“And you got blood on your suit and hands.”
“Yes.” He looked down at the residuum of Honor’s blood, spattered on a silk tie of cornflower blue and dry as paper between his fingertips. He had put the blood there himself, kneeling at her side, and the act had sent him to the bathroom, his gorge rising in revulsion.
“Did she scream?”
“She shouted, I think. I don’t remember if it was loud,” he added, in case they interviewed the neighbors.
“Did she fight you?”
He tasted bile on his teeth. He imagined Honor fighting for her life, her final moments stricken with terror. Realizing she would die, seeing who would kill her. “She fought hard, but not well. She was drunk. She couldn’t believe it was happening. That I would really do that to her.”
“Then what did you do?”
“I went to the phone. I called nine-one-one. I told them I killed my wife.” Jack caught himself. “Wait, I forgot. I went to the bathroom and tried to wash up, but not all the blood came off. I realized there was no way I could hide what I’d done. I had no plan, I hadn’t thought it out. I didn’t even have a way to get her body out of the house. I realized I was going to get caught. There was no way out. I vomited into the toilet.”
Brinkley’s eyes narrowed. “Why did you try to wash up?”
“I was trying to wash the blood off. So I wouldn’t get caught.”
“In your own bathroom?”
“Well, yes.” Jack paused, momentarily confused, but Brinkley’s glare spurred him on. “It’s not like I was thinking clearly, as I said.”
Brinkley leaned back against the wall again. “Let’s switch gears, Mr. Newlin. What time was it when you came home?”
“Just before eight. I was supposed to be there at seven but I got held up.”
“What held you up?”
“I stopped to talk with my partner. The firm’s managing partner, William Whittier.” Jack had been on his way out when Whittier had stopped him to discuss the Florrman bill. It had taken time to get free, then it was pouring outside and Jack couldn’t get a cab. Ironic that the most mundane events, on the wrong night, had ended Honor’s life and changed his forever. “I suppose I should have called to say I was late, but I didn’t think it would matter. The maid is off on Monday, and we usually eat a late dinner.”
“How did you get home?”
“I took a cab.”
“What kind?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Yellow? Gypsy?”
“No clue. I was distracted. The traffic was a mess.”
Hunched over the desk, Kovich nodded in agreement. “That accident on Vine,” he said, but Brinkley stood up and stretched, almost as if he were bored.
“Not every day we get somebody like you in here, Mr. Newlin. We get dope dealers, gangbangers, rapists. Even had a serial killer last year. But we don’t often see the likes of you.”
“What do you mean, detective? I’m like anybody else.”
“You? No way. You’re what we used to call the man who has everything.” Brinkley rubbed his chest. “That’s what doesn’t make sense, Mr. Newlin. About what you’re telling me.”
Jack’s heart stopped in his chest. Had he blown it? He forced out a single word: “What?”
“You hated your wife enough to kill her, but you didn’t want to give her a divorce. That’s psycho time, but you’re no psycho, obviously. Explain it to me.” Brinkley crossed his slim arms, and fear shot through Jack like an electrical current.
“You’re right,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “It doesn’t make sense, if you look at it that way. Logically, I mean.”
“Logically? That’s how I look at it, Mr. Newlin. That’s the only way to look at it.” Brinkley smiled without mirth. “People sit in that chair all the time and they lie to me. None of them look like you or dress like you, that’s for damn sure, but you can lie too. You can lie better. You got the words for it. Only thing I got to tell me if you’re lying is common sense, and what you’re tellin’ me don’t make sense. It’s not, as you say, logical.”
“No it isn’t.” Jack caught sight of Honor’s blood on his hands, and it was so awful, so impossible to contemplate, that it released the emotions he’d been suppressing all night. Grief. Fear. Horror. Tears brimmed in his eyes, but he blinked them away. He remembered his purpose. “I wasn’t thinking logically, I was reacting emotionally. To her shouting, to her insults. To the Scotch. I just did it. I thought I could get away with it, so I tried to clean up, but I couldn’t go through with it. I called nine-one-one, I told them the truth. I did it. It was awful, it is awful.”
