Playing Dead

CHAPTER 33

My brother, murdered.

Everybody covered it up.

My family.

The marshals.

Even the cops, no small feat in our town.

I was queasy and light-headed, reaching for the last thing in the box. A white business-sized envelope, addressed to my mother in bold black print. No return address. An Illinois postmark.

The next few sheets were simple notebook paper, folded and smudged and crammed with bold, stylized print.

I could still feel grit from the crack in the wall or the old pipe where he hid it in his cell.

Dear Gennie, it began.

I let that sink in.

Jack Smith was right.

She was Genoveve first.

When I finished the letter, I believed three things.

Anthony Marchetti was a complicated man.

My mother once loved him.

An eleven-year-old boy, my brother, was at the heart of everything.

He was the witness.

More than thirty years ago while doing his homework in the wine cellar of the Chicago bar where my mother waitressed and played piano, Tuck overheard Azzo Cantini order the hit on Fred Bennett, the undercover agent about to blow the lid off of Cantini’s heroin operation.

Unfortunately, Tuck was seen. Like Fred Bennett, he had to die.

Anthony Marchetti confessed to the Bennett murders to save my brother. To save my mother. To save me, growing inside her. He did this even though Marchetti was from a rival family. Even though he didn’t do it.

Marchetti knew that a mobster, a monster, would never let Tuck live.

After all, he was one.

He agreed to confess to a crime he didn’t do, to a plea deal-but only if the Feds would arrange witness protection for Tuck and Mama.

The Feds were happy to do it. Eager to close a nightmare case even if the lid didn’t fit just right.

At least that is how the letter read.

Anthony Marchetti, a hero.

I stared out the passenger window of Hudson’s truck, lulled by two hours of monotonous highway driving. A twenty-five-foot electric security fence began to run along the right side of the car, a sign that we were close.

Hudson’s face was grimmer than I’d ever seen it, his eyes steady on the road. My body suddenly ached for him, rushing blood to the nasty gash in my cheek so it throbbed and hurt even more. Love in all its painful glory.

Not for the first time, I wondered about pursuing this tiny crack in time. Ten minutes. It was all that Hudson and his connections could get me on less than twenty-four hours’ notice.

A welcome sign appeared announcing the Trudy Lavonne Carter Center for Felons. Most rich people in Texas wanted their names fixed to museums and hospital wings but the late Trudy Lavonne Carter had spent her millions on this fully air-conditioned, high-tech maximum security home for murderers and rapists. Trudy believed God demanded humane treatment of all living things. Its thousands of detractors sarcastically dubbed the prison TLC. The name stuck.

Except for the ten sharpshooters in the four corner towers and on the roof, TLC reminded me of a mini-mall on a Sims game. Hudson handed over our IDs at a massive steel gate while two heavily armed men checked the trunk and the backseat.

In less than five minutes, we stood inside the front entrance, cheerful and flooded with light. A smiling woman behind a glass window gestured for me to sign in, like I was arriving for a mammogram. Upholstered chairs and couches lined the walls. Helpful signage directed us to bathrooms and waiting areas. An erase board declared Roasted Red Pepper and Chicken Fettuccine as today’s special in the visitors’ cafeteria.

Hudson’s cell phone rang.

“Sir, you need to turn that off.” The guard frowned. “You can’t go in with her. I’ll take you to the waiting area.”

“I guess we part here,” Hudson said. “You ready?”

I nodded.

“Ten minutes with Marchetti,” the guard said to me. “No more. Marcy will take you from here.”

A female guard wearing lemon-sized biceps and J. Lo perfume led me down a maze of halls to a cubicle with a curtained-off dressing area and a plaque with an admonishment from Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet: “And don’t forget, a prisoner’s wife must always think good thoughts.”

I wondered how many wives, in a humiliating state of undress, had longed to smash his words against the wall and if any of them knew who in the hell Nazim Hikmet was.

Marcy tried to be considerate of my injuries during the pat down, but I winced through it nonetheless. She allowed me to keep one personal item: an old Walmart receipt with five questions scribbled on the back, winnowed down from a long list in my head.

Two minutes for each answer. For closure.

Impossible.

She guided me to a small, white, windowless room, stark and stripped of any charm. Two steel chairs faced each other, bolted to the concrete floor. I began to shiver as soon as my thighs hit the chilled metal seat. It was like sitting on a glacier.

A guard in a tan uniform stood upright in the corner, ignoring me, as if I didn’t exist.

I stared straight ahead at the chair in front of me, at the rings in the concrete that would chain him in place, the most scared I have ever been.

Waiting.

Full of what? Hope? Anger? Fear?

