The Last Days of Il Duce Read Online Free PDF Page B

with homicide detective Leanora Chinn. I told her I was a lawyer so she gave me the autopsy report and the pictures and all the details that the voice this morning had been too discreet to mention over the phone.
    My brother had been shot at close range, close enough for powder burns on the chest, and he had been hurled backwards by the bullet, straight back, so he fell onto the pavement with both arms outstretched. It was a small-caliber gun, so he had taken a few minutes to die there on the street, clasping and unclasping his hand while blood gushed up his throat. Technically the medics were unable to determine whether death was due to loss of blood or asphyxiation due to blood in the mouth, but the officer’s handwriting summed it up on the form in the appropriate box. Gunshot Wound to the Heart. There were no suspects in the case, Chinn told me, but police had gone door-to-door and had reason, because of the location, to suspect it was a drug deal gone bad. There were crack vials nearby and the victim’s wallet, riffled and empty of money, lay in the street.
    â€œAt least that’s the way the case stands now,” Chinn said. The formality in her voice, mixed with the sadness, made me realize what had escaped me till that moment. She was the same woman who had called me earlier this morning on the phone.
    â€œMy brother wasn’t buying drugs. Not on Linda Street, anyway,” I told Chinn.
    She did not look like the woman I had imagined. Her shirt was neither starched nor white, but blue—and she wore a badge over the pocket. Her hair was black and she wore it cut blunt.
    â€œHe had problems with coke once, but that was over. I don’t think this had anything to do with drugs.”
    Chinn nodded and jotted the words prior user at the bottom of the form. Then she turned me over to the man in the white coat, the coroner, who took me through several doorways down corridors that smelled increasingly of formaldehyde and at last to a gurney wheeled into a corner against the wall. I didn’t need to look, I knew it was Joe by the shape of his big toe protruding out from under the sheet. I went through the motions anyway and stood there at attention while the man peeled back the cloth.
    The features were slack, lips pale, face drained of color, a short stubble on the cheeks. The man lying there didn’t look any way Joe had ever looked when he was alive, but it was still him, his bones and his face.
    â€œYeah,” I said. “That’s my brother.”
    I nodded my head and tried to blink the image away, but I saw my dead brother’s face again, or something close, in the window glass as I walked down the hall—and I saw it again when I glanced into the rearview mirror in the station parking lot. I started the car but I didn’t put it in gear. Instead I thought of Joe standing out on the corner of Linda Street and how he’d probably gotten a glimpse of the gun before the killer pushed it against his chest and left him staring at the black sky. I dwelled the moment over, imagining the violent whooze in his head, the plummeting of the stars, the blood rising in his throat. I lit a cigarette, inhaling deep, too deep, feeling first the rise of nausea, then a needling sensation on my skin. I wanted to get back to North Beach and have a drink. As I pulled out of the lot I caught sight of Leanora Chinn sitting on the station steps. Something in the way she sat there made me guess she had been watching me for some time. Watching in the way that cops watch, pretending she didn’t see you at all, with something else on her mind.
    That night I went to visit Luisa. No one was answering the phone at her place, and I knew her opinion of me was not a high one, but there are times when people are bound together, like it or not, and I felt the need to walk into my brother’s house and get a look at the things of his everyday life.
    Luisa was born in a village outside Mazatlán