A Killer's Alibi (Philadelphia Legal)

by William L. Myers Jr.

  “I’m here to see the boss,” he tells her as Johnny Giacobetti strides into the reception area.

  “The boss is in prison. Did you forget?”

  “I think she’s right here,” he answers.

  The giant’s eyes open as wide as those of the young woman sitting at the desk.

  Giacobetti stares at him for a long moment, then shakes his head and tells Mick to wait. Five minutes later, Johnny G. returns. He searches Mick, then leads him down the hallway. When Mick enters Nunzio’s office, he finds Uncle Ham sitting in one of the guest chairs in front of the desk. Behind the desk sits Rachel Nunzio.

  “Sit,” Giacobetti says.

  He lowers himself onto the seat, and Rachel Nunzio, pen in hand, looks up from a document on her desk.

  “Give me a minute,” she says. “I have to finish up a contract. You know, the problem with opioids is that the product actually reduces the client base—at least that’s the case with heroin and fentanyl. Marijuana users, on the other hand, seem to be multiplying like rabbits, and they stick around forever. Medical marijuana’s already being legalized everywhere and is vastly profitable. I’m told that in another decade or so, the law will yawn at recreational marijuana, too. Did you know that not an hour from this office there’s a perfect microclimate for cannabis? We found out not too long ago, and we’re working with some local businessmen to exploit those growing conditions. We can’t let the state find out about our involvement, of course. Or let the regulators learn about Mr. Stumpf’s colorful past.”

  She pauses and smiles. Then she looks back down at the papers and pretends to track the language with her pen, which, he notices, she doesn’t use to make any changes. She turns the pages one by one, then looks up at him.

  “I’m told you came here to see the boss. So, how can I help you?”

  He leans forward. “You can get me the boss. At least, the interim boss for the next eighteen to twenty-four months.”

  Rachel Nunzio’s face tightens, and he sees her glance at the old man to his left. Before she can think of how to answer him, a hidden doorway in the wood paneling behind her opens, and Christina Nunzio enters the room. Without words, Rachel rises and steps away.

  Christina takes the throne. She stares at Mick, her face unreadable.

  “So . . .”

  “The gun was yours,” he says. “The warehouse—it was to be your bat mitzvah.”

  Uncle Ham sits up straight. “Ah, you remembered.” He turns to Christina. “I told him about your father’s bar mitzvah.”

  “I hate it when you call it that,” says Rachel, now standing behind Christina.

  “Loose lips, Uncle Ham,” Christina says in a mock-scolding tone.

  The old man shrugs, but Christina apparently sees something in his eyes. “My uncle’s not happy about this turn of events, Mick. Nor is my mother.” She looks from one to the other and tells them, “There’s nothing to worry about; we have leverage against Mr. McFarland. Speaking of which . . .” She reaches beneath the desk and lifts out a white box with a pink ribbon, sets it on the desk. “I was going to mail this to Gabby. But since you’re here, you can deliver it personally. It’s a soccer ball. But it’s not just any ball. It’s the second ball Carli Lloyd kicked through the net against Japan to win the 2012 Olympic gold medal. Signed.”

  “I’ll be damned if I’ll give my daughter this ball, or anything else from you. And don’t you dare try to come near her.”

  Christina shrugs. “I actually think the world of Gabby. She’s going to grow up to be someone special. I saw it in her eyes.”

  “Stop talking about my daughter,” he says through clenched jaws.

  She looks at him for a long moment.

  “All right, Mick. Let’s get to it. Yes, the gun was mine, given to me by my mother when I turned eighteen. My father took it from me in the warehouse, after—”

  “You were supposed to use the gun to kill Antonio.”

  “Right again. My father’s plan—”

  “Bullshit.” His voice is flat.

  She sits back and stares, her eyes cold.

  “Fine,” she says. “Tell me what you think happened at the warehouse that night.”

