A Killer's Alibi (Philadelphia Legal)

by William L. Myers Jr.

  “Since then,” she repeats, nodding. She takes a sip of her tea, and they sit quietly for a while.

  “What happened?” he asks.

  “You mean, what made me turn from such a hard worker to a girl who jet-sets from one party to another?” She takes another sip of tea. “I’ve watched you playing with your daughter,” she says. “It’s obvious that you love her very much.”

  “More than anything in the world.”

  She turns to face him squarely. “Tell me, when your daughter talks to you, do you hear her?”

  “Hear her?”

  “Do you see her, Mick? Do you truly see your daughter?”

  “Strange questions.”

  She smiles. “My father stopped hearing me, seeing me, a long time ago.”

  “So that’s it? The partying, the waste of talent—you’re just getting back at Daddy?”

  His words seem to slap her, and her eyes fill with fury. She takes a deep, calming breath.

  “There’s a story in my family that my father killed his first man when he was twelve years old. His own father, and some of his men, marched my dad into a farm field, where they’d brought another man and put him on his knees. My grandfather told my father the man had wronged our family in some way. Then he gave my father a gun and told him to shoot. And he fired, shot the man dead.”

  He’s not sure what to say.

  “Some of the old guard say that’s the day Jimmy Nunzio lost his soul.” She waits a beat. Then: “But what if he hadn’t?”

  “Lost his soul?”

  “Hadn’t shot the man. I think most twelve-year-old boys wouldn’t blow someone’s brains out just because their father put a gun in their hand.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Killing that man didn’t make my father a killer. He was a killer to begin with.” She turns away from him, stares through the railing. “You can’t force someone to be something they’re not. And it’s not fair to try.”

  “Christina.”

  Mick recognizes the voice.

  “You need to come inside,” Rachel says, moving up to them. “You’re too exposed.”

  “There’s no moon, Mother. It’s pitch-black,” Christina says. “Even with the candle, no one out there could see us.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  Christina stands and looks down at him. “It’s been nice talking with you, Mick. Please remember what I said about your daughter.”

  He watches her turn away, walk with her mother across the porch, and disappear inside.

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” Angelo tells Sal. They’ve been sitting in the vans for an hour, and he needs to stretch. He also needs to take a dump. His old man treated him and the other lieutenants to a big pasta dinner at Bamonte’s, and he hasn’t relieved himself since. He knows he should’ve used the toilet back at that motel.

  He walks into the woods, far enough so he can’t be seen by anyone in the vans, and drops his drawers. He squats, leaning against a tree. When he’s done, he pulls out a handkerchief and wipes himself.

  Crazy to think that human beings did this kind of thing for thousands of years, before someone dreamed up indoor plumbing.

  On the way back to the vans, he glances at his watch. Three o’clock. Time to move in. When he gets back, he finds his door locked. He doesn’t remember locking it, but maybe he did, or maybe Sal locked it after he left. Sal is asleep, so he knocks on the glass, first lightly.

  “Come on, wake up.”

  But Sal doesn’t wake up. He knocks harder.

  Pissed, he looks through the front passenger window into the back of the van, and finds everyone else is asleep, too.

  “The fuck?” he says, pounding on the side door. But nobody stirs. He looks at Sal again and notices for the first time that Sal’s eyes are slightly open.

  “Shit.” He runs to the second van and finds the same thing. Everyone is unconscious, some of them with their eyes closed, some with eyes partially closed, and a few with their eyes wide open.

  Dead.

  He looks around in a panic, unsure which way to move. It’s then that he notices the sickly sweet smell. They’ve been gassed.

  It’s a setup.

  He reaches for his cell phone but remembers it’s in the van. He left his pistol in the glove compartment, too. “Motherfu—”

  In the distance, he sees headlights. He darts for the forest, pushing his way through the undergrowth, far enough away that he can hide but close enough that he can still see what’s going on with the vans. After a moment, three big rigs pull ahead of the vans and stop. Men jump out of the trucks and make their way back to the vans. One of them is carrying some kind of device in his hand: a white plastic box with buttons and an antenna. The man moves up to the first van and does something with the box. All the doors to the van open.

