The Vendetta Defense

THE VENDETTA DEFENSE

by

LISA SCOTTOLINE

ALSO BY LISA SCOTTOLINE

Moment of Truth

Mistaken Identity

Rough Justice

Legal Tender

Running from the Law

Final Appeal

Everywhere That Mary Went

Dedication

To the Honorable Edmund B. Spaeth, Jr., who taught me, and all his clerks, about the law, about justice, and about love.

With eternal thanks, and the biggest hug ever—

Thanks, Judge.

BOOK ONE

The conclusion arrived at then has been and always will be the same until I cease to exist; on the score of integrity there is no assault to be made upon me. My political work may be valued more or less, this way or that, and people may shout me up and howl me down, but in the moral field it is another matter.

—BENITO MUSSOLINI,

My Rise and Fall (1948)

Italians! Here is the national programme of a solidly Italian movement. Revolutionary, because it is opposed to dogma and demagogy; robustly innovating because it rejects preconceived opinions. We prize above everything and everybody the experience of a revolutionary war.

Other problems—bureaucratic, administrative, legal, educational, colonial, etc.—will be dealt with when we have established a ruling class.

—From a June 6, 1919, program of the Fascist movement

I grandi dolori sono muti. Great griefs are mute.

—Italian proverb

Chapter 1

The morning Tony Lucia killed Angelo Coluzzi, he was late to feed his pigeons. As long as Tony had kept pigeons, which was for almost all of his seventy-nine years, he had never been late to feed them, and they began complaining the moment he opened the screen door. Deserting their perches, cawing and cooing, they flew agitated around the cages, their wings pounding against the chicken wire, setting into motion the air in the tiny city loft. It didn’t help that the morning had dawned clear and that March blew hard outside. The birds itched to fly.

Tony waved his wrinkled hand to settle them, but his heart wasn’t in it. They had a right to their bad manners, and he was a tolerant man. It was okay with him if the birds did only one thing, which was to fly home. They were homers, thirty-seven of them, and it wasn’t an easy job they had, to travel to a place they’d never been, a distance in some races of three hundred or four hundred miles, then to navigate their return through skies they’d never flown, over city and country they’d never seen and couldn’t possibly know, to flap their way home to a tiny speck in the middle of South Philadelphia, all without even stopping to congratulate themselves for this incredible feat, one that man couldn’t even explain, much less accomplish.

There were so many mistakes a bird could make. Circling too long, as if it were a joyride or a training toss. Getting distracted on the way, buffeted by sudden bad weather, or worse, simply getting tired and disoriented—thousands of things could result in the loss of a precious bird. Even once the first bird had made it home, the race wasn’t won. Many races had been lost by the bird who wouldn’t trap fast enough; the one who was first to reach his loft but who stopped on the roof, dawdling on his way to the trap, so that his leg band couldn’t be slipped off and clocked in before another man’s bird.

But Tony’s birds trapped fast. He bred them for speed, intelligence, and bravery, through six and even seven generations, and over time the birds had become his life. It wasn’t a life for the impatient. It took years, even decades, for Tony to see the results of his breeding choices, and it wasn’t until recently that his South Philly loft had attained the best record in his pigeon-racing club.

Suddenly the screen door banged open, blown by a gust of wind, startling Tony and frightening the birds in the first large cage. They took panicky wing, seventeen of them, all white as Communion wafers, transforming their cage into a snowy blizzard of whirring and beating, squawking and calling. Pinfeathers flurried and snagged on the chicken wire. Tony hurried to the loft door, silently reprimanding himself for being so careless. Normally he would have latched the screen behind him—the old door had bowed in the middle, warped with the rain, and wouldn’t stay shut without the latch—but this morning, Tony’s mind had been on Angelo Coluzzi.

The white pigeons finally took their perches, which were small plywood boxes lining the walls, but in their panic they had displaced each other, violating customary territories and upsetting altogether the pecking order, which led to a final round of fussing. “Mi dispiace,” Tony whispered to the white birds. I’m sorry, in Italian. Though Tony understood English, he preferred Italian. As did his birds, to his mind.

He gazed at the white pigeons, really doves, which he found so beautiful. Large and healthy, the hue of their feathers so pure Tony marveled that only God could make this color. Their pearliness contrasted with the inky roundness of their eye, which looked black but in fact was the deepest of reds, blood-rich. Tony even liked their funny bird-feet, with the flaky red scales and the toe in back with a talon as black as their eyes pretended to be. And he kidded himself into thinking that the doves behaved better than the other birds. More civilized, they seemed aware of how special they were.

The secret reason for the doves’ special status was that they were beloved of his son, who had finally stopped Tony from releasing them at weddings for a hundred fifty dollars a pop. Tony had thought it made a good side business; why not make some money to pay for the seed and medicines, plus keep the birds in shape during the off-season? And it made Tony happy to see the brides, whose hearts lifted at the flock of doves taking off outside the church, since you couldn’t throw rice anymore. It reminded his heart of his own wedding day, less grand than theirs, though such things didn’t matter when it came to love.

But his son had hated the whole idea. They’re not trained monkeys, Frank had said. They’re athletes.

So Tony had relented. “Mi dispiace,” he whispered again, this time to his son. But Tony couldn’t think about Frank now. It would hurt too much, and he had birds to feed.

He shuffled down the skinny aisle, and his old sneakers, their soles worn flat, made a swishing sound on the whitewash of the plywood floor. The floor had held up okay, unlike the screen door; Tony had built the loft himself when he first came to America from Abruzzo, sixty years ago. The loft measured thirty feet long, with the single door in the middle opening onto a skinny aisle that ran the short length of the building. It occupied all of Tony’s backyard, as if the loft and yard were nesting boxes. Off the aisle of the loft were three large chicken wire cages lined with box perches. The aisle ended in a crammed feed room, the seed kept safe from rats in a trash can, and there was a bookshelf holding antibiotics, lice sprays, vitamins, and other supplies, all labels out, in clean white shelves.

Tony prided himself on the neatness of his loft. He dusted the sills, cleaned the windows with the bright blue Windex, and scraped the floor of the cages twice a day, not once. It was important to the health of his birds. He whitewashed the loft interior each spring, before the old bird season; he had done it last week, experiencing a familiar pang—the chalky smell of the whitewash and its brightness reminded him of the white liquid shoe polish he used to paint over the scuffs on Frank’s baby shoes, when his son had started to walk. Tony remembered the shoe polish—they didn’t make it anymore—he would paint it on the stiff baby shoes with the cotton they gave you, stuck on a stick inside the cap like a white ball of dandelion seeds. Even though it dripped it worked okay.

Tony shook his head, thinking of it now, the chalky smell filling his nose like the fragrance of a rose. The bottle of polish had a blue paper label and a little circle picture of a blond-haired, blue-eyed baby who didn’t look anything like baby Frank, with his jet black curls and his big brown eyes. Somehow Tony had the idea that if he painted the watery polish on Frank’s baby shoes, his son would look like all the American babies and one day come to be one, even though Frank had the black hair and no mother. And when it actually happened and Frank grew up to take his place in this country, Tony was just superstitious enough to think that maybe it was the shoe polish.

Tony had to stop thinking about his son, though he couldn’t help it, not this morning, of all mornings, and he tried to concentrate on the first cage of doves, appraising with failing eyes their condition. The doves were settling down, roosting again, and they looked good, no big fights during the night. Tony worried about the fights; the birds were territorial and always bickering about something, and the white birds bruised easily. He wanted them to look especially nice and stay healthy. For Frank.

Tony shuffled down the aisle to the second and third cages, which held the multicolored birds, mostly Meulemans with their reddish-brown feathers, and Janssens. There were other breeds in shades of gray and brown, and the common slateys; a slate gray, their eyes generally the same dark brown. Tony liked the nonwhite breeds, too, the ordinariness of their plumage reminding him of himself; he wasn’t a flashy man, not a braggadocio. He didn’t have the strut that some men had, going about like cocks. It had been his ruin, but now that he was old, it didn’t matter anymore. It had stopped mattering a long time ago. Sixty years, to be exact.

His thoughts elsewhere, Tony watched the Janssens cooing and stirring without really seeing them. The breed name came from the Janssen family who had bred them, and the other names from the other families who had bred them; Tony had always dreamed that his family would produce its own strain of birds, but he wouldn’t name it after himself. He knew who he would name it after, but he didn’t get the chance. Many of the best breed stock came from Belgium and France. Italian pigeons also made good racers, but Tony wouldn’t have much to do with them, especially the so-called Mussolini birds. Anybody who had lived during Mussolini wouldn’t want anything to do with a Mussolini bird. Chi ha poca vergogna, tutto il mondo è suo. He who is without shame, all the world is his. Mussolini birds!

Tony was an old man with old memories. He wished he could spit on the loft floor, but he didn’t want to dirty it. Instead he stood trembling until the anger left him, except for the bitterness in his mouth. Shaken, he idly inspected the Meulemans, and they seemed fine, too. Only Tony had had the terrible morning. An awful morning; the worst he’d had in a long time, but not the worst he’d had in his life. The worst he’d had in his life was sixty years ago. That morning then, and this morning now. Today. Tony had thought he would feel better after, but he didn’t. He felt worse; he had committed an act against God. He knew that his judgment would come in heaven, and he would accept it.

His thoughts were interrupted by the Meulemans, cooing loudly, wanting to be fed, and his dark eyes went, as always, to his favorite bird of all, a Meuleman he had named The Old Man. The Old Man and Tony went back eighteen years; The Old Man was the oldest of Tony’s pigeons, and to look at him, Tony wasn’t sure who was the Old Man, him or the bird. The Old Man roosted peacefully in his corner perch in the second cage, his strong head held characteristically erect, his eyes clear and alert, and his broad breast a still robust curve covering his feet. Tony remembered the day the chick hatched, an otherwise typical slatey, apparently unremarkable at birth except for his eye sign. Eye sign, or the look in a pigeon’s eye, spoke to Tony, and The Old Man’s eyes told Tony that the bird would be fast and smart. And he had been the best, in his day.

“Come sta?” Tony asked The Old Man. How are you? But The Old Man knew exactly what he meant, and it wasn’t, “How are you?”

The Old Man regarded the old man for a long time then. Tony couldn’t help but feel that the old bird knew what he had done that morning, what had been so important as to keep Tony from feeding his birds on time. The Old Man knew why Tony had to do what he had done, even after all this time. And Tony knew that The Old Man approved.

It was then that Tony heard cars pulling up outside his house and in the alley right behind the loft, on the other side of the cinderblock wall. There was the slamming of heavy car doors, and Tony knew that they were police cars.

He had been expecting them.

But the birds startled at the sudden sound, taking flight in their cages, and even though Tony knew that the police were coming, he felt the hair rise on the back of his neck, as it used to so long ago. He froze beside the cages as the police shouted English words he didn’t bother to translate, though he could, then they broke down the old wood door in the backyard wall, one, two, three pushes and it splintered and gave way to their shoulders and they burst into his yard, trampling his basil and tomatoes.

They were coming for him.

Tony didn’t run from them, he wouldn’t have anyway, but he remembered he had yet to feed his birds. He would have to hurry to finish before the police took him away. He shuffled to the feed room even as he caught sight of the police drawing their black guns silently, pointing instructions to each other, and two of them sneaking to the back door of his house like the cowards they were, little men hiding behind black shirts and shiny badges.

Tony’s gut churned with bile, and it struck him with astonishment that the deepest hate could rage like a fire for so many years, never burning itself up.

Dwelling with perfect comfort alongside the deepest love.

Chapter 2

“Come on, it’s lunchtime! Let’s go,” Judy Carrier heard the other associates saying as they grabbed their light coats and bags. It was the first day of real warmth after a long winter, and evidently spring fever struck lawyers, too. Everybody at the Philadelphia law firm of Rosato & Associates, except Judy, was escaping. She remained at her desk trying to draft an antitrust article, though the sun obliterated the legal citations on her computer screen and the chatter in the hall kept distracting her. It was hard to work when you were eavesdropping.

Suddenly Anne Murphy, who called herself only Murphy, popped her head in Judy’s open doorway. She was one of the new associates, her lipsticked lips expertly lined and her dark hair tied back into its typically fashionable knot. “You wanna go to lunch?” she asked.

“No thanks,” Judy answered. She usually gave others the benefit of the doubt, but she was hard-pressed to respect women who drew lines around their lips, like coloring books. Judy wore no makeup herself, and a daily shower was her idea of fashionable. “I ate already.”

“So what? Come on, you haven’t taken lunch in weeks.” Murphy smiled in a friendly way, though Judy suspected it was the lipliner. “It’s gorgeous out. Walk around with us.”

“Can’t, thanks. Got an article to do, on the Simmons case.”

“You can’t even take a walk? It’s Friday, for God’s sake.”

“No time for a walk. I really can’t,” Judy said, knowing that the walk part was bullshit. Murphy didn’t walk, she shopped, and shopping made Judy want to kill indiscriminately. What was the matter with these baby lawyers? Judy didn’t like any of them. Graduates of the Ally McBeal School of Law, they thought being a lawyer meant wearing skirts that met the legal definition of indecent exposure. They weren’t serious about the law, which is the only thing Judy was serious about. She thought of them as Murphy’s Lawyers.

“Oh. Okay. Well, don’t work too hard.” Murphy gave the white molding a good-bye pat and wisely disappeared, and Judy listened to the familiar sounds of the office emptying out, the gossip trailing off toward the elevator banks. The elevator cabs chimed as they left, bearing lawyers into the sun. Rosato & Associates was a small firm, only nine women lawyers and support staff, and for the next hour or so, whatever telephone calls the receptionist didn’t answer would be forwarded to voicemail. E-mail would go unopened, and faxes would wait in gray plastic trays. The office fell silent except for the occasional ringing of telephones, and Judy felt her whole body relax into the midday lull that was a long, deep breath before the afternoon’s business began.

She knew she was supposed to feel lonely, but she didn’t. She liked being on her own. She sipped coffee from a Styrofoam cup amid federal casebooks, stacks of printed cases, scribbled notes, and correspondence that covered her wooden desk and the desk return on her right. Her office was small, standard issue for mid-level associates at Rosato, but the clutter reduced it to a shoebox. Judy didn’t mind. She didn’t think of her office as messy, she thought of it as full, and felt very cozy surrounded by all her stuff. Nobody needed a nest more than a lawyer.

Papers, memos, law school texts, novels, and copies of the federal civil and criminal rules filled the bookshelves across from her and the shelves behind her, under the window. Three large file cabinets sat flush against the side wall, their fake-wood counter hidden by twenty thick accordion files from Moltex v. Huartzer, a massive antitrust case, which was redundant. A tower of potential trial exhibits at the end cabinet threatened daily to topple. Blanketing the walls were dog, horse, and family photos, certificates of court admission and awards Judy had received as law review editor and class salutatorian, and diplomas from Stanford University and Boalt Law School. Judy was the firm’s true legal scholar, so her office, while a mess, was a highly scholarly mess.

And her friend Mary wasn’t around to nag her about it. Mary DiNunzio had worked with Judy since they had graduated from law school, but she was taking time off from work after their last murder case; since then Judy’s nest hadn’t felt much like home. She took a reflective sip of coffee, eased back in an ergonomically correct chair whose cushions stabbed her in the back and shoulders, and crossed her legs, which were strong and shapely but completely bare. In Judy’s view, pantyhose was for Republicans, and now that Mary wasn’t here, she was getting away with that, too. Judy and Mary disagreed about practically everything, including Murphy’s use of lipliner.

On impulse, Judy pulled open her middle drawer and shuffled through ballpoint pens, parti-colored plastic paper clips, and loose change until she found a red pencil she used to edit briefs; then she dug again in the drawer for the mirror Mary had given her. Judy usually used the mirror to check for poppy seeds between her teeth, but now, her red pencil poised, she appraised herself in its large square:

Looking back at her from the mirror was a broad-shouldered young woman whose bright blue dress, yellow T-shirt, and artsy silver earrings made her look out of place against the legal books. Her hair was naturally blond, almost crayon yellow, and hacked off in a straight line at her chin; her face was big and round, reminding her always of a full moon, and her eyes were large and bright blue, as unmade-up as her lips. Her light eyelashes were mascaraless, her nose short and bobbed. An old boyfriend used to tell her she was beautiful, but whenever Judy looked at herself, all she thought was I look like myself, which was satisfying.

She puckered up in the mirror. Her lips were in between full and thin, of a normal pink color. Hmmm. Judy raised the red editing pencil close to her lips. The color match was perfect. And she was a good artist. Watching herself in the mirror, Judy took the pencil, moistened the point, and sketched across the top of her lip. The red pigment smelled funny and felt cold but was blunt enough not to scratch, and she drew a light line on her top lip, outlined her lower lip as well, and puckered up again for the mirror.

Not bad. You could see the red penciling, but her mouth looked bigger, which was supposed to be good these days, when lips like hot dogs ruled. The phone started ringing at reception, but Judy ignored it. She smiled at the mirror and looked instantly friendly, in an ersatz-Murphy I-ignore-the-phones sort of way. Apparently you couldn’t beat office supplies for makeup. Maybe she should take a Sharpie to her eyelids. Paint her fingernails with Wite-Out. Who said being a lawyer wasn’t fun? She set down the pencil, picked up the phone, and punched in a number.

“So how do I look?” Judy asked when Mary picked up.

“I got your message about the Sherman Act. Stop calling me about the Sherman Act.”

“This isn’t about the Sherman Act. Antitrust is easy. Lipliner is hard.”

“Murphy was in, huh?”

“She was trying to be friendly so I sent her away.”

“You should have lunch with her.”

“I don’t like her, and she doesn’t eat lunch. If I liked her and she ate lunch, I would go with her. Instead I stayed in and drew on my lips. So what do you think? Does Oscar Mayer come to mind?” Judy air-kissed the receiver, and Mary scoffed.

“You’re supposed to be making new friends.”

“No, I’m supposed to be writing an article and you’re supposed to stop slacking off and get your ass back to work.”

“I’m fine, and thank you for asking,” Mary said, though Judy could hear the smile in her voice. The smile didn’t come from Revlon or even Dixon Ticonderoga but was due entirely to a wonderful heart, and Judy felt a twinge of guilt. Attempted murder wasn’t a laughing matter.

“I’m sorry. How’re you feeling, Mare?”

“Pretty good for somebody who took two bullets.”

Judy winced. She had almost lost Mary, forever. She didn’t want to think about it. “You need anything? It’s only fifteen minutes by cab. Want me to bring you anything?”

“No thanks.”

“You sure?”

Mary snorted. “You regret that wisecrack, don’t you? If I didn’t know you better, I’d say you feel guilty.”

“Me?” Judy smiled. It was a long-running joke between them. Mary, an Italian Catholic, held the patent on guilt, and Judy could see that it would never expire. “No way. I’m from California.”

“You should be guilty. You were making fun of somebody with ventilation. What kind of friend are you?” Mary laughed, but it got lost in a surprising burst of background noise, which sounded like men talking loud. Mary had been recuperating at her parents’ house in South Philly, and the DiNunzios, whom Judy adored, were an old Italian couple who lived very quietly, at least when Mr. DiNunzio wore his hearing aid. Usually the only background noise at the DiNunzio rowhouse was a continuous loop of novenas.

“What’s that sound over there?” Judy asked. “Another DiNunzio clambake?”

“You don’t wanna know.”

“Yes, I do.” It sounded like quite a commotion, with the men now arguing. Judy frowned. “Is anything the matter?”

“You wouldn’t believe it.”

“Try me.”

“My father’s friends are here. You met Tony-From-Down-The-Block.”

“The guy he buys cigars with?”

“That could be anybody, but yes,” Mary answered, and the background arguing surged.

“What the hell was that?”

“Feet.”

“It didn’t sound like feet, it sounded like voices.”

“Feet’s his nickname. His real name is Tony Two Feet. He’s shouting. He’s an excitable boy, for an eighty-year-old.”

“Tony Two Feet? That’s a name? Everybody has two feet.”

“Don’t ask me. He’s my father’s other friend. They’re all upset about Pigeon Tony.”

Judy smiled. “Is anybody there not named Tony?”

“Please. It’s ten Italian men. Odds are three will be Tony, two will be Frank, and one will end up in jail. Pigeon Tony just got arrested. The smart money was on Dominic.”

