Next to Ito’s picture was the framed image of a woman. The photo was old; she could tell by the clothes, hairstyle, and picture quality. It looked like one of those instant Polaroids. The woman looked to be about the same age as Ito. Was it his wife, Tony Vincenzo’s grandmother? Possibly another source of information, if Pine could only find her.
And maybe I might have someone to ask about that who is very close by. And why the hell didn’t I think of it before? Come on, Pine, start bringing your A game.
She hustled upstairs and out the front door and over to the edge of the front porch where the old woman still sat in her rocker, still reading her Bible.
“How long have you lived here?” asked Pine.
“My husband and I bought this place a year after we were married. Got a good deal. We raised our kids here.”
“So a long time, then?”
“Over fifty years.”
“So you knew Ito Vincenzo? He lived here back then with his family.”
“Yes, I knew him.”
“What can you tell me about him?”
“What do you want to know?”
“Anything.”
“Why?”
Pine walked over to the woman’s porch and perched on the rail in front of her. She wanted to be on the lady’s home turf when she said what she was about to say; it might make all the difference.
“I think he might have abducted my twin sister thirty years ago and nearly killed me.”
For the first time Pine thought she had the woman’s full attention.
“And Ito came back the next morning and got into a fight with my father, trying to blame him for what had happened. For a crime he had committed.”
The woman sized her up. “Thirty years ago. You must’ve been just a child.”
“I was six.”
“Why would Ito have done that? That wouldn’t be like him at all. He was a good, God-fearing man.”
“Maybe something else came along that he was even more afraid of: He had a brother, Bruno Vincenzo.”
The woman visibly shuddered.
“So you knew Bruno too, I take it?”
“Night and day, those two. Ito was nothing like Bruno. We all knew what Bruno was.”
“You mean the mob?”
“I mean a lot of things and all of them bad. It got so that Evie wouldn’t allow him to come over.”
“Evie is Ito’s wife?”
“Yes.”
“And Ito was okay with that?”
“To tell the truth, Ito couldn’t stand his brother.”
“That’s interesting and informative.”
“So I can’t believe Ito would have done something like that. He was a nice guy, raised his kids right. Helped me and my husband out when we needed it. Fixed our furnace, helped reroof our house. Folks did back then. Now? Nobody knows nobody.”
“Teddy’s in prison. And we both know about Tony. So how good could Ito have really been as a father?” She looked at the woman questioningly.
“Well, Ito had a business. He worked long hours. And Teddy took after Bruno, I think. Always a bad one. Nothing you can do about that when it’s in the blood. Always in trouble. Looking for the quick buck.”
“What happened to Teddy’s wife? I assume he was married?”
“Yes. She left him. About ten years ago. She’d had enough. I would’ve never lasted that long. They used to live here. Fights all the time. The thugs Teddy had over, and they were thugs. They threatened us. Would’ve gotten bad, but I do have to say that Teddy wouldn’t let them hurt us. Maybe because we were friends with his parents. Only kind thing I ever knew him to do. So Tony grew up around all that. No wonder he turned out the way he did.”
“Do you know where Teddy’s ex is?” asked Pine.
“Jane? No. I haven’t heard from her in years. I hope she found happiness somewhere. That woman deserved it if anybody ever did.”
“And Ito Vincenzo’s wife, Evie?” said Pine. “I assume you knew her well.”
“Yes. Evie was very sweet. We were good friends. And my husband enjoyed Ito’s company. And that man could cook. The meals we had over there! Everything made fresh. I thought Italians just ate pasta, but Ito made a lot of fish. It was always delicious.”
“Do you know where she is now? Is she still alive?”
The woman nodded slowly. “Evie lives in a nursing home. Kensington Manor. It’s about five miles from here. The name sounds a lot nicer than it is. They always do, I guess.”
“Her family didn’t help her out?”
“Teddy and Tony are the only ones still nearby and they’re useless. About five years ago Evie went to the nursing home when she couldn’t take care of herself anymore. I’ve visited her there. It’s . . . it’s not a nice place. But it’s probably where I’m going to end up, too, sooner rather than later. My kids are very good to me, but they have their own problems. And the nicer places cost way too much, far more than they could afford.”
“You could sell your house.”
“I don’t own it. I did one of those reverse mortgages. I needed the money to pay the bills. As soon as I’m gone they’ll take the house.”
Pine gazed around at the other homes. “I guess a lot of people are in that situation.”
“The government tells you to spend your money to help the economy, create jobs. And then when you do spend pretty much all of it, they turn around and tell you to save money because you’ll need it to retire on. So which is it?”
“I’m afraid I don’t have the answer. I’m just sorry you have to be in this position.”
“At least I know I’ll end up with a roof over my head and three meals a day. I’ll just sit there in my own drool,” she added bitterly. “So much for the golden years.”
“You don’t know it’s that bad.”
“Most of my friends are in state-run nursing homes paid for by Medicaid and whatever dollars they have left. I visit them. It is that bad.”
