The Vendetta Defense raa-8

by Lisa Scottoline

  “The cars and scrap metal go up the conveyor belts, then inside the tower is a row of magnets, and it separates the aluminum, copper, and brass from iron scrap. Aluminum don’t get attracted to magnets, you follow? Also it shoots out the rest of the stuff that’s not metal, like car seats and shit like that. That’s called fluff.”

  Feet looked over. “How do you know that?”

  “I been around, that’s how. A scrapyard this big, they could do three, four thousand cars a day. Usually the cars get collected in the day and shredded at night.” They walked past a ten-foot triangle of chewed-up metal, and Tony-From-Down-The-Block pointed. “That’s frag. Comes outta the metal shredder like that. Worth a lot of money. They use it in new cars. Recycled metal.”

  “Looks like fried clams,” Feet said, and Penny looked over with interest.

  About five miles of trash, scrap, twisted metal, and rusty train wheels later, Judy and Company stood dwarfed before a wall of junked cars, bound by heavy chain. The cars had been stripped of their tires, exposing the brake drums, the headlights had been pulled out, leaving the cars eyeless, and the chrome and the car roofs had been cut off, so that only the bodies remained.

  “Looks like a stack of pancakes,” said Feet, who now held Penny’s leash. The dog had fallen in love with him on the way over, for obvious reasons.

  Judy skimmed the names on the carcasses. Delta 88. Monte Carlo. Sunbird. Ford Granada. They were all old cars, judging from the ridiculous lengths of the car bodies. It was hard to see how earth had room for all the cars in the eighties. “I’ve never heard of half these cars.”

  “I owned half these cars,” Tony-From-Down-The-Block said, and Feet smiled.

  “We better get to work,” Mr. DiNunzio said, finishing his coffee and wiggling the empty cup. “Wait, what’re we doin’ with our trash?”

  “Just throw it on the ground,” Tony-From-Down-The-Block said, but Mr. DiNunzio shook his head.

  “That ain’t right. You don’t throw litter on the ground.”

  “It’s a junkyard, Matty.”

  “It still ain’t right,” he said. He folded his empty cup carefully in two and stuffed it into the pocket of his brown cardigan.

  “Let’s get it done,” Judy said. She scanned the cars, whose rows extended unevenly to the sky, inevitably reminding her of a mountain range. “Feet, you and Penny take the far end. We’ll all space ourselves along and start looking. It’s a red Volkswagen pickup with a Mason’s emblem. There can’t be many of them here.”

  Feet nodded hopefully. “True. I remember it was a pretty unusual thing. I don’t think they made a lot of ’em. Frank, he loved that little truck.”

  Tony-From-Down-The-Block put a comforting hand on Judy’s shoulder. “We’ll find it, Jude. Anybody can find it, we can.”

  Mr. DiNunzio chimed in, “Sure we will. Red is easy to see.”

  Judy forced a smile, from the foothills of the junked-car mountains. “How hard can it be?” she asked.

  Only Penny had the sense to look doubtful.

  Four hours later, the noon sun burned high in a cloudless sky, and its heat reflected on the discarded metal everywhere, transforming the scrapyard into a furnace. Judy sweated through her suit, even with the jacket off, and Penny lapped bottled water from Mr. DiNunzio’s unfolded coffee cup. But all of them forgot the heat when they discovered the short red truck in the middle, third from the bottom, in the stack of junked vehicles.

  “You think this is it?” Judy asked, checking her excitement. Mr. DiNunzio had been the one to find the truck and had let out a yelp at the discovery, but she didn’t want to jump to any conclusions.

  “Sure, it is!” Mr. DiNunzio answered, pointing at the smashed grille. “Got the VW circle and all. It’s smashed and burned but it’s there.”

  Judy looked. The VW logo hung in a circle from the truck’s broken black grille, and its red paint was visible only in dull splotches that weren’t blackened by fire.

  “Look!” Feet shouted from the back of the truck, and Judy’s heart skipped a beat as she remembered the bomb that Tullio had found under her bumper. She hurried over to Feet, who was almost jumping with happiness. “It’s got the Mason thing and all! This has gotta be the truck! See it?”