“Arrested for what?”

“Murder.”

Judy’s lips formed an imperfectly lined circle. “Murder?”

“Also my mother sends her love.”

“Murder?” Judy felt her pulse quicken. “A friend of your father’s, arrested for murder? Your father is around seventy-five, isn’t he? How old is Tony? And who did he kill, allegedly? I mean whom?”

“You can’t just say Tony, you have to say Pigeon Tony, and he’s close to eighty. He grew up in Italy and he supposedly killed another old man, also from Italy. I was trying to figure out what the hell was going on when you called.”

Judy’s eyes flared in surprise. She felt awake for the first time in months. “Does Pigeon Tony have a lawyer?”

“Wait a minute. You sound interested. You’re not allowed to be interested.”

“Why not?” Judy inched forward on her horrible chair. Murder trumped antitrust. Spring had sprung. Her other phone line rang but she ignored it. Ignoring phones got easier with practice. “I can be interested. I have a First Amendment right to be interested.”

“My father wanted me to call you, but I don’t think you should take the case.”

“Your dad wants me to?” Judy’s pulse quickened. She would do anything to help Mary’s father, especially something she already wanted to do.

“Yes, but I don’t, and I don’t have time to fight about it. It’s La Traviata over here. I gotta go.”

“Put your dad on the phone, Mare.”

“No. Remember the last murder case we took? Gunfire ensued. Hot lead whizzing around. Lawyers are ill prepared for such things. Stick to the Sherman Act. Besides, I told my father Bennie won’t allow it.”

“Why wouldn’t she? We take murder cases now, and besides, the boss is at a deposition. I’ll apologize later if she won’t let me take it. Don’t make me whine. Put him on!”

“No.” The ruckus in the background started again, and Judy could hear Mary’s father closer to the phone.

“Now, Mare! Lemme talk to your father.” There was a sudden silence on the phone, and Judy could picture Mary’s hand covering the receiver, muting the arguing of the men and the softer voice of Mariano DiNunzio. “Mr. D, is that you?” Judy asked, shouting through Mary’s hand, as if it were possible. “What’s the matter, Mr. D?”

“Judy, thank God you called!” Mr. DiNunzio said. He came onto the line abruptly, and Judy assumed he had taken the phone from Mary. “The police, they have my friend downtown. They took him away, in handcuffs.” Mr. DiNunzio’s voice was choked with emotion, and Judy’s heart went out to him, the gravity of the situation striking home.

“What happened?”

“They say he killed a man, but he would never. He couldn’t. He wouldn’t.” Mr. DiNunzio cleared his throat, and Judy could hear him collect himself. “I would never ask such a thing, a favor, for me. For myself. You know this. But for my friend, my compare, he’s in trouble.”

“Whatever you need, you got it, Mr. D.”

“I know you, you’re a good girl. A smart lawyer. You know all the ins and outs. You work hard, like my Mary. Will you be his lawyer, Judy? Please?”

“Of course I will, Mr. D,” Judy answered, and the words weren’t out of her mouth before she was reaching for her briefcase.

And slipping her bare feet into a pair of clunky yellow clogs.

Chapter 3

Pigeon Tony struck Judy as the cutest defendant ever, and she wanted to rescue the little old man the moment she saw him in the interview room of the Roundhouse, Philadelphia’s police administration building. He was only five foot four, probably a hundred and thirty pounds, and he startled as Judy burst into the interview room, lost in a white paper jumpsuit that was way too large for his scrawny neck and narrow chest. His withered arms stuck like twigs from short sleeves, and his knobby wrists were pinched by steel handcuffs. His sunburned pate was dotted with liver spots and streaked by only a few filaments of silvery hair. His peeling nose was small and hooked; his eyes a round, dark brown, almost black, under a short brow. Judy couldn’t explain his superb tan, but she gathered he was called Pigeon because he looked like one.

“Mr. Lucia, I’m a lawyer,” she said, briefcase in hand. “My name is Judy Carrier and I was sent by the DiNunzios. They asked me to come and help you.”

The old man’s only response was to squint at her, and Judy didn’t understand why. Maybe he didn’t speak English. Maybe he didn’t want a lawyer. Maybe she should have worn pantyhose.

“I’m a friend of Mary DiNunzio.” Judy took a seat in the orange bucket chair on the lawyer’s side of the counter. Five ratty interview carrels sat side by side. The interview room was otherwise empty, not for want of felons but for want of lawyers. Few attorneys bothered to come to the bowels of the Roundhouse, preferring to meet their clients where the floor didn’t crawl. “You know Mary DiNunzio, don’t you?”

The old man, still squinting, slowly raised his arm and pointed at Judy with a finger that, though crooked at the knuckle, did not waver. His sleeve slid up his arm when he pointed, revealing a surprisingly wiry knot of biceps and a tattooed crucifix that had gone a blurry blue. But Judy still didn’t understand what he was pointing at.

“Mr. Lucia? What is it?”

“Your, eh, your face,” he said, his Italian accent as thick as tomato sauce. “Your mouth. Is bleeding?”

Judy reddened. The lipliner. The editing pencil. No wonder the cops had recoiled at the sight of her. And she thought it was because she was a lawyer. “No, it’s not bleeding. I’m sorry.” She wiped her mouth quickly, rouging the back of her hand. “Despite appearances, I’m not a clown but a lawyer, and a fairly good one, Mr. Lucia.”

“Mariano tell me. I call him, and he tell me you come. I thank you.” The old man nodded, in a courtly way. “Also you calla me Pigeon Tony. Everybody calla me Pigeon Tony.”

“Well, then, Pigeon Tony, you’re welcome, and I’m happy to represent you,” Judy said, then remembered she could get fired for taking on a nice client. Lately she had been representing corporations, ill-mannered entities by charter. “I’ll have to make sure that my boss says my firm can take your case. I just came down today to make sure you didn’t hurt yourself.”

Pigeon Tony’s brow furrowed in confusion.

Judy reminded herself to edit her words. Her only experience with broken English had been in the legal aid clinic in law school, and Latin hadn’t helped there either. “I mean, hurt your case. Say the wrong thing to the police. You didn’t talk to the police, did you?”

“I no talk. Mariano tell me.”

“Did the police ask you questions about the murder?” She flipped open the latch of her messy briefcase, wrested a legal pad from the debris, and located a Pilot pen strictly by sheer good luck. So what if her briefcase was a little full? Sometimes you had to carry your nest around. Nobody knew better than a military brat how to pitch a tent.

“Si, si, they ask questions.”

“What questions?” Judy was wondering if the cops had tried an end-run around the Miranda warnings, as they still did. Taking advantage of a little old man, an immigrant even. They should be

ashamed. “Lots of questions?”

“I no answer.”

“Good.”

“I no like.”

Judy was getting the hang of the accent thing. “You no like what?”

“Police.”

She smiled as she uncapped the pen and flipped through the pad for a clean slate. “Now what else did the police do?”

“Take me to here, take my hands”—Pigeon Tony held up two small palms so that Judy could see the ink on each finger pad— “take me a picture. Take alla clothes, alla shoes, alla socks. Take blood. Take everything. Everything. No can believe!” His dark eyes rounded with amazement, and Judy gathered he didn’t get out much.

“They took your clothes and your blood for evidence. They always do that. It’s procedure.”

“Evidence?” Pigeon Tony repeated, rolling the unfamiliar word around in his mouth. “What means evidence?”

“Evidence is proof against you. Evidence shows you did the crime.”

“Evidence? Take mutandine!”

“What’s mutandine?” Judy asked, and Pigeon Tony went visibly red in the face, his thin skin a dead giveaway. Mutandine must have meant underwear.

“Forget,” he said quickly, looking away, and Judy suppressed a smile. He was so sweet, she couldn’t believe the police had arrested him for murder. Were they nuts? She was starting to no like police.

“I understand they’re charging you with murder.” Judy checked her notes. “The man they say you killed was eighty years old. Named Angelo Coluzzi. Did I say that right? Coluzzi?” She pronounced it like Coa-lootz-see, to make it sound festive and Italian. “Okay?”

“Si, si. Coluzzi.”

“Good. Upstairs they’ll be processing—getting ready—the charge against you. Do you understand?”

“Si.” Pigeon Tony’s face turned grave. “Murder.”

“Yes, murder, and I have to understand the evidence—the proof— they have against you. I’d like to begin by asking you a few—”

“I kill Coluzzi,” Pigeon Tony interrupted, and Judy’s mouth went dry. She hadn’t heard him right. She couldn’t have heard him right. She fumbled for her voice.

“You didn’t say you murdered Coluzzi, did you?” she asked, her tone unprofessionally aghast. She didn’t know what a lawyer was supposed to do when her client volunteered a confession. Probably shut him up, but that wasn’t Judy’s style. If it was true, it was awful, and she wanted to know why. “Did you say you murdered Coluzzi?”

“No.”

Judy sighed with relief. It must have been the language barrier. “Thank God.”

“I no murder Coluzzi.”

“I didn’t think so.”

“I kill him.” Pigeon Tony nodded firmly, his thin lips forming a determined line, confusing Judy completely.

“Let’s try this again, Mr. Lucia. Tony. Did you kill Angelo Coluzzi? Yes or no?”

“Si, si, I kill him. But”—Pigeon Tony held up a finger, like a warning—“no murder. I no murder!”

“What do you mean?” Judy’s mind reeled. Antitrust beckoned. The Sherman Act was a cakewalk compared to an Italian immigrant. “You killed Coluzzi but you didn’t murder him?”

“Si.”

“That means yes, right?” She wanted to make sure. Clarity would be in order right now, since it was the murder part.

“Si, si. He kill my wife, so I kill him. No è murder.”

Judy’s heart lifted. Maybe it was self-defense. “Where was your wife when Coluzzi killed her? Were you trying to protect your wife at the time? Is that why you killed him?”

“No.”

“No?”

“My wife, she dead sixty years. Murder by Coluzzi.”

Baffled, Judy set down her Pilot pen. “Coluzzi killed your wife sixty years ago, so you killed him today?”

“Si.”

It meant yes, but still. “Why did you wait so long?”

“Si! Si!” Pigeon Tony’s face went suddenly red with emotion. “Sixty years, alla same. Occhio per occhio, dente per dente. Coluzzi big, important man.” Suddenly animated, he puffed out his concave chest. “Fascisti! You know, Fascisti?”

“Yes. Fascists?” Judy racked her brain for Italian history but all she could dredge up was The Sopranos. She thought harder. “You mean, like, Mussolini?”

“Si! Il Duce!” Pigeon Tony stuck out his lower lip, in imitation. “A murderer! He! Not me.”

“I don’t understand—”

“Coluzzi murder my Silvana!” Tears welled up in Pigeon Tony’s eyes, a glistening but unmistakable sheen that he blinked away in obvious shame. His pointy Adam’s apple traveled up and down a stringy neck. “So I kill Coluzzi.”

“Are you saying that this Coluzzi killed your wife, in Italy?”

“Si, si! He murder her!”

“Why did he do that?”

“Because he want her and she no want him! So he kill her!” Pigeon Tony trembled at the thought, a shudder that traveled through his face and chin, emphasizing his frailty, and Judy felt her heart go out to him.

“So you got him back?”

“Si, si.”

Judy understood the scenario, but her chest wrenched with conflict. “So Coluzzi got away with murder?”

“Si, si!”

“What did the police do?”

“Coluzzi the police! Fascisti the police! They no care! I tell them, they do nothing! They laugh!” Bitterness curled his thin lips. “The war come, and alla people, they no care about one girl. You think they care? So Pigeon Tony, he get justice! For Silvana! For Frank, my son!” Tony leaned forward, his manacled hands gripping the Formica counter. “We go now. We tell judge!”

Judy put up her hands. “No! We no tell the judge. We no tell nobody. Anybody.” The double negative was throwing her, as usual. “You didn’t tell the police this, did you?”

Pigeon Tony shook his head. “I no like.”

“No like what?”

“Police.”

She had forgotten. “Okay, now, after they arraign you—charge you—they decide if you make bail. Bail means you get to go free, if you pay money. I think you will get bail, considering your age and lack of criminal record.” Judy caught herself. “You never killed anybody before, did you?”

Pigeon Tony appeared to think a minute. “No.”

“Good. Did you ever commit any other crime?”

“No crime.”

“Excellent. If they give you bail, who will bail you out?”

Pigeon Tony frowned again, uncomprehending.

“Who in your family will come for you? Who will pay money for you to be free? Is there anyone, when we go to the judge?”

“Frank. My grandson. He come.” Pigeon Tony stiffened. “I tell judge.”

“No, you no tell the judge.” Judy had a legal duty to protect him and she wanted to get to the bottom of his story before she condemned him, even for murder. “You have to listen to me. Revenge is no defense to murder, outside of Sicily.”

“Com’e’?”

“You can’t tell the judge. If you do, the police will send you to jail for the rest of your life. You don’t want that to happen, do you? You’ll never see Frank again.” Judy watched as Pigeon Tony’s thin lips pursed, the argument seeming to hit home. “Okay, so we agree. Now, let me go upstairs and see when they’re going to arraign you. You have to promise me that you won’t talk to anybody about this. Do you promise?”

“Si, si. Io lo fatto.”

Judy didn’t have time for the translation. She wanted to get upstairs fast, to learn the evidence against him. “Promise me now.”

Pigeon Tony puckered his lower lip in thought.

“I can’t hear you,” Judy sang out, cupping a hand to her ear, and Pigeon Tony broke into the first smile she’d seen so far.

“Promise lady with big mouth,” he answered, and Judy assumed he meant her lipliner.

Chapter 4

Judy hurried off the elevator at the Roundhouse and followed the oddly hand-scrawled signs to the Homicide Division. They led to a narrow hallway of cheap paneling past a huge black plastic tub of trash sitting right outside a reception area, also cheaply paneled. The small room was covered with signs like POLICE PERSONNEL ONLY and PRIVATE —KEEP OUT, which Judy ignored. The front desk was empty, and she barreled past it. She needed as much information as she could get about the Coluzzi case before she went back to the office and had to account to her boss, Bennie Rosato. She’d been so thrown by Pigeon Tony’s confession, she’d forgotten to get the details of the case. Like how he killed Coluzzi, for instance. Little things.

Judy entered the squad room and, because she’d been up here only twice, took a minute to get her bearings. Not that anything had changed—in the last twenty years, for that matter. Water-stained white curtains barely covered grimy windows; most of the curtain hooks were missing and the drapes hung like gaping wounds from cheap metal valances. Six cluttered desks filled the small room, only haphazardly arranged, and in one case covered with breakfast debris of a cold bacon sandwich, the scent of which lingered unaccountably in the air, mixing with traces of cigar smoke. Battered file cabinets lined the side wall, near the two interview rooms. The place was quiet of ringing phones and empty except for two detectives, who were looking through a boxed file on a desk.

Judy wasn’t surprised at how quiet it was. She’d been around enough to know that the day tour at the Homicide Division was the sleepy shift, not the other way around. Murders generally happened under cover of darkness—who said there was nothing to do in Philadelphia at night—and most detectives spent at least part of the day testifying in court. Whether it was their court appearances or their occupational machismo, Judy didn’t know, but homicide detectives were peacocks. The two in the squad room wore flashy silk ties, well-tailored suits, and too-strong cologne, and they looked up from the file at the same time, staring at the invasion of a young blond lawyer.

Judy stood her ground, even in yellow clogs. Being a blonde was a good thing to be with detectives, good enough to trump being a defense lawyer, and she watched their collective gaze scan her athletic body and stall at her bare legs. But when they reached her footwear, their heads almost exploded, and she was glad she had erased her lipliner.

“I’m a lawyer representing Anthony Lucia,” she said, and nevertheless held her head high. It was her first experience with representing a confessed murderer, and she didn’t find it easy, even if the killer was a cute little old man. “He’s being held in connection with the Coluzzi case.”

The detective on the right—a tall, middle-aged man with slicked-back hair—cocked his head. “You work for Rosato,” he said, and Judy nodded.

“The firm hasn’t entered an appearance,” she said, preserving her job. “But I just met with Mr. Lucia. He told me you asked him some questions, and I was surprised at that. You didn’t question him without counsel, did you?”

“Perish the thought,” the detective said, his smile firmly in place. He turned to the desk behind him, picked up a manila folder, plucked a sheet of paper from it, and handed it to Judy. “Here’s the criminal complaint.”

Judy skimmed the sheet, which said only that defendant Anthony Lucia had been charged with the crime that occurred on April 17, at 712 Cotner Street, an “unlawful homicide.” Judy had thought that was the only kind there was. She needed more information. “You videotaped the interview, didn’t you?”

“It’s procedure.”

“When can I get a copy?”

“Whenever they turn over the other evidence, after the prelim.”

Judy gritted her teeth. They were playing my-testosterone-can-beat-up-your-testosterone, and she wasn’t as deficient as she appeared. “You study to be this difficult, or does it just come naturally?”

The detective didn’t react. “We asked a coupla routine questions, completely within our prerogative.”

Judy felt torn. What evidence did they have? How strong was their case? Even the Philadelphia police could convict a guy who actually did it. “What’s the basis for the charge?”

“You’ll see when we charge him, around three o’clock, Ms.—”

“Carrier, but Judy’s fine.” She sighed. “Look, I’m standing here and you’re standing here. You can’t tell me?”

“Ain’t the way we do things,” the detective said matter-of-factly, and the older detective beside him gave him a nudge.

“The junior varsity’s in, Sammy,” he muttered, not really under his breath, but Judy ignored it.

“Do you have any physical evidence against Mr. Lucia?”

“You’ll find that out, too. Later.”

“Are Detectives Kovich or Brinkley around?” Judy knew them from the last case, and they would help if they could. She went up on tiptoe and glanced past the detectives, whose expressions soured.

“The Stan and Reg Show? Not here. They’re out of town, and they do things different than I do anyway.”

Judy knew what he meant. If you like them, you’ll hate me.

“In any event, I caught this one. I’m the assigned. I’m the one you have to deal with.”

“Listen, Detective—”

“Wilkins. Sam Wilkins.”

“Wilkins. Mr. Lucia is not a young man, and I’m concerned about the state of his health. The stress of this—”

“Spare me.” The detective snorted. “That old bird’s tough as nails. He’ll be dancing on my grave.”

Suddenly the detectives looked past Judy, and she turned, feeling a presence behind her. A tall, good-looking man in Levi’s approached almost out of breath, his jeans jacket flapping to the side in his haste. When he got closer, Judy could see that his eyes were dark with anger, barely controlled.

“Excuse me,” the man said brusquely to the detectives. “I’m looking for Anthony Lucia. I heard you arrested him. I want him freed.”

Judy realized who it must be, and even recognized a flicker of the grandfather in the grandson, though he was much taller, maybe six foot three, and handsome. “You must be Frank Lucia,” she said, extending a hand, but he squeezed it only absently, his grip rough with thick skin, his gaze still burning into the detectives.

“Where is my grandfather?” he demanded. “I want to see him. I want him out of here.”

“Relax, pal. Mr. Lucia’s in custody, and he’ll be arraigned at the end of the day. This is his lawyer, Dr. Judy.” The detective gestured in a professional way, and Frank looked over as the introduction registered, his eyes widening with recognition.

“Jeez! You’re Judy! I’m sorry, you’re Mary’s friend. Thanks so much for coming.” Frank burst into a tense grin and suddenly grabbed Judy by the shoulders, pulling her easily into a brief hug. An astonished Judy caught a quick whiff of onion breath before she landed in a wall of hard denim. She recovered her dignity only when Frank set her back on her feet.

“Uh, that’s okay,” she stammered, finger-combing her hair into place, aware of the detectives watching them.

“You know Matty DiNunzio. Mariano. He said you would help.” Frank was talking too fast, his emotions clearly all over the lot. “He said you were a terrific lawyer.”

“Well, I hope so.” Judy swallowed hard. She was getting blocked in on the representation, and of a guilty client. The detectives were taking mental notes. “Frank, maybe we should discuss this in private.”

“After I see my grandfather.”

“You can’t, not yet.”

“Where is he?”

“Downstairs.”

“You’re kidding me. He’s right downstairs and I can’t see him?”

Judy suppressed her smile. Frank sounded like her, even to her. “Only lawyers can meet with defendants before arraignment.”