  Jimmy Nunzio sits behind his desk and smiles. The transportation side of the business is booming. In the past six months, he and Uncle Ham have opened six new dark hubs in Europe, offering regional air transport, eighteen-wheelers, and smaller trucks. Even at HML, the legitimate side of the business, profits are up. The smaller, traditional side of the family business—gambling, loan-sharking, and narcotics—is also flourishing. With his don spending his days drooling into a cup, James Nunzio is the de facto head of the family, the other underbosses—with various degrees of resentment—taking direction from him. The only fly in the ointment is Frank Valiante’s incursion into his territory in an attempt to slice off a big part of the opioid trade. But Nunzio has been moving out of the opioid business anyway—it’s starting to kill enough people that, sooner or later, the government’s going to come down hard on the pushers. In another month or so, he’ll reach out to Frank’s boss and offer to strike a deal whereby Frank and his sons move the product, and he gets a cut. That’ll leave him more time to focus on the burgeoning medical-marijuana business, which he’s going to get into in a big way, starting with his partnership with the locals in the Lehigh Valley.

  He looks at his watch. It’s close to 9:30. He reaches for his cell phone to tell Johnny he can go home, but the burner rings as he lifts it. He recognizes the number of the burner on the other end.

  “Hey.” He tries to sound upbeat. They’ve been fighting so much lately. Practically anything he says sets her off.

  “Daddy, I need you to pay attention to what I’m going to say. I’m at the Valiantes’ warehouse, with Tony, and—”

  He shoots out of his seat. “What?”

  “Just listen! I’m tired of pretending. Tired of acting like I’m some kind of brainless party girl. I’m part of our family, and it’s time you brought me into the business.”

  “No! That’s not who you are—”

  “Yes, it is! I’m just like you. Just like Uncle Ham. I belong in the family, and tonight I’m going to prove it to you.”

  His heart is pounding in his chest.

  “What are you planning?”

  “Tony’s here. So are his bodyguards, or what’s left of them.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I poisoned them. They’re dead. Tony’s tied up, and I’m going to do for you what you did for your father. Prove myself the same way. Tonight’s my bat mitzvah, and you’re invited.”

  “Christina!”

  “What’s the matter?” It’s Johnny G., in the doorway.

  “Come on!” He pushes the giant out of the way and races down the hall to the emergency stairs. He’s out of breath by the time he and Giacobetti reach the Escalade. He orders Johnny to give him the keys, and he climbs into the driver’s seat as his enforcer takes shotgun. He puts the pedal to the floor. They arrive at the warehouse in minutes. He shuts off the lights as they make the turnoff to the service road, not sure what he’ll find and not wanting to alert anyone inside of their arrival.

  “I’ll go around back; you count to twenty and bust in the front.”

  He runs to the rear of the building, climbs onto the loading dock, and enters through an unlocked back door. Pulling his Glock, he quietly makes his way through the darkened rear of the building, navigating through the shelves of white powder standing like canyon walls from floor to ceiling. He sees Christina standing by a couch in the front of the space. Antonio Valiante is on the floor, his hands zip-tied behind him, his ankles bound as well. He’s shaking his head like he’s groggy and just coming to.

  Johnny bursts through the front door. This startles Christina. It only takes her a second to put her hand on the Sig Sauer tucked in her waistband, but Johnny’s on top of her before she can get it. He grabs the gun and pushes her down onto the couch.

  Tony�
�s fully awake now, and cursing.

  “Shut him up,” Nunzio tells Johnny G., who pulls a handkerchief out of his pocket and uses it as a gag.

  He holds out his hand and has Giacobetti give him Christina’s gun, which he tucks into the back of his pants. “Here,” he says to Johnny, handing him his own gun, “take this.”

  He takes a deep breath, and it’s then that he notices the bodies on the floor. He turns to Christina. “What the hell have you done?”

  “I told you, I poisoned them. I put up with their leers and their snide remarks for months. And then, tonight, I cooked them a big pasta dinner, and they died. Tony’s food had something else in it—something that would knock him out but not kill him.”

  He paces the floor, literally pulling at his hair, trying to process what he’s seeing. He stops and tells Johnny, “There’re vans in back. Load the bodies into one of them.”

  He looks down at Valiante, who’s raging through the gag.

  “You have no idea what you’ve done,” Nunzio tells his daughter, who shouts back at him.

