The Vendetta Defense raa-8

by Lisa Scottoline

  “Fool!” Coluzzi’s eyes narrowed. “She is lovely, but she is no blood relative. Her name is none of your business. Now, move out of our way. I have already delivered my pigeons and must return home before they do.”

  Tony bowed deeply, this time to the young woman, and doffed his felt cap with a flourish. “Well, Miss None-of-Your-Business, my name is Tony Lucia, and I’m very honored to make your acquaintance.”

  Gentle laughter came from the cart, but Tony was bowing too low to see her laugh. He knew only that the sound made him aware of the exact location of his heart within his chest, something he’d never given a thought to before this moment. He straightened up slowly and whacked his cap against his wrist to shake out the dust before he returned it to his head and shoved it down over his mass of dark, curly hair at an angle he hoped she would find attractive.

  “How dare you!” Coluzzi bellowed. “How dare you, show-off! How dare you speak to my Silvana!” In one motion, he raised the long whip he had been using on his horses, snapped it high in the air, and cracked it across Tony’s face.

  Pain ripped through the young man’s cheek, tears sprang to his eyes, and he staggered backward in surprise and shock. Through his tears he saw the horrifed expression of the woman, her bright mouth a red gash of pain. Tony could see she had cried out—for him, yes—though he cowered shamefully. Coluzzi cracked the long whip again, and this time it struck the sweating rumps of the horses and they leaped into the air, clawing it with front hooves, and bolted right at Tony.

  He threw himself out of the way, half rolling and half stumbling into the hard ground at the side of the road, landing on his hip and shoulder before he came to a stop at the edge of the field. Dust and small rocks sprayed in his face, and he spit them out in time to see Coluzzi’s cart take off down the road away from the city. Suddenly Tony’s old pony spooked, then galloped off in blind panic down the road, toward the city. No!

  Tony scrambled to his feet. Pain shot through his shoulder, and he heard an odd grinding coming from there, the unmistakable sound of bone against bone. He had broken his collarbone. But there was no time to lose. His pigeons!

  “No! Whoa! Stop!” Tony shouted. Holding his arm against his side, he ran in agony after the old pony, who galloped away with the cart, careening this way and that, using energy he must have hidden from Tony. The cart bounced on the rocky road. The towers of pigeons cages swayed dangerously. The cart was heading straight for a large rock. Tony’s heart leapt to his throat.

  “Whoa!” he cried out, but the pony ignored him and galloped faster. Tony picked up the pace, cradling his arm, wincing at each stride.

  The cart smashed into the rock. Tony held his breath. The pigeon cages at the end popped out of the cart, flew through the air, and crashed when they hit the road. The other cages quickly followed, toppling out of the cart. “No!” Tony yelled, but to no avail. He sent up a quick prayer for the safety of his birds.

  The wooden cages, which Tony had carefully constructed but hadn’t built to withstand such a calamity, splintered instantly. The twine tying them tore apart. Cages split open all over the road. Tony raced to the cages, his shoulder broken, his feet painful. When he got there he fell to his knees, gasping for breath, as his pigeons struggled to free themselves from their wrecked cages, injuring themselves.

  Tony scrambled from cage to cage, breaking them open so the birds wouldn’t get hurt further. His shoulder protested the effort and he heard his bones rubbing, but he ignored it. The race was a total loss, a year’s training and a day’s travel, but there would be other races. He had to save his birds. He hurried to the next cage. Soon passersby came along, laughing at the sight of the young man destroying his own cages and freeing his own pigeons, but Tony didn’t care. He finished wrecking the last cage and looked heavenward.

  The birds, anxious to return home to their mates, were taking flight one by one, a running river of wings flowing up, defying gravity, soaring high into the clearest of skies, the blue darkening to black. A few flew on bloodied wing, but most looked healthy and sound. Tony’s heart lifted with them. Forty pigeons, all slate-gray colored, skated on air currents only they could see, circling just once as Tony had taught them, so as not to waste time, then heading south. He squinted to see them go, holding his hurt arm still. They flapped away, obeying instinct and training, going straight to their mates, and Tony kept watching as they grew smaller and smaller, until they shrank to bright white dots, like stars in the twilight, and then even the stars disappeared. Tony swallowed hard, his heart suddenly full of emotion, and then he understood why.

