Strange Bedfellows v5

by Paula L. Woods

  The Passing Game

  Although I was in my robe and slippers, I felt chilled by Billie’s words. I whispered: “You think the woman who wrote the threatening letter to Zuccari is Alma’s mother?”

  Billie had gotten a verbal summary from Robert Merritt of the P.I.’s report and had made the connection between Alma’s mother and the writer of the letter to Chuck Zuccari. “Merritt never saw the letter, so he didn’t recognize the name Belle Thornton. But when he told me Alma’s mother’s name was Isabelle Thornton, I figured it had to be the same person.”

  “How’d he find her?”

  “Alma provided next of kin information when she was hired by the modeling agency that sent her to that toy convention. How many Isabelle or Belle Thorntons do you think there are in Newark, New Jersey?”

  I was about to argue the point, then remembered Alma and Chuck Zuccari’s daughter’s name was Cara-Isabella and bit my tongue.

  “The P.I. did some digging on Thornton and found out she’d been married previously to an OB/GYN, Dr. Earl Gordone. That’s when he flew out to New Jersey and got that information he passed on to Renata Lippincott about the Gordones passing for white.”

  “But how did he connect her to Chuck Zuccari?”

  “The P.I. pulled her marriage license and traced her through her maiden name. He finally found someone who remembered that Isabelle Kendry had moved to Newark after high school and taken a job as a payroll clerk at CZ Toys, where she met and married the boss’s son.”

  According to the wedding announcement in the local paper, Chuck was twenty-five and destined for great things when he fell head over heels for the eighteen-year-old brown-haired, blue-eyed Isabelle Kendry. “But then, a few years later, when Mario was about two, Isabelle Zuccari dropped off the scene, resurfacing a year later as Belle Gordone of Upper Montclair, New Jersey, wife of Dr. Earl Gordone and mother of a baby girl, Alma.”

  “The Zuccaris must have found out she was black and paid her to disappear,” I said.

  “That’s what the P.I. pieced together after interviewing Belle last year. Bottom line is, with her out of the way, the Zuccaris could pretend to Mario and everyone else that his mother had died. Only now that lie has come back to bite them all in the butt.”

  My grandmother’s voice came to me again, reminding me: One lie calls for another and another. I could only imagine the pain Isabelle Zuccari had felt, separated from her child because of her lies. Or the halfhearted love Mario must have gotten from his family, who knew the truth and withheld it from him. Or Chuck, who must have been riddled with guilt every time he lied to Mario about his mother being dead. I could see how Mario became such a straitlaced, dutiful son. Probably desperate to win his father’s approval, he’d devoted his life to the family business and adopted his father’s politics, his religious beliefs, and God only knew what else.

  “So you were right about that letter being personal,” Billie was saying. “Alma’s mother was writing about how the Zuccaris took her son from her, not their Nazi connection. She probably just put the article in there to remind Chuck she had some dirt on his family, too.”

  The enclosed will remind you of the wrongs you have done to me, Isabelle had reproached her former husband, and of the lengths I will go to stop you.

  Now the truth lay heavy in our hands, but I was completely baffled about what to do with it. How in the hell were we going to tell Alma and Mario that Chuck was once married to Alma’s mother, making them not just in-laws but half sister and brother? Then a thought struck me. “Mrs. Lippincott said Merritt was supposed to talk to Zuccari about the P.I.’s report. Did he?”

  “Sort of. Merritt sent Zuccari a copy of the report and the invoice with a memo telling him how the P.I. was engaged at the insistence of his ex and asking how he wanted Merritt to handle payment. Zuccari wrote back and said to pay the invoice in full, along with a hefty bonus, in exchange for the original case files and notes.”

  “And that was it? Zuccari never discussed it with Merritt directly?”

  “Would you? But Merritt said he kept a copy of the P.I.’s report in a safe at the office, just to cover the company against some future claim by Thornton.”

