Nona nodded. “You are in luck. Mr. Fattore is here. He’s relaxing in his study. He ordinarily has men over here, talking to him, but not this evening. I’ll go and get him. Please wait right here.”
I took a seat, not really knowing what I was going to find out. I did know that there was something up with this whole scenario, and, if I could possibly get to the bottom of it, I could not only get Stefano out of prison, but I also would be able to have some answers for Bianca. She was very hurt by her father’s indifference to her brother. That much I knew.
Benito showed up about a half hour later. “Mr. Azzarra,” he said, extending his hand. “I hope my daughter is okay.”
“She is. I’m sorry for coming by at this late hour.”
Benito appeared to shrug. “That is okay that you are. I did not have any meeting on my schedule tonight. Come into my study.”
I followed him into his study, which was enormous and wood-paneled. It was old-school, just like Benito.
He got up and made himself a drink. “I enjoy drinking bourbon in the evenings. Can I interest you in one?”
“Thank you.”
He gave me the drink and I took a sip, letting the smooth liquor roll down my throat.
Benito took a seat behind an enormous cherry desk. “So, tell me what brings you here this evening?”
I took a deep breath, hoping that Benito would be straight with me. “Stefano.” I looked at him, trying to gauge his reaction to my saying the name of his son.
I noticed that his cheek started to twitch and, for just one second, his eyes showed a hint of emotion. Sadness, maybe. Anger, definitely. I didn’t know why he got that flicker in his eyes, but I knew that I had seen it.
“What about him?”
“I would like to do something about his situation. I specifically would like to get him out of prison.”
Benito nodded his head. “No. He’s where he belongs.”
I cocked my head. “Why? He’s your son. Your son. I don’t mind telling you that the reason why I meddled in his case was because I wanted your attention. I made sure that you knew that I was behind why the judge refused to set him free, like you thought that he would. I wasn’t anticipating that you wouldn’t even care that he was going to be convicted.”
Benito stood up. “You don’t know what you’re saying, here. What I can tell you is this. You did nothing in that case. Nothing that wouldn’t have happened with or without your intervention. That judge is on my payroll, that is true. But I already instructed him that he is not to protect Stefano if he came up on his docket. Stefano would have been convicted even without your meddling.”
I looked at Benito, whose eyes were not meeting mine. “What? Why? I don’t understand, Benito, why you would let Stefano hang like that. Your own son. Your own blood.”
Once again, I saw that same flicker in his eyes that I noticed before. “I am very sorry, Mr. Azzarra, but I must cut this meeting short.” He looked at the grandfather clock, which was right behind my head. “It is very late, and I have an early meeting.”
“Mr. Fattore,” I said. “You never answered my question. Your son is in prison, and you not only don’t care, but you’ve gone out of your way to make sure that he’s not protected by the usual channels. I know that the judge in Stefano’s case has been blackmailed and bribed before to make sure your men are never convicted for anything. Why didn’t Stefano get the same kind of treatment?” I was dumb-founded. Completely dumb-founded.
“Please leave,” he said. “I must tell you once again, I am tired, and I need my rest. Nona will show you out.”
I shook my head, trying to figure out what this guy’s problem was. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure it out.
Nona opened the door, and I got up to follow her out. It was obvious that Benito wasn’t going to tell me the truth about his son, no matter how hard I pressed, so I was just going to have to work it from a different angle.
Then, right before Nona showed me out the door, I got my answer. “Go and see Rafaela,” she said. “You will get your answers.”
Twenty-Three
I wondered if Rafaela was at home. No matter, I was going to go to her home and see what I could find out. It was only 10 o’clock. She definitely didn’t seem the type of person who would be going to bed early. I would just go on over there, and, if she was home, and wasn’t entertaining anybody there, then hopefully she would be willing to tell me what I needed to know.
I rang the doorbell of her home. Her place was much more modest than Benito’s. At least, that was what Bianca had told me about where Rafaela lived.