  “Jeez,” Judy heard herself say. A Masonic emblem, its fake gold charred, could barely be identified by its embossing. It seemed that the truck was the Lucias’, and seeing the wreck this close saddened Judy. She couldn’t see the driver’s side, and the only obvious point about the wreckage was that nobody could have walked away from it alive. And as odd as it felt finding the truck without Frank’s knowledge, she was glad he hadn’t been here to see it. “Nobody tell Frank we found this, okay?” Judy said as a reminder.

  “Okay,” Mr. DiNunzio said, and the others nodded gravely.

  She surveyed the situation. She had a junker that had been confiscated by court order, three very tired but victorious senior citizens, and a puppy shredding a paper cup with vigor. “Now all we got to do is get the truck out of here,” she said, thinking aloud, and Tony-From-Down-The-Block brightened.

  “Piece a cake. We snip the chains and yank—”

  “NO!” Judy said. Instantly Penny dropped the cup, but Judy considered her obedience as temporary insanity. “We can’t just take it. It’s here under court order.”

  Mr. DiNunzio frowned. “Can you call the court?”

  “It’s not that easy, especially bankruptcy court. You have to petition for it. And we can’t get it out by police order unless we’re willing to go public with it, which I’m not.”

  “You don’t want Frank to know.” Feet nodded.

  “I don’t want the Coluzzis to know either. If this was murder and not an accident, I don’t want them to know we’re onto them.” Judy tried to think, but Tony-From-Down-The-Block kept talking, tempting her like a devil with a Macanudo.

  “All it takes is a crane operator,” he was saying. “Crane’s right over there. Drive it over, pick the cars off the top, and pull out the red truck. Friend of mine can work a crane, and another friend got a flatbed.”

  Judy shook her head. “It’s illegal.”

  “We won’t get caught. This place is friggin’ deserted. Both of my buddies are in the club. They’d be glad to help Pigeon Tony out, and they won’t say nothin’. Be done in five minutes.”

  Judy shuddered. “I took an oath.”

  “People get divorced all the time. Look at me and Feet.”

  Mr. DiNunzio snorted. “You two make a bad couple. I wouldn’t a given it ten minutes.”

  Feet laughed, but Judy didn’t. “It’s not the same thing,” she said. “And if we get caught, it’s my license.”

  “So don’t be there. What we need you for?”

  Judy shook her head. “Maybe we can bring the expert to the truck, instead of the other way around.”

  “How’s he gonna test it, like a pancake in a stack?”

  “Gimme a minute.” Judy bit her lip. “There has to be another way.”

  “You think too much, even for a lawyer.”

  “Okay, gimme a day. I’ll come up with something and let you know.”

  Feet laughed. “This is like that joke where the rabbi shoots a hole in one, but he’s playing golf on a high holy day.”

  Judy smiled. Gazing at the car, she couldn’t completely disagree.

  “Not that I tell Jewish jokes,” Feet added.

  “Never happen,” said Tony-From-Down-The-Block.

  Judy didn’t have to fight the press to get to the door of her office building. There were fewer reporters clogging the sidewalk than usual, and she was guessing it wasn’t her new perfume, Eau de Scrapyard. Judging from their questions, they had deserted her for the Coluzzi Construction offices.

  “Ms. Carrier, what do you say to today’s news that Marco has thrown his brother John out of the company offices?” “Ms. Carrier, do you have any comment on the feud between the Coluzzis?” “Judy, where are you hiding Pigeon Tony and why?”


  “No comment,” she said, suppressing her excitement as she hit the building, grabbed an elevator, and punched the button for her floor. She could hardly wait for the doors to open so she could jump out. “Is Bennie in?” she called when she hit the reception area, but the receptionist was leaving, bag in hand.

  “Uh, Bennie?” the receptionist asked. She was apparently a temp, a tall, thin woman with a long, dark braid and too much makeup; but then to Judy, everybody but Marlene Bello wore too much makeup. “Bennie Rosato? She said she went on an emergency TRO, whatever that is. On a First Amendment case. She’s in court.”

  Damn. No wonder Bennie hadn’t answered her cell phone. Judy had wanted to talk to her about the red truck before she got arrested, not after. “May I have my messages and mail? Also the newspapers.”

