The Vendetta Defense (11 page)

“I want to report a break-in,” Judy told her, and gave the address to the dispatcher, who promised that a squad car would be there as soon as possible. Judy palmed the cell phone with some anxiety. She was counting on the Philadelphia police, never a completely safe bet. The score could be Law 0, Old Italian Way 1 unless she did something about it.

She became aware of a tinkling sound and squinted to see a woman in a Phillies T-shirt sweeping shards of jagged glass into a long-handled dustpan. While Judy was touched by the gesture, she couldn’t let her finish. “I know you’re trying to help, but maybe you shouldn’t sweep now,” Judy said to the woman, as politely as possible. “The glass could have fingerprints on it, or other evidence. This is a crime scene, technically.”

“Oh, sorry.” The woman instantly stopped sweeping. Pieces of glass tumbled to a stop across the gritty sidewalk, catching the light from the window. “I didn’t know. You being a lawyer, you would know.”

Judy didn’t ask the woman how she knew about her, from TV or the South Philly network, which apparently was better than cable. “Where are the cops? Did anybody call the cops?”

“I don’t know. It’s a sin, what they did to that old man,” the woman said.

“Who did it?” Judy asked, though she could guess at the answer.

“I don’t know.”

Judy didn’t have to see her face to know she was lying. “You have no idea?”

“No,” the woman said, shaking her head.

“Do you know what time it happened?”

“No,” the woman answered, edging away.

“Did you hear anything? See anything?”

“No way.” The woman disappeared into the crowd, but Judy wasn’t giving up. She held up her hands, one containing her cell phone.

“Please! Everybody! I need your attention!” she shouted.

The neighbors, who had been milling around, stopped and looked at her. She couldn’t see their expressions in the dark, but she knew they were listening because they quieted suddenly, and a sea of Eagles caps, Flyers caps, and pink cotton hairnets turned in her direction. Cigarette ends like lighted erasers glowed next to the chubbier, more muted flames of cigars. Somebody chuckled in the back of the crowd, and somebody else shouted, “Yo! What you got in your hand, a bomb?” and everybody laughed, including Judy, who quickly slipped the cell phone back into her purse.

“Obviously, we have a problem here,” she shouted. “Somebody broke into Pigeon Tony’s house. Did anybody here see who broke the door and windows?”

The crowd remained mostly silent, although some people started talking among themselves and the same joker in the back kept chuckling.

“Look, somebody must have heard or seen something. It takes time to chop down a door and it makes noise to break a window. It had to have happened in broad daylight. Isn’t anybody going to help Pigeon Tony out?”

There was no answer from the crowd, which had started to scatter at the fringes. Somebody was still chuckling. Judy wanted to throttle him.

“Wait! Don’t go away. You’re all Pigeon Tony’s neighbors. You care enough about him to clean up the mess. Don’t you care enough to help him catch who did this?”

A murmur rippled through the dark crowd, which was growing smaller by the minute. Judy watched with dismay as the shadows disappeared into their rowhouses and shut the doors behind them. Suddenly the chuckling ceased and somebody shouted from the back, “Who the hell do you think did it?”

Judy took a deep breath. It was assumption-upon-assumption time again. “I think I know who did it. In fact, we all think we know who did it. But somebody had to see or hear them do it, to hold them accountable for it. So what we need now, what Pigeon Tony needs now, is a witness.”

The crowd quieted suddenly, and Judy understood why. There was something about the way the word rang out in the night that gave even her goose bumps.

“You know what a witness is, don’t you? I’ll define it for you, since I’m Pigeon Tony’s lawyer and it’s a highly technical legal term. A witness is somebody with the balls to come forward and tell the truth.”

The crowd laughed, this time with her, though Judy noticed they continued their defection. Only four shadows stood before her, and one had to stay because his beagle was rooted to a scent on the sidewalk.

“You don’t have to come forward now. You can call me anytime. My name is Judy Carrier, at Rosato and Associates downtown.” By the time she finished the sentence, all of the neighbors had gone, except the beagle owner, unhappy at the other end of the leash. “Nice dog,” Judy said.

“He’s a pain in the ass,” said the man, and tugged the beagle away.

