Strange Bedfellows

19

The Passing Game

Although I was in my robe and slippers, I felt chilled by Billie’s words. I whispered: “You think the woman who wrote the threatening letter to Zuccari is Alma’s mother?”

Billie had gotten a verbal summary from Robert Merritt of the P.I.’s report and had made the connection between Alma’s mother and the writer of the letter to Chuck Zuccari. “Merritt never saw the letter, so he didn’t recognize the name Belle Thornton. But when he told me Alma’s mother’s name was Isabelle Thornton, I figured it had to be the same person.”

“How’d he find her?”

“Alma provided next of kin information when she was hired by the modeling agency that sent her to that toy convention. How many Isabelle or Belle Thorntons do you think there are in Newark, New Jersey?”

I was about to argue the point, then remembered Alma and Chuck Zuccari’s daughter’s name was Cara-Isabella and bit my tongue.

“The P.I. did some digging on Thornton and found out she’d been married previously to an OB/GYN, Dr. Earl Gordone. That’s when he flew out to New Jersey and got that information he passed on to Renata Lippincott about the Gordones passing for white.”

“But how did he connect her to Chuck Zuccari?”

“The P.I. pulled her marriage license and traced her through her maiden name. He finally found someone who remembered that Isabelle Kendry had moved to Newark after high school and taken a job as a payroll clerk at CZ Toys, where she met and married the boss’s son.”

According to the wedding announcement in the local paper, Chuck was twenty-five and destined for great things when he fell head over heels for the eighteen-year-old brown-haired, blue-eyed Isabelle Kendry. “But then, a few years later, when Mario was about two, Isabelle Zuccari dropped off the scene, resurfacing a year later as Belle Gordone of Upper Montclair, New Jersey, wife of Dr. Earl Gordone and mother of a baby girl, Alma.”

“The Zuccaris must have found out she was black and paid her to disappear,” I said.

“That’s what the P.I. pieced together after interviewing Belle last year. Bottom line is, with her out of the way, the Zuccaris could pretend to Mario and everyone else that his mother had died. Only now that lie has come back to bite them all in the butt.”

My grandmother’s voice came to me again, reminding me: One lie calls for another and another. I could only imagine the pain Isabelle Zuccari had felt, separated from her child because of her lies. Or the halfhearted love Mario must have gotten from his family, who knew the truth and withheld it from him. Or Chuck, who must have been riddled with guilt every time he lied to Mario about his mother being dead. I could see how Mario became such a straitlaced, dutiful son. Probably desperate to win his father’s approval, he’d devoted his life to the family business and adopted his father’s politics, his religious beliefs, and God only knew what else.

“So you were right about that letter being personal,” Billie was saying. “Alma’s mother was writing about how the Zuccaris took her son from her, not their Nazi connection. She probably just put the article in there to remind Chuck she had some dirt on his family, too.”

The enclosed will remind you of the wrongs you have done to me, Isabelle had reproached her former husband, and of the lengths I will go to stop you.

Now the truth lay heavy in our hands, but I was completely baffled about what to do with it. How in the hell were we going to tell Alma and Mario that Chuck was once married to Alma’s mother, making them not just in-laws but half sister and brother? Then a thought struck me. “Mrs. Lippincott said Merritt was supposed to talk to Zuccari about the P.I.’s report. Did he?”

“Sort of. Merritt sent Zuccari a copy of the report and the invoice with a memo telling him how the P.I. was engaged at the insistence of his ex and asking how he wanted Merritt to handle payment. Zuccari wrote back and said to pay the invoice in full, along with a hefty bonus, in exchange for the original case files and notes.”

“And that was it? Zuccari never discussed it with Merritt directly?”

“Would you? But Merritt said he kept a copy of the P.I.’s report in a safe at the office, just to cover the company against some future claim by Thornton.”

Merritt had promised to go into his office in the morning and fax a copy of the report to us so we could go over it ourselves. Which we would, with a fine-toothed comb. Yet the prospect of what lay ahead sent a chill straight through me, making my little office in Aubrey’s house seem even colder than it was. I checked the time. Almost midnight. “You know, it’s going to be creepy having to tell Alma and Mario about this.”

