“I don’t know.”
“You expect me to believe you have no idea why there’s a dead kid stashed in the freezer in the basement?”
Frustrated and frightened, he grabs Frankie’s shoulders and shakes him, setting in motion a spinning pinwheel of seemingly random information. Randy Garza and Randy Salazar. Washington Avenue. Methamphetamine. A bleached blonde with a young son. Baltimore. Disposable cell phones and suspicious calls. He’d taken a sleeping pill. More than one. He doesn’t know how many. Then he remembers finding Mariano in the bathwater in the morning. He didn’t know what to do with him, so he dragged the body to the basement.
“Why didn’t you call 911 when you found him? Why did you think you had to hide him?”
Michael pleads with his brother to come clean. Frankie’s only hope of getting out of this mess is to tell the truth. A lie is a labyrinth and a liar is inevitably trapped in the maze.
“I don’t remember. I don’t know why I didn’t call. I must have been scared and didn’t know what to do.”
Frankie’s affect is disturbing. His calmness is eerie. His diffident, fatalistic attitude is out of character. Someone else, some strange spirit, has possessed him. Michael considers and quickly dismisses any thoughts of his brother taking his own life. Frankie’s a devout Catholic despite the Vatican’s disapproval of his sexual conduct. Jesus Christ may tolerate the occasional blow job, but suicide isn’t a sin to which even the most indulgent of gods would turn a blind eye.
“It’s okay, Frankie. I’ll figure something out,” Michael says, trying to reassure him. “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.”
A call to 911 now will bring the circus rolling into town. The responding officer will arrive and secure the scene of the crime. Homicide detectives and a young ADA will be summoned. Photographers and investigators will descend like flies on a carcass. In the midst of pandemonium Michael and his brother will be asked to give statements that neither is prepared to make before securing the best representation money can buy.
It will be hours until Michael can make the call to Walter Rudenstein, the legendary prosecutor and Michael’s one-time mentor who had switched allegiance a decade ago and now uses his prodigious gifts in the service of the enemies of society. He’d been in the headlines last month for getting life in prison for the white serial killer the NAACP wanted guillotined for cannibalizing a half-dozen little black boys. This will be a walk in the park by comparison. Walter Rudenstein will make the arrangements for Frankie to turn himself in. Michael will be by his side, of course. Rudenstein will ask for and get reasonable bail. Frankie’s not a violent man and has no criminal history. He’s no danger to society. He acted in self-defense. The condition of his face proves he was the real victim. And it hadn’t been the first time Frankie had been beaten. Only a few weeks earlier he’d had to hide his cuts and bruises behind sunglasses. The only fly in the ointment is Frankie’s bad decision to deep-freeze the evidence.
Frankie’s phone is ringing.
“Who the fuck is calling at this hour?
“It’s Jack.”
“Answer it.”
The conversation, no longer than a few minutes, feels interminable to Michael.
“I will,” Frankie assures the priest as he hangs up the phone.
“You will what?”
“Be ready to leave by five thirty.”
Michael is speechless. He’d thought his brother had grasped the seriousness of his situation and, instead, he’s running off for a day of fun and games.
“Father Parisi is being buried today in Scranton. You should come, too, Mikey.”
For the first time in his life he’s grateful that fucking horse-faced priest is lurking in the background. Frankie can’t be left alone and his presence would be a constant distraction while Michael makes the arrangements with Walter Rudenstein.
“You can’t say a word about this to anyone, not even him.”
“Do you think I’m crazy?”
No, but you’re trusting and impulsive. Michael pulls the ace from his sleeve, the only thing that will ensure Frankie’s silence.
“I could lose my license for not calling the police and letting you go to Scranton. I might even face charges. Do you understand?”
“Don’t worry, Mikey. No one will ever know you were here,” he promises. “Do you think I should call Connie now and wake her up to tell her to reschedule today’s appointments or just leave a note for her to find when she comes to work?”
Michael questions the wisdom of allowing her free rein to wander through the house.