Having accomplished nothing, Judy turned and went inside the house. She should have been prepared for what she’d find inside, but she wasn’t. The front door, or what was left of it, would have opened onto a small living room, with an old green sofa against the left wall, on which hung a large mirror and several framed black-and-white photographs. There would have been a wooden coffee table in front of the couch, and next to that, at one point, an old overstuffed wing chair, in the same dark green fabric as the sofa. But none of it was recognizable now, the violence well beyond vandalism.

The coffee table had been broken in the middle and looked as if it had been jumped on until its legs gave way. The sofa had been butchered, slashed this way and that, its green fabric rent into shreds. White polyester stuffing had been ripped out and strewn everywhere on the shredded couch and floor. The wing chair had been knifed to death, and somebody had taken a sledgehammer to its frame and splintered the wood as easily as the bones of a human skeleton.

Aghast, Judy looked at the wall. A single blow had shattered the mirror and it hung crazily by one corner. The sledgehammer hadn’t stopped at the mirror but had been pounded through the plaster wall behind it, destroying the lath and battering the wire mesh beneath. The only part of the wall left unscathed was a brown wooden crucifix, apparent evidence of the Christian beliefs of the perpetrators.

Judy shook her head. These were rowhouses, all of them connected, sharing a common wall. Of course the next-door neighbors had heard this pounding. It would have sounded like someone was knocking his house down. If they wouldn’t talk to her, they’d talk to the cops. Wouldn’t they? She couldn’t think about it now. She left the ruined living room to look for Pigeon Tony and Frank.

The living room adjoined an eat-in galley kitchen, as savaged as the living room, and the lights had been left on, apparently for full shock value. The kitchen table had collapsed in the middle, taking the brunt of the fury, and lay broken in two. The telephone had been ripped out of the wall. The cabinet drawers, whose white paint looked like new refacing, had been yanked out, the silverware and kitchen utensils scattered willy-nilly. On the wall, all the cabinets had been opened, their doors wrenched off and tossed onto the linoleum floor, and emptied of their contents. Strewn on the counter were packages of lentils, two cans of garbanzo beans, and a jar of yellow lupini beans. Broken dishes, sharp glass, and smashed china littered the tile. The kitchen sink had been stopped up with a dish towel and the faucet left running, so water spilled over the mess on the countertop and ran freely onto the floor.

Judy struggled to understand the mentality of people who would do this. They acted like common thugs, their destruction mindless, their rage spending itself. The only remotely valuable items, a TV and a small radio, were destroyed and not taken. It hardly seemed real, but Judy experienced the same feeling she’d had at the melee in the courtroom. It was real; her eyes couldn’t deny the scene.

For some reason she went to the faucet and twisted it off. The silence permitted her to hear Frank’s voice somewhere out back. There must have been a backyard. Judy remembered Pigeon Tony’s concern about his birds. She headed for the back door, afraid of what she might find.

12

I
t was dark outside but Judy could see the lighted ruins of a little white house that took up almost all of Pigeon Tony’s backyard. It must have been the house in which Pigeon Tony kept his birds, but it was unhappily silent. The night was still, except for the city sounds of traffic and a faraway siren. Cinderblock enclosed the yard, which was a small rectangle.

She walked through the darkness to the pigeon house. Judy swallowed hard as she took in the sight. The panels of plywood that made up the bottom of the building had been chopped away from the inside at the far end, so that the end of the house had collapsed onto its foundation, which appeared to be supported by stilts. Judy figured that the stilts would have been chopped away, bringing the whole house down, but the vandals had apparently gone inside the pigeon house and started hacking away, then escaped out the front door. The lights within shone through the openings made by an ax or a baseball bat. Judy could see through the torn and missing screens that Pigeon Tony and Frank were inside.

She picked her way between broken slats of plywood in the yard to what used to be wooden steps that led to an open threshold, the front door dismantled and tossed aside. She stepped inside but neither man looked up. They were kneeling over, absorbed in a common task, and she looked around, appalled. Everything inside the pigeon house had been broken, as if smashed by a baseball bat; cages, perches, chicken wire, wooden frames—all of it had been demolished. A medicine chest at the end of the aisle had been overturned, the medicines spilled. Trash cans that held feed had been dumped and bashed in. Birdseed lay scattered on the floor.

