The Vendetta Defense raa-8 Read online

  “Showing you why my grandfather killed Angelo Coluzzi.”

  Frank walked before Judy and stood at the front of the grave with his head bowed for a minute. Judy looked past him to the black granite monument, which sat flush with the grassy carpet:

  LUCIA FRANK GEMMA

  United in life, united in death.

  It took Judy a minute to understand what she was seeing. The graves of Frank’s father and mother. The day etched into the glossy granite was a single one, January 25, and the date was last year’s. Judy’s heart went still. Frank had lost both of his parents. Had Pigeon Tony lost a son?

  Frank lifted his head and turned. Pain softened his rugged features, but his eyes remained dry. “Come forward, it’s okay,” he said, motioning, and Judy stepped toward him.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Me, too. But that’s not why I brought you here.” Frank cleared his throat but his voice sounded predictably hoarse. “My parents died last year, in an accident. The truck, it was my dad’s old truck, flipped over an overpass on the expressway. It happened late at night. The truck turned into a fireball. They were coming home late from a wedding in Jersey, and the cops think my father fell asleep at the wheel.”

  Judy remained silent. She didn’t know what to say. The breeze was so gentle, the air so fresh. The only sound was Frank’s quiet voice, his account continuing tersely.

  “Either that or he had a heart attack at the wheel, I don’t know exactly. It doesn’t matter. I had them cremated, which was . . . well, a necessity. Only that turned out to be a problem, at least as far as my grandfather is concerned.”

  “Why?”

  “See, my grandfather, he didn’t believe it was an accident. He thought my parents were murdered. An autopsy might have proved they weren’t. And he blamed himself for their death.”

  Judy shook her head. “Who would murder your parents?”

  “Angelo Coluzzi.” Frank scanned the oak trees in the distance, then a sun-dappled lawn that stretched over a small hill. “This goes back so many years, decades, to Italy. My grandfather told you about Coluzzi, didn’t he?”

  Judy paused. “What your grandfather told me is privileged. It wouldn’t be ethical to reveal anything, even to you.”

  “I respect that.” Frank nodded, with a half smile, turning to her. His eyes were an earth brown and the amused crinkling at the corners told Judy he was older than she’d thought at first, maybe forty. “Does this mean you’re a lawyer, but with ethics?”

  “It happens.”

  “No it doesn’t.” Frank laughed, a deep, masculine sound that Judy liked. She always thought you could tell a lot about a man by his laugh, but all she could tell by Frank’s laugh was that she hadn’t dated anyone in a long time.

  “I’m an ethical lawyer, and as an ethical matter, you can tell me stuff. And I can listen. Ethically, of course.”

  “I talk and you listen? Can women do that?”

  Judy laughed, then sobered at the thought they were flirting, graveside. At least she suspected she was flirting, though she hadn’t meant to. In legal terms, she didn’t have the intent to flirt; it had sneaked up on her. She realized she’d liked Frank from the moment he tried to deck the cop. “How about you talk, I’ll listen? We’ll leave the politics out of it.”

  “Excellent.” Frank turned again to his parents’ grave, when his smile faded. “Maybe we should take a walk.”

  “Good idea,” she said, and fell into step beside Frank as he strolled down the grassy row between the graves toward a gravel road. He seemed to breathe a little easier.

  “My grandfather’s wife—my grandmother—was killed by Angelo Coluzzi, in Italy. My grandmother had been seeing Coluzzi when she met my grandfather, and she accepted my grandfather’s marriage proposal over Coluzzi’s. Coluzzi could never live it down. He lost face. He hated my grandfather for it. And he killed her. Everybody in the neighborhood knows it.”

  “What neighborhood?”

  “Our block of South Philly. It’s one of the most solidly Italian blocks in South Philly, still. The Korean and the Vietnamese, they’re right next door, but this block is so solid that everybody came from the same region in Italy, from Abruzzo. All the families knew each other over there and everybody knew the Coluzzis, a wealthy family. A powerful family. Fascists.”

  “I see,” Judy said, hearing an echo of his grandfather’s contempt in Frank’s voice.

