When They Come for You

by James W. Hall

  He shook his head.

  “This is a crime scene, lady. You can’t be here.”

  “Show me, goddamn it.”

  She shouldered in beside him, stooped over the sheet, ripped it back. Ross was dressed in a pair of red running shorts and a long-sleeve white T-shirt. Leo, wearing his Lion King pajamas, was strapped to Ross’s chest.

  Leo’s face was untouched, as though Ross managed to spare him from the ravages of the fire. Only a smudge of soot marked his cheek. Leo’s eyes were half-open and his mouth pulled wide into a dreamy grin, as if this were some fresh prank his parents had staged for his amusement.

  On his pajama top, there was a ragged perforation through Simba’s left ear. Leo’s heart had shielded Ross’s heart. It had taken a second bullet to bring down both father and son. That other slug had entered Ross’s forehead, dead center, a neat puncture that hardly bled. Just a smudge, as if someone had dabbed a bloody fingertip against his flesh.

  Harper sank to her knees in the ash and laid her body across the two of them. Father and son.

  Blue lights pulsed around her. She heard a wail, maybe her own.

  Hands drew her upright, brought her to her feet. She struggled for balance as the neighborhood spun. The sirens shook the trees, trembled the darkness. The whirl of emergency lights, her own howl of anguish, the scream of a mother and wife. This wasn’t possible. This was not real.

  Someone led her to a gray unmarked police car. Eased her down in the backseat, leaving the door open. Nick stood nearby while Harper sobbed.

  When the weeping subsided, she lifted her head and looked around to find that most of the crowd had wandered off; only a few stragglers remained. The fire was extinguished. Bright lights were being erected on metal stands to illuminate the scene.

  A detective came to speak to Harper, but she had nothing to say. He was paunchy, wearing a white short-sleeve shirt and dark trousers. His gut hung over his black belt. She stared into his face, uncomprehending. He asked her a couple of questions, and when she didn’t respond, he left to walk the scene, taking notes, speaking to his colleagues.

  “I’m okay,” she said to Nick. “I’m okay.”

  “Shall I call Alvarez back? Get this over with?”

  “Not yet.”

  In the distance, she saw Ross’s body laid out on a stretcher. Two attendants were bumping the gurney across the yard toward an emergency vehicle. Under the sheet was the bulge of Leo still in the sling, as if Ross were pregnant and being rolled away to the maternity ward to deliver their son. All this happening without her, as though she were watching from the sidelines of a dream, paralyzed by sleep, knowing this was wrong, unacceptable, but unable to move, unable to speak or affect the outcome. Her husband was going into labor, suffering the terrible pains of childbirth without her.

  As they opened the rear doors of the ambulance and cranked the stretcher higher, Harper pushed herself upright, stepped out of the car, shrugged off Nick’s hand, and jogged across the street, the policemen stepping aside for her this time, cautiously watching her go, Harper yelling for the paramedics to stop, don’t leave her behind, she needed to be in the operating room, needed to hold Ross’s hand, help him breathe and push, help him survive the hours of travail, be there for the delivery of their smiling boy, Leo, who embraced every new thing, including the trauma of being born, a yip of joy at the sight of the operating room lights. A bright, happy yip.

  FIVE

  February, Coconut Grove, Florida

  Harper was back in the car, numb, dizzy. The door was open, and the detective stood in front of her, smoothing a hand over the swell of his belly as if it had just appeared there and he was becoming familiar with it.

  He asked her questions, several in a row, which Harper only half heard, until he asked, “Know anyone who would want to do harm to your husband?”

  She shook her head, keeping her eyes on Nick, who stood behind the dark-haired cop.

  “Did you have video surveillance on the property?”

  “Why would we?”

  “These days a lot of people do.”

  “No cameras, no.”

  “Ross, your husband, he was a reporter?”

  “An excellent reporter.”

  “I’m sure he was. Know if he’d had any recent disagreements or hostile encounters? Perhaps on the job, a colleague, someone he’d written about.”

  Harper shook her head, saying nothing.

  “Look, I’m sorry for your loss,” the detective said.

  She brought her eyes to his, this cop whose voice was flat, devoid of sentiment, his eyes dulled by too many nights like this.

