Killer Smile (6 page)

“You’ll figure it out. We’re tired. Very tired.” Judy patted Penny, who had curled into a neighboring swivel chair and fallen asleep. Dogs were allowed up on the furniture at Rosato & Associates, which was the sort of thing that happened at an all-woman law firm. That, and the refrigerator was full of Lean Cuisine.

“And think about what we learned from the files of the internees who died in the camps.” Mary reached for the three files of deceased internees and stacked them in front of her on the table. “Each one has a death certificate and burial arrangements. These files are thicker than the others, that’s why I noticed them. So where is Amadeo’s death certificate?”

“What a good doggie you are,” Judy cooed to the drowsy retriever.

“Like you said, it’s a big deal when someone commits suicide in federal custody.” Mary opened up the second and third folders and laid them side by side with the first. On the top of each was a letter that read LEGATION OF SWITZERLAND. “All three of these files are the same. When an internee dies, a letter gets written to Geneva informing them of the death. So where’s Amadeo’s letter?”

“Don’t know.” Judy stroked the dog’s smooth head. “Maybe Penny knows. My smart Penny —”

“Amadeo would still be covered by the Geneva Convention, he was a prisoner of war.” Mary was freewheeling here. International law wasn’t her forte. Unfortunately, she lacked a forte, which was part of the rationale behind that college refund business.

“Such a good doggie.” Judy petted the dog, whose tongue had slipped from her mouth in a stupor common to golden retrievers and crack addicts.

“Also, the internees who died in the camps were buried locally. I found a file of one other internee who died at Fort Missoula, and he was buried in the Catholic cemetery in Missoula. He died of colitis, and his file had a death certificate. So where is Amadeo’s death certificate?” Mary shuffled through the file again, then realized something. “I wonder where Amadeo’s buried. I don’t even know. I never thought about that before. If he committed suicide, they might not let him be buried in a Catholic cemetery.”

“I love you, Penny.”

“All this time, I’ve been concentrating on his business. What happened to his body? Is it in Missoula or Philly?”

“I love you, yes I do.” Judy lapsed into a continuous loop of
pretty dog, smart dog, good dog
, and soon Mary would have to barf.

“His son was in the army when he died, so he couldn’t have had the body sent back, and his wife was already gone. Amadeo had no other family in the area, and I have no idea if his wife’s parents were still alive. But still, would his in-laws send for a body all the way across the country, during wartime? When their daughter was already dead? I doubt it. It had to be expensive, and a pain in the ass. What do you think, Jude?”

Mary looked over but Judy was resting her forehead against Penny’s while she baby talked to her, the two of them floating on a cloud of girl-and-dog love. Mary checked her watch. Almost ten o’clock. Maybe it was time to go home. “Okay, you two, you win.”

“Woohoo!” Judy got out of the chair and stretched. So did Penny, climbing out of the chair and extending her forelegs until they lined up almost even, which made Mary smile.

“Thanks for helping, Jude. I couldn’t have done it without you.”

“Of course you couldn’t.” Judy finished stretching, lowering her arms and rubbing her slim tummy. “I’m the one who found the memo.”

“Lucky.”

“Ingrate.”

“Freak.”

“Geek,” Judy said, and the women continued to trade pleasantries as they gathered their bags, papers, briefcases, and backpacks, then walked to the elevator, with Penny trotting behind them, her tail wagging.

Mary hit the button for the elevator, inwardly elated. The memo was safe in her briefcase, and though it raised more questions than it answered, she couldn’t wait to get it home.

With her secret stash.

At her apartment, Mary downed a bowl of Special K, slipped into an oversized McNabb jersey, and piled her hair on top of her head in a Pebbles ponytail. It was almost midnight but she felt oddly energized, sitting cross-legged on her puffy blue comforter with her newfound FBI memo and Amadeo’s personal effects spread out in front of her. She had gotten them from Frank Cavuto, the estate’s lawyer, who’d gotten them from Amadeo’s son, Tony. She had seen the effects a hundred times, but the FBI memo had got her blood going, and she looked at Amadeo’s things with new eyes.

