Sweetheart
Authors: Andrew Coburn
SWEETHEART
A Novel of Revenge
by ANDREW COBURN
a division of F+W Media, Inc.
For my wife,
Casey Coburn, and our brood,
Cathleen, Krista, Lisa,
and Heather
Ignatius Piscitello, the late Carl Velecca and Don Kiley, Mary Ellen Evans, Captain Joe Fitzpatrick, Norma Nathan, Ned Chase, Rosemary Ford, Peter Grose, Rose Moudis, and Peter Skolnik, for help past and present.
I
T WAS
the heart of the winter in the western part of Massachusetts when two ski-masked youths, smelling of the hide and dung of cows, funneled through the bitter night and invaded the farmhouse of Santo and Rosalie Gardella. They were a proud and handsome couple in their eighties, with a youthful vigor that belied their age. Santo Gardella still had a wave in his white fluff of hair, and his wife was almost as trim as she had been as a young woman. Three nights ago, under a comforter of warm colors, they had made love. Now they stood threatened.
“That’s all we have,” Santo Gardella said, spreading fifty-three dollars on the table. He had come to the United States at age eight and spoke English without an accent. His wife, who had a slight one, said in an honest voice, “We swear to you.”
The youths sweated in their masks. The wood stove in the next room pounded heat into the kitchen, and the heat clawed at their clothes, melted the mess on their boots. They were brothers, and the sockets of their identical blue eyes were punched deep. They were quick of hand if not of mind, their weapons the raw knuckles of their fists. The bigger brother said, “Where’s it hid?”
“Don’t make us ask twice,” the shorter one said, his nose leaking through his mask.
Everyone in the rural town believed, correctly, that the Gardellas had money. The brothers believed, incorrectly, that it was squirreled away in the house. “Liar!” the bigger brother said when Santo Gardella tried to convince them of the truth, and the smaller brother spewed obscenities, mostly ethnic. The old man shot an arm around his wife and turned his face to hers with a helplessness that seemed to mock every year of his life, all but twenty married to her.
“They’re going to hurt us,” he murmured, but she already knew that. Her eyes stretched up to his. Each wanted to protect the other.
“Her first,” the bigger brother said, instantly pleased with his decision. “ ’Less you say quick where it’s at.”
The other one, breathing through his mouth, said, “That old stove in there must be plenty hot.”
“Do it!”
The old man lunged. He never had a chance. The bigger brother had the kick of a horse in each fist. The old woman had no chance either. The smaller brother tore at her hair and spun her toward the stove.
Neighbors heard nothing, there was no way they could. The nearest of them lived a half-mile away. Some thirty minutes later, however, a man named Silas Rogers chugged along in his pickup truck and saw fire clutching an upper window. In the moonlit night he also saw two youths scrambling into a Thunderbird, rusted and shattered at the edges.
• • •
Chunks of cloud filled the early morning sky, and the wind whistled over the small farmhouse, which stood shattered from the fire. The black remains of the roof gave off wisps of smoke. The cold air was acrid. A crowd had arrived, mostly in pickups and vans, but they kept a respectful distance, faces sharp with a mixture of curiosity and fear. An hour earlier an ambulance had taken away the bodies. Victims of a murderous assault, mostly fists and feet, according to the quick eye of the medical examiner.
Detective Lieutenant Christopher Wade of the state police had been summoned in from a day off. He arrived in an unmarked car and was greeted by a trooper named Denton and a local cop named Hunkins. Placing his back to the wind, Lieutenant Wade said, “Was the motive robbery?”
“Seems that way. Place was ransacked.” Trooper Denton tightened his fur-lined gloves. “We’ve got what you might call a witness.”
Officer Hunkins, wearing a fur cap and a mackinaw, interrupted. “They sat the old woman on the wood stove and fried her ass. Can you imagine that?”
Lieutenant Wade hiked the collar of his dark overcoat. He had a lean and faintly handsome face, deep-set greenish-gray eyes of a somewhat somber cast, and a rangy hard-muscled frame, which the quick cut of his coat accentuated. His terse yet unhurried manner made him seem controlled at all times, though at the moment he was wincing inside. Homicides of the savage sort never ceased to sicken him, and more so when a woman was a victim. It seemed a direct threat to his own wife and daughters. He said to Trooper Denton, “What witness?”
“Man named Rogers.”
“Silas Rogers,” Hunkins butted in. “He was driving by and saw the fire and two guys running to a car. Too dark to see their faces. This was like ten o’clock.”
“There was a moon,” Wade said. “He must’ve made out the car.”
“Says he didn’t.” Hunkins lowered the earflaps of his cap. His face was bluntly shaped, like the badge pinned to his mackinaw.
“He still might’ve recognized them,” Wade said. “Maybe by their clothes.”
“He was more interested in sounding the alarm. Good thing he did, otherwise there wouldn’t be a house standing there now.” Branches creaked in the wind, as if the nearby trees were full of doors. “Those suckers, you know, were stupid. They started the fire upstairs, and it never did get down. I found the Gardellas the way they left them. Turned my stomach!”
Wade shifted his eyes, as if from a disturbing glimpse of himself in some inner mirror. His last murder case, three towns away, involved the rape and strangulation of a child. There were no witnesses and not enough evidence to convict the man Wade knew was responsible, and he had watched the man walk.
With a swift glance at Trooper Denton, he said, “Where’s the witness?”
