The Vendetta Defense

by Lisa Scottoline

  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.

  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.

  The engine to the backhoe stopped suddenly. “Yo, Judy!” Frank grinned and called to her from the cab as he stood up and slipped into a white Nike T-shirt that hung beside him on the console. Now there really was no reason to stick around.<
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  “Where’s your grandfather?” she called back.

  “Behind the rocks!” He pointed past the rubble pile, and Judy took off. She didn’t look back, telegraphing that this was a business call, and after a minute she heard the backhoe engine restart. She tramped in the mud around the rock pile, where she found Pigeon Tony.

  He was bent over the rocks, apparently sorting them, in dark baggy pants and a wide-brimmed straw hat that had a makeshift cotton string for a chin strap. A red bandanna was knotted around his neck and a madras shirt hung like a rag from his belt; he toiled as shirtless as his grandson, to a much different effect. His shoulders were skinny and his breasts small and slack, the nipples flat and shriveled against the soft, almost womanish skin. Except for Angelo Coluzzi on the slab, Judy had never seen such an old man so bare. Her throat caught unaccountably, watching him bend over to pick up a rock, setting a golden crucifix around his neck swinging.

  The crucifix brought Judy back to her senses. She remembered the crucifix tattooed on Angelo Coluzzi’s arm and the skinniness of his gray chest on the steel tray, under the harsh fluorescent lighting. The chilly morgue was a world from this sunlit meadow, but it had a death grip on her, and she couldn’t shake its reach. How lucky Pigeon Tony was to be alive in this lovely place and how privileged to be drawing breath today. It was a privilege he hadn’t afforded Angelo Coluzzi.

  Judy looked at her client with cold eyes. He was examining the rock carefully, turning it over and over like a tumbler, then setting it down in the far pile with a tiny grunt. Judging from the size of the three piles before him, which Judy would have classified as rocks, rocks, and more rocks, Pigeon Tony had been making meaningless distinctions between rocks all morning. When he bent over for the next rock, he spotted her standing there and broke into a welcoming smile.

  “Judy!” He straightened up, and his hand went automatically to the back of his belt. He pulled his shirt out and slipped into it as quickly as Frank had, leaving it unbuttoned. “You come!”

  “I need to talk to you, Pigeon Tony.” Judy shielded her eyes from the sun. “Can you take a break?”

  “Sure,” he said, which came out like shhhh, and he set the rock down gently. He slipped his hat from his head, so that it hung on its cotton string, revealing that his smile had vanished. “Whatsa matter?”

  “Follow me,” she said sternly, and led him to the shade of the oak trees.

  15

  Sun peeked through the leaves of the oak tree, falling dappled on the tall grass, and a cool breeze wafted through the shady grove. Judy was too angry to sit down but Pigeon Tony perched on the thickly knotted root of a tree in his bumpy madras shirt and baggy pants, next to a Hefty garbage bag he had insisted on fetching from the truck. He had untied his red bandanna and smoothed it out on the grass, then began unpacking the Hefty bag, placing on the red cloth items that were wrapped with what looked like men’s undershirts. Judy had no idea what they were or why they were bundled with laundry.

  “Pigeon Tony, I need you to listen to me.”

  “Si, si, I listen.” With difficulty he untied the tiny knot in the first item and unfolded it to reveal a generous sandwich on crusty Italian bread—buffalo mozzarella with roasted red peppers. It looked delicious even in underwear, but Judy tried not to notice.

  “I want you to look at me when we talk. This is important.”

  “Okay, okay. Gotta eat.” Pigeon Tony nodded, his fresh sunburn obvious now that his straw hat was off, hanging down his back on its cotton string. He unwrapped the next shirt to find a pile of black olives, their rich oil soaked into the soft cotton. “Alla people gotta eat. Work, eat. Work again.”

  “Fine.” Judy sighed. “Can you eat while I talk?”

  Pigeon Tony shook his head, no. The next shirt contained a perfect red apple, then Pigeon Tony rummaged in the Hefty bag again and produced a thick jelly glass and a half-full bottle of Chianti. Old-fashioned basket-weaving covered the bottom of the bottle and made a loop at its neck.

  “Well, too bad. You have to.” Judy lowered herself to the grass, tucking her feet under her. “I just came from the morgue. You know what that is, a morgue?”

  “Che?” Pigeon Tony twisted the cork from the Chianti bottle, poured it gurgling into the jelly glass, and offered it to Judy. “Drink.”

  “No thanks,” she said, waving it off, but he set it down in front of her anyway. “A morgue is where they keep dead people.”

  “Ah, si, si.” Pigeon Tony picked up the mozzarella-and-pepper sandwich and handed it to her. “Eat.”

