Final Vows

by Karen Kingsbury

  “I’m praying for you every day, Dan,” Maree told him one evening as they ate dinner in her dining room. “Please let me know if I can help in any way.”

  Dan nodded somberly. “In fact, there is something, Maree,” he said. “I’ve been working on a manuscript, the story of my life and what’s happened since Carol died. But it’s hand-written. I wonder, could you type it for me?”

  “Sure, Dan. Whatever you need.” Maree smiled and reached for Dan’s hand. “What’s it called?”

  Dan looked deep into Maree’s trusting brown eyes and hoped with all his heart that he could trust this woman. “It’s called Grief Denied.”

  Chapter 18

  In the course of his investigation, Brian Arnspiger began to develop a very clear picture of Dan’s childhood and background. The information he found did not prove that Dan had killed his wife, but after several months of working on the case, Brian finally thought he was beginning to understand the man he so desperately wanted to put behind bars.

  Daniel John Montecalvo became wise to the ways of a crime-stained lifestyle at a tender young age when most of his peers were busy joining Scout troops and building tree houses. Decades later, prosecutors would compare his later childhood to a fork that pointed in two directions, toward vastly different ways of life. Unfortunately, as those versed in the legal profession would note well after the fact, Danny chose the wrong road.

  He was born May 14, 1941, in Chelsea, Massachusetts, a small suburb of Boston where his father, Nunzio Montecalvo, for reasons Danny was never proud of, was one of the most well known men in town. Other than a brief bout with diphtheria as an infant, Dan Montecalvo’s troubled past didn’t become noteworthy until 1950, just after his ninth birthday.

  By then, he and his four-year-old brother, George, only saw their father during occasional prison visits or on rare Sunday afternoons when Nunzio Montecalvo found himself somewhere between a joyous release from the hole and the inevitable return. Up until that point, Danny, which was what people called him before he grew up, never understood that his father was a crook, a man whose idea of working for a living involved breaking into local shops after hours and taking everything of value.

  Despite his father’s obvious shortcomings, Danny loved the man very much. Like most small boys, he looked up to his father and tried to believe that he had never done the terrible things he was accused of.

  Because his father was not home much, Danny’s mother, Mary, was left to her own methods of raising her young sons. These methods involved keeping the refrigerator full of nothing but beer and inviting rowdy party friends to spend the evening with her and her sons. Several years would pass before Danny would understand why two or sometimes three men would share his mother’s bed each night. At age nine, her crowded bedroom seemed simply a way of conserving space, what with the other numerous adults crashed in various parts of the two-room house.

  On one such bitterly cold night in 1950, with two men asleep on his mother’s bed, Danny lay wide awake in the tiny cot he shared with his sleeping brother. The younger child always fell asleep first, innocently unaware of his parents’ behavior and the degree of discomfort it was beginning to cause Danny. That night as Danny worried about his mother and listened to the sounds of three distinctly different snoring patterns coming from the room next to his, he suddenly heard several loud raps on the kitchen door. Danny quickly surmised that everyone else in the house was incapable of hearing the sounds, let alone responding to them.

  Moving as fast as he could, Danny threw the covers off his thin, childish body, crawled over his sleeping brother, and darted into the kitchen, his young brown eyes wide with concern. For a split second, he froze, taking in the stacks of dirty dishes, rotting leftover food, uncovered trash, empty beer cans, and clothing strewn about. This was how their kitchen had always looked, but that night the place seemed to smell even more rancid; the mixture of spilled beer and stale tobacco smoke even more pungent. Danny made a conscious effort to breathe through his mouth as he pulled his pajama bottoms up a little higher.

  The knocking grew louder and the boy was brought back to the task at hand. Feeling more than slightly embarrassed by his surroundings and knowing how angry his mother would be if he woke her, Danny put his face against the door and whispered, “Who is it?”

  A loud, impatient voice answered him. “Police. Open up.”

  The two uniformed officers standing outside the Montecalvo house that night had not been thrilled with the assignment of notifying Nunzio’s family. Police knew the family well because both parents were—in their opinion—unfit. Neighbors had complained about Mary Montecalvo’s wild parties and poor treatment of her two little boys. Still, no one wanted to be the bearer of bad news, even if they thought Nunzio had deserved it.

  But that night, as Danny stood in his dirty kitchen, his bare feet cold on the hard, wooden floor, he knew nothing of what had happened. Police did not frighten Danny anymore. There was nothing new or surprising about the police paying a visit to his home late at night. The neighbors had complained about noise and wild partying often enough that the boy knew some of the officers by name because of their frequent visits to his home. Obediently, he opened the door and was met with a blinding spotlight.

  “Your mother home, son?” one of the dark-clothed officers asked.

  “She’s sleeping.” The little boy began to shake from the combination of cold and a sudden, inexplicable feeling of fear.

  “Well, go wake her up. We need to talk to her.”

