37

What Ella had to do next was turn a brute named Carmine Fratello into a victim.

Carmine lived in Hell’s Kitchen, less than a mile from Ella’s place in Chelsea, and Ella decided to walk there, as it was a lovely summer day. It occurred to her as she was walking that when it came to the Rosenthal case the beauty of Manhattan was that it was so small. Not only did Carmine live within walking distance of Ella’s apartment; he was also less than a mile from McGill’s Bar & Grill in Midtown South. And Dante Bello, who lived in the East Village, was also about a mile from McGill’s—and when you thought about all these folks living so close to each other, that wasn’t at all remarkable.

The island of Manhattan is only thirteen miles long and two and a half miles wide. It covers a mere twenty-three square miles. By comparison, Disney World in Orlando is about twice the area of Manhattan, covering forty-two square miles. Yet within Manhattan’s small area one point six million people live, meaning there are about seventy thousand residents per square mile. So everybody in Manhattan lives or works near everybody else in the borough. And what all this meant was that Carmine Fratello could have some plausible reason to be near McGill’s when Dominic DiNunzio was shot.

Carmine’s apartment building was an older one, probably prewar, and the place was not impressive. There were black garbage bags on the landing near the front door, and the door itself looked as if someone had whipped the paint off it with a chain. Ella took a seat in a coffee shop across the street from the building and called him.

A woman answered, saying, “Hello?” Ella assumed it was Carmine’s wife. Based on the research she’d done, she knew Carmine was married to a woman named Theresa and had three kids.

“I need to speak to Carmine,” Ella said.

“He’s sleeping. Who are you?”

It was ten in the morning, which reminded her of Dante Bello, not rising until almost noon to walk his dog. Didn’t any of these people get up at a respectable hour? “A business associate,” Ella said.

“Business associate, my ass,” Theresa Fratello said. “All Carmine’s business associates are guys.”

The way Theresa sounded, Ella wondered if Carmine was the unfaithful type. Then she remembered the article about the brawl in Atlantic City saying that Carmine had been accompanied by his girlfriend, not his wife. “Mrs. Fratello, please put Carmine on the phone. This call could be worth a lot of money to him.”

Theresa Fratello didn’t say anything for a moment, but being a wife and a mother, if the call was about something that could make her husband money, she couldn’t afford to let jealousy screw it up. “Hang on a minute,” she said.

A minute turned out to be five minutes, but eventually Carmine came on the line. “Who the fuck is this?” Which, Ella recalled, was exactly the way Dante Bello had answered the phone the time she called him.

“I’m a lady who’s willing to pay you twenty grand to tell a lie,” Ella said.

“What?”

“I’m in the coffee shop across the street from your building. I’ll give you ten minutes to get over here. If you’re not here in ten minutes I’ll find some other hood to do what I need.”

“Twenty grand?” Carmine said.

“Ten minutes, then I’m gone.”

“What do you look like?”

“Red hair,” Ella said.

Five minutes later—enough time for Carmine to throw on a white wifebeater T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants and slip into flip-flops—he entered the coffee shop. He looked heavier than in the pictures Ella had seen of him in the papers. His dark hair was uncombed and he hadn’t shaved for a couple of days; his big gut strained the wifebeater and he had more hair on his arms and shoulders than some apes.

He saw Ella immediately. There were only three other people in the coffee shop: a kid fiddling with an iPad, a man in his eighties reading the Times, and the barista, a girl in her twenties who probably had a master’s degree in some subject that was useless in regard to getting a job.

Ella was wearing the long red wig she wore the day she met Jack Morris in Atlantic City, a green T-shirt that clung to her breasts, tight jeans, and high heels. She figured it wouldn’t hurt to seduce Carmine a bit—and when Carmine arrived at her table the first words out of his mouth were: “Whoa! You’re a babe.” Ella could see that Carmine was not a sophisticate; she just hoped he was bright enough to do what she needed.

“Sit down,” Ella said.

“Let me get a cup of coffee first. Can you wait that long, honey?”

