I knew that he was a moron but I wasn’t convinced it made him any less deadly. “I have a hard time believing that, Gianna. He runs the largest organized-crime family in the tristate area. He couldn’t be that much of a dope.”
“Oh, he is.” She laughed, and it was one of those moments where, if she wasn’t going to kill me minutes later, we would have had a great chuckle over all of it. Peter the moron. The imbecile.
I had one of those moments of clarity that usually only happens in the seconds prior to waking up. Where it seems like everything is crystal clear but you come to find later that you were really sleeping, almost dreaming, and not quite awake. I waited a few seconds to see if I would wake up and all of this would be forgotten, but I was still in the same place and confronted with the same horrors. I felt my energy start to flag and I grabbed Bea’s hand for support.
Gianna let the gun drop to her side. “I’m in charge, Alison. I always have been. Do you think my father would have turned the family over to Peter Miceli?” she said, amazed that I would have thought otherwise. “But it’s still a man’s world in the family. We needed a figurehead. And that’s how I ended up married to Peter. He really was the logical choice given my father’s loyalty to Joe Miceli.”
“It was an arranged marriage,” I said, stunned.
She nodded. “Of sorts. I have a soft spot for the guy, but nothing approximating passion,” she said. “I had passion once. For Sal Paccione.” I remembered Sal from our college days; he had disappeared one day, never to reappear. She picked the gun up and pointed it at me again. “And we know what happened to him.”
Yes, we do, I thought.
“Of course, that’s not to say I like the thought of Peter being in love with someone else,” she said pointedly. She held the gun chest high and steadied it.
“Why did you kill Terri?” I asked.
She looked confused. “Who’s Terri?”
“My neighbor. Terri Morrison. I found her a few days ago.”
“That is something that I know absolutely nothing about.”
“But the hands and feet…” I didn’t have the energy to protest so I dropped it. I would be dead and nobody would know whether or not I had gotten Gianna’s confession. In what I assumed were my final moments on the earth, I thought of Max and Trixie. An image of my father in his UPS uniform flashed before my eyes as did my mother in all of her incredible Gallic beauty. And I saw Crawford, shaking his head sadly, but smiling at me. I choked back a sob. “Please, Gianna. I’m begging you. Let us go.”
“Alison, I might have considered that but now you know way too much.” She shook her head, chagrined. “Way too much.” She leveled the gun at me and I felt my knees go weak. “How far we’ve come,” she mused.
Bea squeezed my hand.
Franco finally spoke and Gianna turned to the sound of his voice. I had never heard him speak, so I was surprised to find he had a Southern accent. “Mrs. Miceli, put the gun down.” He pointed a gun, produced magically from a back pocket, at her.
She trained the gun on him. “Franco, you know why we’re here. Now let me kill them and then we can go home.”
“Put the gun down, Mrs. Miceli.”
Gianna turned and looked at us and then back at Franco, deciding what to do. “I’m not putting the gun down, Franco. Get in the car, please, before I call Mr. Miceli and tell him what a pain in the butt you’ve become.”
“I’ll say it one more time, and then I’m going to shoot you, Mrs. Miceli: put the gun down.”
Crawford got back to the apartment in record time, thanks to his police escort. Fred was already there, as well as just about every cop from his local precinct. He burst into the living room and found the lead detective, John Galvin, a guy he had gone to the academy with, organizing the other detectives.
“Anything, John?” he asked, panting from the exertion of running up the stairs.
The detective put a note in front of Crawford’s face; Crawford wasn’t wearing gloves, and Galvin didn’t want to taint the evidence with another set of fingerprints. “Does this mean anything to you?” he asked.
There was only a name on the slip of paper, written in Bea’s looping, Catholic-school handwriting: “Gianna Miceli.”
Crawford looked at Galvin, confused. “Gianna has them?”
Fred walked in at that moment and looked at the note. “What the hell does that mean?”
Crawford walked over to the kitchen. “There must have been a struggle. There are coffee beans everywhere.”