  Silvana. The sound of her laugh was in his ears. Feminine and musical, from her perch on the cart.

  Her laughter, right beside him in his ear. He could feel the whisper of her painted lips, then a gentle shaking on his shoulder, which hurt no longer, his collarbone miraculously healed.

  “Pigeon Tony,” said the woman’s voice, and he opened his eyes, to look into not Silvana’s earth-brown eyes but the bright blue eyes of another woman. Her mouth had been red the first time they’d met. His lawyer, this Judy.

  “Pigeon Tony,” she was saying, calling his nickname, one that Silvana never heard. “Wake up, you’re almost home.”

  Then he heard another voice, coming from his other side. He looked up into more familiar brown eyes. Though they weren’t Silvana’s, they hinted at hers, for they were her eyes passed down to her grandson Frank.

  “Pop,” Frank was saying with his nice smile. His teeth were white and straight as a wall, like all American teeth. “You okay? Can you wake up?”

  “Sure, sure.” Tony was awakening only slowly. It took him longer than when he was young. He pushed himself up in his seat in the cab, not knowing when he had slumped down, and shook off his slumber. “Okay, Frankie. Okay, Frank,” he said, correcting himself. His grandson didn’t like to be called Frankie or Little Frank anymore, like when he was a baby.

  But suddenly Frank wasn’t smiling and the lawyer wasn’t laughing anymore. The cab pulled up at the curb outside his house, where a crowd had collected. Both Frank and Judy had turned toward his house, and they looked so sad. He craned his neck to see around Judy.

  Pigeon Tony wasn’t at all surprised by what he saw, and he realized that this was both the blessing and the curse of old age.

  Chapter 11

  It was almost dark and the skinny South Philly street was too narrow for streetlights. Judy could barely see the plastic particolored beach chairs that sat outside each house on the sidewalk, in circles of three and four. Neighbors milled on the sidewalk but they were reduced to shadow figures, wearing pink-sponge hair-curlers and smoking cigarettes.

  Judy threaded her way through the crowd with ease, as they congregated around Frank and Pigeon Tony, and when she got to the front, she looked up. The front door to Pigeon Tony’s row-house had been sledgehammered from its hinges, and splintered wood blanketed the marble stoop. The two front windows had been shattered, as if by a baseball bat, and lamplight blazed within. Judy stared at the destruction for a minute, uncomprehending, then reached into her purse for her cell phone.

  “My birds! My birds!” Pigeon Tony cried, his voice quavering, and he scurried past Judy to the front stoop, barely grazing the wrought-iron handrail in his urgency.

  Frank hurried right behind him but stopped to touch Judy’s arm on the way. “Listen, we get my grandfather out of here as fast as possible, understood?” he said in a low voice. “He’s in danger if he stays here tonight. He’ll put up a fight to stay, and I’ll tell him no. You back me up. Got it?”

  “Sure,” she said, willing to take instructions from a client when she agreed with them. She had already opened her black StarTAC and punched the speed dial for 911 when a woman’s voice came on the line. “Hello?” Judy asked, and Frank snorted.

  “Good luck,” he said as he hurried after his grandfather.

  “I want to report a break-in,” Judy told her, and gave the address to the dispatcher, who promi
sed that a squad car would be there as soon as possible. Judy palmed the cell phone with some anxiety. She was counting on the Philadelphia police, never a completely safe bet. The score could be Law 0, Old Italian Way 1 unless she did something about it.

  She became aware of a tinkling sound and squinted to see a woman in a Phillies T-shirt sweeping shards of jagged glass into a long-handled dustpan. While Judy was touched by the gesture, she couldn’t let her finish. “I know you’re trying to help, but maybe you shouldn’t sweep now,” Judy said to the woman, as politely as possible. “The glass could have fingerprints on it, or other evidence. This is a crime scene, technically.”

  “Oh, sorry.” The woman instantly stopped sweeping. Pieces of glass tumbled to a stop across the gritty sidewalk, catching the light from the window. “I didn’t know. You being a lawyer, you would know.”

