Dead Man's Grip

30

Lou Revere didn’t like it when his wife drank heavily, and these past few years, since their three kids had gotten older and left home, Fernanda hit the bottle hard most evenings. It had become the norm for her to be tottering unsteadily around the house by around 8 p.m.

The drunker she was, the more bad-tempered she became, and she would start blaming Lou for almost anything that came into her head that she was not happy about. One moment it was the height at which a television was fixed to the wall, because it hurt her neck to watch. The next might be because she didn’t like the way he’d left his golf clothes on the bedroom floor. But the most consistent of her tirades was blaming him for their younger son, Tony, on whom she doted, going to live with that piece of trash in England.

‘If you were a man,’ she would shout at him, ‘you’d have put your foot down and made Tony complete his education in America. My father would have never let his son go!’

Lou would shrug his shoulders and say, ‘It’s different for today’s generation. You have to let kids do what they want to do. Tony’s a smart boy. He’s his own man and he needs his independence. I miss him, too, but it’s good to see him do that.’

‘Good to see him getting away from our family?’ she’d reply. ‘You mean, like, my family, right?’

He did mean that, but he would never dare say it. Privately, though, he hoped the boy would carve out a life for himself away from the clutches of the Giordinos. Some days he wished he had the courage himself. But it was too late. This was the life he had chosen. It was fine and he should count his blessings. He was rich beyond his wildest dreams. OK, being rich wasn’t everything, and the money he handled came in dirty and sometimes bloody. But that was how the world worked.

Despite his wife’s behaviour, Lou loved her. He was proud of her looks, proud of the lavish gatherings she hosted, and she could still be wild in bed – on the nights when she didn’t fall into a stupor first.

It was true also, of course, that her connections had not exactly done his career any harm.

Lou Revere had started out as an accountant, with a Harvard business degree behind him. Although related to a rival New York crime family, during his early years he’d had no intention of entering the criminal world. That changed the night he met Fernanda at a charity ball. He was lean and handsome then, and she’d particularly liked him because he made her laugh, and something about him reminded her of the deep inner strength of her father.

Sal Giordino had been impressed with Lou’s quietly strategic mind and for some time he had wanted to forge links with Lou Revere’s own crime family. Wanting the best for his daughter, Sal saw the way to do that was to help the man she intended to marry. And then maybe, in turn, the guy could be of use to him.

Within five years, Lou Revere had become the principal financial adviser to the Giordino crime family, taking charge of laundering the hundreds of millions of dollars’ income from their drugs, prostitution and fake designer goods businesses. Over the next twenty years he spread the money through smart investments into legitimate businesses, the most successful of all being their waste disposal empire, which stretched across the United States and up into Canada, and their pornographic film distribution. He also extended the family’s property holdings, much of it overseas in emerging countries including China, Romania, Poland and Thailand.

During this period, Lou Revere had cunningly covered his own and his immediate family’s backs. When Sal Giordino was initially indicted for tax evasion, Lou was untouched. A close associate of Giordino, faced with the loss of all his money, did a deal with the prosecutors and spent three months giving evidence against the Capo. As a result, what started out as a historic tax investigation ended up with Giordino on trial for multiple counts of conspiracy to murder. He would be dying in jail, and if that bothered the old monster, he was damned well not admitting it. When a newspaper reporter asked him how he felt about never getting out alive, he growled back at the man, ‘Gotta die somewhere.’

Fernanda was drunk now. The crew of the Gulfstream jet, chastened by her abuse on the flight over to England, had stocked up with Grey Goose vodka, ice and cranberry juice for the flight back home, as well as an assortment of food which she had not touched. By the end of the seven-hour flight she had finished one bottle and started to make inroads into a second. She was still clutching a glass as the plane touched down at Republic Airport in East Farmingdale at 2.15 p.m. local time.

Lou helped her down the short gangway on to the tarmac. She was barely aware of much of what was happening as they re-entered America through the relaxed immigration control, and fifteen minutes later she was rummaging in the drinks cabinet in the back of the limousine that drove them the short distance home to East Hampton.

‘Don’t you think you’ve had enough, hon?’ Lou asked her, putting out a restraining hand.

‘My father would know what to do,’ she slurred in reply. ‘You don’t know anything, do you?’ Clumsily, she thumbed through the Favourites address list on her iPhone, squinting at the names and numbers, which were all slightly out of focus. Then she tapped her brother’s name.

She was just sober enough to check that the glass partition to the driver’s compartment was closed and the intercom was off, as she lifted the phone to her ear, waiting for it to ring.

‘Who you calling?’ Lou asked.

‘Ricky.’

‘You already told him the news, right?’

‘I’m not calling to give him any news. I need him to do something.’ Then she said, ‘Shit, got his stupid voicemail. Ricky, it’s me. Call me. I need to speak to you urgently,’ she said into the phone, then ended the call.

Lou looked at her. ‘What’s that about?’

Her brother was a sleazebag. Lazy, smug and nasty. He’d inherited his father’s ruthless violence, but none of the old man’s cunning. Lou tolerated him because he had no choice, but he had never liked him.

‘I’ll tell you what it’s about,’ she slurred. ‘It’s about a drunk woman driver, a goddamn van driver who didn’t stop and a truck driver who should not have been on the road. That’s what it’s about.’

‘What do you want Ricky to do?’

‘He’ll know someone.’

‘Someone?’

She turned and glared at him, her eyes glazed, as hard as drill bits.

‘My son’s dead. I want that drunken bitch, that van driver and that truck driver who killed him, OK? I want them to suffer.’