“No. Wow. Break his legs?”
“And Steven told one of the hot-tub borrowers who resisted repaying his loan ahead of schedule that he might just have his legs broken if he didn’t pay up. It’s a uniquely mob-like way of interacting with people, and in this extended family, leg-breaking threats seem to trip off people’s tongues with unusual ease.”
Morley said, “I hope this isn’t like Chekhov’s gun on the mantelpiece, which, if it’s visible when the curtain rises, has to go off before the curtain goes down.”
“That has to do with the audience’s dramatic needs,” Timmy said. “I for one do not feel the need for any leg-breaking. I don’t even like noogies.”
I said, “And there are several features of Jim’s murder that look a lot like a mob hit. Is it possible that Sturdivant only seemed to recoil from his gangster-father background, and that he was in fact into something illegal with or without his brother? He kept his being gay rigidly compartmentalized. Maybe he had yet another aspect of his life that he kept secret. And Steven knows about it, and is happy to see Barry Fields take the rap for the killing so that none of this whatever-it-is comes to light?”
Everyone at the festive table looked unnerved by this possibility.
Murano said, “I don’t know why Jim would have been mixed up in anything truly criminal. He made tons of money legitimately. Why would he do it?”
“To connect with the memory of his real father?” Morley asked. “Stranger things have happened, psychologically speaking.”
“And,” Timmy said, “we know Jim was so uncomfortable with being gay that he never publicly acknowledged his relationship with Steven. Maybe he became a mob guy because it was butch. A diversionary tactic not to throw off the general public, but for… whose benefit? His brother? His mother?”
“The Sturdivants and Muranos all knew Jim was gay,” Murano said. “It was just never spoken of. As long as Jim didn’t flaunt it – that is, mention it north of Great Barrington – the façade of churchy hetero respectability was maintained. And that’s what really mattered to Anne Marie, I’m sure. She could tell the girls at Mount Carmel bingo night that her middle-aged son Jimmy just hadn’t met the right girl yet.”
I said, “Who would be in the best position to know about current Berkshire County mob activities and whether or not any Muranos or Sturdivants might be involved?”
Murano and Morley looked at each other somberly and nodded. Murano said, “Thorne Cornwallis would be the person to talk to. But we really would not recommend that.”
“Why not?”
They just sighed and shook their heads.
Chapter Eighteen
“This is bullshit, total crap! I have never heard such lamebrained, dickhead, idiotic crap, and believe me, I’ve heard it all!”
Thorne Cornwallis was livid, in the clinical sense, his blocky face crimson. I watched to see if his hairpiece would twirl, cartoonlike, on a propeller pin, but it only bobbed a few times.
I was seated across a cluttered desk from the DA in his office near the Berkshire County Courthouse. The third-floor office overlooked Park Square in the center of Pittsfield. The square was actually an oval, a heavily traveled, multi-laned traffic rotary with grass, trees and a Civil War monument in the middle. My attention went back and forth between Cornwallis sputtering and flailing his arms a few feet from me and the bumper-car mayhem down below.
I had called the DA’s office hoping to set up an appointment for Monday, but Cornwallis himself happened to be alone in the office and picked up the phone. When I told him I was working for the Fields defense and had a mob-hit angle I wanted to pursue, Cornwallis let fly with a string of obscenities and then said he would give me ten minutes before he had me run out of town. Timmy remained at the Morley-Murano den of gay-marriage perdition while I went off for some face time with Berkshire County ’s head prosecutor.
“Jim Sturdivant was about as likely to be whacked by the mob as Elton John would be,” Cornwallis told me, waggling a be-ringed, well-manicured stub of a finger in my direction. “The last time a Pittsfield Murano was associated with organized crime was more than fifty years ago. Does old-school, name-ends-with-a-vowel organized crime still exist in Berkshire County? Yes, it does. But it’s small-bore, piss-ant stuff – sports betting, a couple of numbers operations – and nothing that a type of person like Jim Sturdivant would need to be involved with or would ever be interested in getting anywhere near. The last mob homicide in this county was probably twenty-five years ago. Assault? That’s another story. When the mob hurts someone, it’s usually gambling-related, and the old-fashioned methods still apply. Knee-capping, leg-breaking, lead-pipe stuff. But shoot-to-kill is what the new guys do, the blacks and the South Americans, the serious drug operators. And unless Jim Sturdivant was Sheffield ’s heroin kingpin, his murder was not mob-related. Which leaves us with what, Mr. Strachey? Your client – angry, violent, unstable Barry Fields.”
“Except,” I said, “Fields didn’t do it.”
Cornwallis sneered. “You’re so naïve.”
“Fields had no weapon. He had no real motive. He’s not dumb – after the cheese attack he had to know he’d be the prime suspect. He’s volatile, but he’s no fool.”
“Fields has a history of violence. He can’t control himself. He finally snapped and lost all control.”
I said, “Fields is angry and argumentative. That doesn’t mean a lot. Take you, for instance. You’re angry and argumentative, but you don’t go around shooting people. Some people, for a variety of reasons, turn out that way.
They usually make poor spouses, and I wouldn’t want one as my fifth-grade teacher. But if American society locked up all its deeply angry people, the country’s incarceration rate would be even more ridiculous than it is now.”
Cornwallis got even redder. Maybe he didn’t appreciate my including him in the nation’s prone-to-hissy-fit population.
As he glared at me and appeared about to let loose again, I added, “And then there’s this additional complication. A lot of angry people have good reasons for being angry. Barry Fields certainly has one now. You’ve got him in jail based on next to nothing. And he may have other reasons too. What do you know about Fields’ background?”
Looking dangerously scarlet now, Cornwallis spat out, “Get out.”
“What do you mean?”
“Get. Out.”
“You want me to leave?”
“That’s what I said, yes. Just get the fuck out of here.”
He seemed to be struggling to hold back and prove me wrong after I called him a deeply angry man. But a major artery was throbbing on the side of the DA’s neck, and I feared it might burst, spattering blood throughout the office if not the entire western side of Pittsfield ’s busy Park Square.
“Apparently I’ve made a poor first impression,” I said. “I’m sorry. I actually thought I might be helpful. I still can be, I think.”
“Just leave. Now.”
I said, “Barry Fields has a mysterious past. But I guess you know about that. That’s one reason you’re focused on him.”
Cornwallis blinked. He said, “What do you know about Fields’ past?” I could see his pulse rate drop marginally.
What I was thinking was, Thorny, why don’t you go first and tell me what you know? What I said was, “Fields comes from a troubled background.”
He didn’t bite. “Yeah? Which is?”
“His parents died in a boating accident when Barry was six, and he was raised by porpoises in the Andaman Sea.”
Cornwallis calmed down even further and said, “You don’t know any more than I do about Fields’ background, do you now, Mr. Strachey?”