Insatiable Appetites (21 page)

“Okay.”

“Is anything wrong?”

“No, I was just concerned, after what happened to Evan.”

“He’s fine, don’t worry. Now that your story is out, it’s too late for them to need to keep him quiet.”

“Yeah, you said that before, but I was worried anyway. I’m coming to the city this weekend to see my mother—it’s been too long. You want to have dinner?”

“Sure. Where does your mother live?”

“In Brooklyn Heights.”

“You want to ask her to dinner with us?”

“Actually, I had a different kind of dinner in mind. Anyway, she’s always working.”

“What does she do?”

“She’s a translator, from French and Italian to English and vice versa.”

Stone had a thought. “Is she any good at it?”

“She’s highly sought after among publishers, but she’ll only work on stuff she finds interesting.”

“I might have something interesting for her.”

“I’ll give you her number. Got a pencil?”

“Shoot.” Stone wrote down the number. “What’s her name?”

“Anna de Carlo Fontana is her working name. Tell her I sent you.”

“Was she born in Italy?”

“Sicily. Her parents brought her to America when she was fourteen. In fact, she was the reason they emigrated. She was very bright, and they wanted her to have a good education and more opportunity. What do you need translated?”

“Just some old documents. It’s a legal matter, and I can’t discuss it.”

“Okay, I’ll be in Friday morning. I’ve got some meetings at the
Times
that could take all day.”

“Can we make a weekend of it?”

“I like the way you think. Bye-bye.” She hung up.

Stone dialed the Brooklyn number.

The phone was answered immediately. “Yes?”

“Mrs. Fontana?”

“Yes.”

“My name is Stone Barrington. I’m an attorney in the city.”

“How do you do?”

“Very well, thank you. Your daughter, Carla, suggested I call you about doing some translation.”

“Very nice of her to send work to her mother. What do you need translated?”

“It’s an old journal, written in what I’m told is a Sicilian dialect.”

“Whose journal?”

“A friend of mine who passed away recently.”

She was quiet for a moment. “Was he very old?”

“He died at ninety-four.”

“Eduardo Bianchi?”

“That was a very good guess.”

“Not really. I knew him when I was younger. I saw his obituary in the
Times.
”

“Would you like to come to my office and have a look at the journal?”

“Yes, I would. Coming from Eduardo, I expect it must be very interesting.”

“I expect it will be. I would be grateful if you would keep this conversation in the strictest confidence.”

“If you like. When?”

“As soon as you like.”

“This afternoon? I’m delivering a manuscript to a publisher in the city.”

“That would be fine.” He gave her the address.

“Around three o’clock?”

“Very good. I’ll look forward to seeing you.”

“Same here.” She hung up.

Carmine showed up for his appointment with the commissioner the following afternoon.

“How’d you do?” Dino asked.

“I did perfect.”

“How perfect?”

“Stefano said he found some red stains on the floor of the old stone barn, and he cleaned them up on his own, without being asked. The girl was pleased.”

“We need more than that.”

“He used a clean rag for the cleaning,” Carmine said, holding up the evidence bag.

“Great. Now run the DNA against Frank Donovan.”

Carmine put an envelope on Dino’s desk. “Done. A one hundred percent match.”

“Great! Have you done all the paperwork to preserve the chain of evidence?”

“Done.” Carmine handed him another envelope.

“You done perfect, Carmine.”

“Ain’t that what I said?”

“Did you tell Scali he’s going to have to testify to this?”

“Not exactly. He’s not going to want to testify against Eduardo’s daughter, though.”

“Then you have to persuade him.”

“Thing is, he won’t have a problem with testifying against Pietro. We’ll get him in front of a grand jury for that, then the DA can throw in the questions about the girl.”

“We don’t have anything against Pietro, unless he confesses or Dolce testifies, and neither of those things is going to happen.”

“We know that, but Scali don’t.”

“What will the questions be?”

“We’ll lead him through his arrival at work that morning and ask him if he found anything amiss. He’ll say he found the stains and cleaned them up, then we’ll ask him if the girl was aware of that, and he’ll say he told her.”

“That’s not so good. I wish she had seen the stains and asked Scali to clean them up.”

“Wishing ain’t gonna make it happen, but we can put Donovan in her studio, bleeding. That ought to be good enough for a search warrant, then we can look at stains with luminol and at any knives in the place.”

“It only proves that Donovan did some bleeding there, not that Dolce made him do it. And anyway, we got a problem with getting a warrant, Carmine.”

“What problem?”

“The archdiocese. No ADA is going to want to go up against those guys, not unless we’ve got conclusive evidence.”

“In which case we wouldn’t need a warrant.”

“Right.”

“So, if we have the evidence, we don’t need a warrant, and if we don’t have the evidence, we need a warrant to get it. What’s that called?”

“A pain in the ass,” Dino said.

“Maybe if you called the cardinal and explained it to him he’d go along. After all, it’s one of his people who got murdered.”

“More than that, it’s one of the
Vatican
’
s
people.”

“Well, then?”

