Dead Ringer

by Lisa Scottoline

  “I’m Frank, please, and I’ve known the DiNunzio family since the day Mary was baptized. In fact, I’m her godfather’s son.”

  Bennie didn’t know that Italians really did have godfathers, and in truth didn’t know much about Italians at all, despite her surname. “So you came to us through Mary.”

  Mary took over. “Frank came to see me when he probated the will of Tony Brandolini, who died last month, of cancer. Tony was a contractor, and his father, Amadeo Brandolini, was interned in 1942, as part of the internment during World War II. Mr. Brandolini was a fisherman, from the days when you could fish right off the port of Philadelphia.”

  Bennie raised a palm. “Slow down, wait a minute. What do you mean by ‘interned’? Interned means confined during war. Imprisoned.”

  “Yes, exactly. Well, you know that Japanese people living in this country were interned during World War II, even if they were citizens. Their property was taken, and their homes.”

  “Yes.” Bennie remembered the historic Korematsu case, which held that it was constitutional to seize the property of American citizens who had the misfortune of being Japanese during wartime. The stirring dissent by Justice Brennan was renowned by fans of civil liberties. By the way, having pink hair wasn’t a civil liberty. “I remember the time. Not a nice chapter in our history.”

  “Ours, either,” Frank added, and heads nodded around the table, except for that of the old lady with the magnified glare. She fingered a gold necklace with a tiny horn charm as she looked daggers at Bennie, like a Neapolitan Madame Defarge. She sat next to a heavyset, balding man who appeared to be her husband but, unlike her, was dressed normally and was kind-eyed behind bifocals.

  Mary cleared her throat. “Well, more than ten thousand Italians, citizens and legal immigrants, were interned in this country. They were covered by the same act and declared enemy aliens, even if they’d lived here for twenty years or more. They were ordered to register and sent away to internment camps in Missouri, Texas, and other states.”

  It was news to Bennie, even with her background in civil rights work, but it didn’t surprise her. The government assumed all sorts of powers in wartime and used them to their fullest extent, for good and sometimes not-so-good reasons.

  “The impact on Italians was biggest on the West Coast, and on fishermen on both coasts. The FBI considered fishermen especially dangerous because they had access to the sea, submarines, and enemy vessels.” Mary glanced at her notes. “The government confiscated flashlights and shortwave radios so nobody could signal the enemy.”

  “It’s all true,” interrupted an elderly man near the door to the conference room. “My father and mother were both taken to the camp, even though they were living thirty-two years in this country. Even though I was enlisted and served. They weren’t enemy aliens or what they called them, traitors. They were patriots! They never got their papers because they couldn’t read and write in English.”

  “How’s that for irony?” called out a woman near him. She had an academic air, with reading glasses dangling on a chain. “The son was fighting for this country while the parents were considered enemies by the same government. Did you know that Joe DiMaggio’s father wasn’t even allowed to go to his own son’s restaurant in San Francisco? He was confined to a special zone.”

  Mary set her stack of papers on the table. “People lost businesses and homes. Families were split up and left without anyone to support them. And some, like Amadeo Brandolini, killed themselves in the camp. Amadeo couldn’t live with the shame he felt he had brought upon his family.”

  “What shame? He didn’t do anything wrong. He was a victim.”

  Cavuto raised a finger. “You look at it from a modern perspective, Bennie. Maybe even a woman’s. But that wasn’t the way Amadeo saw it, according to his son. His business was taken from him. His fishing boats. His livelihood. He had failed to support his family or to protect them. It made him feel ashamed, as a man.” Cavuto cocked his head. “What kind of Italian are you, you don’t know that? You just married one?”

  “I’m single,” Bennie answered, fighting the need to apologize for her condition. Being single after age thirty defined defensive. “I understand what took place. What I don’t get is what you want us to do.”

