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‘Somebody killed Rob last week,’ Zio Fausto said. ‘Bashed his fucking brains in with a concrete block.’
I sat on a foldout chair on a small patch of lawn that passed for a backyard before it fell away to a steep hill that had never been landscaped.
My uncle, Zio Fausto, sat opposite me and nursed a glass of homemade wine, like an Italian version of the actor Brian Dennehy, all chest and skinny legs with salt and pepper hair. He wore a short-sleeved, unbuttoned, collared shirt over a singlet, beige knee-length shorts, and casual Italian loafers, a more than suitable get up for the mild late-February weather.
I, in direct contrast, wore my usual ensemble: a plain black tee shirt, black jeans, and black lace-up motorcycle boots. To an outsider, we might have looked like a bouncer conferring with the head of the cosa nostra. On a table next to us sat an open bottle of wine, a spare glass, a folded-up newspaper, and a manila folder.
Zio poured me some wine and shook his head. ‘I haven’t spoken to my brother Carmine in over twenty years. He called last week and spoke to your Zia Valeria. She told him you were a private investigator. This is what happened to his son Rob last Monday.’
He passed me the folder.
I opened it and pulled out a small pile of 8x10 photographs. The first one showed a male figure lying on the ground on his side. Judging by the long shadows cast by the body, the photo was taken early in the morning or late in the afternoon. Wooden pallets crept into the top left corner, and wrappers and cans lay strewn by his feet.
So this is how my cousin Rob ended his days.
I hadn’t seen Zio Fausto’s nephew since he was a kid, and couldn’t reconcile this prone, pale figure with the excitable ten-year-old child from my memories. He wore a dark tee shirt, blue jeans, and white Nike runners. His right arm crossed his torso as if mid-turn in sleep, and a thick gold necklace lay entangled within the folds of his shirt. Strange shadows on Rob’s forehead caught my eye. I flicked to the next photo, a close-up of the top left portion of his temple. Blood had pooled under the skin, and a dark purple bruise spread down the entire left side of his face.
I’d seen something similar in a forensic pathology book where a young girl found the crumpled corpse of her mother in an empty bathtub; she’d been in the same position for over twenty-four hours, and her face had shown similar discolouration.
The remaining photos showed the same scene from slightly different angles, obviously taken by a police photographer, or someone in a similar capacity.
I placed the photos on the table, sat back, and met my uncle’s eyes. ‘How’d you get these?’
He looked at me cautiously. ‘Angela.’
I barely stifled a grunt of annoyance at the mention of one Angela Stanchowski, a disgraced ex-sergeant from Redfern Local Area Command, and a casual acquaintance of the family. She’d voiced her disdain for my line of work on more than one occasion over the years.
Zio lifted a thin arm, took a pull on his wine, and looked at the ground. ‘I wanted to stick my nose into Rob’s murder, and Angela was the only way to get information.’
The fact that he still rubbed shoulders with her boggled my mind.
‘My brother,’ he said, ‘is a selfish prick. He will swear his son was an angel, but I know the shit Rob got up to. The arsehole had it coming.’
I took a long pull on the wine and let it coat my mouth. Zio made it from Sangiovese grapes, which meant it had high tannin levels and left a bitter taste on my tongue; but it had the desired effect and relaxed me.
‘Do the police have anything to go on?’
He shrugged.
When I was a kid, I looked up to my uncle. He did all the things adults do that you think are cool when you’re twelve and impressionable—he drank, and smoked, and swore. Now seventy and retired from the retail sector, he’d become recalcitrant. If I were to sum up Zio in one word, it would be ‘brusque.’ He was, like a lot of my family, a cross-cultural blend of old-school Italian and modern Australian.
My sister and I had the distinction of being first generation, with all the cultural baggage and expectation that entailed.
He said, ‘You remember Rob and his brother?’
‘Yeah, I remember them. It’s been ten years since I saw them last. Little smart arses, but nice kids.’
He nodded in appreciation of the evaluation. ‘You remember Carmine?’
I shook my head. ‘Not so much.’
He tossed the newspaper across the table. ‘Carmine sent that to me.’
I opened it to find a copy of the Sussex Inlet Advertiser from the previous Wednesday. I flicked through the pages and found what I needed on a half-page spread on page three. A story reported the mysterious death of Robert Demich, twenty-three, found at a multi-million-dollar construction site in the early hours of Tuesday morning, under suspicious circumstances. Police were treating the incident as a homicide, and if anyone knew anything, they should contact the authorities.
Not important enough for the front page, I guess. ‘You want me to look into this?’