“Lawyers can meet, but not family? A stranger can meet with my grandfather, but I can’t?” Frank’s head snapped angrily toward the detectives. “What the hell—”

Judy interrupted, “I saw him, Frank, and he’s fine. Now, we really should go.” She wanted them both out of there, and flared her eyes meaningfully. Frank wasn’t so hotheaded that he didn’t get the meaning.

“Yeah, maybe.” His glare fixed on the detectives. “Take care of my grandfather.”

“Ain’t my job, buddy,” Detective Wilkins said flatly, and Frank moved instantly toward the detective.

“What did you say?” he demanded, but Judy grabbed his arm before he assaulted anybody wearing a badge or a bad tie.

“Let’s go, Frank,” she said quickly, yanking him back and steering him out of the squad room. She tried not to feel self-conscious about her hand on him, since he had already broken the touch barrier. In her experience, Italians didn’t have a touch barrier anyway.

She managed to get him down the hall and didn’t let go until she had him in an elevator crowded with uniformed cops. Neither Judy nor Frank spoke, and they rode down grimly, with Frank regaining his composure apparently by his looking at his hands. They were unusually thick-skinned for a man his age, which Judy judged to be about hers or a little older. He was built like a weight lifter, though the light in his dark eyes struck her as decidedly intelligent. But maybe that was because he was such a total hunk. She couldn’t get a date at gunpoint lately, which was a factor.

His faded jeans looked dusty except for a darker patch at the knee, and Judy guessed he’d been wearing knee pads while he worked. A stonewashed green T-shirt, black beeper attached to his belt, and pocket cell phone didn’t give further clues as to what he did for a living. He wore tan Timberland work boots, heavily creased at the ankle and dusted with a fine gray silt, and she tried to figure him out. What he did, who he was. And how he would take the news that his grandfather could die in prison, or worse.

“You did say my grandfather was okay?” he said softly, almost reading her mind, as they stepped off the elevator. If Frank’s eyes were angry before, they were full of worry now, and something else. Fear.

“He’s fine, but we should talk. I am concerned about his case.”

“Sure.” Frank reached the door and held it open for her. “But there’s somewhere we have to go first. My truck’s in the lot.”

Chapter 5

I can’t take long. I have to get back to the office before the arraignment, which will be around three this afternoon,” Judy told him, though she was intrigued.

“No problem.” They left the Roundhouse and crossed the parking lot in front, which was overflowing with cops and police personnel enjoying the spring weather, even among the squad cars and pool cars. A white Ford F-250 pickup stood out from the dark sedans, in the far space under a WORKING PRESS ONLY sign. Frank made a beeline for it, with Judy only a step behind.

“So you’re a reporter?” she asked.

“No. I needed a parking space.” Frank yanked a ring of keys from his back pocket, chirped the truck unlocked, and went to the passenger side to open the door. “Climb in, but watch out for the laptop.”

“You don’t have to keep getting doors for me,” she said, and Frank smiled.

“I know that.” He walked around the dinged bed of the truck to the driver’s side and got in. “I didn’t do it because I had to.”

Judy withheld comment as she got into the truck, which was an office on wheels. What did this guy do for a living? The front seat was a soft gray bench, but between the driver and passenger sat a desk-size console that held an open Gateway laptop with a slim portable printer wired to the cigarette lighter. There was another cell phone and a walkie-talkie with a stubby antenna. Judy gave up. “You a drug dealer?” she asked, and he laughed as he turned on the ignition.

“Of course not! I’m a stonemason.” He picked up the cell phone on the console. “Excuse me just one minute. I have to rearrange my schedule to be able to come at three.” He pressed a speed-dial button. “I don’t want you to think I’m one of those assholes who’s on the cell phone all the time.”

“I know how it is,” she said, as they pulled away. And she did, which meant that she knew Frank would be on the phone the remainder of the trip, and he was, answering questions, ordering materials, and explaining estimates for retaining walls. At one point Judy held the steering wheel while he printed out a purchase order and argued with ease over a late shipment. She amused herself by checking her own voicemail, not to be outdone in the cell phone department, and calling the receptionist at work to ascertain that Bennie remained in deposition. The cat was still away.

Judy looked out the window while the big truck sped smoothly out of the city and into the western suburbs, where the asphalt turned to strip malls of Staples stores, Chili’s restaurants, and Gap outlets. Judy had lived in twenty different states growing up, as her father was promoted within the navy, and even in her short time had seen how similar everything had become. Ironically, instead of making her feel more at home anywhere, it made her feel less so. She kept looking out the window, and soon the strip malls became green rolling hills with larger houses. Judy began to like playing hooky, driving around in a noisy truck with a stonemason, who was attractive despite his onion breath.

Frank pushed the cell phone button to end a call and gave a final sigh as the truck slowed to a stop at a traffic light. “Sorry about that,” he said, braking. Every time the truck halted, something rolled around in the pickup’s bed. “I wanted to clear the deck completely, and I don’t like to leave my guys on the job without me. Dry-laid is trickier than it looks.”

“What’s dry-laid?”

“New England dry-laid. Stone walls, no mortar. That’s what I do. That’s all I do now. I used to lay brick and block like my father and my grandfather, but it’s boring. Dry-laid is like fitting a puzzle together. You use fieldstones or whatever’s indigenous. You have to think. My guys, they’re good, but nobody’s as good without the boss around.”

“I bet,” Judy said, as if it didn’t apply to her.

“Now I’m okay for a few hours.” Frank turned the truck into a driveway on the right and cruised past the NO ENTRANCE sign. “Here we are.”

Judy pushed the button and rolled down the window. They were entering a memorial park, lovely and green, dotted with somber gray monuments. Many of the monuments bore flowers, and some had small flags that flapped in a soft breeze. The air wafted unaccountably sweet. “What are we doing here?” she asked, surprised.

“Showing you why my grandfather killed Angelo Coluzzi.”

Frank walked before Judy and stood at the front of the grave with his head bowed for a minute. Judy looked past him to the black granite monument, which sat flush with the grassy carpet:

LUCIA FRANK GEMMA

United in life, united in death.

It took Judy a minute to understand what she was seeing. The graves of Frank’s father and mother. The day etched into the glossy granite was a single one, January 25, and the date was last year’s. Judy’s heart went still. Frank had lost both of his parents. Had Pigeon Tony lost a son?

Frank lifted his head and turned. Pain softened his rugged features, but his eyes remained dry. “Come forward, it’s okay,” he said, motioning, and Judy stepped toward him.

“I’m sorry.”

“Me, too. But that’s not why I brought you here.” Frank cleared his throat but his voice sounded predictably hoarse. “My parents died last year, in an accident. The truck, it was my dad’s old truck, flipped over an overpass on the expressway. It happened late at night. The truck turned into a fireball. They were coming home late from a wedding in Jersey, and the cops think my father fell asleep at the wheel.”

Judy remained silent. She didn’t know what to say. The breeze was so gentle, the air so fresh. The only sound was Frank’s quiet voice, his account continuing tersely.

“Either that or he had a heart attack at the wheel, I don’t know exactly. It doesn’t matter. I had them cremated, which was . . . well, a necessity. Only that turned out to be a problem, at least as far as my grandfather is concerned.”

“Why?”

“See, my grandfather, he didn’t believe it was an accident. He thought my parents were murdered. An autopsy might have proved they weren’t. And he blamed himself for their death.”

Judy shook her head. “Who would murder your parents?”

“Angelo Coluzzi.” Frank scanned the oak trees in the distance, then a sun-dappled lawn that stretched over a small hill. “This goes back so many years, decades, to Italy. My grandfather told you about Coluzzi, didn’t he?”

Judy paused. “What your grandfather told me is privileged. It wouldn’t be ethical to reveal anything, even to you.”

“I respect that.” Frank nodded, with a half smile, turning to her. His eyes were an earth brown and the amused crinkling at the corners told Judy he was older than she’d thought at first, maybe forty. “Does this mean you’re a lawyer, but with ethics?”

“It happens.”

“No it doesn’t.” Frank laughed, a deep, masculine sound that Judy liked. She always thought you could tell a lot about a man by his laugh, but all she could tell by Frank’s laugh was that she hadn’t dated anyone in a long time.

“I’m an ethical lawyer, and as an ethical matter, you can tell me stuff. And I can listen. Ethically, of course.”

“I talk and you listen? Can women do that?”

Judy laughed, then sobered at the thought they were flirting, graveside. At least she suspected she was flirting, though she hadn’t meant to. In legal terms, she didn’t have the intent to flirt; it had sneaked up on her. She realized she’d liked Frank from the moment he tried to deck the cop. “How about you talk, I’ll listen? We’ll leave the politics out of it.”

“Excellent.” Frank turned again to his parents’ grave, when his smile faded. “Maybe we should take a walk.”

“Good idea,” she said, and fell into step beside Frank as he strolled down the grassy row between the graves toward a gravel road. He seemed to breathe a little easier.

“My grandfather’s wife—my grandmother—was killed by Angelo Coluzzi, in Italy. My grandmother had been seeing Coluzzi when she met my grandfather, and she accepted my grandfather’s marriage proposal over Coluzzi’s. Coluzzi could never live it down. He lost face. He hated my grandfather for it. And he killed her. Everybody in the neighborhood knows it.”

“What neighborhood?”

“Our block of South Philly. It’s one of the most solidly Italian blocks in South Philly, still. The Korean and the Vietnamese, they’re right next door, but this block is so solid that everybody came from the same region in Italy, from Abruzzo. All the families knew each other over there and everybody knew the Coluzzis, a wealthy family. A powerful family. Fascists.”

“I see,” Judy said, hearing an echo of his grandfather’s contempt in Frank’s voice.

“There was no prosecution of the murder. The Coluzzis had the juice to keep a lid on it. Their power was increasing, and when war broke out, my grandmother, she just got lost in the shuffle.” His voice trailed off for a moment, and Judy suppressed the urge to ask him for details. They walked down the gravel footpath as it wound past low-lying hostas, sharp fronds of tiger lilies yet to bloom, and purple alyssum that crept over rocks at the borders. The air under the trees they passed was cool. Frank’s Timberlands crunched on the gravel, and Judy was glad for the first time today that she’d worn clogs.

After a time Frank said, “It was a different world then, and another time. My grandfather tried to get her murder prosecuted and almost lost his own life in the process.”

“How?”

“They threatened him. Vandalized his house. Fire-bombed his car.”

“Who did?”

“Angelo Coluzzi, or men who worked for him. Blackshirts.”

“How do you know? Were they caught?”

“Of course not. We just know. Everybody knows, even today.”

Judy raised an eyebrow. It sounded like assumption piled on assumption, but this wasn’t the time to argue it. She needed information. “So what did your grandfather do about it?”

“He just moved. He didn’t retaliate, even when they bombed his car. He left the country with his son—my father, Frank Sr.— who was two at the time. They settled here. Gave up farming, started laying brick, like lots of immigrants from the region. My grandfather tried to accept what had happened to his wife. He went on and raised his son, and his birds.”

“Birds?”

“He keeps pigeons. Homing pigeons, but they race. He’s amazing at it. You should see. He spends all his time outside with them, teaching them, exercising them, tossing them—”

“Tossing?”

“It means letting them out on training runs, so they learn how to find their way back to the loft. He spends hours sitting with them outside, watching them fly.” Frank brightened at the thought, but it wasn’t the type of detail Judy needed right now.

“You were saying, about when he immigrated.” They walked down the path into the sun, and Frank winced at the sudden light.

“Then there was the accident. My father, my mother. I know it was just an accident but my grandfather, he believed Angelo Coluzzi did it. You must have heard of the family. Angelo, and his two sons, John and Marco. They own a big construction company in South Philly. They build strip malls and have houses in the Estates. Have you heard of them?”

Judy shook her head. She knew next to nothing about construction.

“They’re a sick, sick family.” Frank was still wincing, and Judy realized it wasn’t the sunlight. Duh. “My grandfather believes Angelo Coluzzi bombed my parents’ truck, like they had with his car, in Italy. And after they died, he just went downhill. He said it never would have happened if he’d retaliated for my grandmother. He thinks if he’d honored the vendetta, his son would be alive today.”

“Vendetta? What vendetta?” Judy had heard of it from the movies but couldn’t believe it had any application today.

“It’s a blood feud. A vindication of your rights, of your family’s rights. An eye for an eye. It grew up in a country where the law was of no help, not to the little guy like my grandfather. He doesn’t look to the law to save him, or to punish him. A vendetta has to be honored, in my culture, his culture.”

Judy was thinking that Italians raised emotions to an art form, but didn’t say anything for fear of being hit, or hugged.

“And so he just lost it. After my parents died, he became more and more depressed. And he was getting older. It didn’t help.” Frank stopped short on the path and turned to her, in appeal. “He’s a peaceful man. You know, he can’t even cull out his own pigeons. He won’t kill any of them. He keeps the slow ones and the old ones. He’s gentle. You can see that, can’t you?”

“Yes,” Judy answered, meaning it. “It was hard to imagine him killing anybody.”

“He wouldn’t have killed Coluzzi if he didn’t think he was put to it. He didn’t, all those years. Think about that. The Coluzzis moved to Philadelphia, only two blocks away, and every day my grandfather lived with the fact that his wife’s murderer was his neighbor. My father lived with that knowledge and took grief from the Coluzzis for years. They practically ruined his business, but my grandfather wouldn’t let him take revenge. My grandfather had a right to take revenge, and he never used it.”

Judy looked over. “Nobody has a right to kill anybody else.”

“Sure they do. In war, or in self-defense. To satisfy the death penalty. Even if you’re an abused wife. This society, this culture, kills all the time. Isn’t that right?”

“But—”

“There’s more death, more killing, in America than anywhere on the face of the earth. We justify killing in lots of circumstances. So why not if somebody kills your wife, your son, and his wife? Don’t you have a right to kill?”

“No, you don’t, and in any event your grandfather didn’t know that Coluzzi killed your parents. In fact, you think he did.”

“But my grandfather takes it as gospel, and for all I know, he may be right. You have to look at it his way, if it’s his state of mind you’re talking about, don’t you?” Frank’s eyes searched hers with an openness Judy found disarming, but her legal training resisted his words.

“People can’t go around killing each other. That’s what a system of laws is designed to prevent.”

“But they do, in my grandfather’s world, go around killing each other. That’s what happened to him. And now the ones who wronged him have been punished.” Frank shook his head, and a shadow from the long branches of the oak tree above flickered over his pained features. “What good would it do to punish my grandfather? He’s not going to hurt anybody else.”

“That’s not the point.”

“No?” Frank looked at the miniature American flags fluttering when a breeze came along. His gaze rested on a monument that read CIARDI, behind a spray of tall, lavender irises, some of their flowers shriveled to brown and curling at the edges. “The man is seventy-nine. This is what’s next for him—old flowers and gravestones. This cemetery. Next to his son.”

Judy couldn’t suppress her sympathy, then forced herself to think like a lawyer, without a trace of human emotion. “None of this will help me defend him.”

“Are you sure?” Frank turned suddenly. “I was thinking maybe you could try an insanity defense or something like that.”

“The legal standard for insanity is too high.” Judy shook her head. “God knows what evidence they have against your grandfather, but if this is his story, it doesn’t provide any defense at all. There’s no legal excuse for murder that fits here.”

“Not even a broken heart?” Frank asked, and he looked at Judy as if it were more than rhetorical.

“Not even that.”

“So where’s the justice, in the law?”

Judy didn’t know how to answer. Her only certainty was that she wanted to take the case.

All she had to do was convince the boss.

Chapter 6

“You did what?” Bennie shouted, and Judy had a déjà vu. Either that or Bennie had said the same thing to her 3,462,430 times before. Judy fleetingly considered putting You did what? on a T-shirt, but then she’d get fired for sure. Bennie was that angry. “You went to the Roundhouse? You had no right to do that!”

Judy faced Bennie Rosato in the boss’s office, sitting across from a large desk that was almost as cluttered as Judy’s. Bennie’s office was the same size as an associate’s, evidence of her egalitarian ethic, and her bookshelves were stuffed with casebooks, law reviews, and black binders of speeches and articles. Awards from civil rights organizations and First Amendment groups covered the walls. In a far corner sat a pile of running clothes and Sauconys, their rubber-soled toes curled up from wear. In short, it could have been Judy’s office. She didn’t get it. She and Bennie were more alike than they were different, so why did they fight so much?

“You met with the defendant’s family? You went to a grave site? You told him you’d take the case, at his parents’ grave? And you don’t have a single detail of the crime or the evidence against this man!”

Judy swallowed hard. “Bennie, I swear, I made it very clear that the firm hasn’t filed an entry of appearance.”

“Oh, please! It’s just technical whether you entered an appearance. You were there. You appeared.” Bennie’s blue eyes flared, and she yanked off a khaki suit jacket and smoothed it out before she jammed the neck down onto a coatrack behind her leather chair.

“I told the cops it was only temporary.”

“Which means nothing. Besides, it’s not just the cops, it’s the client. It’s the grandson. You went to a grave?” Bennie ran a hand through a tangle of light hair that fell to shoulders sagging in disappointment under a linen shirt. “We’re blocked in. You don’t appear and then disappear. At least I don’t. How do you think a law firm gets any credibility? Our integrity’s on the line. My integrity.”

“Look, it’s me on the line, not you. I got us into this, and I’ll get us out. I want to represent Pigeon Tony.” Judy felt good taking a stand, but Bennie looked underwhelmed.

“Oh, you do?” Bennie paced beside her chair, too aggravated to stay still. At six feet tall, a muscular ex-rower and all-around tough-as-nails trial lawyer, Bennie Rosato intimidated associates, opposing counsel, and major felons. Everybody except Judy, who had yet to figure out why she wasn’t as scared as she should be. Maybe after a childhood filled with lieutenant colonels, she could handle a pissed-off lawyer.

“Ask me if I care what you want,” Bennie continued. “I own this firm. I employ you. That means you’ll represent who I tell you to represent.”

“You said you wanted us to develop our own clients,” Judy argued, though she knew she’d be better shutting up, like Ali letting Foreman punch himself out. Yet she couldn’t help but swing. Maybe it was the boxing lessons she’d taken. “I would think you’d welcome some initiative. Most firms think it’s a basis for partnership decisions.”

“In my firm, you bring in the client, then you take it to me, and I decide if you can take it. You don’t decide on your own.” Bennie glared. “And were you thinking about making partner when you took the case? Is that what you’re trying to sell me?”

Judy felt her face flush. What was the matter with her? Why was she making such a bogus argument? “Not really.”

“Then don’t argue what you don’t believe in. Rule number one, in law and in life.” Bennie’s voice went brittle as ice. Arms akimbo, her hands clutched her hips, wrinkling her skirt. “Now, why did you go down to the Roundhouse? And why do you want to represent Lucia?”

Judy tried to collect her thoughts. This was serious stuff. She had never asked to represent a client before, especially one who was guilty. It felt like the onset of adulthood, but maybe growing up didn’t mean automatically resisting everything Bennie said. Judy flashed on her first image of Pigeon Tony, so small in the overlarge prison jumpsuit. Then the granite memorial to the Lucias, so eloquent in its dark silence. And finally Frank’s grief at the site.

“Well?”

Judy took a deep breath. “If what they tell me is true, then there is an injustice here, and I think I want to help Pigeon Tony. I mean, if it’s true, he’s an old man who had a lifelong heartache. He tried to set it aside, and that effort ended up in the death of his own son and daughter-in-law. He chose peace, and all he got was war. Most people who kill are bad men. Instead, Pigeon Tony seems like a good man, who killed someone.” Judy heard herself, and only then did she realize that that was how she felt. Insight wasn’t her strong suit, but she was learning, and a new certainty steeled her. “Even if you fire me, I’ll still take the case.”

“You would?”

“Yes.”

Bennie stood stock-still. The crease in her forehead relaxed, and the angry redness ebbed from her cheeks. Judy hoped it wasn’t the peace that comes over bosses before they shitcan you.

“Please don’t fire me, by the way. I couldn’t find another firm that would let me dress as funny.”

Bennie laughed softly and sat down in her deep chair. “Oh, well.”

“Does this mean I can keep him?”

Bennie didn’t answer but picked up a coffee mug from her desk, which read I CAN SMELL FEAR. Judy was pretty sure it was a joke. Bennie tilted it to peek inside. “Empty. What else can go wrong?”

