The Vendetta Defense (39 page)

“We must go,” was all Tony could say, his voice unaccountably choked, and he carried Frank along to his bicycle, set him on the middle bar where he always sat, jumped on the bike and pedaled off.

“Whee!” Frank squealed, delighted at the unaccustomed speed, but Tony kept a steadying hand on the boy’s chest. Tony’s fear powered his feet. His thoughts were on Silvana. This would be the perfect time for Coluzzi to strike. Everybody in town knew that Tony and the boy had coffee on this day, at this time. In fact, it was the only time all week Silvana was alone. And it was the boy’s birthday. Tony picked up the pace, as fast as safety allowed.

They pedaled through the town, dodging farmers, cars, horses, carts, and other bicycles, into the countryside, with Tony fueled by sheer terror. Tony’s breath came in labored gulps. His legs began to ache. Sweat dampened his forehead.

The child screamed gleefully on the middle bar. “Yiii!”

Tony avoided each large rock as the paved road turned to dirt, swerving dangerously, and one time Frank yelped in fright. Then came another rock, and another yelp. Frank was becoming frightened, sensing his father’s mood, and with a child’s wisdom realizing that something was going very wrong. His hands reached up for his father, and Tony held fast to him. The bicycle barreled ahead, flying past a stray sheep, on a momentum of its own. Silvana was alone, unprotected. Silvana. Coluzzi. Tony’s feet raced around the pedals. Silvana. Coluzzi. Silvana. Coluzzi.

“Papa! Stop! Papa!” On the bar, Frank was crying fully now.

“Hang on!” Tony called to him. He couldn’t stop now; the road led to home.

“Papa! Stop! Please! I said
please
!”

“Hold on!” Tony yelled, as the bicycle turned down the road to their farm, and as soon as he got home in his sight he found a reserve of strength and pedaled faster. The ache vanished from his thighs and the sweat evaporated from his brow. Even his child’s screams seemed far away. Home. Silvana. Coluzzi.

They zoomed toward the house, and when they reached the front door, Tony slowed the bicycle on the soft grass, scooped Frank in his arms as he let the bike fall, and ran with the boy crying under his arm into the house.

“Silvana!” he cried, charging over the threshold with the sobbing child.

“Papa! Papa!” Frank wailed, squirming from Tony’s arms to collapse in a crying heap on the floor.

“Silvana!” Tony looked wildly around the living room, gaily decorated with flowers and homemade notes for Frank’s birthday. The lace tablecloth had been put out, and a white cake sat in the middle of the table with noisemakers, pieces of nougat, and a large wrapped present. Silvana had readied everything for Frank’s celebration, to surprise him when they came home, according to plan. But she was nowhere in sight. Tony’s heart was seized with a fear he had never known.

“Silvana!” he screamed, the sound so unaccustomed coming from the gentle farmer that baby Frank began to cry even harder, covering his ears in horror amid his birthday decorations.

“Silvana!” Tony ran to the kitchen. No Silvana. He ran to the bedroom and through the small house, yelling. “Silvana!” He ran outside to the pasture.

“Silvana!” Only the sheep looked over, peering with their slitted eyes. He ran to the olive groves, hill after hill of flowering trees, their fragrance usually intoxicating to Tony. But not tonight. Where
was
she?

“Silvana!” he bellowed, cupping his mouth with his hands, but only her name came back, a hollow echo.
“Silvana!”

Tony’s thoughts were panicky. Where had she gone? She had few friends, her sister had moved and she had lost both parents. Silvana never went anywhere alone. What woman did? He racked his brain. What hadn’t he checked? The pigeon loft? Perhaps she was visiting them. She liked them as much as he did.

Tony sprinted for the loft and threw open the wooden door. Birds fluttered on their perches at the intrusion, sending pinfeathers into the air. No Silvana. Tony ran from the loft for the house, but then he heard the sound of the horses neighing.

He stopped in his tracks.

The stable. It was the only place he hadn’t checked, for Silvana never went in there. She was afraid of horses. Still. Tony ran for the stable and yanked open the rolling door.

The only sight worse than the one before him was the one behind him.

“Mama?” asked the boy, his eyes wide with shock at the body that lay lifeless in the hay.

38

“
A
ll rise!” announced the court crier, and everyone packing the largest courtroom in the Criminal Justice Center rose as one. “All rise for the Honorable Russell Vaughn!”

