As Lanza studied the single-room apartment, it dawned on him that there may be a relationship between Deadly Eddie’s demise and the Luca bribery thing, and if one didn’t exist, there must be a way to make it so. Maybe Eddie didn’t try to stiff Luca, maybe Eddie knew something Luca didn’t want him to know and this was Luca’s way of giving Eddie terminal amnesia.
“What do you have?” Sam asked the uniform who interviewed the apartment manager.
“Not much. He said some woman came by to retrieve her purse, but then left. He said she’s just a slip of a woman, maybe five-foot-four max, and thin. Doesn’t sound like somebody who could get the drop on this guy, let alone do all that damage.”
“Get a name?”
“Only the description.”
Lanza stepped aside to let the medical examiner and crime scene teams do their work. He was feeling relieved. Events of the past two weeks should cause his workload and Department pressure to abate like a lanced boil. Paulie would pin the Thunder Woman and Jericho-girlfriend cases on the now-deceased Eddie, and the twink’s case on the now-deceased Angie.
The only dangling problem was who killed Eddie. The barmaid Louise Bearden should be a suspect, considering the priest’s allegation that Eddie held her hostage. But she claimed she was in Detroit, and the priest would give her cover, so that was not an avenue Lanza wanted to go down. Dragging her into the picture now might blur everything. Sam didn’t want that. The picture he had in mind was already suitable for framing.
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
Louise was pruning flowers in her small back yard when Bill returned from his AA meeting. He was still living in her house though not sharing her bed. He hadn’t been sure if deference to her awful experience put his libido into hiatus, or something else, maybe alcohol. He tried to quit drinking but the best he could do was compartmentalize it, week-ends or evenings or just beer and wine or skipping a week, but long term, the volume had remained the same. He never forgot that she wouldn’t put up with being second.
Or maybe it was him. Even during the peak of their sex life he had periods when he couldn’t get into it, though his love for her was always deeply felt and expressed. It only bothered him if it bothered her, and he found other ways to bring her satisfaction. Maybe it was only his plumbing.
What had been a chronic but tolerable problem took a turn for the worse after she killed Eddie, and whatever libido he had that could have nurtured togetherness disappeared altogether. When she had come home that night with Eddie’s penis and gonads in a baggie, a veil seemed to have lifted, not in him, but her. Within weeks she was virtually her old self again, though the subject of Eddie was safely locked away in some corner of her psychic attic.
His focus on her troubles diminished as she continued to show signs of healing, but his own personal torments replaced them. The same budding feelings of sadness and anxiety that had plagued him before she got taken returned in spades after she killed Eddie. And Jericho was no help. Maybe it was fear that she might be caught.
“Are you okay?” she often asked.
“I’m fine,” he’d say.
He wasn’t, but there was no way he would burden her with his problems. Not after what she had been through. Yet he didn’t mind sharing it at AA meetings. While it was a relief to talk about it as best he could, the only responses he got from his fellow alcoholics were the usual bromides of “one day at a time,” and “trust your higher power,” and “let go, let God,” and such. Useless crap. His higher power had already abandoned him and what the fuck other choice was there besides living one day at a time?
Out of the blue, Louise asked, “How do you feel that I killed Eddie?”
“The bastard had it coming,” he said, both in truth and to offer reassurance that it hadn’t affected his feelings for her. But as he thought alone in his room that night, he discovered that it had affected his feelings for her, because it had affected his feelings about himself.
Eddie should have been his to kill, his salvation. Bill let people he loved slip away because of pride, his desires consumed all else, that forgiveness would somehow attach without penance and sorrow. Then, if it didn’t, some magical extrication from guilt would be there if vengeance went wrong. He had been on the wrong track ever since Mikey got killed. Nurturing Mikey was supposed to make up for Dennis, except Dennis was gone forever. And Mikey had nothing to do with that while Bill had everything to do with it. And in the perverse logic of guilt, he had come to believe that killing Eddie meant expiation. Eddie had become a straw man but knocking down a straw man could never compensate for a brother’s death.
It was 2:30 a.m. He went downstairs to Louise’s bedroom and shook her awake.