She answered the door. “Well, hello,” she said, sounding like she had been drinking. “Lucca. It’s good to see you.”
“Hello, Rafaela,” I said to her. “I hope that I’m not bothering you too much.”
“You aren’t.” Her words were slurred. “Not at all. Come on in.”
She went over to a crystal decanter and poured a drink. “Like one?”
I shook my head. I had a drink over at Benito’s, and I was starting to feel it. “No, but thank you.”
“You’re going to be a poop?”she said and started to laugh. I suddenly knew where Izzy got her personality. Rafaela looked like she could be Bianca and Izzy’s sister, and she acted much like Izzy. Dippy, funny and strange. Just like Izzy.
I wondered if she had an Etsy shop of her own that she was trying to run. I wouldn’t be surprised.
“No,” I said, trying to make sure that she knew that I was there for a serious reason, and not that I wanted to hit on her. “I need to talk to you about something.”
“Something.” She hung her head. “What is that something? By the way, how are things over at your house? With Bianca and Izzy both there with you?” She smiled a wicked smile. “You taking turns with my two girls, or are you just focused on Bianca?”
What a weird thing to ask. “Ms. Fattore,” I began.
“Oh, please. I don’t go by Fattore. I haven’t since Benito and I got divorced. Call me Rafaela, and, for the record, my last name is Ricci now. My maiden name.” She shook her head. “God, I hated that last name. Fattore. I don’t like any name that begins with the word fat.” She pinched her waist to make the point, although I knew that she wasn’t pinching any fat there. She didn’t seem to have an ounce of fat on her entire body.
She lurched over to the bar and poured herself another drink. She raised it above her head and nodded to me. “You sure you don’t want one?”
“I’m positive.”
“You’re an odd one, you know that? I don’t trust a man who doesn’t drink.”
“I do drink, but only when the situation is appropriate.”
“Oh, and this situation isn’t appropriate? You dropped by my home in the middle of the night. I would think that if there was an appropriate situation to get shit-faced, this would be it.” Then she started to laugh hysterically. “Oh, I’m so sorry. It’s not the middle of the night. It’s only 10 o’clock. I just noticed that. It’s starting to get dark so early again. I miss summer.” She looked out the window sorrowfully. “Soon, that tree will be bare. I hate it when that happens. It means that I won’t see green leaves for another six months or so. Sometimes I wish that I could move to Italy, just so I can see green year-round. You know?”
She suddenly looked as if she was about to cry, and I knew that I had to get the answers from her that I needed, and soon. If I waited much longer, she was going to be passed out on the couch, and who knows if I would ever be able to ask her the questions that I needed to ask her?
“Rafaela, I need to know what is going on with Benito and Stefano. Benito doesn’t seem to care about him at all. He let Stefano go to prison, and I just found out that he never had Stefano protected the way that he protects all of his other men. I found that to be extremely strange.”
“You do?” She raised an eyebrow. “What’s so strange about it? Benito is a bastard. He’s a bastard, and he likes to make my life hell. What bet
ter way to make my life hell but to make sure that my son goes to prison?”
“Your son?”
“Yes, my son. My son and Benito’s son.” She lurched back to the bar and made herself another drink. “My son and Benito’s son. Our son.”
I wondered if she had made a slip of the tongue earlier when she referred to Stefano as “my son.” Why didn’t she just say “our son” to begin with? “Rafaela, what is going on? Stefano is Benito’s blood. Why-“
She sat down and hung her head. And then she started to cry. “No. No. Stefano is not Benito’s blood. At least, I don’t think so.”
Twenty-Four
Well, that was a twist. Somehow, the thought that Stefano didn’t “belong” to Benito didn’t even occur to me. It should have. It really should have. But it didn’t. It made sense, though. Still, it was cruel that Benito would treat Stefano in such an unfair way. Sure, Stefano wasn’t his, but, still, he was one of his men. As such, he should have made sure that Stefano was protected, just as he would any other man on his payroll.
“So, Benito isn’t Stefano’s father,” I said. “Who is?”