All of the above?

I focused my eyes on the door, trying to stir up the girl inside, the bull rider who was so much gutsier than the woman in this room. Would he look me in the eyes? Speak first? Beg forgiveness? Threaten me? Say he loved me?

The mob was supposed to be dead. Fiction. Cliché fodder for television and movies. And yet here I sat, tapping my boot nervously, about to confront a man who knew guys on the outside named Nerves and Baby Shanks, Vinnie Carwash and Jack the Whack.

I grew up with names like Sug and Dub, Butelle and Waydeen, Coody and Willie Pearl. Even without the three fingers he lost in a farm equipment accident, I’d bet Butelle could take down Nerves and Baby Shanks at the same time.

The door clicked. I yanked my attention back. He was coming.

As he shuffled through the door, blinding in a highlighter orange jumpsuit, shackled, cuffed, and led by two men in full riot gear, I reacted like I would to any powerful, leashed animal. I stayed perfectly still, struck again by his potent dark looks.

Neither of us spoke, wasting precious seconds, while one of the men unshackled his feet, reattaching the cuff on his right foot to the hook in the floor. Throughout this process, Marchetti’s eyes traveled over my face, furious, reminding me what a horror show it was.

“I am innocent,” he said.

Out of more than a million words to pick from in the English language, he chose those three to say first, to the daughter he might never see again, who had presented herself to him like a hurt rabbit.

It was and forever would be about him. Ten minutes would be plenty.

To hell with my list. I really only had one question. One thing to say.

“Why are you here? In Texas?” I drew in a shaky breath. “I want you to go back.”

He gazed at me steadily, not reacting.

“I wanted to breathe the same air as your mother. I wanted to know she was close.”

“Jack?”

“He was interfering. Raising the dead. It wasn’t that hard to get here. I still have a few connections.”

My eyes dropped to the floor, locking onto the black patch of hair I could see between the cheap prison-issued blue deck shoe and the hem of his jumpsuit.

“You are safe now,” Marchetti said. “I’ve made sure.”

I met his pupils, receding into vertical slits, reminding me of a copperhead that once wrapped itself around my boot. Daddy had taught me, only inches from a rattlesnake curled on a rock, that elliptical pupils in a snake meant venomous. Back away.

“Who murdered Tuck?” My voice trembled, amplified by the close space, the thick walls.

It took just a second for me to travel the few feet between us, to grab his chin and turn his face up so he was forced to look at me, unflinching. My fingers were hot against his skin, a current pulsing between us. The guard leapt up, maybe surprised that a 107-pound woman with a braid down her back was going to be today’s problem.

I didn’t flinch as the correctional officer grabbed my arm. “Ma’am, no contact. Sit down.” He was giving me a chance to behave.

“You owe me,” I said fiercely to Marchetti, not letting go. Wasn’t that what Rosalina had said to me not that long ago?

It occurred to me that he probably hadn’t been touched like this in more than thirty years. That he might like it.

Everything around us was happening in slow motion. The guard yanking me back, barking into his walkie-talkie, the human black bugs running in.

“I don’t know,” Marchetti said quietly.

One of the bugs pulled me by my sling and the pain dropped me to my knees.

My father didn’t move. His face twisted into something inhuman.

And I knew.

Unchained, he would have killed the man who hurt me.

We were halfway home before Hudson spoke.

“You remember that phone call I got at the prison?”

I roused myself from half slumber.

“Your library kidnapper got a toothbrush shiv to the throat last night in jail.”

I sat up straight, ignoring the pain. “Is he dead?”

“Very dead. Coincidentally, his father, Azzo Cantini, died in his sleep last night.”

You’re safe, my father had told me.

“Marchetti told me he is innocent of the Bennett murders,” I said dully, face pressed against the window, brown scenery whirring by.

“Marchetti was knee deep in their blood.” Hudson said it sharply. “Those murders benefited every single mobster dealing drugs in Chicago. Who knows how much the Feds had on him?”

He hesitated.

“I’ve been able to trace Jack Smith, aka little Joe Bennett. He did survive a crappy childhood in the foster care system. He did go to Princeton on a full-ride scholarship. Until six months ago, he was a computer software engineer at one of the large insurance companies in Hartford. That’s when he took an extended leave of absence, claiming a family tragedy. His boss was talkative on the phone. Smith is very gifted with computers, apparently. Nobody knows where he is right now.”

I nodded, absorbing this. A brilliant guy. A computer expert. Jack Smith was probably his own best source.

Hudson rested a hand on my knee, concerned, and asked the question of the day.

“Are you all right?”

“Almost,” I said.

I still had a little dead girl to find.