“I’ll take your word for it. Look, do you know if Ito is still alive?”
“I don’t know that for sure. He just up and vanished one day. Long time ago.”
“Was it in the late eighties?” asked Pine sharply. “That’s when my sister was taken.”
“No, it wasn’t that far back” was her surprising reply. She mulled over this. “If I had to guess it was sometime around 9/11, or maybe the year after, but that’s all I can remember.”
“What did Evie think had happened to him?”
“I don’t know. Any time I brought it up, she changed the subject.”
“So she doesn’t know if he’s dead or alive?”
“Not that she ever told me. But him disappearing like that? It left a hole in her heart as big as the Lincoln Tunnel. I could never understand it. Sometimes I think Bruno came back from the grave and killed him because that’s just who Bruno was.”
Pine thanked the woman and walked back to her car. She called Blum and asked her to take an Uber and meet Pine at the nursing home.
“Her old neighbor said five years ago Evie could no longer take care of herself. She might have deteriorated a lot since then.”
“Well, we can only try,” replied Blum.
Story of my life, thought Pine as she walked to her car.
CHAPTER
6
AS PINE MET BLUM OUTSIDE of the nursing home, she said, “There’s one thing that has bugged the crap out of me.”
“What is that?” asked Blum.
“How could Ito have possibly found out that my mother was a mole for the government? She never testified in court. Her identity was kept secret.”
“And we learned that before you and your sister moved to Andersonville, attempts were made on your lives while you were in WITSEC,” said Blum, referring to the Witness Protection Program run by the U.S. Marshals Service. “So how did those people find out?”
“Do you think whoever was behind that might have leaked the information to Ito or his brother, Bruno? He was still aliv
e at that time, albeit in prison.”
“It certainly could be that the two things are connected.”
The nursing home looked like it had been built in the sixties with lots of poured cement and now-dated architecture. The roof-line was flat, and they could see rusty rooftop AC units perched up there in a linear formation.
They walked into the facility. The place had a musty odor, and the furnishings and wall coverings were old and frayed. Pine saw some elderly people moving slowly down the halls in either wheelchairs or walkers. Though old, the place looked relatively clean and uncluttered, but it certainly didn’t seem “cheery.”
Pine showed her creds and badge to the receptionist and they were directed to a supervisor’s office.
“What is this about?” asked the woman, who was in her thirties and dressed in a white smock. The remains of her lunch were sitting on her desk, in an office that was small and messy.
“We just want to ask Mrs. Vincenzo some questions in connection with an inquiry,” Pine began.
“Don’t you need a search warrant or something?” said the woman, who had not identified herself, but whose name tag read sally.
“Not for just talking to someone voluntarily, Sally,” replied Pine. “We’re not searching anything. Just asking questions. It’s about Mrs. Vincenzo’s husband.”
“I didn’t even know she had a husband. No one ever comes to visit except an old neighbor of hers.”
“She was the one who told me Mrs. Vincenzo was here, that she couldn’t care for herself any longer.”
Sally shook her head. “The poor folks forget to take medication, fall down, break a hip, try to drive, leave the cooktop on all night. It’s the old story.”
“So can we talk to her?”
“I’m not sure how much good it will do. She’s in our memory care unit.”
“ ‘Memory care unit’?”
“She’s been diagnosed with dementia.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, but so long as we’re here? Can we at least give it a try? It’s important.”
“Well, I guess it can’t hurt. It might be good for her to have some visitors, poor thing.”
She led them down the hall to a set of double doors where a stenciled sign read MEMORY CARE UNIT.
Sally slid a card through a reader and the door clicked open. She led them to one room along the hall and knocked on the door. In a singsong voice she said, “Mrs. Vincenzo? Evie? You have visitors.”
She opened the door and they entered the room.
Evie Vincenzo was sitting up in bed and gazing placidly at them. She had on pink pajamas and there was a pink scarf over her curly hair. Many of the items in the room were also pink.
“She likes pink,” noted Sally. “It soothes her.”
“I’m fond of pink myself,” said Blum.
“I’ll check back in a bit,” said Sally. “Any issues, just hit that red button over the bed.”
She left, and Pine and Blum drew closer to the woman. Pine sat in a chair while Blum stood next to her.
Vincenzo gazed up at Pine. “Do I know you, young lady?” she asked in a pleasant voice.
“No, but I know your neighbor. She likes to knit. She called you Evie.”
Evie said nothing and her eyes started to close.
“She lived in the house to the left of yours?” Pine said helpfully.
The woman opened her eyes, but again didn’t respond.
Blum said, “Do you enjoy visitors? I think I would. It’s nice to talk to people.”
“I . . . I don’t know you, do I?”
Pine glanced at Blum. “No, but we wanted to visit you today.”
“My . . . I . . . not many visitors.”
“Your neighbor told us you were here.”
Evie shook her head, clearly frustrated. “Old woman.”
Pine drew closer. “Yes, I, uh, I was talking to her about your husband?”
“My . . . husband?”
