Need You Now

17

S now started to gather on the giant mushroom. I watched the first few flakes fall from a gray sky and rest on the bronze heads of Alice and her friends. Connie was beside me on the park bench. We had hot coffee and one of the smelly zoo blankets to keep us warm on a day that was turning colder by the minute.

“My snow monkeys are absolutely loving this,” said Connie.

I smiled. Huddled beneath that blanket in the middle of Central Park, we must have looked like a couple of lost little monkeys.

“Do you remember that summer we came here with Mom and Dad?” she asked.

“I think of it often,” I said.

“Remember when Dad walked over and read the poem out loud?”

“Mmmm, no. Dad read a poem?”

“You don’t remember the time-”

“Connie, I’m kidding. How could I forget? It was the only time in my life that I heard Dad recite something more literary than a menu, and he managed to punctuate it with the f-bomb.”

We laughed, then it faded. I wrapped my hands more tightly around my extra-tall cup of coffee, trying to draw the last bit of warmth through the paper sleeve. Connie sniffled back what sounded like the beginnings of a cold. I hoped it wasn’t snow monkey flu, or some such thing.

“Patrick?” she said, her tone more serious. “Why are you so sure Dad didn’t kill Gerry Collins?”

“Do you think he did it?”

“I asked you first.”

Sibling talk. Connie could shift from stand-in mother to big sister in a heartbeat, when it suited her.

I glanced again at the sculpture. The snow was falling harder, making the bronze a blur. Strangely, it seemed to make the past clearer. “About six months before Mom died, we had a talk.”

“What about?”

“At first it was about me, the kind of talk any single mother might have with her son about gangs. Madison High changed a lot after you graduated. One of the gangs there had ties all the way up to the Crips. I was getting pressure to join one of the rivals. Mom wanted to make sure I stayed clear of it.”

“Were you actually thinking of being a gangbanger?”

“Not really. But she was afraid that I might, because of the things Dad did when he was young.”

“She didn’t want you to make the same mistakes.”

“That was a big part of it. But she wasn’t preaching. As the talk went on, I think she just wanted me to know Dad’s story. The truth.”

“The truth about what?”

I put down my coffee-it was ice cold-and folded my arms to fight off the chill. “Do you know why Dad turned against the Santucci family?”

Connie paused. Her expression told me that she had never thought of it in terms of a trigger event, that she’d simply accepted Mom’s mantra over the years that our father had searched his soul and finally found the courage to do the right thing.

“I’m not sure I do,” she said.

“An underboss ordered him to whack a guy.”

“You mean a genuine mob-style hit?”

“Yup. It was like an initiation rite. The natural progression of things on his way to a made man.”

“I assume he didn’t do it.”

“No. But the family wasn’t going to take no for an answer. They kept up the pressure for him to prove his loyalty, and he found himself in a kill-or-be-killed situation. He didn’t see a way out. That’s when he went to the FBI.”

“So, ‘doing the right thing’ was just an exit strategy?”

“Not exactly. It was a matter of principle. It’s how I know Dad didn’t kill Gerry Collins.”

“I’m not seeing the connection.”

“Dad gave up everything-his wife, his kids, his existence -because he refused to whack some two-bit thug who probably deserved to die. Yet we’re supposed to believe that he killed Gerry Collins for losing his money?”

She considered it. Connie was a bright woman, but she thought things through before rendering a verdict. “It doesn’t compute,” she said.

“It sure doesn’t for me,” I said.

Connie sighed, her breath steaming in front of me. “I wish Mom had packed us up and we had all disappeared with him.”

I shook my head. “Mom was right. The marriage wasn’t strong enough to survive that kind of trauma. Why would any woman take her kids into witness protection, away from extended family and friends, only to go through a divorce?”

“It would have been safer.”

“That’s easy to say in hindsight. She had good reason to believe that no one would touch a woman whose maiden name was Santucci.”

“What has the world come to? Not even the Mafia plays by the old code of conduct.” It was an unusual bit of sarcasm from Connie, who normally had the optimism of an Eagle Scout.

I checked my BlackBerry for the time. Almost forty minutes since I’d texted Andie. She was taking her sweet time about getting here.

Connie said, “I don’t want you going anywhere near the Santucci family.”

“I’m not going to join them, if that’s what you mean.” Sarcasm came more naturally to me.

“No, smart ass. I understand what you were saying earlier in the van. I agree it would be nice if you could convince them that Dad is dead. That might put an end to all this. But it’s too dangerous to make any contact with them for any reason.”

“Connie, you must not have been listening. Let me say it again: the Santucci family is the bogeyman. Operation Clean House reduced them to almost nothing.”

“Never underestimate a convicted mobster who wants revenge and finally gets paroled.”

“I just don’t believe it’s the Santucci family who roughed me up in the park last night.”

“How can you say that? Lilly called me this morning and said you might be dead before breakfast if we didn’t get you out of the ER.”

“That’s the whole point: Lilly is mixed up with something else entirely. Something big enough to get her fired from the bank. I think it’s tied to a guy named Manu Robledo, who heads up a phony-sounding church downtown that has to be a front for something. It could be a cult. I’m not sure.”

“How much does Lilly know about the Santucci family?”

“I don’t know. When you told her my real name is Peter Mandretti, did you talk about the Santucci family?”

Connie’s expression was one of complete incredulity. “When I told her? Patrick, I didn’t tell her anything.”

“Then how did she find out my real name?”

“Cut the crap. For now I’ll accept the fact that if she hadn’t given me a heads-up to get you out of the ER, something really bad could have happened. But at some point you and I are going to have a talk about how ticked off I am that you told her.”

It took a moment before I could speak, but finally my response came. “I never told Lilly anything about us. From beginning to end I’ve led her to believe that I’m Patrick Lloyd, and that I’ve always been Patrick Lloyd.”

“Oh, come on,” she said.

“I didn’t tell her. I swear.”

We sat in silence, and finally Connie seemed to believe me, but her expression turned to one of grave concern.

“We got a problem, brother. I’m telling it to you straight: Lilly knows. Based on what we talked about on the phone this morning, I’d say she knows the whole story.”

“I don’t understand how she could.”

Connie reached over and put her arm around my shoulder. “I hate to bust your chops, dipshit, but who the heck is this woman?”

I shook my head slowly, focused on nothing in particular in the falling snow. All was a blur.

“Apparently, I have no clue.”