  Merritt had promised to go into his office in the morning and fax a copy of the report to us so we could go over it ourselves. Which we would, with a fine-toothed comb. Yet the prospect of what lay ahead sent a chill straight through me, making my little office in Aubrey’s house seem even colder than it was. I checked the time. Almost midnight. “You know, it’s going to be creepy having to tell Alma and Mario about this.”

  Billie agreed, but advised we wait until morning. “Zuccari’s taken a turn for the worse,” she said. “When I checked in with the Feds surveilling Mario and Gabriella, they told me they both drove down to the hospital about nine and just got back home. And the nurse I called on Chuck’s unit said Alma was still there. It doesn’t sound good.”

  Given the hour and the circumstances, I agreed that we’d let it rest until morning, allowing us to be better prepared for the difficult interviews that lay ahead. “But what the hell are we going to tell Alma and Mario, Charlotte?” Billie asked.

  “The truth.”

  Alma Zuccari agreed to come in at eleven, after she had visited her husband at the hospital. But Mario Zuccari, speaking through his attorney, Sarkisian, asked if he could meet with us first thing Monday morning, ostensibly to allow him time to participate in an Easter pageant rehearsal at his church.

  “Pageant my ass!” Thor scoffed over the phone as Perkins, Billie, and I sat in MIA’s office, giving him an update. “The only pageant Mario Zuccari’s involved in is the one with him and his attorneys, trying to get their ducks in a row.”

  “He could be in church,” Billie added, “praying he can keep the embezzlement from hitting the news until after his family can dump their stock!”

  “Hopefully, they’re not that stupid,” Perkins said. “’Cause if they are, the Feds could hook them for insider trading on top of the embezzlement.”

  “Want us to go down there and bring him in?” I asked.

  “No, let him do something stupid,” Thor replied. “It could give us some leverage, especially since we don’t have anything conclusive to tie him to the embezzlement or the shootings.”

  “But we’ve got one hell of a smoking gun,” Billie put in. “That letter from Mario’s mother to his father we found hidden in his desk. If he realized who she was and that his father had kept them apart all these years—”

  “He could have contracted to have his father killed himself,” Thor interrupted, “and then paid off Engalla to make it look like he was responsible.”

  “We’ll know if that’s the case soon enough,” I said. “Latent Prints left a message that they’ll have complete results on the prints they lifted off the letter to Engalla by Monday. If you want us to hold off on Alma Zuccari until then, we can.”

  “I’d rather not. I don’t want to run the risk of Merritt giving Alma a heads-up before we can interview her. In fact, I’m a little concerned we may have blown the element of surprise by not interviewing her last night.”

  “I didn’t think the time was right,” I said, explaining what we knew about Chuck Zuccari’s condition. “But we should have checked it with you. After all, you are the supervising detective on the case.”

  “No, that was a good call,” he conceded. “You know what you’re doing as much as I do.”

  It was one of the few compliments I’d received from the veteran detective since he’d come onto this case, and I didn’t know quite what to do with it.

  As I mumbled thanks, Thor said: “I should have listened to you about that passing thing, Justice. I just never thought it was that big a deal.”

  “It was to Alma Zuccari and her mother.”

  “And from what the P.I. found out,” Billie added, “it was a whole lot more than that to Chuck.”

  Thor grunted. “That whole family is choking to death on its secrets. Questi
on is, how far were they willing to go to keep them.”

  At one, Alma Zuccari was wheeled into the interview room by a fiftyish, toupee-wearing suit I’d not met before. Her face pale and drawn, she looked worse than she did the day I saw her at the hospital, reminding me again of the havoc that crime can wreak on families. “This is Jerry Gales. Mr. Gales is a political associate and friend of my husband’s,” she explained, after I introduced Billie.

  Gales snapped a card in my direction. “And the family’s personal attorney.”

  “I’m sorry I’m late,” she went on, the agitation clear in her voice. “My husband’s developed an infection that’s causing his kidneys and other organs to fail. They’ve had to put him on a ventilator, and the first EEG was flat. I’m afraid he may be . . .”

  I glanced quickly at Billie as we chimed “I’m so sorry” in unison.

