Blood of My Brother

by James Lepore

  The nuns made no objection. Senor Hermano had donated five thousand dollars to the convent each year that Isabel was with them. When he told them that she would be going into service with a good family with close government ties, the sisters felt they had done well for Isabel. Not every orphan who came to them entered the Order, especially ones as beautiful as Isabel. They did not permit the absence of legal nicety in her initial placement and her final departure to disturb them. Senor seemed like a good man and his money had fed and clothed dozens of children over the years, and they were grateful for his promise that it would continue.

  In July, Sister Josefina and Sister Adelina took Isabel to a small retreat house owned by the Order in the hills above Puerto Angel, a tiny, impoverished fishing village on Mexico’s southern Pacific coast. There they explained Senor Hermano ’s plans to her. Afterward, as she walked the beach and climbed into the hills with a local peasant boy who had become her friend during prior visits, she silently thanked the Virgin of Guadalupe for her good fortune, and allowed herself for once to envision a happy future not as a dream but as a reality.

  5.

  3:00 AM, Sunday, September 5, 2004, Montclair

  “I think I’m in love,” Danny said.

  They were sitting in padded outdoor chairs on Jay’s patio, a small coffee table between them, on which rested, as if composed for a still-life painting, an old-fashioned aluminum espresso pot, a bottle of Remy Martin, an ashtray, and a pack of unfiltered Camels. Danny had lit a candle he found in the kitchen to complete this scene. It was three a.m. In the distance they could hear the splashing of the stream that meandered through the reservation, coming only a few hundred feet from Jay’s property line before swinging back into the woods. An awning of stars shone down on them through a crystal clear night.

  “Not with Gloria?” Jay said.

  “No, but she’s interesting.”

  After drinks and dinner and more drinks they had put their dates, Gloria and Candy, in cabs and headed back to Jersey.

  “You can have Candy, too,” Jay said.

  “Do you remember her now?”

  “Yes.”

  “You told her you were on the United States Supreme Court.”

  “I remember.”

  “She checked it out.”

  “I didn’t think she’d take me seriously.”

  “She’s crazy about you.”

  Jay did not answer. Candy, in her late twenties, was tall and beautiful, with a great smile. She wasn’t pushy, not looking for a commitment, just a fun night, maybe a few more. There was no click, and that was it. It had been almost three years since he had last had a serious girlfriend, a long time between clicks, he knew. He liked being alone, he would tell himself. An only child, he had lost both of his parents at once in a plane crash. Danny had a theory about the effect this trauma had on his life, but he rarely brought it up, just as Jay rarely mentioned his friend’s shortness of stature—he was five-seven—not even to tease him about the platform cowboy boots he’d been wearing since he was a teenager. It was the things not said, Jay knew, that made for a great friendship.

  “Maybe I’ll call her,” he said finally.

  “I’m worried about you,” Dan said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I know you won’t call her. You didn’t even ask for her number.”

  “You can get it for me.”

  “Do you want it?” Dan asked.

  “Not really.”

  “Jay,” Dan said, “she’s a fucking knockout. Every guy we know would kill his mother just to be with this broad.”

  “You’ll have to find me somebody else. You always do.”

  “What happens when I’m not around?”

  “You’ll always be around.”

  “Don’t be so sure. I might run off with Donna Kelly.”

  “Is that who you’re in love with?” Jay asked, laughing. “The new client? That you just met yesterday?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me about her.”

  “I put her in her mid-twenties,” Dan said, “about five-seven, a hundred and twenty-five pounds. Slender, but voluptuous—a great rack—an unbeatable combination.”

  “What about the face?”

  “That’s the best part. Long black hair, dark complexion, blue eyes. Strong, classic features. I said she’s Hispanic, but I’m really not sure. Those blue eyes . . . You’ll die when you see this broad. She’s an absolute knockout, and very classy.”