Fred looked around. “Yeah, but nothing else.” He ran a hand over his bald head. “Why would either of the Micelis kidnap Bea and Alison?”
Crawford had no idea. He shook his head sadly. “I don’t know.” He looked up at Galvin. “Do we know anything else?”
“No.” Galvin handed the note to the crime scene technician who appeared beside him. “Give me a full description of your aunt and the woman with her.” Galvin jotted some notes as Crawford described Bea, then Alison. He smiled when Crawford finished. “I think I’ll leave ‘beautiful’ out of Alison’s description. With this crew,” he said, hooking a thumb at the uniforms, “that’ll be open to interpretation. Johnson over there might bring back a Twelfth Avenue hooker,” he said, attempting to joke Crawford out of his black mood.
Crawford got up from the couch. “I feel like I should be doing something. Anything.” He looked at Fred. “What should we do?”
Galvin held up a hand. “You’re going to stay here and do nothing. We’ve got it under control. Every cop in the city will have these descriptions in about two minutes.” He reached up and put a hand on Crawford’s shoulder. “Don’t worry. We’ll find them.”
Crawford ran his hands over his face and looked at Fred. Fred didn’t say anything, but the intensity of his gaze let Crawford know that he was worried, too.
“Fred,” he said, his voice cracking, “if anything happens to them…” Then he stopped. He didn’t know what he would do if something happened to them and that was the saddest reality of all.
Chapter 29
Franco repeated his request but didn’t make good on his promise to shoot her if he had to ask again.
Gianna looked at Franco, her back to us. “What?” she asked.
“Put the gun down, Mrs. Miceli.” He hesitated for a moment and then said, “You are under arrest.”
Gianna’s face was a mixture of surprise, anger, and shock. The gun waved back and forth in her hand and she put her left hand under it to steady it, pointing it now at Franco instead of me and Bea.
“You’re under arrest, Mrs. Miceli,” he said, keeping his gun pointed at her chest. He reached into his pocket with his free hand and produced a badge. “I’m with the FBI.”
Gianna let out a breath of air that sounded like the air coming out of a balloon. “Don’t be ridiculous. I think I would have known if you were with the FBI. You’ve worked for us for five years.”
“And I’ve been with the FBI for twenty,” he said. “Put the gun down.”
Bea reached over and grabbed my hand, pulling me away from the scene. We slipped around to the front of the limo and crouched beside the front driver’s side, our eyes barely over the hood so that we could see what was happening.
“You have got to be kidding me!” Gianna screamed. “You’ve worked for us for five years. Why are you pulling this shit now?”
“Because I’m a federal agent, ma’am. And I now have enough to put you and Mr. Miceli away for a long time.”
She was obviously as confused as we were. I could almost see her mind trying to process what Franco had revealed, what he had seen in five years, what would happen to her and Peter as a result. And her children, still young. After some time, I could tell that she had made her decision as to how this was going to go and it didn’t include her in an orange jumpsuit. She started toward Franco, ten feet separating them, and attempted to squeeze the trigger of the gun.
Franco coolly fired a shot directly into her chest an
d she crumpled to the ground without uttering a sound. I grabbed Bea and put my head into her chest.
Franco walked over to Gianna and stood over her, the gun pointed at her lifeless body. Convinced that she was dead, he crouched beside her, took the gun from her hand, and put his finger to her neck. “It’s all right, ladies. You can come out,” he said and stood up.
I stood first, leaving Bea by the side of the limo. “You killed her,” I said, stunned. I looked down at Gianna, a lump at the foot of a heap of garbage, a gaping hole in the middle of her chest. I put my hand to my mouth. “Why did you do that?”
“Because she was going to kill you.” He reached into his pocket and took out a cell phone, telling someone what had happened and giving them our location. When he was done, he flipped the phone closed and looked at me. “I’m sorry you all had to see that.”
“You could have maimed her!” I cried.
“We aren’t taught to shoot to maim, ma’am,” he said, smiling slightly.
