The Vendetta Defense raa-8

by Lisa Scottoline

  The reporters started raising their hands and shouting questions, but Judy held up a palm like a traffic cop. She had to stay on message, since she wanted the Coluzzis to get every word of what she was saying.

  “We’ll take questions after the statement, please,” she said, and noticed Bennie slip into the back of the crowded room. They had agreed Judy would run the show, with Bennie joining her to answer questions. Judy welcomed Bennie’s confidence in her, as much as she was surprised by it. It was Bennie’s drawing power that got the crowd this morning. In a way, Bennie was putting her life on the line, too.

  “I am also filing, on my behalf, a lawsuit in state court against John and Marco Coluzzi, as well as members of their family, for torts against me, including but not limited to attempted murder by incendiary device . . .”

  Judy went on to describe briefly the particulars of the state law claims, holding her head high. She felt less and less afraid of the Coluzzis the more she went on, empowered by the law itself. She was upping the ante, she could almost feel it, and as risky as it felt, it was exciting. When Judy finished her statement, Bennie came and stood beside her, and they faced the press, the TV cameras, and the Coluzzis, in identical brown pumps.

  “Any questions?” Judy asked, and the barrage commenced. One tall reporter in the front was waving wildly. “Yes?” Judy said, since that’s the way they did it on TV.

  “Ms. Carrier, isn’t this really some kind of retaliation, or revenge?”

  Judy gritted her teeth. “The suits are valid and are being brought to vindicate legal wrongs, under both federal and state law. This office will continue to vindicate any and all legal wrongs which may be perpetrated against me in the future.”

  The reporter scribbled quickly. “Aren’t you trying to send a message to the Coluzzis?”

  Judy hesitated only a minute. “You’re damn right I am.”

  After the reporters had gone, empty Styrofoam coffee cups dotted the conference room table, and spare copies of the federal and state court complaints were scattered about. A leftover newspaper lay on the table, next to Judy’s bare feet, propped up there. The show was over, so she had kicked off her pumps and molted her pantyhose like a garden snake.

  “Well, that was about as good as it gets,” Judy said, and Bennie crossed to the small white Sony television on the credenza near the telephone. “Lotsa questions, huh?”

  “Plenty, and we handled them well. We’re making noise with this thing, I promise you. If we don’t make the twelve o’clock news, I’m losing my touch.” Bennie switched on the TV, and the Action News logo popped onto the screen. “Here we go.” Bennie sat on the edge of the table as a pretty African-American anchorwoman appeared on the screen, her foundation sculpting her face into beautiful curves and her mouth glossy with blackberry-colored lipstick.

  The anchor said, “The top story on Action News is the continuing vendetta between South Philadelphia’s Lucia and Coluzzi families. The police have charged no suspects in the attempted murder of criminal lawyer Judy Carrier and her client, defendant Anthony Lucia, and so it seems the attorney has taken the law into her own hands, filing a series of powerhouse complaints in retaliation.”

  “Retaliation?” Judy groaned as the footage from the conference began to roll, with her looking fairly stiff in her navy suit, but Bennie waved her into quiet. In the next second, the screen had changed, and a reporter was interviewing an assistant city solicitor, a bright-looking young man with short hair, who appeared on the screen with an expression of official concern.

  He was saying, “We will be investigating the allegations of the complaints immediately, beginning with the Bureau of Licenses and Inspections. Any wrongdoing there will be met with termination and possible suits for damages. The city wants to reassure the citizens of Philadelphia and our friends in the business community of the integrity and fairness of its construction contracts.”

  Judy grinned. “They’re worried.”

  Bennie nodded. “They should be. They’re exposed, big-time.”

  Next on the screen was a well-dressed businessman, wearing a three-piece suit and sitting behind a huge glass desk. Crystal awards were reflected in its gleaming surface. Judy clicked up the audio and heard the businessman saying, “As one of the city’s largest construction lenders, we at ConstruBank are reacting to these allegations with a great deal of concern, and we will investigate them fully.”