On her left sat three photographs. The first was of Amadeo, bending over in a fishing boat and evidently doing something to one of the nets that lay in ropey piles on the deck of his boat. Mary squinted but couldn’t see what he was doing. Repairing the net? The deck? Either way, he focused intently on his task and didn’t smile for the camera. It told her that he wasn’t a vain man; he was a little shy. Mike had been like that. She set the photo down on the bed.

The next photo was a wedding portrait of Amadeo and his wife, Theresa. He stood stiff as a toy soldier with his bride, and Theresa’s dark eyes shone behind the gauzy veil. Her hair curled to her shoulders, and her dress was frilly in an appealing, old-fashioned way. Mary found herself drawn back to Amadeo. His eyes, brown-black but so animated, had been joyful on his wedding day. Again, it reminded her of Mike, on their wedding day. He had teared up at the altar, and his frat brothers had never let him forget it. Mary smiled at the memory, then remembered something Judy had said, in her office:

It’s like you have a crush on him or something.

Mary set the photo down. The next was of Theresa and Amadeo holding a baby boy with dense, black curls; their son, Tony. The end of the photo was tattered, as if it had been torn from a booklet. Mary turned it over to read JULY 4, penciled in a woman’s flowing hand. There was no notation of what year the photo had been taken, but if the baby was Tony, it had to be around 1920; Tony grew to be old enough to enlist when World War II came around. But in the happier times of the picture, they were all dressed up to celebrate the birth of their new country. Mary couldn’t ignore the irony, as bitter on her tongue as broccoli rabe.

She set the photos next to the last item, a flimsy black wallet with a cheap fake brass snap. It was made of black plastic and inside were three clear photo compartments, now cloudy with age. She flipped to the first, which held a black-and white picture of a woman’s face, cut out in the shape of a circle. Mary slid it out and flipped it over, the paper thin and pulpy in her hands. The writing on the back was printed Italian, cut off where the circle was, but the name was visible.
Francesca Saverio.
Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini, patron saint of immigrants. Mary should have recognized her. Cabrini’s face was typically framed by a black veil and graced with a sweetly melancholic smile; her story was that she was a quiet, withdrawn child. Her symbol was a boat. It made sense that Amadeo, an immigrant and a sailor, would have adopted Cabrini as his patron. And if his suicide was any indication, he had been the melancholy type, too.

Mary went to the next envelope, which contained a lock of dark hair pressed within the dusty plastic. It had been snipped crudely and curled into a question mark about an inch long. She pried open the envelope and caught the lock as it came sliding into her hand. It felt soft, fine, and seemed to have almost no weight in her palm. She prodded the strands with an index finger, as if the lock were something alive, then held it under her bedside lamp, watching the filaments catch the light. The hair wasn’t as black as it looked in the envelope, but was a deep brown, shot through with russet highlights. Whose hair was it? Amadeo’s son’s? His wife’s? Mary held the hair to the heads in each photo, like a fright wig. Funny, but not good detective work.

Mary fingered the lock. Amadeo’s effects only reinforced her sense of him. He was a simple man whose world was small, yet perfect. Wife Theresa. Son Tony. Growing business. Three boats. He had his family and his fishing. Love and work. Rich by any standard, even Freud’s. She opened the billfold in the wallet, where money would be kept.

A thick stack of white papers nestled inside, and she slid them out. They were five pieces of scrap paper, and on each were a series of drawings. The drawings were of a circle of some sort, with a tiny bump on the side. Each page had several different views of the circle, drawn with a crude pencil. There was no writing on it, not even in Italian. The circle drawing was repeated at least twenty times. Was that obsessive? Not really. When Mary doodled, she’d usually draw the same things over and over; her name, a pair of large eyes, or for some reason, a ballet slipper. But she wondered about it, with Amadeo. Was it an early sign of depression? And why did he keep it in his wallet?

For no reason, she held the papers up to the lamp, so the light shone through. There was no watermark or secret inks. It told her nothing more, which was the problem with things you do for no reason. But they were drawings of Amadeo’s, Mary felt sure. It was the only tangible thing she had seen — apart from his
X
mark on the registration card — that had actually come from him. That he had touched.

