The Vendetta Defense

by Lisa Scottoline

  Mr. DiNunzio nodded. “We were thinking, if you only look at the red ones, that narrows it down to only 593 wrecks we gotta look at.”

  “But we gotta check the burned ones, too,” Tony-From-Down-The-Block added, “since I think the truck caught on fire.”

  “How many burned trucks are there?” Judy asked, but Feet shrugged.

  “We didn’t count. We got tired and ate doughnuts instead.”

  Judy smiled and faced the Cyclone fence around the scrapyard. She didn’t know how’d she’d scale it, much less get them over. It was easily ten feet high, and the concertina wire would slice like a razor. “Only one obstacle left. We gotta climb the fence.”

  “The hell with that,” Feet said, and Mr. DiNunzio laughed.

  “You think a fence can keep out a coupla boys from the neighborhood?” He hooked an arthritic index finger on one of the fence’s wires and yanked. A waist-high door opened in the fence, its metal crudely severed. “I know it ain’t right, so don’t tell my daughter on me.”

  Judy’s eyes widened. “Mr. D, this is breaking and entering.”

  “No, it ain’t,” Tony-From-Down-The-Block said. “We didn’t break nothing.”

  “Let’s go.” Feet ducked down and shuffled with his coffee through the makeshift gate, and Tony-From-Down-The-Block went behind him, while Mr. DiNunzio held open the door for Judy, who balked.

  “I can’t do this,” she said, albeit reluctantly. All the Italians were going inside to have fun. Even the puppy tugged at the leash. “I’m an officer of the court. I’ve never broken the law in my life. It’s the only rules I follow.”

  “Don’t be a party pooper!” Tony-From-Down-The-Block shouted from the other side of the fence, and Feet agreed.

  “You tol’ us to find the truck, we found the truck. Now come on, Jude! It could be in there somewhere. We gotta get goin’.”

  Judy thought hard. She could petition the bankruptcy court for permission to enter, but that would show her hand, publicly and to Frank, and they wouldn’t grant it in the end. Maybe if she called the counsel for the scrap company, but that could take days. She couldn’t see any alternative.

  “You gotta do it, Judy,” Mr. DiNunzio said. “For Pigeon Tony. How’s he ever gonna get justice if we don’t help?”

  Judy smiled at the irony. “Is it okay to break the law to get justice, Mr. D?”

  The old man’s eyes narrowed, and though none of them had ever discussed the direct question of Pigeon Tony’s guilt, Mr. DiNunzio knew just what she was saying. “Sure it is,” he said with certainty.

  Judy considered it, standing her ground, feeling like a hypocrite, then a fool. It had started as a simple question but had become freighted. Still, an ethical question didn’t have to be a momentous one to present the issue; the fact that it seemed minor only eased glossing over the ethics. Judy was confronting the white lie of break-ins.

  “Penny, come! Come!” Feet shouted suddenly, with a loud clap, and Penny, on the leash in Judy’s hand, leaped forward and tugged them both through the gate, lunging for the doughnut Feet was offering.

  “No fair!” Judy said, landing confused on the other side.

  Mr. DiNunzio came through and patted her on the back. “Let’s go save a life,” he said, but Feet shook his head.

  “What’s the big deal, Jude? You may be a lawyer, but you can lighten up a little.”

  Tony-From-Down-The-Block threw an arm around her, with a cigar between his fingers. “Sometimes education makes you dumb,” he said.

  Judy wasn’t sure she agreed, but she was already on the other side of the fence.

  And the gate was closed behind her.

  32

  The toxic wind from the expressway lessened inside the scrapyard, and Judy and The Two Tonys, the puppy, and Mr. DiNunzio made their way to the junked cars, past a thirty-foot-high pile of car parts. “Looks like crab shells,” Feet said.

  They passed a lineup of used rubber tires.

  “Looks like chocolate doughnuts,” Feet said.

  They passed bales of smashed tin cans.

  “Looks like shredded wheat,” Feet said.

  Judy smiled as they walked by a yellow crane that said KOMATSU on the side in black letters. “What’s that look like, Feet?”

  “My mother-in-law,” he said, and everybody laughed.