  “There was no prosecution of the murder. The Coluzzis had the juice to keep a lid on it. Their power was increasing, and when war broke out, my grandmother, she just got lost in the shuffle.” His voice trailed off for a moment, and Judy suppressed the urge to ask him for details. They walked down the gravel footpath as it wound past low-lying hostas, sharp fronds of tiger lilies yet to bloom, and purple alyssum that crept over rocks at the borders. The air under the trees they passed was cool. Frank’s Timberlands crunched on the gravel, and Judy was glad for the first time today that she’d worn clogs.

  After a time Frank said, “It was a different world then, and another time. My grandfather tried to get her murder prosecuted and almost lost his own life in the process.”

  “How?”

  “They threatened him. Vandalized his house. Fire-bombed his car.”

  “Who did?”

  “Angelo Coluzzi, or men who worked for him. Blackshirts.”

  “How do you know? Were they caught?”

  “Of course not. We just know. Everybody knows, even today.”

  Judy raised an eyebrow. It sounded like assumption piled on assumption, but this wasn’t the time to argue it. She needed information. “So what did your grandfather do about it?”

  “He just moved. He didn’t retaliate, even when they bombed his car. He left the country with his son—my father, Frank Sr.— who was two at the time. They settled here. Gave up farming, started laying brick, like lots of immigrants from the region. My grandfather tried to accept what had happened to his wife. He went on and raised his son, and his birds.”

  “Birds?”

  “He keeps pigeons. Homing pigeons, but they race. He’s amazing at it. You should see. He spends all his time outside with them, teaching them, exercising them, tossing them—”

  “Tossing?”

  “It means letting them out on training runs, so they learn how to find their way back to the loft. He spends hours sitting with them outside, watching them fly.” Frank brightened at the thought, but it wasn’t the type of detail Judy needed right now.

  “You were saying, about when he immigrated.” They walked down the path into the sun, and Frank winced at the sudden light.

  “Then there was the accident. My father, my mother. I know it was just an accident but my grandfather, he believed Angelo Coluzzi did it. You must have heard of the family. Angelo, and his two sons, John and Marco. They own a big construction company in South Philly. They build strip malls and have houses in the Estates. Have you heard of them?”

  Judy shook her head. She knew next to nothing about construction.

  “They’re a sick, sick family.” Frank was still wincing, and Judy realized it wasn’t the sunlight. Duh. “My grandfather believes Angelo Coluzzi bombed my parents’ truck, like they had with his car, in Italy. And after they died, he just went downhill. He said it never would have happened if he’d retaliated for my grandmother. He thinks if he’d honored the vendetta, his son would be alive today.”

  “Vendetta? What vendetta?” Judy had heard of it from the movies but couldn’t believe it had any application today.

  “It’s a blood feud. A vindication of your rights, of your family’s rights. An eye for an eye. It grew up in a country where the law was of no help, not to the little guy like my grandfather. He doesn’t look to the law to save him, or to punish him. A vendetta has to be honored, in my culture, his culture.”

  Judy was thinking that Italians raised emotions to an art form, but didn’t say anything for fear of being hit, or hugged.

  “And so he
just lost it. After my parents died, he became more and more depressed. And he was getting older. It didn’t help.” Frank stopped short on the path and turned to her, in appeal. “He’s a peaceful man. You know, he can’t even cull out his own pigeons. He won’t kill any of them. He keeps the slow ones and the old ones. He’s gentle. You can see that, can’t you?”

  “Yes,” Judy answered, meaning it. “It was hard to imagine him killing anybody.”

  “He wouldn’t have killed Coluzzi if he didn’t think he was put to it. He didn’t, all those years. Think about that. The Coluzzis moved to Philadelphia, only two blocks away, and every day my grandfather lived with the fact that his wife’s murderer was his neighbor. My father lived with that knowledge and took grief from the Coluzzis for years. They practically ruined his business, but my grandfather wouldn’t let him take revenge. My grandfather had a right to take revenge, and he never used it.”

  Judy looked over. “Nobody has a right to kill anybody else.”

