“There’s no liability for you. Whatever exposure there was, the statute of limitations has long since passed. Being a lawyer, you know that.”
“I haven’t really thought about it, frankly. I haven’t practiced law since my first marriage.”
“So you won’t have a problem telling me about what you might have done.”
“Why do you care?”
“Because I have a twin sister who may be dead or may be alive. But I need to know either way.”
This seemed to affect the woman more than Pine thought it would.
“Tell me more about that,” she said in a low voice tinged with curiosity.
And Pine did, every detail from that awful night in Andersonville. And then all that she had learned about Bruno and Ito Vincenzo.
“That is quite horrible,” Holden-Bryant finally said in a breathless gush.
“Yes, it was. So anything you can tell me would be more than I have now.”
The woman once more got out of bed. But this time not for a drink. She pulled a chair up to them and sat down. She stared at the carpeted floor as she spoke. “I loved Jack unconditionally, with everything I had. He was absolutely everything I wanted in a husband. I had planned out our wedding, our first few years of marriage together. I was a driven, independent woman, don’t get me wrong. I wanted a very high-powered legal career and I worked my ass off for it.” She paused. “But that wasn’t all I wanted. I wanted a life with Jack. I wanted children with him.” She paused again and looked around her to-die-for bedroom. “And instead I got this. And I can tell you it doesn’t come close to making up for it.” She bowed her head for a moment before looking up. She eyed Blum. “I suspected Jack was seeing someone else. A woman can just tell, you know?”
Blum nodded. “I had that happen to me. And I agree with you. There are telltale signs.”
“What did you do to validate your suspicions?” asked Pine.
“I hired a private detective and had him followed. I used a guy who worked with me on my legal cases. He was good, very good. He got details, photos, everything.”
“Of Jack with my mother?” said Pine.
“As soon as you walked in that door over there, I knew you were Amanda and Jack’s daughter. Amanda was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. I could understand why Jack would fall for her. But I was also furious with him. Angry beyond belief.”
“And what did you do about that anger?” asked Pine quietly.
“I knew that Jack worked for the feds. He never talked about that work, and I never pressed him. I knew all about confidences. I exercised those in my line of work. I never talked to him about my cases.” She got up, went over to the bar, and poured herself a glass of club soda. Returning to her seat she said, “I followed the mob cases going on in New York at that time. I never repped any of the mob bosses, but from time to time I did represent some of the foot soldiers. I knew they were scum, but that was part of the challenge. And I happen to believe that everyone deserves good legal representation. But it was more than that. The bosses expected undying loyalty from the guys down below. But they never extended that same level of loyalty. They’d throw them under the bus to save their own asses. That didn’t sit well with me.”
Holden-Bryant paused and seemed poised to lapse into a sea of old memories.
“Go on,” prompted Pine.
“There was one foot soldier who came to me for legal representation in connection with the string of RICO cases going on then. His name was Amadeo Bertelli. You can’t get more Italian than that, and the guy filled every awful stereotype of the Italian mobster. He was up to his elbows in blood. He was not a man I would have spent one minute with on a personal level. But he had a story to tell and I listened to that story. And the more I listened the more things started to make sense to me.
“He had a friend who had gotten embroiled in this whole thing. The friend had tried to do the right thing but had gotten screwed by someone. He’d already been arrested but had made bail for some reason. I met with this person.”
“Bruno Vincenzo,” said Pine. “The man you just denied ever hearing of?”
“Yes. Bruno Vincenzo,” she parroted bitterly. “He was even worse than Bertelli. Just being in the same room with the guy gave me the creeps. Anyway, Vincenzo told me everything. And I mean everything. He was hoping I could work a deal with the prosecutors to put him in WITSEC. But before any of that could happen his bail was revoked, and another lawyer took over the case. Bruno ended up going to prison. And I learned he was killed in there some time later.”
“And that should have been the end of it,” said Pine.
“Should have been but wasn’t,” said Holden-Bryant in a heavy voice.
“How did you find out where my family was being relocated?” asked Pine. “You said Jack never talked about his work.”
Holden-Bryant glanced up at her, her eyes slits through which tears were seeping.
“He didn’t always lock up his briefcase. He didn’t check to see if anyone was listening to his phone calls, meaning he didn’t check to see if I was listening to the phone calls he made from our apartment. I suppose he trusted me. And when he’d been drinking heavily, which was quite often back then, his lips got looser around me than they should have. It didn’t take me long to find out that the person Bruno said had screwed him over and Jack’s Amanda were one and the same.”
“And what did you do with that information?” asked Pine, keeping her gaze directly on the woman.
“I must have been mad with jealousy. I really must have.”
“You somehow got the information on our whereabouts, our new names, and other details to Bruno,” said Pine. “Didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“I passed it to his attorney of record, who passed it to Bruno when he visited him in prison. Guards can’t mess with notes passed to prisoners from their attorneys.”
“And did this attorney know what the notes were about?”
“He never asked, and I never said.”