Rafaela waved her drink around and got a look on her face that I couldn’t quite read. It looked like she was trying to say that she didn’t really know, but, at the same time, her expression could have meant something else. At this point, with her so drunk, I didn’t really know what to think.
“Stefano...” She shook her head. “I never should have allowed that man in my home. I never should have. Let him in my home.”
I sat down, and looked right at Rafaela. I was going to get to the bottom of all of this, and I hoped to get to the bottom of it soon. “What man? What are you talking about?”
She sighed. “I was home alone that night. Home alone. Completely alone.” She shook her head. “I didn’t know that he felt that way about me.”
“Who? Who felt what way about you?”
“Marco. He was on my husband’s payroll. He was only an associate, just a low-level guy. I had seen him around, though, hanging around. And he came over that night. Just like you did. I only had Nico around. He was only 1 years old. And Benito was in Italy. He was looking into buying some land for us there.” She looked sad. “Believe it or not, we were in love. I know, I know. How can anybody love a guy like Benito, you’re probably thinking. But I did. I knew him when he was a boy in Sicily. Just a young boy, and I was a little girl, not much younger than him. He didn’t have much, or anything, really. Just a burning ambition to be someone. To get out of his village and make his mark on the world. I was disappointed, of course, to find out that the mark that he wanted to make on the world was to create his own mob syndicate in New York City, but them’s the breaks, right?”
I couldn’t, for the life of me, imagine Benito as a boy. Or as anything other than what he was – a greying guy who had a fondness for real crystal in his chandeliers and classical music and whose every idea seems to have come straight out of the 1950s. Rafaela couldn’t be more different. She favored loud colors, had salty language, apparently like to drink to excess, and her apartment reflected all of this. In contrast to Benito’s staid place with marble floor, crystal chandeliers, and white walls, Rafaela’s place was as colorful and loud as she was. Her walls were red, blood red, and her furniture was black. All around her were statues of large cats. On her walls were paintings that were painted in the modernist genre, in contrast to Benito’s artwork that clearly favored Renaissance masters.
“Yes, well, we were in love.” She looked sad and seemed that she was on the verge of tears. “Love. And that damned Marco took that all away. At least for awhile.”
“Who is Marco?”
“Excuse me,” she said, putting her hand up to her mouth. She ran to the bathroom, and I could hear her retching into the bowl.
She came back out. “I need to stop drinking so much. I drink all the time because I’m sad, you know. It takes away the pain. The pain of…” She shook her head. “What did you want to know again? I mean, you’re here, but I can’t remember what the topic was.”
“Stefano. I was trying to find out why Benito treats him so unfairly.”
“Yes, Stefano. Stefano. Well, let’s see….I was talking about Marco. He was one of Benito’s men. An associate.”
She was repeating herself, of course, but I decided just to let her ramble. I was getting to the kernel of what was going on, and I knew that if I let her talk, I would get to it for sure.
“Marco. He came over, and I thought that he was friendly. He told me that he found me attractive, yada, yada, yada. You know the drill.” She shook her head to and fro, to and fro, and looked at me. “Whatever. I wasn’t interested, of course, because I was in love with my husband. Did I tell you that I was in love with him for years? That I knew him in Italy when he was a boy, long before he became this big-shot Don?”
“Yes,” I said softly. “You did.”
“I did. Okay. Well, Marco wasn’t going to take no for an answer. And he was in my apartment. This was before there were cell phones and all that, you know. It was in the 90s. I wish that there were cell phones back then, but there weren’t any. Maybe if there were, all of this wouldn’t have happened.”
“All of what?”
“Marco. Wouldn’t take no for an answer. And I tried to call the police. I didn’t want him in my home anymore. I wanted him to get the hell out. But he cut the lines. He cut the lines. I don’t know how he did that, but he did. Goddammit, I wish that there were cell phones back then. You know, if I had a time-machine, that’s what I would do. Invent cell phones back in the 80s, so that they would be everywhere, and I would have been able to call the goddamn police. Not to mention the fact that I would be fabulously wealthy, legitimately wealthy, no blood money. And maybe Benito wouldn’t have gotten into the mob, either. But I digress.”
