The Vendetta Defense (7 page)

“No comment!” Judy shouted, hustling toward the entrance. Over the door the stained-glass mural caught the sunlight in vivid yellows, blues, and golds, but she didn’t pause to enjoy it as she usually did. She had a pigeon to defend, and from the research she had done, it was iffy whether he’d get bail. The case law was against it; her only hope was his age and record. The reporters bumped her around and shouted questions she wouldn’t answer, to the amusement of a blue sea of cops in summer uniforms, waiting by the door to be called to testify. A couple of civilians stood nearest the door with them, and Judy had almost tottered to the threshold when she felt a strong hand on her arm and looked over in irritation.

“No comment,” she said, but the man with the grip on her arm didn’t look like a reporter. He was middle-aged and heavyset, with greased hair and a polyester polo shirt. His eyes were brown slits and his expression looked distinctly unfriendly to Judy. “Let go of my arm,” she said, wrenching it free.

“Just wanted to say hello to you, Miss Carrier.” He smiled for the cameras. Judy heard the whining of motor drives and the whirring of videotape recording the moment. “My name’s John Coluzzi. My father was Angelo Coluzzi. You heard of him. He was murdered by your client.”

Judy flushed. There was nothing she could say. It was all true. Her face felt aflame.

“He broke my father’s neck, Miss Carrier. Snapped it like it was one of his birds.”

Judy’s mouth went dry. Was that how Pigeon Tony had done it? It seemed inconceivable.

“I come down here to see what kind of piece-of-shit lawyer you were. You oughta be ashamed of yourself,” Coluzzi said, almost spitting in fresh sorrow, and Judy fumbled for words she felt compelled to say, because the cameras were watching them. Her client’s life was at stake, and this tape could be Film at 11.

“I’m sorry for your loss, Mr. Coluzzi,” she said, and broke away, hurrying for the entrance to the courthouse. Not knowing who was the bad guy, Angelo Coluzzi or Pigeon Tony.

And feeling suddenly that she was worse than both of them put together.

The arraignment courtroom in the basement of the Criminal Justice Center defied the TV stereotype of how a courtroom should look, ironically because it was a TV studio. Philadelphia, like most major American cities, had recently adopted arraignment by television, so that the arraignment courtroom had become a stage set, the same width but only half as long as the conventional courtroom. The bar of the court was separated from the gallery by a wall-to-wall span of soundproof glass, and hidden microphones carried the judge’s words to the gallery, though not vice versa.

The courtroom contained the typical judge’s dais and counsel tables, but a huge television near the dais dominated the room. The only program playing was
The Defendant Show
. Each defendant appeared in huge close-up on the monitor while the charges against him were read, and he got only three minutes of face time, less than the average bank of commercials. Defendants appeared one after the next, sometimes thirty in a row, and when they were finished, the bail commissioner could be heard to say, “Get off the screen.”

Judy, entering the slick courtroom set, shuddered at the sight. Not only was it bizarre, it was unconstitutional; if the defendant wanted to consult with his lawyer, he could do so only by a special telephone in the cell, and his guard would hear anything he said. Likewise, if she wanted to advise him, she could use the phone, but the entire courtroom—including the bail commissioner, her opponent the Commonwealth, and even the gallery—could hear everything she said. Judy thought it violated the right to counsel, but nobody was asking her or had the money to bring a test case against the procedure, which had gained nationwide acceptance in all its variations. The government had gotten away with it only because arraignments were considered a routine criminal procedure, but to Judy no procedure was routine if somebody lost his liberty.

She walked down the aisle, her ankles hurting and her feeling of unease intensifying. The gallery was oddly packed, with spectators sitting shoulder to shoulder, jammed together in light clothes. Why was everybody here? Could this really be for her case? And who had told the reporters to come? She flashed on John Coluzzi outside the courthouse and felt her own face grow hot. Then she thought of Bennie and what she’d said,
If you don’t believe in him, Lucia doesn’t have a chance.

Judy shook it off as she caught Frank’s eye in the front row on the right. Turning only slightly in his seat, his jeans jacket replaced by a corduroy sport jacket, he smiled with the tension of the moment, his dark eyes obviously pained. In contrast, Mr. DiNunzio sat next to him in the front row with a group of older men, and when he spotted her, started pumping his hand with an enthusiasm usually reserved for the President of the United States. In a better mood Judy would have laughed.

