To Free a Spy (7 page)

The tree-lined boulevard curved in a way that afforded a view of the Gothic architecture of The Cathedral of the Good Shepherd several blocks before they got there. Quinn instructed that the government cars were to wait in a remote corner of the parking area to leave space for others to park closer to the building.

The bright, sunny day with birds chirping all around seemed determined to belie the occasion, Phelps thought. Reverent mourners in black, some blotting their eyes, crossed the exquisitely manicured church grounds in silence as they approached the tall stone entrance. Even the city streets were empty, as if the citizens of Atlantic City took time from daily routines to pay their respects to Frank Gallardi, a home-town boy who grew up poor, pulled himself up by sheer determination and will, fought a long but not universally popular battle to bring in casinos, risked everything he had before it bore fruit, and then returned so much of it to the people: New symphony center, children’s hospital, the new park, endless funding for the homeless shelter, and the list went on. Even casino critics could find nothing negative to say about Frank Gallardi.

The live acoustics inside the old church were excellent for music but the echoing words of the speakers lost the glue that held them together before reaching straining ears. Gallardi’s widow Rose, their grown children, and Frank’s sister Molly sat in the first row. Molly’s son and Frank Gallardi’s nephew Lenny Magliacci sat in the second with other family members, and Quinn was escorted to the reserved third row. Phelps noticed two or three U.S. Congressmen, several military officers in uniform and a few show business personalities he recognized. Not present was Ana Koronis.

* * *

After the service, Quinn spoke with Rose Gallardi and told her the president sent his personal condolences. They hugged each other before Quinn moved on.

Quinn stopped along the way to his car to shake hands with a few of the dozens of supporters who had gathered. Minutes later he was ready to return to the airport.

* * *

Leonard Antonio Magliacci had tuned out the eulogies and prayers and remained in his seat when the service was over as his mother Molly, Rose Gallardi and the others emptied out. In the days since Gallardi’s murder Magliacci had dwelled on a phone conversation that took place in Frank’s office one early evening several years ago and now possibly held some potential for Magliacci. Magliacci had been in his cubicle near Gallardi’s office that night and heard Frank get upset with a caller. A few minutes later, Frank had summoned someone to his office. When he came, Lenny couldn’t hear what was said even though he had moved as close as he dared risk.

All of this came back to Lenny when he read the newspaper account of Gallardi’s murder. The story said an underworld character named Matty Figueriano was killed across town on the same night as Frank. Police said there was no known connection between Gallardi and the gangster known as Matty Fig, or their deaths.

Lenny Magliacci wasn’t so sure.

He walked out of the chapel and looked for his mother. Some of his cousins who were talking with her finished their conversations and left as he approached. He had grown up with them, played on the same little-league teams at Kimble Park, but all that was long ago and Lenny felt he and his cousins had little in common now. Lenny had gone to law school and none of his cousins made it through college.

Magliacci skipped the family gathering at the Gallardi home and drove to the Golden Touch. Frank had moved him downstairs years earlier but he had kept a key to the executive elevator. He got off at the third floor where the executive offices were located and walked through the empty, large reception area where Gallardi’s collection of art was displayed, past the windowless room Lenny once occupied and on to Gallardi’s office suite. He half-expected the area to still be sealed off and was glad to see that the police and FBI had released it. He’d never had the courage to venture into Gallardi’s private office before, but Frank was dead now and the executive offices were officially closed for the day. So Lenny was surprised that the feelings of apprehension that had kept him away reappeared now.

He stood in front of Gallardi’s huge desk and thought of the first and only time he sat there across from Gallardi. There had been no small talk or family news to start the meeting off, even though the two men hadn’t seen each other in months. Gallardi had opened a tan folder that held Lenny’s papers and frowned as he studied it, a deep vertical crease appearing between Gallardi’s thick brows as he spoke.

“Molly tells me you got into a little trouble,” Gallardi said that day. Lenny remembered Gallardi’s chilling voice as he sat forward in the big leather chair and formed a steeple with his hands as they lay on the desk. Lenny understood that it was time to grovel.