  Jay did not put much credence in this description. Danny’s women were always more beautiful, and occasionally more “classy”—meaning in his friend’s lexicon that they had minds as well as bodies—before he slept with them.

  “What’s her story?”

  “She says that Powers gave her the cash to hold for him about a month ago.”

  “Where’s she from?” Jay asked.

  “Florida,” said Danny. “She was managing a property in West Palm Beach for Powers.”

  “Were they lovers?”

  “She says not. She would fly up for monthly property managers meetings. After the last meeting he took her out to dinner, and asked her to keep the cash for him.”

  “What does she want from you?”

  “I’m supposed to bring the money to her in Florida on Monday.”

  “Which you’ll happily do.”

  “Of course.”

  Jay had fought tooth and nail for what lawyers call discovery in the Powers divorce case, which, as it was provided grudgingly in small pieces by Bryce Powers’s lawyers, he scrutinized thoroughly under the old legal maxim, if you’re trying to hide something it must be damaging. Powers had gone to work for Gentex, a huge international real estate developer, right out of Harvard Business School, at the age of twenty-one. By the time he was thirty, he was a vice president, in charge of government relations for all of Central and South America. Chief Executive Officer had clearly not been out of the question for him. But he left, and used his carefully guarded savings and contacts to start Bryce Powers & Company. True grit, Jay had thought, sincerely, until recently.

  “Powers lived in Mexico City,” he told Danny, “for about five years. He worked for a very big international developer, skyscrapers, things like that. He must have met some important people. He was in charge there eventually. Don’t take this lightly, Del.”

  “What?” Danny asked.

  “Come on.”

  “I’ll die with my boots on,” said Danny, smiling, sipping his liquore-laced espresso.

  “Do you know anybody in Florida?” Jay asked.

  “No,” said Danny, “but Frank Dunn has a buddy living there, another ex-New York cop, who’s supposed to have friends in the Miami Police Department.”

  “What good will that do you?”

  “If I get in trouble, I’ll call him. But I won’t get in trouble. Don’t worry, this is not the French Connection.”

  “How did she get your name?”

  “She says you recommended me.”

  “I don’t know her, Dan.”

  “She was in Jersey this week, for a property managers meeting scheduled for the day after the massacre at the Powers house. She read in the paper that you were representing the wife. She says Powers told her what a prick you were. She liked that about you. She called your office and Cheryl gave her my name and number.”

  “I don’t buy it. I mean, she hardly knows Powers and he’s trusting her with a half million dollars in cash?”

  “I don’t either, actually.”

  “Why can’t she get the money herself?”

  “I think the idea is that other people are interested in it.”

  “Besides her.”

  “Right.”

  “Maybe you should have someone else with you.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “What’s your take on it?”

  “I think Powers was banging her. Anybody would. And together they were stealing the company’s money. Maybe they were planning on running
away.”

  “Then why would anyone else know about the money?”

  “I’ve already spent half my fee, Jay. I can finally catch up. Fuck the rest.”

  “Why not just skip it altogether, then? Keep it all?” Jay knew that his friend was a petty, not a real, thief. He would make an honest effort on behalf of Miss Kelly. Honest according to his own somewhat flexible standards. He also knew that Dan had smiled his way through more dangerous assignments, not so much fearless as oblivious to fear, and that no amount of talk, sarcastic or otherwise, had the slightest chance of persuading him to change his approach to his work or his life. He watched as his friend of thirty-seven years shook a cigarette from the pack, lit it from the candle, took a deep drag, and then blew the smoke up into the night sky.

  “She’s hot for me, Jay,” Dan said, smiling his insane devil’s smile. “I can feel it in my bones.”

  “Christ.”

  “Well, some of us still like to get laid.”

  “Just be careful, okay, asshole?”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll wear a condom.”

  “Christ.”

  6.

