Abbiocco. The red sideways-diamond sign hung boldly over the canopied double-doored front entrance. Wine barrel planters loaded with red geraniums flanked the sides and smokey glass windows cut dark swaths into the red brick. It reminded me of places I’d visited during my Wisconsin childhood that, at the time, had defined fine dining but today would be considered kitschy and of another era. I imagined pine-paneled walls, Budweiser on tap, stained carpet that had been installed in the seventies, and maybe even some dead animals on the walls.
Aside from its in-town location, I could have picked it up and placed it in any rural Wisconsin town and it wouldn’t have looked out of place. It was a joint, the kind my father would love, and where patrons all knew each other. A place where stories became lore and reputations were built or destroyed based on the amount of alcohol consumed. The kind of place that was far too inbred for my tastes.
An alley on the east side of the building led to a parking lot in the back, but I wanted to get my bearings on the neighborhood. The restaurant was a short fifteen-minute drive from Rae’s salon and situated outside of the village’s Restaurant Row. Elmwood Park was a leafy bedroom community with a population of approximately twenty-five thousand, located about ten miles from downtown. Chicago still stubbornly held onto its ethnic neighborhood history, and the village reflected that with its Italian and Polish heritage.
So, it was no surprise that an Italian pizzeria with an Italian name would exist here. The question was what role did it have in these murders? It could be a clubhouse of sorts for the various men I’d come across, I supposed.
Rae’s language about her husband kept flashing into my head. Because you’re connected. The family. Send me on a long trip. That was language right out of a fifties mob movie. Was that still a thing? I thought the old-time mafia had been replaced by gangs and drug cartels. The idea of mob involvement seemed both contrived and stereotypical as I sat across from a decades-old Italian restaurant.
I walked over to the restaurant. The waft of garlicky tomato sauce hit me as I pulled open the heavy door and stepped inside the dark restaurant. Although no dead animals graced the walls, the decor was largely as I imagined it would be. Dark paneled walls, neon beer signs, vinyl upholstered booths, red plastic carnations in a bud vase on the tables, and red plastic checkerboard tablecloths. I doubt it had looked much different in the eighties than it did today.
A sign instructed me to seat myself, so I took a booth where I could watch both the bar and the majority of the restaurant floor. A server dropped off a laminated menu, took my iced tea order, and told me that a meatball sub was the special of the day. When she returned with my drink, I added a small, thin-crust veggie pie to my order, then sat back to people-watch. The restaurant was filled to about three-quarters capacity, and the long wooden bar sat another ten. Not a bad crowd, since it was on the early side of the Saturday lunch rush. Small parties of two and four filled tables, and a couple of the larger parties contained elementary school–age boys in their soccer gear filling up on pizza after the morning game. Another Saturday in the suburbs. And nothing nefarious about it.
The pizza was damn good, but I wasn’t seeing these Abbiocco stickers because of a citywide reputation for a good slice. Nor, as I sat eating, was I seeing anything or anyone that gave me a clue about the relevance of this restaurant to the murders. As near as I could tell, it was just a good neighborhood pizza joint. I finished another piece, paid my bill, and headed for the ladies’ room prior to my drive back into the city. In the time-honored tradition of steakhouses that thought they were famous, the hallway was a gallery of framed photos. Patrons, local celebrities, smiling staff. The occasional official autographed headshot of some C-level actor from the nineties whom I didn’t know mingled with the impromptu, on-location restaurant shots.
Slow-walking the hall, I perused the shots. The village president. Alderman Farnsworth. An annoying guy that owned half a dozen car dealerships in the burbs and plastered his face and voluminous belly on all of his commercials. A tall, dark-haired man I didn’t know was at the center of many of the shots. His smile was wide, his forehead even wider. The owner, I assumed.
As I looked over the collection, familiar faces began to creep into the mix. Felix Panici with a goofy grin and highball glass in hand, next to the guy I assumed was the owner. Edmund Rastello with the same guy. Rastello and Panici and Farnsworth. Panici and Rae and Rastello with another woman, everyone’s arms around each other. A dozen shots of these men in various small groups. I pulled out my phone and snapped shots of the shots as I walked the hall.
Working toward the restrooms, I came across a photo of eight. Panici and Rae. Rastello and a woman, possibly his wife. The guy I presumed was the owner, also with a woman. And the guy from court with the widow’s peak. He stood, a forced half-smile, half-sneer on his face, his arm around a woman. That woman was Rae’s employee, Viola.