Judy got the impression that as many pigeons as could be caught were killed, brutally. She had no idea how many pigeons Pigeon Tony kept, but she counted seven dead. Some had their necks wrung; some had had been stomped to death, a gruesome sight. One slate-gray pigeon had had its head sadistically pulled off, exposing a bloody section of delicate backbone. Sickened, Judy took a step and almost tripped over the lifeless body of a white bird. Its head was a pulpy mass of blood, and it lay on its back, its feet curled in death. A silver band on its pink legs had slid back against the downy feathers of its underbelly. Its blood stained the whitewashed floor. It smelled raw and wasted. Judy felt her gorge rising.

“You okay?” Frank asked, looking at her quickly. He squatted on the floor, helping his grandfather care for a large gray pigeon, mercifully still alive. “Maybe you should sit down.”

Judy shook her head no, afraid to speak until her nausea passed. Frank returned to his task, cradling the pigeon expertly in his cupped hands, so that the body of the bird nestled in his palms and his hands gripped underneath its wings. Pigeon Tony deftly wrapped a thin bandage around the top of its left wing, which he had extended. Neither man spoke, but their expressions and their brown Lucia eyes were almost identically strained.

Judy watched and began to feel a little better. She concentrated on the live pigeon. She had never seen one so close up, mainly because she had never bothered to look at them pecking at trash in Washington Square or waddling fast down the street, like Olympic walkers. The injured bird was alert, and its golden eye, with a black pupil like a punctuation mark, darted this way and that. Whitish, wrinkly folds around its eye provided an odd sort of ring, and Judy wondered what it was for. She was surprised at the bird’s wingspan, a full twenty inches, with ten pinfeathers at the front of the wing clearly longer than those closer to the body. She wished she had paid more attention in science when they talked about drag and lift, but she assumed that it all made the birds fly better. She didn’t really care. She just wanted the pigeon to live.

“Is it going to be okay?” she asked, and Frank looked up.

“Hope so.” He managed a grim smile. “There’s only the one break. He’s young and strong, so I don’t think he’ll die.”

“Good. It’s so . . . awful about the house, and the birds.”

“We had to destroy two, to put them out of their pain.” His mouth tightened. “But most got away. We figure thirty survived, including Jimbo here.”

Judy smiled, relieved. “Will they come back, to the house?”

“Loft. After something like this, there’s no way to tell.” Frank focused again on the bird. Pigeon Tony, almost finished taping its wing, cut the bandage with a bent surgical scissors. “Instinct will tell them to stay away, especially if they left with their mates, which all of them did, except two.”

“Which two?”

“One whose mate was killed, a cock named Nino, and The Old Man. His mate died a long time ago.”

Pigeon Tony said nothing as he gentled the snipped end of the tape closed, and the pigeon took an ungrateful peck at his finger. A tiny bulb of blood appeared on Pigeon Tony’s weathered hand, and he gave an indulgent
heh-heh-heh
when he noticed it, then wiped it on his baggy pants.

Frank laughed, too. “He feels better, Pop.”

“Si, si. Va bene.”
Pigeon Tony smiled, but Judy could see his dark eyes aching with the loss of his birds. He cradled the bird against his sweater, curling his body protectively around it, then rose to his knees, with Frank supporting his elbow. Pigeon Tony nodded and, holding the bird, walked through the debris down the aisle.

Frank gave Judy the high sign, then called after his grandfather, “Pop, we have to get out of here now. Judy thinks so, too.”

Pigeon Tony shuffled off, but Judy knew he was only apparently oblivious to them, and she said her line.

“I agree with Frank, Tony. It’s not a good idea for you to stay here any longer. You both go, and I’ll wait for the police.”

“Police!” Pigeon Tony shook his head querulously, picking through the mess in the feed room, righting jugs of veterinary medicines and unused syringes with his free hand. “No like police! Police do nothing!
Nothing!
”

Judy sighed. She kept forgetting that the Lucias lived in Palermo, not Philadelphia. “I had to call the police, I had to report it. What was done here, to your house, to your pigeon house, to your birds, it’s a crime. Breaking and entering. Animal cruelty. Malicious mischief. The police will do something about it when they get here.”