  “Tony Brandolini wasn’t a wealthy man, but he had some means and he never forgot his father or forgave his government.” Cavuto bent over, reached into his thick briefcase, and retrieved a manila file folder. “Tony started to research what happened to his father’s business, but then he got cancer and was too sick to finish the job. He provided in his will that when he died, his estate should hire a lawyer to recover the damages incurred by his father. We came to hire Mary and your firm to do this.”

  “You mean sue the government? Recover damages? Reparations?”

  “That’s what my client wanted. He was divorced, he had no children, and he left his entire estate to this cause.” Cavuto gestured around the table. “It’s a very important issue to all of us, and that’s why we’re all here. We’ll help you any way we can.”

  “I second that emotion!” yelled South Philly Rocks, with a wink at Bennie. “Anything you need, you got it! And Mary, too. Alla youse!” Heads around him nodded in instant agreement.

  “Thank you,” Bennie said, pulling the case file over while the Circolo resettled, hopefully permanently. She opened the file, skimmed Brandolini’s will, and read the bequest with a sinking heart. The will earmarked nine thousand dollars to fund the litigation. It was a lot of money, but it wasn’t enough to take on the United States.

  Mary read her mind. “Bennie, I told Frank how expensive it is to sue the government, and the Circolo has taken up a collection to raise money for the lawsuit. They’ve already pledged to match the funds in the will. That’s almost twenty thousand dollars.”

  From across the table, South Philly Rocks was nodding again. “We got three Easter raffles going at church. And Goretti and St. Monica’s are gonna do a real big basket of cheer. We got three different parishes working on it!”

  Bennie sighed inwardly. You can’t stage a lawsuit with a bake sale. “Frank, this is a very complex question. I’m not even sure the Brandolini estate has standing to bring suit, and there are issues of sovereign immunity and constitutional law. This is an expensive—”

  “Bennie,” Mary interjected, “I would donate all my time and do it pro bono. I would even work on my own time, outside of regular business hours.”

  Bennie didn’t have the lira to let an associate work for free. “Mary, I’m sorry but—” she began to say, when there was a loud shout from the back of the room.

  “Vide! Vide!” a woman shrieked, and Bennie jumped. The hard-eyed old woman at the end of the table was on her feet, yelling in Italian and pointing at Bennie with an arthritic finger. Bennie didn’t understand anything until the end, when the woman lapsed into broken English. “You! You, Benedetta Rosato! You are evil! Evil!”

  Bennie’s eyes widened. She had no idea what she’d done. She’d never even met the woman. Who was she?

  “Mom!” Mary shouted, leaping to her feet. “No, please! Mom!”

  Mom? Bennie looked dumbfounded from her associate to the shouting woman and back again. Madame Defarge is DiNunzio’s mother?

  “Mom, no! Dad, please! She promised!” Mary was rushing over to the woman, whose thin skin had turned red as marinara. “Ma, no! You promised! Dad, she promised!”

  Mom? Dad? Bennie watched as the older man got to his feet and tried to hug his wife into a state less hysterical. She kept waving her finger at Bennie, even as the rest of the Circolo tried to calm her down with help from Mary.

  “Mom, please, be quiet!” she kept saying, joined by Carrier, who sprang from the side wall and hurried over to Mrs. DiNunzio. Fuchsia hair blossomed like a petunia among the brunettes. Murphy was right behind her.

  Bennie rose to her feet, amazed. The conference room had gone nuts. Everybody left their chairs. People shouted at one another
, and Mrs. DiNunzio was on a Neapolitan tear. Bennie turned to Cavuto. “Frank, do you speak Italian? What is she saying?”

  Cavuto grabbed Bennie’s elbow and took her aside. “Well, she says that you’re evil and she hates you.”

  “How can she hate me when she doesn’t even know me?” Bennie was confounded. “You have to know me to hate me.”

  “She says that you don’t care about nobody but yourself. Sorry, but Italian uses the double negative.” Cavuto translated as the raving intensified. “You don’t appreciate Mary. You don’t care about nothing but yourself. Again the double negative.”

  “Me? I don’t care about Mary?”

  “You aren’t good enough to her daughter. Or to her daughter’s friends.”

  “Carrier and Murphy?”