Billie agreed, but advised we wait until morning. “Zuccari’s taken a turn for the worse,” she said. “When I checked in with the Feds surveilling Mario and Gabriella, they told me they both drove down to the hospital about nine and just got back home. And the nurse I called on Chuck’s unit said Alma was still there. It doesn’t sound good.”

Given the hour and the circumstances, I agreed that we’d let it rest until morning, allowing us to be better prepared for the difficult interviews that lay ahead. “But what the hell are we going to tell Alma and Mario, Charlotte?” Billie asked.

“The truth.”

Alma Zuccari agreed to come in at eleven, after she had visited her husband at the hospital. But Mario Zuccari, speaking through his attorney, Sarkisian, asked if he could meet with us first thing Monday morning, ostensibly to allow him time to participate in an Easter pageant rehearsal at his church.

“Pageant my ass!” Thor scoffed over the phone as Perkins, Billie, and I sat in MIA’s office, giving him an update. “The only pageant Mario Zuccari’s involved in is the one with him and his attorneys, trying to get their ducks in a row.”

“He could be in church,” Billie added, “praying he can keep the embezzlement from hitting the news until after his family can dump their stock!”

“Hopefully, they’re not that stupid,” Perkins said. “’Cause if they are, the Feds could hook them for insider trading on top of the embezzlement.”

“Want us to go down there and bring him in?” I asked.

“No, let him do something stupid,” Thor replied. “It could give us some leverage, especially since we don’t have anything conclusive to tie him to the embezzlement or the shootings.”

“But we’ve got one hell of a smoking gun,” Billie put in. “That letter from Mario’s mother to his father we found hidden in his desk. If he realized who she was and that his father had kept them apart all these years-”

“He could have contracted to have his father killed himself,” Thor interrupted, “and then paid off Engalla to make it look like he was responsible.”

“We’ll know if that’s the case soon enough,” I said. “Latent Prints left a message that they’ll have complete results on the prints they lifted off the letter to Engalla by Monday. If you want us to hold off on Alma Zuccari until then, we can.”

“I’d rather not. I don’t want to run the risk of Merritt giving Alma a heads-up before we can interview her. In fact, I’m a little concerned we may have blown the element of surprise by not interviewing her last night.”

“I didn’t think the time was right,” I said, explaining what we knew about Chuck Zuccari’s condition. “But we should have checked it with you. After all, you are the supervising detective on the case.”

“No, that was a good call,” he conceded. “You know what you’re doing as much as I do.”

It was one of the few compliments I’d received from the veteran detective since he’d come onto this case, and I didn’t know quite what to do with it.

As I mumbled thanks, Thor said: “I should have listened to you about that passing thing, Justice. I just never thought it was that big a deal.”

“It was to Alma Zuccari and her mother.”

“And from what the P.I. found out,” Billie added, “it was a whole lot more than that to Chuck.”

Thor grunted. “That whole family is choking to death on its secrets. Question is, how far were they willing to go to keep them.”

At one, Alma Zuccari was wheeled into the interview room by a fiftyish, toupee-wearing suit I’d not met before. Her face pale and drawn, she looked worse than she did the day I saw her at the hospital, reminding me again of the havoc that crime can wreak on families. “This is Jerry Gales. Mr. Gales is a political associate and friend of my husband’s,” she explained, after I introduced Billie.

Gales snapped a card in my direction. “And the family’s personal attorney.”

“I’m sorry I’m late,” she went on, the agitation clear in her voice. “My husband’s developed an infection that’s causing his kidneys and other organs to fail. They’ve had to put him on a ventilator, and the first EEG was flat. I’m afraid he may be…”

I glanced quickly at Billie as we chimed “I’m so sorry” in unison.

But Alma didn’t want our sympathy. “All I care about is that you arrest whoever shot my husband before he… before I have to…” She shifted uncomfortably in her chair. “It might help me to let him go, to know the guilty party will be punished.”

“We’ll do our best, ma’am,” I promised, and shot another look at Billie, wondering how she was interpreting Alma’s response.

After an awkward silence, Gales said: “Mrs. Zuccari tells me she never saw the shooter that night and doesn’t remember much of what happened before or after she was shot. So, if you’ve called her up here to identify that boy suspected of embezzling funds from the company, I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed.”

