“I never followed it up,” he told us. “Perhaps I should have. But I have the feeling that if you should dig it up you wouldn’t find much in it. It’s like Joe and the Lindbergh baby. Joe made contacts with Jafsie Condon, and he was going to get to the bottom of the kidnapping, but first of all he needed five thousand dollars. That was Joe. Cash down!
“I’m not as sold on the Morelli theory as Ehrmann is” he went on, “but I always meant to look up Mancini when I was working on this. He was around here up till a few years ago. He was the toughest and brightest of the gang, and if he decided to talk why he’d talk. But I got off onto something else, and now he’s gone. Old Jackvony’s gone too. His son could probably tell you a lot, but he won’t. The old man was a criminal lawyer, and young Jackvony wants to get away from it all. Once I saw his garage with the back of it all piled up with his father’s papers. That autobiography might even be somewhere among them. It would be odd now if you found the key after all these years. Let me know if you get hold of it.”
McLean had copied down Frank Morelli’s address from the Journal’s files. It was on Mount Pleasant Avenue, a boulevard cutting through one of Providence’s many Italian districts. The house was easy enough to find: a garish cube of red-and-yellow mottled tapestry brick, the largest on the avenue. When we rang the bell a woman in her forties came to the door. Her expression turned sour when we mentioned the Morellis, and she announced with an equally sour voice that she knew nothing about them except that a year or so before her husband had bought the house from Frank. She did not know Frank’s address; she did not know who might know it.
Pawtucket is like Providence without the green university enclave, a brooding wooden decay of massed streets. It took us an hour to find Joe Morelli’s Toledo Avenue house. This was a different avenue, a still unpaved street on the outskirts, and Joe’s was the kind of shapeless wooden house perched on granite foundations common in the early 1900s. The layout would be routine—three rooms downstairs, four smallish bedrooms upstairs, and a room or two on the top floor. I walked up the steps to the long front porch. Everything looked neat, freshly painted. The aluminum combination screen door had a scrolled S on it.
No one answered when I rang, but as I looked over the porch rail I saw a woman by the garage emptying garbage into a can. I waited until she returned. When I mentioned the name Morelli, she winced. She said she knew nothing about the family except Joe’s reputation. Some years ago she and her husband had bought the house when it was in bad shape, and since then they had fixed it up. It looked too neat and too mild, really, for the place where Joe had kept his wenches and stored his counterfeit money and hidden his stolen goods and at last uncommunicatively died.
The chief of detectives at the Pawtucket police headquarters shook his head when McLean offered him a cigarette, and picked up a cigar with the end chewed so that it looked as if it were sprouting roots. He was a tanned heavy man in a sport shirt and summer trousers, his hair close-cropped almost to baldness, his only symbol of authority the automatic strapped to his belt. The walls of his office were bare of everything but the daily list of arrests and a safety calendar contributed by Pawtucket firms to warn motorists to look out for children at school crossings.
“Thank God I haven’t seen that crowd in a long time,” he said when McLean mentioned the Morellis. “That Joe was one of the most troublesome sons of bitches I ever had. I’d keep raiding his place and he’d keep coming back for more. Why, when he was dying he still had a couple of broads hustling upstairs.”
That might have ended our conversation if Bob had not somehow mentioned bass fishing. A night light seemed to glow behind the pupils of the chief’s smoky eyes. He picked up the cold cigar again and for ten minutes they talked about hula lures with double wiggles, ponds on Cape Cod that nobody knew about, and bluefish in the Canal at Bourne turning the water red when they attacked other fish. The chief had just come back from his vacation and the more he talked about it, the mellower he grew.
“Come to think of it,” he said finally, “Joe Morelli’s granddaughter was in here just a couple months ago. Her boy was up on some driving charge. She was married to some Italian, then to a fellow named Dunne. She’s married again. I don’t know his name, but here’s her address.” He flipped open a file. “On Douglas Avenue, Providence.”
Douglas Avenue, when we returned to Providence, proved to be a line of three-decker wooden tenements broken by an occasional barroom. The top floor of the three-decker we were looking for was empty, a FOR RENT sign in the blank center window. The second floor, too, looked empty, though it had Venetian blinds at the windows. We almost turned away, then decided to try the bells. A penciled card over the middle button read D’Agostino. I rang, but the rumble of trucks was so heavy anyone could have bawled down through the speaking tube without my hearing it. Finally, through the wavy glass of the door, I had a glimpse of a pair of legs that seemed to be walking by themselves in the shadow of a dim stairway. Then a woman with frizzed metallic hair opened the door. Long-chinned, with bright agate eyes, she seemed to be in her late thirties. When I mentioned Joe Morelli she relaxed and appeared almost amiable.