“I have something important to tell you,” he said, and slid under the covers next to her as she lay her head on his arm and he told her the story.
“Doesn’t the risk you took to rescue me matter?” she asked. She propped herself onto one elbow and cupped his chin in her hand. “I killed him because of what he did to me. I don’t regret it one iota. But you wanted his hide for what he did to somebody else and as a stand-in for something you felt guilty about.”
He knew she was right. In fact, she saved him from digging himself into a deeper hole. He and Louise were partners now, partners in the joint venture of Eddie’s demise and the redemption of Bill and Louise. It was time to move on.
CHAPTER SEVENTY
Lanza clicked off the Sony recorder, rewound Paulie’s tape to make sure the volume was right, then dropped the tape into his shirt pocket where he still kept Thunder Woman’s press-on fingernails.
“Okay, I’m going to turn you over to the task force.”
“Did I tell it right?” Paulie asked.
“Perfect. Just like we talked.”
Paulie’s testimony, combined with the documents found in Eddie’s apartment, would seal the deal. Sam was on the cusp of writing it all up and loudly proclaiming that he brought all the pieces of the puzzle together and leave mop-up to the task force.
“Will those guys give me witness protection, I mean now that you have everything you asked for on tape?” Paulie asked.
“With this testimony against Luca and Bigelow, if you don’t deserve it, nobody does.”
“But they’re feds, right?”
“Yeah.”
“So how can you be sure they’ll give it to me? Didn’t you promise?”
“Paulie, it’s a whole process. It costs a lot of money. A lot of people have to sign off on it. And Luca and Bigelow have to get convicted.”
“What if they don’t? What if some Loophole Louie defends them? Where does that leave me?”
Sam Lanza couldn’t care less. It wasn’t his problem. This bust and the convictions that would flow from it would make him a legend. He’d take early retirement, move the family to Biloxi, and after a few years of catching crawdads, use his laurels to button down a gig like Jericho’s. A nice office, good pay, and pressure-free. Or maybe just stick with the crawdads.
Imagine this low-down fuck Paulie Spano trying to pressure him into a witness protection deal, what a dumb fuck! All these guys were like that, thought everything should walk to them while they wore diamond cufflinks and fucked their girlfriends on the bows of their boats and threw enemies off the stern. Then, let some underpaid civil servant cop interrupt their happy dance and they pull strings to have his badge.
“I’ll do my best for you Paulie, but no more. You chose the life. You know how it goes, if you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime. Speaking of time, put your hands out so I can cuff you and take you in.”
“Before you do that, I got a message.”
“What kind of message. For who?”
“For cops.”
“What are you talking about? Put out your fucking hands!”
“I’m talking about this…” Paulie reached to his back waistband, extracted the same pistol that killed the twink, and before Sam could react, fired a hollow-point round that entered Sam’s chee
kbone as a pencil-thin hole and exited the back of his head, tearing away half his skull and splashing tissue like spray paint. The force of the round thrust Sam against his headrest only to rebound onto the steering wheel, where the airbag exploded and buried his entire upper torso in a billowing cloud of white nylon. His life and senses poured out like a raging river from a busted dam, but not before he heard Paulie’s door slam through ears still ringing from the explosion inside the car. The tape was still in Sam’s shirt pocket, people would find it.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE
Louise returned to her job at Dirty Frank’s and Bill finally had a real job instead of manning a security booth at Temple University. Jericho needed staff to evaluate case files and gave Bill a tryout. Bill took to it and got hired. The job involved field work as an insurance investigator. It allowed Bill and Louise to have a life together.
When he got home on a Wednesday after his fourth month of working for Jericho, Louise was glued to the TV. She motioned for him to hurry in. “You have to see this,” she said.
Governor Casey was in front of a mic, holding a press conference amid the strum of clicks and whirrs of cameras. A platoon of officials formed a phalanx around him. The crawl beneath the television picture said, Governor talks Harrisburg scandal.
“Let me introduce the officials responsible for draining the swamp in our Commonwealth,” the governor began. He introduced Attorney General Preate, Philadelphia District Attorney, Ron Castille, FBI Special Agent, Hammond Bendix, Philadelphia Mayor, Wilson Goode, Deputy Assistant General Counsel to the Governor, Ralph Imhoff, and others. “Let me also introduce Dupree Williams of the Pennsylvania Convicts Association,” the Governor said.
