She took one look at me sitting on the couch with a can of beer in my hands, staring at the television with bloodshot eyes, and she said: “I want a trial separation.”
At first I thought she was kidding. So I answered back with some gallows humor of my own: “Well, honey, it looks like that’s exactly what you’re going to get. There’s going to be a trial, and afterwards you and I are going to separate for seven to ten years.”
“I’m not kidding.” I looked up from the television to see if she was smiling. From the moment our eyes met, I could tell she was serious.
I dropped the beer on the floor. There was only a sip or two left in the can so it didn’t make a mess. I tried to turn off the television set so we could talk. But the remote had vanished. Remotes have a way of doing that. I looked under the seat cushion. Under the couch. Under Gizmo, who was fast asleep next to me. I got up from the couch and turned off the television the old-fashioned way. When I turned to face her, Caitlin was still standing in the same spot with the same serious look.
“You’re joking, right?”
“Do I look like I’m joking?”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why do you want a separation?”
“Now you’re the one who’s got to be joking.”
“No, I’m serious. Why do you want a separation? Why now of all times? I told you I’d stop messing around and I did. I haven’t even left the apartment for weeks. Do you think I’m having an affair with Mrs. Morgenstern?”
Mrs. Morgenstern was our ninety-six-year-old neighbor. The only attractive thing about her was that she was living in one of the last fully rent-controlled apartments in New York. She was paying two hundred and fifty dollars a month for a three-bedroom apartment in Manhattan with a market value of five thousand. Which made her as rare as a bird-of-paradise with a nest in Central Park.
“It’s not just the other women,” she said.
“There was one other woman, Caitlin. How many times do I have to tell you that?”
“Don’t play me for a fool, Joey. If there’s one woman I know about, there’s got to be others. Women who sleep with married men are like cockroaches. For every one you see, there must be a million hiding in the cupboard.”
“There was only one, I swear.”
“To tell you the truth, it doesn’t even matter at this point.”
“Well, if it isn’t about the other women … I mean woman, what is it?”
“Joey, I don’t even feel like I know you anymore.”
“You don’t know me? We’ve known each other since we were in college. We were Romeo and Juliet, for heaven’s sake. We were twenty-one years old when we met. We’ve grown up together. We’ve had a child together.” I lowered my voice. “Where is she, by the way? I don’t want her to hear this conversation.”
“She went to a friend’s house. I didn’t want her to hear it either. You were so busy with your beer and your television show, you didn’t even notice her leave. So don’t try to tell me what a loving father you are because I’m not in the mood to hear it.”
“Caitlin, you can’t leave me now. Not when I’m about to go on trial. Not when I’m at the lowest point of life. You can’t leave me here alone.”
“I’m not going to leave you here alone.”
“Good.”
“I want you to pack your things and get out.”
“Where am I supposed to go?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care. Go live with your parents in Gladwyne.”
“I’m not allowed to leave New York.”
I was telling the truth. It was okay for me to leave Ohio after the robbery because the cops in Columbus never booked me. Now that I’d been arraigned in New York, staying in town was a condition of my release. If I went to Gladwyne, I’d go straight to jail. My father was so mad at me, he’d be the one to drop the dime.
Caitlin stood firm and silent. She said nothing. But the expression on her face still said, “Get out.” So I came up with a strategy that had often worked in our marital arguments before: I started to cry.
Maybe it was because I was an actor and, as the saying goes, I wore my heart on my sleeve. I couldn’t argue with Caitlin for five minutes before I started to cry. Not just arguments with Caitlin. I’ve cried in arguments with my mother, my father, my sister, even my male friends. I used to cry in school, where it was mortifying for a kid to cry—even a girl. I’m not just talking about grade school. I’m talking about grad school! I cried in an argument with the butcher at a grocery store because he overcharged me for a leg of lamb. I’m not faking it. The tears are real. I’m just lachrymose. What can I say?
Crying always made me feel like a pathetic weakling. But it usually got me what I wanted. (The butcher wound up giving me a discount on the lamb.) This ability, if you want to call it that, came in mighty handy as an actor. Even in rehearsal, I could manufacture tears at the drop of a hat. When I did it in performance, I often overheard audience members turn to each other and say, “What an actor!” One time I glanced down at the audience through my tears and saw that everyone in the front row was crying, too.
Caitlin and I had been married twenty years at this point, and it’d been a long time since my tears had moved her. “Crying isn’t going to help you this time, Joey.”
“I don’t understand why you’re doing this to me now,” I wailed. “When I need you the most.”
“I already told you. I don’t even know who you are anymore. I can’t go on living with a stranger in my house. I can’t let Bianca live with a stranger.”
“I’m not a stranger.”
“Yes, you are. I’m not talking about your girlfriend now, Joey. Or your girlfriends, whatever the case may be. I’ve forgotten about that. Well, I haven’t forgotten, but that’s not what this is about. Joey, you were arrested for armed robbery? That’s not the man I married.”
I had no response for this. So I just kept sniveling and wiping my nose with the back of my hand.
