Red White & Dead-IM 03 Read online

  Praise for the novels of

  LAURA CALDWELL

  Red, White & Dead

  “A fresh, intel igent and emotional thril er. Laura Caldwel writes with an assured ease, showing a true sense of style and story, delivering a bril iant and complicated heroine.”

  — New York Times bestsel ing author Steve Berry

  Red Blooded Murder

  “Aims for the sweet spot between tough and tender, between thril s and thought—and hits the bul ’s-eye…. A terrific novel.”

  —#1 New York Times bestsel ing author Lee Child

  “Take Izzy McNeil to bed tonight. You won’t get much sleep, but you’l spend tomorrow smiling. Red Blooded Murder is smoking hot and impossible to put down.”

  —Marcus Sakey, author of Good People and

  The Blade Itself

  Red Hot Lies

  “A legal lioness—Caldwel has written a gripping edge-of-the-seat thril er that wil not disappoint.”

  — New York Times bestsel ing author Steve Martini

  The Good Liar

  “A massive achievement, in one novel, launching a woman right up there with the top thril er writers around.”

  —International bestsel ing author Ken Bruen

  The Rome Affair

  “A fabulous, hypnotic psychological thril er. Laura Caldwel is a force we can’t ignore.”

  — New York Times bestsel ing author

  Stel a Cameron

  Look Closely

  “A haunting story of suspense and family secrets…you won’t want to put it down.”

  — New York Times bestsel ing author

  Mary Jane Clark

  The Night I Got Lucky

  “Caldwel is one of the most talented and inventive…writers around.”

  —Booklist

  The Year of Living Famously

  “Snazzy, gripping…an exciting taste of life in the fast lane.”

  — Booklist

  A Clean Slate

  “A page-turner about a woman with a chance to reinvent herself.”

  — Chicago Tribune

  Burning the Map

  “A touching story of a young woman at a crossroads in her life.”

  — Barnes & Noble.com on Burning the Map, selected as one of “The Best of 2002”

  RED, WHITE & DEAD

  LAURA CALDWELL

  Also by Laura Caldwell

  RED BLOODED MURDER

  RED HOT LIES

  THE GOOD LIAR

  THE ROME AFFAIR

  LOOK CLOSELY

  THE NIGHT I GOT LUCKY

  THE YEAR OF LIVING FAMOUSLY

  A CLEAN SLATE

  BURNING THE MAP

  Dear Reader,

  The Izzy McNeil series is fiction. But it’s personal, too. Much of Izzy’s world is my world. She’s proud to be a lawyer (although she can’t always find her exact footing in the legal world), and she’s even more proud to be a Chicagoan. The Windy City has never been more alive for me than it was during the writing of these books— Red Hot Lies, Red Blooded Murder and Red, White & Dead. Nearly al the places I’ve written about are as true-blue-Chicago as Lake Michigan on a crisp October day. Occasional y I’ve taken license with a few locales, but I hope you’l enjoy visiting them. If you’re not a Chicagoan, I hope you’l visit the city, too, particularly if you haven’t recently. Chicago is humming right now—it’s a city whose surging vibrancy is at once surprising and yet, to those of us who’ve lived here a while, inevitable.

  The Izzy McNeil books can be read in any order, although Izzy does age throughout, just like the rest of us. Please e-mail me at info@lauracaldwel .com to let me know what you think about the books, especial y what you think Izzy and her crew should be doing next. And thank you, thank you, for reading.

  Laura Caldwell

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you so very much to Margaret O’Neil Marbury, Amy Moore-Benson and Maureen Walters. Thanks also to everyone at MIRA Books, including Valerie Gray, Donna Hayes, Dianne Moggy, Loriana Sacilotto, Craig Swinwood, Pete McMahon, Stacy Widdrington, Andrew Wright, Pamela Laycock, Katherine Orr, Marleah Stout, Alex Osuszek, Erin Craig, Margie Mil er, Adam Wilson, Don Lucey, Gordy Goihl, Dave Carley, Ken Foy, Erica Mohr, Darren Lizotte, Andi Richman, Reka Rubin, Margie Mul in, Sam Smith, Kathy Lodge, Carolyn Flear, Maureen Stead, Emily Ohanjanians, Michel e Renaud, Linda McFal , Stephen Miles, Jennifer Watters, Amy Jones, Mal e Val ik, Tracey Langmuir, Anne Fontanesi, Scott Ingram, Deborah Brody, Marianna Ricciuto, Jim Robinson, John Jordan and Brent Lewis.

  Grazie mille to Andrea Rossi in Rome for answering my many questions about the Camorra and the anti-mafia efforts in Italy, and grazie to Francesco Marinuzzi and Laura Roberts for their assistance with al things Italia.

  Much gratitude to my experts—Chicago Police Officer Jeremy Schultz; criminal defense lawyers Catharine O’Daniel and Sarah Toney; pilot Jonathan Sandrolini, private investigator Paul Ciolino; journalist Maurice Possley and physicians Dr. Richard Feely and Dr. Roman Voytsekhovskiy.