  Bennie smiled. “Now they’ll begin to separate themselves from Coluzzi. The deniability defense is about to begin. The shit is hitting the fan.” She raised her hand for a high-five, and Judy slapped it decisively.

  “We did it!” she said, her crabbiness lifting. Maybe litigation was better than sex? Nah.

  “Way to go. You worked hard and it paid off.”

  “You too, Coach.”

  “Hey, look,” Bennie said, pointing happily at the TV. “Enemy territory.”

  Judy watched. The last shot was of the anchorwoman, standing on the sidewalk outside a modest brick building squeezed behind a sandwich shop and a bakery in South Philly. An old painted sign read COLUZZI CONSTRUCTION, but it was draped in black crepe. The anchorwoman held the bubble mike to her glossy mouth. “We tried to reach officials of Coluzzi Construction for comment, but they did not return our calls. Their offices were closed today, in observance of the services in the death of their founder, Angelo Coluzzi.”

  Bennie’s eyes widened an incredulous blue. “No! What services? Is there a funeral today? I didn’t know about that, did you?”

  “No, but we couldn’t have delayed anything. We had to react fast, like you said.”

  “Goddamn it!” Bennie tossed her empty Styrofoam cup at the wastebasket so hard it had to miss. “They’re at their father’s viewing at the same time we file suit?”

  Judy didn’t understand Bennie’s reaction. “Okay, so it doesn’t look that good—”

  “It’s not about how it looks!”

  “We didn’t have a lot of choice, Bennie. The Coluzzis were shooting at me when they should have been picking out caskets.”

  Bennie stood up. “You know, you’re right. We had to file first thing Monday, but I don’t feel good about it. And, God forbid, when you bury your parents, you won’t either.” She walked to the discarded coffee cup and tossed it into the waste can. “Did you call them, by the way?”

  “My parents? Not yet.”

  “Do it,” Bennie said, and strode unhappily from the conference room.

  Judy watched the remainder of the broadcast, distracted as the news segued into labor strikes and warehouse fires and an early summer boating accident. She felt they’d done right in filing the lawsuits. Did it really make a difference that the service was today? These people were killers. They had put a bomb under her car. Judy sighed. Her gaze fell on the newspaper near her bare toes, which had been squeezed unfortunately into little flesh blocks by being shoved into wooden shoes all the time.

  Her mood was going downhill again. She had passed up sex with an Italian, now for no reason. Was there really a funeral today? She reached the leftover newspaper with her bare foot and slid it toward her hand. She opened it, turned to the obituaries, and found Angelo Coluzzi’s.

  Loving father, it began, which got Judy right there because she had never had one. She imagined her father’s obit. Stern father. Militaristic father. Bad father, but really good lieutenant colonel. She decided on the spot against making the phone call that Bennie had ordered. If the Colonel hadn’t read that his daughter had been fired upon and almost killed, she wouldn’t ruin his roast-beef-and-butter sandwich.

  Judy skimmed the rest of the tiny print but felt no guilt. How could they say all these nice things about such a rotten person? How could the surviving sons be bereft when they spent their spare time using little old men for target practice? The last line said that donations may be made to Our Lady of Sorrows Church, and a viewing would be held at Bondi Funeral Home in South Philly, with a funeral mass there today.

&nb
sp; It gave Judy an idea.

  Chapter 25

  The Bondi Funeral Home was one of several that lined South Broad Street, the main thoroughfare of the city, and Judy stood in the midst of the growing crowd across the street. Dressed in a black silk scarf, oversized sunglasses, and black raincoat from the spy wardrobe in the office closet, Judy looked more like Boris’s Natasha than a mourner, but at least she didn’t look like the lawyer suing the bereaved. She might not be welcome at the viewing.

  Cigarette smoke blew past her face, and the man standing next to her swilled wine from a bottle inside a bag. Two old women behind her were gossiping about a neighbor, but a couple of students who had stopped on their way to the College of Art were talking about the car bomb. Judy flipped up her raincoat collar. No doubt that the morning’s press coverage had attracted residents, onlookers, and the press to the viewing, which wasn’t set to begin until three o’clock, according to the obit. Judy checked her watch. It was only two, and uniformed cops were already arriving to control the crowd.