  “Hold on a minute.” The receptionist turned reluctantly back to the desk, rooted through the papers to locate Judy’s phone messages, correspondence, and today’s newspapers, and handed them all to her. “Your name is Judy Carrier, right? Where’s the dog?”

  “With a man named Feet. Thanks for the mail.” Preoccupied, Judy flipped through her phone messages. WCAU-TV, WPVI-TV, ABC, NBC, CNN, Court TV and an array of newspapers. “You a temp, by the way? Where’s Marshall?”

  “Gotta go. Late lunch and all.”

  “Have fun.” Judy grabbed the papers and her correspondence, chugged to her office, and ignored everything but the front page of The Daily News. IT’S OVER, JOHNNIE, read the tabloid headline, and Judy flipped the page to read the story.

  In a major power grab, Marco Coluzzi, chief financial officer of Coluzzi Construction Company, this morning blocked his brother John’s entrance to the company offices. The surprise move almost caused a riot on this tiny block of South Philadelphia. Private security guards apparently employed by Marco Coluzzi were able to keep John Coluzzi, chief operating officer of Coluzzi Construction, and others from reporting to work without violence. Philadelphia police arrived quickly on the scene, and one highly placed company official commented that they had been called in advance to keep a lid on any potential disturbance.

  Neither Coluzzi brother could be reached for comment, but Coluzzi Construction has issued a press release stating that, “Effective today, Marco Coluzzi has been named president and CEO of Coluzzi Construction. All previous contracts made under prior management will remain in force and be honored.”

  My God. So Marco had made his move. What sort of king waited to be crowned, when he could crown himself? Judy read the tabloid’s account, then the next newspaper’s and the next, sinking into her desk chair in her sunny office, soaking it all in. It couldn’t have gone better if she’d planned it. She flipped the page to continue reading the story, and next to it was a sidebar that was even better.

  Coluzzi Construction, considered a shoo-in for the construction contract for the new waterfront shopping complex, was today denied the nod. City officials state that the contract was offered to Melton Construction instead because of “their high quality of workmanship and price, of course,” but insiders say that the recent racketeering lawsuit against Coluzzi Construction over the nearby Philly Court Center was behind the upset. The contract was valued at $11 million.

  Judy was stunned. She had cost the Coluzzis a fortune. The timing of Marco’s takeover was no coincidence. If John had been responsible for the Philly Court debacle, it had to have been the final blow against him. Judy changed her plans. She had come back to the office to press her lawsuit against the Coluzzis, to prepare and file the first wave of interrogatories and document requests, but the takeover became instant priority. Marco had declared war, and she could only guess how John would react. Judy had no way of knowing. Then she thought about it. Yes, she did.

  The tapes, between Fat Jimmy and Angelo Coluzzi. They were her only way into the inner workings of the Coluzzis, and she hadn’t finished listening to them yet. They’d been a dry hole for the murder of Frank’s parents, except for the fact that Angelo and Fat Jimmy had been together that night. But what could the tapes tell her, if anything, about the warring brothers?

  Judy considered it. John Coluzzi and Fat Jimmy were allies now, maybe they had been for a long time. Maybe there had been discussions of Marco on the tapes. It was likelier than not. She tossed the newspaper aside and hurried to the conference room, where she had left the box of tapes.

  But when she got there, they were gone.

  Chapter 33

  Judy couldn’t believe what she was seeing. The conference room was the way she’d left it this morning, minus the lo mein cartons, the dog dish, and the big cardboard box of tapes. “Who took my tapes?” she shouted.

  She turned on her heels, but the office looked empty, normal for lunchtime. Nobody would have gone into the war room and taken evidence from it. It was an unwritten rule, observed by everyone. Who was new on the scene? Then Judy remembered. There had been a temp at the front desk. The temp was the only possibility. And she had been on the way out when Judy came in.

  One of the secretaries appeared behind her. “The temp was in there this morning,” she said. “She told me you told her to clean up the food and all—”

  “Thanks, but I didn’t do that.” Alarmed, Judy sprinted from the conference room, past the astonished expressions of the lawyers, including Murphy, who was escorting clients to the reception area. Judy didn’t care. “Murphy, call Marshall’s house and check on her!”