“Yes, Ito? Do you remember him? She said he was a wonderful cook.”
Evie looked down at her lap. “I . . . used to . . . cook.” She glanced at a wall. “They took my . . . stove.”
Blum reached over and put a gentle hand on the woman’s shoulder. “I like to cook, too. I’m so sorry that you can’t.”
“Evie, do you think you could answer some questions about It—your husband?”
“My husband?” she said again. “I . . . no husband.” She shook her head. “I . . . so miss cooking.”
“Yes, I’m sure you do. Now, you have a son named Teddy and a grandson named Anthony.”
In response to this Evie took off her scarf, showing that her hair was mostly gone. The clumps that were left were a tinted red. She scrunched the scarf up in her hands. “I would bake bread. Knead, knead, knead, like this.”
Pine sighed and glanced at Blum in resignation. She leaned in and whispered, “Just keep talking to her.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Just look around.”
“Agent Pine, the poor woman, I mean.”
“Carol, I know. I feel for her, I really do. But if she has something in here that can help me find my sister, I have to look. I might not get another chance. I’ll be quick and efficient.”
Blum refocused on Evie and asked her what kind of bread she liked to bake. Pine quickly searched through drawers and bent down to look under the bed. If Evie noticed this she made no sign. She was still kneading her scarf.
Pine next started riffling through the closet and finally spied a cardboard box behind a mound of clothes, stacks of People magazines, and a collapsed walker. The box was packed with papers.
She pulled it out of the closet. “Mrs. Vincenzo, do you mind if I look through this?”
She was now lightly tapping the scarf while Blum looked over and shrugged at Pine.
“I don’t think she can give informed consent,” noted Blum.
“It’s not like I’m going to use anything I find to put her in jail.”
“But it might her husband.”
“Don’t go all lawyer on me, Carol. This could be my only shot.”
Pine sat down and went through the box while Vincenzo had set the scarf aside and now stared happily at her pink lampshade, seemingly having forgotten that they were even there.
There was so much in the box that Pine ended up giving Blum a stack to look through. “Old photos of her kids. Here’s one of her and Ito, I think. Looks to be on their wedding day.”
“These photos have the names on the back. Here’s Teddy,” said Blum as she went through a stack. “He looks to be a teenager. And this one is of Tony when he was a baby; someone’s written his name at the bottom. He looks so innocent. They all do at that age, of course, because they are.”
“And then some of them grow up to be felons.”
“Keeps us gainfully employed,” said Blum.
“Look,” Pine said excitedly. “Here’s an article on Bruno Vincenzo’s conviction. This is his picture.” She showed Blum the clipping with the photo of Bruno.
Blum recoiled a bit at the image. “He looks like he’d kill you over a piece of chewing gum.”
Pine scanned the article. “It says he was convicted of murdering two people, one of them a witness for the prosecution. The trial was in New Jersey, which still had the death penalty back then. He got a death sentence, but then it was commuted to life after he agreed to cooperate.”
“And then he was later killed in prison?” said Blum.
“Right. He was in solitary at the prison, but apparently somebody paid off a guard, and an inmate knifed Bruno.” She pulled a folded, yellowed newspaper out of the box, and when she opened it something fell out from between the folds. It was a piece of paper with writing on it. Pine started to read it and her eyes widened as she did so.
“What?” asked Blum, trying to read over her shoulder.
“This is a letter from Bruno to Ito. From the date on it he must’ve written it after he went to prison but obvi
ously before he was killed there.”
“What does it say?”
“Bruno says he discovered a snitch but didn’t out the person to his mob bosses.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. He told his brother that the snitch had screwed him over somehow and that’s why he’d been arrested and was in prison now. He asked Ito to come see him.”
“Maybe he didn’t want to write down anything too sensitive. He wanted to tell his brother in person.”
“Yeah, to tell him that it was my mom who screwed him over. But this letter still doesn’t tell me how Bruno found out where we were living. Because he had to know. That was the only way Ito would have known.”
“I guess this confirms once and for all that he was the one to take Mercy.”
“I can’t think of another possibility. But what did he do with her?” She looked over at Evie Vincenzo, who was still staring in fascination at her lampshade. “And this poor woman isn’t going to be able to answer that question.”
“But maybe her son can.”
They finished searching the box but found nothing else nearly as earth-shattering as the letter. Pine slipped it into her pocket along with a few other items, including photos of various family members.
She rose and said to the woman in the bed, “Mrs. Vincenzo, thank you for seeing us.”
“I so miss my stove.”
She started kneading her scarf again.
Blum watched Evie for a moment, her eyes glistening, and then she followed Pine out.
CHAPTER
7
IT WAS MUCH LIKE EVERY other prison that Pine had been in: loud, reeking of foul odors, chaotic and at the same time rigid in organization mainly because of the walls and bars. It was a sophisticated chess match between the imprisoned and the guards, but sometimes the guards shirked their duties in exchange for the profits associated with allowing access to drugs, girls, and other things that made whiling away years of one’s life in a cage somewhat bearable.
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