  Johnny finishes loading the bodies and approaches him, waiting for orders.

  “Drive the van to one of our dark hubs, park it with the other vans. Call Uncle Ham, tell him what’s up. He’ll take care of the rest.”

  “Should I come back here then?”

  “No. I’ll take care of this myself.”

  Johnny leaves, and Nunzio orders Christina to sit on the couch and wait for him. Then he walks out the back and calls Frank Valiante.

  “I have your boy,” he says when Frank answers. “Tony.”

  Valiante goes crazy, but after a while, he settles down and asks him what he wants.

  “I want to make a deal,” he answers. “You want the opioid business, it’s yours, starting now. You run it and give me a cut, twenty percent. That’s part one. Part two is you and I both agree that our kids are off-limits. I’ll let Tony go. You promise not to harm my daughter.”

  Frank Valiante accepts immediately, and they hang up. He realizes that he’s walked around the building, so he reenters the warehouse through the front door. And there she is, standing over Antonio Valiante with a knife in her hand. She has removed Valiante’s gag, and he’s raging at the top of his lungs.

  “See me!” she screams. Then she leans down, and saws through Valiante’s throat.

  Blood sprays everywhere.

  “No. No!” But he’s too late.

  Valiante’s body slumps, and his blood jets ten feet into the air, coating Christina from waist to forehead.

  That’s when he notices the lights. He races to the door, peers through the space between it and the doorjamb, spotting the patrol car slowly making its way up the service road. His head clears in an instant, and he races to Christina.

  “It’s the cops.” He gently pulls the knife from her hand and cuts the zip cuffs off Valiante’s wrists and ankles.

  Christina stares at him, panic growing in her eyes.

  Nunzio thinks for a nanosecond. “Romeo and Juliet!”

  She slides onto the floor and pulls Antonio on top of her, a ready explanation for the blood covering her. He gets onto his knees, hugs them both, covering himself in Valiante’s blood. He wipes the knife handle, clearing it of Christina’s prints. Then he looks into her eyes, and in that instant, they both know he’s going to take the fall.

  “You hesitated when Johnny broke down the door. You want to be a leader in this family? Never hesitate.”

  He watches as her eyes well up. She understands what he’s just told her. He sees her for who she is now, and he accepts her.

  He slowly backs into the shadows.

  The police rush in, guns drawn.

  43

  FRIDAY, JULY 18

  Having come directly home from his audience with Christina Nunzio, Mick sits with Piper on the patio as he tells the tale. It’s an unusually beautiful day in July. The sky is bright blue, the temperature in the low eighties, humidity at 10 percent. Inside, however, Mick’s mind is mired in darkness.

  “She asked me what I thought went down at the warehouse, and I laid it out for her. When I finished, she told me I got some of the details wrong but got the gist of it right. She asked me how I figured it out; she said the gun couldn’t have been all there was to it. I told her she was right. The gun was just the hook that pulled down the veil. After it was gone, I could see clearly. I realized that her work leading the Greek system at Penn wasn’t simply her volunteering, helping out, or being a party girl; it was her taking over everything she touched. Same thing with the soccer team in college. Captain Christina. I also figured out that when her cheating college boyfriend was beaten half to death, it wasn’t Jimmy who had it done, but Christina. What her roommates thought was her yelling at Jimmy for the assault was actually Jimmy yelling at her. I told her that her history was probably littered with many more markers of what she was that I didn’t know about.”

  Piper waits as he stares across their backyard for a few minutes, then looks back at her.

  “The worst part was when I asked her what happened to Valiante’s men. The ones who disappeared. I figured they came to the lodge with Angelo.”

  He shares what Christina told him about the vans and the poison gas. When he’s finished, he sees horror on Piper’s face.

  “She killed sixty men?”

  He nods.

  “And then she executed Valiante himself. She laid it out for me like she was explaining how she’d done her laundry. It meant nothing to her.”

  In fact, Christina had sat back and smiled, her face changing before his eyes. All the softness drained out of her skin, all the youth. Her eyes grew black as coal. He knew it had to be his imagination, but it seemed as if she transformed from a beautiful young woman into something very, very old and evil.