“The guy I married was such a beautiful boy. With curly hair and blue eyes. You were so romantic. So funny and charming. You wouldn’t hurt a flea. And you were so sensitive. You know, Joey, sometimes I can’t even blame these women for jumping into bed with you. I’ve been there myself. I know what you’re like.”
I had to file that away as the most unusual thing a husband ever heard from his wife.
“Until I met you,” she went on, “nobody had ever really listened to me. Even onstage, I could tell you were hearing every word I was saying. I could see it in those eyes of yours. I don’t know if the audience could see it, but I sure could. We connected in a way I’ve never connected with another human being before. It didn’t matter if we were onstage or off, I always knew you could hear me. And I could always tell what was in your heart.”
In the middle of my mewling and blubbering, I smiled for a moment when Caitlin complimented my acting. Actors love compliments more than life itself. If an actor was about to be guillotined and the executioner paused for a moment to say, “By the way, I loved you in Tartuffe,” he would die happy.
“But now look at you,” she said in a different tone. “You don’t listen. You don’t talk. You won’t tell me what happened in Columbus. My God, Joey, how could you do this? How could someone even accuse you of such a thing? How could you come up with the idea of stealing from people at gunpoint? I didn’t even know you owned a gun. And stealing from other actors, no less? Stealing from our own people. How could you do that?”
She was starting to cry now, and this only made my own crying worse.
“It wasn’t my idea,” I protested.
“Then whose idea was it?”
“I can’t tell you. I just can’t.”
I couldn’t take the risk of telling anyone, not even Caitlin. If I told her about Rosetti, she’d want me to tell my lawyer. My lawyer would want me to tell the cops. And if the cops found out, Rosetti would put Caitlin, Bianca, and me in the East River.
&
nbsp; “That’s exactly what I’m talking about, Joey. Every time I try to find out what happened in Columbus, you clam up. Maybe if you’d tell me what happened, I could help with your defense. We could work on this problem together, the way a married couple is supposed to work on things together. Maybe I could help you.”
My tears weren’t working so I decided to change strategy and go on the offensive. Her last line gave me an opening to land a punch of my own.
“Yeah, right. You’ve been a big help. If it weren’t for you, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
“What the hell do you mean by that, Joey? How in the world is this my fault?”
“When a brick comes through the window with five thousand dollars taped to it, you don’t call the police and let them take the money.”
“What was I supposed to do?”
“Keep the money and shut up, that’s what. If you’d done that, we would’ve had five thousand bucks, and I would’ve gotten away with this thing. We needed money, Caitlin. That’s why I got involved in the first place.”
“We needed money so you decided to become an armed robber? Is that what you’re telling me? I can understand how some of our neighbors in Harlem might come up with a bright idea like that, Joey. They’ve never had any other options in life. But it’s not a good excuse for someone with degrees from Haverford and Yale. With that kind of education, you could at least get a job at Starbucks. Hell, you could even be a taxi driver with an education like that. Did you really have to shoot a member of the cast of Star Trek to make a buck?”
“I didn’t shoot him. Somebody else did.”
“Who?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Here we go again.”
“I don’t know, Caitlin, I don’t know.”
“You don’t know what?”
“You’ve got a degree from Yale, too,” I said. “Granted, it’s a worthless degree in fine arts. But still. You should be smart enough to know that when someone gives you money, it’s not a kidnapping. I don’t know if you were being stupid, or—”
“Or what?”
“Or maybe you wanted to get me in trouble. You were mad at me for screwing around with other women, and you figured that would be a good way to get back at me. To call the cops on me and turn me in.”
“I don’t know how you could even think such a thing.” She stormed out of the room in tears.
It was a ridiculous thing to accuse her of, I know. But I was desperate. I couldn’t let her kick me out of the house. Not right then. I needed a place to stay in New York. And with seven dollars in my pocket, it wasn’t going to be the Sherry Netherland. After the trial, if I was found not guilty, Caitlin and I could work something out. Until then, I’d have to stay put. I walked to the kitchen to grab another beer. Then I plopped myself back down on the couch and turned on the TV. Gizmo rolled over and snuggled up to me.
“After the trial, things will get better between me and Mommy,” I said to Gizmo. “You’ll see. After the trial, everything will work out fine.”
That’s how low I’d sunk. I was lying to my own dog.
17
A few days later, as I was heading out the door for my first strategy meeting with my public defender, I received a disturbing telephone call.
“Is that you, Joey?” said the familiar voice on the other end of the line.
“Yes, Mr. Rosetti, it’s me.”
“I know you’re meeting with your attorney today, so I wanted to give you some legal advice. After all, I’ve got lots of experience with this kind of thing.”
“What advice?”
“My advice is that trying to blame this on Paulie or Carlo, or even me, would be a shortsighted strategy.”
“Shortsighted?”
“Yes. It might get you off the hook in the short term. But in the long term, it wouldn’t be good for Gizmo.”
I was silent for a while, so he went on.