“She won’t go down into the basement, Mikey. She’s terrified of mice.”
“You don’t seem yourself this morning, Mr. Gagliano. Are you feeling under the weather?”
The judge is truly concerned. The Chief Deputy’s attention to detail is known throughout the courthouse. A suppression hearing like this morning’s is approached with no less gravity and passion than a jury trial. It’s completely out of character for Michael to appear in the courtroom unprepared. He fumbles through the case file. His ability to think quickly and speak extemporaneously has deserted him.
“I didn’t sleep last night, Your Honor. A family situation.”
He’d boarded up the back door to the building. Then he sat in his parked car, waiting until he saw Frankie leave the house and drive away in the priest’s Ford Explorer. The sun had risen by the time he finally got home.
“Nothing serious, I hope.”
“No, nothing like that.”
“Would you like a continuance?”
“That would be greatly appreciated, Your Honor.”
“Jesus Christ, Michael. You look like shit,” the lead defense attorney informs him after the judge has left the bench.
“I’m really sorry about this.”
“I’m going to mark this day in my calendar! Michael Gagliano is actually human!” she says with a laugh as she turns her attention to the messages on her cell phone.
He should have asked one of the junior attorneys to cover today. The short walk between the courthouse and the DA’s office feels like a death march. He expects there will be a message waiting for him on his desk. Rudenstein or his assistant will have returned the call Michael had made before leaving for court. His brother’s life will never be the same after they speak. He’ll never be a truly free man again. No matter the outcome of the negotiations and pleas in the months to come, he’ll wear the yoke of notoriety around his neck until the day he dies. Isn’t he the one who killed that young man? Yes, isn’t it hard to believe someone with such a sweet face would be capable of doing such a thing? It seems like a lifetime since he scarfed down a couple of slices on the street last night. It’s past one and he makes a sharp left on the sidewalk, walking away from the office, seeking the comfort of food before he destroys his brother’s life.
The Bishop’s words are generic. It’s his one-size-fits-all eulogy. In all fairness, he hadn’t known the deceased, had never even met him. Father Parisi spent his entire clerical career in the much larger archdiocese to the south. But his last instructions were clear. He wanted his funeral Mass in the city where he’d been born and to be buried in the soil of his native Scranton.
It’s a High Mass, of course, and a Latin one at that. The chants and prayers are mysterious, a secret language between men who have dedicated their lives to the work of God. No ambient noise disturbs or disrupts the solemnity of the occasion. No coughing, no wailing of babies, no banging of kneelers echoing off the walls of the cathedral. Frankie is seated among a clutch of laypeople here to pay their last respects. No one from Saint Catherine of Siena has traveled a hundred twenty-five miles north to say farewell. He’d always thought Father Parisi was beloved by his congregation, only to learn from Jack after the priest was transferred to another parish that he was considered an odd duck, someone who made his parishioners uncomfortable. They were polite, respectful of his standing in the community, but would breathe a sigh of relief when
he excused himself after making the briefest of appearances at their wedding receptions and funeral luncheons. Only Frankie had held any affection for him.
It takes more than a single celebrant, even one who’s a bishop, to bury a priest. The altar is crowded with ordained men in billowing white cassocks. The organist and choir begin the communion hymn, and Frankie joins the line to receive the Body of Christ. Only after receiving the sacrament, kneeling in his pew, his head bowed, does he realize what he has done. He remembers Father Parisi’s voice, instructing him that it is a grievous sin to take Holy Communion while unconfessed, unforgiven sins still blacken the soul. He remembers the vivid tale of the wafer turning to blood in the mouth of the cynical nonbeliever who had flaunted God’s law.
The Mass is ending and the processional to the waiting hearse begins. A long column of prelates, hands folded in prayer, accompany the flag-draped casket (Father Parisi was a chaplain in the Second World War) down the aisle of the cathedral. Their voices—tenors, baritones, basses—blend effortlessly, all in perfect pitch, as they sing the closing hymn. Frankie, who’s been dry-eyed throughout the service, feels tears welling in his eyes. He’s not crying for the deceased, who had lived a long and useful life, but for the boy he once was, the reverent young man who posed with his little brother in a pressed shirt and tie for the kind and generous priest, solemn and dignified as they stared into the lens of his camera.