  He shares some more details of his meeting with Christina Nunzio, and Piper listens patiently, letting him vent. When he’s finished, she leaves him alone; she knows him well enough to understand that’s what he needs.

  He putters around the garage for an hour, then goes to his home office, shuffles some papers, makes some calls. The hours drag on, and at some point, Piper pulls him from his thoughts with a call to dinner. They eat quietly. Gabby notices and is quiet, too, upset. He can tell. He forces himself to smile, tell a joke, but she isn’t buying it. He sinks back into himself.

  The evening passes slowly, but it passes, and eventually Gabby goes to bed, and then Piper, and Mick is left alone.

  He sits behind his desk, nursing his scotch. The only light in the room comes from the green banker’s light on the desk. He hears the grandfather clock in the hallway chime half past midnight, and he takes it as a signal to empty his glass and pour another.

  His mind takes him to what Christina Nunzio said when he asked her why her father chose him to be his trial lawyer. She said it was because he was smart and slick and had a reputation for doing anything necessary to win.

  “Then why didn’t he tell me the truth about you and what really happened?”

  “Because he was shielding me, protecting me. As a father. And that’s the other reason he hired you.”

  He tilted his head. “You’re blind. You have a great big daughter-shaped splinter in your eye. Just like he had.”

  “He was counting on me not being able to see you.”

  “It worked. You looked at me and saw Gabby. Isn’t that true?”

  It is.

  “That day I was at your house . . . you told me that your father played you.”

  “Misdirection. That was my mother’s idea—to call you to the house and have me feed you that line to reinforce that it was all my father’s doing.”

  He nods. “I thought your father was a monster who had fed you to the wolves. Twice.”

  But you were the monster all along.

  He takes another sip of the scotch, and his mind drifts back to the morning after the murder, when he was in the kitchen with Piper and Gabby and he saw the video repla
y of Jimmy Nunzio’s perp-walk from the police car to the station. The crime lord had an odd look on his face. Mick couldn’t place it then, but now he realizes what it was: Jimmy Nunzio had finally seen his daughter, and it haunted him.

  For a long time, he sits motionless. Then he leans forward and lifts the picture of Gabby off his desk. It’s the photo of her in her soccer uniform, taken the year before. He stares at it and remembers how angry he was when Gabby was accused of tripping another girl on the soccer field. Then he recalls Christina telling him that she saw something special in Gabby, and it makes him shudder.

  He brings the photo closer to his face, his heart breaking as he studies his daughter in her soccer uniform at nine years old, her smiling face open, her eyes wide with wonder and joy. A fat tear slides down the side of his face and splashes onto the glass. More follow, until Jimmy Nunzio is weeping openly.

  “Christina.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  As with all my works, this book was a team effort. I have a lot of people to thank, starting with my wife, Lisa Chalmers, whose support, motivation, and advice are the fuel that move me forward in all things, including my writing. Thanks also to my early readers—Jill Reiff, Alan Sandman, Ellie Moffat, and Courtney Johnson—I am indebted to you for your suggestions and feedback.

  Special thanks to Greg Pagano, a great Philadelphia criminal-defense attorney, for your advice and help with issues of criminal procedure. Thank you, too, for agreeing to let me use your last name for one of the characters. The Pagano in this book is tough like you, though not as smart.

  My continuing gratitude goes to my editor, Ed Stackler. You return each of my manuscripts with more red marks than all my elementary, middle school, and high school teachers combined. I pull out my hair, but always end up thanking you in the end.

  Cynthia Manson, my agent and mentor, thank you for guiding me through the wilderness. This is quite an adventure.

  Finally, thank you, Gracie Doyle and your team at Thomas & Mercer. Writing a book is like building a race car: without someone great to drive it, it goes nowhere. So thank you, Jeffrey Belle, Mikyla Bruder, Galen Maynard, Clint Singley, Sarah Shaw, Dennelle Catlett, Ashley Vanicek, Gabrielle Guarnero, Laura Constantino, and Laura Barrett.