She strode toward them, noticing that every head on the right turned toward her. At first she thought it was her brown pumps attracting the attention, until she realized that spectators on that side of the gallery—old men, women, young children, and family of all kinds—were gazing at her adoringly, as if she were a bride coming down an aisle. Evidently word had spread that she was defending Pigeon Tony, and the whole village had turned out. Luckily Judy reached the bar of the court before anybody burst into applause.

Mr. DiNunzio rose to his heavy orthopedic shoes and hugged her instantly, squeezing Frank’s head between them. “Judy, I’m so happy to see you. Thank you so much,” he said, though the words got trapped somewhere in Judy’s hair.

“That’s okay, Mr. DiNunzio. Everything is going be okay.” She was thinking just the opposite, but she said it reflexively, breathing in his smell of scented mothballs and fresh starch, and patting his back through the wool sweater he wore no matter what season. It was brown, as they all were, a lumpy cardigan that felt to Judy like a security blanket, even though he wasn’t even her father. Under it he had on a white shirt with a knotted tie and old-fashioned brown pants, and Judy had the sense that it was his church clothes. She gentled him back into the pew. “Just sit down and leave it to me. We’re on the case officially now.”

“Thank God. Thank you. And my wife, she says to tell you hello. She stayed home today, with Mary.” He sounded apologetic and seemed not to realize that the spectators in the gallery were craning their necks to overhear their conversation. “She wished she could be here, you know that. They both do. But Judy, you understand.”

“Of course I do, my goodness. And thanks for taking such wonderful care of my best friend.” Out of the corner of her eye Judy checked the television monitor, but it wasn’t showing Pigeon Tony yet. The face of a young black woman filled the screen, and she was tearful. Her lawyer, a public defender, argued her case for bail on the other side of the plastic divider, his mouth moving like a TV on mute.

“I want you to meet my friends, Judy,” Mr. DiNunzio said, turning to his right. Beside him sat a row of men easily his age or in their eighties. They were dressed remarkably like him, with sweaters over white shirts and thin ties left over from a working life in a different era. Mr. DiNunzio waved a wrinkled hand at the man closest to him, who was shaped like a friendly meatball. “This here is my friend Tony LoMonaco from down the block. He knows Pigeon Tony from the club.”

“The club?” Judy doubted it was the kind of club her parents meant when they said “the club.”

“The pigeon-racing club, you know,” Mr. DiNunzio said, and Judy remembered.

“Of course. Happy to meet you, Mr. LoMonaco.” She shook his hand, catching a whiff of the cigar smoke that clung to his clothes, and surmised that he was Tony
-
From
-
Down
-
The
-
Block of cigar-buying fame.

Judy itched to finish the pleasantries. She had an arraignment to prepare for, at least mentally, and an unusual case of courtroom jitters. The encounter with John Coluzzi had rattled her, and her peripheral vision had found him sitting in the front row of the gallery on the left side of the courtroom. A shorter man sitting next to him struck a similarly hostile pose, and Judy figured he must be John’s brother, Marco, whom Frank had told her about. The two men, John the heavier of the two, anchored the grim-faced crowd around them, with whom she was obviously unpopular. If the right side of the courtroom was the Lucia cheering section, the left was the Coluzzi clan, sitting side by side with only a carpeted courtroom aisle between them, like a modern-day Maginot Line.

Judy felt an intuitive tingle of fear. It struck her that Angelo Coluzzi’s death could mean retaliation, as deadly as if the courtroom had been transported to Sicily. And the surviving sons, John and Marco, were very much alive; Marco, in a sharp suit and tie, looked like the more intelligent of the two, and Judy was guessing it was he who ran the business. But it was John’s meaty arm that encircled a very old woman in a black dress, dabbing at her aged, red eyes with a balled-up Kleenex. She had to be his mother, Angelo Coluzzi’s widow.
He broke my father’s neck, Miss Carrier. Snapped it like it was one of his birds
. Judy looked away, her thoughts racing, but Mr. DiNunzio was tugging at her sleeve.

“And this young man here is my friend Tony Pensiera,” Mr. DiNunzio was saying. “We call him Tony Two Feet, but you can call him Feet for short.” He laughed, as did the man sitting next to him, a thin man who wore glasses with frames like Mr. Potatohead. His feet looked normal to Judy.

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Feet,” she said, drawing a smile from Mr. DiNunzio, as well as from Feet himself and her eavesdropping fans.