“Carmine, if we go into that we’re going to have to go into Dolce’s relationship with Donovan, and that is not going to sit well with the archdiocese
or
the Vatican.”

“I must be missing something here,” Carmine said. “What relationship?”

“This goes back a while. Dolce was certifiable, but instead of putting her into a loony bin, Eduardo shipped her to a convent in Sicily, where Donovan was her psychiatrist.”

“He was a priest
and
a psychiatrist?”

“Right: two men in one, and neither of them should have been fucking Dolce, but both of them were.”

“Sheesh!”

“If you’d ever seen Dolce, you’d understand why. Anyway, the mother superior figured it out and got Donovan pulled from Dolce’s case, but we don’t know exactly what she said to the higher-ups to make that happen. And can you imagine issuing a subpoena to a mother superior in Sicily to testify before a grand jury?”

“No,” Carmine said, shaking his head vigorously. “I cannot imagine that.”

“Neither can I.”

“So, Commish, you’re saying we’re fucked?”

“For the moment, yes. We need more, and I don’t know how we’re going to get it.”

“Well,” Carmine said, getting to his feet, “let me know if there’s anything else I can do.”

“I’d assign you to the case officially, if I thought there was some point,” Dino said.

“Then I’ll leave it in your hands, Commish.” Carmine shook the boss’s hand and excused himself, but he was not happy about the way this had gone. He was within an ace of going into retirement with the solving of a huge case on his record, maybe even a promotion, which would up his pension, which he could use.

This was not right.

Stone could see where Carla got her beauty. Her mother, Anna, who must be in her seventies, he reckoned, was a knockout: lots of nearly white hair, beautifully coiffed; nicely made up; manicured; wearing an Armani suit.

“Good afternoon,” Anna said, offering her hand.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Fontana. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

“Please, call me Anna—even my daughter does.”

“And I’m Stone.”

“This is a nice legal nest you have here,” she said, looking around. “Are you a one-man practice?”

“No, I’m a partner in the firm of Woodman & Weld, but I prefer working here.”

“I don’t blame you,” she said. “Is that the journal?” she asked, nodding toward the stack of red leather volumes on Stone’s coffee table.”

“That’s it.”

“May I see the first volume?” she asked.

Stone went to the table, brought back the volume, and handed it to her.

She leafed through it. “I recognize Eduardo’s handwriting,” she said. “He wrote me many letters.”

“So you won’t have any trouble reading it?”

“Nor trouble translating it,” she said. “How many volumes are there?”

“Eight. How long do you think it would take you?”

“Let me explain how I work,” Anna said. “First, I read through the volume and make notes on particular passages, then I sit at my computer and type the manuscript in English as I read it in Italian.”

“What word processing software do you use?”

“WordPerfect. It’s not as popular as it used to be, but I’ve never used anything else.”

“Many law firms still use it, and we have it here.”

“You understand that I’d want to work at home, as I always do?”

“What do you usually charge for translating a book?” Stone asked.

“For a novel of three hundred and fifty to four hundred pages, twenty-five thousand dollars.”

“I’ll pay you fifty thousand dollars to translate the journal, but there are conditions.”

“What conditions?”

“First, you sign and keep a very strict confidentiality agreement. Second, you work in an office here—there’s an empty one next door with a computer. Third, you never remove so much as a page from this office, and you make only one backup copy and leave it here at all times.”

“May I see the office?”

Stone rose and took her down the hall to the office once used by an associate from Woodman & Weld. She looked around, sat in the chair, switched on the computer and typed a few sentences.

“Satisfactory?”

“Yes, and I like the chair so much I think I’ll get myself one.”

“How long do you think it will take you to make the translation?”

“If I work, say, six hours a day, perhaps three weeks.”

“That seems quite quick.”

“Remember, it’s a handwritten journal, not typed, so when it’s typed on the computer the number of pages will come down.”

“Are you translating anything else at the moment?”

“I just turned in a manuscript. I’ve been sent a couple of others, but I can turn them down to do this.”

“Do you accept my terms?”

“Yes, I believe they are fair. One thing, should the manuscript or any part of it ever be published, I want full credit as translator, my name on the cover, if it’s a book.”

“Agreed.”

“Then I can start tomorrow morning at ten.”

“That’s fine. I’ll have my driver run you back to Brooklyn Heights.”

“Thanks, but I’d rather take the subway—it’s faster.”

Joan came to the door and Stone introduced the two women. “Anna is going to be translating Eduardo’s journal,” Stone said. “She’ll be here every day at ten, until she’s done. Please write her a check for twenty-five thousand dollars, and when she’s done there’ll be another twenty-five thousand due. And print out a confidentiality agreement for Anna to sign.”

Joan went back to her office.

“Tell me,” Anna said, “are you and my daughter an item?”

“We first met in Paris last month, when she interviewed me. We’ve seen each other a couple of times when she has been in New York. In fact, she’ll be here this weekend.”

“What a lucky girl,” Anna said, making Stone laugh. “She’s probably going to get a Pulitzer, too. If so, it will be her second.”