  As Danny turned away he heard one of the policemen mutter something about the smell. The boy dropped his head shamefully, thankful only that the officers couldn’t hear the sound of mice scurrying out of sight as he made his way along the dark hallway to his mother’s bedroom. Opening the door, he saw her sound asleep next to a man he knew only as Henry. Another man was asleep at the foot of the bed, despite the fact that only a few days earlier he had been in the “boyfriend” spot next to his mother, and Henry had been at the bottom of the bed. The covers had slipped off his mother, leaving her naked body exposed and causing her young son further embarrassment. Danny lifted the covers over her as he began shaking her.

  “Mom, wake up,” he whispered.

  The woman began mumbling a series of profanities. Danny never understood how his mother could be such a gentle woman when she was sober. She never swore or lost her temper until the evening parties began in earnest.

  Danny tried again to get his mother out of bed. “Mom, police are here. They want to talk to you,” he whispered urgently.

  As soon as Danny mentioned police, the entire room seemed to come to life. Two other men who had apparently passed out on the floor sprang up and both men in his mother’s bed jumped to their feet and began pulling on articles of clothing. His mother slowly pulled on a torn bathrobe, her eyes barely open and the effects of alcohol still evident in the way she used both hands to steady herself. While the men in her room scampered out the back door, Danny’s mother led the way to the kitchen. Holding the robe tightly around her body, she came into the bright room, squinting as her eyes adjusted to the light.

  “I’m afraid we have some bad news for you, ma’am. It’s about your husband.” The officer was doing his best to sound respectfully sorry.

  Mary had long anticipated this late-night call. She knew Nunzio was a no-good two-bit thief and that many of the town’s merchants had taken to arming themselves to protect against him. For years now she’d believed that one day he might rob the wrong one and wind up dead as a result. Not that there was ever any love lost between the two of them. They had split up long ago but had never divorced because neither of them had been interested in remarrying. The woman turned to Danny, standing next to her. “Son, go wake up your brother. I want both of you to get dressed and wait in your room until I come get you.”

  The officers watched the scene uncomfortably and then, with the child out of earshot, they told her what had happene
d. Hours earlier Nunzio had performed one too many break-ins, this time at an older establishment in the center of town. Police had been cruising by the building, seen the robbery in progress, and drawn their guns. What happened next was a matter of debate.

  According to the local newspaper, police reports said that upon being confronted, Nunzio turned toward the officers and drew a weapon. Acting in defense, one of the officers then fired a single shot, sending a speeding bullet dead center between the crook’s eyes, killing him instantly.

  However, rumors around town the next day offered a slightly different version of the story, one that involved an agreement by local police to eliminate their most notorious nuisance at the next available opportunity. The townspeople were split over whether this version held any truth at all. But no one was willing to express anger at the police over the incident because even if the rumor had been true, in a town as small as Chelsea, most people would have thought it just as well. Someone like Nunzio Montecalvo was a black spot in their midst. In fact the only person who ever came to doubt publicly the role of local police in Chelsea, Massachusetts, as a result of the murder of Mr. Montecalvo was his oldest son, Danny. After his father’s murder Danny’s classmates began calling him Al Capone’s son, and making mock gestures of putting their hands up whenever Danny walked by. Already smaller than other boys his age, Danny believed he had just one option—learn to fight.

  Perhaps at this time, with his young friends’ taunts and his life resembling a mobster movie, Danny began to lose his innocence. He viewed himself as something of a troublemaker. Maybe, as with many small boys, this happened because he missed his daddy and, whatever the truth about the man, still looked up to him.

  Overnight he seemed to become quite good at fighting and despite his size soon had no trouble getting the best of the boys who teased him. But nearly every time he was involved in a fight, even if more than one boy was swinging back, he was forced to take the punishment for it. School officials said this was because the fights were Danny’s fault. Danny said his punishments were unfairly administered with no evidence of his guilt. He was convinced his poor treatment was the direct result of his father’s criminal record.

  A bitter resentment began to build deep inside the little boy’s heart, and finally, months after his father’s death, he tired of trying to clear his reputation and began earning it. By then, he no longer cared if someone called him Al Capone’s son. He quite possibly even bragged about the label.

  One day, when Danny should have been in school, he and a friend discovered a department store in downtown Chelsea which had what appeared to the nine-year-old boys to be hundreds, maybe millions, of one-dollar bills pasted on a window display. It was more than enough, Danny figured, to finance his scheme of running away from home. That night he and a friend went back to the store, smashed a hole in the window, and plucked off every dollar bill in the display. The boys were giggling over their success and splitting up the money when they were arrested.

  Years later Dan would dictate his life story to Maree Flores as part of a manuscript that essentially declared his grief over Carol’s death. In that document, he described what happened after being arrested for the first time, several months shy of his tenth birthday:

  “I remember how foreboding the courtroom looked when I was ushered into it. The juvenile judge cleared his throat and in a voice that I’m sure he used to sentence murderers announced he was going to straighten me out before I ended up bleeding in a gutter like my father.”

  Danny spent the next nine years—until his eighteenth birthday—in juvenile detention facilities. Each time he was released to his mother’s care, he would wind up back in trouble and be ordered back to detention camp. To this day he maintains that during his nine years in the Massachusetts Youth Detention system he was beaten, the victim of perversions and cruelties at the hands of the system authorities.

