The Vendetta Defense (5 page)

“So you’re a reporter?” she asked.

“No. I needed a parking space.” Frank yanked a ring of keys from his back pocket, chirped the truck unlocked, and went to the passenger side to open the door. “Climb in, but watch out for the laptop.”

“You don’t have to keep getting doors for me,” she said, and Frank smiled.

“I know that.” He walked around the dinged bed of the truck to the driver’s side and got in. “I didn’t do it because I had to.”

Judy withheld comment as she got into the truck, which was an office on wheels. What did this guy do for a living? The front seat was a soft gray bench, but between the driver and passenger sat a desk-size console that held an open Gateway laptop with a slim portable printer wired to the cigarette lighter. There was another cell phone and a walkie-talkie with a stubby antenna. Judy gave up. “You a drug dealer?” she asked, and he laughed as he turned on the ignition.

“Of course not! I’m a stonemason.” He picked up the cell phone on the console. “Excuse me just one minute. I have to rearrange my schedule to be able to come at three.” He pressed a speed-dial button. “I don’t want you to think I’m one of those assholes who’s on the cell phone all the time.”

“I know how it is,” she said, as they pulled away. And she did, which meant that she knew Frank would be on the phone the remainder of the trip, and he was, answering questions, ordering materials, and explaining estimates for retaining walls. At one point Judy held the steering wheel while he printed out a purchase order and argued with ease over a late shipment. She amused herself by checking her own voicemail, not to be outdone in the cell phone department, and calling the receptionist at work to ascertain that Bennie remained in deposition. The cat was still away.

Judy looked out the window while the big truck sped smoothly out of the city and into the western suburbs, where the asphalt turned to strip malls of Staples stores, Chili’s restaurants, and Gap outlets. Judy had lived in twenty different states growing up, as her father was promoted within the navy, and even in her short time had seen how similar everything had become. Ironically, instead of making her feel more at home anywhere, it made her feel less so. She kept looking out the window, and soon the strip malls became green rolling hills with larger houses. Judy began to like playing hooky, driving around in a noisy truck with a stonemason, who was attractive despite his onion breath.

Frank pushed the cell phone button to end a call and gave a final sigh as the truck slowed to a stop at a traffic light. “Sorry about that,” he said, braking. Every time the truck halted, something rolled around in the pickup’s bed. “I wanted to clear the deck completely, and I don’t like to leave my guys on the job without me. Dry-laid is trickier than it looks.”

“What’s dry-laid?”

“New England dry-laid. Stone walls, no mortar. That’s what I do. That’s all I do now. I used to lay brick and block like my father and my grandfather, but it’s boring. Dry-laid is like fitting a puzzle together. You use fieldstones or whatever’s indigenous. You have to think. My guys, they’re good, but nobody’s as good without the boss around.”

“I bet,” Judy said, as if it didn’t apply to her.

“Now I’m okay for a few hours.” Frank turned the truck into a driveway on the right and cruised past the NO ENTRANCE sign. “Here we are.”

Judy pushed the button and rolled down the window. They were entering a memorial park, lovely and green, dotted with somber gray monuments. Many of the monuments bore flowers, and some had small flags that flapped in a soft breeze. The air wafted unaccountably sweet. “What are we doing here?” she asked, surprised.

“Showing you why my grandfather killed Angelo Coluzzi.”

Frank walked before Judy and stood at the front of the grave with his head bowed for a minute. Judy looked past him to the black granite monument, which sat flush with the grassy carpet:

LUCIA

FRANK     GEMMA

United in life, united in death.

It took Judy a minute to understand what she was seeing. The graves of Frank’s father and mother. The day etched into the glossy granite was a single one, January 25, and the date was last year’s. Judy’s heart went still. Frank had lost both of his parents. Had Pigeon Tony lost a son?

Frank lifted his head and turned. Pain softened his rugged features, but his eyes remained dry. “Come forward, it’s okay,” he said, motioning, and Judy stepped toward him.

“I’m sorry.”

“Me, too. But that’s not why I brought you here.” Frank cleared his throat but his voice sounded predictably hoarse. “My parents died last year, in an accident. The truck, it was my dad’s old truck, flipped over an overpass on the expressway. It happened late at night. The truck turned into a fireball. They were coming home late from a wedding in Jersey, and the cops think my father fell asleep at the wheel.”