Judy stood up next to Pigeon Tony, dressed in a dark blue suit that fit him better than the last one and matched her regulation courtroom wear, with navy pumps. In the four intervening months, she had sprung for a boring new wardrobe and her first pair of lawyer pumps. In her view, it wasn’t progress.

Judge Vaughn, a tall man, gray-haired and ruddy-faced, whose voluminous judicial robes couldn’t conceal the power of his frame, swept into the courtroom from a pocket door, ascended the walnut dais, and took his leather seat as if he were born to it. In fact he was. His father had been a common pleas court judge before him, and both were equally respected. Judy considered his assignment to this case a good sign.

“Good morning, all,” he said. “Please sit down. Court is now in session in the matter of Commonwealth versus Lucia. This trial has been expedited on request of defense counsel, and it’s already taken two weeks to pick a jury, so let’s not waste any more time.” Judge Vaughn glanced at the bailiff. “Please bring them in, Bailiff.”

Judy watched as the jury filed in through another pocket door and took their seats, in bucket swivel chairs of black vinyl. The jury consisted of two rows of seven, including alternates; there were an equal number of men and women. Judy felt lucky to have gotten five people over age sixty-five onto the panel, in the hope that they’d be sympathetic to Pigeon Tony. But since it was a case of murder in the first, they had been death-qualified. So as sympathetic as they seemed, every one of them had sworn that he or she would be able to sentence Pigeon Tony to death.

Judy gazed at them now, one by one, behind a sleek panel of walnut veneer. In time she would come to know their faces and they hers, in the oddly remote familiarity that occurred in every jury trial. But right now the jurors sat as stiff as the courtroom furniture, avoiding meeting anyone’s eyes, almost blending in with the beige acoustic panels on the wall, a wool carpet of a graphite color, and walnut pews of the gallery. The only odd element of the courtroom’s modern decor was the expanse of bulletproof glass that separated the gallery from the bar of court.

Judy glanced back at the gallery through the clear shield. In this case, security would be in order. The two guards Bennie had hired sat solidly in the front row; they had become Judy’s new best friends, shadowing her everywhere, advising her when it was time to change hotels. They’d even followed her to her few visits with Frank, and between the guards and Pigeon Tony, ensured that the affair remained unhappily chaste. Judy sought Frank out in the gallery, and he was sitting in the front row next to Bennie, Mr. DiNunzio, Tony-From-Down-The-Block, and Feet, wearing new glasses. Judy tried to catch Frank’s eye, but he was watching the Coluzzi side of the aisle.

John Coluzzi, in a black suit and tie, sat on the right side of the gallery with his meaty arm around his mother, who was also dressed in black, next to Fat Jimmy Bello. No one had been charged in the death of Marco, and the police said they still had no leads. Like Frank, Judy found herself glaring at John, unable to look away. Flashing on the image of Marco, dying in her arms. Judy hadn’t been able to get far even in her lawsuits against them, without a live witness in Kevin McRea, but he was still nowhere to be found.

“Let’s get started. Mr. D.A., Mr. Santoro?” Judge Vaughn was saying, and Judy turned around. The judge was slipping on a pair of black reading glasses, with half frames. “Your opening statement?”

“Yes, sir.” Joe Santoro drew himself up, buttoned his well-made Italian suit at the middle, and strode to the podium facing the jury. His dark hair glistened in moussed waves, and his fingernails shone with nail polish, but his self-important grooming belied the time he had to have spent on case preparation. Judy knew it had matched hers, and she picked up her pen to take notes. The Commonwealth had turned over its evidence, which was predictably overwhelming. Given the evidence, the case was his to lose.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” he began, “my name is Joseph Santoro, and I represent the people of the Commonwealth. I’ll keep this short and sweet, because I prefer to let my witnesses do my talking for me, as you will see.”

Santoro took a breath. “In my view, lying at the core of every murder case is a simple story. This case is no exception. This case is a story about defendant Anthony Lucia, a man who has hated Angelo Coluzzi for sixty years and has harbored malice against him, going back all the way to when they both were young men in Italy. The reason for this hatred? Defendant Lucia mistakenly believed that Angelo Coluzzi killed his wife sixty years ago and even killed his son and daughter-in-law in a traffic accident. Of course, this is pure fantasy, the imaginings of an angry man, who lives alone, with nothing but his malice.”