Governor Casey turned the mic over to Attorney General Preate, who went on to announce that at 5:00 a.m. of that day, teams of state police and FBI agents conducted concurrent raids and placed under arrest Gary Bigelow and five assistants from ServMark, Inc., Luca Cunnio and other members of La Cosa Nostra, four state prison wardens, including Londell White of SCI Graterford, and the Deputy Secretary for Administration of the Department of Corrections, Kathryn Maloof.
The TV split screen showed the various busts as handcuffed perps tried to block views of their faces and were led away in bedroom slippers and flimsy garments over pajamas.
The raft of charges ranged from RICO violations, to bid-rigging, extortion, bribery, various counts of fraud and conspiracy. Hundreds of other criminal counts against the combined defendants.
“Holy shit,” Bill said.
“Jericho called. He said to watch it,” Louise said. “He said he couldn’t reach you.”
“I wonder why he never told me about any of this.”
“He said he’d give you all the details when you went into the office. He said to watch if Dupree Williams, is that the right name, was smiling”
Bill looked again at the screen. Dupree was the only one smiling among the somber group, and Bill surmised immediately that Dupree’s investigation and lawsuit had cracked the case wide open.
“I’m dumbfounded that Jericho was able to sit on this without telling me for so many months,” Bill said.
“I’m not,” Louise said. “We were on the periphery. He didn’t want us to get snared.”
“You know that for a fact?” Bill asked.
“No. But it’s what I would expect of him.”
CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO
Bill and Louise stood atop the bar facing First Unitarian minister, Henry Waldron, while witnesses Jericho Lewis and Dupree Williams looked on and Peter Jambalaya dabbed at tears smearing mascara in the corners of his eyes. The crowd at Dirty Frank’s was packed to immobility to celebrate the wedding, for which owner Frank Wilkerson contributed all-day free beer to celebrate the event, the only caveat being that customers not break the glasses when the final “I do” was uttered.
Bill had guessed correctly. It was Dupree who had cracked the case. Dupree and his staff compared information from documents found at the Eddie Matthews homicide scene with DOC documents disclosed through discovery, including thousands of food invoices from packagers and canners from Thailand and Laos. ServMark not only rigged its bid to get the DOC account but falsified the labels of goods shipped to the prisons to avoid import taxes and obfuscate expiration dates.
Millionaire CEO and raconteur, Gary Bigelow, who was behind the entire scam, had recruited Luca Cunnio when Luca tipped him off that some punk at Graterford was onto the game and Luca could see to it that it got handled. Thanks to the Paulie Spano tape, Luca was sentenced to do his penance at USP Big Sandy while Bigelow cooled his heels at USP Leavenworth.
Dominoes also fell into the lap of Virginia “Ginger” Albright, whose testimony led to the top brass of the Department of Corrections. From there, the FBI took over as the Commonwealth appeared to be corrupt from stem to stern.
Dupree’s five-million-dollar settlement with the DOC on behalf of his membership became seed money to fund newly-released prisoner transition services.
Jericho kissed the bride and jumped off the bar. The thud of his weight raised beer glasses an inch off their tables. He reached up and took Louise’s hand. She leaped as if parachuting out of a plane. Bill, holding full steins in each hand, wriggled onto a stool, laughing that he didn’t spill a drop.
“I guess when you’re on the wrong track, every station you go by is the wrong station,” Bill shouted into Louise’s ear.
“That was then,” she shouted above the din. “We’re not on any train now, we’re on the ground.”
The End
Author Bio
Lanny Larcinese is a native mid-westerner transplanted to the City of Brotherly Love where he has been writing fiction for seven years. His short work has appeared in magazines and has won a handful of local prizes. When not writing, he let’s his daughter, Amanda, charm him out of his socks, and works at impressing Jackie, his long-time companion who keeps him honest and laughing—in addition to being his first-line writing critic.
He also spends more time than he should on Facebook but feels suitably guilty for it.
I Detest All My Sins Page 23