  They walked on, down one of the makeshift streets of scrap, and in time Tony-From-Down-The-Block took on the role of tour guide. “See, Judy, that thing there”—he pointed at the corrugated tower, his cigar between two fingers—“that’s the shredder. It shreds the metal.”

  “Interesting,” Judy said, meaning it. She thought all cars got flattened, like in The Brave Little You-Know-What.

  “The cars and scrap metal go up the conveyor belts, then inside the tower is a row of magnets, and it separates the aluminum, copper, and brass from iron scrap. Aluminum don’t get attracted to magnets, you follow? Also it shoots out the rest of the stuff that’s not metal, like car seats and shit like that. That’s called fluff.”

  Feet looked over. “How do you know that?”

  “I been around, that’s how. A scrapyard this big, they could do three, four thousand cars a day. Usually the cars get collected in the day and shredded at night.” They walked past a ten-foot triangle of chewed-up metal, and Tony-From-Down-The-Block pointed. “That’s frag. Comes outta the metal shredder like that. Worth a lot of money. They use it in new cars. Recycled metal.”

  “Looks like fried clams,” Feet said, and Penny looked over with interest.

  About five miles of trash, scrap, twisted metal, and rusty train wheels later, Judy and Company stood dwarfed before a wall of junked cars, bound by heavy chain. The cars had been stripped of their tires, exposing the brake drums, the headlights had been pulled out, leaving the cars eyeless, and the chrome and the car roofs had been cut off, so that only the bodies remained.

  “Looks like a stack of pancakes,” said Feet, who now held Penny’s leash. The dog had fallen in love with him on the way over, for obvious reasons.

  Judy skimmed the names on the carcasses. Delta 88. Monte Carlo. Sunbird. Ford Granada. They were all old cars, judging from the ridiculous lengths of the car bodies. It was hard to see how earth had room for all the cars in the eighties. “I’ve never heard of half these cars.”

  “I owned half these cars,” Tony-From-Down-The-Block said, and Feet smiled.

  “We better get to work,” Mr. DiNunzio said, finishing his coffee and wiggling the empty cup. “Wait, what’re we doin’ with our trash?”

  “Just throw it on the ground,” Tony-From-Down-The-Block said, but Mr. DiNunzio shook his head.

  “That ain’t right. You don’t throw litter on the ground.”

  “It’s a junkyard, Matty.”

  “It still ain’t right,” he said. He folded his empty cup carefully in two and stuffed it into the pocket of his brown cardigan.

  “Let’s get it done,” Judy said. She scanned the cars, whose rows extended unevenly to the sky, inevitably reminding her of a mountain range. “Feet, you and Penny take the far end. We’ll all space ourselves along and start looking. It’s a red Volkswagen pickup with a Mason’s emblem. There can’t be many of them here.”

  Feet nodded hopefully. “True. I remember it was a pretty unusual thing. I don’t think they made a lot of ’em. Frank, he loved that little truck.”

  Tony-From-Down-The-Block put a comforting hand on Judy’s shoulder. “We’ll find it, Jude. Anybody can find it, we can.”

  Mr. DiNunzio chimed in, “Sure we will. Red is easy to see.”

  Judy forced a smile, from the foothills of the junked-car mountains. “How hard can it be?” she asked.

  Only Penny had the sense to look doubtful.

  Four hours later, the noon sun burned high in a cloudless sky, and its heat reflected on the discarded metal everywhere, transforming the scrapyard into a furnace. Judy sweated through her suit, even with the jacket off, and Penny lapped bottled water fr
om Mr. DiNunzio’s unfolded coffee cup. But all of them forgot the heat when they discovered the short red truck in the middle, third from the bottom, in the stack of junked vehicles.

  “You think this is it?” Judy asked, checking her excitement. Mr. DiNunzio had been the one to find the truck and had let out a yelp at the discovery, but she didn’t want to jump to any conclusions.

  “Sure, it is!” Mr. DiNunzio answered, pointing at the smashed grille. “Got the VW circle and all. It’s smashed and burned but it’s there.”

  Judy looked. The VW logo hung in a circle from the truck’s broken black grille, and its red paint was visible only in dull splotches that weren’t blackened by fire.

  “Look!” Feet shouted from the back of the truck, and Judy’s heart skipped a beat as she remembered the bomb that Tullio had found under her bumper. She hurried over to Feet, who was almost jumping with happiness. “It’s got the Mason thing and all! This has gotta be the truck! See it?”