I carefully placed the attorney’s card in front of me on the table. “Thank you, sir, we’ve already got your client’s statement on where she was at the time of the shooting.”

“So you agree she can’t possibly identify Nilo Engalla.” Gales sat back in his chair, proud of the point he thought he was scoring.

“Yes, sir, we do. But Mr. Engalla is not a suspect at this time.”

“Then why are we here?”

I addressed Alma Zuccari directly. “I was wondering, before we begin, if we might speak with you privately, ma’am, completely off the record?”

Gales again placed his hand over Alma’s. “Don’t you believe them, my dear. Nothing is off the record with the police!”

“We’re not trying to entrap your client, merely protect her privacy.”

Alma gave me a puzzled look. “Protect my privacy from whom? Mr. Gales is our attorney!”

I fingered the card in front of me. “Yes, ma’am,” I said, “and a family friend and political associate of your husband’s. You explained that.”

Alma watched me intently, blinking as she slowly withdrew her hand from Gales’s protective grasp. “Jerry, could you get me some water? I promise I won’t confess to anything while you’re gone.”

“There’s a watercooler in our break room, sir,” Billie offered. “If you step outside and turn to your right, Detective Perkins can direct you.”

“Ten minutes, Jerry,” Alma promised as she turned and mustered an encouraging smile for her skeptical attorney. “Then you can protect Chuck and me to your heart’s content.”

She waited until she could no longer hear Gales’s footstep in the hall. “What’s this all about?”

“We wanted to talk to you about Isabelle Thornton,” Billie told her.

Alma started as if Billie had slapped her. “My mother?” she whispered. “How did you find her?”

“We didn’t,” Billie replied as she explained about the P.I. Renata Lippincott had had CZ Toys hire.

Alma shook her head, her eyes welling with tears. “I kept telling her someone would eventually find out. How is she?”

“I’m sorry to say she’s had a stroke, ma’am,” Billie said gently.

Alma drew in her breath, the color draining from her already pale face. “Is she all right?”

“When the P.I. filed his report, she was in a nursing home, but that was over a year ago. Is there a reason you two haven’t communicated?”

Alma nodded fiercely as she fumbled in her pocket for a tissue. “That’s how she wanted it. She wanted me to get as far away from the past as possible.”

“And your racial identity?” Billie asked.

Alma gave Billie a crooked smile. “I told Mother it was ridiculous, playing that stupid passing game in this day and age, but she couldn’t stop. Kept shuttling us around these small towns in Connecticut and New Jersey, lying to get us into better neighborhoods, and me into better schools.”

“And for her, better meant white,” Billie said, her clipped tone betraying her disapproval.

Alma nodded, a guilty look on her face. “I hated every minute of it, especially when I’d get beaten up when the white kids at a school found out I was black. But my mother would just pick us up and move again. It was like, after the mistake she made with my father, she had to get it right.”

“You’re referring to what happened to Dr. Gordone’s practice in Upper Montclair?” I asked.

“I’m sorry, I’m not being clear.” Alma sighed, wiped her eyes, and folded her hands in her lap. “Dr. Gordone was the only father I’ve ever known, but he wasn’t my birth father-something Mother didn’t tell me until after he died. No, the mistake she was referring to was with my real father.”

Beside me, Billie ducked her head and started writing in her notepad. I glanced down and read: OH, SHIT!

“My mother and father married when my mother was very young,” Alma was saying. “But when his family discovered she was black, they had the marriage annulled, and they never saw each other again.”

It was bad enough, trying to figure out how to tell Alma about her mother’s marriage to Chuck Zuccari, but what she’d just told us left me sick at heart and not knowing quite how to proceed. Chuck Zuccari had married his daughter and fathered her baby!

I glanced at Billie, who was tapping her pen on her notepad, the same awful realization written all over her face. “Did you ever meet your father, ma’am?” I asked carefully. “Or find out who he was?”

“Mother wouldn’t tell me his name, and naturally my birth certificate said my father was Earl Gordone. She and Dr. Gordone had gotten married right after her marriage to my father was annulled, so I don’t know if even he knew the truth.” She looked up at us, tears again in her eyes. “But I know my mother never got over what my father and his people did to her. And what happened to us in Montclair only made her worse. By the time I was in my teens, she’d married and divorced again-”

“This would be Mr. Thornton?” I asked, my mind still reeling.