  Thanks also to everyone who read the book or offered advice or suggestions, especial y Dustin O’Regan, Jason Bil ups, Liza Jaine, Rob Kovel , Katie Caldwel Kuhn, Margaret Caldwel , Christi Smith, Wil iam Caldwel , Matthew Caldwel , Meredith Caldwel , Liz Flock, Kris Verdeck and Les Klinger.

  Contents

  Inspiration for Red, White & Dead

  Character List

  PART I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  PART II

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Part III

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Book Club Questions

  Deleted Scenes

  Epilogue to the Novel

  Inspiration for Red, White & Dead

  In the summer of 2008, I was fortunate to teach at the Loyola of Rome Center in Italy. My mother was part of the fi
rst class of Loyola of Rome in the 1960s, and I had been a student there myself while in law school. To find myself back there and teaching international criminal law was a delight.

  I was about a fourth of the way into Red White and Dead while traveling there. I knew that someone from Izzy’s life whom she thought was dead was going to turn out to be very alive. I didn’t have the rest of the story mapped out, but when I arrived in Rome and got my first glimpse of the dome of St. Peters, I knew Izzy would be returning to Rome as wel . I’ve said that Izzy McNeil is more like me than any other character I have written. And like me, Izzy feels that Rome is a second home.

  Character List

  Izzy McNeil—main character. Unemployed lawyer and occasional private investigator finds herself in over her head when a family link to the mob turns her life upside-down.

  Theo Jameson—Izzy’s current flame. He’s young, hot, and rich to boot. Izzy has some issues with their age difference, but is wil ing to explore the possibility of a relationship with him.

  Sam Hollings—Izzy’s ex-boyfriend. They are trying to remain friends, but are having it difficult to keep old feelings at bay.

  Dez Romano—Leader of the Chicago branch of the Camorra, a faction of the Italian mafia. He has delusions of grandeur and wants to run ALL of the Camorra. Izzy is a thorn in his side and he wants to make her pay for it.

  Ransom—Dez Romano’s right hand man. A tattooed brut that does his dirty work.

  Q (Quentin) Briscoe—Izzy’s former assistant and dear friend. Previously a struggling actor, now unemployed and living with his wealthy boyfriend.

  Maggie— Izzy’s best friend. She is short with light brown hair. She is a criminal defense lawyer known for representing al eged drug runners and mobsters. Her grandfather, Martin Bristol, is a famous Chicago Assistant State’s Attorney.

  Bernard—A Filipino from Seattle teaching in Italy. Sparks fly between he and Maggie when they meet on a train.

  Charlie McNeil—Izzy’s younger brother. Though formerly the laziest person Izzy knows, Charlie has found excitement in a new job at WGN Chicago radio. He no longer earns his nickname, “Sheets”.

  Victoria McNeil—Izzy’s mother. She’s a beautiful elegant woman, always impeccably dressed with strawberry blonde hair. She runs the Victoria Project, which helps widowed women with children. After Izzy’s father, died, she moved to Chicago and married Spence.

  Elena Traviata—Izzy’s aunt on her father’s side. She lives in Rome and is Izzy’s only connection to information about her father’s mysterious death. She is married to Maurizio Traviata, a known member of the Camorra.

  Christopher McNeil—Izzy’s father. He died over 20 years ago in a helicopter accident. The more Izzy looks into his past, his connections to the Camorra, the suspicious events surrounding her current situation and her father’s death, al lead her to suspect something is amiss.

  Spence—Izzy’s step-father. He is warm and kind and loves Victoria more than life itself.

  Bunny Loveland—The housekeeper Victoria hired when Izzy was a child. She is cranky and mean spirited, but the McNeil’s love her and she always manages to give good advice, help, and encouragement when it is most needed.

  John Mayburn—A sought-after Chicago PI who occasional y hires Izzy to do some undercover work for him. Though, currently, he is helping Izzy find out information about her father’s mysterious death.

  Lucy DeSanto—Friend to Izzy and wife to Michael Desanto, who is in deep with the mob. She is in denial over this and continues to try and make their marriage work.

  PART I

  1

  W hen it happened, it happened at night, the way bizarre things often do.

  For a Sunday, and nearly midnight, the restaurant was buzzing. That’s the way Sundays work in Chicago. Often the city is quiet—most people tucked under sheets by 10 p.m., newspapers sprawled on the floor below them. Other times, on a Sunday in June like that night, when the weather plays nice—the occasional puffed cloud skimming across a crystal ized blue sky, a sky that gently settles into a soft black without losing the day’s warmth—things can get a little raucous. And I’m the kind of girl who likes a raucous Sunday now and again.

  So even though Rush Street wasn’t my usual hangout, if I’d been surrounded by friends at that corner table at Gibsons Bar, the one by the windows that looked onto the street where people stil strol ed and lights stil burned, I would have been very happy. But I wasn’t with friends.

