by Kyanna Skye
Mr. Rizzuto lowered his eyes from hers as though contemplating the grass at her feet. “Well, there’s not much to tell, really.”
Her regret froze like a river in a flash freeze and rather than paddle on with her regret, she sensed an opportunity. And one that she might distress herself over not taking now that it had presented itself. “But there is something to tell?”
She waited and listened while he was quiet for a moment, then sipping at his lemonade he kept his gaze low while he spoke. “I was kind of like you with your father; I adored mine… but his work, not so much.” His tone was almost somber like he was remembering the day of a loved one’s funeral.
Her gut clenched.
“My father was a lot like yours, a career man. But his career often kept him from home a lot of the time. When I was a boy I remembered not seeing him too much. It was just me and my mother; she wasn’t exactly what one would call ‘top notch’. She loved her wine… she loved her brandy… she loved anything that was potent enough to fog the senses and dull her wits.” His tone changed, becoming angry and he clenched his fist tightly.
Jamie set her glass down on the table that sat between them. It was clear that they had gotten into some murky waters here. “I’m sorry, Mr. Rizzuto. I didn’t mean to–”
He dismissed her apology with the wave of a hand and his tone softened, becoming more like the gentle sort that she had only ever heard before now. “No, it’s fine, Jamie. I asked about your life, the least I can do is share mine. It’s only fair after all.”
“But you don’t have to go on if you don’t want.”
He was silent for only a heartbeat before he finally raised his eyes to meet hers again. “No… I think it’s good for me to get this out.”
She waited, not sure of what else she could have said.
“When my mother and father got married, neither of them really had much in the way of anything. It was a marriage of convenience, I suppose you might say. My mother expected to elevate herself from being what she was and my father was looking for a quiet and simple life.” He drummed his fingers on the table top disappointedly. “Neither of them got it. My mother’s only solace was the drink and my father was consumed by his work, albeit reluctantly.”
“What did your father do?”
Mr. Rizzuto sighed. “He would often joke that he was into the bad news business; bankruptcy… repossessions… and like that. Sometimes he’d be gone for long stretches of time… weeks, sometimes even months. There was a time once when he was even gone for a year.” He smiled as a reminiscent look crossed his face. “I used to imagine him as a prominent banker, dressed in his best suit, and going from one big building to another and telling people that they were being audited or having their wages garnished… something like that.
“Because I was a child at the time, I didn’t really understand what was going on and I just thought that those were things that everyone in the adult world had to deal with. And when my father came home, he always had this warm smile on his face. And he would open up his arms and I would rush into them and hug him so tightly.” His smile became a little sad. “God, I’d give anything to feel that way again.”
Jamie felt her brow crease a little. “It must have been a strange business for your father to be gone like that. I’ve heard of people being gone for days and weeks, sure, but never months or a year. It must have been some pretty big financial business for it to come to that.”
“I’m given to understand that it was, yes. Well, his business was anything but pleasant. I can well imagine that he never wanted to be gone so long. As much as my mother enjoyed her drinks, my father and I enjoyed our time together. We always went to watch ballgames… we went to the park… he taught me about archery… hunting and tracking. My cousin had a vineyard in the country that we used to visit spring and that’s where I developed my passion for wine,” he said with an acknowledging wink. “And there was, of course, my favorite of our bonding experiences: trips to Drubber’s Magic Store.”
“A magic store?” she asked curiously.
He took a deep breath at the memory of it as if he were reliving that experience in the span it took to fill his lungs. “Card tricks, rope tricks, magic boxes, coin traps, vanishing rubber chickens, fake vomit, rubber dog turds, top hats, velvet capes, magic wands…” His face positively beamed with the recollection. “We never had a greater time than we did visiting Drubber’s Magic Store. Oh, the things that we would buy. I’d spend weeks rehearsing every little trick I knew, putting together my own little magic act and I’d perform it for my father when he came home from his business trips.”
She felt a curious sense of warmth spread through her at the mention of these words. She had had similar experiences with her father and mother, but to hear Mr. Rizzuto talk of it… there was something, enchanting about it.
Jamie felt an upswing of courage in her heart. “Your father sounds like an incredible man. Where are your parents now?”
Mr. Rizzuto folded his hands in his lap. “Well, my mother died just about the time I was getting into high school. She finally found a bottle that she couldn’t let go of,” he said noncommittally.
She felt a shard of sorrow enter into her heart for the man across from her. His mother didn’t sound like any grand prize, but it was always hard to lose a parent she thought. “And your father?”
His look became dour. “My father… well… let’s just say that he had a small falling out with his employer. He wound up in prison for it.”
That shocked her. From just a few things that she had heard, Rizzuto Senior sounded like a well-meaning and caring man that made time for his son. That he could end up in prison when he had a young son to look after seemed like some sort of a terrible joke. “He did?”
He nodded. “He died in prison as well.”
“My god.”