  2:00 AM, September 12, 2004, Montclair

  A week later Danny was dead, shot twice in the head; his body, tied at hand and foot, found in a room at the South Miami Beach Motor Hotel. Frank Dunn showed up at Jay’s house at 2:00 a.m. to break the news. Dunn had gotten a call from his friend in Miami, Angelo Perna. Multiple burn wounds had been found on Danny’s hands and feet, and his testicles were grossly swollen and pulpy. Dunn found a bottle of Jameson in Jay’s liquor cabinet, and by three a.m. it was finished. It had been Dunn’s first drop of liquor in ten years.

  Jay did not drink. Judge Moran had returned the Powers divorce file to Jay’s office on Wednesday after Al Garland had determined that the deaths of Bryce and Kate were definitely murder-suicide. But the copy Jay had made before going to court last week was still in the small second bedroom he used as an office. He managed to lay Dunn out on the couch, and then he sat and carefully began to reread Kate Powers’s letters, hoping to find some reference to the beautiful Hispanic woman, aka Donna Kelly, who had lured Dan Del Colliano to his death.

  He found none, but one or two letters he now read in a different light. In one, Kate mentioned an affair Bryce was supposed to have had while they were living in Mexico City, with the daughter of a well connected, patrician type family. His “fouling of the royal nest,” as she melodramatically put it, had led, she claimed, to Bryce’s resignation from Gentex and their sudden departure from Mexico. Bryce Powers & Company was capitalized, according to Kate, with hush money from the woman’s father. This was supposed to have happened in the mid-seventies, clearly eliminating Donna Kelly, in her mid-twenties according to Danny, as Bryce’s lover. Was Kate raving? Was an affair in the high end of Mexican society such a scandal in the seventies? In several other letters Kate spoke of Bryce’s “friends” in Bogotá and Panama, of the many supper parties they attended in Mexico City with the “biggest drug dealers in the world and their front men.”

  Putting the letters aside, Jay recalled that Bryce’s first syndication in 1977 was a deal in southwest Texas, and that the four general partners, except for Bryce, had distinctly Latin names, which would not be unusual given the location of the property. He pulled the documents relating to that deal and found that the property, a two hundred unit garden apartment complex called Lantana Gardens, had been valued at twenty million in 2004. Assuming a conservative rate of appreciation, the purchase price for the property would have probably been around eight or nine million. How had Bryce come up with his share? Or enough collateral to make a bank comfortable, assuming there was some financing in the beginning?

  The next few deals were also in Texas, but after that, properties were purchased in Florida, Delaware, Arizona, New York, and New Jersey, Bryce’s eventual home base. In the mid-eighties Plaza I and II were built. They were Bryce’s ultimate achievement, establishing his net worth, at the time of the divorce, at around seventy-five million. Why, then, was he dicking around with five hundred thousand in cash just before he died? Why bother? Jay looked again at the Lantana Gardens partnership papers, and found that the other managing partner, besides Bryce, was one Herman Santaria. “H. Santaria” was the co-managing partner on the other Texas properties as well. Managing partners, Jay knew, were the ones with the real control over real estate syndicates set up as partnerships.

  H. Santaria did not appear as a partner in any deal outside of Texas, but every Bryce Powers & Company property, forty-three in all, listed H. S. Company as a maintenance contractor receiving close to a million dollars per year in all for its services. It took no great power of deduction for Jay to see the distinct possibility that Herman Santaria, aka H.S. Company, had the same phony deal with Bryce as did Melissa and Marcy, only on a much larger scale. So who was Herman Santaria, and what grip did he have on Bryce Powers?

  And then, of course, there was the cash. The properties were run as separate businesses, with each having several bank accounts, including a rent account, a payroll account, a general operating account, and a trust account into which deposits from investors were made and dividends distributed. Bryce Powers & Company was the manager of all forty-three properties, which gave it, by contract, exclusive control over some 172 bank accounts. The cash flow was about forty million per year. In addition there were Plaza I and II, which also maintained several bank accounts and which had a total cash flow of about ten million per year. Jay did not know much about money laundering, but any beginner could see that having control of 172 bank accounts would not be a bad idea for someone interested in doing it.