I started crying. “Who are you? And why didn’t you try to stop her from having Ray killed? Or me?”
“Franco Castellano. FBI. I’ve been undercover in the Miceli family for five years.” He pulled out his badge and showed it to me; it looked real. “And I didn’t know about the hit on you. When I saw that your ex-husband had been killed, I tried to get information, but it’s a large family, Dr. Bergeron. A lot goes on. And I spent more time with Mr. Miceli than with Mrs. Miceli.”
Bea appeared at my side. “Where are you from?” she asked.
“Alabama, ma’am.”
“I didn’t know there were any Italians in the South.” She looked down at Gianna and whistled her amazement. “You’re some shot, my friend.” She looked back up at Franco. “Do they have some kind of protection program for guys like you?”
“Ma’am?” Franco asked, unsure of what she meant.
“You know, guys like you. You just killed the wife of a capo in New York. Or a sort of capo. Or the capo herself. I don’t know which end is up anymore,” she said, confused. “You’re a dead man,” she finally concluded.
Franco smiled. “I think I’ll be fine,” he said. He took off his black jacket and placed it carefully over Gianna’s face and most of her body; her legs had folded beneath her, so her frame was compressed into a tiny ball under the fabric of his jacket. “Despite the fact that he was a figurehead for the family, Peter Miceli has his hand in a lot of illegal activities. He’s going away for a long time. This investigation has unearthed a lot of evidence that the government needed to put him and several of his soldiers away.”
“Are you the only one?” I asked.
“The only one?”
“The only undercover agent,” I said. “Or are there more of you?”
He smiled again. “If I told you that, I’d have to kill you,” he said, in a weak attempt at joke making.
I gave him a wan smile in reply. Seeing how he had just shot Gianna in cold blood, I thought perhaps he was only half kidding.
“Seriously, though, this investigation has been going on probably for as long as you’ve known the Micelis,” he said, and pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. He cupped his hand around the match as he lit one. “Mrs. Miceli’s hatred of you and her suspicion of her husband’s adultery was really just a nuisance. I couldn’t blow the case but I couldn’t let her kill you, either. Fortunately, a series of indictments will come down tomorrow and Mr. Miceli will be making funeral arrangements from jail.”
His detachment in telling us the details of the story chilled me to the bone but he had saved our lives. Who was I to judge?
I felt as if the ground below me were shifting, unsteady. I put an arm around Bea and turned away, wiping my eyes on the arm of my sweater. In the distance, I heard the persistent wail of sirens and relief flooded my body.
Franco put his hand in his pocket again and pulled out my cell phone. “You’ll probably want this back,” he said and tossed it to me.
It started ringing the minute it hit the palm of my hand. Crawford. “Hello?”
His voice crackled over the bad connection but I could tell that he was frantic. “Alison? Is Bea with you? Are you both okay?”
I filled him in as best I could and told him I would call him back when I got to the station house; I knew, from experience, that being the witness to a homicide meant a long night. The police cars that had been in the distance sped up to our location, spewing dust and decomposing garbage into the air. I covered my mouth and tried not to gag. Dozens of cops jumped from the six or more cars that had pulled up and immediately sized up the scene. Franco pulled his FBI badge from his pocket and began detailing what had happened over the past hour and a half.
I took one last look at Gianna’s form before getting into the police car and said a silent prayer for her tortured soul.
Chapter 30
The week passed without incident, a new and joyful experience for me. Work returned to the mundane, and after having been shot (sort of) and kidnapped (for real), the back-up of papers, phone calls, and student visits was overwhelming. By the end of the week, I was frazzled, but in a good way. Work had helped return my life to normal and that was a good thing.
Sister Calista had begun eyeing me warily every time I set foot in the office area. I wanted to walk up to her and say, “You want a piece of me, lady?” because the events of the past weeks had obviously given her pause when it came to me. Maybe that would make her reconsider her recent recalcitrance.
