Red, White & Dead Page 6

  My mother had a desk in there, where she worked on her charity, an organization called the Victoria Project, which helped widowed women with children. A few stacks of paper sat on the desk, but it was the slow time of the year for the project, and so the library was as pristine as the rest of my mother’s house. I drifted to her fiction section and perused some novels, but my eyes kept moving upward, to the shelf at the top right, the one above the autobiographies, the one that required a step stool to reach.

  A wooden stool with two steps was tucked to the side of the shelves. I pulled it over and climbed the steps. I felt a little dizzy as I did so, part of me remembering climbing down the dark steps the other night, another part of me woozy with the sense of climbing now into the past.

  These were my father’s books. I easily found the one Charlie and I talked about. Poems & Prayers for the Very Young.

  I took it off the shelf and stepped off the stool, drawing my fingers over the cover, over the drawing of the two children on the front. I felt flooded by snippets of recollection-my dad’s hands opening that book; me, excitedly pointing to a poem I wanted to hear.

  I flipped, reading the first lines. I wake in the morning early. And always, the very first thing…

  What did my dad do first thing in the morning these days?

  I chastised myself a little for asking the question. What were the chances that he was really alive? Was this something I’d concocted from the recesses of my mind to distract myself from the fact that my life was stuttering?

  Yet here I was on a Tuesday morning, when I should have been working (or at least looking for work), idly perusing my mother’s bookshelves, stepping back in time. Later, I told myself. Later I would look for a job, then I would sort through the night with Theo and what it meant, if anything. I would call Sam for the first time in weeks and see how he was doing, how we were doing.

  I put the book down on my mother’s desk and stepped back up on the stool. A few of my dad’s textbooks were there, a couple of those novels he used to read and some historical books dealing with the history of Southern Italy and others on uprisings in Italy and Greece.

  My father was half Italian on his mother’s side, and he always had a taste for learning about his heritage. I opened the history books one by one, flipping through them. The pages were golden with age. I searched for notes my father might have made, passages he might have underlined, but there was nothing like that.

  I looked at a book about urban regeneration in Naples. I flipped through the pages the way I had with the other books. Again, no idle thoughts were scribbled into the margins, nothing that told me what my dad was thinking as he read the lines. But at the end, I found something sandwiched tight between the back cover and the last page. A newspaper clipping, dated February 1970.

  The clipping was small, almost ashy to the touch, and like the book pages, it was yellowed. I unfolded it and read the headline. Thieves Kill Man at Shell Station.

  I began to read the text and flinched when I saw the name of the victim-Kelvin McNeil. Suddenly, I remembered my dad talking to me one night, telling me a story, but this one wasn’t from a book. It was about his own deceased father, the one who would never meet his grandkids.

  You would have called him Grandpa Kelvin, he’d said, and he was a great man. He loved your grandmother very much. He always said the best thing he did was marry her.

  Grandma O? I asked.

  My father had nodded, smiled. Grandma O was Oriana, my dad’s mom. She lived in Phoenix, having moved out there from the East Coast when it was still a desert and not a suburb. Because of the distance, I only saw her about once a year. She’d died in a car accident a month before my father.

  I got down from the step stool, held the article closer and read it.

  Kelvin McNeil, it said, had pulled his vehicle, a 1969 F100 truck, into a Shell Station. Five minutes later, a neighbor screamed from an apartment next door. Police arrived at the scene and found McNeil lying dead beside his truck, the victim of a stabbing to his chest and abdomen, his wallet stolen. The keys were still in the ignition.

  8

  Dez Romano watched Michael DeSanto pace his office.

  “We’ve gone over this,” Michael said, “but there’s got to be something I’m missing, you know?”

  Dez decided to say nothing.

  Michael kept pacing. “When my wife met her last year, she said her name was Isabel Bristol. She said she was a lawyer who moved here from L.A. ”

  “Did you have someone check the California Bar records?”

  “Yeah. No one with that name.”

  Dez reached forward to his desk and picked up a program from the Naples opera house, which he’d gotten on his trip there two weeks ago. The opera had been Puccini’s Turandot. He leafed through the program, remembering the heat in the opera house, the women waving fans in front of their faces, the swell of the orchestra’s music, the lone, clear note of the alto that cut through the heat and made everyone think of no one but her.

  Michael kept pacing, kept talking about the redhead. Even though he was out on bail for the money laundering he’d done for Dez and the Camorra, the case, from what Dez had heard, was nearly lock solid. Michael would most likely be heading to a federal pen for something like ten years. Dez’s source had also told him that although the authorities could prove Michael had been laundering funds for a company in the suburbs called Advent Corporation, they couldn’t tie the ownership of the company to Dez or anyone in the Camorra. The attorneys Dez had originally paid to structure Advent Corporation had charged him astronomically, but they’d been worth every penny.

  As far as Dez could tell, it was only Michael, and his word, that could bring Dez down, and so Dez wanted to keep Michael as happy as possible, until he could pat him on the shoulder and tell him he’d see him after prison. He had promised Michael that he would always have a job with him, a place in Dez’s system, and a hell of a lot of money when he got out. And Michael was happy to be a cog in the wheel.