  Jay and Danny were five years old when their paths first crossed on a deceptively lovely summer day in 1967. Neither the past nor the future exist, only the present, but in Jay’s present, making coffee in his quiet kitchen, was Danny; running headlong down Sheffield Street in their old neighborhood in Newark on the day they met; pitching from a comically big windup during their stickball games; ordering drinks for the bar at Tierney’s, their hangout in Montclair; making tomato sauce in the kitchen of his apartment; reciting lines from Scarface and The Godfather, his favorite movies: brash, confident, swaggering, the devil in his eyes and in his smile. These and more were the images embedded in Jay’s heart, in the here and now. Beyond these images he could not see, did not want to see.

  7.

  9:00 PM, July 12, 1967, Newark

  “What were you doing in the church?” A.J. asked.

  Jay was silent.

  “Did you see the cop who was shot?”

  “Yes.”

  “That was Phil Franco.”

  “I know.”

  “He’s dead.”

  Silence.

  The police had let the mourners leave the church, along with Jay and Danny, who had appeared suddenly in their midst, at around six p.m. Run, Danny had said, and before the cops could say or do anything, Jay was halfway home and Danny was dashing around the perimeter of the projects toward his apartment building on Eighth Avenue, where, he had casually mentioned to Jay while they were holed up in the bell tower, a “spic and a shine family”—whatever they were—had just moved in.

  “The school said you were missing,” his mother said.

  “I spoke to your friend’s father,” said A.J. “We were just about to go looking for you.”

  On the table in front of Jay was a dish of spaghettini marinara, a favorite of his, with several chunks of his father’s bread on a plate next to it. He was hungry, but he hadn’t touched it. His parents were making him too nervous.

  “What else did you see?” his father asked.

  “I saw the guy on the roof.”

  “The guy with the rifle?”

  “Yes.”

  “You saw him shooting?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you see Phil get shot?”

  “Yes.”

  “Son of a bitch,” said A.J., softly. Jay watched his father’s ey
es go flat, look inward, if that was the right way to describe it. Sadness, Jay thought. Every day for as long as Jay could remember, Phil Franco had stopped by the bakery to buy bread to bring home to his family. Jay had listened in occasionally as Phil and A.J. had spoken about grown-up things. They were friends, he thought now. My father had a friend-—and lost him. These thoughts were like small claps of thunder in his brain, marking something he would think about later, lying in bed.

  “We’ll go to the funeral,” A.J. said.

  “Me?” said Jay.

  “Yes. When people die, they’re laid out in a funeral home—it’s called a wake—then they’re buried in a cemetery. You saw Phil die, you should see him buried.”

  Silence.

  Jay turned his attention to his mother, who had said little since placing Jay’s food on the table. She was looking around the small kitchen. Jay followed her gaze as it swept in a few seconds over the things that he had seen her wipe and scrub and clean every day of his life: the gas stove, the new refrigerator, the worn linoleum floor, the chipped enamel sink. He paused with her to look through the window above the sink at the television antennas on the rooftop of the three-story tenement behind theirs, the hot summer breeze rustling her gauzy yellow curtains.

  Carmela taught something called Greek mythology at the local junior high school, two blocks away. Occasionally Jay had watched with pride as one of her students, passing her on the street out front, would say, “Hello, Mrs. Cassio,” or “Good morning, Mrs. Cassio.” Until tonight he had thought that her air of calm authority was a permanent part of her, like her beautiful brown eyes or her wedding ring. Tonight he could see she was afraid—of the city going up in smoke, yes, of course, but of something else, too, something worse; something he would only much later identify as the prospect of poverty and loss of hope.

  “I think that’s a good idea,” she said to Jay, finally, her face recomposed, reassuring him with her eyes, “You can meet Phil’s wife, and tell her how brave he was.”