Quite a tight circle these people ran in. Perhaps Viola had phoned the man in the photo, her husband, and not Felix. It wasn’t clear how Rae’s standing in the group might have changed given the divorce. It wasn’t unusual for friends to choose sides, and I wondered if Viola was choosing her employer or her employer’s husband. If Felix was as “shady” as Rae indicated, having Viola snitch on Rae’s activities would not be out of bounds, whether the content was for use in their divorce or to monitor whether she was a risk based on what she knew about his deeds.
My mind was rumbling through the possibilities as I got back to my car.
“You’re supposed to park in the back.” An elderly woman, broom in hand, stood on the sidewalk next to my vehicle, pushing dried leaves into a pile. She nodded at my box of leftover pizza. “This parking is for residents. And if you lived here, you’d know that.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t see a sign,” I said as I opened the passenger door and placed my box on the floor.
“You city people never do.” She huffed and flicked her broom at an errant leaf. I guessed her to be around eighty, but her spine was spry and straight with pride, or perhaps stubbornness.
“I hope you have help this fall,” I said. I looked at the canopy of green overhead that was about to turn color and shed. “It must be a lot of work to keep your yard so nice.” Her hedges were perfectly pruned. Her coneflowers stood strong and tall. And the little bit of debris she had amassed on the sidewalk would have anyone else leaving it for another day. My knowledge of plants was limited to what I could put in a pot or what I could put in a vase. But if this woman lived across the street from Abbiocco, she likely had more information than a skim of a website and a forty-five-minute lunch could provide and was worth chatting up.
“I have a kid from the neighborhood who rakes. Can’t stand those damn loud blowers everyone else seems to use. They’re nothing but pollution machines for lazies.”
The scowl on her face had softened. “All that noise would bother me too,” I said. “Does the smell of tomato sauce start to get annoying after a while, or have you become immune to it?” I tilted my head toward the restaurant, wondering how she felt about her neighbor, other than annoyed when their customers ignored parking etiquette.
“I don’t even smell it anymore. What do they call that, being nose blind? I’ve been in this house for forty-two years’ worth of garlic and peppers. Bought this house with my husband. Raised my kids here. That was long before the kid took over the place. Not that he’s changed much around the place.”
“The founder’s son runs the business now?” I asked.
“Not the son. A nephew, Francis. The dad, Lorenzo, he’s still around, but I’m not sure he’s all there anymore. Last I heard, he was drooling onto a bib at some home his daughter put him in. Back in the day, he was a hottie, though,” she said, a mischievous smile on her face.
“Sounds like you had a crush on him,” I said, suspecting there were some stories in her past.
“I was always soft on tall, dark-haired men,” she said. “But he had a mean streak, that one. I wouldn’t date him no matter how many times he asked me out. I never liked that tough-guy type. Nice to look at, but not nice in other ways, if you know what I mean. You’ve probably met a few in your day as well.”
“Abbiocco seems like it’s kind of a neighborhood hangout,” I said, moving the conversation back to my area of focus.
“Yeah, always been that way. More like a men’s club, though. I think some of those guys have spent more time on one of those barstools than they did in their own homes. Wasn’t hard to find them that way, back before everyone had cell phones. Kids were always running in and out, telling daddy that mom wanted him to come home or to guilt him into laying off the sauce.”
Again, images of childhood came back into my mind. Every local bar had a crew of faces that treated the place like a home away from home.
“Might have been a different place today if the girl had taken over,” she said. “But Lorenzo and his ilk still think women belong in the kitchen, and the daughter never got the chance. The daughter, she’s got more brains than the dad and the nephew combined. The nephew, he’s flat-out lazy, running the business on what’s left of his uncle’s good will and trying to hang on to customers from the old days. Families don’t stay close to home like they used to. Can’t keep thinking your customers aren’t going to die off and your business with it. Rumor has it that the biz is not doing so well.”
“You must have spent a lot of time there yourself over the years, living so close.”
“When I was first married, we did. But then Lorenzo started buddying up to my Anthony. Wanted him to hang with him and his friends. I put a stop to that. I wasn’t going to be a barstool widow like every other woman around here. And they were nothing but a bunch of crooks in nice clothing, anyway.”
Crooks. That was an interesting choice of words.
“What do you mean by crooks?” I asked. “That sounds juicy. What were they up to?” I was keeping my voice light, as if I were just looking for some good local gossip.
“I don’t know exactly, but there were always rumors floating around. Gambling. Cash changing hands for some favor or another. That’s just how those guys did things. Everything had a price.”
“Is that still the case today?”
“I imagine. I think that’s another reason Lorenzo passed the place on to his nephew, Francis, instead of his daughter, Rae—because she wouldn’t play that game. So the men couldn’t control her.”
My mind was suddenly racing. “Are you talking about Rae Panici?”
“Sure am. Do you know her?”