Franco’s promise to put Peter away was kept: a day after Gianna’s death, Peter was picked up at a social club in Little Italy and arrested. Franco apparently wasn’t the only undercover member of the Miceli family; there were four in total and they had amassed quite a file of information. The number of indictments against him and several of his closest “family” members was staggering and the story filled the paper. Several local newspapers called me for interviews, as did most of the morning programs, but I declined all comment and sent them to my new lawyer, Jimmy, a man I had grown very fond of in the last few weeks. He was a nutcase, and obviously had terrible eating habits and high blood pressure, judging from his potbelly and florid color, but I felt secure knowing that he was fielding all of my phone calls, even if I couldn’t be sure of how he was characterizing the situation.
Jimmy was circumspect about the possibility of my testifying at the trial but promised he would do everything to keep me out of it.
Jimmy was also true to his word in getting my resisting-arrest charge dropped along with the harassment portion of the charges. Crawford had continued looking into the stolen-car part of the case on his own time but couldn’t come up with anything. He had, however, found out that the person driving the car and who had called the New York State Troopers to report that I was following them was a man. So, it could have been Jackson. Or not.
My money was still on a Miceli but I still hadn’t figured out the motive part of things.
Regarding the state troopers, however, I had to pay a fine for driving without my license and registration, had points put on my license for the speed, and had to enroll in the defensive driving class. I sent them a fruit basket just for good measure. All in all, not too bad. But I would never go to Stew Leonard’s again without thinking about getting arrested in my pajamas.
I had spoken with Crawford a few times, but we hadn’t seen each other since the week before. Our last conversation had held the most disturbing news of all: Franco had gone missing, and when Crawford had called the FBI to get contact information on him, they professed to never have heard of him. That gave me pause. Either he was under such deep cover that that was the FBI’s story—a theory Crawford leaned toward, given the fact that he had spent a few months undercover in narcotics and knew a bit about these things—or Franco was a member of another “family” and had been hired to take out Gianna, or a combination of both, an FBI informant and member of the “family.” I tried, along with everything else I knew, to put the fact that h
e was missing in my own brain’s deep cover.
I had also talked to Bea two times; nothing brings you closer together than being kidnapped and having your life threatened. We decided to get together for lunch in a couple of weeks to get to know each other outside of a threatening situation.
I was surprised when Crawford stopped by my office unexpectedly on a Friday afternoon. He had just gotten off work and was hoping to catch me before I left.
“Hey, handsome,” I said, standing up behind my desk.
He leaned over the piece of furniture separating us and gave me a peck on the cheek. “I was thinking.”
“Always trouble,” I remarked, shoving some papers into my briefcase.
He smirked. “If you’re not doing anything tonight, do you want to come over to my place? I’d like to make you dinner.”
I walked around my desk and closed my door, putting some space between the two of us and Dottie’s prying eyes and ears. I lowered my voice. “Let’s call a spade a spade. We both know what we’re talking about here. A pizza, a bottle of cheap red wine, and sex. No interruptions. How does that sound?” I asked him, slipping my finger into the waistband of his pants and pulling him close.
He sighed. “Can we at least have the illusion of romance here?” He looked at a spot over my head. “Does everything have to be so cut-and-dried with you?”
I smiled, holding my hands up as if to say “you knew what you were getting yourself into.”
“Fine. Have it your way,” he said and shoved his hands into his pockets. “We’ll do it your way: come to my place. Seven o’clock. Leave your underwear at home.”
“Now you’re talking.” I wrapped my arms around his waist. “Did you leave your handcuffs at work?”
He flushed a deep red. “Nope. They’re in the car.”
I kissed him. “Good. Make sure you bring them inside.”
He pulled away from me. “Great,” he said, exasperated. “Now I can’t leave.” He looked down at his belt buckle, his zipper lying not quite as flat as when he had arrived. “Talk about James Joyce or something so I don’t feel quite so”—he searched for the right word—“happy.”
Extracurricular Activities Page 24