Carmine got his coffee and took a seat. “You said twenty g’s.”

“You know Vinnie Caniglia?” Ella said, already knowing the answer.

“Yeah, I know the fat fuck. This have to do with him?”

“How ‘bout one of his guys, a man named Dante Bello?”

“Yeah, I know him, too, the little shit.”

“Well, Carmine, I’m willing to pay you twenty thousand dollars to implicate Dante Bello in a murder he didn’t commit.”

Carmine laughed. “You’re shittin’ me.”

“Nope. You’re going to be subpoenaed to testify at the murder trial of a man named Toby Rosenthal. You’re going to say—”

“How do I know you’re not a cop wearing a wire?”

“I guess you don’t, Carmine. And these days, cops don’t wear wires. Communication equipment is so sophisticated that the old guy over there reading the Times could be recording this. This button on my jeans could be a listening device. But why don’t you just listen to what I have to say and see if you think this is the sort of thing the cops would do to put a low-level hood like you in jail.”

“Hey! Fuck you, ‘low-level.’”

Ella reached into her purse and pulled out a white business envelope filled with twenties and hundreds. She opened the envelope and showed Carmine the money. “There’s ten thousand in the envelope. Are you interested or not?”

“Maybe. Keep talking.”

“As I was saying, you’re going to be subpoenaed to testify at the trial of Toby Rosenthal, who’s been accused of murdering a man named Dominic DiNunzio. You’re going to say that you frequently go to a bar named McGill’s on—”

“Never heard of the place.”

“Quit interrupting, Carmine; just listen. As I was saying, you’re going to say you go to McGill’s all the time. You’re also going to say, under questioning, that there’s been bad blood between you and Vinnie Caniglia for a long time. You’re going to talk about the incident in Atlantic City where you got into a fight with Vinnie and broke his nose.”

“You know about that?” Carmine said.

“Yes, it was in the papers. You’re going to say that Vinnie threatened to kill you.”

“He did.”

“And that you’ve seen Dante Bello following you.”

“I ever saw that little shit following me, I woulda stomped him like a bug.”

“You’re not going to say that, Carmine. You’re going to say that Dante has been following you—that he’s been stalking you—and you know he’s a vicious little prick who works for Vinnie …”

“Well, that part’s true.”

“… and you’d heard that he might even be a button man for Vinnie and you were afraid he might kill you.”

“I’d never be afraid of a mutt like him.”

Ella shook her head. “I can see this is going to take some work.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Never mind. By the way, what is the story of the bad blood between you and Vinnie? The papers didn’t say.”

Carmine sipped his coffee as he thought about what to say. “Ten, fifteen years ago Vinnie and me both worked for a guy named Frank Vitale. Frank’s dead now, but Vinnie ended up getting the bar Frank used to own. Anyway, Vinnie got busted for killing a guy over in Jersey and it looked like he was going to go away for a long time. So, Vinnie claimed that I, uh, allegedly killed a guy in a warehouse in Red Hook when Vinnie and I were, uh, allegedly robbing the place. I mean, I couldn’t believe he would do that to me. In the end no one went to jail, but no thanks to fuckin’ Vinnie.”

“Did you attempt to retaliate against Vinnie for implicating you?”

“I would have killed him, but Frank wouldn’t let me. Then, you know, time goes by and it’s not worth it. But we never worked together again.”

Ella thought about the story and concluded it didn’t really matter other than in establishing that the papers were right about Vinnie and Carmine having a reason to dislike each other.

“Okay,” Ella said. “There’s one other thing.” She took out of her pocket a glossy page that had come from a Macy’s catalog and showed it to Carmine. On the page she’d circled a London Fog trench coat. “Send your wife to Macy’s and have her buy that trench coat for you. That exact trench coat. I want her to buy it, not you, and tell her to use cash. After she buys it, tell her to drag it on the ground, spill a couple of drinks on it, wash it half a dozen times. You know, do whatever she has to do to make it look like you’ve owned the coat for a while. And that’s basically it. That’s all you have to do to make twenty thousand.”