  “Why? What?”

  “Our regular receptionist, Marshall. Just do it!” Judy called over her shoulder, and took off for the reception area. “Where’s that temp?” she shouted, but the reception desk was empty.

  “You just missed her,” one of the associates said, waving a brief. “But don’t use her, she’s terrible. She’s been trying to go home all morning, but I needed her to type something for me. Look at it! She types worse than I do.”

  But Judy was already hustling for the elevator. The steel doors were sealed closed but she heard the cab ping downstairs as it landed on the ground floor. She couldn’t wait for it to return. She ran for the staircase next to the elevator, banged open the fire door, and ran down the concrete steps, her clogs clumping on the steel tread of each step. She wound down the one flight, then hit the fire door and slammed into it, banging it open.

  “Where’d that woman go, with the braid?” she called to the alarmed security guard, who pointed to the service entrance of the building.

  “Out the back. Said she wanted to avoid the press. Is there a problem?”

  Judy was off and running, down a short corridor, past a green time clock with white cards in slots underneath, and out the back exit, which dumped her into an alley. She looked down the street just in time to see the receptionist’s dark braid flying around the corner.

  Judy darted up the alley after her and found herself on a hot sidewalk crowded with businesspeople coming back from lunch. She looked left. The dark braid wasn’t in sight. She looked right. Up ahead, running now against the current of the crowd, sprinted the woman with the dark braid. She was tall enough that her head bobbed above the crowd.

  Judy barreled through the crowd, keeping a bead on her. The temp had on running shoes, but they were no match for clogs. Judy could do anything in clogs. She could leap tall buildings. Running down a fake temp was a no-brainer.

  Her heart beat faster. She sweated through her days-old suit. Questions flew through her brain. How had they known about the tapes? Had they been watching her? Who had sent this woman? Judy kept her eye on the dark braid, who swerved around a corner toward Chestnut Street, heading into the heart of the business district, clearly hoping to lose Judy in the crowd.

  Judy put on the afterburners, becoming breathless, and the dark braid picked up her pace, too, tearing down the street. Startled passersby jumped out of the way and looked on curiously. The distance between Judy and the woman was widening. The crowd thickened. Judy was losing her. Clogs were stupid. Then Judy got an idea. If the dark braid
could use the crowd, so could she.

  “Stop that woman, she took my purse!” Judy called out, dimly aware that Bennie had tried that trick once, with success. But nobody stopped. They just let the woman run by. Damn. Judy charged ahead and got another idea.

  “Stop that woman, she took my baby!” Judy shouted, louder, but nobody stopped the woman with the dark braid, who tore down the street, slipped through traffic and made it to the next curb, and took off. So much for the City of Brotherly Love. Judy got another idea.

  “Stop that woman—it’s Cher!” she screamed, but this time a ripple of excitement went through the passersby and they stopped and stared at the woman with too much makeup and a long black braid. One thrust a pen and paper at her for an autograph, and a young man started chasing after her. Bingo! “Hey, everybody!” Judy hollered at the top of her lungs, to anyone who would listen. “That’s CHER!”

  In no time a small crowd was running after the tall woman with the dark braid, and Judy trailed them by a furlong. They chased the woman into an alley, where they cornered her and had her backed against the brick wall, panting like a dog. Judy peered over their heads, blocked the alley, and waited for the inevitable.

  “That’s not Cher!” “She’s not Cher!” “You don’t even look like Cher!” “Wannabe!” “Poser!” called the crowd, and after some commotion they dispersed, filing disappointed out of the alley, leaving Judy and the temp alone.

  Judy went to the back of the alley and faced the woman, who didn’t even try to run past her but looked plainly exhausted, her head to one side, as if she were nodding out. She didn’t even move as Judy approached, and up close Judy could see that the woman was just a girl, with heavy black eyeliner, greasy from exertion, and her hair dyed black as midnight. She couldn’t have been more than nineteen or weighed more than a hundred pounds in tight Guess jeans and a thin white sweater. Her skin was pale, her cheekbones too prominent to be healthy, and her pupils pinpoints. It wasn’t because of the sun.