Need You Now

15

“I have to get the van back to the zoo, pronto,” my sister said over the hum of the engine. She was driving through lower Midtown, and the zoo accounted for both the funky odors in the cargo hold and the metal grate between the cockpit and me.

Working with exotic animals was the perfect job for Connie, a childhood dream she’d held since the same family trip on which Tony “The Snitch” Mandretti-our dad-had butchered Lewis Carroll’s poetry and offended every East Side nanny within earshot of the Alice in Wonderland sculpture. For all his flaws, Dad was big on family events. That one had turned out to be his last before putting on a wire for the FBI, testifying against the Santucci family, and disappearing into witness protection. Mom had refused to join him. Only after her death-more precisely, after the parole of a certain underboss who literally had an ax to grind with “The Snitch”-did my sister and I enter the program as Connie Ryan and Patrick Lloyd. The different surnames were for added protection. I was a young teen at the time, and my sister acted much older than her twenty-three years. I suppose it didn’t take a psychiatrist to explain why, years after that final family trip, Connie would end up working at the Central Park Zoo, and I would designate Alice in Wonderland as a place to meet my FBI contact.

The van stopped at a red light. Connie reached back, opened the metal grate between us, and offered me the passenger seat.

“We’re a good twenty blocks from the hospital,” she said. “I think it’s safe to say that no one saw you sneak away.”

I buckled up as she steered through the intersection, heading north through Midtown. Even in traffic, the zoo was just minutes away. I had a slew of questions for her, but logistics came to the forefront.

“What’s the plan after you return the van?” I asked.

“Don’t have one. Lilly called and said you were in trouble. Step one was to get you out of the ER. We didn’t get to step two.”

I glanced out the window, then back at my sister. “I didn’t realize that you and Lilly stay in touch.”

“We don’t. The last time I talked to her was when the two of you Skyped me from Singapore.”

“And she just called you out of the blue this morning?”

“She said she didn’t know who else to call. She was pretty much in a panic.”

“Exactly what did she tell you?”

“Basically that you got roughed up in the park last night, and that if we didn’t get you out of the ER immediately, someone would likely stop by and shake hands with your Adam’s apple.”

“That doesn’t sound like something Lilly would say.”

“I’m paraphrasing.”

I circled back to the “they” question. “Did she tell you who ‘someone’ might be?”

“After what happened to Mom, I don’t need to have it spelled out for me.”

The buzz of city traffic filled the silence between us. Mom was a complicated subject. She’d always told us how brave Dad was for turning against the mob, and yet she’d refused to join him in the witness protection program. She’d probably still be alive if she had.

“You’re saying it’s the Santucci family?”

“Who else?” she said. “It seems like every six months one of the thugs Dad put in jail is paroled. They refused to believe Mom didn’t know how to find Dad, and they killed her. What makes you think they’ll stop there? They are never going to stop looking for us.”

The Cushman connection had turned the Santucci family into old news in my mind, but I didn’t think Connie was ready to swallow what this was really about. For the moment, I stayed with her theory, since it provided a nice segue to my visit to Central Prison.

“What if we could convince them that Dad is dead?” I asked.

Her response caught in her throat, and the pained expression puzzled me to the point of concern. “Are you okay?” I asked.

“Sorry,” she said. “It’s just weird that I wasn’t prepared for that. All these years he’s been gone, and I’ve never thought of him as anything but being very alive, the way I remembered him. It’s upsetting to think of him as dead.”

“I’m just saying, theoretically, if Dad were dead, then these guys he put in jail would stop, wouldn’t they?”

“The key word there is ‘theoretically.’ There’s no way to prove he’s dead or alive. We don’t even know who he is.”

“Well… what if we did know?”

She glanced over and immediately caught my drift. “Holy shit. You found him? How? No, don’t tell me,” she said as her hands instinctively covered her ears, “I don’t want to know.”

I grabbed the wheel and steered around a stopped cab.

“Damn it, Patrick! You are going to get us both killed!”

“We’re more likely to be done in by your driving, sis.”

She swatted me and took back the wheel, but she was beyond angry. “We agreed that we would never do this,” she said. “We promised Mom that we would never look for him.”

“Listen to what I’m saying. If I can convince the Santucci family that he’s dead, their search is over. There would be no reason for the mob to chase us, threaten us, kill us, or do anything else to us ever again.”

“Is that what you’re telling me: Dad is dead?”

“Actually, I’m virtually certain he’s still alive. But I can prove he’s dead.”

“Stop playing with me!” she said as she stood on the brake. Behind us, tires screeched and horns blasted. It was a bona fide miracle that we weren’t rear-ended. Connie steered the van to the curb and slammed it into park, her face beet red.