  But Alma didn’t want our sympathy. “All I care about is that you arrest whoever shot my husband before he . . . before I have to . . .” She shifted uncomfortably in her chair. “It might help me to let him go, to know the guilty party will be punished.”

  “We’ll do our best, ma’am,” I promised, and shot another look at Billie, wondering how she was interpreting Alma’s response.

  After an awkward silence, Gales said: “Mrs. Zuccari tells me she never saw the shooter that night and doesn’t remember much of what happened before or after she was shot. So, if you’ve called her up here to identify that boy suspected of embezzling funds from the company, I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed.”

  I carefully placed the attorney’s card in front of me on the table. “Thank you, sir, we’ve already got your client’s statement on where she was at the time of the shooting.”

  “So you agree she can’t possibly identify Nilo Engalla.” Gales sat back in his chair, proud of the point he thought he was scoring.

  “Yes, sir, we do. But Mr. Engalla is not a suspect at this time.”

  “Then why are we here?”

  I addressed Alma Zuccari directly. “I was wondering, before we begin, if we might speak with you privately, ma’am, completely off the record?”

  Gales again placed his hand over Alma’s. “Don’t you believe them, my dear. Nothing is off the record with the police!”

  “We’re not trying to entrap your client, merely protect her privacy.”

  Alma gave me a puzzled look. “Protect my privacy from whom? Mr. Gales is our attorney!”

  I fingered the card in front of me. “Yes, ma’am,” I said, “and a family friend and political associate of your husband’s. You explained that.”

  Alma watched me intently, blinking as she slowly withdrew her hand from Gales’s protective grasp. “Jerry, could you get me some water? I promise I won’t confess to anything while you’re gone.”

  “There’s a watercooler in our break room, sir,” Billie offered. “If you step outside and turn to your right, Detective Perkins can direct you.”

  “Ten minutes, Jerry,” Alma promised as she turned and mustered an encouraging smile for her skeptical attorney. “Then you can protect Chuck and me to your heart’s content.”

  She waited until she could no longer hear Gales’s footstep in the hall. “What’s this all about?”

  “We wanted to talk to you about Isabelle Thornton,” Billie told her.

  Alma started as if Billie had slapped her. “My mother?” she whispered. “How did you find her?”

  “We didn’t,” Billie replied as she explained about the P.I. Renata Lippincott had had CZ Toys hire.

  Alma shook her head, her eyes welling with tears. “I kept telling her someone would eventually find out. How is she?”

  “I’m sorry to say she’s had a stroke, ma’am,” Billie said gently.

  Alma drew in her breath, the color draining from her already pale face. “Is she all right?”

  “When the P.I. filed his report, she was in a nursing home, but that was over a year ago. Is there a reason you two haven’t communicated?”

  Alma nodded fiercely as she fumbled in her pocket for a tissue. “That’s how she wanted it. She wanted me to get as far away from the past as possible.”

  “And your racial identity?” Billie asked.

  Alma gave Billie a crooked smile. “I told Mother it was ridiculous, playing that stupid passing game in this day and age, but she couldn’t stop. Kept shuttling us around these small towns in Connecticut and New Jersey, lying to get us into better neighborhoods, and me into better schools.”

  “And for her, better meant white,” Billie said, her clipped tone betraying her disapproval.

  Alma nodded, a guilty look on her face. “I hated every minute of it, especially when I’d get beaten up when the white kids at a school found out I was black. But my mother would just pick us up and move again. It was like, after the mistake she made with my father, she had to get it right.”

  “You’re referring to what happened to Dr. Gordone’s practice in Upper Montclair?” I asked.

  “I’m sorry, I’m not being clear.” Alma sighed, wiped her eyes, and folded her hands in her lap. “Dr. Gordone was the only father I’ve ever known, but he wasn’t my birth father—something Mother didn’t tell me until after he died. No, the mistake she was referring to was with my real father.”

  Beside me, Billie ducked her head and started writing in her notepad. I glanced down and read: OH, SHIT!