  So now Dez watched Michael stalk and talk in front of his desk. It was tough to take Michael’s energy. Dez tuned him out. He was thinking of that alto, and yes, he was thinking of the redhead. In fact, he’d been thinking of little but her since Sunday night when he’d first seen her at the bar, her head dipped down toward her cell phone, her face grimacing at what she read there, the way the purple silk of her dress had slipped down one shoulder. At that moment, she struck him as exactly the kind of woman he wanted now that he was divorced. She looked educated, well brought up. But she also looked like a hell of a lot of fun.

  And he’d been right. Dinner was a blast. And a turn-on.

  But sex wasn’t why he was thinking about her now. No, not at all. Another emotion drove his thoughts, one just as primal, but much more violent.

  9

  “What was dad working on when he died?”

  My mother turned from the kitchen counter, where she was collecting her cell phone, putting it in her purse. Since I’d come out of her library, she had been talking about Spence, how it was so funny that sometimes he couldn’t seem to dress himself. I hadn’t known how to segue into the topic again, so I just blurted it out.

  My mom cocked her head. I watched her intently for her reaction, not wanting to upset her, but she just blinked a few times, shook her head a little as if she was surprised, and said, “Why these questions all of a sudden?”

  I was sitting on a tall chair at the island. “I don’t know. I’ve just been thinking about him, I guess.”

  She turned back to her purse. “It makes sense, I suppose.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you’re at a transition point in your life, a time when you can go one way or another, and it’s usually at those times that we look back and try to make some sense of it all, see if we’ve done the right things, if we’ve ended up with the right people. And we remember people who aren’t with us anymore.”

  “Is that what you do? I mean, do you think
about whether you ended up with the right people, wonder if you did the right things?”

  My mother turned around again and looked at me. She put her hands on the counter behind her and leaned back.

  In the last year, I had learned something about Victoria McNeil, something she thought no one else would ever know. We hadn’t spoken about it since. Not directly. But now, I think we both knew I was referring, obliquely, to the topic, and yet we both knew the specifics would remain unspoken. My mother was from the school of holding your emotional cards close to your heart, and after all she’d been through in her life, I respected that.

  A thump from above us, then another. Spence dropping something upstairs. He could be clumsy, especially when he was distracted and running late. My mother smiled at the sound. “I ended up with the right people,” she said. “And you?”

  “Well, since I haven’t ended up with anyone, it’s kind of hard to say right now.”

  “What about that young guy you mentioned?”

  I laughed a little. I hadn’t told my mother how young he was.

  “What?” she said.

  “Nothing. I saw him last night.”

  “Fun?”

  I remembered the feel of my legs around him, my back against the rough wall of the stairwell. I thought of him later in bed, curving around me, how he fell asleep first and I traced the ribbon of red tattooed in a trail down his arm. “Yeah, it was fun.”

  “And so?”

  I shrugged. “Who knows?”

  Theo hadn’t said anything specific about getting together again. It gave me a tickle of discomfort. Was all that stuff about dying to see me just about one thing-sex? Then again, what did I care?

  “And how’s Sam?” my mom asked.

  “We haven’t spoken in a few weeks.”

  “Do you miss him?”

  I shifted around on the chair. “Yes. And no. I mean, I miss lots of things about him, and I miss having someone in my life, but sometimes I don’t mind being alone. I don’t mind deciding what I want to eat for dinner and what I want to do for the weekend. I like that part a lot.” I looked down at the book my dad used to read me, played with its cover. Inside, I had tucked the clipping about my grandfather’s death. “But then again, sometimes it’s lonely.”

  My mother chuckled. “And so goes the circle of life.” She nodded at the book. “So all this about your dad…”

  “Yeah, I don’t know.” You’re okay now, Boo.

  My mother stood away from the counter, collecting other things in her purse-her keys, a small water bottle. “You asked what he was working on when he died. I don’t know all the specifics. I really never did. Your dad didn’t talk much when it came to his work.”

  “Didn’t that bother you?”

  “No. I knew he had to keep quiet because he was working sensitive cases.”

  “He worked for the Detroit police, right? Wasn’t it just the usual robberies and stuff?”

  “Your father worked out of the Detroit police office, and yes, he worked on things like robberies and even a serial killer, but he also profiled for the federal government. The primary case he was working on when he died was federal.”

  “What was it?”

  “A Mob case. The killing of the Rizzato Brothers.”

  “A Mob case?” I repeated. I thought of Dez Romano, Michael DeSanto.

  “Your dad had a certain knack for organized-crime cases. They were always asking him to consult.”

  “Did he ever get any threats from them?”

  “From whom? The Mob?” My mother shook her head. “He was just an average consultant. Never in the forefront.”

  I thought about the man running behind Dez and Michael as they chased me out of Gibsons. He hadn’t been at the forefront there, either. But somehow, whoever he was, I doubted that he was just an average consultant.