  Judy didn’t ask the woman how she knew about her, from TV or the South Philly network, which apparently was better than cable. “Where are the cops? Did anybody call the cops?”

  “I don’t know. It’s a sin, what they did to that old man,” the woman said.

  “Who did it?” Judy asked, though she could guess at the answer.

  “I don’t know.”

  Judy didn’t have to see her face to know she was lying. “You have no idea?”

  “No,” the woman said, shaking her head.

  “Do you know what time it happened?”

  “No,” the woman answered, edging away.

  “Did you hear anything? See anything?”

  “No way.” The woman disappeared into the crowd, but Judy wasn’t giving up. She held up her hands, one containing her cell phone.

  “Please! Everybody! I need your attention!” she shouted.

  The neighbors, who had been milling around, stopped and looked at her. She couldn’t see their expressions in the dark, but she knew they were listening because they quieted suddenly, and a sea of Eagles caps, Flyers caps, and pink cotton hairnets turned in her direction. Cigarette ends like lighted erasers glowed next to the chubbier, more muted flames of cigars. Somebody chuckled in the back of the crowd, and somebody else shouted, “Yo! What you got in your hand, a bomb?” and everybody laughed, including Judy, who quickly slipped the cell phone back into her purse.

  “Obviously, we have a problem here,” she shouted. “Somebody broke into Pigeon Tony’s house. Did anybody here see who broke the door and windows?”

  The crowd remained mostly silent, although some people started talking among themselves and the same joker in the back kept chuckling.

  “Look, somebody must have heard or seen something. It takes time to chop down a door and it makes noise to break a window. It had to have happened in broad daylight. Isn’t anybody going to help Pigeon Tony out?”

  There was no answer from the crowd, which had started to scatter at the fringes. Somebody was still chuckling. Judy wanted to throttle him.

  “Wait! Don’t go away. You’re all Pigeon Tony’s neighbors. You care enough about him to clean up the mess. Don’t you care enough to help him catch who did this?”

  A murmur rippled through the dark crowd, which was growing smaller by the minute. Judy watched with dismay as the shadows disappeared into their rowhouses and shut the doors behind them. Suddenly the chuckling ceased and somebody shouted from the back, “Who the hell do you think did it?”

  Judy took a deep breath. It was assumption-upon-assumption time again. “I think I know who did it. In fact, we all think we know who did it. But somebody had to see or hear them do it, to hold them accountable for it. So what we need now, what Pigeon Tony needs now, is a witness.”

  The crowd quieted suddenly, and Judy understood why. There was something about the way the word rang out in the night that gave even her goose bumps.

  “You know what a witness is, don’t you? I’ll define it for you, since I’m Pigeon Tony’s lawyer and it’s a highly technical legal term. A witness is somebody with the balls to come forward and tell the truth.”

  The crowd laughed, this time with her, though Judy noticed they continued their defection. Only four shadows stood before her, and one had to stay because his beagle was rooted to a scent on the sidewalk.

  “You don’t have to come forward now. You can call me anytime. My name is Judy Carrier, at Rosato and Associates downtown.” By the time she finished the sentence, all of the neighbors had gone, except the beagle owner, unhappy at the other end of the leash. “Nice dog,” Judy said.

  “He’s a pain in the ass,” said the man, and tugged the beagle away.

  Having accomplished nothing, Judy turned and went inside the house. She should have been prepared for what she’d find inside, but she wasn’t. The front door, or what was left of it, would have opened onto a small living room, with an old green sofa against the left wall, on which hung a large mirror and several framed black-and-white photographs. There would have been a wooden coffee table in front of the couch, and next to that, at one point, an old overstuffed wing chair, in the same dark green fabric as the sofa. But none of it was recognizable now, the violence well beyond vandalism.

  The coffee table had been broken in the middle and looked as if it had been jumped on until its legs gave way. The sofa had been butchered, slashed this way and that, its green fabric rent into shreds. White polyester stuffing had been ripped out and strewn everywhere on the shredded couch and floor. The wing chair had been knifed to death, and somebody had taken a sledgehammer to its frame and splintered the wood as easily as the bones of a human skeleton.

