The Vendetta Defense (30 page)

“No!”

“No!” Pigeon Tony struggled in the strong arms of the guards, his heart beating wildly and his breath coming only in short bursts, but the guards held him tighter. There must have been ten of them.

“Pop! Pop!” Frankie cried. “What’s the matter, Pop?”

“No! No!” Pigeon Tony kept shouting, screaming in Italian, panicking, surrounded by police in uniform. “No!”

“Let him go, you’re scaring him!” Frank shouted. “Let him go!”

Suddenly the grip released and Pigeon Tony felt the guards pushed aside and his grandson Frank holding him, talking to him in his ear, whispering in Italian like music, his voice as soft as his father Frank’s used to be, as a boy. The lullaby reached Tony’s heart and soothed him from the inside out, relaxing every muscle in his body, easing even the deepest grief within him, so that he allowed himself to be cradled as unashamedly as a child, and he dreamed in that moment that his own son Frank was still alive, as was his Silvana, and Frank’s wife, too.

And he dreamed that all of them lived together in eternal sweetness, as a family, whole again and full of love.

29

A
fter the prelim, Judy hit the office running, with a lot of work to do. The trial was a few months away, but she had learned something at the prelim and there was no time to waste. Also she had other cases she’d been neglecting, not to mention a general counsel who would fire her any day now. Judy stopped at the reception desk in the entrance room of the firm.

“They in there?” she asked the receptionist, as she picked up her correspondence and thumbed through her phone messages. There were twenty in all.
The Daily News,
the
Inquirer,
the
New York Times
. The Coluzzi story was white-hot. She’d return the calls later on the cell phone, to keep the Coluzzis’ feet to the fire.

“Sure, they arrived about ten minutes ago.”

“Will you tell ’em I’ll be right in? I want to drop this stuff at my office.”

“Sure.”

“Thanks.” Judy tucked her things under her arm with her briefcase, powered past associates and secretaries to her office, only to find Murphy sitting behind her desk.

“Huh?” Judy said, and Murphy shot up self-consciously. Her dark hair was slicked back, her lips properly lined, and she wore a white silk T-shirt with a yellow skirt the size of a Post-it. Murphy looked wrong, not to mention naked, behind Judy’s desk. “What are you doing in my office?”

“I wasn’t snooping or anything.” Murphy stepped away from the desk quickly. “I was leaving you something.”

“What?” Judy dumped her stuff on her already cluttered desk and walked around it. Next to a leftover coffee cup and some old correspondence sat the fresh draft of an article. It looked like Judy’s article, but it was finished. “That’s mine,” Judy said, reading her own mind.

“Yes. But I knew you’d be too busy to finish it, given the car bomb and all. I picked up the file and drafted it for you.”

Judy skimmed the top page of the brief. A one-paragraph introduction, a statement of the legal issues, a crisp analysis of the law. It was really good. “Where did you get this?” she asked, but Murphy thought she was joking.

“Make any corrections you want and pass it back to me. I’ll make Bennie a copy, and if she likes it, I’ll submit it.”

Then Judy got it. Murphy was trying to make her look bad in front of Bennie. Judy turned to the last page of the article. The proof would be on the signature line. Judy was just about to shout Aha! when she read it. It was her name on the papers, not Murphy’s.

“You don’t have to use it if you don’t like it.”

“Well, jeez, thank you.” Judy felt touched. Only Mary did things this nice, and she was a saint. Judy picked it up and put it in her briefcase. “I’ll look at it first chance I get.”

“Good.” Murphy moved to the door. “Anything else I can do?”

“Uh, no, thanks.”

“Thank me over lunch,” Murphy said, and she left.

Seated around the walnut table in the conference room, still in their best going-to-court polyester, were Tony-From-Down-The-Block LoMonaco, Tony Two Feet Pensiera, and Mr. DiNunzio. They sat behind Styrofoam cups of office coffee, heat curling from each cup, and among the pencils and legal pads in the middle of the table sat a white bakery box the size of a briefcase. On the top it said, in script,
Capaciello’s
. “What’s that?” Judy asked, and Mr. DiNunzio smiled.

“Just a little something to thank you for what you’re doin’ for Tony.”

Tony-From-Down-The-Block nodded. “You think we’d come over empty-handed? That ain’t right.”

Feet looked cranky. “Open it already. We all got our coffee here. We been waitin’.”

“I’m on it, Coach,” Judy said. She pulled the box to her, broke the light string, and opened the lid, releasing a sweet smell. The box was stuffed with pastries, but she didn’t recognize any of them. Some large pastries were shaped like flowers of dough, some looked like clams with fruit embedded in them, and others were long slices of flaky cake. God knew what these were. Judy’s family ate doughnuts and brownies. “How nice of you. Thanks, gentlemen.”