  10

  Louis (“Louie”) and Joseph (“Big Joe”) Rizzato were born and raised in Chicago after their parents emigrated from Ischia, Italy, an island off the Gulf of Naples. The Brothers Rizzato, as they were sometimes called, became involved in criminal activity early in life, eventually became Mob enforcers and were known for their violent and often cruel tactics. Louie rose to the position of Mob boss, but roughly six months after that, both brothers disappeared on the same night.

  I looked away from the computer for a moment.

  I had gone home from my mother’s and called Aunt Elena. No answer. I hung up without leaving a message. I wanted to get her on the phone, rather than crisscrossing with messages for weeks.

  I looked then at the stack of résumés by my keyboard, copies of ones I’d sent out and now just waiting for me to follow up on them. When I worked at the firm of Baltimore & Brown, I specialized in entertainment law, mostly because Forester Pickett, the media mogul, had taken a shine to me and given me a large chunk of his work-negotiating contracts for radio and TV personalities, defending the company or hiring local counsel, when cases of all kinds were filed against it. The phrase “trial by fire” had never been more apt. I hadn’t known what I was doing when I started, but I learned, and I learned fast, if only because there was no other way to stay afloat.

  When Forester died and I lost all my work, I’d been set adrift, and unfortunately the city didn’t have much entertainment law work to go around. When actors, musicians and directors from Chicago hit it big, they usually headed for one of the coasts. And so, unless I wanted to move, I was going to have to start thinking creatively about my employment possibilities. I’d already contacted most of the big law firms months ago, and after that attempt rendered nothing I could get excited about, I tried a gig as an on-air legal analyst. I even initiated an investigative report on a very wealthy but very crooked attorney, and that investigation eventually uncovered a class-action lawsuit scam. But after my bizarre run-in with the law as a murder suspect, no station was jumping at the chance to put me back in front of the camera. Hence the pile of résumés I’d sent out for in-house positions at different corporations.

  But I was too curious about that newspaper clipping about my grandfather, and what my mom had said about my dad, to make follow-up calls. I had pushed away the stack of résumés and done an Internet search for the Rizzato Brothers. And found that description of them-known for their violent and often cruel tactics.

  I sat back, away from the computer, and tried to think.

  My father had been working on a Mob case-that of the Rizzato Brothers-when he died. The Rizzato Brothers were Mob enforcers, one eventually a Mob boss, and they had disappeared. Meanwhile, I had been hanging out, rather innocently, with a Mob figure and was being chased by him when suddenly a vision appeared-an auditory one at least-of my dead father.

  It sounded like a load of crazy.

  Enough of this. I turned off the computer monitor and lined up my stack of résumés, then started making job-hunting calls.

  I got a lot of Sorry, nothing right now kind of responses. I got a few vague We haven’t decided anything yet, but we’ll let you know kind of answers. I got a lot of anxiety as it seemed that nothing was opening up and nothing would anytime soon.

  I looked at my watch. Six o’clock in the evening Rome time. I picked up the phone and dialed the number for my aunt Elena.

  She answered this time. “Cara!” she said, hearing my voice.

  It had been so long, and we chatted about everything-Charlie, my employment status, Chicago. We got into that seamless conversational space that weaves around in a pleasantly aimless way. I had always loved my aunt, and the older I got, the more I enjoyed her.

  But as with my mom, I couldn’t just dive in and say, Is it possible your brother is alive, or do you think I’m losing it? And although I’d told Maggie I would contact Elena about visiting, I hadn’t spoken with her in over a year. It seemed awkward to suggest a houseguest too quickly.

  Instead, it was less uncomfortable to say, “So, tell me about your mom and dad.” I had the book my father used to read on the edge
of my desk. I pulled it forward, opened it and took out the yellowed clipping. Thieves Kill Man at Shell Station.

  “What about them, cara? They were wonderful people. I guess you never got to meet my father.”

  “No. And I’ve been thinking about family lately. Grandma O was Italian and Grandpa Kelvin was Scottish, right?”

  “That’s right. Their love affair was something of a scandal. No one in my mother’s family had been involved with anyone who wasn’t Italian. Actually, no one had ever been involved with someone who wasn’t originally from Naples, if you can believe that. She met my father at a drugstore. It was in the winter, and they were both buying cough drops. My mother, Oriana, was a few years out of high school. My father was a few years older than her. It was one of those things you hear about-they saw each other, they both looked at shelves without talking, and when my father finally got up the courage to speak to her, they didn’t stop. They talked for hours in that aisle.”

  “And that was that? They were just in love and they lived happily ever after?” When had I gotten so cynical?

  “Well, no. There was resistance to them dating. Her family wasn’t happy at all, especially when they got engaged only six months later. But like I said, they were in love.”

  I thought of Sam. We had been in love once. There had never been a doubt about that.

  “Did they stay in love?”

  “Yes, always.” She sighed a little. “I used to wonder if I was only seeing that love through the eyes of a child, if maybe it didn’t really exist, or maybe as an adult I would realize that it was very different than what I’d thought. But no, now that I am an adult…” She laughed. “Incredibilemente, I am much more than an adult. Well, I see how pure their love was. It wasn’t always easy for them, especially my dad, coming into this Italian family. His family was already scattered around the country and didn’t see each other often, but my parents had this powerful connection. Everyone could see it.”