He looked across the table at her. “After I heard about that, I was kind of like you and I followed in my father’s footsteps. Or at least, in as much as I could. I had other relatives to help take care of me and with their help, I was able to get through school and I learned all that I could about the world of banking, which by then had mostly become dependent on how well one could run a computer. But somewhere in the back of my mind, I never forgot the injustice done to my father.”
She felt her daring rising but sensed that the time was quickly approaching for her not to ask any more personal questions. But there was one question that she knew she could not let go unanswered. “Why was your father sent to prison?”
His look at her remained gentle and neutral, but somehow she perceived that their conversation had reached its end. “It’s of no consequence now, Jamie. I can’t pretend that I wasn’t upset about it or that it helped to shape me into what I am now. But I put it behind me and that’s usually where I like to keep it.”
In a move that surprised her, he reached out and gently brushed one of her thick wavy locks from out of her face. The simple gesture was oddly tender and she felt delightfully evoked by it. “Sometimes, you just have to keep things where people don’t look for it.”
***
When she returned to her hotel room she collapsed directly onto her bed, exhaustion feeling as though it had played a larger part in her day. She sighed deeply and the darkness of the growing night around her enveloped her like a wave upon the sand. She felt lost but also elated at the same time. It was an odd feeling, and she knew its cause.
On one hand, she was getting nowhere with her case and she knew that she was nowhere near to discovering where the money had gone to. But on the other hand, she felt like she was making progress with Mr. Rizzuto… with Dominic… on a level that felt, well... more personal than that which was normally shared between a lawyer and a client. She felt attached, in a strange way, to Dominic.
She smiled at that. Even just thinking his name, especially after today, she felt oddly closer to him. They had shared something today and really shared it. She’d given him details of her life, a
lbeit only slightly significant ones and he’d done likewise for her. But it had seemed as though what he’d shared had been infinitely more profound.
After today she realized that she had learned something about the man, not what he’d been put in prison for or what he’d altogether done to her employers. And somehow, that seemed like the proverbial quantum leap compared to the lack of progress she had been making lately. It seemed the most important thing that she had taken from today’s session. It seemed that it was the most important thing, in fact.
Strange as it was, there was something… appealing… in listening to the way Dominic talked of his father today. There had been times when, as a child, her own father had sat her on his knees and told her about her other relatives. She’d heard stories about a great-grandfather that had worked on the Western Pacific Railroad… a grandfather that had worked in prisons during the Great Depression… on and on like that. She remembered the stories and remembered feeling entranced by them.
Dominic’s story had been no less gripping. Brief as it was, she felt taken in by his words. Even now she remembered the subtle things about today’s conversation. The way his face lit up when he mentioned going on outings with his father… how he would rush into his father’s arms when he came home… how he seemed grief-stricken even now that his father had passed on. There was something tender in that.
Tender and appealing, she thought with a girlish smile.
She rolled onto her back and allowed a momentary surge of raw instincts to overcome her. She thought of Dominic as she had seen him before during their other talks. The way his clothes seemed to hug every contour of a perfectly sculpted body… the way his hair, wet and thick, had framed his face when he climbed out of the pool… and that smile that he constantly wore that wouldn’t have melted ice, it was so cool.
She felt a stirring of lust inside of her and that brought her back to her senses. The thought struck her like the front-end of a semi-truck: sex with Dominic? Yes, there was a certain appeal in that. But caution counseled that it would come with repercussions that were wholly not worth it. She would be facing disbarment from any kind of legal practice, for one. Years’ worth of her parent’s money and time training her to do what she was currently doing would be lost for another. Then, of course, there was the fact that it was nothing short of a breach of principals that she could ill afford.
A lawyer did, of course, have to remain objective in the work that they did. There was no room for personal feelings whatever the circumstances of the case were. She knew that she had to focus on her objective here and that her feelings for Dominic – Mr. Rizzuto – had to remain immaterial. She couldn’t allow herself to be distracted by him.
She froze at that thought.
Distracted… magic… Mr. Rizzuto likes magic tricks!
She sat up with the speed of a ballistic missile being shot off as the profoundness of her realization penetrated her mind. All at once, a billion thoughts came crashing down on her and she couldn’t make heads or tails of them, they were so many. But she latched on to the simplicity of what she had just thought like a lifeline and focused all of her efforts on that. Combined with what she now knew about Mr. Rizzuto’s character suddenly made a strange sense that permeated the mystery that had been surrounding him until now.
And none of it would have been possible if I hadn’t stuck to my methods! She allowed herself a moment of triumph in thinking that.
She bounded from her bed for her laptop with the speed of a bullet. She switched it on and waited impatiently for the machine to boot up as her thoughts began to align themselves. How could I be so stupid? How could I have missed it? It’s so damn simple.
Once her laptop was ready she hastily opened up the Hahn’s Peak detention roster. As an attorney with a client inside she was privy to certain details of her client’s internment. Quickly she drew up Mr. Rizzuto’s finances and kicked herself in the head mentally for not having realized it sooner. It was so damn obvious a fact that it was literally as plain as the nose on her face… and she hadn’t noticed it.