  “Sure they do. In war, or in self-defense. To satisfy the death penalty. Even if you’re an abused wife. This society, this culture, kills all the time. Isn’t that right?”

  “But—”

  “There’s more death, more killing, in America than anywhere on the face of the earth. We justify killing in lots of circumstances. So why not if somebody kills your wife, your son, and his wife? Don’t you have a right to kill?”

  “No, you don’t, and in any event your grandfather didn’t know that Coluzzi killed your parents. In fact, you think he did.”

  “But my grandfather takes it as gospel, and for all I know, he may be right. You have to look at it his way, if it’s his state of mind you’re talking about, don’t you?” Frank’s eyes searched hers with an openness Judy found disarming, but her legal training resisted his words.

  “People can’t go around killing each other. That’s what a system of laws is designed to prevent.”

  “But they do, in my grandfather’s world, go around killing each other. That’s what happened to him. And now the ones who wronged him have been punished.” Frank shook his head, and a shadow from the long branches of the oak tree above flickered over his pained features. “What good would it do to punish my grandfather? He’s not going to hurt anybody else.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “No?” Frank looked at the miniature American flags fluttering when a breeze came along. His gaze rested on a monument that read CIARDI, behind a spray of tall, lavender irises, some of their flowers shriveled to brown and curling at the edges. “The man is seventy-nine. This is what’s next for him—old flowers and gravestones. This cemetery. Next to his son.”

  Judy couldn’t suppress her sympathy, then forced herself to think like a lawyer, without a trace of human emotion. “None of this will help me defend him.”

  “Are you sure?” Frank turned suddenly. “I was thinking maybe you could try an insanity defense or something like that.”

  “The legal standard for insanity is too high.” Judy shook her head. “God knows what evidence they have against your grandfather, but if this is his story, it doesn’t provide any defense at all. There’s no legal excuse for murder that fits here.”

  “Not even a broken heart?” Frank asked, and he looked at Judy as if it were more than rhetorical.

  “Not even that.”

  “So where’s the justice, in the law?”

  Judy didn’t know how to answer. Her only certainty was that she wanted to take the case.

  All she had to do was convince the boss.

  Chapter 6

  “You did what?” Bennie shouted, and Judy had a déjà vu. Either that or Bennie had said the same thing to her 3,462,430 times before. Judy fleetingly considered putting You did what? on a T-shirt, but then she’d get fired for sure. Bennie was that angry. “You went to the Roundhouse? You had no right to do that!”

  Judy faced Bennie Rosato in the boss’s office, sitting across from a large desk that was almost as cluttered as Judy’s. Bennie’s office was the same size as an associate’s, evidence of her egalitarian ethic, and her bookshelves were stuffed with casebooks, law reviews, and black binders of speeches and articles. Awards from civil rights organizations and First Amendment groups covered the walls. In a far corner sat a pile of running clothes and Sauconys, their rubber-soled toes curled up from wear. In short, it could have been Judy’s office. She didn’t get it. She and Bennie were more alike than they were different, so why did they fight so much?

  “You met with the defendant’s family? You went to a grave site? You told him you’d take the case, at his parents’ grave? And you don’t have a single detail of the crime or the evidence against this man!”

  Judy swallowed hard. “Bennie, I swear, I made it very clear that the firm hasn’t filed an entry of appearance.”

  “Oh, please! It’s just technical whether you entered an appearance. You were there. You appeared.” Bennie’s blue eyes flared, and she yanked off a khaki suit jacket and smoothed it out before she jammed the neck down onto a coatrack behind her leather chair.

  “I told the cops it was only temporary.”

  “Which means nothing. Besides, it’s not just the cops, it’s the client. It’s the grandson. You went to a grave?” Bennie ran a hand through a tangle of light hair that fell to shoulders sagging in disappointment under a linen shirt. “We’re blocked in. You don’t appear and then disappear. At least I don’t. How do you think a law firm gets any credibility? Our integrity’s on the line. My integrity.”

  “Look, it’s me on the line, not you. I got us into this, and I’ll get us out. I want to represent Pigeon Tony.” Judy felt good taking a stand, but Bennie looked underwhelmed.