“I’ll take care of him. I’ll walk him every day.”

Bennie half smiled, gazing into the empty mug as if coffee would materialize through an act of sheer will. “Can Lucia afford us?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”

“Of course you didn’t.”

“I’ll find out, if you let me keep him.”

The coffee mug clattered to an upright position. “All right, fine. You win, but you’ll do it under my supervision.”

“Wahoo!”

“Hold your applause.” Bennie waved her into silence. “You’ll report to me at every stage of the proceedings.”

“Agreed.”

“You’ll still be responsible for your other matters. You have that antitrust article to do—get a draft to me on time. The journal editor told me they’ve been waiting on it to cite-check. Don’t screw around.” Bennie thought a minute. “As I recall, you have seven other fairly active cases, all civil. They have to be worked, just as before. Those clients were there first and they didn’t kill anybody.”

“Yes, sir.”

Bennie ignored it. “Finally, since you didn’t bother to see if Lucia could pay for your services, your services to him are free. That means the time you spend on this matter is your own. You bill none of it, to him or to me. That’ll teach you.”

It took Judy aback, but she saw the rightness of it. “Fair enough. My money where my mouth is.”

“And you’re on a short leash. Stay in touch on every decision. That’s your final punishment for showing initiative. You have to spend time with me.”

“What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger,” Judy said, then ducked as a pencil came flying at her.

“Don’t press your luck, Carrier. This firm is doing better than when we started. You ain’t the only law review editor in the sea. Now get out of my office. One of us has to make some money.” Bennie hit a key on her keyboard, opening her e-mail, and Judy rose happily, despite the situation. She had gotten the case, even if she’d have to work her ass off. But there was a problem, and it nagged at her.

“One last question. What do I do about representing a guilty defendant?”

“Why are you asking me?” Bennie didn’t look away from her e-mail. “You took the case, you have to answer it for yourself.”

Judy blinked at the sharpness of the response. So much for bonding. “Uh, well, I mean, I know he’s entitled to a defense, but I also know he’s guilty. It bothers me, even though it’s not supposed to, as a legal matter.”

“You always were academic, Carrier, so here’s the short course.” Bennie clicked away, responding to one e-mail after another. “Under the Code of Professional Responsibility, your only ethical constraint is that you can’t put him up on the stand and elicit that he’s innocent if you know he’s guilty. That’s suborning perjury, essentially permitting a known falsehood to go to the court. And obviously, Code or no, I wouldn’t represent to the jury in your opening or closing that he’s innocent.”

“I wouldn’t do that.”

“I didn’t think so. You’re a lousy liar anyway. I don’t know how you got out of law school.” Bennie hit “send” and opened the next e-mail, and Judy suddenly didn’t know how to talk to her.

“I meant more . . . as an emotional matter. Have you ever represented a guilty defendant?”

“I did in the old days, when I took mostly murder cases. Frankly, it’s why I got out.” Bennie’s large hands covered the keyboard as she typed another response, giving no indication she remembered that anybody else shared the room.

“So how did you handle it?” Judy asked anyway. “Defending the principle, not the person? Innocent until proven guilty?”

“It doesn’t matter how I dealt with it,” Bennie answered, typing away. “It only matters how you deal with it. You want to defend a guilty man? Do it your way.”

Judy detected a change in Bennie’s voice. It softened, though she still didn’t look up from her computer. “Can you give me a hint or is that against the rules?”

Her fingers poised expertly over the keyboard, Bennie raised her eyes, and Judy was surprised to see them filled with concern, not indifference. “I told you, don’t argue what you don’t believe in. The converse is also true. Do you believe in him?”

“I think so.”

“Figure it out. Figure out if he’s guilty or innocent, in your own mind. But don’t analyze it as a legal matter or an academic question. That’s too abstract, too safe. Don’t be a judge, there’ll be a judge there already. He’s the one in black. You be the advocate.”

Judy was understanding. She knew she tended to be a little academic. It had gotten her A’s in law school, but nowhere else. “But let’s say that I decide that he’s innocent, in my own mind. What good does that do him?”

“It will help you build a defense. If you believe in him, your conviction will carry through to the judge and the jury. In your voice, in your manner, in everything you do. If you don’t believe in him, Lucia doesn’t have a chance.” Bennie’s attention returned to her monitor. “And you’re the worst thing that ever happened to him.”

The words shut Judy down, and she stood rooted for a minute, listening to the quiet tapping of the keys. Outside the door, phones rang and lawyers yapped, but the workaday sounds receded. Judy had the sinking feeling she had bitten off more than she could chew—and she had one of the biggest mouths in the city.

“Don’t you have an arraignment to go to?” Bennie asked, breaking the silence. “It’s tough to get bail for murder. Wear a suit jacket over your dress. And lose the shoes. You can borrow my brown pumps from the closet in reception. I got a whole second wardrobe in there. You’re welcome to all of it.”

Judy checked her watch. It was almost three. She had to get downtown. She’d have to set aside her angst and her clogs. She murmured a hurried thank-you and let herself out of the office as Bennie returned to her e-mail.

Judy couldn’t know that after she left, Bennie spent a long time staring at the computer screen, unable to write a single word.

Chapter 7

The press thronged outside the Criminal Justice Center, spilling off the curb and onto Filbert Street, a colonial street wide enough to accommodate only a single horse and buggy, not reporters and their egos. Both blocked traffic, waiting for something to happen, chatting in the sunshine and blowing puffs of cigarette smoke into the clear air. Judy wondered what case they were feeding on this time.

“There she is!” a photographer with a light meter around his neck shouted, turning to Judy. “Ms. Carrier, just one shot!” “Over here, Ms. Carrier!”

Judy was surprised but didn’t break stride. She couldn’t, in Bennie’s too-big pumps. She hurried ahead, dragging her heels across the cobblestones, feeling like a kid dressing up as a lawyer, in case anybody missed the point. Her thoughts raced ahead. How did the press know about the case? Why did they care? They were all turning to her. Reporters flicked aside their cigarettes. Cameramen hoisted video cameras to their shoulders. Stringers surged toward her with notebooks in hand. She put her head down and wobbled through the crowd as it rushed to meet her.

“Ms. Carrier, is Bennie Rosato on this case for Tony Lucia?” “Ms. Carrier, is he guilty or innocent?” “Judy, is Mary DiNunzio gonna work with you on the case?” “Ms. Carrier, the Coluzzi family is already on record as saying your client’s the killer. Any comment?”

Judy plowed shakily ahead, taking a bead on the brass revolving door at the courthouse entrance. It wasn’t the worst thing to be swarmed by reporters. Bennie and Mary never liked it, but Judy had played coed rugby in her time. Reporters jostled her, but she jostled them back. Justice as contact sport. She got bumped in the arm by a TV camera but didn’t stop to flip the bird. It might not look professional on tape.

“Ms. Carrier, what do you think about the Commonwealth’s evidence?” “Will Mr. Lucia plead guilty?” “Do you think he’ll get bail?”

“No comment!” Judy shouted, hustling toward the entrance. Over the door the stained-glass mural caught the sunlight in vivid yellows, blues, and golds, but she didn’t pause to enjoy it as she usually did. She had a pigeon to defend, and from the research she had done, it was iffy whether he’d get bail. The case law was against it; her only hope was his age and record. The reporters bumped her around and shouted questions she wouldn’t answer, to the amusement of a blue sea of cops in summer uniforms, waiting by the door to be called to testify. A couple of civilians stood nearest the door with them, and Judy had almost tottered to the threshold when she felt a strong hand on her arm and looked over in irritation.

“No comment,” she said, but the man with the grip on her arm didn’t look like a reporter. He was middle-aged and heavyset, with greased hair and a polyester polo shirt. His eyes were brown slits and his expression looked distinctly unfriendly to Judy. “Let go of my arm,” she said, wrenching it free.

“Just wanted to say hello to you, Miss Carrier.” He smiled for the cameras. Judy heard the whining of motor drives and the whirring of videotape recording the moment. “My name’s John Coluzzi. My father was Angelo Coluzzi. You heard of him. He was murdered by your client.”

Judy flushed. There was nothing she could say. It was all true. Her face felt aflame.

“He broke my father’s neck, Miss Carrier. Snapped it like it was one of his birds.”

Judy’s mouth went dry. Was that how Pigeon Tony had done it? It seemed inconceivable.

“I come down here to see what kind of piece-of-shit lawyer you were. You oughta be ashamed of yourself,” Coluzzi said, almost spitting in fresh sorrow, and Judy fumbled for words she felt compelled to say, because the cameras were watching them. Her client’s life was at stake, and this tape could be Film at 11.

“I’m sorry for your loss, Mr. Coluzzi,” she said, and broke away, hurrying for the entrance to the courthouse. Not knowing who was the bad guy, Angelo Coluzzi or Pigeon Tony.

And feeling suddenly that she was worse than both of them put together.

The arraignment courtroom in the basement of the Criminal Justice Center defied the TV stereotype of how a courtroom should look, ironically because it was a TV studio. Philadelphia, like most major American cities, had recently adopted arraignment by television, so that the arraignment courtroom had become a stage set, the same width but only half as long as the conventional courtroom. The bar of the court was separated from the gallery by a wall-to-wall span of soundproof glass, and hidden microphones carried the judge’s words to the gallery, though not vice versa.

The courtroom contained the typical judge’s dais and counsel tables, but a huge television near the dais dominated the room. The only program playing was The Defendant Show. Each defendant appeared in huge close-up on the monitor while the charges against him were read, and he got only three minutes of face time, less than the average bank of commercials. Defendants appeared one after the next, sometimes thirty in a row, and when they were finished, the bail commissioner could be heard to say, “Get off the screen.”

Judy, entering the slick courtroom set, shuddered at the sight. Not only was it bizarre, it was unconstitutional; if the defendant wanted to consult with his lawyer, he could do so only by a special telephone in the cell, and his guard would hear anything he said. Likewise, if she wanted to advise him, she could use the phone, but the entire courtroom—including the bail commissioner, her opponent the Commonwealth, and even the gallery— could hear everything she said. Judy thought it violated the right to counsel, but nobody was asking her or had the money to bring a test case against the procedure, which had gained nationwide acceptance in all its variations. The government had gotten away with it only because arraignments were considered a routine criminal procedure, but to Judy no procedure was routine if somebody lost his liberty.

She walked down the aisle, her ankles hurting and her feeling of unease intensifying. The gallery was oddly packed, with spectators sitting shoulder to shoulder, jammed together in light clothes. Why was everybody here? Could this really be for her case? And who had told the reporters to come? She flashed on John Coluzzi outside the courthouse and felt her own face grow hot. Then she thought of Bennie and what she’d said, If you don’t believe in him, Lucia doesn’t have a chance.

Judy shook it off as she caught Frank’s eye in the front row on the right. Turning only slightly in his seat, his jeans jacket replaced by a corduroy sport jacket, he smiled with the tension of the moment, his dark eyes obviously pained. In contrast, Mr. DiNunzio sat next to him in the front row with a group of older men, and when he spotted her, started pumping his hand with an enthusiasm usually reserved for the President of the United States. In a better mood Judy would have laughed.

She strode toward them, noticing that every head on the right turned toward her. At first she thought it was her brown pumps attracting the attention, until she realized that spectators on that side of the gallery—old men, women, young children, and family of all kinds—were gazing at her adoringly, as if she were a bride coming down an aisle. Evidently word had spread that she was defending Pigeon Tony, and the whole village had turned out. Luckily Judy reached the bar of the court before anybody burst into applause.

Mr. DiNunzio rose to his heavy orthopedic shoes and hugged her instantly, squeezing Frank’s head between them. “Judy, I’m so happy to see you. Thank you so much,” he said, though the words got trapped somewhere in Judy’s hair.

“That’s okay, Mr. DiNunzio. Everything is going be okay.” She was thinking just the opposite, but she said it reflexively, breathing in his smell of scented mothballs and fresh starch, and patting his back through the wool sweater he wore no matter what season. It was brown, as they all were, a lumpy cardigan that felt to Judy like a security blanket, even though he wasn’t even her father. Under it he had on a white shirt with a knotted tie and old-fashioned brown pants, and Judy had the sense that it was his church clothes. She gentled him back into the pew. “Just sit down and leave it to me. We’re on the case officially now.”

“Thank God. Thank you. And my wife, she says to tell you hello. She stayed home today, with Mary.” He sounded apologetic and seemed not to realize that the spectators in the gallery were craning their necks to overhear their conversation. “She wished she could be here, you know that. They both do. But Judy, you understand.”

“Of course I do, my goodness. And thanks for taking such wonderful care of my best friend.” Out of the corner of her eye Judy checked the television monitor, but it wasn’t showing Pigeon Tony yet. The face of a young black woman filled the screen, and she was tearful. Her lawyer, a public defender, argued her case for bail on the other side of the plastic divider, his mouth moving like a TV on mute.

“I want you to meet my friends, Judy,” Mr. DiNunzio said, turning to his right. Beside him sat a row of men easily his age or in their eighties. They were dressed remarkably like him, with sweaters over white shirts and thin ties left over from a working life in a different era. Mr. DiNunzio waved a wrinkled hand at the man closest to him, who was shaped like a friendly meatball. “This here is my friend Tony LoMonaco from down the block. He knows Pigeon Tony from the club.”

“The club?” Judy doubted it was the kind of club her parents meant when they said “the club.”

“The pigeon-racing club, you know,” Mr. DiNunzio said, and Judy remembered.

“Of course. Happy to meet you, Mr. LoMonaco.” She shook his hand, catching a whiff of the cigar smoke that clung to his clothes, and surmised that he was Tony-From-Down-The-Block of cigar-buying fame.

Judy itched to finish the pleasantries. She had an arraignment to prepare for, at least mentally, and an unusual case of courtroom jitters. The encounter with John Coluzzi had rattled her, and her peripheral vision had found him sitting in the front row of the gallery on the left side of the courtroom. A shorter man sitting next to him struck a similarly hostile pose, and Judy figured he must be John’s brother, Marco, whom Frank had told her about. The two men, John the heavier of the two, anchored the grim-faced crowd around them, with whom she was obviously unpopular. If the right side of the courtroom was the Lucia cheering section, the left was the Coluzzi clan, sitting side by side with only a carpeted courtroom aisle between them, like a modern-day Maginot Line.

Judy felt an intuitive tingle of fear. It struck her that Angelo Coluzzi’s death could mean retaliation, as deadly as if the courtroom had been transported to Sicily. And the surviving sons, John and Marco, were very much alive; Marco, in a sharp suit and tie, looked like the more intelligent of the two, and Judy was guessing it was he who ran the business. But it was John’s meaty arm that encircled a very old woman in a black dress, dabbing at her aged, red eyes with a balled-up Kleenex. She had to be his mother, Angelo Coluzzi’s widow. He broke my father’s neck, Miss Carrier. Snapped it like it was one of his birds. Judy looked away, her thoughts racing, but Mr. DiNunzio was tugging at her sleeve.

“And this young man here is my friend Tony Pensiera,” Mr. DiNunzio was saying. “We call him Tony Two Feet, but you can call him Feet for short.” He laughed, as did the man sitting next to him, a thin man who wore glasses with frames like Mr. Potato-head. His feet looked normal to Judy.

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Feet,” she said, drawing a smile from Mr. DiNunzio, as well as from Feet himself and her eavesdropping fans.

“Mr. Feet. I like that. Mr. Feet.” Feet grinned, showing a silver tooth in front, which led Judy to wonder briefly why they didn’t call him Tooth. The remaining old men in the row edged forward, shaky hands extended with arthritic fingers, trying to meet her, but she begged off with a quick apology.

“I’d like to meet you, but I have to get to the office. We’ll talk later, if that’s okay.” They withdrew their hands and eased back into the sleek pews, nodding with approval. She could clearly do no wrong. They were a brown-pumps kind of crowd. With a quick glance at Frank, she took her leave and buzzed herself into the door in the plastic divider, standing with her back to it until the last case concluded.

Pigeon Tony’s face popped onto the screen five minutes later, his appearance giving Judy a start. The close-up magnified every line in his tan face, turning wrinkles into fissures in the brown earth of his skin. The confusion furrowing his brow made him look like Methuselah. His round eyes darted back and forth; he was obviously unsure about whether to look into the camera lens, and disoriented and frightened by the procedure. It was impossible to square the helpless image with someone who would intentionally break the neck of another man. She remembered Frank’s words, You know, he can’t even cull out his own pigeons, he won’t kill any of them. But there was no time to puzzle it out now.

Judy moved to counsel table as the public defender stepped deferentially aside. “Your Honor, my name is Judy Carrier and I represent the defendant in this matter, Anthony Lucia,” she said, then sat down.

“So Mr. Lucia has private counsel,” the bail commissioner said noncommittally as he shifted stacks of docket sheets on the dais. Bail commissioners weren’t judges, though this one wore judicial robes, a tie with a collar pin, and the harassed expression of a man who presided over 150 bail cases a day. His light blue eyes looked beleaguered behind tortoiseshell reading glasses. “We’re ready to go, Bailiff. Where’s defendant Anthony Lucia?”

As if on cue, the TV sound burst to life with a crackle, and Pigeon Tony was whispering, “’Allo? ’Allo?”

Judy worried that he couldn’t understand what was happening, and a ripple of unrest ran through the courtroom gallery as soon as they heard his trembling voice over the microphones; the Lucia side of the courtroom stricken at seeing Pigeon Tony in jail, the Coluzzi side furious at seeing him alive. Judy’s mouth went dry.

The bail commissioner remained insulated on his side of the bulletproof plastic. “This is Commonwealth versus Lucia,” he began, reciting the docket number, then looking at the camera facing him, which would transmit his image to a television in Pigeon Tony’s cell. “Mr. Lucia, you have been charged on a general charge of murder, do you understand?”

“’Allo? Who is?” Pigeon Tony kept whispering, squinting at the camera lens.

“Mr. Lucia, this is the bail commissioner speaking to you. I am the judge. Look directly into the camera.” The bail commissioner glared into his camera, posing for a fairly cranky photo op. “Mr. Lucia, do you need an interpreter? We have a Spanish interpreter at your location, I believe.”

Judy shook her head. “Your Honor, he’s Italian. A member of his family could translate if there’s no translator available.”

“No, that wouldn’t be kosher. Let’s see if he gets it. Mr. Lucia,” the bail commissioner said loudly, as if that would help. “Do you understand that you have been charged with murder?”

“Si, si. Murder. Judge? Is judge?” Pigeon Tony still didn’t look at the camera, and Judy’s anxiety segued into fear. If Pigeon Tony understood it was the judge, he might blurt out the truth. Anything he said in open court would be admissible at trial. An admission now could kill him.

Oh, no. Judy’s hand crept toward the black telephone on counsel table, which would connect her directly to Pigeon Tony. She wouldn’t use it unless she had to, since everybody and his dog would hear everything. Pigeon Tony couldn’t be counted on to get any hidden messages, and please don’t confess might tip off the Commonwealth.

“Yes, I am the judge. Excellent, Mr. Lucia.” The bail commissioner looked over his glasses at the prosecutor’s table. “Is the Commonwealth opposing bail in this matter?”

“We are, Your Honor,” answered the prosecutor. Judging from his spiky haircut and black suit, he was a recent law school graduate who had drawn the rotating duty of arraignment court. “As you know, murder is not typically a bailable offense in the county, and this was a particularly heinous murder of an eighty-year-old man. The Commonwealth argues that bail should not be granted.”

Pigeon Tony’s mouth opened as if he were going to speak.

“Your Honor,” Judy said quickly, moving her hand to the phone, “the defense argues that Mr. Lucia is certainly entitled to bail. His criminal record is spotless, and he obviously poses no risk to the population of the city. Nor does he, at almost eighty years of age, pose any flight risk at all.”

“Does he have any roots in the city, Ms. Carrier?” the commissioner asked, from the standard checklist for determining whether bail was appropriate.

“He has significant roots in the city, including his grandson, Frank Lucia, who is fully prepared to meet his bail.” Judy gestured for emphasis at the right side of the gallery, and they started waving back so wildly she wondered if they thought they were on camera, like a studio audience on The Jerry Springer Show. “As you can see, his entire extended family and all his friends support him and are here for this proceeding. He isn’t going anywhere, Judge.”