  He sees the man notice the empty front passenger seat—his seat—and hears the man shout at the row of semitrucks. A minute later, Giacobetti is with him, talking into a cell phone. The giant hangs up, shouts for some soldiers to join him by the van. At the same time, a man climbs into the driver’s side of the first van, pushing Sal’s body into the empty seat. The van starts, and the solider drives it up a ramp and into the back of one of the semitrailers.

  Johnny Giacobetti turns toward the forest and peers through the trees. He pulls his gun and begins running in Angelo’s direction.

  Angelo leaps from his crouched position and races toward the lodge. He was a sprinter in high school and is still in great shape. He knows he can outrun Giacobetti and his men. He’ll find a way into the lodge, find Nunzio’s wife and daughter, and kill them. He doesn’t have a gun, but he has his knife, a twin to the one his brother, Tony, always carried with him—the one Nunzio killed him with.

  Mick is by the lake, rerunning his conversation with Christina Nunzio in his head. Still feeling wide awake, he’s decided to walk the grounds. The beach curves the whole way around the lake, and he’s on the far side now, standing in a fifty-yard clearing between the water and the trees. He looks back at the rear of the lodge. All the lights in the guest rooms are out, save for a few on the second floor. He wonders whether it’s Christina who’s still awake, or Rachel. Maybe it’s the curious old man, Uncle Ham.

  Without knowing why, his internal alarm goes off. A split second later, his mind registers the sound of labored breathing and heavy feet pounding on the grass, heading straight for him. He turns toward the trees to see the man coming at him, teeth bared, eyes blazing with rage.

  “You’re the lawyer!”

  It takes Mick a moment to recognize Angelo Valiante in the dim light, to see the knife in Angelo’s hand, to grasp that there’s no time to react, to realize he’s a dead man.

  Then, in an instant, Angelo is gone in a blur of teeth and fur, jumped on and tackled by both of Giacobetti’s beasts. The young gang leader hits the ground so fast it knocks the wind out of him, and he can’t even scream.

  Seconds later, Giacobetti bursts from the trees, half a dozen men behind him. “Settle! Settle!” he orders the dogs, who instantly lie down, one atop Valiante and one next to him.

  Giacobetti clears the dogs away and roughly lifts Angelo to his feet.

  “What the hell!” Mick shouts.

  “Quiet,” Giacobetti answers, his voice thick with menace. “You’ll wake the guests.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  Giacobetti pulls a Taser from his coat pocket. “Don’t make me put you down.”

  The giant drags Angelo Valiante around the lake toward the lodge, his men and dogs and Mick following behind. When they get to the side of the lake closest to the lodge, Rachel Nunzio approaches them.

  “Are you all right?” she asks.

  “This is crazy. I’m taking my daughter, and we’re getting the hell out of here.”

  Two of the soldiers move on him, but Rachel calls them off.

  “It’s okay,” she says. “He can leave. We can all leave. The war’s over.
”

  He looks at Rachel. “This was the war? One guy?” But he knows even as the words leave his mouth that it wasn’t only Angelo. “Where are the rest of his men? What did you do to them?”

  “Go back to your room, counselor. Pack up your things, and take your daughter to the porch. There’ll be a car waiting for you.”

  He realizes he doesn’t need Jimmy Nunzio’s wife to tell him what happened to the rest of Valiante’s men. “How many?” he asks. “How many were there?”

  She takes a step toward him, her eyes black as coal. “Enough to kill us all, Mr. McFarland. If we hadn’t stopped them.”

  When Angelo regains consciousness, he finds himself on his knees, his hands secured behind his back. He’s on a concrete floor in a room of unpainted cinder block. There are no windows, and the wood beams and plumbing overhead tell him he’s in the lodge’s basement.

  “Welcome back.” A woman’s voice. She approaches from a steel door, now open. Johnny Giacobetti, behind her, closes it.

  “We chloroformed you,” she says simply. “Didn’t want to take a chance you’d wake our guests. We’ve gone to great pains to make their stay . . . unremarkable.”