  “Oh, you do?” Bennie paced beside her chair, too aggravated to stay still. At six feet tall, a muscular ex-rower and all-around tough-as-nails trial lawyer, Bennie Rosato intimidated associates, opposing counsel, and major felons. Everybody except Judy, who had yet to figure out why she wasn’t as scared as she should be. Maybe after a childhood filled with lieutenant colonels, she could handle a pissed-off lawyer.

  “Ask me if I care what you want,” Bennie continued. “I own this firm. I employ you. That means you’ll represent who I tell you to represent.”

  “You said you wanted us to develop our own clients,” Judy argued, though she knew she’d be better shutting up, like Ali letting Foreman punch himself out. Yet she couldn’t help but swing. Maybe it was the boxing lessons she’d taken. “I would think you’d welcome some initiative. Most firms think it’s a basis for partnership decisions.”

  “In my firm, you bring in the client, then you take it to me, and I decide if you can take it. You don’t decide on your own.” Bennie glared. “And were you thinking about making partner when you took the case? Is that what you’re trying to sell me?”

  Judy felt her face flush. What was the matter with her? Why was she making such a bogus argument? “Not really.”

  “Then don’t argue what you don’t believe in. Rule number one, in law and in life.” Bennie’s voice went brittle as ice. Arms akimbo, her hands clutched her hips, wrinkling her skirt. “Now, why did you go down to the Roundhouse? And why do you want to represent Lucia?”

  Judy tried to collect her thoughts. This was serious stuff. She had never asked to represent a client before, especially one who was guilty. It felt like the onset of adulthood, but maybe growing up didn’t mean automatically resisting everything Bennie said. Judy flashed on her first image of Pigeon Tony, so small in the overlarge prison jumpsuit. Then the granite memorial to the Lucias, so eloquent in its dark silence. And finally Frank’s grief at the site.

  “Well?”

  Judy took a deep breath. “If what they tell me is true, then there is an injustice here, and I think I want to help Pigeon Tony. I mean, if it’s true, he’s an old man who had a lifelong heartache. He tried to set it aside, and that effort ended up in the death of his own son and daughter-in-law. He chose peace, and all he got w
as war. Most people who kill are bad men. Instead, Pigeon Tony seems like a good man, who killed someone.” Judy heard herself, and only then did she realize that that was how she felt. Insight wasn’t her strong suit, but she was learning, and a new certainty steeled her. “Even if you fire me, I’ll still take the case.”

  “You would?”

  “Yes.”

  Bennie stood stock-still. The crease in her forehead relaxed, and the angry redness ebbed from her cheeks. Judy hoped it wasn’t the peace that comes over bosses before they shitcan you.

  “Please don’t fire me, by the way. I couldn’t find another firm that would let me dress as funny.”

  Bennie laughed softly and sat down in her deep chair. “Oh, well.”

  “Does this mean I can keep him?”

  Bennie didn’t answer but picked up a coffee mug from her desk, which read I CAN SMELL FEAR. Judy was pretty sure it was a joke. Bennie tilted it to peek inside. “Empty. What else can go wrong?”

  “I’ll take care of him. I’ll walk him every day.”

  Bennie half smiled, gazing into the empty mug as if coffee would materialize through an act of sheer will. “Can Lucia afford us?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”

  “Of course you didn’t.”

  “I’ll find out, if you let me keep him.”

  The coffee mug clattered to an upright position. “All right, fine. You win, but you’ll do it under my supervision.”

  “Wahoo!”

  “Hold your applause.” Bennie waved her into silence. “You’ll report to me at every stage of the proceedings.”

  “Agreed.”

  “You’ll still be responsible for your other matters. You have that antitrust article to do—get a draft to me on time. The journal editor told me they’ve been waiting on it to cite-check. Don’t screw around.” Bennie thought a minute. “As I recall, you have seven other fairly active cases, all civil. They have to be worked, just as before. Those clients were there first and they didn’t kill anybody.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Bennie ignored it. “Finally, since you didn’t bother to see if Lucia could pay for your services, your services to him are free. That means the time you spend on this matter is your own. You bill none of it, to him or to me. That’ll teach you.”