“We received a threatening letter, which caused us to be moved. Shortly after that two attempts were made to murder us, and then Jack got paranoid and pulled us from WITSEC. He moved us to Andersonville under the last name Pine. And he went down to personally watch over us.” She paused. “And then Ito Vincenzo, Bruno’s brother, came calling, shortly after his brother was killed. Because you also told Bruno about us moving to Georgia, didn’t you? Before he was killed in prison for being a snitch.”
Holden-Bryant wouldn’t look at her now, but she nodded her head. “When Jack finally broke it off with me and told me he was moving, I knew what was going on. I knew exactly what he was doing. He was following your mother, the woman he really loved. And leaving me . . . alone.”
“He wouldn’t have told you the details, surely,” said Blum. “How did you find out what you needed to tell Bruno?”
“Jack told me nothing. And he stopped drinking and stopped making calls from the apartment. I don’t think he ever suspected me, but he was just taking an abundance of caution. But he did make a big mistake. He had gotten a phone call that made him rush into his home office and check something in his safe. Our relationship was on the ropes, but we were still sharing the apartment, and I was trying to turn it around. Now, normally when I was there, he would shut and lock the door when he went into his office. But he was in such a hurry he left the door ajar. This allowed me to spy on him from the doorway when he was opening his wall safe, and I learned the combo. I checked it periodically while we were still living together. One day, when it was clear he was leaving town, I waited until he was gone, and then got into the safe and found a letter in there that had been sent to him by someone at his agency. It was all there. Andersonville, Georgia. Tim and Julia Pine and their two lovely daughters, Atlee and Mercy. I got that info to Bruno, and I guess he told his brother about it, because I suppose, by then, his mob connections had dried up. I believe he died shortly after he got t
hat information.”
“But not before he got that info to his brother.” Pine paused. “Did you ever hear what happened to us back in the late 1980s?” she asked.
“I don’t really recall.”
“But you didn’t tell anyone what you had done?”
“And put myself in prison? No, I didn’t do that.”
“I read a letter that Bruno had written to his brother, Ito, complaining about his unfair treatment. As if a man who had killed scores of people had a right to complain. He basically guilt-tripped his law-abiding brother, Ito, to come after us. Ito almost killed me, and he took my sister and she’s never been seen since. My father killed himself, and my mother has vanished. I don’t know if she’s dead or not. So if your goal was to destroy my family, you succeeded. You wiped us out. As far as I know, I’m the only one left.”
Holden-Bryant put a hand to her face and sobbed quietly into it. She said shakily, “I’m sorry, Atlee. I never imagined—”
“Sure you did. You told a murderer where to find us. What exactly did you think was going to happen?”
Holden-Bryant dried her eyes on her sleeve and looked at Pine with a sober expression. “I guess, in a way, exactly what did happen. I guess it would be absurd and trivial and even cruel to say that I’m sorry for what happened, though I sincerely am.”
“Did you ever meet with Ito Vincenzo?” asked Pine.
“No, I never even knew he existed until you mentioned him.”
“You’re sure you never communicated with him?”
“Never.”
“When did you and Jack officially break up?”
“When he moved down to Georgia. There didn’t seem to be a point to continuing.”
Pine rose and handed her a card. “If anything else occurs to you, please call me.”
She took the card. “I know what you must think of me.”
“It doesn’t matter what I think of you. It’s far more important what you think of yourself.”
Holden-Bryant pulled a tissue from a box on the nightstand and sniffled into it. “Well, right now, I don’t think much of myself at all.”
“Okay.”
“Will Jack be all right?”
“It seems that he will, yes. He’s lucky to be alive, actually. As am I.”
“You really just found out about his being your father?”
“Yes.”
“It must have been a shock.”
“Everything about this has been a shock.”
“I hope you find your sister.”
Pine didn’t respond to this.
“Will . . . will you tell Jack about what I did?”
“Not unless I have to, no.”
“I appreciate that.”
Pine didn’t answer. She was already headed to the door. A moment later she was gone.
Holden-Bryant looked at Blum, who still stood next to the bed. “I guess love makes fools of us all,” she said.
“Oh, I think we do a pretty good job of that all by ourselves,” said Blum. She looked around. “Well, at least you have all this . . . to keep you happy. Aren’t you lucky?”
She walked out and closed the door softly behind her.
CHAPTER
39
PULLER HAD JUST FINISHED a six-mile run at Quantico, keeping pace with a couple of long-legged Marine recruits still in their teens. He returned to his “new” apartment, since the other one was still a crime scene, took a shower, and was about to put on civilian clothes when his phone buzzed.
It was a text from his brother.
Tonight twenty hundred, ANC, Remember the Maine. Salt. Four bars and a star.
Anyone not knowing the brothers, or the military in general, would be hard-pressed to decipher this message. But it made perfect sense to Puller, up to a point.
He checked his watch. He would have just enough time because he needed to make a stop first. He went to his closet and pulled out his set of dress blues. It was for the meeting tonight, though it wasn’t exactly required. But it was also for where he was going right now.
