Page 52 of The Don’s Omega

Carlo takes a long drag and then blows the smoke from his lungs. “You believe him? You think it really was Valentina Lucchese?”

“Yes. But I’m not killing a Lucchese on the word of a man I tortured. I need to verify.” I lean against the opposite wall. “We’ll start with her staff. She has a driver, Enzo or something? He takes her everywhere. He’ll know who she’s been meeting with.”

Carlo grins. “His name is Bruna, not Enzo, and I know the guy. He drinks at Vecchio’s just about every night after work. He has a rep for talking too much after a few glasses.”

“Yeah? That sounds promising. Maybe you need to go drinking tonight.”

He smirks. “It’s not like I’m going to argue with that.”

I frown. “Don’t get wasted. You’re on a mission.”

“I know,” he says good-naturedly. “I’ll buy him some drinks and let him talk. What else?”

“Renzo says he was paid forty thousand for the hit on Elio.”

Carlo bugs his eyes, looking disgusted. “Jesus, that’s it? To hit a Foschini? That’s disrespectful.”

“I agree. And if you can believe it, that slob downstairs only got half up front.”

Carlo shakes his head and drops his cigarette butt on the ground, crushing it with his shoe. “That guy was a fuck up from beginning to end.”

“Definitely. But I have a lead that might connect Valentina to the hit. The money was a wire transfer possibly routed through a dry cleaning business.”

“Oh, yeah?” Carlo rubs his jaw.

“Valentina has a nephew, Tomaso, who runs a chain of dry cleaners. He launders for half the families in the city. If Valentina needed to move money without her name on it, she’d probably go through Tomaso.”

Carlo’s eyes narrow. “You want me to go get the records?”

“No. I have someone on the inside for that.” I let out a tired breath. “You find out whether Valentina met with Renzo before the hit. If she did, I want dates, times, and who was with her.”

“Okay, boss.”

Carlo makes his calls. I make mine. I sit in the front seat of my car in the alley with the engine off and the windows down, listening to the harbor. The water slaps against the pylons. A foghorn sounds somewhere out past the breakwater. The air smells like brine and diesel.

My thoughts keep drifting to Elio. I want to know that he’s okay, but I don’t want to call him. We don’t really have that kind of relationship yet. So instead, I call Ginevra for some info. She tells me Elio is home and resting. That he has a bump on his head but other than that, he’s fine.

Once I know Elio is home and doing okay, the investigating continues. At 8:00 p.m. Carlo heads over to Vecchio’s to pump Bruna for info, but when he gets there Bruna is a no-show. So we scratch that plan and Carlo heads over to Bruna’s house to have a different kind of talk. A less friendly one.

Carlo calls me an hour later. “I got some info, boss.”

“What did he tell you?” I get out of my car, staring out at the dark water from the pier.

“Well, Bruna could confirm that Valentina had two meetings last week with a guy who matches Renzo’s description. I showed him a photo. He said the meetings were brief, but he didn’t know what they talked about because Valentina instructed Bruna to wait in the car.”

“Do you believe him?”

Carlo’s laugh is snide. “Yeah. Let’s just say, he’s no Renzo. He spilled his guts easy.”

“Okay.”

“Also, while Bruna couldn’t tell me what Valentina and Renzo discussed, he said she told him not to mention the meetings with anyone, especially Sandro.”

“Okay, good. That tells me two things, Valentina acted without Sandro’s knowledge, and she knew what she was doing was bad enough to hide from him.” I’m relieved that Sandro wasn’t involved. I’m still fond of him, but if he’d been behind the hit on Elio, I don’t know that I could have been merciful.

“Bingo,” Carlo says. “She knew what she was doing was wrong.”

“Fucking A she did. I need to pin down if Valentina made a twenty-thousand dollar payment to Renzo around the time he said it happened.”