Katie Cavuto and David Greco agreed to start work immediately on the Capone project, so she booked a room at a local motel and was at his door the next morning by nine, to find him yet again out in the yard killing hogweed.
         “I know, I know, don’t shake hands,” she said.
         “Hey. You look chipper this morning,” he said, immediately regretting his choice of words.  “Had breakfast?”
         “I just grabbed a cup of coffee in the motel lobby.”
         David shook his head and said, “You can’t go all day on that.  I haven’t eaten yet either.  I’ll make us breakfast.”                 They entered his house, a split-level ranch that appeared to have been emptied by its last residents without taking much of the well-worn furniture: sofa, two arm chairs, coffee table, TV in front of the fireplace. But it smelled clean, no animal aromas.  So did the kitchen, which was of a good size, with a table and a counter, with an old professional stove and stainless steel canopy.
          David went to wash up and returned in a fresh tennis shirt and shorts.  Looked like he also put a comb through his hair.  Katie was in jeans and a t-shirt, carrying a bag of note pads and books.
        “Eggs, okay with you? I’m known for my scrambled eggs.”
         “Gee, being a detective, I would have thought you make them hard-boiled.”
         David pinched his paunch and said, “I’m more soft-boiled, but I break eggs really well. And the eggs are fantastic. I get them from a farm about a mile away.  They are very happy chickens. You’ll taste it.”
         He began by chopping some onions fine and sautéing them in butter till they started turning golden brown. Then he cracked four eggs into a saucepan—not a skillet—whisking them with salt and pepper, then put them over low heat with some butter, a big spoonful of ricotta, and then grated pecorino.  Stirring constantly to meld the ingredients, he added the cooked onions just as the eggs began to come together.
         David had already heated two plates and dropped two slices of Italian bread into the toaster. “Can you get some knives and forks out of that third drawer on the left? That one, yeah.  Okay if we sit at the counter?”
         Katie shrugged and placed the cutlery on the counter just as the toast popped up.  David portioned out the eggs onto the warm plates.
         “Let me know what you think,” he said.
         Katie tasted the eggs, which were a brilliant yellow and very moist, closed her eyes and said, “My God, they are really delicious. They’re so creamy and light!”
         “Never make eggs in a skillet. They cook too fast and get hard. You want espresso or cappuccino?”
         “Cappuccino, if it’s not too much trouble.”
         “Not at all,” he said and put a cup under the espresso machine, then steamed the milk.  “I apologize. I don’t make those little heart shapes in the foam.”  Then he made himself a double espresso.
         Two eggs each don’t take long to finish, so David wiped his mouth, made himself another espresso and said, “So, let’s get to work.”

         Katie seated herself across from David and started unpacking her bag: one legal pad, two reporter’s notebooks, a thick manila folder, two biographies of Al Capone and a copy of Jay Robert Nash’s 1973 book, Bloodletters and Badmen: A Narrative Encyclopedia of American Criminals from the Pilgrims to the Present.
         “The Nash book is very comprehensive but has a lot of errors,” said David. “He tried to cover everyone from Billy the Kid to Sam Giancana.”
          “Have you read either of these Capone bios?” asked Katie, pulling them from the pile.
         “I read the Schoenberg book when it came out a few years ago,” said David, picking up the author’s 1993 bio, Mr. Capone: The Real—and Complete—Story of Al Capone.  “Top-notch researcher.  He spoke to a lot of Chicago and Miami cops who were around when Capone was operating. Of course, if we find Capone’s gold, he’ll have to add a chapter.”
         “And then he’ll have to credit my article and your assistance.”
         “And interview us.”
         David had started to assess the brown-eyed journalist at his kitchen counter. Good looking woman, about thirty, a difference of, say, fifteen to twenty years between them.  Nice chest, Italian-American hips.  Slightly olive skin tone. Hair in a ponytail, nails not too long, no polish. No face makeup except for a slight blush of lipstick and eyeliner. No designer jeans, simple white t-shirt, probably GAP. Flats, not sneakers. Two silver rings, no wedding ring, small round silver earrings.  The nose was strong, pretty little bump on the bridge.  He had to admit, her eyes were sexy.