“Hand me a
sfogatelle,
will ya, Jude?” Feet asked, and Mr. DiNunzio shifted forward on his chair.

“I’ll take the
pastaciotti,
please.”

“Gimme a
crostata,
” said Tony-From-Down-The-Block.

Judy looked bewildered at the box. “Is this a test? There’s not even a cannoli, so I could go by process of elimination.”

“No cannoli, sorry.” Feet frowned behind his Band-Aid bridge, which Judy was getting used to. In fact, she was starting to like it. Some glasses, Band-Aids could improve. “They didn’t have the chocolate chip. They don’t have the chocolate chip, I don’t buy cannoli.”

“Not all Italians like cannoli,” added Mr. DiNunzio. “People think we do, but we don’t.”

Tony-From-Down-The-Block rubbed his ample tummy. “Cannoli’s too heavy. If I eat one, I feel like I’m gonna blow up.”

Judy wanted to get on with it. “Okay, gentlemen, which one’s the what-you-said?”

Tony-From-Down-The-Block pointed, as did Mr. DiNunzio and Feet, but their wires kept getting crossed so Judy gave up and slid the box across the table. “You’re on your own. I called you here for a reason.”

“You got dishes?” Feet asked, pastry in hand.

“It’s a law firm, not a restaurant.” Judy grabbed a legal pad from the center of the table, ripped off the top three pages, and passed them out like plates. “Use these. Now to business—”

“Ain’t you eatin’, Judy?” It was Tony-From-Down-The-Block.

“No, thanks, I had lunch on the way over. A hot dog.”

“So? This is dessert.”

“At lunch?”

“People have rights.”

Judy blinked. “No thanks.”

He paused. “Well, if you ain’t eatin’, can I have my cigar?”

“No.” Judy stood up and went to the front of the conference room, while Mr. D and The Tonys munched away, poured coffee, and slid sugar packs around like bumper cars. The atmosphere was more family wedding than case conference, but Judy knew that would disappear when she started talking. She stood near the easel at the front of the room, which supported her delusion that, except for the pastry part, she was controlling this meeting. “Okay, here’s the problem,” she began. “Our firm has a great investigator, but he’s away and—”

“You want coffee?” Mr. DiNunzio was holding the pot in the air.

Feet nodded, his mouth full of mystery pastry. “We made fresh. The girl showed us how.”

“Feet, you’re not supposed to say ‘girl’ anymore,” Mr. DiNunzio said, placing his pastry carefully on his sheet of legal paper.

“Why not?” Feet shrugged. “Whatsa matter with ‘girl’? I like girls.”

“You don’t call them girls anymore. They’re women.”

“Hey, if she’s got her own teeth, she’s a girl.” Feet shoved his pastry into his mouth, and Judy cleared her throat as effectively as a substitute teacher.

“Gentlemen, listen up. We were just in court and we heard lots of testimony. Who can tell me the most interesting thing we heard this morning?” Mr. D’s hand shot up, and Judy smiled. Every teacher needs a pet. “Mr. D?”

“I didn’t know that Fat Jimmy heard Pigeon Tony say, ‘I’m gonna kill you.’ ”

Judy nodded. “Very good, but it’s not the answer I’m looking for. Tell me why that was interesting to you, Mr. D. Did you hear Pigeon Tony say that?”

“Of course. We all heard it, didn’t we?” Mr. DiNunzio looked at the other two for verification and they nodded, sure. “I was just surprised that Fat Jimmy heard it. He never looks like he hears anything. I guess it was really loud.”

Judy sighed. Case was going down the tubes. That made four—count ’em, four—witnesses to a murder threat by the client, who was, by the way, guilty as charged. “Did any of you hear anything that Coluzzi said, while they were both in there?”

“No,” Mr. DiNunzio said, and the others shook their heads, no.

“Why?” Feet asked. “Did he say something we shoulda heard?” He half-smiled in an encouraging way, but as much as she wanted to, Judy wasn’t writing scripts for witnesses.

“No, you heard what you heard. Okay, anybody else find anything interesting in the testimony today?”

Tony-From-Down-The-Block raised an unlit cigar. “I thought it was interesting that Fat Jimmy broke up with Marlene. Musta just happened, because I didn’t hear nothin’ about it. She’s a number, that Marlene. She makes a buck, too.”

“Not what I was looking for, but that’s very interesting.”

“It’s what
I’m
looking for,” Tony-From-Down-The-Block said with a snort, and Mr. DiNunzio gave him a solid shove.

“I thought you had that girl, on the Internet. In Florida.”