Hunkins answered. “Home. I told him to stay there.”
“What’s he like?”
“Old Yankee, tight-mouthed, you know the type.”
“The type that keeps to himself?”
Hunkins shrugged. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking he might’ve seen more than he let on. Possible, isn’t it?”
Hunkins shrugged again. “Hell, I don’t know. That’s hard to tell. Hey!” he said suddenly as some of the curious began venturing onto the gray frozen ground of the front yard, bare except for a few fierce patches of ice. “What the hell do they think they’re doing!” With the flourish of an arm, he stomped toward them.
“Takes over, doesn’t he?” Wade said from the side of his mouth and moved toward the house, Trooper Denton following. The smell of the damage was rank. Fire fighters had battered back the storm door nearly off its hinges. The inner door stood open a crack. Wade paused on the middle step and shivered. “I don’t like winter, do you, Denton?”
“I try not to think about it, sir.”
“Most murders are in warm weather. Suicides are for the cold. Nothing growing, nothing coming. More nosebleeds in the winter than the summer, did you know that?”
“No, sir, I didn’t.”
“Statistical fact. What did
you
think of the witness?”
“Scared out of his wits,” the trooper said. “He wouldn’t talk to me, only to Hunkins.”
“Why waste time?” Wade said, stepping up and reaching for the door. “We’ll give him a polygraph.”
“Sir, if you go in there you’re going to ruin your shoes and freeze your feet. The floors are soaked.”
“Tell me about it,” Wade said and went in, nearly slipping where the water had iced over near the threshold. There was blood in the water that puddled the kitchen and traces of more in the next room, where furniture was broken. The wood stove was hot, still pumping heat.
Lieutenant Wade could not take his eyes off the stove.
• • •
Rita Gardella O’Dea came out of the ocean complaining of tar balls and tugging at her bathing suit. The Florida sun had baked and burnished her wide-boned face and nearly charred her shoulders. She had beautiful black eyes and was robustly overweight. Her feet left deep dents in the sand.
“They were looking for you,” the towel attendant said as she approached her chair. Her drink, an exotic emerald-green concoction, quivered in its holder staked into the sand.
“Who’s looking for me, Alvaro?”
Alvaro, the towel attendant, was a youngish Cuban, perhaps thirty, with a close beard that lay hot against his handsome face. His neon-red swim trunks bore the logo of the hotel. Ignoring the stares of other guests, she placed her back to him, and he toweled it.
“You had a telephone call,” he said. “There’s a number for you to call back.”
“Must be my brother,” she said with small interest. “He’s the only one knows where I am.”
“They said it was important.”
She freed her fancy drink from the holder and took a slow sip. Then she said quickly, “Help me on with my robe.”
She shared the elevator with three elderly women who, as if threatened by her size, shied away from her. She glanced at their soft, privileged faces and then ignored them. Knowing she could probably buy and sell them all gave her a sharp feeling of comfort, and when the elevator hummed to a stop she elbowed them out of the way. “This is my floor,” she explained, though it was theirs too.
In her room, sitting on the edge of the bright bed, she talked with her brother, who, without giving a reason, wanted her to catch the next flight to Boston. Her hand tightened on the receiver. She knew by his tone that something was terribly wrong, something to do with family. “Is it Ma? Has something happened to her?” Her voice quivered. “Is it Pa? Tell me, Tony!”
“It’s both of them,” he said.
She was no longer on the phone, though still sitting on the bed, inert, pale through her tan, eyes snapped shut, when someone slipped surreptitiously into the room and marked time with even breaths. Her eyes fluttered open, worked to focus, and saw the slim, straight waist of Alvaro. Sensing tragedy, he sat quietly beside her.
She said, “Pack my bags.”
“Why? Where are you going?”
“Do as I say,” she said and pushed him aside as though he were a child.
“Rita, be good.”
She reached out and pretended to shoot a gun. “Someone’s going to pay.”
• • •
Anthony Gardella lived in a high brick house in Boston’s Hyde Park, well away from his businesses. His first wife had died four years before, and his second wife, considerably younger than he, was vacationing in the Caribbean with her mother. His children, two sons, no longer lived at home. The younger one was a senior at Holy Cross and the older was in the Marine Corps. Gardella stood in the front room with a small glass of Saint Raphael in his hand, several of his people hovering near him. They were ready to weep for him, wait on him, and do for him in other ways. In his tailored charcoal-gray suit he was a courtly presence among them and an object of respect. At age twenty-one, down in Providence, he had received a pat on the head and a kiss on the cheek from Raymond Patriarca, and when he had turned forty, Don Peppino, better known as Bananas, had honored him with a birthday card from Tucson. Here in Boston, four or five times a year, he broke bread with Gennaro Angello, whose blessings meant more than a priest’s.
Abruptly he laughed. The sound was low and ugly. “I still can’t believe it,” he said, and the others fidgeted. His grief, bound inside him, expressed itself only in the tight set of his jaw. “Names,” he said in an undertone. “I want names.”
His close friend and right-hand man, Victor Scandura, said, “You’ll get them.”
Murmurs of support rose up.
Scandura eased forward, a slight figure with vanishing hair and gold-rimmed spectacles that seemed screwed into the gray flesh of his face. He could smile and repel people. “Do you want me to handle it personally?”
“Yes,” Gardella said, the ice faintly rattling in his drink. “Don’t disappoint me.”
“Have I ever, Anthony?”