Judy remained silent. She didn’t know what to say. The breeze was so gentle, the air so fresh. The only sound was Frank’s quiet voice, his account continuing tersely.

“Either that or he had a heart attack at the wheel, I don’t know exactly. It doesn’t matter. I had them cremated, which was . . . well, a necessity. Only that turned out to be a problem, at least as far as my grandfather is concerned.”

“Why?”

“See, my grandfather, he didn’t believe it was an accident. He thought my parents were murdered. An autopsy might have proved they weren’t. And he blamed himself for their death.”

Judy shook her head. “Who would murder your parents?”

“Angelo Coluzzi.” Frank scanned the oak trees in the distance, then a sun-dappled lawn that stretched over a small hill. “This goes back so many years, decades, to Italy. My grandfather told you about Coluzzi, didn’t he?”

Judy paused. “What your grandfather told me is privileged. It wouldn’t be ethical to reveal anything, even to you.”

“I respect that.” Frank nodded, with a half smile, turning to her. His eyes were an earth brown and the amused crinkling at the corners told Judy he was older than she’d thought at first, maybe forty. “Does this mean you’re a lawyer, but with ethics?”

“It happens.”

“No it doesn’t.” Frank laughed, a deep, masculine sound that Judy liked. She always thought you could tell a lot about a man by his laugh, but all she could tell by Frank’s laugh was that she hadn’t dated anyone in a long time.

“I’m an ethical lawyer, and as an ethical matter, you can tell me stuff. And I can listen. Ethically, of course.”

“I talk and you listen? Can women do that?”

Judy laughed, then sobered at the thought they were flirting, graveside. At least she suspected she was flirting, though she hadn’t meant to. In legal terms, she didn’t have the intent to flirt; it had sneaked up on her. She realized she’d liked Frank from the moment he tried to deck the cop. “How about you talk, I’ll listen? We’ll leave the politics out of it.”

“Excellent.” Frank turned again to his parents’ grave, when his smile faded. “Maybe we should take a walk.”

“Good idea,” she said, and fell into step beside Frank as he strolled down the grassy row between the graves toward a gravel road. He seemed to breathe a little easier.

“My grandfather’s wife—my grandmother—was killed by Angelo Coluzzi, in Italy. My grandmother had been seeing Coluzzi when she met my grandfather, and she accepted my grandfather’s marriage proposal over Coluzzi’s. Coluzzi could never live it down. He lost face. He hated my grandfather for it. And he killed her. Everybody in the neighborhood knows it.”

“What neighborhood?”

“Our block of South Philly. It’s one of the most solidly Italian blocks in South Philly, still. The Korean and the Vietnamese, they’re right next door, but this block is so solid that everybody came from the same region in Italy, from Abruzzo. All the families knew each other over there and everybody knew the Coluzzis, a wealthy family. A powerful family. Fascists.”

“I see,” Judy said, hearing an echo of his grandfather’s contempt in Frank’s voice.

“There was no prosecution of the murder. The Coluzzis had the juice to keep a lid on it. Their power was increasing, and when war broke out, my grandmother, she just got lost in the shuffle.” His voice trailed off for a moment, and Judy suppressed the urge to ask him for details. They walked down the gravel footpath as it wound past low-lying hostas, sharp fronds of tiger lilies yet to bloom, and purple alyssum that crept over rocks at the borders. The air under the trees they passed was cool. Frank’s Timberlands crunched on the gravel, and Judy was glad for the first time today that she’d worn clogs.

After a time Frank said, “It was a different world then, and another time. My grandfather tried to get her murder prosecuted and almost lost his own life in the process.”

“How?”

“They threatened him. Vandalized his house. Fire-bombed his car.”

“Who did?”

“Angelo Coluzzi, or men who worked for him. Blackshirts.”

“How do you know? Were they caught?”

“Of course not. We just know. Everybody knows, even today.”

Judy raised an eyebrow. It sounded like assumption piled on assumption, but this wasn’t the time to argue it. She needed information. “So what did your grandfather do about it?”