“Judge? Where judge?” Pigeon Tony began to fidget in his chair, leaning to the side and peering behind the camera. “Judge, you see me?” He tried to get up out of his chair, exposing the handcuffs that locked him there, and Judy couldn’t take it anymore and grabbed the black telephone.

“Mr. Lucia, this is Judy speaking. Pick up the telephone. Answer the telephone,” she said quickly into the receiver. The phone should have been ringing in the special cell, and a second later she heard it, then the hollow sound of the turnkey telling Pigeon Tony to pick up.

“Come?” he asked in confusion, turning off screen to the guard, who finally gave up telling him to pick up and reached across to the ringing phone and picked it up himself. The courtroom TV screen showed a sleeve of tan uniform thrusting a black receiver at Pigeon Tony, and he recoiled as if it were a cobra. With prodding, he reached for the telephone cautiously, only partly because of his handcuffs, and answered it as if he had never answered one before. “Si? Chi è?” he said, keeping his distance from the receiver, and Judy translated immediately. It did sound like Latin!

“This is Judy, Mr. Lucia. Remember me, Judy? Your lawyer?” She had to get them out of court, even TV court, fast. The arraignment had already lasted too long. “Listen to me carefully. Please stay in your seat and answer only the questions the judge asks you.”

“Judy?” Pigeon Tony burst into a grin of recognition. “Is Judy, with big mouth?”

“Yes! Right!” It was the first time she was happy to admit it, and she could see that the gallery was laughing.

The bail commissioner banged his gavel and addressed the prosecutor. “Counsel, given Mr. Lucia’s trouble with the common telephone, I find it hard to believe that he could negotiate the flight schedules of the Philadelphia airport. I find he poses no risk of flight and order bail to be set at twenty-five thousand dollars.” The commissioner faced the camera. “Mr. Lucia, you will be free as soon as your bail is paid. You must come back and appear at your preliminary hearing. Please sign the subpoena regarding your next court appearance. It’s a paper in front of you. Now, get—”

“Judge? Is judge?” Pigeon Tony started saying into his telephone receiver, and Judy went into action, doing what she did best. Talking.

“That’s enough, Mr. Lucia. It’s time to go home. Hang up the phone and you can go home.”

“Judy? Where judge? Now we talk to judge?” Pigeon Tony asked, and Judy’s heart stopped. She was about to start filibustering when the bail commissioner banged his gavel again.

“Mr. Lucia, you and I have done enough talking for one day, and we have a lot of cases to get to. This concludes your arraignment. Please sign the paper in front of you before you go back to your cell. Ask the turnkey to help you if need be, sir.”

Suddenly Pigeon Tony’s face vanished from the screen, which went black, and Judy almost cried with relief. She hung up the phone, grabbed her briefcase, and turned to leave as another defendant materialized on the screen and the public defender reclaimed his desk. She hadn’t been so glad to see a TV show end since Happy Days. And she had won. Pigeon Tony would be set free. The Lucia side of the gallery was on its feet, hugging each other with happiness.

Judy felt almost high as she opened the door in the plastic divider, and Frank, Mr. DiNunzio, the fragrant Tony-From-Down-The-Block LoMonaco, and glasses-wearing Tony Two Feet Pensiera rushed to sweep her up, thanking, hugging, and congratulating her. She had never experienced such emotion, such total love coming from complete strangers, and she found herself caught up in it, laughing with delight, forgetting every last doubt about the case.

Until the shouting began.

And the first punch was thrown.

Chapter 8

Judy had never witnessed such a scene in any of the conference rooms at Rosato & Associates before, or in any other law firm, for that matter. Seated around the sleek, polished walnut table were a trio of bruised and battered Italian octogenarians, slumping in rumpled and bloodied shirts behind medicinal cups of coffee. Fresh legal pads lay unnoticed in the center of the table with sharpened pencils piled in a ready-for-business logjam, and the state-of-the-art gray conferencing phone went untouched. A huge bank of glistening picture windows showed off a modern skyline of granite skyscrapers and mirrored glass columns, and though it was the best view in the city, the old men around the table hurt too much to be impressed.

Judy surveyed the damage as she doled out Tylenol Extra Strength. At least no one had to go to the hospital. Mr. DiNunzio had taken a mean uppercut to the chin, which swelled unhappily, but he didn’t need stitches and had given as good as he got. Tony-From-Down-The-Block had shown surprising agility despite his weight, being the first to respond to the Coluzzi clan’s attack, especially aggravated when someone called him a “fat bastard.”

Frank sustained a gash over his right eye—luckily the bleeding had stopped—and had been the most effective fighter, largely because he was so tall and muscular, in addition to being the only male under age seventy. He had almost knocked out the more heavyweight John Coluzzi when a combined army of courthouse security and uniformed cops appeared in the courtroom, summoned by a hysterical bail commissioner. The cops broke up the fight, separating the warring tribes and threatening hard time until they dispersed to their separate corners of South Philadelphia. No Lucia had gone to jail only because they had a fairly mouthy blonde on retainer, whose listing to the right was barely detectable.

Judy snapped closed the Tylenol jug and watched Frank apply a butterfly Band-Aid to the bald noggin of Tony Two Feet, who had proved, not surprisingly, to excel at kicking Coluzzis in the shins. Unfortunately, his Mr. Potatohead-eyeglasses had been knocked off in the brawl and nestled broken in his shirt pocket, their dark frames showing through the thin fabric.

And for Judy’s part in the battle, she had found herself relegated to the sidelines, apparently viewed as Switzerland by the Coluzzis. After she’d lost one of Bennie’s brown pumps in the fussing, which was no great loss, she helped the cops bring the mess to a close. Pigeon Tony was unscathed only because he hadn’t been at the fistfight and had still been trapped in TV custody. Judy was at present rethinking her position on televised arraignments. They were an excellent idea where Italians were involved.

She stood at the head of the table. “Here comes the lecture. First of all, we’re damn lucky that the judge didn’t revoke Pigeon Tony’s bail, and I hope all of you know it. You have to understand right here and right now that we are not going to run this case this way. I may be a slow learner, but I’m getting the idea. The Lucias hate the Coluzzis, and the Coluzzis hate the Lucias. But right now that doesn’t matter. I cannot and will not defend Pigeon Tony in this case if you people can’t control yourselves.” Judy wasn’t used to being so dictatorial, but she was starting to like the power femme thing, even though her version of it sounded like a gym teacher. She wished for a whistle on a gimp lanyard, in school colors. “You people have to think a lot more long-term than you have been. You can’t be so emotional all the time.”

Pigeon Tony blinked. Mr. DiNunzio looked grave. Tony Two Feet hung his head.

Frank smiled, despite a goose egg rising on his right cheekbone. He stood at the opposite end of the table, resting his hands on the back of Pigeon Tony’s chair. “Need I remind you that we come by it honestly?”

“Need I remind you that your grandfather’s life is at stake?” Judy watched his smile fade. “Get over yourselves. Being Italian is no excuse for bad behavior any longer. In any event, not with this lawyer. From now on we do this my way, every step of the way, or Pigeon Tony finds somebody else to represent him.”

Pigeon Tony stopped blinking and the corners of his mouth went south.

“Pigeon Tony, listen to me.” Judy softened her tone, since even gym teachers had a heart. “Do you understand what I’m saying here?”

“Judy, we no start fight. Coluzzis start fight.” He made a bony fist with his hand and waved it in the air. “They hit, then we hit.”

Tony Two Feet nodded in agreement, as did Tony-From-Down-The-Block, and Judy realized she had a fairly tough row to hoe.

“Tonys. Gentlemen. Please. I really don’t want to hear ‘they started it’ from eighty-year-olds. You’re grown men, not little boys. You should all know better than that, and you’re still not getting it.” Judy heard herself and wondered when dodgeball was starting. “This isn’t a schoolyard game, or a fight, or even a war. It’s a legal case. A matter of law.”

“In a war,” Frank said coolly, sipping his coffee, and Judy bore down.

“Maybe so. But I run this war or I’m outta here.” She picked up her briefcase and walked to the door of the conference room, in case Pigeon Tony missed the point. The fact that it was her own conference room seemed a detail compared with the drama of the demonstration. If she kept this up, she’d be promoted to health teacher and could draw fallopian tubes shaped like moose antlers on the blackboard. “We do it my way, or I’m gone.”

“No! Judy!” Pigeon Tony exclaimed, his voice thin with anxiety, and she turned at the door, pivoting on one pump, which was a neat trick in itself.

“You want me to be your lawyer?” she demanded, and his sunburned head went up and down.

“Si, si!”

“You gonna be good?”

“Si, si!”

“No more fighting?”

“Si, si!”

“You promise, like before? I was wondering about that promise, back in the courtroom.”

Pigeon Tony kept nodding. “È vero. I promise.”

“And all the Lucias have to understand the rules, Pigeon Tony. All the people in the gallery today, in the courtroom. All the neighborhood, the whole damn village, the home team. Got it? No more fighting! Or I go.”

“Si, si!”

Mr. DiNunzio rose, upset. “Don’t go, Judy. You’re right, everything you said. I’ll make sure there’s no more fighting. I swear it, God as my witness.”

The leftover Tonys looked properly contrite. “Okay, you win. No more fighting,” Tony Two Feet said, blinking unhappily without his glasses, and Tony-From-Down-The-Block gave a grudging wave.

Judy looked at Frank, who was still sipping his coffee. “Well?”

“Well what?” Frank set his Styrofoam cup down on the table. “Will I promise not to fight when they come after my grandfather? The answer is no.”

“Are you nuts?” Judy dropped her briefcase in frustration. “You’re not in Naples anymore. It was 1900 a long time ago. You’re in Philadelphia, in the new millennium. We have the Internet now, and e-books, and boy bands. Microsoft and Britney Spears. Nobody has to go to the well for water in this town, or pound their socks with rocks. If somebody comes after your grandfather, we’ll call the friggin’ police!”

“No like police!” Pigeon Tony shouted, banging the table with his hard little fist. “Io non sono Napoletano!”

Judy couldn’t translate. “What did he say?” she asked Frank.

Frank smiled at the outburst, this time with mirth. “He’s insulted that you said he was from Naples. He thinks they’re all thieves.”

Judy groaned. “Is that all you got from what I said?”

“No, but I don’t agree with you,” Frank said, his tone carrying no accusation. “You say this is a legal case, but when I said it takes place in a war, I meant it. You believe there are rules and law, but a vendetta exists apart from the law. It doesn’t care about space and time, and it didn’t stop in 1900. It’s as current as the memories of the Coluzzis and the Lucias, who grew up in another time, in another country, and whose way of living is very much alive, to them, their sons, and their grandsons.”

“Are you defending vendettas?”

“No, I’m explaining them. This one, anyway. You have to understand the way it is, before you can represent my grandfather.”

Judy fell momentarily speechless. Frank was turning the tables on her, and she didn’t like it much. His voice carried authority and weight, and she couldn’t let him win, for Pigeon Tony’s sake or her own. Frank’s words attacked the law she had been trained in, believed in, and had even come to love. Judy’s speechlessness stretched into two moments, which worried her.

“John and Marco Coluzzi are not about to let this pass, Judy. They’ll come looking for him. That’s what sure as hell is going to happen next. What would you have me do then? He’s my grandfather. And your client.”

Judy threw up her hands. “If that’s true, then why did I just get him out on bail? Why didn’t we leave him in jail?”

“No, we did the right thing. He’d be in more danger in jail. On the outside I can protect him, and it’s my job to protect him. Your laws are going to be useless.”

“Why?”

“Because the Coluzzis are too smart for your laws. They have been so far. They have money and power, and they’ll get to him if we let them. Your laws can’t arrest anybody until after they murder somebody, and sometimes not even then.”

Pigeon Tony nodded sadly. “È vero,” he said, and Judy translated. It sounded like the Latin noun veritas. Truth. Both men fell equally grave, their mouths set in identical determination and their Lucia eyes glowing darkly. Grandfather and grandson looked so much alike, because of the way similarities of feature and gesture skip generations, that Judy was taken aback. Maybe it was true, what they were saying. She never would have believed it if she hadn’t seen the melee in the courtroom with her own eyes. And if all of this vendetta craziness was true, Pigeon Tony would get killed long before she could get him to trial.

“Fair enough,” Judy said to Frank suddenly. “I’ll give you that your grandfather may be in jeopardy. But we have to investigate this case, to build a defense. We have to go forward. So you protect him your way, and I’ll protect him mine. You fight back, only to save him, and I’ll use the law.”

Frank broke into a relieved smile. “You want to bet on who wins?”

“I can’t take your money,” Judy told him. “Now let’s go.”

Judy had no religion per se, but she did believe in karma, Krispy Kreme doughnuts, and Vincent van Gogh. In fact, she was sure it was her terrific karma that had sent her boss out of the office when she had arrived with her battered clients. She hoped she had enough in her reserve tanks to get out of the conference room as cleanly. She had changed back into her yellow clogs to help her escape, and also for obvious style reasons.

She cracked the conference room door to check if the coast was clear. Her eyes swept the office. A square, open meeting area with fancy blue carpet, ringed by lawyers’ offices with secretaries’ desks in Dilbert cubicles in front of each. Printers were printing. Keyboards were clacking. Lawyers were yapping. Secretaries were doing the real work. All was in order. And no boss.

Judy snuck out of the conference room with Frank and Mr. Di-Nunzio at her side. The Three Tonys, which sounded like an operatic trio but wasn’t, trailed behind. The secretaries averted their eyes pointedly as the injured passed, the way the nicest people avoid gaping at car accidents, but the lawyers contributed to gaper block. Murphy and Murphy’s lawyers, wasting time in the hallway, stared as Judy approached. And Murphy’s lined lips parted when she spotted Frank, though Judy wasn’t sure whether her reaction was due to the fact that he was so good-looking or that he was so good-looking even with an open wound.

“These are my clients,” Judy said to Murphy’s lawyers, as they passed them. “Please don’t drool, stare, point, or laugh. Just say good-bye.”

Murphy thrust a manicured hand at Frank. “I would never do such a thing. You must be Frank Lucia. I saw you on TV.”

“Yes, you did,” Judy said. The courthouse fight qualified as Action News. “Now, say good-bye.”

“Hello,” Murphy said to Frank, ignoring Judy. She shook Frank’s hand, and he shook back, which Judy noticed with disapproval. “That was quite a show you put on at the courthouse. Everybody throwing punches, even outside, when the cops tried to break it up. The news guy said it was the biggest brawl they ever had there.”

Frank smiled. “He was just being modest.”

Murphy laughed, as did her friends, since that was their job. And the only job for which they were qualified. Judy had had enough.

“Well, we have to go. Say good-bye.”

“But aren’t you going to introduce me?” Murphy asked, and Judy gritted her teeth. Murphy wasn’t interested in meeting The Three Tonys.

“Frank Lucia, this is Murphy. She uses only one name. Nobody knows why. Now let’s go.”

“Nice meeting you,” Frank told Murphy, as Judy took his arm. She wanted to avoid Bennie, and, okay, she was a little jealous of Murphy. She was allowed to have more than one reason for doing something. She was a complex girl.

They headed for the reception room followed by The Three Tonys, who no longer reminded Judy of anything musical but rather of those municipal trucks that were signed SLOW-MOVING VEHICLE. They shuffled across the plush carpet, war-weary, and though she felt sorry for them, she wanted to go. They had almost made it to the reception desk when Judy’s karma reserves ran out.

“Just the lawyer I want to see!” Bennie boomed, bustling into the office, carrying her heavy briefcase and two newspapers under her arm. She stopped momentarily, introduced herself to Frank and The Slow-Moving Vehicle, and smiled for their benefit. The smile remained fixed as she yanked a newspaper from underneath her elbow and handed it to Judy. “Judy, I have to get to my office, but I thought you might like to have this. You may want it for your scrapbook. And this story is very informative. Looks like your boxing lessons are paying off.”

“Thank you,” Judy said, also for the clients’ benefit, and opened the Daily News, Philadelphia’s biggest tabloid. UNCIVIL LAW, screamed the banner headline, and under it was a photo of security guards leading her and Frank out of the Criminal Justice Center. Judy thought they made a nice couple, but it didn’t seem like the right time to say so. “Yes, the arraignment did get a little out of hand.”

“Apparently. This isn’t the kind of thing you want to do too often, Judy. Assault and battery in a courthouse, that is.” Bennie turned to Frank, and at least she was still smiling. “By way of explanation, we at Rosato and Associates usually confine our felonies to the office.”

Frank smiled grimly. “Don’t blame Judy for this. It’s on me, and she has already dressed us down. I know it doesn’t help our case. It won’t happen again. Sorry about that.”

Bennie waved it away and took off. “No need to apologize,” she called back. “Not if you won.”

“We did,” Frank answered, calling after her, and as Bennie hurried to her office, she shot him a thumbs-up.

It left Judy and The Senior Citizens standing there in amazement, until Judy realized she had to get rolling. She grabbed her telephone messages from the receptionist on the way out and paged through the soft pink slips on the way to the elevator. Three were from opposing counsel in her civil case, one was from the general counsel in Huartzer, and one was from Mary. She’d ignore all but the GC’s and Mary’s for the time being. Her e-mail would go unread, her voicemail unchecked.

She had Italians to defend.

Chapter 9

Judy was relieved to find there was no press outside the office, and the only congestion was the standard rush-hour traffic on a warm evening. The sun dropped low, a cool, fiery disk edging behind the buildings, filling the twilight sky with a dusky orange wash. Businesspeople flowed onto the sidewalk from the buildings lining Locust Street, their heads bobbing as they moved en masse to the PATCO train station to New Jersey at the end of the street. Couples walked hand in hand, heading for the ritzy shops and restaurants in Center City. Judy noticed Frank’s eyes scanning the crowd, his smooth brow a worried wrinkle, and she realized it wasn’t the press he was worried about. She edged closer to Pigeon Tony, though it was hard to believe the threat was real.

She and Frank herded Tony-From-Down-The-Block and Tony Two Feet into a cab with Mr. DiNunzio, directing them to their respective houses. She and Frank grabbed the second cab, sliding into the backseat with Pigeon Tony in the middle. Judy and Frank were roughly the same height, but Pigeon Tony, squeezed between them, came only to their shoulders, and Judy felt oddly as if he were their very small, very gray-haired child. He didn’t seem as worried about the crowd, and he was completely captivated by the cab, looking around its filthy interior with wonder, his brown eyes recording the greasy door handle, the open and sooty ashtray, and the smudged plastic divider between them and the driver. Judy caught Frank’s eye with a smile.

Frank leaned down to his grandfather. “Pop, you ever been in a cab before?”

“Me? Sure!” Pigeon Tony startled as if he’d been awakened by an alarm clock, and his hand flew into the air in a grandiose gesture of a dismissal. “Me inna cab alla time!”

“I thought so,” Frank said, and Judy decided then she’d never put Pigeon Tony on the witness stand. He was a worse liar than she was, if that were possible.

The cab lurched off, then came to a quick, nauseating stop, since there was nowhere to go. Frank fell silent, and Pigeon Tony returned to the Total Cab Experience as Judy looked out the window. The driver took a left, going south on one of the number streets, and she watched as they left rush hour behind and the scenery changed. The view going crosstown on the number street was different from that on Broad Street, which was a wide, mainly commercial artery, and the single lane south afforded Judy a perspective of the city she hadn’t seen before.

Frank stayed quiet, Pigeon Tony looked drowsy, and the shops and businesses of Center City gave way to rowhouses. Those near the business district were four stories of colonial vintage, their mullioned windows bubbled with old glass, their bricks a soft melon color with a refined white line of mortar. The cab rattled along a few blocks south, passing gentrified houses on Rodman and Bainbridge Streets, which showed off new, modern picture windows and repointed brick. In a few short blocks, only three dollars on the meter, they were into South Philly, where the row-houses lost their top story.

Judy found it apt, somehow. The houses here were stripped-down, no-frills, working-class, but each was different in its own way. Though they all had a front door and single window on the first floor, with two windows on the second story like wide-open, honest eyes, and each façade had been lovingly customized by the homeowner. Some had plastic awnings, corrugated in orange and green, many adorned with the family’s initials, a script D or C. Some rowhouses sported flagstone stoops, some were of old-fashioned marble, and many were made of brick. Here and there wrought-iron railings had been added, and she saw one railing painted bright red to match the exterior molding. It struck Judy that these differences, whether her taste or not, contrasted with the sameness she had seen in the housing developments, strip malls, and Gap stores she’d driven past earlier the same day. It seemed so long ago now. She felt fatigue creep though her bones, and she still had so much to do.