  “I don’t want your lunch.”

  “Not my, is for you. Work, then eat.” Pigeon Tony thrust the sandwich at her again. “I make, for you. You work, eat. Work again.”

  “This isn’t your lunch?” Judy didn’t understand. She didn’t want to understand. She was prepared to ream him out, to call him to account. She had just seen his victim. Pigeon Tony was a murderer.

  “No, no, not my. I eat, before.” He gestured to the apple and the slick olives. “Alla, for you.”

  Judy didn’t want the sandwich. She set it back down on the undershirt. “Pigeon Tony, I saw Angelo Coluzzi in the morgue. I want you to tell me how you came to kill him. Do you understand?”

  “Si.” Pigeon Tony frowned, his forehead buckling into leathery wrinkles. “You no eat, Judy?”

  “No, now let’s talk. Tell me everything. Who else was there, how you found him—everything.”

  “Talk, then eat?”

  “Talk, then eat.” Judy sighed. The man could negotiate with the best of them. She imagined him back in Italy, getting the best prices for whatever he grew. Tomatoes, olives, whatever. “But we’re going to talk first. Talk now.”

  Pigeon Tony appeared to think a minute, then his face darkened. “I see Coluzzi at the club, you know? The club?”

  Judy nodded. The pigeon-racing club. “What time of day, exactly?”

  “Ah, inna mornin’. Friday, eight o’clock inna mornin’.” Pigeon Tony nodded, his small mouth tight. “Alla loft, they come to the clubhouse. The birds, they get the bands. Onna legs. Before race. You understand?”

  Judy nodded. She was the one who spoke English. She understood. “Who else was there, in the clubhouse?”

  “Alla people—Tony, Feet, alla inna club. Me, Pigeon Tony, I go to back, inna back, to get bands and bom”—Pigeon Tony’s eyes glittered—“I see Coluzzi!”

  “In the back? What back?”

  “Inna room, inna back. They play cards. You know.”

  Judy didn’t know, but she could guess. “Why were you going in the back room?”

  “To get bands, for birds. They have at club. They count, so no cheating. Everybody get bands before race.”

  “Fine.” Judy nodded. Whatever. “Was anybody else in the back room?”

  “Coluzzi.”

  Judy persisted. “I meant anybody besides Coluzzi and you?”

  “No.”

  “So it was just you and him, in the back room.” Judy tried to visualize it. She would have to get to the crime scene soon. When would she find the time? What about her other cases? “How big is the back room?”

  “Little. Is little room.”

  “What’s in it besides bands?”

  “Alla things. Alla for birds.”

  “Supplies for the birds?”

  “Si, si.”

  Judy could make only a mental note. She’d been so pissed when she got here, she’d left her backpack in the car. “Okay, so you go in the back room, and there he is. What happens next?”

  “I see Coluzzi and I hate him. Hate!” Pigeon Tony’s face colored and he clenched his small hands. “I hate him, in here. Inside.” He thumped a fist on his chest. “Inna my heart I hate him. You know, hate?”

  “Yes, I know,” Judy said, though she doubted that anybody whose first language was English knew the hate he was talking about.

  “And I kill him.”

  The words made Judy shudder. “So you just start hati
ng him, and you kill him?” It sounded like spontaneous combustion, but she couldn’t begin to translate. “Just like that?”

  Pigeon Tony’s eyes clouded with apparent confusion.

  “I’m trying to understand why you killed him. I saw his body and his neck. It was broken very badly. It was awful to see. I don’t know how you could do such a thing.”

  “Si, si.” Pigeon Tony nodded. “I say you before. I kill him. He kill my wife. I say, before.”

  Judy wiped her brow. If this weren’t a privileged conversation, she’d get Frank to translate. Shirtless. “I’m trying to make sense of this. I’m asking, did you just see Coluzzi and then run at him and break his neck?”

  “Si, si, we make a fight and I break his neck. You know.”

  Judy did a double take. “What do you mean, you made a fight?”

  “Si, si, we make a fight.” Pigeon Tony cocked his head. “Come se dice, make a fight?”

  “No, wait a minute.” She would have to hire a fully dressed translator. It would be less fun but she could do her job. “We say fight, too, but you didn’t tell me you two had a fight. What did you fight about?”

  “What he say.”

  “What did he say?”

  Pigeon Tony’s dark eyes fluttered. “He say . . . thing.”

  “Yes, but what?” Judy couldn’t keep anger from her tone. “Did he call you a name? What?”

  Pigeon Tony didn’t answer, his gaze focused on a splotch of sun outside the oak grove. Birds chirped in the meadow but he wasn’t listening to them either.

  “Pigeon Tony, tell me what he said. You understand more than you let on. You don’t fool me.”