She found herself closing her hand around the paper, then opening it again. She thought of her mother in the kitchen, playing hand tricks with the steam. She couldn’t help but feel that she was closer to Amadeo, connected to him, and she admitted to herself that Judy had been right. It was as if she had a crush on Amadeo, not because he reminded her of George Clooney, but because he reminded her of Mike. She didn’t know if Mike had gotten justice and she didn’t know if Amadeo could either, but the confused tangle in her heart told her she had to try. She slid the papers back in the billfold, closed the wallet, and snapped it shut. Then she gathered the photos, set them neatly back in her briefcase, and switched off the light.

Mary lay back in bed alone, as she had almost every night since Mike had died, except for one love affair that hadn’t worked out. She had changed apartments, hit thirty, and still didn’t own a house. She didn’t even have a cat anymore and had grown used to being on her own, kept company at night by Jay Leno, HBO, the Discovery Channel, Lifetime, or at last resort, Paid Programming. She had grown so accustomed to being on her own that it didn’t feel lonely anymore. It was just the state of things. Her friends would send her on blind dates, and she would go because it was easier than resisting, but being alone wasn’t so terrible. She was a single girl, and it felt like enough. Especially with cable.

Her room was dark except for the orange rectangle glowing from the Westclox and a white slice of the moon, so bright it shone through an opening in the curtain. She tried to ignore it but couldn’t, so she climbed out of bed and trundled to the window. She pulled the curtain closed just as she saw a dark Escalade leave a parking space across the street and drive away.

Mary blinked. Which one of her neighbors had an Escalade? None that she knew of. It looked like the same car she’d seen the other day, on Mercer Street. What was going on? She couldn’t decide if she was being paranoid.

The dangerous ones, the truly murderous ones, lie in wait. And then, when the moment’s right, they strike.

Mary tried to banish the voice, but couldn’t. She returned to bed and climbed under the comforter, her body stiff with a bad feeling.

The bad feeling was fear.

First thing Monday morning, Mary stopped by Frank Cavuto’s law office to take him the FBI memo that she, Judy, and Saint Anthony had found. She sat across his desk in a slippery leather chair, waiting for him to finish reading it. Frank’s shave was so fresh she could smell the minty Gillette on his softening cheeks, and he wore a three-piece pinstriped suit, because lawyers still dressed up for work in South Philly. Down here, they were proud to wear ties. A tie meant you were a high school grad.

“Interesting document, huh?” Mary asked, but Frank merely held up an index finger as his large, brown eyes darted across the page. His head was pitched slightly back to see through his black-rimmed reading glasses, and she wondered what was taking so long. The document was all of two paragraphs.

She looked impatiently around the office, which was over-stuffed, downscale, and even dirty, like most of the solo practitioners in South Philly. They made good money doing wills, contracts, and the occasional slip-and-fall in the produce aisle, but you’d never know it from their offices. The walls were covered with thin wood paneling, a backdrop for diplomas from a Catholic university and law school, mounted in a precut frame from CVS. In the self-promotion department, there were certificates from the Knights of Columbus, the Masons, Kiwanis Club, and framed thank-yous from the Boys’ Club, PAL, and the ASPCA, this last telegraphing that Frank was a soft touch. Puppies don’t hire lawyers.

Next to that hung group photos of the girls’ softball team he’d sponsored over the years, posed in red jerseys on the weathered bleachers of Palumbo Field. A nine-year-old Mary DiNunzio grinned from the third row of one of them, next to her old best friend, Marti Funnell, her face partially obscured by a dust-covered corn plant that struggled for air behind Frank’s desk. The desk itself was of dark veneer, cluttered with correspondence, manila files, and white curls of adding machine tape. There wasn’t a single law book in the office. In South Philly, you didn’t need books if you wore a tie.

Frank set down the document and slid his glasses off, folding the eyepieces together with the faintest
click
. “Now, what did you say?”

“The FBI monitored Amadeo in the internment camp. Surprising, huh?”

“I guess so, sure.”

“The memo says that Joe Giorno met with Amadeo to tell him about his wife’s death. Did Joe represent Amadeo?”

“I think so.”

Mary blinked. “You didn’t mention that when you hired me. You told me that you represented his son, Tony, but not that Joe represented Amadeo.”

“I didn’t remember, or I didn’t think it mattered. My firm represents the family, going back. So what?” Frank shrugged, which got Mary thinking that although she had known him a long time, she didn’t know him that well.