It grew quiet in the cab except for the churning of the old meter, and Judy kept looking out the window as the sun dipped behind the buildings, leaving the sky a darker haze of clay-orange. The waning light filtered onto the rowhouses, emphasizing the redness of the brick in some and the rust-orange of others, setting the sandstone-hued brick, thin with skinny mortar lines, glowing in the twilight. Judy, who had been painting in oils for most of her adult life, saw the bricks as a gritty mosaic of amber, titian, and apricot, all the more beautiful because they housed people, and families, within.

The cab carried them along, and on each corner of South Philly would be a store, a grocery, a beauty parlor, bakery, a tavern, and all of them named after people. Sam and El’s. Juno’s. Yolanda’s. Esposito’s. There wasn’t a chain store of any type in sight. The names telegraphed the ethnicity of the owner and, by extension, of the neighborhood. Judy took note that the corner stores grew solidly more Italian as they got closer to Pigeon Tony’s house. Only two blocks away she began to feel a weight on her right arm and looked over.

It was her client, dozing on her shoulder, and he had just begun to snore, soft as a puppy.

BOOK TWO

With arms provided by the Agrarian Association or by some regimental stores, the blackshirts would ride to their destination in lorries. When they arrived they began by beating up any passer-by who did not take off his hat to the colours, or who was wearing a red tie, handkerchief, or shirt. If anyone protested or tried to defend himself, if a fascist was roughly treated or wounded, the “punishment” was intensified. They would rush to the buildings and . . . break down the doors, hurl furniture, books, or stores into the street, pour petrol over them, and in a few moments there would be a blaze. Anyone found on the premises would be severely beaten or killed. . . .

—ROSSI, The Rise of Italian Fascism (1983)

At the beginning of December, it is time to mate the birds. . . . All cocks and hens should be allowed to select their own mates. A widowhood cock or hen performs better when they are permitted to choose their mate. Isn’t a man or woman happier if they select their partner than those that are forced into “shotgun” marriages, etc.?

It is a fact that a cock or a hen will perform well in the races for many years. But if one of the pair is lost, the remaining bird never seems to do as well as it did with the old mate.

—JOSEPH ROTONDO, Rotondo on Racing Pigeons (1987)

Chapter 10

As he dozed, Pigeon Tony was remembering the first day he met his wife. He did not know the day exactly—he was never a precise man, but he did know the year because he wasn’t stupid either. He was seventeen years old, and the year was 1937. It was a Friday night, in the early spring, in May.

Pigeon Tony, then merely Tony Lucia, was living in the house of his father and mother, in a village outside the city of Veramo, in the mountainous Abruzzo province of Italy. Tony worked hard, helping his father in their olive groves and with the pigeons, spending all his time in the company of birds and old men, having no time, or finding no time, for the frivolities that consumed others. That he was shy was his own secret, or so he believed. That he was also undesirable was something he knew anybody could see.

Tony Lucia was little and skinny, too skinny, his mother said all the time, with his legs like lengths of twine with a knot where the knee would be. His wrists were as fine as a child’s. No matter what Tony ate, he never got heavier. No matter what Tony lifted, pulled, or carried, his arm muscles grew no bigger. He had flat feet, which hurt if he walked too far for too long. But that he was strong was beyond doubt; he was the only child of the Lucia family—his mother could bear no more—yet Tony could handle the chores of ten sons, and did.

When he first met his wife, he was doing one of these chores, hauling their pigeons by cart to a shipping for the race on Saturday. It would be a weekend of good flying weather, starting with a warm evening, now on the edge of darkness. Tomorrow would be the first race of the old bird season, and it had taken the day to travel north from Veramo to the city of Mascoli in the Marche province, where the birds would be released, the trip made slower because Tony was on his bad feet. Even so, out of kindness he led rather than drove their pony, an overweight, sway-backed brown creature with a brushy black mane and stiffness in his right hind. The beast pulled the cart gamely, and in back of the cart the pigeons cooed, called, and beat their wings in their wooden cages, sending pinfeathers into the air, transforming the assembly into a swirling cloud of dust.

The pigeons knew they were being shipped to race and anticipated the event as much as they felt fresh despair at having left their mates behind. The Lucias used the widowhood method of racing, leaving the captive hen at the loft, so that the cocks felt eager to fly home faster and so were agitated until they were finally released to be on their way. It didn’t help that the dirt road was a rocky one, winding through the hills of the region, and the pigeon cages, piled five on top of one another and tied up with twine, jostled right and left. The birds felt unstable in the creaky cart with the weary pony yanking them along, and Tony couldn’t blame them for that.

They all plodded ahead, with Tony barely noticing the terrain, even though he had never been in Marche before on his own. Abruzzo, on Marche’s southern border, was considered by the Marchegiani to be far less sophisticated than their province. And for their part, the Abruzzese had a popular saying: “It is better to have a dead man in your house than a Marchegiani at your door,” because the men of Marche had been used as tax collectors by the Romans, and so were universally hated.

But Tony took no notice of differences between men, for all of it sounded like generalizations to him, and he was not the political sort, despite the heated politics of the day. His concerns were his family, his olives, and his pigeons, and he practically walked backward as he led the pony so he could make sure no birds fell off the bumpy cart. It was the reason he was almost run over by another cart that suddenly came roaring down the curving road, bearing a beautiful woman and a Blackshirt, Angelo Coluzzi.

“Hey! You! Hey! Stupido!” Coluzzi shouted to him. Almost out of breath, the Blackshirt pulled hard on his leather reins, bringing his matched brown horses to a stuttering halt, leaving them tossing their heads against the painful bit, their mouths gaping and their nostrils flaring. “Why don’t you watch what you’re doing, bumpkin? You’re hogging the whole road! Fool!”

“Oh, my!” Tony exclaimed, startled. The sudden lurch to a stop set the birds complaining and flapping their wings. He put his hand up to protect the cages from falling. “I didn’t see you. The birds—”

“The birds! The birds are no reason to cause a traffic accident! Cavone! Idiota!” Coluzzi’s face had gone red and he seemed to get angrier as a result of Tony’s explanation, not less so. His eyes and mouth were large and his dark hair combed back with brilliantine, making it as black as his shirt, with its gold buttons and pressed epaulets. It identified him as a squadrista, one of the elite cadre of Fascists who helped Mussolini rise to prime minister mainly by beating people up, breaking strikes, and destroying all opposition. But Angelo Coluzzi needed no identification in this region, as everybody knew him, or of him, for he had attained high station at only eighteen years of age, mostly because of his father’s influence.

“I beg your pardon, sir,” Tony said. It cost him nothing to placate the man, any more than a father minds calming a child in tantrum. And Tony’s attention was riveted, despite the noisy blowing of the horses and the feather-beating of the pigeons, on the lovely signorina sitting beside Coluzzi.

Her eyes were as brown as the earth itself, and her hair was, almost miraculously, the identical color, only shot through with filaments of red, like veins of clay in soil. Bright red lipstick, which Tony knew was the fashion among city women, made her mouth shiny, but Tony would have noticed her lips whether they were painted or not. She smiled at him kindly despite the anger of her companion, and because Tony was not stupid, he apprehended in an instant that she and Coluzzi made a poor match and wondered if she would ever realize it herself. He concluded that she would, because of the intelligence dancing behind her eyes.

“Stumblebum! Why in heaven’s name are you leading your broken-down pony along? How can you be so dim-witted?”

Coluzzi continued his diatribe; it seemed that nothing could stop him. “Buffoon! Are you so simple you don’t realize that man is meant to ride upon his animals and not walk beside them, as a lover?”

Tony ignored the insult, so lost was he in the eyes of the woman. He contrived to think of a way to make her acquaintance, and then God sent him one. “Please forgive me, sir. My pony is so burdened with his own weight he can’t bear even mine after a long day’s journey. If I may formally introduce myself, by way of apology, my name is Anthony Lucia, from near Veramo, in Abruzzo. And you, sir, are Signore Angelo Coluzzi, I believe.” Tony bowed slightly.

“Abruzzese! I knew it! Farmers and nose-pickers!” Coluzzi yanked again on the mouths of his fine horses, who, resigned to his ill treatment, only stamped their feet in response. “Si, I am Coluzzi. So you know me.”

“Of course I do, sir.”

“You are loyal to Il Duce.”

“Si, si. Of course. As are we all.” Tony was hoping Coluzzi would now introduce the young lady in the seat of his cart, but no such introduction was forthcoming. Tony glanced again at the woman, and her smile emboldened him. “I have not had the honor of meeting your companion. She is so lovely, she must be your sister.”

“Fool!” Coluzzi’s eyes narrowed. “She is lovely, but she is no blood relative. Her name is none of your business. Now, move out of our way. I have already delivered my pigeons and must return home before they do.”

Tony bowed deeply, this time to the young woman, and doffed his felt cap with a flourish. “Well, Miss None-of-Your-Business, my name is Tony Lucia, and I’m very honored to make your acquaintance.”

Gentle laughter came from the cart, but Tony was bowing too low to see her laugh. He knew only that the sound made him aware of the exact location of his heart within his chest, something he’d never given a thought to before this moment. He straightened up slowly and whacked his cap against his wrist to shake out the dust before he returned it to his head and shoved it down over his mass of dark, curly hair at an angle he hoped she would find attractive.

“How dare you!” Coluzzi bellowed. “How dare you, show-off! How dare you speak to my Silvana!” In one motion, he raised the long whip he had been using on his horses, snapped it high in the air, and cracked it across Tony’s face.

Pain ripped through the young man’s cheek, tears sprang to his eyes, and he staggered backward in surprise and shock. Through his tears he saw the horrifed expression of the woman, her bright mouth a red gash of pain. Tony could see she had cried out—for him, yes—though he cowered shamefully. Coluzzi cracked the long whip again, and this time it struck the sweating rumps of the horses and they leaped into the air, clawing it with front hooves, and bolted right at Tony.

He threw himself out of the way, half rolling and half stumbling into the hard ground at the side of the road, landing on his hip and shoulder before he came to a stop at the edge of the field. Dust and small rocks sprayed in his face, and he spit them out in time to see Coluzzi’s cart take off down the road away from the city. Suddenly Tony’s old pony spooked, then galloped off in blind panic down the road, toward the city. No!

Tony scrambled to his feet. Pain shot through his shoulder, and he heard an odd grinding coming from there, the unmistakable sound of bone against bone. He had broken his collarbone. But there was no time to lose. His pigeons!

“No! Whoa! Stop!” Tony shouted. Holding his arm against his side, he ran in agony after the old pony, who galloped away with the cart, careening this way and that, using energy he must have hidden from Tony. The cart bounced on the rocky road. The towers of pigeons cages swayed dangerously. The cart was heading straight for a large rock. Tony’s heart leapt to his throat.

“Whoa!” he cried out, but the pony ignored him and galloped faster. Tony picked up the pace, cradling his arm, wincing at each stride.

The cart smashed into the rock. Tony held his breath. The pigeon cages at the end popped out of the cart, flew through the air, and crashed when they hit the road. The other cages quickly followed, toppling out of the cart. “No!” Tony yelled, but to no avail. He sent up a quick prayer for the safety of his birds.

The wooden cages, which Tony had carefully constructed but hadn’t built to withstand such a calamity, splintered instantly. The twine tying them tore apart. Cages split open all over the road. Tony raced to the cages, his shoulder broken, his feet painful. When he got there he fell to his knees, gasping for breath, as his pigeons struggled to free themselves from their wrecked cages, injuring themselves.

Tony scrambled from cage to cage, breaking them open so the birds wouldn’t get hurt further. His shoulder protested the effort and he heard his bones rubbing, but he ignored it. The race was a total loss, a year’s training and a day’s travel, but there would be other races. He had to save his birds. He hurried to the next cage. Soon passersby came along, laughing at the sight of the young man destroying his own cages and freeing his own pigeons, but Tony didn’t care. He finished wrecking the last cage and looked heavenward.

The birds, anxious to return home to their mates, were taking flight one by one, a running river of wings flowing up, defying gravity, soaring high into the clearest of skies, the blue darkening to black. A few flew on bloodied wing, but most looked healthy and sound. Tony’s heart lifted with them. Forty pigeons, all slate-gray colored, skated on air currents only they could see, circling just once as Tony had taught them, so as not to waste time, then heading south. He squinted to see them go, holding his hurt arm still. They flapped away, obeying instinct and training, going straight to their mates, and Tony kept watching as they grew smaller and smaller, until they shrank to bright white dots, like stars in the twilight, and then even the stars disappeared. Tony swallowed hard, his heart suddenly full of emotion, and then he understood why.

Silvana. The sound of her laugh was in his ears. Feminine and musical, from her perch on the cart.

Her laughter, right beside him in his ear. He could feel the whisper of her painted lips, then a gentle shaking on his shoulder, which hurt no longer, his collarbone miraculously healed.

“Pigeon Tony,” said the woman’s voice, and he opened his eyes, to look into not Silvana’s earth-brown eyes but the bright blue eyes of another woman. Her mouth had been red the first time they’d met. His lawyer, this Judy.

“Pigeon Tony,” she was saying, calling his nickname, one that Silvana never heard. “Wake up, you’re almost home.”

Then he heard another voice, coming from his other side. He looked up into more familiar brown eyes. Though they weren’t Silvana’s, they hinted at hers, for they were her eyes passed down to her grandson Frank.

“Pop,” Frank was saying with his nice smile. His teeth were white and straight as a wall, like all American teeth. “You okay? Can you wake up?”

“Sure, sure.” Tony was awakening only slowly. It took him longer than when he was young. He pushed himself up in his seat in the cab, not knowing when he had slumped down, and shook off his slumber. “Okay, Frankie. Okay, Frank,” he said, correcting himself. His grandson didn’t like to be called Frankie or Little Frank anymore, like when he was a baby.

But suddenly Frank wasn’t smiling and the lawyer wasn’t laughing anymore. The cab pulled up at the curb outside his house, where a crowd had collected. Both Frank and Judy had turned toward his house, and they looked so sad. He craned his neck to see around Judy.

Pigeon Tony wasn’t at all surprised by what he saw, and he realized that this was both the blessing and the curse of old age.

Chapter 11

It was almost dark and the skinny South Philly street was too narrow for streetlights. Judy could barely see the plastic particolored beach chairs that sat outside each house on the sidewalk, in circles of three and four. Neighbors milled on the sidewalk but they were reduced to shadow figures, wearing pink-sponge hair-curlers and smoking cigarettes.

Judy threaded her way through the crowd with ease, as they congregated around Frank and Pigeon Tony, and when she got to the front, she looked up. The front door to Pigeon Tony’s row-house had been sledgehammered from its hinges, and splintered wood blanketed the marble stoop. The two front windows had been shattered, as if by a baseball bat, and lamplight blazed within. Judy stared at the destruction for a minute, uncomprehending, then reached into her purse for her cell phone.

“My birds! My birds!” Pigeon Tony cried, his voice quavering, and he scurried past Judy to the front stoop, barely grazing the wrought-iron handrail in his urgency.

Frank hurried right behind him but stopped to touch Judy’s arm on the way. “Listen, we get my grandfather out of here as fast as possible, understood?” he said in a low voice. “He’s in danger if he stays here tonight. He’ll put up a fight to stay, and I’ll tell him no. You back me up. Got it?”

“Sure,” she said, willing to take instructions from a client when she agreed with them. She had already opened her black StarTAC and punched the speed dial for 911 when a woman’s voice came on the line. “Hello?” Judy asked, and Frank snorted.

“Good luck,” he said as he hurried after his grandfather.

“I want to report a break-in,” Judy told her, and gave the address to the dispatcher, who promised that a squad car would be there as soon as possible. Judy palmed the cell phone with some anxiety. She was counting on the Philadelphia police, never a completely safe bet. The score could be Law 0, Old Italian Way 1 unless she did something about it.

She became aware of a tinkling sound and squinted to see a woman in a Phillies T-shirt sweeping shards of jagged glass into a long-handled dustpan. While Judy was touched by the gesture, she couldn’t let her finish. “I know you’re trying to help, but maybe you shouldn’t sweep now,” Judy said to the woman, as politely as possible. “The glass could have fingerprints on it, or other evidence. This is a crime scene, technically.”

“Oh, sorry.” The woman instantly stopped sweeping. Pieces of glass tumbled to a stop across the gritty sidewalk, catching the light from the window. “I didn’t know. You being a lawyer, you would know.”

Judy didn’t ask the woman how she knew about her, from TV or the South Philly network, which apparently was better than cable. “Where are the cops? Did anybody call the cops?”

“I don’t know. It’s a sin, what they did to that old man,” the woman said.

“Who did it?” Judy asked, though she could guess at the answer.

“I don’t know.”

Judy didn’t have to see her face to know she was lying. “You have no idea?”

“No,” the woman said, shaking her head.

“Do you know what time it happened?”

“No,” the woman answered, edging away.

“Did you hear anything? See anything?”

“No way.” The woman disappeared into the crowd, but Judy wasn’t giving up. She held up her hands, one containing her cell phone.

“Please! Everybody! I need your attention!” she shouted.

The neighbors, who had been milling around, stopped and looked at her. She couldn’t see their expressions in the dark, but she knew they were listening because they quieted suddenly, and a sea of Eagles caps, Flyers caps, and pink cotton hairnets turned in her direction. Cigarette ends like lighted erasers glowed next to the chubbier, more muted flames of cigars. Somebody chuckled in the back of the crowd, and somebody else shouted, “Yo! What you got in your hand, a bomb?” and everybody laughed, including Judy, who quickly slipped the cell phone back into her purse.

“Obviously, we have a problem here,” she shouted. “Somebody broke into Pigeon Tony’s house. Did anybody here see who broke the door and windows?”

The crowd remained mostly silent, although some people started talking among themselves and the same joker in the back kept chuckling.

“Look, somebody must have heard or seen something. It takes time to chop down a door and it makes noise to break a window. It had to have happened in broad daylight. Isn’t anybody going to help Pigeon Tony out?”

There was no answer from the crowd, which had started to scatter at the fringes. Somebody was still chuckling. Judy wanted to throttle him.

“Wait! Don’t go away. You’re all Pigeon Tony’s neighbors. You care enough about him to clean up the mess. Don’t you care enough to help him catch who did this?”

A murmur rippled through the dark crowd, which was growing smaller by the minute. Judy watched with dismay as the shadows disappeared into their rowhouses and shut the doors behind them. Suddenly the chuckling ceased and somebody shouted from the back, “Who the hell do you think did it?”

Judy took a deep breath. It was assumption-upon-assumption time again. “I think I know who did it. In fact, we all think we know who did it. But somebody had to see or hear them do it, to hold them accountable for it. So what we need now, what Pigeon Tony needs now, is a witness.”

The crowd quieted suddenly, and Judy understood why. There was something about the way the word rang out in the night that gave even her goose bumps.

“You know what a witness is, don’t you? I’ll define it for you, since I’m Pigeon Tony’s lawyer and it’s a highly technical legal term. A witness is somebody with the balls to come forward and tell the truth.”

The crowd laughed, this time with her, though Judy noticed they continued their defection. Only four shadows stood before her, and one had to stay because his beagle was rooted to a scent on the sidewalk.

“You don’t have to come forward now. You can call me anytime. My name is Judy Carrier, at Rosato and Associates downtown.” By the time she finished the sentence, all of the neighbors had gone, except the beagle owner, unhappy at the other end of the leash. “Nice dog,” Judy said.

“He’s a pain in the ass,” said the man, and tugged the beagle away.

Having accomplished nothing, Judy turned and went inside the house. She should have been prepared for what she’d find inside, but she wasn’t. The front door, or what was left of it, would have opened onto a small living room, with an old green sofa against the left wall, on which hung a large mirror and several framed black-and-white photographs. There would have been a wooden coffee table in front of the couch, and next to that, at one point, an old overstuffed wing chair, in the same dark green fabric as the sofa. But none of it was recognizable now, the violence well beyond vandalism.