  “Back it up, folks,” called out one of the cops, stepping out of a squad car and signaling to a slow-moving municipal truck that followed. He and a cadre of other policemen hurried to unload blue-and-white sawhorses from the tailgate of the truck and set them up in front of the curb to prevent the crowd from spilling onto Broad Street and getting hit by cars. Judy could never understand the South Philly tradition of locating funeral homes on the busiest street in town, ensuring either congested traffic or dead mourners, or both, but there was much about South Philly she didn’t understand. Twirling your spaghetti and attempted murder, for starters.

  “Yo, back it up, sports fans,” the cop said again. The art students edged back, leaving Judy standing next to them at the opening between two sawhorses, giving her a clear view of the entrance to the funeral home. She was hoping to see the Coluzzis, to get a bead on how John and Marco were getting along, and also to learn anything else she could. She didn’t know what could happen, and even attending a viewing was better than calling her parents.

  A murmur ran through the crowd, and Judy followed the heads turning south down the street. From the oohs and aaahs she would have expected the Mummers Parade, but it was an inky line of shiny black limos snaking their way to the funeral home. Judy stood on wobbly tiptoe. It had to be the Coluzzis. Her pulse quickened.

  Gray-jacketed men from the funeral home scurried down the marble steps and took stations at the bottom of the stairs as a limo pulled up, a triple stretch with curved smoked glass more suited to Elvis than a contractor. Its mammoth engine idled at the curb awaiting the others, which pulled up slowly behind it, inadvertently building interest in the crowd. Press cameras flashed, and one of the students next to Judy giggled as she raised a disposable Kodak camera.

  Judy looked over. That could come in handy. “I’ll give you twenty bucks for the camera,” she said to the student. The woman had a cartilage pierce, a nostril pierce, and a lower lip pierce, and Judy, who had considered herself counterculture until this moment, felt very sorry for her.

  “It cost twenty bucks,” the art student retorted, but Judy was reaching into her backpack for her wallet.

  “You can punch a lot of holes with this.” Judy opened her wallet, extracted a fifty, and handed it to her.

  “Whoa,” the student said, and she and her friend left.

  Judy raised the camera just as the doors of the first limo opened and John Coluzzi stepped out, his stocky frame encased in an expensive suit, and reached a hand out to help his mother, wearing a black dress and a shawl like Judy’s, and then his wife, a petite woman in a trim black suit with a black lace doily pinned to the top of her stop-time bouffant hairdo. Judy snapped a picture, and only a half second later another limo arrived. The smaller Marco Coluzzi climbed out with his wife, a corporate version of John’s wife with normal hair and two young boys in Holy Communion suits holding on to each of her manicured hands.

  Judy took another picture, remembering the newspaper feature about who would be king of Coluzzi Construction. You didn’t have to be Italian to know that the son with the sons would make a better successor, since the royal line would be assured. Judy took another photo.

  The third limo pulled up and a group of men and women Judy didn’t recognize got out. She snapped a few photos on the assumption they were named defendants, and then the limos started coming down Broad, fast and furious as string bands. Judy shot all of them, at least in profile, and got lots of photos as mourners arrived in a black river that moved as slowly as tar through the crowd and traffic.

  But as the mourners went inside, she began to feel sidelined, even as she snapped away and finished the entire roll in the camera. The viewing was open to the public, and Judy could go in if she wanted to. It was risky, going into the belly of the beast you were suing blind, but she hadn’t been recognized so far, even by the art students, who had read about the car bomb. And if she got inside, maybe she could overhear something. Judy slipped the camera into her raincoat pocket, ducked through the sawhorses, and hurried across the street.

  Her heart beat faster as she ascended the marble steps to the funeral home, under a gray plastic awning whose scalloped edges flapped in the wind whipping down Broad Street. Mourners filed up the stairs next to her, meeting a bottleneck at the top as people greeted each other, talking and plunging cigarettes into tall ceramic urns filled with sand. Judy waited for the crowd to move, her eyes on the cigarette butts that stuck like a nightmare forest from the sand. She had never been to a viewing before, much less an Italian viewing, and told herself to stay cool and go with the flow. When in Rome and all.