  “Yes. You almost got them all killed on some murder case.” Cavuto’s dark eyes narrowed in accusation. “Is this true?”

  Ouch. “Well, yes. But it was on three different murder cases.”

  Cavuto turned away. “She says you don’t pay them enough.”

  Bennie had no immediate reply. Mrs. DiNunzio was in the zone.

  “She says your hair is always a mess.”

  “Does this matter?”

  “And you walk like a man.”

  “I’m trying to get somewhere!”

  “You’re all alone. No man will ever marry you.”

  Whoa. Bennie bristled. “Now she’s getting personal.”

  “You should leave immediately.”

  “She has nerve, throwing me out of my own conference room.”

  Cavuto met Bennie’s eye. “She didn’t say you should leave, I did.”

  “Why? It’s my conference room. She should leave, not me.” Bennie folded her arms. “I’m as capable as anyone of being childish. I have a First Amendment right to be childish.”

  Cavuto shook his head. “Rethink your position. I know Vita DiNunzio. She can go on like this for an hour or more. She only gets stronger as she goes, like a house on fire.”

  Bennie eyed the scene. The group was practically wrestling Mrs. DiNunzio to the ground, and she was still yelling. Her finger stuck up from the throng, like the Statue of Liberty in a hurricane.

  Cavuto tsk-tsked. “At some point, she gets completely out of control. A whole city block can be consumed. She’s a natural force.”

  Bennie snorted. “Okay, tell Mary I’ll meet her in my office. I’ll get back to you about the Brandolini representation. You put me on the spot here, you know.”

  “Forgive me, but it’s for a good cause. Buona fortuna.”

  “For that I don’t need a translation.” Bennie gave him a pat on the back, then went back to her office to find her goddamn wallet.

  4

  Bennie combed the dhurrie rug and crawled under her desk and chairs. She wasn’t giving up on that Filofax. She didn’t have time to replace her driver’s license, and she needed an organizer to feel organized. She went over every cluttered surface, then peeked under stacks of correspondence, old court decisions, and law books. She rummaged through every drawer in her desk and didn’t find the wallet, but did find an old picture of her ex-boyfriend, Grady Wells, from a weekend trip to Cape May. She stopped at the sight of the photo. Maybe if they’d spent more weekends together. That was what he’d said anyway, but she’d had a business to run.

  Just then came a timid knock on the door, and Bennie didn’t have to guess who it was. The secretary was out, Carrier knocked like a freight train, and Murphy never knocked at all. Bennie shoved the photo in the drawer and closed it quickly, so as not to reveal that she had Normal Human Emotions and/or Chinks in the Armor. She called out, “You’re fired, DiNunzio!”

  No laughter came from outside the door.

  “I’m only kidding! Come in, silly!”

  The door opened slowly, and a stricken Mary DiNunzio peeked inside. “I’m not coming in if you’re going to fire me.”

  “I’m not going to fire you.” Bennie waved her inside. “Come in and sit down.”

  “Thank you, thank you so much, Bennie, I can explain everything. First off, I’m really sorry and my mother is not crazy.” DiNunzio hurried to the club chair across from the desk, perching on the edge of the seat cushion. Her words tumbled over each other and she gestured as rapidly as sign language. “She’s really great, and I love her a lot, but I never would have let her come to the meeting if I had known she was going to act that way. She said she’d behave, but I guess she couldn’t control herself, because she’s very old school, you heard her accent, she wasn’t even born here, and she gets a little upset and emotional because she loves me and she worries about me, and I’m really sorry. I can’t believe she did that and I’m so embarrassed and so sorry. Really sorry. Did I say that already?”

  “Yes. You—”

  “I feel just awful. I’m so embarrassed, I know you must be so embarrassed. It was just so embarrassing.”

  “No, I’m an adult, and a lawyer. I can deal—”

  “I mean, to have someone yelling at you, right in front of everybody, right in the office, and the whole thing was like a nightmare, I couldn’t believe it was happening. It was awful! My mother says she’s sorry and my father says he’s sorry and we’re all so upset that it happened.” Mary teared up, but all Bennie had was a cup of cold coffee, so she handed it across her desk. The associate drank some and made a face. “Ugh! This tastes terrible.”