For a long time the Army had stuck with dress greens and dress whites. But now blue was the thing. It was the color of America’s two greatest military home-turf victories. The bluecoats against the redcoats in the Revolutionary War. And the Union blue against the Confederate gray in the Civil War.
Why mess with success?
He checked his row of ribbons to make sure they were all where they were supposed to be—the military allowed no margin for error there—picked up his dress cap and headed out after allowing AWOL to give him the once-over and purr his approval.
He drove to the VA hospital and was escorted to the memory care unit. Along the way he saw and saluted soldiers sitting in wheelchairs, lying on gurneys, and roaming the halls using walkers. They had all served their country well and honorably. Now they were here, the last deployment of their careers: a nursing home provided by Uncle Sam.
The escort left him, and Puller tapped on the door to the room. He waited for a moment and then entered.
The space was small, and held very few things, chief among them a bed with an old man in it. That old man was Puller’s father and namesake. John Puller Sr.
It used to be that his father, upon seeing Puller, would bark out, “XO, what are you doing here?”
Puller was not his father’s executive officer, or XO, but he had played along with it because the doctors said it was probably for the best.
That was then.
That was no longer the case. Now was very different from then.
His father lay curled in the bed. Once six three, he had been robbed of several inches by age and bad health. He was bald except for small pockets of hair the color of clouds strewn around his scalp. His clothes these days were not combat fatigues or dress blues. They were hospital scrub pants and a white T-shirt, where curly white chest hair poked out from the front.
Puller came around to the side of the bed so he could face his father. He stood there flagpole straight and looked down at the man who had helped create him, giving him half his DNA and other attributes, some good, some not so good.
“Reporting in, sir,” said Puller, a bit half-heartedly. He did not expect an answer. The last five times he had come to visit his father, the man had never even woken up.
Alzheimer’s was the worst thing that could happen to a person, Puller thought. It eventually killed you, like other bad diseases. But before it did that, it took away the one thing that made a person a person, leaving their physical husk reasonably intact. And that wasn’t much of a comfort, not for the family and friends. It just made one wonder how a person could look normal, and yet no longer be anywhere close to who they had been.
To his surprise, his father stirred. The eyes blinked open for a moment before closing again. Puller thought that would be the end of it. But the eyes came open a second time and stayed that way.
Puller leaned down and decided to forego the subterfuge. “Dad?”
“Bobby?” he said gruffly.
His father now often got the brothers mixed up.
Puller Senior had endured his oldest son going to military prison for a crime that he didn’t commit. He had seen Robert Puller freed and fully exonerated. He had also endured learning what had happened to his wife, Puller’s mother, who had vanished decades before. That had been the hardest for the old man, Puller knew. Nothing could be worse than that. But at least he had closure on that.
At least we all have closure.
Puller glanced at his father’s still-broad shoulders and visualized seeing the three stars on them. There should have been a fourth star, but politics had gotten in the way of that. And Puller knew there wasn’t a four-star in the Army who felt Fighting John Puller didn’t deserve that last bit of shiny career acknowledgment. But it wasn’t to be. Just like the Medal of Honor wasn’t to be, another sacrifice to politics over merit. But his old man was a legend, and legends didn’t need stars or medals. They lived on in the thoughts and
memories and myths of everybody who came after them.
“It’s Junior, sir. Not Bobby.”
His father straightened in the bed, sat up against the pillow, and looked around at probably the last room he would occupy on earth. By his expression, he didn’t seem to recognize it at all. He lay back, stared at the ceiling for a moment, and then turned his head to the side and stared at his youngest son.
“You in the Army, soldier?”
“Yes sir. Chief warrant officer.”
“What are those?”
Puller’s heart sank because his old man was pointing at his rows of ribbons. Puller had been a combat stud. He had earned every major wartime commendation the Army offered, several more than once. And with all that, his rows of “guts and glory” would have paled in comparison to his father’s, whose commendations had run to a dozen horizontal rows. They could have made a blanket out of them. But then again what did you expect from someone who had tried to enlist to fight in a war while in his sixties?
“Just something that came with the suit,” replied Puller.
“They’re nice,” said his father.
“Yeah, thanks. I think so, too.”
“Who are you again?”
“I work here. Anything you need?”
“Better chow. The crap they serve here I wouldn’t feed to a damn dog, that is if I had one. Do I have a dog?”
“No sir.”
“Well, the food still sucks.”
“Yes sir, I’ll check on that.”
“I don’t know how I even got here. I was at work and now I’m here.”
“Yes sir. I think it was complicated.”
“And they put this here and I have no idea who she even is.”
Puller glanced at the framed photo of his mother, Jackie.
“You know her name, son?” asked his father.
“I . . . No.” Puller didn’t know what his father’s reaction might be if he mentioned his mother’s name.
“Doesn’t seem right, putting a strange woman’s picture in here. My wife might get angry.”
“Do you remember your wife?”
“What?”
“Your wife?”
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