Timmy raised a glass of limeade, and the rest joined in when he said, “To Pittsfield’s bravest!”

“Hear! Hear! To Pittsfield ’s bravest!”

“And then,” Murano said, setting his glass down, “in Jim Sturdivant’s case, there was this other problem.”

“It being?” I asked eagerly.

“Some of his family were criminals.”

“Uh huh.”

“Not just criminals, but the organized crime type. The old mainly Italian mob is pretty much out of the county now. It’s black gangs from New York that deal drugs. But when I was growing up – and especially when Jim was young – there was the numbers racket, card games, protection, some prostitution, and the big one, racetrack betting. There’s still some of that that goes on, a lot of sports betting especially.”

Timmy said, “Not to be too careless with an ethnic stereotype, but Sturdivant doesn’t sound to me like much of a Mafia family name.”

Murano said, “No, but Murano does.”

“Jim changed his name?”

“Phil Murano, Anne Marie’s first husband, was Jim’s father. The guy was a low-level mob goon. He was convicted in a loan-sharking crackdown in the late forties and was sent to Walpole, where he was stabbed to death in a brawl in 1951. Anne Marie married Mel Sturdivant a couple of years later, and she changed her name and the kids’ names to Sturdivant.”

Timmy said, “Loan-sharking. Hmm.”

“Jim had a hard time growing up,” Murano went on, “because people in Lakewood – the neighborhood over near the GE plant where we all lived then – knew his real dad was a mobster. Some people held it against him and Michael and even Rose, and other people took the other tack and expected Jim to be a tough, mean guy too. Which very definitely was not in the cards. Jim was choir and drama club material and a disappointment to both the Muranos and Sturdivants who were into sports and heavy betting. Luckily, Michael turned out to be ‘all boy,’ as I remember my mother’s aunts calling him, so that took some of the pressure off Jim. But Jim went off to UMass right after high school, and he never really came back to Pittsfield to live. Also, he met Steven in college, and back then neither the Muranos nor the Sturdivants would have put up with that.”

I said, “None of this is mentioned in the newspaper obit. I don’t mean the mob stuff or the gay thing. But the omission of the legal father seems odd.”

Murano laughed. “The family provides that type of information to the funeral home, which gives it to the paper. Anne Marie, Michael and Rose apparently chose to leave it out. And since the Eagle was bought by a penny-pinching chain, turnover has been so high that the paper has no institutional memory. You could list Ma Joad as one of somebody’s survivors on an obit form, or Buffalo Bill Cody, and some hapless kid working for minimum wage over there would just type it up.”

I said, “David, tell me more about the brother, Michael. The one who was ‘all boy.’”

“I don’t know that much about Michael. He’s five or six years younger than Jim was – Rose is in between – and he left

Pittsfield a long time ago. The paper said he lives in Rhode Island. That’s all I know, really.”

“Apparently Barry Fields once threw him and Anne Marie Sturdivant out of the Triplex movie house for bothering other patrons, and Michael threatened to break Fields’ legs. Do you know this story?”

“No. Wow. Break his legs?”

“And Steven told one of the hot-tub borrowers who resisted repaying his loan ahead of schedule that he might just have his legs broken if he didn’t pay up. It’s a uniquely mob-like way of interacting with people, and in this extended family, leg-breaking threats seem to trip off people’s tongues with unusual ease.”

Morley said, “I hope this isn’t like Chekhov’s gun on the mantelpiece, which, if it’s visible when the curtain rises, has to go off before the curtain goes down.”

“That has to do with the audience’s dramatic needs,” Timmy said. “I for one do not feel the need for any leg-breaking. I don’t even like noogies.”

I said, “And there are several features of Jim’s murder that look a lot like a mob hit. Is it possible that Sturdivant only seemed to recoil from his gangster-father background, and that he was in fact into something illegal with or without his brother? He kept his being gay rigidly compartmentalized. Maybe he had yet another aspect of his life that he kept secret. And Steven knows about it, and is happy to see Barry Fields take the rap for the killing so that none of this whatever-it-is comes to light?”

Everyone at the festive table looked unnerved by this possibility.

Murano said, “I don’t know why Jim would have been mixed up in anything truly criminal. He made tons of money legitimately. Why would he do it?”

“To connect with the memory of his real father?” Morley asked. “Stranger things have happened, psychologically speaking.”

“And,” Timmy said, “we know Jim was so uncomfortable with being gay that he never publicly acknowledged his relationship with Steven. Maybe he became a mob guy because it was butch. A diversionary tactic not to throw off the general public, but for… whose benefit? His brother? His mother?”

“The Sturdivants and Muranos all knew Jim was gay,” Murano said. “It was just never spoken of. As long as Jim didn’t flaunt it – that is, mention it north of Great Barrington – the façade of churchy hetero respectability was maintained. And that’s what really mattered to Anne Marie, I’m sure. She could tell the girls at Mount Carmel bingo night that her middle-aged son Jimmy just hadn’t met the right girl yet.”

I said, “Who would be in the best position to know about current Berkshire County mob activities and whether or not any Muranos or Sturdivants might be involved?”

Murano and Morley looked at each other somberly and nodded. Murano said, “Thorne Cornwallis would be the person to talk to. But we really would not recommend that.”

“Why not?”

They just sighed and shook their heads.

“This is bullshit, total crap! I have never heard such lamebrained, dickhead, idiotic crap, and believe me, I’ve heard it all!”

Thorne Cornwallis was livid, in the clinical sense, his blocky face crimson. I watched to see if his hairpiece would twirl, cartoonlike, on a propeller pin, but it only bobbed a few times.

I was seated across a cluttered desk from the DA in his office near the Berkshire County Courthouse. The third-floor office overlooked Park Square in the center of Pittsfield. The square was actually an oval, a heavily traveled, multi-laned traffic rotary with grass, trees and a Civil War monument in the middle. My attention went back and forth between Cornwallis sputtering and flailing his arms a few feet from me and the bumper-car mayhem down below.

I had called the DA’s office hoping to set up an appointment for Monday, but Cornwallis himself happened to be alone in the office and picked up the phone. When I told him I was working for the Fields defense and had a mob-hit angle I wanted to pursue, Cornwallis let fly with a string of obscenities and then said he would give me ten minutes before he had me run out of town. Timmy remained at the Morley-Murano den of gay-marriage perdition while I went off for some face time with Berkshire County ’s head prosecutor.

“Jim Sturdivant was about as likely to be whacked by the mob as Elton John would be,” Cornwallis told me, waggling a be-ringed, well-manicured stub of a finger in my direction. “The last time a Pittsfield Murano was associated with organized crime was more than fifty years ago. Does old-school, name-ends-with-a-vowel organized crime still exist in Berkshire County? Yes, it does. But it’s small-bore, piss-ant stuff – sports betting, a couple of numbers operations – and nothing that a type of person like Jim Sturdivant would need to be involved with or would ever be interested in getting anywhere near. The last mob homicide in this county was probably twenty-five years ago. Assault? That’s another story. When the mob hurts someone, it’s usually gambling-related, and the old-fashioned methods still apply. Knee-capping, leg-breaking, lead-pipe stuff. But shoot-to-kill is what the new guys do, the blacks and the South Americans, the serious drug operators. And unless Jim Sturdivant was Sheffield ’s heroin kingpin, his murder was not mob-related. Which leaves us with what, Mr. Strachey? Your client – angry, violent, unstable Barry Fields.”