The coffee table had been broken in the middle and looked as if it had been jumped on until its legs gave way. The sofa had been butchered, slashed this way and that, its green fabric rent into shreds. White polyester stuffing had been ripped out and strewn everywhere on the shredded couch and floor. The wing chair had been knifed to death, and somebody had taken a sledgehammer to its frame and splintered the wood as easily as the bones of a human skeleton.

Aghast, Judy looked at the wall. A single blow had shattered the mirror and it hung crazily by one corner. The sledgehammer hadn’t stopped at the mirror but had been pounded through the plaster wall behind it, destroying the lath and battering the wire mesh beneath. The only part of the wall left unscathed was a brown wooden crucifix, apparent evidence of the Christian beliefs of the perpetrators.

Judy shook her head. These were rowhouses, all of them connected, sharing a common wall. Of course the next-door neighbors had heard this pounding. It would have sounded like someone was knocking his house down. If they wouldn’t talk to her, they’d talk to the cops. Wouldn’t they? She couldn’t think about it now. She left the ruined living room to look for Pigeon Tony and Frank.

The living room adjoined an eat-in galley kitchen, as savaged as the living room, and the lights had been left on, apparently for full shock value. The kitchen table had collapsed in the middle, taking the brunt of the fury, and lay broken in two. The telephone had been ripped out of the wall. The cabinet drawers, whose white paint looked like new refacing, had been yanked out, the silverware and kitchen utensils scattered willy-nilly. On the wall, all the cabinets had been opened, their doors wrenched off and tossed onto the linoleum floor, and emptied of their contents. Strewn on the counter were packages of lentils, two cans of garbanzo beans, and a jar of yellow lupini beans. Broken dishes, sharp glass, and smashed china littered the tile. The kitchen sink had been stopped up with a dish towel and the faucet left running, so water spilled over the mess on the countertop and ran freely onto the floor.

Judy struggled to understand the mentality of people who would do this. They acted like common thugs, their destruction mindless, their rage spending itself. The only remotely valuable items, a TV and a small radio, were destroyed and not taken. It hardly seemed real, but Judy experienced the same feeling she’d had at the melee in the courtroom. It was real; her eyes couldn’t deny the scene.

For some reason she went to the faucet and twisted it off. The silence permitted her to hear Frank’s voice somewhere out back. There must have been a backyard. Judy remembered Pigeon Tony’s concern about his birds. She headed for the back door, afraid of what she might find.

Chapter 12

It was dark outside but Judy could see the lighted ruins of a little white house that took up almost all of Pigeon Tony’s backyard. It must have been the house in which Pigeon Tony kept his birds, but it was unhappily silent. The night was still, except for the city sounds of traffic and a faraway siren. Cinderblock enclosed the yard, which was a small rectangle.

She walked through the darkness to the pigeon house. Judy swallowed hard as she took in the sight. The panels of plywood that made up the bottom of the building had been chopped away from the inside at the far end, so that the end of the house had collapsed onto its foundation, which appeared to be supported by stilts. Judy figured that the stilts would have been chopped away, bringing the whole house down, but the vandals had apparently gone inside the pigeon house and started hacking away, then escaped out the front door. The lights within shone through the openings made by an ax or a baseball bat. Judy could see through the torn and missing screens that Pigeon Tony and Frank were inside.

She picked her way between broken slats of plywood in the yard to what used to be wooden steps that led to an open threshold, the front door dismantled and tossed aside. She stepped inside but neither man looked up. They were kneeling over, absorbed in a common task, and she looked around, appalled. Everything inside the pigeon house had been broken, as if smashed by a baseball bat; cages, perches, chicken wire, wooden frames—all of it had been demolished. A medicine chest at the end of the aisle had been overturned, the medicines spilled. Trash cans that held feed had been dumped and bashed in. Birdseed lay scattered on the floor.

Judy got the impression that as many pigeons as could be caught were killed, brutally. She had no idea how many pigeons Pigeon Tony kept, but she counted seven dead. Some had their necks wrung; some had had been stomped to death, a gruesome sight. One slate-gray pigeon had had its head sadistically pulled off, exposing a bloody section of delicate backbone. Sickened, Judy took a step and almost tripped over the lifeless body of a white bird. Its head was a pulpy mass of blood, and it lay on its back, its feet curled in death. A silver band on its pink legs had slid back against the downy feathers of its underbelly. Its blood stained the whitewashed floor. It smelled raw and wasted. Judy felt her gorge rising.

“You okay?” Frank asked, looking at her quickly. He squatted on the floor, helping his grandfather care for a large gray pigeon, mercifully still alive. “Maybe you should sit down.”

Judy shook her head no, afraid to speak until her nausea passed. Frank returned to his task, cradling the pigeon expertly in his cupped hands, so that the body of the bird nestled in his palms and his hands gripped underneath its wings. Pigeon Tony deftly wrapped a thin bandage around the top of its left wing, which he had extended. Neither man spoke, but their expressions and their brown Lucia eyes were almost identically strained.

Judy watched and began to feel a little better. She concentrated on the live pigeon. She had never seen one so close up, mainly because she had never bothered to look at them pecking at trash in Washington Square or waddling fast down the street, like Olympic walkers. The injured bird was alert, and its golden eye, with a black pupil like a punctuation mark, darted this way and that. Whitish, wrinkly folds around its eye provided an odd sort of ring, and Judy wondered what it was for. She was surprised at the bird’s wingspan, a full twenty inches, with ten pinfeathers at the front of the wing clearly longer than those closer to the body. She wished she had paid more attention in science when they talked about drag and lift, but she assumed that it all made the birds fly better. She didn’t really care. She just wanted the pigeon to live.

“Is it going to be okay?” she asked, and Frank looked up.

“Hope so.” He managed a grim smile. “There’s only the one break. He’s young and strong, so I don’t think he’ll die.”

“Good. It’s so . . . awful about the house, and the birds.”

“We had to destroy two, to put them out of their pain.” His mouth tightened. “But most got away. We figure thirty survived, including Jimbo here.”

Judy smiled, relieved. “Will they come back, to the house?”

“Loft. After something like this, there’s no way to tell.” Frank focused again on the bird. Pigeon Tony, almost finished taping its wing, cut the bandage with a bent surgical scissors. “Instinct will tell them to stay away, especially if they left with their mates, which all of them did, except two.”

“Which two?”

“One whose mate was killed, a cock named Nino, and The Old Man. His mate died a long time ago.”

Pigeon Tony said nothing as he gentled the snipped end of the tape closed, and the pigeon took an ungrateful peck at his finger. A tiny bulb of blood appeared on Pigeon Tony’s weathered hand, and he gave an indulgent heh-heh-heh when he noticed it, then wiped it on his baggy pants.

Frank laughed, too. “He feels better, Pop.”

“Si, si. Va bene.” Pigeon Tony smiled, but Judy could see his dark eyes aching with the loss of his birds. He cradled the bird against his sweater, curling his body protectively around it, then rose to his knees, with Frank supporting his elbow. Pigeon Tony nodded and, holding the bird, walked through the debris down the aisle.

Frank gave Judy the high sign, then called after his grandfather, “Pop, we have to get out of here now. Judy thinks so, too.”

Pigeon Tony shuffled off, but Judy knew he was only apparently oblivious to them, and she said her line.

“I agree with Frank, Tony. It’s not a good idea for you to stay here any longer. You both go, and I’ll wait for the police.”

“Police!” Pigeon Tony shook his head querulously, picking through the mess in the feed room, righting jugs of veterinary medicines and unused syringes with his free hand. “No like police! Police do nothing! Nothing!”

Judy sighed. She kept forgetting that the Lucias lived in Palermo, not Philadelphia. “I had to call the police, I had to report it. What was done here, to your house, to your pigeon house, to your birds, it’s a crime. Breaking and entering. Animal cruelty. Malicious mischief. The police will do something about it when they get here.”

“Nothing!” Pigeon Tony repeated, but he was preoccupied, pulling a green cardboard box from the wreckage. It read PERONI in bright red and green, and Judy assumed it was a special pigeoner’s term until she translated the BIRRA part. Beer, from the Latin, Budweiser. Pigeon Tony opened the lid of the cardboard box, placed the bird carefully inside, then closed the top flap loosely. “I no go. I no go nowhere.”

“You can’t stay here.”

“No.” Pigeon Tony slid the scissors from his pocket and poked it into the box top, making an airhole. “I no go.”

Frank waved Judy off. “Thanks, but let me try again. This is really a family matter.” He turned to his grandfather. “Pop, you have to go with me. The Coluzzis will come back, and you know it. We’ll go to my house or a hotel. It’s dangerous to stay here.”

“I no go.” Pigeon Tony made another airhole. “The birds, they come home. The Old Man, he come home.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know, I know.” Pigeon Tony made a third airhole in the box, and the injured pigeon popped his head through the loose top. The bird watched, making no effort to escape, as Pigeon Tony punctured the top again. “Alla time, he come home.”

“But you don’t know when, Pop. You can’t stay here. We shouldn’t be here now.”

“I no leave.” Pigeon Tony kept making airholes for his audience of one. “My birds. My house. My loft. Alla mine.”

“Pop, it’s not safe.” Frank raised his voice, his face reddening with frustration. “I’m not going to fight with you about this.”

“I no leave,” Pigeon Tony shouted. “Basta, Frankie!”

“Pop, you can’t stay here!” Frank shouted back, and Pigeon Tony looked up from his airholes. The pigeon’s head wheeled around.

“I no leave!” Pigeon Tony waved the scissors for emphasis, and Judy knew he had won. An Italian with a sharp object always won, except for World War II.

Suddenly she heard a commotion outside the loft and looked through the torn screen. Two uniformed police were looking around the kitchen. The cavalry had arrived.

Finally.

The five of them—Judy, Frank, Pigeon Tony, and two heavyset, older cops—crowded into the wrecked kitchen. Judy kept Pigeon Tony behind her, so he wouldn’t bite, as she talked to the police. He remained unhappily still, clutching his Peroni box, which cooed throughout her account of the events. One cop, whose black nameplate read McDADE, listened critically while the other, named O’NEILL, took careful notes on his white Incident Report pad. Judy knew they wouldn’t really understand this situation. Even the Irish were pikers in the grudge department, comparatively. Vendetta was an Italian word for a reason.

Officer McDade flipped his pad closed. “So I have my report, and we’ll get right on it. Thanks.”

Judy looked around. “When will the mobile techs arrive?”

“Mobile techs?”

“You know, for the crime scene. I see them at murder cases all the time. They dust for fingerprints, photograph everything—”

“We do that for a homicide, but not a B and E.”

Judy blinked, vaguely aware of Frank’s impatience at her side. “It’s still a crime scene.”

“We don’t have the resources to dust every B and E.”

“But this B and E is part of a homicide case,” Judy argued, echoing Frank’s words from earlier that day. “My client, Mr. Lucia, was charged this afternoon with the murder of the elder Coluzzi, and this is in retaliation.”

“I’ve already told Mr. Lucia here”—he nodded at Frank—“that we’ll question the Coluzzi family.” Officer McDade shifted restlessly on his shiny black shoes, and his partner started toward the kitchen door. “We’ll start with John, the son he mentioned.”

“But this is a warning. The Coluzzis are waging war on my client.” Judy knew she was pushing it, but pushing it was what advocates were supposed to do. She couldn’t leave Pigeon Tony unprotected. The law would take care of him, wouldn’t it? “I want whoever did this behind bars. It’s the only way Mr. Lucia will be safe.”

The cop’s blue eyes flared. “No attempt has been made on his life.”

“Not yet, but one could be.”

“We’ll look into it, Ms. Carrier.” The officer glanced after his partner, who was leaving. “Now we do have to be getting along.”

“But the issue is what happens to him tonight. If you don’t believe there’s a threat, you can still catch the eleven o’clock news. I’m sure the film of the fight at the courthouse is all over it.”

“We have twelve other B and E’s to deal with tonight. It’s a Friday and a full moon. The whole city is going nuts. We looked upstairs and down. Nothing is missing. Your guy—your client— didn’t even lose anything valuable.”

“Only his home, and birds he loves,” Frank interjected, and Officer McDade turned to him.

“I meant no disrespect to your grandfather, Mr. Lucia, but I just came from an apartment on Moore, near Fifth. That guy’s home is a wreck and they took everything he owned.” Officer McDade touched the patent bill of his cap, a modern-day doffing. “We’re doing our best. You’ll hear from us as soon as we know something.”

Judy couldn’t let it go. “So you’ll pick up John Coluzzi?”

“Pick up? I didn’t say that. I said we’d talk to him and we will.”

“Can’t you question him at the Roundhouse? Isn’t he a suspect?”

“Not legally.” Officer McDade frowned. “We have no evidence, only your suspicion. We’ll question him, like I said, but we don’t have probable cause for arrest. Not on these facts.”

“If you talk to the neighbors—”

“We did that already. Nobody saw anything.”

“They’re just afraid.”

“Possibly, but we can’t manufacture witnesses, Ms. Carrier. Between us, me and my partner”—at this he nodded in the direction of his now-absent colleague—“have forty-something years of experience in talking to witnesses. We know how to handle this.”

Judy fished in her purse, dug for her wallet, and found a business card. She handed it to the cop. “I’ll let you know if any of them call me. Will you do the same?”

“Sure, that’s standard procedure.” The cop stuck her card in his back pocket with his white pad, reminding Judy uncomfortably of a booklet of traffic tickets.

“Thanks,” she said anyway, her hopes sinking. Officer McDade shook her hand and Frank’s and nodded to Pigeon Tony, who gripped his Peroni box. The cops had been gone only a minute when Judy answered Frank’s unsaid argument, “It’s a process, Frank. It takes time.”

“I understand. I really didn’t expect more.” Frank didn’t look angry to Judy, or even frightened. His brown eyes were concerned, and the stubble on his chin had grown darker. He turned to his grandfather. “Pop, I can’t get you to go, so I’m staying.”

“You? Inna house? No. No!” Pigeon Tony scowled, his brow creasing with concern, but Frank put up his hand like a crossing guard.

“Yes, and no more fighting. That’s it. I’m sleeping on the couch, Pop.”

Pigeon Tony nodded only reluctantly, though the Peroni box cooed in happy response.

Home in her apartment, Judy tried to sleep but couldn’t. She flopped back and forth in bed because her Patagonia surfer T-shirt, the same blue one she’d worn to bed for the past three nights, had become suddenly bunchy. She yanked it off over her head, then tossed it at the foot of the bed and slid nude under the coverlet, feeling suddenly cold. She refused to put the T-shirt back on, which would involve not only getting out of bed but also admitting defeat, so she leaned over and switched on the electric blanket, at which point she became suddenly hot. Even a pillow cave didn’t help. She had a lot on her mind.

Pigeon Tony was across town in his ruined house, in danger. Frank was with him, protecting them both with only a portable copier. The police were changing shifts and proving her faith in them misplaced. She had a murder case to defend and the guy actually did it. Plus she liked the murderer and was developing a crush on his grandson. The thought made her smile, almost, but it faded when she focused on the predicament they were in, then the visions of the smashed house. The slaughtered birds. The pain on Pigeon Tony’s face.

She fluffed up her pillow and snuggled deeper into bed, which was queen-size but seemed small. The room was large and messy, with two IKEA bureaus on the far wall, their drawers open and overstuffed, and between them an old rocking chair with sweat clothes piled on it. Her bicycle, a yellow Cannondale, leaned against the wall; her boxing gear sat piled in the corner. She could clean up but that wouldn’t improve her mood. She could work the case but she was too distracted. She turned over, facing the opposite wall.

Moonlight streamed through the window, a tall one with mullioned panes, typical of the architecture in this part of town. Judy had moved to Society Hill, the oldest section of the city, as part of her never-ending quest for The Perfect Apartment. The possibilities had narrowed since she got Penny, now a healthy nine-month-old golden retriever, who snored happily at the foot of the bed. No rentals wanted pets and even the largest security deposit didn’t help. She’d ended up in this place, her nicest so far and the fanciest, only because she bartered free legal services to the landlord for a year. He had a tricky boiler in one of his other buildings, but like her other clients, he’d have to wait. She had forgotten to call the GC at Huartzer during business hours and left a message only when she’d finally gotten home. And her antitrust article awaited her at the office. The deadline loomed on Tuesday. Her boss loomed constantly.

Judy sat up in bed. She couldn’t relax. If she did drugs she’d do them now, but she stayed away from that stuff. She was already addicted to M&M’s, a monkey on her back. She could drink a nice chilled glass of pink Zinfandel but that would make her want to dance, not sleep. She had nothing good to read, though the stack of hardcovers on the bedside table threatened to topple. She resolved instantly to buy only books she wanted to read, not books that she should read, and felt suddenly free. Free! She switched on the ginger-jar lamp next to the books and jumped out of bed. Waking, the puppy lifted her head from her oversize paws and put it back down again, knowing where Judy was going and deciding it wasn’t worth the trouble to follow.

She padded out of her bedroom and headed for her studio in the adjoining room, where she flicked on the lights. Like her bedroom, it was large and empty, painted white, but there the similarity ended. It contained no furniture but was filled with multi-layered wooden trays of acrylic paints in tubes, jars of sable paintbrushes in all sizes, and large-format canvases, most of which were finished, propped against the walls.

Bright, bold paintings of natural landscapes dominated her work, painted from memories and photographs of places she had lived. There were mountains she had hiked in Big Sur from when her father was commissioned at Stanford, and rocks she had climbed in Virginia, near the basic-training facility at Quantico; and green, tropical trails through which she had mountain-biked, outside of Pensacola, where they had moved so he could teach initial flight training. The painting resting on the easel showed a secret stream she had discovered curling through the marsh on the way to the Everglades. She surveyed the verdant greens, dense cobalt blues, and hot orange of the painting without the usual satisfaction. What was wrong with it? Judy confronted her art with new eyes in the still apartment. The dark window across the room reflected the naked form of a tall, athletic woman with tousled blond hair.

The reflection caught her eye. She considered pulling the shade, but there was none to pull, and in any event the city was asleep. The full moon was the only thing peeking into her window, shining off the granulated tar roof of the rowhouse across the street and illuminating the aluminum of the gutter like an outline of light. Beyond the rooftop twinkled the lights of the city and the office buildings uptown. For the first time Judy noticed its gritty beauty, in hues of midnight black, cool silver, and bright white. She remembered the colors of the brick on the way to South Philly, from the cab window. She watched the city shimmer before her, then in her mind’s eye, with her own naked form ghosted in the foreground. In time she strode to the easel, picked up the unfinished canvas, and set it aside.

By the time Judy stopped painting, the moon had thinned to a pale shadow in a gray dawn sky, and she caught two hours’ sleep before she showered, got dressed, and went to work. She felt peaceful, rested, and even eager, all of which was necessary for where she was going.

Chapter 13

It was another perfect day in Philadelphia, which meant they had used up both of them. The sun was high in the clear sky, and the air felt cool. Judy intercepted a cab heading to the new Society Hill hotels, climbed into the backseat, and retrieved her cell phone from a full backpack. She wanted to know if she still had a live client. It seemed relevant, especially in view of where she was going.

“University City, Thirty-eighth and Spruce,” she told the cabbie, intentionally omitting the name of the building. She didn’t want him looking at her funnier than he already was.

A young man, he had a line of cartilage pierces, and his red hair had been knotted into ropy Rasta dreads that sprang like palm fronds from the center of his head. He smelled of reefer and was too cool to approve of her Saturday work uniform of jeans, denim clogs, and a wacky-colored Oilily sweater over a white T-shirt. Judy used to like bad boys that looked like him, but she was happily over that phase, having learned the obvious: that bad boys were simply childish men. She punched in the number for Frank’s cell phone and examined her nails, fingers outstretched, while the phone connected. Rust-colored acrylic paint rimmed her cuticles and the scent of turpentine overwhelmed the cabbie’s pot stink, which was as it should be.

“Hello, Lucia here,” Frank said when he picked up, and his voice sounded tired but reassuringly oxygenated.

“Tell me you’re both alive and well.”

“We’re both alive and one of us is well. He’s cleaning up the first floor as we speak. He already swept the loft and the second-

floor bedrooms. He’s the Energizer Bunny of grandpops.”

“Is he upset?”

“Yes, because we’re out of Hefty trash bags. He wanted to go to the corner for that and coffee, but I told him no.”