“She thinks I’m twenty-five. And anyway, I need a real girlfriend. I need Marlene. She’s got red hair.”

Feet wiped his mouth. “Her hair ain’t real.”

“So?” Tony-From-Down-The-Block sipped his coffee. “I got a bum ear and a prostate the size of Trenton. I’m gonna throw stones?”

Judy wished for a pointer and something to tap it on. “In any event, Feet, what did you learn in court today?”

“I heard something interesting.” Feet rubbed his hands over his legal pad, so that sugar crumbs fell like snow all over the table. “I heard Fat Jimmy say he only got paid fifteen large for blowing Angelo Coluzzi.”

Mr. DiNunzio’s head snapped angrily around. “Don’t say blowing.”

Tony-From-Down-The-Block scowled. “Not in front of a girl.”

Judy winced. “True, it wouldn’t be the way I’d put it, but that’s close to what I was looking for. Fat Jimmy said he’d worked for Angelo for over thirty years. That’s a long time. What did he do for Coluzzi, besides the aforementioned? Mr. D? Do you know?”

“Not really. I wasn’t in the racing club, like these guys. I just know Pigeon Tony.”

Feet thought a minute. “Fat Jimmy was with Angelo all the time. He drove him around, went to the clubhouse with him. Showed up at all the races with him.”

Tony-From-Down-The-Block was nodding. “He had to take Angelo’s shit, that’s what. Angelo bossed him around all the time.”

“You couldn’t pay me enough,” Feet said, and Mr. DiNunzio shook his head.

“Me neither.”

But Judy had stopped listening. She took a seat at the head of the table. “We all know that Pigeon Tony’s son and daughter-in-law were killed in a truck accident last year, and that Pigeon Tony thought Angelo Coluzzi was responsible for it. Tell me what happened with the accident, like where it was.”

Mr. DiNunzio looked up. “It was at the ramp off of I-95, you know where it goes high to get back into the city, like an overpass. It’s a sin.” He shook his head slowly. “They think Frank lost control of the car, maybe he was tired, and the car went over the side and crashed underneath.”

Judy tried to visualize it. “Did it hit anybody when it fell?”

“No. That time a night, there was no traffic. They say the Lucias, they died when the truck crashed. They didn’t suffer, which was good.”

“They were good people,” Feet said. “Frank, he’d give you the shirt offa his back. Did free brick work for me and my cousin. And Gemma, my wife loved her.” His silver tooth disappeared behind the sad downturn to his mouth, and Judy realized they were all still grieving over the loss of the Lucias, despite their bravado. “They didn’t deserve to go like that.”

Tony-From-Down-The-Block was shaking his head. “Nobody does, ’cept my ex-wife.” Feet laughed, and even Mr. DiNunzio smiled, which broke the grim mood that had fallen in the room.

Judy leaned over. “Well, if that wasn’t an accident, but was murder, and we can prove it at trial, maybe we can get Pigeon Tony’s charge reduced. And if Coluzzi was responsible for it, I’m betting that Fat Jimmy was involved.”

Mr. DiNunzio set his coffee cup down quietly. “Judy, I don’t think so. It had to be an accident, didn’t it? Maybe Angelo Coluzzi could get away with murder in the old country, in the old days. But here, in Philly? Nowadays?”

Tony-From-Down-The-Block chewed his unlit cigar. “They put a bomb under Judy’s car, for Christ’s sake. I wouldn’t put it past the Coluzzis, not at all. That scum was capable of anything, and he coulda made it look like it was an accident, since it was on the expressway and all.”

Only Feet looked grave. “I always thought Coluzzi did it. Always.”

“Why?” Judy asked.

“Just because. Coluzzi hated Pigeon Tony. He wanted to ruin him. Coluzzi was an evil bastard, and you know what? The next person Coluzzi woulda killed was Frankie. Frank.”

Judy shuddered. “So we have our work cut out for us. I want you all to help, but you gotta make me one promise before I give you your assignment.”

“What?” asked Mr. DiNunzio.

“Nobody tells Frank,” she said. “Agreed?”

Around the table, each of the old men nodded. Conspirators, covered with confectioner’s sugar.

30

A
s soon as Marlene Bello answered the screen door of her brick rowhouse, Judy could see what Tony-From-Down-The-Block had meant. She was wreathed in the scent of a spicy perfume, her dark red hair was wrapped into a neat French twist, and her big brown eyes were expertly made-up. She had a cute little nose and full lips emphasized by chic rust-colored lipstick. Marlene had to be sixty, and it looked womanly on her, as if she had earned honestly the smile lines around her eyes and mouth. “Can I help you?” she asked with one of those smiles.