“William Thornton, that’s right.” She nodded, a frown crossing her face. “Right skin tone, but he was a gambler, and violent, too. We ended up broke and on the wrong side of the tracks in Newark, this time with the black kids beating me up because they thought I was white. But then I went away to college, where nobody knew me, and things were better. My mother made me promise to keep my mouth shut and let people make their own assumptions about who and what I was.”

Alma looked from me to Billie, her face flushed with embarrassment. “You must think I’m a pitiful excuse for a black person,” she said as she blew her nose, “but I never tried actively to pass. I just fell into it. And when my mother found out, she was so thrilled that I’d been able to accomplish something she hadn’t. After I graduated, she convinced me it was better not to come home, lest someone found out. I used to write, but she never wrote back. Then she moved again and I lost track of her completely. I haven’t seen or heard from her in almost three years now.”

During which time Alma had settled into her new life-the one her mother had struggled so hard for her to have-and stumbled straight into hell. But as much as her story sickened me, I hadn’t lived Alma’s life, or her mother’s, so how could I judge. “But you should know,” I said, “that in addition to Ms. Lippincott, Mr. Merritt discussed the P.I.’s report directly with your husband.”

“Chuck knew?” she whispered, her lips barely moving. “For how long?”

“Why do you ask how long your husband knew?” I asked, noting the stricken look on her face.

Alma beat a fist into her lap. “I knew it was something!”

“Why do you say that?” Billie asked.

“I kept asking him what was wrong, but Chuck said it was nothing.”

“But you weren’t convinced,” I prompted, glancing at Billie.

She shook her head. “When Chuck found out I was pregnant, he was thrilled at first. Then in the late spring, around the end of my first trimester, everything changed. He became distant, even hostile at times, questioning whether the baby was his and then badgering me to abort it.”

I felt my pulse quicken. “Do you know any other reason he could have had a change of heart about your baby?”

“I never cheated on my husband, so don’t even go there!” she whispered fiercely. “I just thought he was just having an old man’s doubts. Not that my husband was old, mind you, but… he just changed so completely, I figured it was those kind of doubts, or him being turned off to me being pregnant… I mean, he even stopped sleeping with me.”

Embarrassed, she fell silent. Billie and I exchanged pained looks, then Billie took a breath and said: “And you never thought the changes in your… husband’s affections had anything to do with the secret you were keeping about your race?”

“Or anything else?” I added.

“Never!” She shook her head, bewildered. “What are you driving at?”

“Ma’am, I need you to prepare yourself.” I took in a deep breath, and looked her in the eyes. “What I need to tell you is going to be hard to hear.”

“For God’s sake, tell me!”

And so I did, as gently as I could, everything about the lies her mother and father had kept to themselves and told each other and how the secret of her birth that her mother had kept all these years had surfaced to poison them all.

Alma’s face went slack, and her eyes dull. “You’re wrong!” she murmured. “Surely there’s been some mistake.”

“I wish there were, but given what you’ve just told us and the P.I.’s report, we’re pretty sure of it. Chuck Zuccari is your father.”

Alma sat, her eyes filled with unbelieving tears. And then, from somewhere deep in her soul, she moaned, a sound of betrayal that dissolved the space between us. I could feel myself slipping inside her skin, feel the corrosiveness of old secrets eating away at her life, as they had at mine, eat away at flesh and bone, blood and marrow.

But the moment passed and I was back in my own skin, watching Alma gulp and gasp for air, hyperventilating to the point where she began to slump in her wheelchair. I hurried to her side and held her steady while Billie exited the interview room, blowing past Jerry Gales, who was waiting outside.

“What happened?” Gales demanded as he stepped into the room. “What did you say to her?”

“She’s had a bit of a shock is all, sir,” I assured him. “She’ll be all right.”

Billie returned with a cup of ice. After a few minutes of ice applied to Alma’s neck and gentle reassurance, we were able to bring her back. But as her eyes opened I could tell this was not the place she wanted to be, nor Gales, Billie, and I the people she wanted to see. “I need to talk to my mother,” she whispered.