  He struggles against the cuffs, the plastic digging into the skin on his wrists.

  “I’m gonna kill you,” he says. “I swear to God—”

  “I think you overestimate your position.”

  “My father—”

  “The poor man. I feel terribly for him. Antonio’s death hit him so hard, I’m afraid he couldn’t bear it. He took his own life.” She looks at her watch. “In about ten minutes.”

  He screams, fights the cuffs again. He tries to get to his feet, but the giant, now behind him, presses on his shoulders, holds him down. He lowers his head, slumps.

  “Any last words?” she asks as Johnny G. hands her a pistol.

  Half choking, half crying, he says, “Fuck you, bitch.”

  She pulls the trigger.

  24

  TUESDAY, MAY 28

  Mick glances at the clock in the dashboard of his E350. It’s 10:00 a.m. He’s on the way to the prison to confront Nunzio. The ordeal that began with his and Gabby’s abduction—and that’s what it was—and ended with him watching Angelo Valiante being dragged away was among the most unsettling of his life. He wants answers. He would have paid a visit yesterday, but he wanted to spend the day at home, with his family. Piper, who returned from Georgia late Sunday evening, was a basket case. It took all his energy to keep her from calling the police on Nunzio.

  Part of the difficulty, he realizes, is that he wasn’t persuaded himself that not reporting Nunzio was the best course of action. Attorney-client privilege only extends so far. Certainly, it doesn’t obligate him to shield Nunzio from what might be the ongoing kidnapping of Angelo Valiante. On the other hand, he’s almost certain the young mobster is dead. The press is reporting that Angelo’s father, Frank, was found dead of a supposedly self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. The police want to question Angelo and Frank’s other lieutenants and soldiers, but they can’t be found—any of them. Mick believes that, like Angelo, the rest of Frank Valiante’s army was at the lodge Sunday night or early Monday morning. And that’s the strangest part of it. The two mob armies were in position to fight. But there was no fight. Or, more accurately, there was, but only Angelo showed up for it. What happened to the rest of Valiante’s men? That’s one question. The other thing troubling him is why Nunzio would have invited a celebrity writer and a movie producer to the lodge.

  He parks the car, enters the prison, and makes his way through the tedious security procedures. The guard escorts him to the little room with the cinder-block walls and gray steel table and chairs.

  “You son of a bitch.” He’s on his feet as soon as the door is closed behind Nunzio.

  “You didn’t like the salmon?”

  “This is no joke.”

  The crime lord sits, waves his hand. “Okay, bring it on. Unload on me.” He screws off the lid of a water bottle and takes a long swallow.

  “You put my daughter in danger. You put me at risk, and if my wife had been home, you would have endangered her, too.”

  “You mean to say that I placed your family into the same situation as I placed my own—”

  “Let’s get to that. You hear Valiante is on the move against you for killing his son, so you bring your own wife and daughter and your brother’s whole family to the same location. What were you thinking?”

  Nunzio sighs, as if he must explain a simple concept to a child.

  “Sun Tzu. When the enemy is at rest, make him move. Appear at places to which he must hasten.”

  Mick stares.

  “If you know your enemy is going to attack you,” Nunzio continues, “find a way to control where he attacks you. Set up a target he cannot resist.”

  “We were bait? My daughter, your own daughter and wife? My God, how low—”

  “Enough!” Nunzio slams his palm on the table.

  Startled, Mick pauses. Then he leans back. He is tired—and more than a little afraid—but he has to know the answers to the rest of his questions.

  “The writer, Alecia Silver. The movie guy, Malcolm Crowe. Why have them there?”

  Nunzio smiles. “You ever try to prove a negative, Mick?”

  “A negative?”

  “Like when the cops come to me and say, ‘Hey, Mr. Nunzio. Frank Valiante’s son and all of his men disappeared this weekend. We think you had something to do with it. Okay, maybe not you, because you’re a guest of the state right now, but your men. Did your men make Valiante’s guys disappear? No? Prove it.’ And I say, ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Federal Agent, I can’t prove what my men were doing this weekend. I wasn’t with them. But you know who was? My family and my defense lawyer. You say you don’t believe them because they’re biased? How about a famous writer and an even more famous movie producer? They were also with my men—all of my men—this weekend, in the Poconos.’”