  Dez Romano threw his arm over the back of my stool. Dez, short for Desmond, had dark black hair, even though he was surely a few years past forty, and it curled in pleasing twists, like ribbons of ink around his face. The somewhat thick bridge of his nose was the only coarse thing on Dez Romano’s face, and he managed to make that look spectacularly handsome. He was so confident, so lit up with energy that you began to think every man should have such a face.

  The story I’d been told by John Mayburn, the private investigator I moonlighted for, was that Dez had been named by his mother after a Catholic cardinal whom she admired.

  The religious connotation hadn’t helped. Dez was now the head of his family business, as in the family business. Dez was, as Mayburn had said, “the new face of Chicago’s organized crime.”

  Dez smiled at me now. I thought a smile by such a man would be flashy, a surface grin that easily revealed danger underneath. But it was genuine. Or at least it appeared so. I’d been told that, in some ways, Dez was the new kind of Mafia—the kind who had friends from al walks of life around the city, who opted, when possible, for courting rather than strong-arming, who made large donations to charities, not because he or his family business wanted something from them, but simply because every respectable business did so.

  I returned Dez’s smile, thinking that the problem with Dez wasn’t his looks and it wasn’t that he lacked generosity, whether toward a woman like me, whom he’d met at the bar, a woman supposedly stood up by a flaky friend or toward his associates. The problem was, at least according to the suspicions of the federal government, Dez ran an intricate business, an arm of the Italian Camorra, believed to be more ambitious and more ruthless than the Cosa Nostra faction made famous by The Godfather movies. In other words, Dez was also the old kind of Mafia. He wasn’t afraid of strong-arming or something much more violent. No, not at al .

  “So, Suzanne,” Dez said, using the alias I’d given him, “where to from here?”

  I laughed, looked at my watch. “It’s almost midnight. I’d say home is where I’m going from here.”

  “And where is home?”

  “Old Town,” I answered vaguely.

  I real y did live in Old Town. When Mayburn first taught me to assume a cover name in order to conduct surveil ance, he told me to always blend in some reality—some truth that couldn’t be easily tied to your real life—or otherwise you’d forget or confuse yourself, and you could land in some very real trouble.

  The blending of such truths hadn’t exactly helped. My occasional moonlighting gig for Mayburn had gotten me into more than a little trouble, but I hadn’t been able to turn him down this time.

  I need a favor, Izzy, he’d said, earlier that night. I want you to hang out at Gibsons. Act like you’re meeting a friend at the bar, act like the friend canceled on you. Dez Romano is always there on Sunday. Throw that red hair over your shoulder and give him the famous Izzy McNeil smile. Talk to him. See if he says anything about Michael DeSanto.

  I didn’t say that there was no “famous Izzy McNeil smile” that I knew of. I didn’t point out al the things that could go wrong with this little “favor.” Instead, I agreed rather quickly.

  Not because I needed the money, which I did, but because Mayburn was in love, the first time I’d witnessed such a thing. And yet it appeared he was about to lose his beloved to Michael DeSanto, a banker we’d helped put in jail for laundering money for the Mob. Correction: laundering money for Dez Romano.

  “My car is outside,” Dez said. “Let me
give you a lift.”

  “That’s al right. I’m a taxi kind of girl.” I pointed out the window, where a few Yel ow Cabs and Checkers floated by. “I won’t have a problem. But thank you for dinner.” I waved at the table toward the bottles of wine and grappa and the desserts in which we’d barely made a dent.

  Dez answered that it had been wonderful, that he’d like to see me again. “I guess I should have asked before,” he said, with a shy shrug that surprised me. “You’re single, right?”

  I answered honestly—“I am.”

  A few short months before, I’d juggled three men, and then suddenly there were none. Today, one was staging a comeback, and I wasn’t sure what to do about that. In the meantime, although I was occasional y tortured about those who had left my life, I was free to date whomever I wanted. Even a ranking member of the Mafia, if only as a part-time job.

  If I hadn’t known who he was and what he did for a living, I wouldn’t have blinked before agreeing to go out with Dez. I was about to turn thirty, and with my birthday fast approaching, it seemed the dating gods had flipped a switch in my head. I had never dated anyone much older than me, never real y been interested, but now Dez’s forty-some years compared to my twenty-nine seemed just fine.

  Dez leaned his elbows on the green-and-white tablecloth and shot me a sexy kind of smile. “Would you go out with me sometime? Official y?”

  Official y, I was about to say, Sure, This was what Mayburn had hoped would happen. I would listen for anything having to do with Michael DeSanto, and if nothing came up, I’d establish a contact with Dez so I could see him again, so I might learn something about Michael in the future.

  I looked out the window once more, thought about how to phrase my answer. And then I saw him.

  He was standing across the street at a stop sign, wearing a blue blazer and a scowl. He glanced at his watch, then up again, and as the cars slowed, he began to cross the street, right toward us.

  I opened my mouth. I must have looked shocked because Dez fol owed my gaze.

  “Hey, it’s DeSanto,” he said fondly. He looked back at me.