He came back, discreetly shook his head behind Wallis’s hunched figure at the desk, and placed a cup in front of the American. Wallis had the makings of tears in his eyes. He wiped them away with the back of his hand.
“Sorry,” he said eventually. “You’ve got a lot of surprises around here right now.”
“Too many,” Falcone replied. “You had no idea? You never knew she and Mickey were messing around together?”
This was the moment, Peroni realized. Vergil Wallis could stick to his guns, pretend he had pretty much told them the truth all along and just try to brazen the whole thing out. And if that happened then Nic Costa would be dead, along with the Julius woman and her kid. Everything hung on this old crook’s decision.
“No,” Wallis answered dolefully. “I still can’t believe it. You’d never have guessed it from seeing them together. Eleanor was smart. A little naÏve. Maybe that was why I indulged her from time to time. But she could have walked into any college she liked. The Neri kid was just an oaf. Worse than his father, if that’s possible.”
“Maybe that’s what she liked,” Peroni suggested, trying to be reasonable with this man because he understood how essential he was to them. “I have kids. You get to understand these things. A little anyhow. Sometimes they do the opposite of what you want just because it is the opposite of what you want. It doesn’t mean you can go blaming yourself for what happens next. That’s how people are made.”
Wallis nodded. “True.”
“So,” Peroni continued. “Now you know this, how about we stop pretending, huh? We know she didn’t go missing just off the cuff. And I got to say, Mr. Wallis, you must have realized that all along. So let’s cut the crap. We got a little time before your appointment. You tell us. What really happened that day?”
“Really?” There was some bitter amusement in Wallis’s face. Peroni didn’t like what he was seeing. This man just might help them, but he’d never relinquish control and never fully divulge anything he didn’t think necessary. “I’ve no idea. That is the truth. I swear to it. If I’d known—”
He didn’t finish the sentence.
“You’d have killed him?” Peroni suggested. “Just for screwing around?”
Wallis nodded. “The person I was then… I would have killed him.”
“And now?”
“Now I live in Rome and read my books,” Vergil Wallis said quietly.
He pulled the overcoat tighter around him. “A man can drown himself in a few illusions if he likes. Is there anything wrong in that?”
Falcone and Peroni exchanged glances. Then Falcone tried to get things back on track.
“Where did you think Eleanor was going that day?”
“To some kind of party. Neri knew what interested me. Knew what interested her too. They were the same things. When we went on vacation together it was just after Eleanor’s birthday. Neri said he wanted to give her a gift. A surprise. Something out of the past. I’d given her Kirk’s book as a birthday present. She loved the stupid thing, read it all in a couple of days. So I mentioned this to Neri and said, maybe—”
Wallis paused and sighed. “The next thing I know Neri’s fixed a meeting round at his house. Me and him and the Kirk guy, who’s all eyes at the idea he might get paid to throw the party of his dreams. If I’d thought about it maybe the alarm bells would have started ringing. I didn’t even know what a Dionysian ceremony was. Maybe that was why the Kirk guy kept looking at me, weird, all the time. I just didn’t… imagine.”
He hesitated over this last point. “Eleanor knew, of course. Neri’s kid must have set her up for the whole thing.”
“Where was this supposed to happen?” Peroni asked.
“I don’t know,” Wallis replied. “I never asked. I could have gone along if I’d wanted. I didn’t.”
“Why not?” Peroni wondered.
Wallis glowered at him. “Watching some young kids dance around in costume? That’s what I thought it was. I’d been in Rome long enough to recognize all the tourist shit they try to sell you. They say it’s culture. I thought it was just one more turn around the block. If Eleanor wanted it… fine. I’d better things to do with my time.”
Peroni shot Falcone a look that said unconvinced. “Did you drive her there?”
“No. She went off on that little bike of hers. Like I said.”
“You really have no idea where she might have gone?”
“None at all. And that’s the truth.”
They waited. Wallis wasn’t going to give this up to them easily.
Falcone pressed him. “It’s nine in the morning and she’s left for this fancy dress party. Is she wearing the clothes we found her in?”
“She had them in a bag. The Kirk guy sent them along with some other stuff.”
“Then what?” Falcone asked.
Wallis closed his eyes for a moment and Peroni felt his heart skip a beat because this could just be the point where the American thought “no further.” “Then nothing. For hours and hours. And I’m busy. I got people to talk to, calls to make. So I don’t think twice about it. Not until the evening and then I think… she never said when she’d be back. She went out there and she was so excited she didn’t even care about what time it all ended.”
“Then you call Emilio Neri, right?” Peroni could work this through for himself. It was what you did as a father. Not approach the kids direct, even if you could find them. That was wrong. That was uncool. You phoned their dads and said, look, man to man…
“Eventually, Neri calls me.” Wallis shook his head. “I never touched dope. Sold plenty. I never thought about it. It wasn’t anything that came near me. It never affected anyone I loved, not even back in the old days when I was just some black punk on the street. Dope just existed. It was a utility for us. Like water or electricity.”
“Pretty lucrative utility, Mr. Wallis,” Peroni observed. “Bought you that nice house on the hill.”
“Bought me part of that nice house. Not as much as you think.”
“Does that hurt? Now you realize the kid got burned by dope?”
For a moment Peroni thought Vergil Wallis might take one of those big black fists out of the pocket of his leather overcoat and smack him with it.
“But she wasn’t, was she?” Wallis replied calmly. “Someone cut her throat. Neri said it was dope. He acted like he was furious too. Said he came in on the thing and found the kids had been popping stuff on the side, and even the professor guy never knew it was that bad. He said—”
Vergil Wallis could have been a good actor, Peroni thought. Or maybe he did feel this cut up after all these years.
“There’d been an accident,” Wallis continued. “Eleanor had over-dosed on some bad crack one of the kids—not Mickey—had smuggled into the party. She’d gone into a coma. They’d called a doctor they knew. They’d tried everything. She was dead. Nothing they could do.”
“Then what?”
Wallis stared at his long black hands. He hunched up inside the coat looking as miserable as any man Gianni Peroni had ever seen. “For an hour or two I went crazy. Went round smashing things. Beating up on anyone I could find. Trying to find someone else to blame.”
“You blame yourself,” Peroni said instantly, and found, against his wishes, some feelings of sympathy rising inside himself. “That’s how it works.”
“That’s how it works.”
“But after,” Peroni continued, “when you stop feeling quite so mad, what do you do? Go to the cops? No. Because you’re a crook, Mr. Wallis. And crooks don’t go to the cops. We’d start asking where that dope came from. We’d start asking all kinds of stuff.”
Wallis nodded and didn’t say a word.