  Aghast, Judy looked at the wall. A single blow had shattered the mirror and it hung crazily by one corner. The sledgehammer hadn’t stopped at the mirror but had been pounded through the plaster wall behind it, destroying the lath and battering the wire mesh beneath. The only part of the wall left unscathed was a brown wooden crucifix, apparent evidence of the Christian beliefs of the perpetrators.

  Judy shook her head. These were rowhouses, all of them connected, sharing a common wall. Of course the next-door neighbors had heard this pounding. It would have sounded like someone was knocking his house down. If they wouldn’t talk to her, they’d talk to the cops. Wouldn’t they? She couldn’t think about it now. She left the ruined living room to look for Pigeon Tony and Frank.

  The living room adjoined an eat-in galley kitchen, as savaged as the living room, and the lights had been left on, apparently for full shock value. The kitchen table had collapsed in the middle, taking the brunt of the fury, and lay broken in two. The telephone had been ripped out of the wall. The cabinet drawers, whose white paint looked like new refacing, had been yanked out, the silverware and kitchen utensils scattered willy-nilly. On the wall, all the cabinets had been opened, their doors wrenched off and tossed onto the linoleum floor, and emptied of their contents. Strewn on the counter were packages of lentils, two cans of garbanzo beans, and a jar of yellow lupini beans. Broken dishes, sharp glass, and smashed china littered the tile. The kitchen sink had been stopped up with a dish towel and the faucet left running, so water spilled over the mess on the countertop and ran freely onto the floor.

  Judy struggled to understand the mentality of people who would do this. They acted like common thugs, their destruction mindless, their rage spending itself. The only remotely valuable items, a TV and a small radio, were destroyed and not taken. It hardly seemed real, but Judy experienced the same feeling she’d had at the melee in the courtroom. It was real; her eyes couldn’t deny the scene.

  For some reason she went to the faucet and twisted it off. The silence permitted her to hear Frank’s voice somewhere out back. There must have been a backyard. Judy remembered Pigeon Tony’s concern about his birds. She headed for the back door, afraid of what she might find.

  Chapter 12

  It was dark outside but Judy could see the lighted ruins of a little white house that took up almost all of Pigeon Tony’s backyard. It must have been the house in which Pigeon Tony kept his birds, but it was unhappily silent. The nig
ht was still, except for the city sounds of traffic and a faraway siren. Cinderblock enclosed the yard, which was a small rectangle.

  She walked through the darkness to the pigeon house. Judy swallowed hard as she took in the sight. The panels of plywood that made up the bottom of the building had been chopped away from the inside at the far end, so that the end of the house had collapsed onto its foundation, which appeared to be supported by stilts. Judy figured that the stilts would have been chopped away, bringing the whole house down, but the vandals had apparently gone inside the pigeon house and started hacking away, then escaped out the front door. The lights within shone through the openings made by an ax or a baseball bat. Judy could see through the torn and missing screens that Pigeon Tony and Frank were inside.

  She picked her way between broken slats of plywood in the yard to what used to be wooden steps that led to an open threshold, the front door dismantled and tossed aside. She stepped inside but neither man looked up. They were kneeling over, absorbed in a common task, and she looked around, appalled. Everything inside the pigeon house had been broken, as if smashed by a baseball bat; cages, perches, chicken wire, wooden frames—all of it had been demolished. A medicine chest at the end of the aisle had been overturned, the medicines spilled. Trash cans that held feed had been dumped and bashed in. Birdseed lay scattered on the floor.

  Judy got the impression that as many pigeons as could be caught were killed, brutally. She had no idea how many pigeons Pigeon Tony kept, but she counted seven dead. Some had their necks wrung; some had had been stomped to death, a gruesome sight. One slate-gray pigeon had had its head sadistically pulled off, exposing a bloody section of delicate backbone. Sickened, Judy took a step and almost tripped over the lifeless body of a white bird. Its head was a pulpy mass of blood, and it lay on its back, its feet curled in death. A silver band on its pink legs had slid back against the downy feathers of its underbelly. Its blood stained the whitewashed floor. It smelled raw and wasted. Judy felt her gorge rising.