“Not very often. Holidays, mostly. Robbie would come here.” Her eyes filled with tears. “He was supposed to be coming for Thanksgiving.”
“Was he ever married?”
“No. I don’t think he ever even had a girlfriend.”
“Was he heterosexual?” Jackson asked.
Carbone raised her shoulders. “Well,” she said, “if I had to guess, I’d say he was-what’da you call it?-no sexual?”
“Asexual,” Priscilla said.
“Yes. Maybe that. I don’t know. But definitely not queer. I’d have known that. I can always spot them.”
“How’d he spend his time?” Rizzo asked, with a glance at Priscilla. “Any hobbies, interests, anything like that?”
She looked from one to the other, settling her gaze on Rizzo, but avoiding eye contact.
“No,” she said, a casual lilt in her tone. “Not that I know of.”
Priscilla leaned forward. “What about his writing, Mrs. Carbone?” she asked pointedly.
The woman seemed surprised. “Oh, that… You know about that?”
“Yeah, we do,” Rizzo said. “We found a suitcase full of manuscripts in his closet. They date back over twenty years.”
Jackson spoke up. “And a shoe box of rejection slips, too. In his dresser drawer.”
Rizzo tapped his pen against the note pad. “You know, Mrs. Carbone, your obligation to Robbie is to help us out here. We can’t be pullin’ teeth on every little detail. You’ve gotta help us find out who killed him, not protect secrets that died with him. Anything from his personal life could be relevant if he was killed deliberately and not by a random burglar. I been doin’ this a long time, Mrs. Carbone, and even I can’t guess what may or may not be important. So please, don’t you try. Just answer our questions as fully as you can. Okay?”
“Of course,” she said. “I understand. But Robbie told no one about his writing. Only me. It was a very personal thing for him, a secret.”
Priscilla spoke warmly, trying to establish a bond of trust with the woman. “Well, that speaks highly for you. I know how private a thing like that can be. Believe me. He must have respected you a great deal to confide in you like he did.”
“I’m not sure about that, Detective Jackson,” Carbone said with a sad smile. “Robbie liked me, of course, and in his own way, maybe he loved me. I was really his only relative. No one else in the family has seen or spoken to him in years, except for the occasional holiday when they may have seen him at my house.”
“Well, believe me,” Priscilla said, “if he let you in on his writing, he had to think you were very special.”
Carbone dipped her head from side to side. “Personally, Detective Jackson, I think it was more about storage space than anything else.”
“Oh?” Rizzo asked. “What do you mean?”
“Well, Robbie needed a place to safeguard his manuscripts. See, in addition to his other idiosyncrasies, he was a little paranoid, always worrying that his apartment might burn down and his writings would be destroyed. So he’d bring copies of his works here. For safekeeping. That’s probably the only reason he told me about his writing.”
Priscilla spoke. “So you have some of his belongings here, in the house?”
“Well, not really belongings. Just manuscripts, stories, stuff like that.” She looked from one cop to the other. “They’re in the garage. In an old suitcase.”
After a moment of silence, Mrs. Carbone continued. “It’s so sad,” she said, her eyes welling up again. “Robbie wasn’t a bad guy, just odd. But he was family.” She looked from Rizzo to Jackson. “And that’s what’s important, you know.”
They nodded at her, remaining silent.
“My kids called him uncle. Uncle Robbie. He liked that. Even my husband, who doesn’t trust anybody, was comfortable with Robbie being around the kids. You know, these days… sometimes with relatives… But Robbie was just a big, dopey, gentle guy who didn’t want anything out of life except to see his name on the cover of a book someday.
“You know,” she said sheepishly, “I have to admit, I was curious and I went out to the garage one day. I read some of Robbie’s stories.” She shrugged. “I’m not much of a reader, I’d rather see a movie or what ever, but I have to say they seemed pretty good to me. I don’t know, maybe if he had had some guidance… I think he just didn’t know how to go about it. Getting himself published, I mean. Maybe if someone had helped him… Who knows.”
With a sigh, she went on. “Or maybe he just aimed too high. Imagine? The guy couldn’t even hold a menial job for more than a year or two at a time. And he aimed too high.” Resignation came to her eyes. “Imagine that?”
AFTER NEARLY an hour of further questioning Carbone and her newly arrived husband, the two detectives made their way down the concrete driveway toward the detached garage. Wispy snowflakes floated before their eyes, the sky growing darker, the air crisper.
“Last winter was bad enough,” Rizzo said. “Now it’s gonna start snowin’ before Thanksgiving?”
“They’re just flurries, Joe, relax. But I gotta ask, why are we checking out here? We already saw this stuff, in his apartment. These are just copies.”
Rizzo glanced at her as they reached the garage. He raised the borrowed key, unlocking the weathered doors.
“Remember Tucci, Cil? That kid who got shot in the foot? Remember him?” he asked, swinging one hinged door open.
“Yeah, I remember,” she answered. “What?”
Rizzo reached into the garage, throwing a switch and flooding the musty interior with bright, buzzing fluorescent light.
“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “We were all set to call out the cavalry, pushin’ Vince to get a sketch artist, remember? Then Vince tells us to talk to the vic first, get the whole story before we start draftin’ help. And what happened next? The vic turned us on to that dental angle, we followed it up and made the case.”
“Okay,” Priscilla said with a nod. “And this is like that how?”
Rizzo looked around the garage. No car was present on the worn, oil-stained concrete floor, the parking area surrounded by sundry family items and outdoor furniture stored for winter.
“We’re doin’ it by the book, Cil. Bein’ thorough. Just because Carbone told us there’s nothing here but copies of manuscripts don’t necessarily make it so. Let’s take a look and make sure.”
He turned to face her. “Thoroughness,” he said. “Ga-peesha?”
“Yeah, Joe,” she said. “I ga-peesh.”
Minutes later, the two detectives were seated on the cold concrete floor, another old suitcase open before them. They leafed slowly through its contents.
Rizzo thumbed through a thin, weathered manuscript, the pages stapled together. He knitted his brows.
“Hey, Cil,” he said. “In that other suitcase, the one we found at Lauria’s place, were there any plays?”
Priscilla looked up from the book-length manuscript she was examining, a duplicate of one she had seen at Lauria’s.
She shook her head. “No. Why?”
Rizzo held the pages in his hand out to her. “Look at this,” he said. “It’s a play Lauria wrote. I didn’t see anything like this in his closet.”
Priscilla took the script from him and skimmed through some pages. Minutes later, she whistled softly and raised her eyes.
“Jesus,” she said. “This is strange.”
“What?” Rizzo asked, looking up from another manuscript.
“This play, the play that wasn’t in the suitcase in Lauria’s apartment.” She held it out to him.
Rizzo dropped the papers he’d been examining onto the floor and took the play back from Priscilla and began to read.
“What about it?” he asked.
“I’m not sure. Give me a few minutes, let me read this from page one.”
“Knock yourself out,” Rizzo replied, shrugging. “I’ll write up my notes on the Carbone interview while you read.” He handed the stack of pages back to Priscilla.