  “I know. I’m trying to shut you up.”

  “It worked.” She set down the mug. “I’m sorry.”

  “Me, too. Now can we get over it? You know I’m not good at the comforting thing. I—”

  “But I should be comforting you.” Mary’s eyes welled up again. “You didn’t do anything wrong. You were just trying to help me and—”

  “Please shut up!” Bennie shouted, startling the associate into a tearstained silence. “Thank you. Now, settle down and listen. Your mother has good cause to be angry at me. I gather it’s because of the trouble I’ve gotten you into on some of our cases.”

  “But that’s not your fault, and I tried to explain it to her. Working on those cases was my decision, and things happened. She just worries because I work here. She wants me to quit.”

  “You can do whatever you like.” Bennie couldn’t imagine the place without DiNunzio, but she wasn’t about to guilt-trip the kid. “Do you want to work somewhere where your mom wouldn’t worry?”

  “That’s impossible. She’d worry no matter what I did. She worried about my sister Angie, and she was a nun in a cloistered convent.”

  Bennie said nothing. She was thinking about her mother, who had been so ill and had passed two years ago. Bennie still missed her every day.

  “Besides, I like the work we do, even if sometimes I get into trouble. I mean, we’re doing justice. We actually do justice.” The associate’s mouth set with determination. “I think I’m getting better at being a lawyer, over time. I know I’m trying, and I don’t want to stop. And today I brought in a new client, all by myself.”

  Bennie smiled. She’d never heard DiNunzio speak with such pride. It seemed like a cue for Bennie to say something she’d never said, even at the associate’s performance reviews, when maybe she’d been too bogged down in the details of brief writing. “DiNunzio, I think you’re a far better lawyer than you know. You have the mind, and the heart, to be one of the best of your generation.”

  Mary almost started crying again.

  “Also your hair doesn’t glow in the dark.”

  Mary smiled, but tears threatened still.

  “Don’t give a second thought to what just happened with your mom. I’m sure we can work it out. I’ll take her to lunch and have a little chat.”

  “No!” Mary’s eyes flared with new alarm. “I mean, thanks, but I don’t think so. My mother doesn’t go out to lunch.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s outside.”

  “Outside what?”

  “Her kitchen.”

&nb
sp; “Of course it is.” Bennie thought again of her own mother. Depression had kept her confined to bed, often for months, in the era before Prozac and Paxil, when nothing seemed to work. “Why doesn’t she go out? Is she ill?”

  “No way. You saw her.”

  “Is she agoraphobic?”

  “No, she’s Italian.”

  Bennie let it go. “Okay. Then I’ll take her to an Italian restaurant. Get her a nice plate of pasta.”

  “No, she would never eat someone else’s gravy. Unless it was a blood relative.”

  “Okay, we won’t go out. I’ll go over to see her. That’s in.”

  “No.” Mary shuddered. “No talking, no seeing.”

  “Why not?” To Bennie, the whole thing seemed unusually complicated. “I want to make peace. We can reason together. I have great faith in the power of words.”

  “Take it from me, you two don’t speak the same language. Bennie, you may not realize this, but my mother has lots of superstitions. Beliefs she brought over from the old country.”

  “Like that I’m the devil incarnate? Because of our cases?”

  Mary swallowed hard. “It’s not what you do, it’s more who you are. It’s what you stand for, the way you wear your hair, that you’re tall, that you’re so unlike her, what she thinks a woman should be, that you’re not married, that you’re not really ladylike—”

  Don’t hold back now.

  “—and also it’s not completely rational. Like, she’s mad at you because I grew up, because I work, because I don’t live at home, because my sister is a nun and I’m a lawyer and all and—”

  Bennie stopped the word flow like a traffic cop. Funny thing was, she sort of understood. “Okay, so what do I do about it?”

  “Letting it go will be the best course.”