Next to Judy, Pigeon Tony emitted a low growl, but she put a hand on his to calm him. She had warned him to behave during the trial, as she had Frank and The Tonys. She couldn’t afford another courtroom war between the Lucias and the Coluzzis. It would play right into Santoro’s opening argument. Santoro had been clever to bring the vendetta into the case, recasting it as one-way grudge, or pure malice.

“Defendant Lucia’s hatred for Angelo Coluzzi has been brewing for all of these years. And the defendant carried his malice with him when he immigrated to America, where Mr. Coluzzi built a successful construction company in his adopted homeland. In contrast, the defendant’s construction company, essentially a one-man bricklaying business, failed to thrive, feeding his hatred for and jealousy of Angelo Coluzzi. It was then that the defendant began planning to kill an innocent man.”

Pigeon Tony’s mouth dropped open in offense, but Judy squeezed his hand, though she was equally outraged. None of what Santoro was saying was true, but she couldn’t disprove it. The proof of Silvana Lucia’s murder was long gone, and the accident reconstructionist who had examined the Lucias’ charred pickup had reached a disappointing conclusion:
Negligent driving, poor weather conditions, and a substandard guardrail resulted in the lethal accident involving the Lucia family on January 25.
The report also noted that the crash had killed the Lucias instantly, and found no evidence of tampering with the truck, as only residues of engine oil, diesel fuel, and gasoline appeared, not unusual in accidents involving construction vehicles.

“Acting on this mistaken belief, defendant Lucia took his brutal revenge, and after lying in wait for decades, killed Angelo Coluzzi on April seventeenth. That morning, which was a Friday, defendant Lucia entered the back room of a pigeon-racing club that both men belonged to. Angelo Coluzzi was inside the room alone. You will hear that a fellow club member was sitting nearby and heard the defendant shout at Mr. Coluzzi, ‘I’m going to kill you.’ ” Santoro paused for dramatic effect, and the jury looked predictably surprised. One of them, an older woman in the front, glanced at Pigeon Tony, then looked away.

“You will hear, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that this same club member heard a scream, then a crash coming from the room, apparently the sound of a bookshelf falling over. He ran into the room. Too late, unfortunately. Defendant Lucia had gone into that room, attacked Angelo Coluzzi, and broken the poor man’s neck with his bare hands.”

Judy set down her pen. The opening worried her, if she wasn’t already worried enough. She had prepared for something more conventional and had outlined a complete defense, described witness by witness in black notebooks. But Bennie had warned her to try the case that went in, from word one. She struggled not to panic.

“By the end of this case,” Santoro said, “the Commonwealth will have proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant murdered Angelo Coluzzi and that he is guilty of murder in the first degree. That is how the story of this murder case will end. It can by no means be considered a happy ending, for it will never bring Angelo Coluzzi back to his loving wife and family. Nor will it be an unhappy ending. What it will be is an ending that serves justice. Thank you.” Santoro left the podium, crossed to the prosecutor’s table, and sat down.

Judge Vaughn looked at Judy. “Your turn, Ms. Carrier,” he said, and nodded.

Judy stood up and took the podium, after a thoughtful moment. “Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Judy Carrier, and I stand before you to defend Anthony Lucia. I will keep it short as well, because I want you to be clear on the one and only question in this case, which is this: Has the Commonwealth proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Anthony Lucia is guilty of murdering Angelo Coluzzi? The Commonwealth must prove that answer beyond a reasonable doubt, and that is the one question before you. I heard nothing about such proof in Mr. Santoro’s opening. And proof is the only thing that matters.”

Judy came out from behind the podium and, when Judge Vaughn didn’t rebuke her, leaned on it. “As you listen to the evidence that follows, please keep your focus on the question at hand. Has the Commonwealth proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Anthony Lucia is guilty of murdering Angelo Coluzzi? And I submit to you, the answer to that question will be no. My client, Anthony Lucia, is not guilty of murder. And finding him not guilty is the only just ending to this case.” Judy looked at the jurors for a moment, but they seemed attentive, which was the best she could hope for. She left the podium and sat down.

“Call your first witness, Mr. Santoro,” Judge Vaughn called out, and Santoro gestured to the court officer through the bulletproof glass to the gallery. Judy half turned, expecting to see Detective Wilkins or Jimmy Bello getting to his feet, but entering the courtroom through the double doors at the back was an elderly, frail woman she didn’t recognize. Her face was wrinkled and her cheeks gaunt behind plastic glasses with upside-down frames. Her hair was as poofy as Mrs. DiNunzio’s.