He nodded his head, and when he looked at me, I noticed a flicker of worry in his eyes. Then he winked and drained his glass. ‘Hurry up and drink. I want to finish the bottle.’
It surprised me. Ever since achieving my private investigator’s accreditation, the New South Wales CAPI licence, I was sensitive to whispers from within my family about the less than honourable career path I’d chosen. Patriarchal tradition dictated decades of toil at the Port Kembla steel works—legitimacy borne from blue-collar grit.
I told him I’d look into it, and asked if Carmine knew what happened.
He took a heavy belt of the wine.
I did the same.
He shook his head, perhaps dislodging a troubling thought, or a bad memory.
I said, ‘Zio, how close were you with Rob?’
‘He was a fucking arsehole.’ He ran a hand over his face as if to smooth away the creases, topped his glass up, and knocked back two mouthfuls in quick succession. ‘Listen, Matthew, for Carmine to send this to me...? Jesus Christ! He must be in a bad place.’
He took another drink and slowly exhaled.
We sat in silence for a few minutes, and I sensed Zio kept some cards close to his chest. Italians were known for their guilt-ridden pauses, and I’d had a lot of first-hand experience in that particular psychological arena. I drained the wine in my glass and decided to share my thoughts.
‘I’ll pull some strings with my boss to get a week off work, meet Carmine, and look into who might have killed Rob.’
He seemed happy with the proposal, and raised the wine bottle.
I refused, needing to stay under the limit.
We talked movies and football for twenty minutes, until the conversation died naturally.
‘Ciao.’ I shook his hand and made my way back into the house via the back door. I crossed through the downstairs garage strewn with sewing machine parts, and climbed the carpeted stairs back up into the main part of the house.
Zia Valeria sat in the kitchen removing the casings from a dozen Italian sausages. Next to the stovetop rested a bottle of red wine, a plate of diced onions, clumps of ricotta, and a kilo of grated pecorino Romano cheese. The bag of fresh rigatoni gave the game away—Zia was preparing her famous ‘Rigatoni alla Calabrese’ for lunch.
She asked what we’d talked about, and I explained.
She nodded sadly and sighed as only older Roman Catholic women can. ‘Oh Matthew. Poor Rob. Mannaggia.’
‘Mannaggia’ is a well-loved southern Italian word from my childhood, and hearing it always reminded me of my Nonna. She usually muttered it under her breath when she couldn’t prise the lid from a sauce jar, or upon acquiring a particularly salacious piece of family gossip. The English equivalent of the word is “dammit.”
Zia tried to blow a stray hair from her face.
I pushed it back behind her ear.
‘Thank you, mio nipote.’ She sighed and said, ‘Carmine called me last week, because... you know, he doesn’t talk to Fausto. I don’t know what it is between them. I don’t ask, and he doesn’t tell me.’
‘What did Carmine say?’
‘Rob worked on a construction site in Sussex Inlet. It’s going to be a huge retirement village with security gates, gardens, everything you could possibly imagine. The foreman found his body, and Carmine thinks, maybe, he was dealing drugs and something went wrong. Who knows? Who knows what happens?’
She invited me to stay for lunch, and I declined despite the enticing smells wafting from the kitchen.
She looked at me with a pained expression. ‘Will you help Carmine? You know you’ll be helping Fausto too.’
I told her I’d be happy to help, even though I didn’t have any experience with homicides. If I was truthful to myself, the pull to find Rob’s killer enticed me. I needed to tread carefully with the family situation, but it wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle. I had the expectations of my aunt and uncle to satisfy, and if I looked deeper, a compunction to commemorate my youthful reverence of my uncle.
Zia said, ‘Have you seen this?’ She led me into the dining room and pointed at a framed photograph on the wall.
I’d seen the picture, but never knew its context. Taken in the 1960s, it showed four young men in a paddock. They all had rifles slung over their shoulders, and two of them held up dead rabbits. One of them was Zio Fausto as a young man. He wore a collared shirt and high-waisted, chocolate-brown, pleated pants—a good-looking guy with the touch of Gary Cooper about him. He stood proudly next to a shorter man with thick wavy hair and a close-mouthed smile.
‘That’s Carmine,’ Zia said. ‘They were so close, Matthew.’
I saw something in the way Zio stood next to his brother—a warm closeness, a familiarity, good times before things went bad. I went to give Zia a hug goodbye, but she raised her meat-covered hands in apology. I kissed her on the cheek instead, careful not get sausage on me, and promised I’d keep in touch.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I think this will really help. You might be the one to heal the old wounds. Thank you.’
No pressure, then. Mannaggia, indeed.