  “My mother and father married when my mother was very young,” Alma was saying. “But when his family discovered she was black, they had the marriage annulled, and they never saw each other again.”

  It was bad enough, trying to figure out how to tell Alma about her mother’s marriage to Chuck Zuccari, but what she’d just told us left me sick at heart and not knowing quite how to proceed. Chuck Zuccari had married his daughter and fathered her baby!

  I glanced at Billie, who was tapping her pen on her notepad, the same awful realization written all over her face. “Did you ever meet your father, ma’am?” I asked carefully. “Or find out who he was?”

  “Mother wouldn’t tell me his name, and naturally my birth certificate said my father was Earl Gordone. She and Dr. Gordone had gotten married right after her marriage to my father was annulled, so I don’t know if even he knew the truth.” She looked up at us, tears again in her eyes. “But I know my mother never got over what my father and his people did to her. And what happened to us in Montclair only made her worse. By the time I was in my teens, she’d married and divorced again—”

  “This would be Mr. Thornton?” I asked, my mind still reeling.

  “William Thornton, that’s right.” She nodded, a frown crossing her face. “Right skin tone, but he was a gambler, and violent, too. We ended up broke and on the wrong side of the tracks in Newark, this time with the black kids beating me up because they thought I was white. But then I went away to college, where nobody knew me, and things were better. My mother made me promise to keep my mouth shut and let people make their own assumptions about who and what I was.”

  Alma looked from me to Billie, her face flushed with embarrassment. “You must think I’m a pitiful excuse for a black person,” she said as she blew her nose, “but I never tried actively to pass. I just fell into it. And when my mother found out, she was so thrilled that I’d been able to accomplish something she hadn’t. After I graduated, she convinced me it was better not to come home, lest someone found out. I used to write, but she never wrote back. Then she moved again and I lost track of her completely. I haven’t seen or heard from her in almost three years now.”

  During which time Alma had settled into her new life—the one her mother had struggled so hard for her to have—and stumbled straight into hell. But as much as her story sickened me, I hadn’t lived Alma’s life, or her mother’s, so how could I judge. “But you should know,” I said, “that in addition to Ms. Lippincott, Mr. Merritt discussed the P.I.’s report directly with your husband.”

  “Chuck knew?” she whispered, her
lips barely moving. “For how long?”

  “Why do you ask how long your husband knew?” I asked, noting the stricken look on her face.

  Alma beat a fist into her lap. “I knew it was something!”

  “Why do you say that?” Billie asked.

  “I kept asking him what was wrong, but Chuck said it was nothing.”

  “But you weren’t convinced,” I prompted, glancing at Billie.

  She shook her head. “When Chuck found out I was pregnant, he was thrilled at first. Then in the late spring, around the end of my first trimester, everything changed. He became distant, even hostile at times, questioning whether the baby was his and then badgering me to abort it.”

  I felt my pulse quicken. “Do you know any other reason he could have had a change of heart about your baby?”

  “I never cheated on my husband, so don’t even go there!” she whispered fiercely. “I just thought he was just having an old man’s doubts. Not that my husband was old, mind you, but . . . he just changed so completely, I figured it was those kind of doubts, or him being turned off to me being pregnant . . . I mean, he even stopped sleeping with me.”

  Embarrassed, she fell silent. Billie and I exchanged pained looks, then Billie took a breath and said: “And you never thought the changes in your . . . husband’s affections had anything to do with the secret you were keeping about your race?”

  “Or anything else?” I added.

  “Never!” She shook her head, bewildered. “What are you driving at?”

  “Ma’am, I need you to prepare yourself.” I took in a deep breath, and looked her in the eyes. “What I need to tell you is going to be hard to hear.”

  “For God’s sake, tell me!”

  And so I did, as gently as I could, everything about the lies her mother and father had kept to themselves and told each other and how the secret of her birth that her mother had kept all these years had surfaced to poison them all.

  Alma’s face went slack, and her eyes dull. “You’re wrong!” she murmured. “Surely there’s been some mistake.”