  “Spare me,” she said.

  “The sooner we do this, the more helpful your answers might be. You want us to catch this guy, don’t you?”

  She choked on her response, made a noise like a child’s hiccup.

  “Okay, okay,” the detective said. “Tomorrow we’ll talk, when you’ve had a chance to compose yourself.”

  “Agreed,” Nick said.

  The detective asked Nick if he was a friend or relative.

  “Brother.”

  “You’ll see she has somewhere to sleep tonight?”

  “I want to get Leo’s stuffed animals and his trucks,” she said.

  Alvarez told her she couldn’t do that. There’d been enough contamination of the crime scene. Maybe by tomorrow afternoon their work would be done and she could see what items she might salvage. The site would be well protected. Nothing would get stolen.

  “This was arson,” Nick said. “I smell accelerant from over here. Gasoline, kerosene, something. You don’t smell it?”

  “Doesn’t work that way. We process the scene, find the origin of the fire, do lab work on the materials, canvass the neighborhood. We don’t sniff the air.”

  “It was an execution,” Harper said. “Fire was to destroy evidence. It’s not complicated.”

  “Possibly,” the detective said. “We’ll know soon enough.”

  “Why? Who would kill a child and set him on fire?”

  The detective looked away. “I need a phone number, sir, where I can reach Ms. McDaniel, then you’re free to go.”

  Alvarez handed Nick his business card and a pad and pen. Nick scribbled on the pad and handed it over.

  “What part of town you in?”

  “Condo on Brickell, the Aqua. You need an address?”

  “I know the place. I’ll call in the morning, see if she’s ready. Come by when it’s convenient, but the sooner I get a statement the better.”

  “That’s it?” Harper said. “Exchange phone numbers, send us home?”

  “Look, Ms. McDaniel. Considering you assaulted two of my men, I’m being pretty patient. Somebody else running this crime scene, you’d be downtown now.”

  “No need to threaten her,” Nick said.

  “You’re her brother,” Alvarez said. “And her lawyer too?”

  “I’m her bodyguard,” Nick said. “And she’s mine.”

  They had a brief stare-down until the cop looked back at Harper.

  “Moments like this,” the cop said, “sure, I’ve seen people lose it. But putting two officers on the ground, that’s a first. I’m giving you a pass, but honestly, you’re straining my goodwill. Both of you.”

  The capillaries threading the cop’s nose and cheeks were engorged. His eyes flickered as if Harper’s rage and grief had roused in this man some dormant fury of his own, not directed at her but toward some larger failure of humanity he’d witnessed too often. This was probably as close to empathy as the detective could muster. Repressed by his training, calloused from other gruesome nights, he’d acquired the survival techniques he needed to keep going.

  “I’m sorry,” Harper said. “Please ask the officers to forgive me for blindsiding them. I’ll try to get ready for your questions tomorrow.”

  With a curt nod, Alvarez paced back to the rubble, rejoining a couple of other men dressed in white short-sleeve shirts and dark trouse
rs.

  Nick helped Harper out of the car, led her down the row of emergency vehicles and patrol cars to his red Mercedes. He held the passenger door for her and took her elbow as though she were an invalid. She looked back at what was left of her home, the house Ross had occupied for a decade before they met, the house where they fell in love, had their first candlelight dinners, where she became pregnant, the charming cottage they were going to share till they were old.

  Someone called her name, someone hustling down the street.

  Nick stepped in front of Harper to shield her from this new intrusion. Out of the smoky gloom, Geneva Carlson came huffing toward her.

  Senior editor at the Miami News, Ross’s boss, wearing a black tracksuit and running shoes, holding some rolled-up papers like a baton. Geneva was in her late sixties with a silver cloud of hair. Though she was short and delicately boned, she was a dynamo in the news business, a relentless broad whose decades of covering the Miami crime beat had earned her the unwavering support of the most cynical of her stable of reporters. Ross had loved her.

  “Tell me it’s not true,” Geneva said. “Ross and Leo.”

  Yes, it was true, Nick told her, giving her the outline. Gunshots, arson. A two-sentence summary.