“And he listened?”

“Of course not. I had to tie him to a chair. What’s family for? I didn’t think you’d mind.”

Judy smiled. “That’s false imprisonment.”

“Nothing false about it.”

Judy laughed. Frank was fun to talk to. His voice was deep and warm. She wondered whether he was dating anybody and hoped he didn’t like bad girls. Everybody knew what they were. “Have the cops been over?”

“Are you kidding?”

Their first fight. She let it lie. The cab turned west on Walnut Street, the traffic sparse this morning, before the day’s shopping started. “Did the pigeons come back?”

“Not yet.”

“So your grandfather isn’t leaving the house?”

“He has to. I have a job to go to today, so I’m taking him with me. Did you see the newspapers this morning?”

“I’m avoiding them.”

“We’re the big story, unfortunately, and there’s a whole piece on the Coluzzis and the construction company. Pictures of John and Marco. Speculation about who’s taking over now that Angelo’s gone. Wait a minute.” Frank covered the receiver but Judy could hear Pigeon Tony fussing in Italian. “Sorry,” Frank said, when he came back on the line. “He’s not leaving my sight today, no matter what he says.”

“He wants to stay at the house.”

“He’s worried about the birds, but he doesn’t have to be here when they come home, if they come home. I don’t care. I slept on the couch pillows for him, that’s enough. He goes with me today.”

“I agree.” Judy’s cab zipped up Walnut. “Why don’t you get the Tonys to come over? They can wait for the birds.”

“The Tonys?” Frank asked, then laughed softly. “If you think it’s weird that they’re all named Tony, you’re wrong. The only thing that’s weird is that they’re not all named Frank.”

The cab crossed the concrete bridge over the Schuylkill River, which managed to fake a green-blue color today, and reached the Gothic towers of the University of Pennsylvania. They were getting closer. Judy needed information. “Where will you be today, in case I need to see your grandfather?” It was the real reason, but it sounded lame even to her.

“You got a pencil?”

Judy foraged in her leather backpack for a ballpoint pen and her little black Filofax. She found both, evidence of her karma returning, and flipped through the onion-thin pages of the Filofax until she found a blank one. The cabdriver clucked at the Filofax, but Judy didn’t apologize for it. At least it wasn’t a PalmPilot. “Go ahead,” she said, and jotted down the address and directions, then flipped the Filofax closed as the cab turned the corner on Thirty-eighth Street. They were only blocks away. Her stomach tightened. “Frank, listen, I have to go. I’m calling you from the cell.”

“Where are you?”

“You don’t want to know.” She looked out the window as the cab climbed University Avenue. The modern building, of low-slung red brick, squatted directly ahead, incongruous against the cheery blue sky.

“Okay, well, stay outta trouble. Don’t embarrass me like you did yesterday at the courthouse. Your jab needs work.”

Judy laughed, her face flushing warmly. She flipped the Star-TAC closed and tossed it into her backpack. “Pull up in front of that brick building on the right, please,” she said to the cabbie, who glanced back at her.

“But that’s the—”

“I know,” she said grimly, and the cabbie’s eyes met hers in the rearview mirror with a new respect.

Filofax 1, Dope 0.

Although Judy had impressed the cabbie, she had never been to the city morgue before, much less to an autopsy, and she concentrated on concealing that fact from the district attorney next to her, who had introduced himself as Jeff Gold, and Detective Sam Wilkins, the thin cop from the Roundhouse. They seemed undaunted by the glistening stainless-steel table they stood before, with raised edges all around, surprisingly long because it had a drain in one end and a stainless-steel sink. Judy’s gaze ran down the slant in the table toward the drain, and she realized that it wasn’t for water but for blood. Her stomach flip-flopped. She would have had to paint forever to get centered enough for this experience. She summoned up images of mountains, rocks, and forest streams from her landscapes, but nothing helped. Autopsy 1, Art 0.

A stainless-steel organ scale was suspended near Judy’s face and a huge operating room lamp poised over the table, casting a calcium-white brightness on a lineup of medical instruments on a stand at its head. Shiny scalpels, large scissors with a mysterious bulb at one end, and a tool that looked like a wire cutter gleamed in the light. Next to them rested a hammer with an odd hook on one side, a stubby handsaw with a handle like a gun, and an electric tool with a chubby chrome barrel and a rotating blade. A power saw. Judy forced herself to breathe deeply, but formaldehyde and disinfectant cut off fresh air. The operating-room light stung her eyes. Her head throbbed. She gripped the leather strap of her backpack for an anchor, to steady herself for whatever happened next.

The assistant medical examiner, who had introduced himself as Dr. Patel, stood aside as two assistants, both young African-American men in blue scrubs, wheeled over a gurney containing a black body bag. They lifted it from the gurney and placed it on the stainless-steel table with a dull thud that echoed in the quiet morgue. Dr. Patel and an assistant wordlessly positioned the body bag on the table, while the other assistant disappeared with the empty gurney. Judy concentrated on the coroner, not the body bag.

An Indian who spoke with an English accent, Dr. Patel was a middle-aged man with a permanent half smile and steel-framed glasses over brown eyes. He was dressed in blue scrubs and a blue puffy hat with a drawstring, and he wore two pairs of latex gloves. A little gold bump on one finger betrayed a wedding band. His hand rested protectively atop the body bag, which couldn’t be denied any longer. The black nylon bag was surprisingly short, with a puff at the end where the head would be and a mound where the feet would be. It smelled of new, cheap synthetics and carried with it the faint chill of refrigeration. Judy’s head felt light.

“Are you okay?” Dr. Patel asked her, and though it was kind, she was getting tired of being asked that question. Judy was supposed to be tough. She took boxing lessons. She climbed rocks for sport. She was a lieutenant colonel’s daughter.

“I’m fine,” she answered, hoping it sounded professional, but knowing it sounded like WATCH OUT, I’M GONNA RALPH! The district attorney and Detective Wilkins looked over. She wanted to run away. “I love it here,” she said, and the coroner smiled.

“This is your first time.”

No shit. “Yes.”

“I understand.” Dr. Patel’s eyes softened. “Perhaps if I explain as I go along, you can understand what you are seeing and it will diminish your fear.”

No, please, God, Judy thought. But what she said was, “Thank you.”

“Fine. We will begin the external examination.” With the help of an assistant, Dr. Patel unzipped the body bag, making a metallic chattering sound. The zipper opened from the top to the bottom and the widening opening at the top showed a V-slit of a gray human mask. The coroner and his assistant made quick work of slipping the body out of the bag and repositioning it on the table, then quickly covering its privates with a white sheet. Judy’s nausea surged at the sight. It was the dead body of Angelo Coluzzi.

“This is the case of Angelo Coluzzi,” Dr. Patel said, pronouncing the Italian name perfectly as he read it and a case number from a large yellow tag that hung from the body’s big toe. The coroner projected his voice in the direction of a black microphone that hung from the ceiling over the body. “Subject was brought into the Philadelphia Medical Examiner’s Office on April seventeenth. Subject is an eighty-year-old male Caucasian.”

Judy was about to look away again but stopped. She may have been an artist at heart, but she was a lawyer by profession. She had to understand everything about the facts to build her defense. There was a dead body at the crux of every murder case; it couldn’t, and shouldn’t, be avoided. Especially when this dead body was her client’s handiwork. The thought struck her that maybe that was part of the problem, which was also as it should be. It was easier to confront her art than her profession, but she was responsible for both. She told herself, So take responsibility. Look at the act you’re about to defend. Decide if he’s innocent or guilty. Judy’s eyes narrowed and her stomach tensed. She took a good look, and it repulsed her.

His face was bone-white in places and gray in the hollow of his cheeks and around his eyes, which were closed so tightly they seemed glued shut. Sparse gray hair sprung haphazardly from his scalp, which was as bald as Pigeon Tony’s. His nose protruded from gaunt cheeks, a bulbous shape with a breach at the bridge; it looked as if it had been broken long ago. His lips, flat in death, looked thin. Although Angelo Coluzzi’s head rested roughly in line with his backbone, even Judy’s untrained eye could see that its location was tenuous. His head wasn’t firmly attached to anything; only skin and muscle held it to the body. Judy realized that a broken neck was essentially a beheading. She closed her eyes briefly. How could one human being do this to another? How could Pigeon Tony do this to anyone?

“The first step in the external examination is easy,” Dr. Patel was saying. “The body must be measured and those measurements recorded for the case file.” He selected a common yardstick from the table of medical instruments and began measuring various parts of Angelo Coluzzi’s body, dictating the findings into the microphone. Judy barely listened, except to hear that the body weighed only 155 pounds and measured a mere 67 inches.

As the coroner read his other measurements, Judy’s horrified gaze traveled down Angelo Coluzzi’s body, which was skinny, his chest almost wasted and his upper arms withered with age. His hands had been bagged in clear plastic with a loose rubber band, but Judy could see they were arthritic. His hips jutted from above the discreet white sheet, and his legs rested slightly open, their calf muscles slack. Blood had collected along the backside of Angelo Coluzzi’s body, drawn by gravity once his heart had stopped, making a grim outline around his frail form.

Judy hadn’t expected that, hadn’t expected any of it. She had imagined that Angelo Coluzzi would be a tall, strong man. A big bully, a brute. But in death he took up only a little over half of the tray table. His were the remains of a bony old man. The body of a frail victim. Her client’s victim. A wave of emotion swept over her, stronger than the earlier nausea but kin to it, a sensation of ugliness that left her feeling sorrowful and sad. A vendetta was a living thing, and it could kill. It could do this, to an old man.

“Now we will note for the record the external abnormalities in the body,” Dr. Patel was saying, for Judy’s benefit. She watched as he gestured to Coluzzi’s broken neck. “There is slight bruising in the neck region, and the neck is at a distinctly abnormal angle in relation to the spine.”

Judy blinked, sickened, but the district attorney opened a fresh legal pad. “Wasn’t he strangled?” he asked, his pen poised for a note. “Looks like he could’ve been strangled, with the bruising on the neck and all.”

“I think not. Let me explain. Here, see.” Dr. Patel turned to an oversize manila folder on the side table, slid a large, dark X ray from it, and with a loud rustling noise tucked the X ray under the clamp on a light box on the near wall. Judy shakily retrieved a pen and a legal pad from her backpack as Dr. Patel switched on the light box. The box illuminated the X ray, a close-up of the miraculous tongue-in-groove vertebrae of the human backbone. But you didn’t have to be a doctor to know that something was terribly wrong with this backbone. It was disconnected at the base of a shadowy skull. Dr. Patel pointed calmly to the film. “We took these X rays when he first came in, the same time as the photos. You can see the fracture to the spinal column, at C3. A fracture that high up, death would have been instantaneous.”

“But he could have been strangled, couldn’t he? I mean, the bruises to the neck look like it was squeezed,” the district attorney asked again, but Dr. Patel shook his head, apparently willing only to state facts the science would support.

“No, the neck wasn’t squeezed. The bleeding you see is internal. The victim was not strangled to death. In the cases of strangulation, or asphyxia, one always sees petechial hemorrhages on the conjunctiva.” Dr. Patel turned back to the body and with a gloved thumb suddenly opened wide the eye of Angelo Coluzzi. Judy startled at the odd sight of the one-eyed corpse, his brown cornea clouded. Dr. Patel was pointing to the flap of the eyelid. “See? There is no blood clotting on the membrane lining the eye, not at all. So there was no loss of oxygen that resulted in death. We are getting ahead of ourselves here”—at this he gave an uncomfortable laugh—“but my initial conclusion is that the cause of death was the fracture to the neck. Death would have been instantaneous. This man did not suffer.”

Judy realized where the D.A. was going, and it wasn’t concern over the man’s suffering. He wanted to prove that the murder was premeditated. The law in Pennsylvania was that premeditation wasn’t a question of time, as in weeks or days in advance, but could occur in an instant, as long as death was the intended result. Strangulation was a slam-dunk for premeditation. Judy didn’t know if she was allowed to ask questions at an autopsy, but figured if the D.A. could, she could, too. And she had more than a legal reason for asking this one. “Dr. Patel, you said the victim’s neck was broken. Is that difficult to do?”

The district attorney snorted. “You can’t know that, can you, Doctor?” he asked, while the detective beside him listened impassively. “That’s not a pathology question.”

Dr. Patel blinked round-eyed behind his glasses, making him look owlish. “Perhaps not, but I am a doctor, sir, and it pertains here. The neck of a man this age would break without difficulty. One forceful snap would be enough. This man’s neck was essentially severed by the force.” Judy fell into an appalled silence, and Dr. Patel rested a hand on the body’s shoulder. “Now. Please, everyone, while I appreciate your interest, allow me to proceed in order, if you would. I must follow our department procedures.”

The district attorney made another note, and Judy was having the same trouble the jury would have. This man’s neck was essentially severed by the force.

“I move next to determine if there are other abnormalities on the body.” Dr. Patel took his time reviewing every inch of Angelo Coluzzi’s corpse, running his gloved fingers slowly over the skin, bending closer, and recording every scar, mole, and skin lesion. He even described a tattoo on Coluzzi’s arm, a crucifix encircled by a blurry crown of thorns and under it a ribbon banner reading ITALY , which Dr. Patel’s English accent made sound classy. It made Judy think about Pigeon Tony’s tattoo, also of a crucifix.

Judy mulled it over. Angelo Coluzzi and Pigeon Tony were two men, contemporaries, both immigrants from the same country. According to Frank they had grown up not ten miles apart. They both raced homing pigeons. They liked the same tattoos. They loved the same woman. They had more in common than most friends; yet they were enemies. Two little old men, and one had killed the other. Pigeon Tony had killed Angelo Coluzzi, the old man on the table, whose hands were now being slid from sealed evidence bags.

Judy’s thoughts churned away as she watched Dr. Patel separate Angelo Coluzzi’s stiff fingers and then scrape under each fingernail one by one, bagging carefully each line of dirt. Judy knew Dr. Patel would send them to the crime lab, where common dirt would reveal DNA from Pigeon Tony’s skin and fibers from the clothes he was wearing. Angelo Coluzzi’s body might even yield up Pigeon Tony’s fingerprints from its skin; the lab could do that, too, Judy recalled. The Commonwealth’s evidence against Pigeon Tony would be both substantial and solid, because he did it. He was guilty. And she was defending him. The thought sickened her. The death smell filled her nose. The icy body chilled her. The black bruises demanded justice. This man’s neck was essentially severed by the force. Judy couldn’t deny the act any longer. It was murder.

“Now we will begin the internal examination of the body,” Dr. Patel was saying. He turned to the instrument tray and picked up a large, shiny scalpel. “I will make a Y, or primary incision, into the trunk, cutting from shoulder to shoulder, crossing down over the breast. Then from the xyphoid process, or the lower tip, of the sternum, I will make a midline cut down the abdomen to the pubis.” Scalpel poised in the air, Dr. Patel peered uncertainly at Judy. “Are you feeling okay? You look unwell.”

But she couldn’t answer, because she felt her gorge rising and had to run for the nearest bathroom.

Chapter 14

After the morgue, Judy had planned to go back to the office, but that would have to wait. It had taken her only a minute to decide to blow off work at the office and another half hour to retrieve her car, a new VW Beetle. She had more important things on her mind than antitrust articles. She floored the gas pedal, and warm air blasted through the open window. She was going to talk to her client, the one who could twist another man’s neck off and think that was just fine.

The bright green Bug zoomed down the Schuylkill Expressway out of Philadelphia, faster than any cartoon insect should. Judy adored her car but today it gave her no pleasure. Its black vinyl interior reminded her of the nylon body bag. The new-car smell was too close to formaldehyde. The fresh daisy she kept in the glass bottle on the console had wilted. She tasted bile on her teeth and it wasn’t nausea, it was anger. At Pigeon Tony for what he had done, and at herself, for being so clueless. She was defending a guilty man. That she could have doubted it scared her. What was she thinking? That he was a cute little guy? That he had a handsome grandson?

What kind of a lawyer was she? The kind who represented guilty people as innocent. The kind who lied to themselves and to the jury. The kind everybody hated, who starred in countless lawyer jokes: How do you stop a lawyer from drowning? You shoot him. What do lawyers use for birth control? Their personalities. What do you call forty skydiving lawyers? Skeet. What’s the difference between a woman lawyer and a pit bull? Lipstick.

What’s the trouble with lawyer jokes? Lawyers don’t think they’re funny and nobody else thinks they’re jokes.

Despite the punch lines, Judy couldn’t laugh. She hated that the public made jokes about lawyers, hated that they didn’t understand the nobility of the profession, or of the law itself. Now she had become a lawyer joke. She hit the gas.

The Beetle flew west toward Chester County, where Frank had said he’d be with Pigeon Tony. She had intended to go there after finishing her antitrust article, but she still had Sunday and the weekend gave her a reprieve on returning the GC’s phone calls. She left the city skyline behind and switched lanes again, impatient even in light traffic. The directions Frank had given her, written in her open Filofax on the passenger seat, fluttered in the wind as the VW accelerated. She’d go out 202 South and west from there. It would take over an hour. Too damn long.

But still not long enough to cool down.

Judy could smell the wetness that chilled the air blowing in the VW’s window; though it was sunny outside now, it must have rained west of the city earlier in the morning, and it wasn’t only the weather that was drastically different. She glanced around as she steered the car down a winding gravel road flanked by pasturelands. Out here it was country. She checked the directions but she was going to the right place.

A blue sky chased dawdling gray clouds to the horizon, which extended to an expanse of grassy hills so immense she could hardly believe she was still in Pennsylvania. The hills rolled into an unmowed meadow rippling in a gentle, still-damp breeze, and swallows and blue jays sailed above, swooping low to catch bugs the rainstorm had stirred up. Chirping and singing filled the meadow and its overgrown grasses, browning at the top, swaying with chrome-yellow bursts of dandelions, blue dots of forget-me-nots, and clusters of wild honeysuckle. The wildflowers sweetened the air, but Judy rolled up the window. The landscape inspired the painter in her, but a lawyer was in the driver’s seat.

Huge pin oak trees towered in a shady grove beside the meadow, and in front of it Judy spotted Frank’s white truck and other construction vehicles. They circled the only scar in the perfect landscape: a site that was a large, cleared patch of land the size of a private airstrip. Lush grass had been peeled away like pieces of an orange rind and tons of topsoil surrounded the strip, mounded in triangles smoothed by a bulldozer. Judy aimed for Frank’s truck, her VW tires slip-sliding on the wet grass, and as she pulled up she could see that the strip housed a deep trench that ran its length.

The VW bounced off the grass and hit the wet dirt, which clotted Judy’s car tires immediately, and Judy wished for four-wheel drive so she could yell at her client sooner. How come they hadn’t mentioned that at the VW dealership? She added the car salesman to her shit list, cut the ignition, and climbed out of the car.

Her feet landed in dirt but her clogs felt completely at home. Brown-orange mud lay everywhere and little white butterflies flitted between the wet patches, looking for moisture. Judy couldn’t have cared less. She stalked over to Frank’s pickup, parked at the far side of the muddy strip, next to a six-foot mountain of rubble. The sun glared off the truck window, and she couldn’t tell if anyone was in it at first; when she got closer, she could see that it was empty. She didn’t see Frank or Pigeon Tony. A big yellow backhoe was running, but no one was around except a man shoveling more gravel into the trench. Judy thought about yelling at him, but she didn’t represent him.

She hurried on, her clogs collecting mud until they looked like snowshoes. It slowed her but didn’t stop her. Nothing could. At the far end of the patch roared the John Deere backhoe, big as a dinosaur and equally incongruous, making ferocious grinding and rattling noises. The hoe was engaged, toeing the earth between two hydraulic braces on either side. Judy looked up at the glass cab and there was Frank.

Frowning in concentration, he sat shirtless in jeans, straddling a black console with two black-knobbed levers. He had a palm on each stick, working them independently, so that the immense claw of the hoe feathered the topsoil, extending the trench line. Judy couldn’t help but eye Frank’s chest, lightly covered with fine black hair and muscular enough to make even his farmer’s tan look damn good. She watched him pull the levers expertly, then warned herself not to be distracted by the fact that Frank could operate heavy machinery while naked. Judy’s attraction to him confused her, especially since the morgue. She looked around for Pigeon Tony. She hoped the Coluzzis hadn’t gotten to him before she could.