“Get him,” Patricia said, flatly.
“Ma’am?”
“I said, go get him, tell him I’m here and I want to see him,” Patricia said, her voice raised just a little.
“Pat . . .” Brewster said.
“Brewster, shut up!” Patricia said. “Do what I say, Lieutenant. Matt, I told you to go inside and sit with your Aunt Jean.”
“Do what she says, Matt,” Brewster Payne ordered.
Matt looked at him, then shrugged, and went inside.
“Would you please stand to the side?” the lieutenant said. “I’m afraid we’re holding things up.”
“This is humiliating,” Amy said, softly.
The lieutenant caught the eye of a sergeant, and motioned him over.
“See if you can find Chief Coughlin,” the lieutenant ordered. “Tell him that a Mrs. Payne wants to see him, here.”
Four other mourners filed into Saint Dominic’s after giving their invitations to the lieutenant.
Then two stout, gray-haired women, dressed completely in black, with black lace shawls over their heads, walked slowly up the flagstones, accompanied by an expensively dressed muscular young man with long, elaborately combed hair.
“May I have your invitations, please?” the lieutenant asked politely.
“No invitations,” the muscular young man said. “Friends of the family. This is Mrs. Turpino, and this is Mrs. Savarese.”
The lieutenant now took a good look at the expensively dressed young man.
“And you’re Angelo Turpino, right?”
“That’s right, Lieutenant,” Turpino said. “I saw Captain Moffitt just minutes before this terrible thing happened, and I’ve come to pay my last respects.”
The lieutenant, with an almost visible effort to keep control of himself, went through the sheets on his clipboard.
“You’re on here,” he said. “Won’t you please go inside? Tell the usher ‘friends of the family.’ “
“Thank you very much,” Angelo Turpino said. He took the women’s arms. “Come on, Mama,” he said. He led them into Saint Dominic’s.
The sergeant whom the lieutenant had sent after Chief Inspector Coughlin came back. “He’ll be right here, Lieutenant,” he said. “He’s on the phone.”
The lieutenant nodded.
“Was that who I thought it was just going in?” the sergeant asked.
“That was Angelo Turpino,” the lieutenant said. “And his mother. And a Mrs. Savarese. ‘Friends of the family.’ “
“Probably Vincenzo’s wife,” the sergeant said. “They was on the list?”
“Yes, they were,” the lieutenant said.
“I’ll be damned,” the sergeant said.
“Mother,” Amy Payne, who had heard all this, and who was fully aware that Vincenzo Savarese was almost universally recognized to be the head of the mob in Philadelphia, exploded, “I refuse to stand here and see you humiliated like this ...”
Chief Inspector Dennis V. Coughlin came around the corner of the church. He kissed Patricia as he offered his hand to Brewster Payne.