  She rocked forward, bowed at the waist, hands on her knees, a silent yawp of pain. Harper put her arm around Geneva’s shoulders and raised her upright.

  Geneva stared into Harper’s eyes. “This is my fault,” she said.

  Harper stepped away. “How could it be your fault?”

  Geneva walked over to the Mercedes and unrolled the newsprint on the hood of the car.

  “Tomorrow’s edition, it’s just out. I should’ve said no. It felt risky, a violation. But it was such a great story. Ross didn’t tell you, did he?”

  In the murky light, Harper and Nick leaned close to the page.

  Ross’s byline.

  The Mobster Living Next Door

  She scanned the first paragraph, and the name leaped from the page: Sal Leonardi, the gangster. Deena’s father. Harper’s cold-blooded granddad.

  SIX

  February, the Aqua, Brickell Avenue, City of Miami

  Sal Leonardi was born of immigrant parents in Newark during the Great Depression. When Sal was still a child, his father, Giuseppe Antonio Leonardi, was drafted, sent overseas to fight against the Nazis, and damn if he wasn’t among the 160,000 Allied troops storming the beaches of Normandy. Along with four thousand other unlucky Americans, Giuseppe Leonardi lost his life that day, leaving young Sal as the eldest male in the family. That was how Ross’s article began.

  Harper knew every heartbeat of her grandfather’s story. She’d told Ross some of it herself. As it turned out, Giuseppe was no war hero. He died a coward. Executed by his own commander as he raced back to the landing vehicles through the bloody waves and bobbing corpses. Running for his life, a deserter, struck down as an example to the others.

  After he lost his father, Sal devoted himself to the church, an altar boy, drugging himself on the incense of piety. For the next few years, he was a priest in training, until one August night when Sal was fifteen.

  Sal’s mother, Margaret, a modest, religious woman who bore a resemblance to a slimmed-down Sophia Loren, was walking home late at night from her second job as a barmaid at an Irish alehouse when she was waylaid by a gang of punks she’d been serving earlier that evening. They dragged her into their automobile, and for the next few hours they worked her over, used her and used her again in every way those hoodlums could imagine, then tossed her out on a desolate highway like trash.

  The next day, Sal—the apprentice priest, Sal, the fifteen-year-old boy with angelic features, a soft voice, and a deep religious fervor—marched out of the church and never returned.

  The first corpse was discovered in the weeds beside a school yard. The Irish punk was castrated, his eyeballs scooped out, testicles jammed into the sockets. His penis was missing.

  All this, each grisly detail, Harper first heard at the age of six. Portioned out, one grim anecdote after another, night after night, as Deena used her family’s dark history for Harper’s bedtime fairy tales.

  Harper had shut her eyes and squirmed, but even so, she was enthralled. One night at the conclusion of the latest installment, Harper admitted she was confused about the moral of these bedtime stories.

  “This is what’s in us, darling,” Deena said. “You should know, this is what’s swimming in our veins.”

  Harper couldn’t tell by Deena’s tone: was this a warning or a boast?

  After a second castrated body appeared, Sal’s priest appeared at the Leonardis’ door and took Sal into a room alone and commanded that he stop what the priest and everyone else in the neighborhood knew full well he was doing.

  A few days after the priest’s visit, the third corpse was discovered. Again, the testicles were replanted in the eye sockets, the penis gone.

  Michael Tessalini, the boss of Newark’s leading crime family, was the next to arrive at the Leonardis’ door. Like the priest before him, he sat with Sal alone in their parlor. He asked after Sal’s mother. Convalescing upstairs, Sal told him. All right, Tessalini said, what you’re doing, these killings, this is not good, not good for business. The Irish coppers are seething, some are harassing my men.

  The mobster understood Sal’s anger, of course, for who could not understand such a thing, an eldest son protecting the honor of his mother. But this had to cease. Sal said nothing but nodded as if he understood. When Tessalini was finished, Sal walked him back to his fancy sedan and watched him drive away.

  A week went by before another of the Irish punks was found mutilated like the others. Which left only one, the leader of the group, a loud and reckless lout named Patrick Mulligan. In a panic, Mulligan left Newark, running to Boston, where some of his cousins promised to protect him. He spent every waking hour in their presence, slept in the gang house with his door bolted, a gun at his side.