It hit her like a boxing glove filled with cement. Hahn’s Peak was a white collar prison. And in white collar prisons, unlike regular correctional facilities, prisoners had to pay for the treatment that they got. Private rooms, the clothes that they wore, the luxuries that they enjoyed, the TV channels that their cells came with, the sauna… the pool… the archery range… the lounge… the food… all of it had to be paid for with money that the inmates alone could provide. There was no tax-payer money involved in such institutions.
And the money that he uses has to come from somewhere! Like an account holding ten million dollars that he claimed to know nothing about, perhaps?
Quickly she began looking at Mr. Rizzuto’s finances all the way back to the day he had arrived. The average cost of living inside Hahn’s Peak for him was in the neighborhood of $300 daily; the average for someone with millions of dollars in store somewhere. And after listening to him today, she was able to judge for certain that he didn’t come from a moneyed family if he and his father made trips to a joke shop where a highlight was fake dog turds. No, no, no… the money that paid for his cushy life here in the prison had to come from somewhere else.
And I bet I know where, she thought, her fingers dancing furiously across the keyboard to check if her theory was correct. She looked at all of the transactions numbers that appeared in the prison’s daily ledger for Mr. Rizzuto. To a one, they were a match. The money that paid for his stay in prison was all coming from the same place.
I’ve got you now, she thought happily as she began a backtrace, but still the hurt in her mind as to how she could have overlooked this very simple fact burned at her. Hell, this was something that the forensic accountants at Lester & Desoto should have missed. But somehow they’d all missed it. And in the back of her mind, it all made sense. But even if her hunch was right then the joke would still be on her… as well as Mr. Rizzuto.
Somehow, the latter more than the prior worried her.
After a day like today, she realized that she was growing to like him. He was kind, thoughtful, and obviously, he had a sharp mind and a good heart to him. All of which were things that she had thought a good man should have. But if she was right about this whole thing, then she would be ruining him.
The thought dug at her like a knife.
She put the thoughts aside as her backtrace completed and her laptop dug up an account number for her. Got it! I found his money! I found his goddamn money! The thought was one of triumph, but again there was that small pain of ruining Mr. Rizzuto if she divulged what she knew.
She was stymied by that for only a moment. This was a matter that needed to be handled delicately. She had to be sure of her evidence. There was no room for error. She had to double-check what she knew before proceeding. It would only be embarrassing if she went to her employers with what she knew and it all turned out to be a false trail.
Just another magic trick, she thought.
She calmed herself and quickly gathered up her cell phone. She dialed a number that she had used a dozen times already and waited for the other end to pick up. After only a few rings she got her answer.
“Lester & Desoto Law Firm, finances office,” said a voice on the other end that she imagined as belonging to some pimply-faced kid.
“Hi, this is Jamie Lombardo on special assignment. I need some help with a backtrace on an account number. It’s an account being used to finance the stay of a prisoner at Hahn’s Peak Correctional Facility in Colorado. I just need to know whose name is on the account and where it’s coming from if you can tell me.”
“Sure thing, just give me the number and we’ll see where it goes from there.”
She fed the numbers to the accountant on the other end and waited. Only a few seconds passed before the voice on other end responded, “Huh… that’s weird.”
“What’s weird?”
“Well, I’m looking at the transaction history here… you
say that this account is financing an inmate’s stay at Hahn’s Peak Correctional?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, it’s weird for sure then because according to my data here, Lester & Desoto is footing the bill for his stay.”
She was silent for a moment before finding the words in her mind to make sure that she had heard the voice on the other end correctly. “You’re saying that our law firm is paying for this man’s stay in prison?”
“It sure looks that way. But it’s got to be a mistake, right?”
She was quiet a moment before she replied, “Yeah… mistake.”
***
“What do you mean you haven’t found the money yet?” asked Mr. Desoto over the phone. “I thought you said that you were making progress on this case?”
The words stung at her with the viscosity of molten metal. She cringed her eyes tightly as she listened to the venom in Mr. Desoto’s words, hearing the terseness in them as though she was standing in the room with him. “I thought I was too, Mr. Desoto… but something tells me that I could be making a very large mistake with what he’s told me. I need to be certain that I haven’t been led down a false trail.”
There was a brief silence on the other end of the phone and she could almost see the short and portly man grinding his lips together in frustration with her. She could hear him take a deep and patient breath before he spoke next. “Ms. Lombardo… you are aware that Mr. Rizzuto is due to be released in a few days, are you not?”
She tried to remain calm. How could she be unaware of it, being as close as she was to this case? “Yes, sir, I am.”
There was another brief silence, this one filled with a kind of malice that was she was thankful she wasn’t present to witness firsthand. “You’re a very smart woman, Ms. Lombardo. I’m certain that you’ve ascertained why you’re there and what it is that we want you to do, so I’ll not beat around the bush any longer because time is a factor. We chose you for this task because we believed that you could deliver. If Mr. Rizzuto doesn’t divulge the location of the money that he swindled from us before he is released from prison… we’ll lose it forever. And that would not be good. Not for you, or for your future with this – or any other – firm. Is that clear?”