“At the appropriate time, we can give you the number we have for her,” I assured her.

She motioned me closer and whispered, her lips barely moving: “Please don’t tell Jerry about… I’d hate for something like this to tarnish Chuck’s legacy.”

After the hell Chuck Zuccari’s lies had put her and her mother through, I was stunned at Alma’s willingness to protect the man. “We’ll do our best, ma’am.”

Gales moved behind her chair. “Perhaps I should be getting Mrs. Zuccari back home, Detective,” he said, oblivious to how she cringed at the title.

“Of course, sir, but I just have a couple more questions for your client.”

“Haven’t you badgered this poor woman enough?” Gales said.

Alma held up a hand. “No, Jerry, let them do their job. We’ve got to get to the bottom of who shot my… Chuck and killed poor Malik.”

Unless she was the greatest actress on earth, Alma’s willingness to go on just convinced me she had nothing to do with the shooting. I motioned Gales to a seat and gave Alma a few more moments to compose herself. “Did your-did Chuck mention a project he was working on with Mr. Engalla shortly before the shooting? Or mention any concerns he had about Mario, or an employee named Natalie Johnson?”

“The only thing Chuck talked about during that time was the joint venture with Malik and Habiba Shareef.” Again her blue eyes welled up with tears. Had it occurred to her that Chuck might have pushed her toward the Shareefs and their venture because he knew who she was?

Oblivious to what was transpiring, Gales patted Alma’s hand reassuringly. “We understand the LAPD and FBI seized records from the company and Mr. Zuccari’s children. Are we to assume Mario and this Johnson woman are suspects in the shooting?”

Disregarding his question, I spoke directly to Alma. “It would help us tremendously if you could provide us access to Mr. Zuccari’s personal financial records. We need to be sure someone wasn’t trying to blackmail him.”

“Why would someone want to blackmail Chuck?” Gales said, antennae up.

Ignoring the question, Billie asked Alma whether Chuck had told her about the threatening letter. “He mentioned it,” she replied, “but he never showed it to me. Now I can understand why.”

Gales looked from Alma to Billie to me, a baffled look on his face. “Am I missing something here?” he asked.

“So was my-” Here, Alma hesitated, unsure of what to say. “Is that who you think might have blackmailed Chuck?”

“It’s something we have to look at.”

“I see.” The possibility seemed to shake Chuck and Isabelle’s daughter to her core. “You have my permission to review anything you like.”

“Alma,” Gales broke in. “Are you sure you want to open Chuck’s personal affairs to the police and the Feds without a subpoena?”

“We can certainly obtain one,” I assured the attorney. “But we’d be wasting valuable time that I frankly don’t think we have, given Mr. Zuccari’s condition.”

Alma turned to her attorney. “She’s right, Jerry. I want to be able to go back to that hospital and tell my-tell Chuck they’ve arrested the person who shot him and my baby.” Focusing her attention on me, she said: “If you can provide Mr. Gales with a list of items you need, we can have everything sent up to you tonight.”

“It would be faster to have one of our people go with you and pick them up.”

While Billie walked Gales out to Detective Perkins to get a complete list, Alma sat in her wheelchair, her face suffused with pain as her emotions caught up with her. “D-does this mean Mario is my brother?”

“Most likely, yes.”

She nodded as if confirming something to herself. “You know, from the day I met him at that convention, I felt like I’d known Mario all my life. He was like a kindred spirit… so intent on succeeding, and yet so sad. It’s like there was a piece of him missing. Just like in me.” She frowned suddenly and asked: “Is it possible-could Mario have known about all this?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Last night, when Chuck took a turn for the worse, I called Mario and Gabriella. After all, they are his children.” Her voice faltered, perhaps sensing the irony of her words, but she struggled on. “When Mario got to the hospital, he said something about chickens coming home to roost that I thought was sort of odd, but I thought he was still upset about not being named as president. Now I’m not so sure what he meant.”

“I appreciate you telling me this, ma’am,” I said as I gathered up my notebook. “And we’ll certainly follow up on it. But in the meantime, it’s essential that you not say anything about this to Mario or anyone else.”

She smiled bitterly. “Who could I tell something like this?”