  The crowd edged inside and when it hit the thick red carpet, filed to the left. Judy couldn’t see ahead of the burly man in front of her. A surreptitious scan of the male mourners revealed a collection of rough-hewn faces weathered from outside work and large, hammy hands bearing high school rings. The men looked even less accustomed to their stiff suits than Judy was to hers, and her stomach tensed as she realized that they had to be subcontractors on the Philly Court strip mall and other Coluzzi projects. Unless she missed her guess, they would be very jumpy today, looking to the Coluzzis to protect them. It could be a lawyer’s gold mine. She tried to keep her head down, her ears open, and her eyes attuned to detail. The first detail she noticed was that nobody around her was crying.

  The line flowed slowly into a room on the left, and Judy took it in quickly. It was a huge room filled with folding chairs that faced toward the front, which she couldn’t see for all the people milling around, clapping each other on the back and laughing. The metal folding chairs were covered with slipcovers of ivory plastic, matching the ivory-colored walls of the room, which were flocked with curlicues of gold velveteen. The air was thick with the scent of refrigerated flowers and Shalimar knock-off. Judy tried not to breathe.

  The line edged forward, and she could hear snippets of conversation from the seated areas. “Yo, Tommy, I only see you at wakes and weddings.” “So, Jimmy, you back on the Atkins shit?” “I tol’ him, the Eagles don’t get themselves a new RB, they’re fucked.” “They never shoulda got ridda Reggie.” “She’s a real nice girl, real nice. Goin’ to Villanova inna fall.”

  Judy kept listening, but so far it wasn’t promising. Maybe nobody was going to chat about confessing today. The line shifted forward along the fuzzy wall. It was almost at the front of the room, and Judy peeked up. A gleaming bronze casket with chrome handles sat on a massive dais of roses, freesia, gladiola, and white carnations spray-dyed rainbow colors. To the left of the casket in front of a similar floral backdrop stood a somber John and Marco Coluzzi, stiff as bookends that didn’t match. They didn’t say a word to each other, nor did they stand close, but Judy was suddenly too preoccupied to notice more about their body language. The line of mourners flowed directly to the casket, and the people were kneeling in front on a padded knee rest and making the sign of the cross on their chests, then moving on to speak with the Coluzzi
brothers.

  Judy’s eyes went as wide as her sunglasses. She was in a receiving line! She didn’t want to kneel in front of Coluzzi’s casket. She didn’t even know how to cross herself. If she didn’t get out of the line fast, she’d be shaking hands with the men who were trying to kill her.

  She looked around wildly. There was nowhere to go but the seats on the left and moving there at this point would be dangerously obvious. Nobody in the line was breaking ranks before paying proper respect to the dead. And anybody who had seen The Godfather knew that respect counted in this crowd.

  The line shifted forward two rows, bringing Judy only twenty feet from the front of the room. She didn’t know what to do. She thought fast. Only one excuse was acceptable on this occasion. “Excuse me,” she said loudly. “Does anybody know where the ladies’ room is?”

  An older woman two couples up turned around and pointed right with a slim finger. “Other side of the hall,” she said sympathetically, and Judy nodded.

  But the only exits were back the way she came, or to the right of the casket. Only one way to go. If Judy acted suspicious, the Coluzzis would suspect her. She held her stomach as if she’d had a sudden attack of dysentery and hurried to the front of the room, took a quick right at the red gladiolus, and looked for signs to the ladies’ room.

  LOUNGE, read one softly lighted sign, and she followed the euphemism to the ladies’ room. But when she opened the door, it wasn’t a bathroom at all but a large, gold-flecked room ringed with covered folding chairs, supplied with prominent boxes of Kleenex, and occupied completely by crying women. One group sat in one corner weeping theatrically and clutching soggy tissues, and the other sat in the other corner sobbing even louder. Judy looked from one to the other and wondered fleetingly if it was an Italian Battle of the Bands.