“Mr. Feet. I like that. Mr. Feet.” Feet grinned, showing a silver tooth in front, which led Judy to wonder briefly why they didn’t call him Tooth. The remaining old men in the row edged forward, shaky hands extended with arthritic fingers, trying to meet her, but she begged off with a quick apology.

“I’d like to meet you, but I have to get to the office. We’ll talk later, if that’s okay.” They withdrew their hands and eased back into the sleek pews, nodding with approval. She could clearly do no wrong. They were a brown-pumps kind of crowd. With a quick glance at Frank, she took her leave and buzzed herself into the door in the plastic divider, standing with her back to it until the last case concluded.

Pigeon Tony’s face popped onto the screen five minutes later, his appearance giving Judy a start. The close-up magnified every line in his tan face, turning wrinkles into fissures in the brown earth of his skin. The confusion furrowing his brow made him look like Methuselah. His round eyes darted back and forth; he was obviously unsure about whether to look into the camera lens, and disoriented and frightened by the procedure. It was impossible to square the helpless image with someone who would intentionally break the neck of another man. She remembered Frank’s words,
You know, he can’t even cull out his own pigeons, he won’t kill any of them.
But there was no time to puzzle it out now.

Judy moved to counsel table as the public defender stepped deferentially aside. “Your Honor, my name is Judy Carrier and I represent the defendant in this matter, Anthony Lucia,” she said, then sat down.

“So Mr. Lucia has private counsel,” the bail commissioner said noncommittally as he shifted stacks of docket sheets on the dais. Bail commissioners weren’t judges, though this one wore judicial robes, a tie with a collar pin, and the harassed expression of a man who presided over 150 bail cases a day. His light blue eyes looked beleaguered behind tortoiseshell reading glasses. “We’re ready to go, Bailiff. Where’s defendant Anthony Lucia?”

As if on cue, the TV sound burst to life with a crackle, and Pigeon Tony was whispering, “ ’Allo? ’Allo?”

Judy worried that he couldn’t understand what was happening, and a ripple of unrest ran through the courtroom gallery as soon as they heard his trembling voice over the microphones; the Lucia side of the courtroom stricken at seeing Pigeon Tony in jail, the Coluzzi side furious at seeing him alive. Judy’s mouth went dry.

The bail commissioner remained insulated on his side of the bulletproof plastic. “This is Commonwealth versus Lucia,” he began, reciting the docket number, then looking at the camera facing him, which would transmit his image to a television in Pigeon Tony’s cell. “Mr. Lucia, you have been charged on a general charge of murder, do you understand?”

“ ’Allo? Who is?” Pigeon Tony kept whispering, squinting at the camera lens.

“Mr. Lucia, this is the bail commissioner speaking to you. I am the judge. Look directly into the camera.” The bail commissioner glared into his camera, posing for a fairly cranky photo op. “Mr. Lucia, do you need an interpreter? We have a Spanish interpreter at your location, I believe.”

Judy shook her head. “Your Honor, he’s Italian. A member of his family could translate if there’s no translator available.”

“No, that wouldn’t be kosher. Let’s see if he gets it. Mr. Lucia,” the bail commissioner said loudly, as if that would help. “Do you understand that you have been charged with murder?”

“
Si, si
. Murder. Judge? Is judge?” Pigeon Tony still didn’t look at the camera, and Judy’s anxiety segued into fear. If Pigeon Tony understood it was the judge, he might blurt out the truth. Anything he said in open court would be admissible at trial. An admission now could kill him.

Oh, no. Judy’s hand crept toward the black telephone on counsel table, which would connect her directly to Pigeon Tony. She wouldn’t use it unless she had to, since everybody and his dog would hear everything. Pigeon Tony couldn’t be counted on to get any hidden messages, and
please don’t confess
might tip off the Commonwealth.

“Yes, I am the judge. Excellent, Mr. Lucia.” The bail commissioner looked over his glasses at the prosecutor’s table. “Is the Commonwealth opposing bail in this matter?”

“We are, Your Honor,” answered the prosecutor. Judging from his spiky haircut and black suit, he was a recent law school graduate who had drawn the rotating duty of arraignment court. “As you know, murder is not typically a bailable offense in the county, and this was a particularly heinous murder of an eighty-year-old man. The Commonwealth argues that bail should not be granted.”