  “Jeez,” Judy heard herself say. A Masonic emblem, its fake gold charred, could barely be identified by its embossing. It seemed that the truck was the Lucias’, and seeing the wreck this close saddened Judy. She couldn’t see the driver’s side, and the only obvious point about the wreckage was that nobody could have walked away from it alive. And as odd as it felt finding the truck without Frank’s knowledge, she was glad he hadn’t been here to see it. “Nobody tell Frank we found this, okay?” Judy said as a reminder.

  “Okay,” Mr. DiNunzio said, and the others nodded gravely.

  She surveyed the situation. She had a junker that had been confiscated by court order, three very tired but victorious senior citizens, and a puppy shredding a paper cup with vigor. “Now all we got to do is get the truck out of here,” she said, thinking aloud, and Tony-From-Down-The-Block brightened.

  “Piece a cake. We snip the chains and yank—”

  “NO!” Judy said. Instantly Penny dropped the cup, but Judy considered her obedience as temporary insanity. “We can’t just take it. It’s here under court order.”

  Mr. DiNunzio frowned. “Can you call the court?”

  “It’s not that easy, especially bankruptcy court. You have to petition for it. And we can’t get it out by police order unless we’re willing to go public with it, which I’m not.”

  “You don’t want Frank to know.” Feet nodded.

  “I don’t want the Coluzzis to know either. If this was murder and not an accident, I don’t want them to know we’re onto them.” Judy tried to think, but Tony-From-Down-The-Block kept talking, tempting her like a devil with a Macanudo.

  “All it takes is a crane operator,” he was saying. “Crane’s right over there. Drive it over, pick the cars off the top, and pull out the red truck. Friend of mine can work a crane, and another friend got a flatbed.”

  Judy shook her head. “It’s illegal.”

  “We won’t get caught. This place is friggin’ deserted. Both of my buddies are in the club. They’d be glad to help Pigeon Tony out, and they won’t say nothin’. Be done in five minutes.”

  Judy shuddered. “I took an oath.”

  “People get divorced all the time. Look at me and Feet.”

  Mr. DiNunzio snorted. “You two make a bad couple. I wouldn’t a given it ten minutes.”

  Feet laughed, but Judy didn’t. “It’s not the same thing,” she said. “And if we get caught, it’s my license.”

  “So don’t be there. What we need you for?”

  Judy shook her head. “Maybe we can bring the expert to the truck, instead of the other way around.”

  “How’s he gonna test it, like a pancake in a stack?”

  “Gimme a minute.” Judy bit her lip. “There has to be another way.”

  “You think too much, even for a lawyer.”

  “Okay, gimme a day. I’ll come up with something and let you know.”

  Feet laughed. “This is like that joke where the rabbi shoots a hole in one, but he’s playing golf on a high holy day.”

  Judy smiled. Gazing at the car, she couldn’t completely disagree.

  “Not that I tell Jewish jokes,” Feet added.

  “Never happen,” said Tony-From-Down-The-Block.

  Judy didn’t have to fight the press to get to the door of her office building. There were fewer reporters clogging the sidewalk than usual, and she was guessing it wasn’t her new perfume, Eau de Scrapyard. Judging from their questions, they had deserted her for the Coluzzi Construction offices.

  “Ms. Carrier, what do you say to today’s news that Marco has thrown his brother John out of the company offices?” “Ms. Carrier, do you have any comment on the feud between the Coluzzis?” “Judy, where are you hiding Pigeon Tony and why?”

  “No comment,” she said, suppressing her excitement as she hit the building, grabbed an elevator, and punched the button for her floor. She could hardly wait for the doors to open so she could jump out. “Is Bennie in?” she called when she hit the reception area, but the receptionist was leaving, bag in hand.

  “Uh, Bennie?” the receptionist asked. She was apparently a temp, a tall, thin woman with a long, dark braid and too much makeup; but then to Judy, everybody but Marlene Bello wore too much makeup. “Bennie Rosato? She said she went on an emergency TRO, whatever that is. On a First Amendment case. She’s in court.”

  Damn. No wonder Bennie hadn’t answered her cell phone. Judy had wanted to talk to her about the red truck before she got arrested, not after. “May I have my messages and mail? Also the newspapers.”