There was no doubt in Lenny Magliacci’s mind that Gallardi already knew every detail of his nephew’s problems—a malpractice case that cost him his license to practice law and put him into bankruptcy—but he wanted them extracted through Lenny’s pores in small pieces with sharp edges. Magliacci was flat broke and had no alternative to the offer Gallardi made him that day sitting at the desk he now stood in front of. Lenny’s mother Molly said she had forced her brother’s
generosity
, but the way Lenny saw it he had been made to pay the price by once again humiliating himself before the high-and-mighty family patriarch.

On the rare occasions when Frank spoke to Magliacci after that, he would stand at the door to Lenny’s office, never quite entering, and deliver a reprimand over something Frank couldn’t blame on someone else. That was the way Lenny saw it. Never any small talk. The work assignments Frank’s legal staff gave him weren’t even worthy of a beginning paralegal, and over time they grew into mountains of paper seldom asked for. Once a month or so, Lenny trashed them.

Lenny wandered around the large room now, taking in the luxury. Gallardi had selected exotic leathers and rare woods for the furnishings. One wall was all glass and took in the Boardwalk and the Atlantic Ocean. Magliacci watched the waves lap the Boardwalk below for a minute, tried Gallardi’s chair for size and then moved to one of the walls covered with photos. There were more than a hundred of them on the tall wall, Lenny estimated, showing his uncle with entertainers, government officials including President Cross, former President McNabb, Austin Quinn, numerous New Jersey politicos, local charity officials, several military officers, and members of his family. Noticeably absent to Lenny was even a single photo of himself.

In the center of the cluster was a portrait of the Gallardi estate, the mansion framed by brick pillars in the foreground that guarded the entrance to the property, from which the driveway curved to the right and ran beside verdant gardens anchored by towering oaks before reaching the grand mansion in the distance. This photo was as close as Lenny had ever been to Frank’s home.

Molly never missed a chance to hold Gallardi up to him with stories of her brother’s rise from kid dishwasher in the restaurant of the old Staffordshire Hotel on the Boardwalk, long before the casinos were even thought of. Gallardi had attended law school at night while supporting himself selling real estate, and years later
bought
the Staffordshire. “If you did something besides eat and watch television all the time, you could go out there like Frankie did and make yourself rich,” Molly would say. Lenny thought she had always placed her brother above him,
her very son,
but that might be about to change. Once he uncovered all the facts of that mysterious night of a few years back, perhaps his mother would see her brother in a different light. Her son, too. Perhaps there would be a
new
patriarch.

As Lenny continued to explore Gallardi’s office now, he ventured into a closet that turned out to not be a closet at all. A fierce-eyed eagle logo peered down from above the door of a bank-like vault that had an ancient combination knob in the center of its door. The cold steel door wouldn’t budge and Lenny went through the retro Rolodex on Frank’s credenza (he wondered why the investigators had not taken the Rolodex) and any drawer he could open hoping to find something resembling a combination. After twenty minutes searching he found a tiny sliver of paper bearing a set of numbers taped to the top edge of a door and was trying to make the combination work when he heard the back elevator start up. He closed the closet door, looked around to be sure nothing was out of place, turned out the lights and went back down on the executive elevator.

Next day at work, Lenny thought about nothing but the vault and the opportunities that might arise from a Gallardi and Matty Figueriano connection. After work, he went home and settled on the sofa in front of the television and watched
The Simpsons
. He set an alarm clock to go off at ten p.m. in case he fell asleep.

* * *

Lenny Magliacci was sure no one noticed when he got on the executive elevator at ten-thirty that night. The red exit directionals on the executive level afforded enough visibility for him to get through the familiar reception area and around the corner to Gallardi’s office, where the Boardwalk lighting reflected off the office ceiling and cast a soft glow on the walls and furniture. The Ferris wheel out on Steel Pier stood out against the black ocean like a giant roulette.

