”

  Yeah. Sure. That’s what he’d do. He lit a cigarette. Yeah, that’s what he’d do. Only he wouldn’t. If there was anything he hated more than Carlo Lucchese it was himself. He’d begged. They’d laughed at him, and they were still laughing at him.

  One thing. He had one thing over all of them. He knew the whole story. Carlo knew who the old man was, but that was all he knew. Johnny had been around a long time, and he knew the whole history.

  7

  Johnny had gone home and picked up his Ferrari. While he was there he picked up also his .25 caliber Baby Browning automatic.