She seemed to have aged another ten years since coming through the door. “If there’s nothing else, Detective Justice, I need to head back to find those documents, and go back to the hospital.” She slowly moved her wheelchair to the door.

“There is one more thing.” At Alma’s mention of the hospital, a memory flickered into my consciousness that sent me back to my notebook. “Detective Thorfinsen asked you something at the hospital on Monday about the night of the shooting that I just need to doublecheck.”

I found my notation, hastily scribbled when I’d walked in on her conversation with Thor. “‘The last thing I remember,’ you said, ‘was Chuck turning around and pushing me away from him as we were waiting for the valet to bring our car.’ You said you couldn’t remember whether he pushed you toward the building or the street.”

Her gaze focused on the far wall, Alma seemed lost in thought. Then she shuddered, her attention back on me. “I remember now. It was toward the building.”

“You’re certain?”

“Of course I’m certain!” she said, that same agitated note in her voice that I heard when she spoke to Thor. She reached into her handbag. “He was trying to shield me from that car!”

I watched as she started rearranging items in her bag, aware that she seemed unable to look me in the eye. Billie had just reentered the room when I said: “Frankly, ma’am, I’m confused.”

“Confused about what?” Annoyed, Alma looked up from what she was doing and shifted her shoulders against the back of the chair. “I told you what happened!”

“But how can you be so sure in which direction he pushed you today when you’ve never been able to remember anything else about the moments leading up to the shooting or much of what happened afterward?”

Alma’s hands started fluttering in her lap. “I guess the shock of all this jogged my memory.” She sighed again and clenched her hands over her bag. “Up until ten minutes ago, that was the worst day of my life, Detective. Can you blame me for not being able to remember until now?”

I saw the defiance and pain on her face and flipped my notebook closed. “Thank you for your time.” I walked over and took her hand. “Please call us if anything else occurs to you in the coming days. And we are truly sorry about everything.”

She nodded, swallowing hard. “So am I, Detective.”

Billie and I watched her move slowly down the hall. She was joined by Gales and Perkins, who Billie told me was going to follow them to Chuck and Alma’s house to get those records. “What was with the question about which way her husband pushed her?” she asked.

“When she was talking to Thor about it on Monday, something just struck me as odd. And just now it hit me-we’ve been wondering if Alma might have had her husband shot to keep him from finding out she was black, or Chuck contracted to have her killed when he heard the news from Merritt. But what if it was more than that?”

I read to Billie from my notes. “‘That’s about when my memory of that night runs out,’ ” she said. “Then she asked Thor if it mattered.”

Billie frowned. “I’m not following you.”

“See, I think she may have had her suspicions about Zuccari even then, but us telling her about his true identity just pushed her over the edge.” I trailed Billie to her desk. “Think about it. We tell Alma Zuccari that her husband-this paragon of perfection-not only found out she was passing for white but is most likely her father, and all of a sudden she remembers on the night of the shooting that he pushed her out of the line of fire. Maybe our conversation has made her wonder if he contracted to have her killed, and pushing her was part of the plan, but she doesn’t want to admit it.”

“How on earth can we prove that?”

I brought my hand down on the original murder book from last summer. “Check the crime scene photos and witness interviews. Then talk to the uniforms on the scene, see if they remember the exact location of Alma’s body in relation to Zuccari’s.”

“How about Habiba Shareef? Maybe she saw something.”

“Good idea.”

While Billie got busy I called Thor to brief him on our interview with Alma, catching him just as he was about to leave his daughter’s house for the airport. “Good God!” he exclaimed. “Are you sure about Zuccari being Alma’s father?”

“As sure as I can be without a paternity test talking to Belle Thornton myself. The latter of which I intend to do as soon as we’re off the phone.”

“Good. I drew a diagram of the crime scene as Alma described it at the hospital, if that’ll help Billie.”

“I’ll have her compare it with the one I drew last summer. Meanwhile, I’m also going to talk to the D.A. on call, see if we should try for a court to stop Alma from pulling Zuccari off of that ventilator.”

“Is he that far gone?”

“That’s what it sounds like. And if Alma Zuccari’s as angry at what Chuck’s done to her and her mother as she ought to be, the last thing we want is her making a decision about whether he should live or die.”