This time he succeeded with the vault combination on the first try and pulled open the heavy door and stood at the threshold for a minute or so taking it in. The vault was tall enough for Magliacci to stand up in, about eight feet deep and just wide enough for his 350-pound frame to squeeze between the boxes lining the shelves on the side walls. A single fluorescent light overhead lit the top shelf but left those below in shadows. He rummaged through the contents of the boxes for close to an hour before conceding they contained nothing more important than yellowed bank statements, political correspondence and real estate files dating back to the beginnings of the Golden Touch. The vault was nothing more than dead storage. Magliacci’s hopes took a dive.

Standing at the vault door taking a final doleful look, he spotted a small black bag he hadn’t noticed before, stuffed behind a box on the bottom shelf in the front corner of the vault. His heart raced as he emptied the contents out on the carpet. In it were a pair of earrings, a gold chain, a colored gemstone ring, a small serrated kitchen knife, a ring with a large stone that looked like a diamond, a tiny black dress he thought was silk, and a phone number someone had penned on a Golden Touch memo pad. All of the items were crusted over or at least spattered with a dark substance Lenny thought was blood. He sat looking at all of this, considering the possibilities. After a few minutes he put everything back into the nylon bag, closed the vault and left with the bag in hand.

By the time he reached his car, he had held his excitement as long as he could. He kicked the rusted rear bumper of the Lincoln.
“You are one smart dude, Lenny Magliacci. One smart dude!”

Magliacci’s usual routine was
to show up at the office around nine. After moving papers around his desk all day he would go to Harry’s High Hat Lounge, whose clientele and worn furnishings betrayed its name, four blocks from the Golden Touch where Eve the bartender had a pitcher of beer and frosted mug waiting. Several beers and a M*A*S*H rerun later he’d wander over to his apartment, find something in the refrigerator and turn on the TV. Some nights Eve would come over after work and they would nuke some frozen pizzas. It was always around two when he rolled into bed, and waking up to go to work was hard. His supervisor over at the Golden Touch warned him several times about his appearance and work habits, which led to snipes back and forth about Lenny’s attitude.

That was before Frank Gallardi’s death. Tonight he went straight to his apartment and dumped the bag out on the kitchen counter. He scrutinized each item one at a time and kept going back to the diamond ring.

Next morning, he woke up before the alarm clock went off—first time he could remember that happening—and got to the office at seven-thirty. He closed the door and pulled the Golden Touch memo sheet from the bag. It was the kind of pad the hotel placed by the phone in guest rooms. Brownish-black stain dotted the page but the scribbled word
Post
and a phone number were legible. Lenny dialed the number and got a recorded message that said the area code had been changed. When he redialed using the area code the recording gave him, a voice said he had reached
The Washington Post
. He hung up.

As he lined through the newspaper’s old area code on the memo sheet and wrote in the new one, he noticed that the Golden Touch’s area code beneath the logo also was no longer current. Both the Washington and the Atlantic City area codes had changed since the blood stained pad was printed.

At lunch Lenny walked over to Pacific Avenue a block off the Boardwalk where unlucky gamblers traded their remaining possessions for a last, desperate chance to reverse their losses. He stopped at a door that said
Barella’s
. A red neon sign in the window read
Cash for Gold.
Halogen light beamed down on the gold jewelry and diamonds that sparkled on black velvet. The elderly shopkeeper kept one hand in his pocket as Lenny walked in.

“Tony Barella?” Lenny said.

“That’d be me.” The man was expressionless.

“Leonard Magliacci.
Junior
.”

A smile began to develop on the man’s wrinkled face. “I’ll be damned.” He removed his hand from his pocket and shook Lenny’s. “You were knee-high last time I saw you. How’s your mother, son?”

“Fine, good. I, uh, need—”

Barella reached across the display case and grasped Lenny’s big shoulder. “Your dad and me, pretty good buddies. Yeah, soon’s we got back from Germany after the war, I made that wedding ring of your mother’s for him. I bet you didn’t know that!”

Magliacci nodded and started to speak, but Barella continued.

“Say, too bad about your uncle Frank. Your mother’s younger brother, right? Couldn’t believe it.”