“He just moved. He didn’t retaliate, even when they bombed his car. He left the country with his son—my father, Frank Sr.—who was two at the time. They settled here. Gave up farming, started laying brick, like lots of immigrants from the region. My grandfather tried to accept what had happened to his wife. He went on and raised his son, and his birds.”

“Birds?”

“He keeps pigeons. Homing pigeons, but they race. He’s amazing at it. You should see. He spends all his time outside with them, teaching them, exercising them, tossing them—”

“Tossing?”

“It means letting them out on training runs, so they learn how to find their way back to the loft. He spends hours sitting with them outside, watching them fly.” Frank brightened at the thought, but it wasn’t the type of detail Judy needed right now.

“You were saying, about when he immigrated.” They walked down the path into the sun, and Frank winced at the sudden light.

“Then there was the accident. My father, my mother. I know it was just an accident but my grandfather, he believed Angelo Coluzzi did it. You must have heard of the family. Angelo, and his two sons, John and Marco. They own a big construction company in South Philly. They build strip malls and have houses in the Estates. Have you heard of them?”

Judy shook her head. She knew next to nothing about construction.

“They’re a sick, sick family.” Frank was still wincing, and Judy realized it wasn’t the sunlight. Duh. “My grandfather believes Angelo Coluzzi bombed my parents’ truck, like they had with his car, in Italy. And after they died, he just went downhill. He said it never would have happened if he’d retaliated for my grandmother. He thinks if he’d honored the vendetta, his son would be alive today.”

“Vendetta? What vendetta?” Judy had heard of it from the movies but couldn’t believe it had any application today.

“It’s a blood feud. A vindication of your rights, of your family’s rights. An eye for an eye. It grew up in a country where the law was of no help, not to the little guy like my grandfather. He doesn’t look to the law to save him, or to punish him. A vendetta has to be honored, in my culture, his culture.”

Judy was thinking that Italians raised emotions to an art form, but didn’t say anything for fear of being hit, or hugged.

“And so he just lost it. After my parents died, he became more and more depressed. And he was getting older. It didn’t help.” Frank stopped short on the path and turned to her, in appeal. “He’s a peaceful man. You know, he can’t even cull out his own pigeons. He won’t kill any of them. He keeps the slow ones and the old ones. He’s gentle. You can see that, can’t you?”

“Yes,” Judy answered, meaning it. “It was hard to imagine him killing anybody.”

“He wouldn’t have killed Coluzzi if he didn’t think he was put to it. He didn’t, all those years. Think about that. The Coluzzis moved to Philadelphia, only two blocks away, and every day my grandfather lived with the fact that his wife’s murderer was his neighbor. My father lived with that knowledge and took grief from the Coluzzis for years. They practically ruined his business, but my grandfather wouldn’t let him take revenge. My grandfather had a
right
to take revenge, and he never used it.”

Judy looked over. “Nobody has a right to kill anybody else.”

“Sure they do. In war, or in self-defense. To satisfy the death penalty. Even if you’re an abused wife. This society, this culture, kills all the time. Isn’t that right?”

“But—”

“There’s more death, more killing, in America than anywhere on the face of the earth. We justify killing in lots of circumstances. So why not if somebody kills your wife, your son, and
his
wife? Don’t you have a right to kill?”

“No, you don’t, and in any event your grandfather didn’t know that Coluzzi killed your parents. In fact, you think he did.”

“But my grandfather takes it as gospel, and for all I know, he may be right. You have to look at it his way, if it’s his state of mind you’re talking about, don’t you?” Frank’s eyes searched hers with an openness Judy found disarming, but her legal training resisted his words.

“People can’t go around killing each other. That’s what a system of laws is designed to prevent.”

“But they
do
, in my grandfather’s world, go around killing each other. That’s what happened to him. And now the ones who wronged him have been punished.” Frank shook his head, and a shadow from the long branches of the oak tree above flickered over his pained features. “What good would it do to punish my grandfather? He’s not going to hurt anybody else.”

“That’s not the point.”

“No?” Frank looked at the miniature American flags fluttering when a breeze came along. His gaze rested on a monument that read CIARDI, behind a spray of tall, lavender irises, some of their flowers shriveled to brown and curling at the edges. “The man is seventy-nine. This is what’s next for him—old flowers and gravestones. This cemetery. Next to his son.”