Brinkley’s dark eyes remained dubious, and Jack realized his mistake. The rich didn’t behave this way. They didn’t confess or blubber. They expected to get away with murder. Jack, who had never thought like a rich man and evidently never would, knew instantly what to do to convince him: “Detective, this interview is over,” he said abruptly, sitting up straighter. “I want to call my attorney.”
The reaction was immediate. Brinkley’s dark eyes glittered, his mouth formed a grim line, and he fell into his customary silence. Jack couldn’t read the detective completely, but sensed that he had acted in character, in a way that comported with Brinkley’s world view, and that would ultimately put his doubts to rest.
In contrast, Kovich deflated at the typewriter, his heavy shoulders slumping, his big fingers stilled. “But, Jack, we can settle this thing right here and now. Make it real easy.”
“I think not,” Jack said, turning haughty. He knew how to give orders from hearing them given. “I insist on my attorney. I should have called him in the first place.”
“But all you gotta do is sign this statement. Once you do that, we’re all done here. It’ll be easiest on you and your daughter this way.” Kovich’s eyes burned an earnest brown. “I’m a father, too, Jack, and I know how it is. You gotta think about your kid now.”
“No, I’ve said much too much already. I want my lawyer and we’ll take care of notifying Paige. I will not have you at my daughter’s home this late at night. It’s harassment. I’ll handle the notification through my attorney.”
Detective Brinkley buttoned his jacket with nimble fingers. “Better get yourself a good mouthpiece, Mr. Newlin,” he said, his face a professional mask. He pivoted on a smooth sole, walked out of the interview room, and closed the door behind him.
Once Brinkley had gone, Kovich yanked the sheet from the typewriter roll with a resigned sigh. “Now you did it. You got him mad, askin’ for a lawyer. After judges, there’s nothin’ Mick hates more than lawyers.”
“But I am a lawyer.”
“Like I said.” Kovich laughed his guttural laugh and turned to Jack as warmly as he had at the beginning. “You sure you don’t wanna talk to me? I’m the nice one. I like lawyers. It’s realtors I hate.”
“No thanks,” Jack answered, and managed a snotty smile.
Copyright © 2000 by Lisa Scottoline. All rights reserved
The Vendetta Defense
Lawyer Judy Carrier takes the case of her career to defend Anthony Lucia, fondly known as “Pigeon Tony,” who is arrested for the murder of his lifelong enemy Angelo Coluzzi.
When her client freely admits he killed Coluzzi because of a vendetta, Judy’s troubles really begin. The Coluzzi family wants revenge. Then there’s Pigeon Tony’s hunky grandson, who makes Judy think about everything but the law.
In a case steeped in blood and memory, it will take brains and a lot of luck to save Pigeon Tony. But if anyone might see justice done, it’s this gutsy attorney who’ll risk everything to win — including her own life.
Houston Chronicle: “Scottoline sweeps her audience up in a luscious whirl of unforgettable characters and crisp plotting.”
People: “Highly entertaining.”
Chapter One
The morning Tony Lucia killed Angelo Coluzzi, he was late to feed his pigeons. As long as Tony had kept pigeons, which was
for almost all of his seventy-nine years, he had never been late to feed them, and they began complaining the moment he opened the screen door. Deserting their perches, cawing and cooing, they flew agitated around the cages, their wings pounding against the chicken wire, setting into motion the air in the tiny city loft. It didn’t help that the morning had dawned clear and that March blew hard outside. The birds itched to fly.
Tony waved his wrinkled hand to settle them, but his heart wasn’t in it. They had a right to their bad manners, and he was a tolerant man. It was okay with him if the birds did only one thing, which was to fly home. They were homers, thirty-seven of them, and it wasn’t an easy job they had, to travel to a place they’d never been, a distance in some races of three hundred or four hundred miles, then to navigate their return through skies they’d never flown, over city and country they’d never seen and couldn’t possibly know, to flap their way home to a tiny speck in the middle of South Philadelphia, all without even stopping to congratulate themselves for this incredible feat, one that man couldn’t even explain, much less accomplish.