There’s a long, detailed message from Walter Rudenstein’s office when Michael returns to his desk. Mr. Rudenstein is at his St. John’s residence until Thursday morning. His secretary assures the Chief Deputy that Mr. Rudenstein will contact him when he returns. Michael is tempted to call back and remind her satellite service reaches the Caribbean, but pressing would make him sound desperate. The little Mexican’s going nowhere in the next forty-eight hours. No suspicious odors will be drifting up from the basement. He and Frankie had collected the rotting meat and stashed it in sidewalk trash cans blocks away from the barbershop under the cover of night. But the delay means Michael’s going to have to retain Rudenstein to represent both him and his brother so that the timeline between finding the body and the report to the authorities is protected from disclosure by the attorney-client privilege.
His phone is ringing. Frankie is checking in. Michael had told him to call when the service was over and they were on their way home.
“Mikey. Jack wants to drive to New York since we’re so close. He’s going to try to get standing-room tickets for Jersey Boys and stay overnight. I called Connie and asked her to reschedule tomorrow’s appointments, too.”
Michael rubs his bloodshot eyes. Everything is spinning out of his control. A trial is out of the question. Not even Walter Rudenstein could win an acquittal on charges against his brother for the death of his young house pet. What jury of his peers will ever sympathize with a man who runs off for an evening of show tunes while a human Popsicle is lying in his freezer chest?
“Breathe. Just breathe.”
Jack’s doing his best to calm and reassure him, but Frankie’s claustrophobia resists his best efforts to achieve tranquility through measured intakes of oxygen. Traffic has come to a complete stop. Pungent exhaust fumes seep through the closed windows. They’ve been sitting ten minutes at most, but Frankie feels like he’s been captive in the Lincoln Tunnel for days. The filthy walls seem to be shrinking and the dim lighting feels threatening. Frankie’s heart is racing and his knuckles are white from gripping the dashboard.
“Maybe this will help,” Jack suggests, slipping Mozart’s Six Quartets Dedicated to Haydn into the disc player.
But the music only agitates Frankie. The screeching violin strings are hardly soothing.
“Just breathe. Take deep breaths. You can do it. I think I see some movement ahead. It won’t be much longer.”
His words are no comfort to Frankie. If he can’t find the courage to do what he needs to do, he’ll be confined to a space not much larger, and far less comfortable, than the interior of Jack’s Ford Explorer. He dreads the thought of spending the rest of his life pacing ten steps between the wall and the bars of a cell. He would never survive it. He reaches into his pocket to touch the iPod Mariano had given him and takes comfort in knowing the last thing he’ll hear in this life is Stevie’s voice singing about the mysteries of Rhiannon.
APRIL 16, 2008
Michael is sitting at his desk, staring at the ungrammatical affidavit presented by the officer seeking a search warrant in a high-profile narcotics distribution investigation. Nearly a decade after Kettleman’s first election, Delaware County law enforcement still resents his decision to impose the option under the Criminal Code allowing the DA’s Office the discretion to approve every application for a warrant before it can be presented to the court. The consensus among the cops was all you could do was cross your fingers and hope you didn’t pull that bastard Gagliano, who was known to cross-examine you as vigorously as he would a defendant on the stand before he would even consider signing the fucking thing. The officer is loaded for bear, expecting even more rigorous scrutiny than the Deputy’s usual vigilance. It’s not often, after all, the Commonwealth wants to raid the neat and tidy little bungalow of an eighty-nine-year-old woman. But if three months of observation and the detailed recording of the suspicious comings-and-goings of a steady stream of jittery and paranoid-seeming young visitors to a churchgoing lady’s home sweet home isn’t probable cause to search the premises for evidence of a prescription narcotics operation, he doesn’t know what is. The cop is shocked when the Chief Deputy approves his affidavit without asking a single question.