  “Hold on a minute.” The receptionist turned reluctantly back to the desk, rooted through the papers to locate Judy’s phone messages, correspondence, and today’s newspapers, and handed them all to her. “Your name is Judy Carrier, right? Where’s the dog?”

  “With a man named Feet. Thanks for the mail.” Preoccupied, Judy flipped through her phone messages. WCAU-TV, WPVI-TV, ABC, NBC, CNN, Court TV and an array of newspapers. “You a temp, by the way? Where’s Marshall?”

  “Gotta go. Late lunch and all.”

  “Have fun.” Judy grabbed the papers and her correspondence, chugged to her office, and ignored everything but the front page of The Daily News. IT’S OVER, JOHNNIE, read the tabloid headline, and Judy flipped the page to read the story.

  In a major power grab, Marco Coluzzi, chief financial officer of Coluzzi Construction Company, this morning blocked his brother John’s entrance to the company offices. The surprise move almost caused a riot on this tiny block of South Philadelphia. Private security guards apparently employed by Marco Coluzzi were able to keep John Coluzzi, chief operating officer of Coluzzi Construction, and others from reporting to work without violence. Philadelphia police arrived quickly on the scene, and one highly placed company official commented that they had been called in advance to keep a lid on any potential disturbance.

  Neither Coluzzi brother could be reached for comment, but Coluzzi Construction has issued a press release stating that, “Effective today, Marco Coluzzi has been named president and CEO of Coluzzi Construction. All previous contracts made under prior management will remain in force and be honored.”

  My God. So Marco had made his move. What sort of king waited to be crowned, when he could crown himself? Judy read the tabloid’s account, then the next newspaper’s and the next, sinking into her desk chair in her sunny office, soaking it all in. It couldn’t have gone better if she’d planned it. She flipped the page to continue reading the story, and next to it was a sidebar that was even better.

  Coluzzi Construction, considered a shoo-in for the construction contract for the new waterfront shopping complex, was today denied the nod. City officials state that the contract was offered to Melton Construction instead because of “their high quality of workmanship and price, of course,” but insiders say that the recent racketeering lawsuit against Coluzzi Construction over the nearby Philly Court Center was behind the upset. The contract was valued at $11 million.

  Judy was stunned. She had cost the
Coluzzis a fortune. The timing of Marco’s takeover was no coincidence. If John had been responsible for the Philly Court debacle, it had to have been the final blow against him. Judy changed her plans. She had come back to the office to press her lawsuit against the Coluzzis, to prepare and file the first wave of interrogatories and document requests, but the takeover became instant priority. Marco had declared war, and she could only guess how John would react. Judy had no way of knowing. Then she thought about it. Yes, she did.

  The tapes, between Fat Jimmy and Angelo Coluzzi. They were her only way into the inner workings of the Coluzzis, and she hadn’t finished listening to them yet. They’d been a dry hole for the murder of Frank’s parents, except for the fact that Angelo and Fat Jimmy had been together that night. But what could the tapes tell her, if anything, about the warring brothers?

  Judy considered it. John Coluzzi and Fat Jimmy were allies now, maybe they had been for a long time. Maybe there had been discussions of Marco on the tapes. It was likelier than not. She tossed the newspaper aside and hurried to the conference room, where she had left the box of tapes.

  But when she got there, they were gone.

  33

  Judy couldn’t believe what she was seeing. The conference room was the way she’d left it this morning, minus the lo mein cartons, the dog dish, and the big cardboard box of tapes. “Who took my tapes?” she shouted.

  She turned on her heels, but the office looked empty, normal for lunchtime. Nobody would have gone into the war room and taken evidence from it. It was an unwritten rule, observed by everyone. Who was new on the scene? Then Judy remembered. There had been a temp at the front desk. The temp was the only possibility. And she had been on the way out when Judy came in.

  One of the secretaries appeared behind her. “The temp was in there this morning,” she said. “She told me you told her to clean up the food and all—”

  “Thanks, but I didn’t do that.” Alarmed, Judy sprinted from the conference room, past the astonished expressions of the lawyers, including Murphy, who was escorting clients to the reception area. Judy didn’t care. “Murphy, call Marshall’s house and check on her!”