I suddenly knew where this was going. And it wasn’t going anywhere good.
“He overpowered me. I screamed, but he didn’t care. He threw me down, and….” She shook her head. “I had to tell Benito the truth. At that time, he was a capo, not the capo, but A capo. It was before he even branched out and started his own organization. Boy, was he able to get that new organization off the ground. He never wanted to be an underling, my husband. Never did.”
I nodded my head. I didn’t really know what to say. Rafaela started to cry. “I told Benito the truth. He had Marco killed, of course. He wasn’t the person to call hits, the Don was the one, but once he told the Don what Marco did, he was taken care of in a most brutal way.” She shook her head. “Nine months later, along comes Stefano. I tried to insist to Benito that I wanted a DNA test, but he always refused. He said that he considered Stefano to be his, and he didn’t want a DNA test to show that Stefano wasn’t. Yet, he always treated Stefano differently. Harshly. I’ve talked to a shrink about it, I’ve talked to a shrink for years about it, and the shrink tells me that every time Benito looks at Stefano, he sees Marco. My rapist. And that’s why he has always been so cruel to him. It’s not fair, it’s not right, but it is what it is.”
It is what it is. “I understand now.” It suddenly all made sense. All of it.
And I knew what I had to do.
Twenty-Five
After I talked to Rafaela, I put my plan into action. I knew that there was probably a 50/50 chance that Benito was the actual father of Stefano. I was going to have to find some kind of sample from him so that I could do a DNA test to see if he actually was Stefano’s father. If he was, and I could prove it, then maybe Benito would feel differently about Stefano. If he felt differently about Stefano, then maybe, just maybe, he would be willing to help him. He would have much more influence over the trial court judge then I did. The judge who sentenced Stefano was Benito’s usual judge, the judge who tried all the cases that came before him that involved Benito’s men. That judge was paid handsomely in exchange for giving the men light sentences, if he didn’t acquit them outright. There were many murder cases that came befo
re him, involving Benito’s men, where that judge mysteriously upheld motions to dismiss in favor of the defendants, which meant that, even with a jury, those men walked. Occasionally, the cases would end in a conviction, but that judge always gave those defendants the lightest possible sentence.
In short, that judge, Judge Williams, was under Benito’s thumb. As such, Benito would be able to convince him to go ahead and vacate Stefano’s conviction. Once that happened, and Gianni was able to get Stefano’s murder conviction reduced to a simple assault, Stefano would be out of prison.
I also had information to blackmail that judge if things didn’t work out, but I preferred having Benito do it. If Benito was the one who got Stefano out of prison, it would go a long way towards healing the rift between Benito and Stefano, not to mention healing the rift between Benito and Bianca. Plus, if things went well, perhaps Benito and Stefano could have a true father-son relationship. After all these years.
All of that depended upon the DNA test showing that Benito was Stefano’s father, of course. If it didn’t, then…I shook my head. I would have to go with my Plan B, which was to blackmail the judge into doing what I wanted. That wasn’t ideal. It would accomplish my goal of getting Stefano out of prison, but it certainly wouldn’t accomplish my goal of seeing Benito and Stefano heal their relationship. And if the DNA test showed, for sure, that Stefano belonged to Marco, not Benito, then that would only poison the well further. Therefore, I knew that I had to do this DNA test as secretly and discreetly as possible. Benito could never know that this was happening.
I sat in my study and tried to think about how to accomplish this. According to my research, a hair could be used, but only if the root was attached. It wouldn’t work for me to try to sneak into his bathroom, find a hairbrush and send the hair in. Somebody would have to pull the hair out of his head. I could stage a fight with Gino, but fights didn’t usually involve hair-pulling. Not with men, anyhow. With women, they did, but not with guys.
Lucca: Azzarra Crime Family Book Two Page 15