Michael rises from his desk and shuts and locks the door. At this very moment, some fresh-faced, eager young member of the Philadelphia police force could be standing in front of a judge, asking for a signature to enter and search the premises at Eighth and Carpenter. An hour later investigators will be dusting for fingerprints and the photographer will digitally preserve a series of images of the frozen body in the freezer chest. The prosecutor will enter the photographs into evidence. Michael’s witnessed the scene a hundred times: the pinched faces of the jurors, flinching as the grisly pictures of the victim are passed through the jury box, the abject disgust when they look up to stare at the accused sitting at the defense table.
He unlocks the bottom drawer of his desk and retrieves a worn manila envelope. He’s been tempted several times since the Corcoran reversal to look at its contents, but resisted, afraid his anger, already bubbling on low heat, would ignite. He arranges them in a morbid solitaire pattern so he can see the images all at once. The face, battered beyond recognition. The glazed, unseeing eye, staring at the lens of the camera. The charred skin from the clumsy attempt to burn the body. The filthy duct tape sealing his mouth. And, most hideous of all, the shredded ribbons of skin and muscles that once were his throat, the naked bones of his neck and the severed vertebrae exposed. The defense had tried to exclude them as inflammatory. Michael argued that a jury of Tommy Corcoran’s peers deserved to see the monsters’ handiwork. One of the jurors had to be excused to regain her composure after viewing the evidence.
A light tap on his door snaps him to attention.
“Michael, it’s almost three o’clock. You need to leave soon if you’re going to be there on time.”
The opening statements in the mock trial are scheduled to begin precisely at five. Michael takes his work as an instructor in Penn’s trial-advocacy program seriously. His team—the earnest daughter of a Pittsburgh machinist, a boisterous Cuban-American princess from Miami, and a wisecracking Orthodox kid from Brooklyn—is expecting a last-minute pep talk to boost their confidence. They’ve rehearsed their opening statements and closing arguments. They’ve mastered the art of direct examination and sharpened their skills at cross. His presence will be an unnecessary crutch. He doesn’t need to be there at all. But the dean wouldn’t look kindly on an adjunct clinical professor who blew off the grand finale to his semester’s efforts. And it might
help him to forget, for a few hours at least, that it’s Frankie’s last night as an unmarked man, who, come tomorrow when Rudenstein returns to town, will be betrayed by an ungrateful Judas Iscariot who once had been a motherless boy he’d loved and protected.
“Come on, Mary Wilson. How about some backup vocals?” Jack insists, taking the lead on the refrain to “Close to You.” Jack’s finally given up trying to get him to admit he hadn’t acquired this fresh set of bruises in a traffic accident and can’t cajole Frankie into joining in a sing-along to the Carpenters’ Ultimate Collection.
The New York getaway hadn’t lifted Frankie’s dour mood. Jack knew he was lying when he said he’d enjoyed Jersey Boys. He’d had to be prodded to join the curtain call standing ovation. He’d stayed in bed this morning until checkout. Even a shopping expedition to the menswear department at Saks failed to brighten Frankie’s spirits.
A road sign informs all southbound travelers the Joyce Kilmer Service Plaza is two miles ahead.
“We need to stop here,” Frankie says, clutching his gut. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
“Please. You’re coming,” Kelly, the machinist’s daughter, pleads. “We couldn’t have done it without you.”
Frankie hasn’t given him a set of keys for the new locks and the thought of waiting at the bar at the Speakeasy until the priest delivers his brother into his custody isn’t terribly appealing.
“Just one,” he concedes. “I’ll meet you guys there.”
The young South Floridian is shepherding everyone out of the law school building. Michael admires her brisk efficiency. The Orthodox kid is on his cell, giving a blow-by-blow account of the victory.
“I’m coming to find you if you’re not there in ten minutes,” Kelly warns him as she runs off to join her classmates.
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