  “You had them there to be witnesses,” Mick says. “To alibi your men.”

  Nunzio takes another drink of water, his cold black eyes locked on Mick’s.

  Mick thinks back to the crime for which Nunzio was originally arrested, suddenly seeing it from another vantage point. How spontaneous was Nunzio’s murder of Christina’s lover? Did Nunzio really race for his car, seemingly in a panic about his daughter, as the security guard portrayed it? It’s hard to believe.

  “That night, at the warehouse—”

  Nunzio puts up his hand. “Not now.”

  He sighs. “What happened to Valiante’s men?”

  Nunzio shrugs. “It’s dark in those mountains. Not like the city with all the streetlights and lights from buildings and cars and movie marquees. Plus, I’m told there was cloud cover. Maybe they lost their way and drove into a lake. There are more than a few up there.”

  Mick feels deflated. With the exception of the Hanson case, he’s never felt so conflicted about his involvement in a case. He is truly in bed with the devil.

  As if reading his mind, Nunzio says, “Why the frown, Mick? You’ve represented guys like me before.”

  “Have I, Jimmy? Are there other guys like you?”

  Nunzio smiles. “Now you’re making me blush.”

  It’s almost midnight when they pull onto the small side street off Route 52 in Kennett Square. Directly to the north is the Chester County Prison. About a mile south and west is Longwood Gardens.

  “Middle of nowhere,” Mick says from the passenger seat of Tommy’s F-150.

  “Feels like it, but not really,” Tommy says.

  “I don’t like it. Too much cloak-and-dagger.”

  “You want to talk to someone willing to give you the lowdown on Nunzio, this is what you’re going to get.”

  The ordeal in the Poconos was making him more determined than ever to learn everything he could about James Frances Xavier Nunzio. He went back to Tommy about it and was happy to learn that his brother had been work
ing on it all along. He’d already found someone with inside information who was willing to talk. When Mick asked Tommy how he persuaded the guy to open up, his brother said, “He owes me a favor. A huge favor.”

  Mick long ago accepted that Tommy spent a good part of his life in an underworld where favors and secrets were legal and illegal tender, traded on the full faith and credit of ex-cons, crooked cops, private investigators, and the more-than-occasional upstanding white-collar citizen caught doing less-than-upstanding things. In the case of Sid Haltzman, a retired reporter for the Philly Inquirer, the favor Tommy had bestowed involved rescuing Haltzman’s young niece from an age-old profession. Tommy was short on the details, but from what he did share, Mick gathered that bones were broken in the process.

  “We’re here,” Tommy says as they pull into a mud-rut driveway.

  He narrows his eyes, looking for signs of life. All he sees is a beat-up old Airstream trailer sitting on cinder blocks at the end of the driveway.

  “You’re kidding me. This guy lives here?”

  “No one lives here. His friend said he could use the place for a few hours.”

  They get out of the truck and walk up to the trailer. A pale-yellow light glows dimly behind a faded curtain. He stands back as Tommy knocks on the door. After a minute, it’s opened slowly by a tall old man with a balding head and silver-framed glasses. He waves them inside.

  The space is small and cramped. On the left wall is a cabinet with a sink and black Formica top. Beyond it, at the end of the trailer, is a fold-up table flanked by bench seats topped with rust-colored upholstery. The other end of the trailer holds the bedroom.

  Sid leads them to the table, and they all sit.

  “Isn’t this a little over the top?” Mick says.

  “You represent the man,” the reporter says. “You tell me. Is there such a thing as ‘too safe’ when it comes to Jimmy Nutzo?”

  “Good point,” he says, glancing at Tommy.

  “Let’s go over the ground rules,” Sid says. “First, whatever I tell you is only to be used for background information. You’re not going public with any of it. Agreed?”