There were so many mistakes a bird could make. Circling too long, as if it were a joyride or a training toss. Getting distracted on the way, buffeted by sudden bad weather, or worse, simply getting tired and disoriented—thousands of things could result in the loss of a precious bird. Even once the first bird had made it home, the race wasn’t won. Many races had been lost by the bird who wouldn’t trap fast enough; the one who was first to reach his loft but who stopped on the roof, dawdling on his way to the trap, so that his leg band couldn’t be slipped off and clocked in before another man’s bird.
But Tony’s birds trapped fast. He bred them for speed, intelligence, and bravery, through six and even seven generations, and over time the birds had become his life. It wasn’t a life for the impatient. It took years, even decades, for Tony to see the results of his breeding choices, and it wasn’t until recently that his South Philly loft had attained the best record in his pigeon-racing club.
Suddenly the screen door banged open, blown by a gust of wind, startling Tony and frightening the birds in the first large cage. They took panicky wing, seventeen of them, all white as Communion wafers, transforming their cage into a snowy blizzard of whirring and beating, squawking and calling. Pinfeathers flurried and snagged on the chicken wire. Tony hurried to the loft door, silently reprimanding himself for being so careless. Normally he would have latched the screen behind him—the old door had bowed in the middle, warped with the rain, and wouldn’t stay shut without the latch—but this morning, Tony’s mind had been on Angelo Coluzzi.
The white pigeons finally took their perches, which were small plywood boxes lining the walls, but in their panic they had displaced each other, violating customary territories and upsetting altogether the pecking order, which led to a final round of fussing. “Mi dispiace,” Tony whispered to the white birds. I’m sorry, in Italian. Though Tony understood English, he preferred Italian. As did his birds, to his mind.
He gazed at the white pigeons, really doves, which he found so beautiful. Large and healthy, the hue of their feathers so pure Tony marveled that only God could make this color. Their pearliness contrasted with the inky roundness of their eye, which looked black but in fact was the deepest of reds, blood-rich. Tony even liked their funny bird-feet, with the flaky red scales and the toe in back with a talon as black as their eyes pretended to be. And he kidded himself into thinking that the doves behaved better than the other birds. More civilized, they seemed aware of how special they were.
The secret reason for the doves’ special status was that they were beloved of his son, who had finally stopped Tony from releasing them at weddings for a hundred fifty dollars a pop. Tony had thought it made a good side business; why not make some money to pay for the seed and medicines, plus keep the birds in shape during the off-season? And it made Tony happy to see the brides, whose hearts lifted at the flock of doves taking off outside the church, since you couldn’t throw rice anymore. It reminded his heart of his own wedding day, less grand than theirs, though such things didn’t matter when it came to love.
But his son had hated the whole idea. They’re not trained monkeys, Frank had said. They’re athletes.
So Tony had relented. “Mi dispiace,” he whispered again, this time to his son. But Tony couldn’t think about Frank now. It would hurt too much, and he had birds to feed.
He shuffled down the skinny aisle, and his old sneakers, their soles worn flat, made a swishing sound on the whitewash of the plywood floor. The floor had held up okay, unlike the screen door; Tony had built the loft himself when he first came to America from Abruzzo, sixty years ago. The loft measured thirty feet long, with the single door in the middle opening onto a skinny aisle that ran the short length of the building. It occupied all of Tony’s backyard, as if the loft and yard were nesting boxes. Off the aisle of the loft were three large chicken wire cages lined with box perches. The aisle ended in a crammed feed room, the seed kept safe from rats in a trash can, and there was a bookshelf holding antibiotics, lice sprays, vitamins, and other supplies, all labels out, in clean white shelves.
Tony prided himself on the neatness of his loft. He dusted the sills, cleaned the windows with the bright blue Windex, and scraped the floor of the cages twice a day, not once. It was important to the health of his birds. He whitewashed the loft interior each spring, before the old bird season; he had done it last week, experiencing a familiar pang—the chalky smell of the whitewash and its brightness reminded him of the white liquid shoe polish he used to paint over the scuffs on Frank’s baby shoes, when his son had started to walk. Tony remembered the shoe polish—they didn’t make it anymore—he would paint it on the stiff baby shoes with the cotton they gave you, stuck on a stick inside the cap like a white ball of dandelion seeds. Even though it dripped it worked okay.