Carmine ran his fingernails over his cheek, the sound like a bastard file being dragged across a pipe as he scraped his beard. “I say I’ve had a beef with Vinnie, that I saw fuckin’ Dante following me, say I was worried he might kill me, and I own a trench coat. That’s it? For twenty g’s?”

“Yep,” Ella said. “But we’re going to practice your testimony several times before the trial.”

“And Dante ends up in jail for murder?” Carmine said.

“I doubt it,” Ella said. “We—the people I work for—don’t care about what happens to Dante. If he’s arrested for murder and convicted, well, that’s okay, but that’s not our objective. Our objective is only to show that Dante might have seen you go into McGill’s and tried to kill you. Do you understand?”

“Not really.”

Ella sighed. Did everything have to be so hard? “Like I said, we’re going to talk several times before the trial and you’re going to practice your testimony with me. Now, can you think of a reason why you might go to McGill’s frequently?”

“No. I told you, I don’t even know where it is. I wanna drink, I go to my usual places around here.”

Ella pulled out a tourist map of Manhattan and showed him the location of McGill’s. “Do you know anyone who lives near the bar?”

Carmine squinted at the map. “Yeah,” he said. “I got a cousin who lives about four blocks from there.”

“Do you know this cousin well?”

“He works for me. And his mother, my aunt Lucy, she lives about two blocks from him. Oh, and there’s a restaurant here,” Carmine said, stabbing at the map. “I go there with my wife a couple of times a year because she knows the gal who owns it. She went to high school with her.”

And Ella thought: the little island of Manhattan. She loved it.

Then Carmine grinned. “There’s someone else who lives a few blocks from there, too.”

“Who’s that?” Ella said, seeing that Carmine was dying for her to ask.

“My girlfriend.”

“Now that would be perfect,” Ella said. “That’s the reason you go to McGill’s. You go to see your girlfriend a couple of times a week, and you stop off in McGill’s before or after you see her.”

“I don’t know,” Carmine said. “Theresa wouldn’t be too happy to hear me talking about Nadine. I mean, she knows I got a girlfriend, but as long as I don’t rub her nose in it …”

“For twenty grand,” Ella said, “your wife can live with the humiliation. And she doesn’t have to be in court when you testify. I want to go with the girlfriend story. Now, show me on the map exactly where she lives.”

Carmine did.

“Like I said, Carmine, we’re going to practice your testimony, but the main thing you need to remember is you go see your girlfriend all the time, and when you do, you drop by McGill’s. You also know that Dante Bello has been stalking you, and most likely because you broke Vinnie’s nose in Atlantic City. Last, you have a London Fog trench coat that you wear when it rains. Are we on the same page here, Carmine?”

“You know, maybe this is such a big deal, it’s worth more than twenty. I mean, I don’t know how much time I could get for perjury, but—”

“Don’t get greedy, Carmine. You probably can’t remember the last time you made twenty thousand dollars for a single job. Now, I’m going to give you half the money today. I realize you could stiff me and take the money and not testify, but if you do that you won’t get the other ten.”

“Hey, I don’t stiff people, honey, and it pisses me off you’d say that. I give my word … Well, it’s my word.”

Yeah, right, like a criminal’s word was worth Carmine’s considerable weight in gold.

“There’s one other thing I need you to do. The trial starts in about three weeks, so until then I want you to stop by McGill’s at least twice a week. And when you go there, chat with the bartender. His name is Jack. Do you understand? Jack is going to testify that you go to McGill’s all the time.”

“Okay. How do I get ahold of you?” Carmine asked.

“You don’t. Give me your cell phone number.”

Ella left a puzzled but pleased Carmine Fratello sitting in the coffee shop, counting the money she’d given him. Tomorrow, she’d call Jack Morris and tell him that if he was asked during cross-examination if a man named Carmine Fratello was a frequent patron at McGill’s, he would say yes. She’d also mail Jack a couple of grand for him to lose in Atlantic City to keep him content.