The Vendetta Defense

by Lisa Scottoline

  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.

  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 StarTAC 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-d
unk 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.