  Two months after Sal’s mother’s savage violation, on that same desolate roadway where Margaret Leonardi was found bleeding and unconscious, Mulligan’s body was discovered sprawled on the shoulder of the road, eyes gone, replaced by his gonads. A collection of withered penises lay on his chest.

  Soon afterward, Tessalini paid another visit to the Leonardi home and sat with Sal in silence. The mobster gazed in wonderment across the room into the eyes of the fifteen-year-old boy, amazed that a child whose only knowledge of the world until a few weeks before had been acquired in the hushed sanctuary of the Church of the Little Flower on Fowler Street could have transformed himself into a killer who inspired awe throughout the hard-bitten neighborhood and the respect of men as cold and depraved as Tessalini.

  Finally, Tessalini asked him if he was done, if he’d had his justice.

  “No more killing,” Sal said. “I’m finished.”

  “No matter,” Tessalini said. “There’s other uses for a young man like you.”

  Thus began Sal’s career. And that was the lede of Ross McDaniel’s story. Everything Harper had heard of her grandfather was contained in Ross’s article. Each element fully faithful to the facts that Deena had long ago relayed to her.

  But Ross McDaniel had clearly gleaned the details from other sources, since Harper had always been guarded in what she revealed to him about Sal. Only the broad outlines. She’d never mentioned Tessalini, never told him about the Boston gang of toughs that hid Mulligan and failed to protect him. All that and more, Ross uncovered on his own. Somewhere, somehow.

  In the haze of days that followed, Nick looked in on her at intervals, offered homemade chicken soup, scrambled eggs and bacon, sandwiches, meatloaf, mashed potatoes, comfort food, Harper shaking her head, no, no, she couldn’t eat, she could barely breathe, even when Warren Roberts, her work-obsessed, cosmically distant father, and Willow, his shiny new wife, came for a visit and stood stiffly in the doorway, mouthing banalities: If there’s anything we can do please let us know, do you nee
d anything, anything at all? Help in planning the memorial service maybe?

  I want my child back and my husband, she told them. Can you do that, can you bring them back to life? I want to hold Ross in my arms, cradle my son, my spunky kid. Can you do that, Dad? You have some special powers I don’t know about? All your money, your high-powered connections, can they buy back my family?

  You don’t mean that, Harper, said Willow.

  Oh yes, she did. She damn well meant it. She wanted them back, she wanted her world back, her lucky life that was snatched away. Slinging her anger, her bottomless despair into her father’s pale, round face.

  A runty man, five foot eight, Warren Roberts sighed with what sounded like relief, turned, and left. Failing again to muster a simple comforting word or touch. He seemed forever confounded by the language of empathy. A deficiency that was only magnified by his marriage to Deena, whose personality and success so dwarfed his own that Harper never understood what strange alchemy drew them together in the first place and kept Deena returning home from her far-flung travels.

  Harper rose and shut her door and wept and writhed on Nick’s guest bed. She paced. She read Ross’s article again, a detailed accounting of her grandfather’s appalling life, his growing power in the mob, his brushes with the law, multiple indictments for racketeering, tax evasion, conspiracy to commit murder, all dismissals or hung juries. Photos of Sal at a nightclub, showgirls on each arm, always surrounded by squat, flat-eyed gangsters, politicians, and Hollywood types. Another shot of him leaving a Manhattan courthouse, smiling, giving a thumbs-up. In the latter stages of his Mafia career, he became an elder statesman to his young compatriots, brokering disputes among warring families, gliding above the fray with a newfound authority. Last, Ross described Sal’s final transition, his quiet withdrawal to South Beach, just another old fart, crab-walking the sunbaked avenues in his plaid Bermudas. He quoted one of Sal’s neighbors: “That Sal is a sweet old guy, quick with the joke. All the kids on the street love him.”

  Living among the naïve, a wolf among lambs.

  Harper never warned Ross away from Sal. Never thought it necessary to tell him that Sal was off-limits. It was so obvious. Sal was their family’s private disgrace, the mob’s paymaster, a man who’d overseen dozens of hired killers.