         At the same time, Katie was sizing up the detective, thinking he fit the mold pretty well of what she’d thought he’d be like from his official photo she’d seen in the newspaper.  Stocky, five-ten, strong eyebrows on a large forehead.  The haircut was a cop’s cut, clean at the neck and around the ears, starting to get a little sparse at the top. His tennis shirt revealed quite muscular arms but not overdeveloped the way the younger cops went for.
         Katie had never really been a crime reporter, though in her early years  she’d cover whatever the assignment desk editor at Bronx News gave her, and that included spending days in criminal courtrooms trying to get a story out of the arrest of a local drug dealer or car thief.
         Later on, when she went freelance, she wrote for some of the city magazines, then broke into national ones like McClure’s, which was named after a quite famous muckraking magazine of the 1920s that had published authors like Willa Cather, Jack London, Mark Twain, and Lincoln Steffens.
The original McClure’s went out of business in 1929, but a wealthy New York publisher with a passion for solid investigative reporting titillating enough to sell to a large audience started up the new McClure’s in 1990 in homage to the mission of the first.  Hence, the Capone story, which, if it panned out, would make banner headlines and garner TV coverage.
         Katie Cavuto had certainly proven herself a dogged reporter on many stories.  She’d had some nominations and won some prizes along the way for stories like her exposé of a congressman with financial ties to a corrupt HMO in Florida. She also got the last interview with a major British movie star before he died of alcoholism. 
         David had never heard of Katie Cavuto and was still waiting to hear what new research she had before going further with the Capone project.  As the lead detective in New York investigating mob activities, he knew enough history of organized crime and had enough files of his own on modern day gangsters that he wondered how this nice Italian-American girl with the dark eyes and great hips could have come up with something novel about Capone. 
          Then again, David had never spent much time delving into Capone’s dealings—the mobster had died three years before David was born—except how his associates took over the rackets upon his demise.  Those were the tentacles that still needed to be regularly lopped off.
         Being Italian-American himself, David Greco hated the way gangsters with names like Capone, Genovese, Bonano, and Gallo had so indelibly tainted his ancestors’ and contemporaries’ reputation, so that early on when he joined the police force, he swore that his mission would be to cripple the Italian-led mobs and put the top bosses away.
          His zeal for the job, which got him his detective’s badge and many citations, also brought him to the attention of Italian-American Rudy Giuliani, first when he was U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, then as Mayor of New York.  As a prosecutor Giuliani always sought out high profile cases like Wall Street crooks Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken along with drug lords and the heads of organized crime. Giuliani loved the spotlight.
         Longtime New York City D.A. Robert M. Morgenthau competed for publicity with Giuliani, who’d invented the “perp walk”—the parading of handcuffed “perpetrators” past well-placed TV cameras. Also publicity hungry were the Police Commissioners, first Ray Kelly, then Bill Bratton, whose job it was to face the press on a daily basis. David Greco was more than content to be on the streets getting the dirty work done on their behalf.  When he saw he could rise no higher, and after falling out with Giuliani, David Greco retired after 20 years on the force.
        David had won all their respect, as he did from his closest cop friends, though, as ever, he was too often frustrated by higher ups shutting down  investigations and sting operations without any official reason given.
Perhaps more importantly, David Greco had won respect for his professionalism from the very people he was arresting.  The mobsters felt he played fair, and, while it was far from the case with other cops, Greco could not be bought. If he were ever present at one of those perp walks, he never gloated in front of those he had arrested. Sometimes he’d even get a wink from the perp.
        Of course, the age-old understanding between the police and the mob  still persisted: The latter never ordered a hit on the former, lest the full, concentrated wrath of the NYPD would crash down on them, resulting in the immediate and wholesale arrest of scores of mobsters, high and low, thereby decimating and upending their secret criminal enterprises. Indeed, David Greco and his colleagues always thought it was a bullshit part of The Godfather when young Mafioso Michael Corleone murdered the corrupt police captain over a plate of spaghetti.  Other than that, though, he loved the movie.