  In telling his life story, he claims there were times when he was forced to eat soap for using profanity. He says he was wrapped in cold urine-drenched sheets for wetting the bed and forced to do other unspeakable things. Using a hard, wooden stick, the wardens would administer spankings to the buttocks, feet, hands, elbows, and sometimes the head whenever Danny wouldn’t stay still.

  In Danny’s opinion the warden and his wife enjoyed the various abuses to the boys. The warden’s wife would talk about burning in hell or some other fearful place and how the boys had to be beaten into compliance or face a life in state prison.

  Even at that tender age Danny realized that a discrepancy was growing between his opinion of himself and the opinion that others held. In his eyes he was a victim of circumstances, of a crime-riddled family background, someone who had done little or nothing to deserve the punishments he’d received.

  Others, though, saw Danny as a bad little boy with all the tendencies of becoming a career criminal. By then the list of crimes he had committed during various releases was long and distinguished. In fact, when he left the Massachusetts juvenile detention system, he was no longer Danny Montecalvo, Nunzio’s little boy. He was Dan, with enough time served and enough trouble in his past that people no longer blamed his father for his place in life.

  They blamed him.

  Chapter 19

  In addition to gathering information about Dan’s background through mid-1989, Brian Arnspiger spent as much time as possible searching for evidence against him. He was still frustrated that the experts had disagreed about the bloody spots on Dan’s pants. But he was determined to find another avenue—something concrete that would convince a jury of his guilt.

  He went through each report again, re-interviewing neighbors along South Myers Street and talking again to every officer who had worked the scene the night of Carol’s murder. When he wasn’t making phone calls or visiting those people in person, he was thinking about the crime, envisioning the clues that so far no one had been able to find. At night he sometimes woke from a deep sleep with an avenue that had not yet been checked. He began to keep index cards and a pencil next to his bed for those occasions.

  Gradually Brian began to gather threads of information. There was nothing terribly significant about each individual thread. But Brian wasn’t just collecting them, he was weaving them together. Already Brian could see a quilt taking shape. It was one the district attorney would marvel at when it was completed.

  In early November one of the officers working the case knocked on Brian’s office door.

  “Got the report for you,” Officer Mike Gough said, tossing a bundle of stapled pages onto Brian’s desk. “Dan Montecalvo’s gambling habits through October ’89.”

  “Anything interesting?” Brian leaned back in his chair and picked up the report.

  “Depends on what you find interesting.” Gough smiled wryly.

  “Try me.”

  Gough took a deep breath. “Well, it seems Danny Boy has rediscovered blackjack.”

  “Now, there’s a surprise. The slimeball.”

  “Yes.” Gough raised his eyebrows in mock amazement. “Las Vegas pit bosses say he’s one of their best customers.”

  “I’ll bet.” Brian looked disgusted. “How good?”

  “Good enough to average three hundred twenty-seven dollars a hand.”

  “Per hand?” Brian sounded incredulous.

  “He’s a regular high-stakes gambler these days,” Gough said.

  “Winning?”

  “Not exactly. He lost fifty-three thousand two hundred dollars in March and another fifty thousand dollars last month.”

  “Just the kind of thing I’d do if my wife was murdered.” Brian was disgusted.

  “What I want to know is where’d poor, old, brokenhearted Dan get that kind of play money?” Gough asked.

  “Compliments of Carol.”

  This time Gough’s look of surprise was sincere. “He’s already got her insurance money?”

  “Some four hundred thousand dollars of it. The rest is b
eing contested by the insurance companies who for some strange reason suspect Dan might have had something to do with Carol’s accidental death.” Brian was disgusted. “Of course, just like any grieving husband, he’s drowning his sorrows at the rate of three hundred twenty-seven dollars a hand.”

  “That stinks.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  With the knowledge that Dan was spending his time gambling away Carol’s insurance money, Brian worked even harder on the case. As in all investigations one of his responsibilities was to close up any loopholes the defense might use when the case went to trial. From the beginning it was obvious to Brian that if Dan was responsible for killing his wife the prosecution faced one gaping loophole in particular. After hearing about Dan’s gambling Brian’s anger spurred him on so that he spent much of November finding threads strong enough to sew that hole shut for good.

  The problem was this: Fingerprints lifted from a cologne box on Dan and Carol’s bed had been matched by the California identification computer as belonging to a man named Kevin Bennington. A person was only listed on the computer if they had been arrested and convicted for a past crime.

  Unless the prosecution could explain why an ex-convict’s fingerprints were found in the Montecalvo bedroom the night of the murder, no jury would ever believe Dan was guilty. It would be too easy to prove his innocence based on the presence of a stranger in the house.

  There was another problem. Other than matching his fingerprints with his prior record and a signature card, the computer offered no assistance in locating the man. Brian checked with the Department of Motor Vehicles and used other similar means to locate him, but each attempt proved fruitless.

  Brian was not discouraged. A gut feeling told him that there was a reasonable explanation why Bennington’s fingerprints were in Dan and Carol’s house.

  The answer came the last week of November when Brian was Christmas shopping for his wife’s favorite perfume. He pointed to the box and watched as a sales clerk took it from the case and began turning it in her hands to find the price. Suddenly he thought of something he hadn’t before.