“It wasn’t my intention to rip into you so soon,” she said, “but you obviously don’t understand how furious I am with you. Do you realize what you’ve done? Our only option may be to go back to the Justice Department and get ourselves reprocessed in the program. New location, new identity: square one. That makes me mad, it makes me want to kick your ass, it makes me just want to cry. I like my life. Finally, for the first time since Mom died, I’m happy with who I am. And now I may lose everything all over again because you had to go and stir things up.”

“I didn’t stir up anything.”

Connie looked away. She was trying to hold her emotions inside, but tears were coming, and it was tearing me up to watch her fall apart. I had to tell her. Finally, I had to tell someone the truth.

“This whole fear of the Santucci family rearing its ugly head is like being afraid of the bogeyman.”

“The bogeyman doesn’t put you in the emergency room.”

“That had nothing to do with the Mafia. But it does involve Dad. I didn’t want to go looking for him. I really didn’t. It was the FBI who came to me.”

“What are you talking about?”

I took a breath, not sure where to begin.

“Patrick, talk to me.”

She was using her stern maternal voice, the one that made me feel like the fifteen-year-old boy who went to live with his twenty-three-year-old sister. This wasn’t skipping school or getting drunk on prom night, but I felt the same need to come clean.

“Her name is Andie Henning,” I said. “About eight months ago she came to me and said she needed my help with an investigation.”

“What kind of investigation?”

Anyone who had watched the news in the twenty-first century was generally familiar with the Abe Cushman story. Beyond that, I was so far ahead of Connie and the rest of the world that I had to stop and remind myself that the name “Gerry Collins” would probably mean nothing to my sister. More to the point, she had no idea that Tony Mandretti-our father-was Tony Martin, and that Tony Martin had pleaded guilty to killing Cushman’s right-hand man.

“The FBI believes that a big chunk of the Cushman money was funneled through BOS in Singapore. We’re talking about billions of dollars.”

“The FBI asked you to spy on your own bank? Why on earth would you agree to do that?”

“That was exactly my reaction. Until Agent Henning mentioned the name Tony Mandretti.”

I could see her anger rising all over again. “Please don’t tell me that you got suckered into working for the FBI in exchange for some promise of a family reunion. That is the craziest thing I-”

“Dad’s dying,” I said.

She blinked hard, absorbing the blow.

“Not tomorrow, not next week,” I said. “But it’s coming. The good news is that he’s getting decent treatment. That was the deal. I helped the FBI and went to Singapore; they arranged for Dad to get the kind of treatment he couldn’t get in prison.”

“Wait a minute. He’s in prison? For what?”

I paused to soften it, but that seemed only to make her more anxious.

“For what? ” she asked again.

“Murder.”

She closed her eyes in anguish. “I really wish you hadn’t told me.”

“He didn’t do it.”

“Then why is he behind bars?”

“He pleaded guilty to the murder of Gerry Collins.”

Her eyes closed again. More anguish. Or maybe it was a massive headache. “You are not making me feel better.”

“Connie, I’m telling you: Dad didn’t do it.”

“Did the FBI tell you that?”

“No. In fact, Agent Henning is adamant that he’s guilty.”

“Did Dad tell you he’s innocent?”

“Not directly.”

“Don’t be cute. Have you talked to him or not?”

“No. That was one of the conditions of my assignment: no contact between us. This wasn’t about a family reunion, as you put it. The deal was simply to get Dad the medical treatment he needed. He doesn’t know I had anything to do with it.”

She drew a breath. “Patrick, it’s understandable that you would want to help Dad if he was sick, and I can see how it would make it easier to help him if you thought he was innocent. But-”

“That’s not it,” I said. “I didn’t agree to the FBI’s terms and risk my career just to get medical treatment for a deadbeat father who had killed another man. What drove me is that I knew he was innocent. I’m not asking for your help or approval. I’m simply telling you that it’s my intention to get him out of prison and let him live his last days the way he wants to live them.”

“We haven’t seen Dad in years. How could you possibly know anything about him, much less whether or not he’s sitting in prison for something he didn’t do?”

I started to talk, then reconsidered. It was beyond my persuasive powers to convince her in this setting. “Let me borrow your phone.”

She handed it to me but asked, “What’s wrong with yours?”

I didn’t have time to get into it fully. “I only have my BlackBerry, and I’d rather not send this message on a bank-issued phone if I can avoid it.”

“Why not?”

“Just drive,” I said.

“Drive where? To the zoo?”

“No, go through the circle and head up Central Park West,” I said, while tapping out a text message on her phone. “Take Terrace Drive through the park. There’s someone you need to meet.”

“Who?”

Connie’s phone chimed with Agent Henning’s response to my text. She was on her way.

“Alice in Wonderland,” I told Connie. “I think it’s time we all got acquainted.”