Tony shook his head, thinking of it now, the chalky smell filling his nose like the fragrance of a rose. The bottle of polish had a blue paper label and a little circle picture of a blond-haired, blue-eyed baby who didn’t look anything like baby Frank, with his jet black curls and his big brown eyes. Somehow Tony had the idea that if he painted the watery polish on Frank’s baby shoes, his son would look like all the American babies and one day come to be one, even though Frank had the black hair and no mother. And when it actually happened and Frank grew up to take his place in this country, Tony was just superstitious enough to think that maybe it was the shoe polish.
Tony had to stop thinking about his son, though he couldn’t help it, not this morning, of all mornings, and he tried to concentrate on the first cage of doves, appraising with failing eyes their condition. The doves were settling down, roosting again, and they looked good, no big fights during the night. Tony worried about the fights; the birds were territorial and always bickering about something, and the white birds bruised easily. He wanted them to look especially nice and stay healthy. For Frank.
Tony shuffled down the aisle to the second and third cages, which held the multicolored birds, mostly Meulemans with their reddish-brown feathers, and Janssens. There were other breeds in shades of gray and brown, and the common slateys; a slate gray, their eyes generally the same dark brown. Tony liked the nonwhite breeds, too, the ordinariness of their plumage reminding him of himself; he wasn’t a flashy man, not a braggadocio. He didn’t have the strut that some men had, going about like cocks. It had been his ruin, but now that he was old, it didn’t matter anymore. It had stopped mattering a long time ago. Sixty years, to be exact.
His thoughts elsewhere, Tony watched the Janssens cooing and stirring without really seeing them. The breed name came from the Janssen family who had bred them, and the other names from the other families who had bred them; Tony had always dreamed that his family would produce its own strain of birds, but he wouldn’t name it after himself. He knew who he would name it after, but he didn’t get the chance. Many of the best breed stock came from Belgium and France. Italian pig
eons also made good racers, but Tony wouldn’t have much to do with them, especially the so-called Mussolini birds. Anybody who had lived during Mussolini wouldn’t want anything to do with a Mussolini bird. Chi ha poca vergogna, tutto il mondo è suo. He who is without shame, all the world is his. Mussolini birds!
Tony was an old man with old memories. He wished he could spit on the loft floor, but he didn’t want to dirty it. Instead he stood trembling until the anger left him, except for the bitterness in his mouth. Shaken, he idly inspected the Meulemans, and they seemed fine, too. Only Tony had had the terrible morning. An awful morning; the worst he’d had in a long time, but not the worst he’d had in his life. The worst he’d had in his life was sixty years ago. That morning then, and this morning now. Today. Tony had thought he would feel better after, but he didn’t. He felt worse; he had committed an act against God. He knew that his judgment would come in heaven, and he would accept it.
His thoughts were interrupted by the Meulemans, cooing loudly, wanting to be fed, and his dark eyes went, as always, to his favorite bird of all, a Meuleman he had named The Old Man. The Old Man and Tony went back eighteen years; The Old Man was the oldest of Tony’s pigeons, and to look at him, Tony wasn’t sure who was the Old Man, him or the bird. The Old Man roosted peacefully in his corner perch in the second cage, his strong head held characteristically erect, his eyes clear and alert, and his broad breast a still robust curve covering his feet. Tony remembered the day the chick hatched, an otherwise typical slatey, apparently unremarkable at birth except for his eye sign. Eye sign, or the look in a pigeon’s eye, spoke to Tony, and The Old Man’s eyes told Tony that the bird would be fast and smart. And he had been the best, in his day.
“Come sta?” Tony asked The Old Man. How are you? But The Old Man knew exactly what he meant, and it wasn’t, “How are you?”
The Old Man regarded the old man for a long time then. Tony couldn’t help but feel that the old bird knew what he had done that morning, what had been so important as to keep Tony from feeding his birds on time. The Old Man knew why Tony had to do what he had done, even after all this time. And Tony knew that The Old Man approved.
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