“Let me make myself clear, Joey. I won’t kidnap your family and bring them right back like I did before. There won’t be any happy ending this time. I’ll make them suffer. Maybe not your little girl. I’m not an animal, after all. I’ll put a bullet through her brain to make it quick. Because I’m a nice guy. But I’ll make your wife watch me do it. Then I’ll have some fun with her before I kill her. And I’ll take my sweet time doing it, too. Capisci?”
“Si, capisco bene.” I understand very well.
I could tell he was about to hang up, but I stopped him. “I have one question for you, Mr. Rosetti.”
“Fire away.”
“Why me? With all the other actors you could’ve forced to do this, how did I get so lucky?”
“I told you at our dinner in Atlantic City, Joey. We did some research on you. We knew you had some money problems. We knew you had some problems in your marriage. Remember Wild Kingdom with Marlin Perkins, Joey?”
He was talking about a television show that went off the air when I was still a kid, but I remembered it.
“Mutual of Omaha?”
“Yeah, that’s the one. Well, when the lion attacks the antelope, he doesn’t go after the fastest and the strongest one in the herd. He goes after the young ones. The sick ones. The old ones that are half-dead already. It’s easier that way.”
I was going to mention that it’s the females, not the males, who do all the hunting in a lion pride. But I got his point.
“Well, that’s pretty much the way we work in our business. If we need help from a civilian, we tend to look for ones who won’t give us a lot of trouble.”
“I see.”
“Let’s face it, Joey, you’re weak.”
“I guess I am.”
“So let me give you some more advice. Don’t look weak in prison. Use all your acting ability not to seem weak. Because if you look weak in prison, five years is going to seem like five hundred.”
“Good advice, I guess.”
“Now I gotta go, Joey. Good luck with your trial. Don’t forget what we talked about, okay?”
“Okay.”
He hung up.
And I clicked off my tape recorder.
I rewound the tape a bit to make sure it had recorded. I heard Rosetti’s voice say, “Let’s face it, Joey, you’re weak.”
“Maybe I’m not so weak after all, asshole,” I said to the tape recorder.
I knew this call was coming eventually, so I was ready for it. I already had the tape recorder hooked up to the phone. All I had to do was press the button marked “Record” as soon as the call came in.
But let’s get real, okay? I wasn’t going to use this tape recording in court. Heck, I wasn’t even going to let my lawyer listen to it. The thing about fighting the Mafia is that it’s like fighting a zombie. When you think you’ve killed it, it springs back to life and keeps coming after you. Suppose I did succeed in getting off the hook by ratting out Rosetti, Paulie, or Carlo. What good would it do me? Some other Mafia boss would come and kill me. They’d kill my family, too. No, I had to take my chances in court and hope to get off on a technicality. Ratting out Rosetti would be trading a prison cell for a gravestone.
I made this tape for one reason and one reason only. And there was only one person in the world I wanted to hear it. So I popped the cassette out of the tape recorder and put it into an envelope. I grabbed a Sharpie from the kitchen counter and wrote on the outside of the envelope:
FOR CAITLIN’S EYES ONLY
Do not open until one week before I get out of prison.
There was a notepad nearby that we kept in the kitchen for writing grocery lists. It wasn’t big, so I had to keep it short. I wrote the first words that came to my mind:
Dear Juliet. I love you. I’ve loved you from the first moment I heard you speak. And I love our daughter. You know I would do anything for both of you. Even go to prison.
I know I fucked up. I’m so sorry. I don’t have any excuses for my behavior over the last few years. But if you listen to this tape, you’ll understand what happened
in Columbus and why. And why I couldn’t confide in you.
Caitlin, listen to me. PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE don’t give this tape to the police or let anyone listen to it. Not even my lawyer. I’ll be out of prison soon. And if you still want me in your life, we can play it by ear from there.
I’ll love you forever and a day,
Romeo
I put the note in with the cassette, licked the envelope flap, and sealed it. If things started to look like they were going badly in the trial, my plan was to give it to my lawyer and tell him to hold it until I was almost out of prison.
Little did I know that things would start to go badly from the moment I met him.
18
I knew I was in trouble the moment I showed up in my public defender’s office to discuss our legal strategy. My previous experience with a public defender, Sharon Talley, had been pretty good so I was optimistic. But the lawyer assigned to my case made Sharon Talley look like Clarence Darrow.
It turned out they didn’t have to extradite me to Ohio, after all. The prosecution charged me under the RICO Act, which stands for Racketeering-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations. They created the criminal statute to put Mafia bosses in jail. RICO is a federal law, so I got to be tried in my hometown of New York City. Lucky me!
Unlike Sharon Talley, my new attorney didn’t work for the Public Defender’s Office itself. Instead, he was one of the hundreds of young, inexperienced attorneys in New York hired by the courts to defend poor clients like me. This kind of freelance work didn’t attract the city’s best attorneys. But he had done a decent job of getting me out on bail and released on my own recognizance. So I had no reason to believe Michael Willis would turn out to be the worst lawyer in the history of jurisprudence.
Do you know how you sit in a doctor’s office and try to figure out what disease the other people in the waiting room have? Well, I realized the same thing is true in a lawyer’s office.
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