Need You Now

“It’s not ambiguous to Patrick. He firmly believes his father didn’t kill Collins. He thinks his father was coerced into a confession.”

Andie braced herself again, this time for a forceful denial, or at least a hearty guffaw. She got neither.

“I have to get back to work,” said Teese. “Deliver this message to Mr. Lloyd: it’s time he kept his end of the bargain. Deliver something. If he does, we’ll take another look at protection.”

Andie felt like she was back where she’d started. There was definitely no point in going around the same circle. “It would be helpful if I could tell him that we are continuing to keep our end of the deal.”

“You mean tell him that his father is still alive and receiving treatment?”

“Yes.”

Teese pondered it. “I don’t see a problem with that.”

“He’ll also want assurance that the new treatment facility is comparable to the Duke center.”

“You can tell him that in general terms. But you can’t disclose the new location.”

“That’s going to be awkward,” said Andie. “It’s only natural for him to ask why his father was moved, what his new name is, why I can’t tell him where he’s gone-all of that.”

“We can’t tell him.”

“Okay. But it would be easier for me to accept that decision if I knew the answers to those questions.”

“That’s on a strictly need-to-know basis.”

“I find it interesting that there’s enough money allocated to this operation to create a new identity for Patrick’s father, move him to another facility, and arrange for medical treatment from a new facility. But there’s not a dime in the budget to protect Patrick, who happens to be the only person helping us in the BOS investigation.”

“Sorry,” said Teese. “Strict need-to-know basis.”

“Got it,” said Andie.

Teese turned in his chair and faced his computer screen. Andie rose and started for the door, then stopped.

“You know, Patrick is very emphatic that his father is innocent. I can’t overstate how strong his feelings are on that.”

Teese was typing and staring at his computer screen, never looking up. “Strictly need to know,” he said.

Andie nodded, not in agreement, but merely acknowledging his words as the FBI’s final position. She left the office, her thoughts awhirl as she walked down the hall toward the elevator. No doubt about it: Andie needed to know.

17

S now started to gather on the giant mushroom. I watched the first few flakes fall from a gray sky and rest on the bronze heads of Alice and her friends. Connie was beside me on the park bench. We had hot coffee and one of the smelly zoo blankets to keep us warm on a day that was turning colder by the minute.

“My snow monkeys are absolutely loving this,” said Connie.

I smiled. Huddled beneath that blanket in the middle of Central Park, we must have looked like a couple of lost little monkeys.

“Do you remember that summer we came here with Mom and Dad?” she asked.

“I think of it often,” I said.

“Remember when Dad walked over and read the poem out loud?”

“Mmmm, no. Dad read a poem?”

“You don’t remember the time-”

“Connie, I’m kidding. How could I forget? It was the only time in my life that I heard Dad recite something more literary than a menu, and he managed to punctuate it with the f-bomb.”

We laughed, then it faded. I wrapped my hands more tightly around my extra-tall cup of coffee, trying to draw the last bit of warmth through the paper sleeve. Connie sniffled back what sounded like the beginnings of a cold. I hoped it wasn’t snow monkey flu, or some such thing.

“Patrick?” she said, her tone more serious. “Why are you so sure Dad didn’t kill Gerry Collins?”

“Do you think he did it?”

“I asked you first.”

Sibling talk. Connie could shift from stand-in mother to big sister in a heartbeat, when it suited her.

I glanced again at the sculpture. The snow was falling harder, making the bronze a blur. Strangely, it seemed to make the past clearer. “About six months before Mom died, we had a talk.”

“What about?”

“At first it was about me, the kind of talk any single mother might have with her son about gangs. Madison High changed a lot after you graduated. One of the gangs there had ties all the way up to the Crips. I was getting pressure to join one of the rivals. Mom wanted to make sure I stayed clear of it.”

“Were you actually thinking of being a gangbanger?”

“Not really. But she was afraid that I might, because of the things Dad did when he was young.”

“She didn’t want you to make the same mistakes.”

“That was a big part of it. But she wasn’t preaching. As the talk went on, I think she just wanted me to know Dad’s story. The truth.”

“The truth about what?”

I put down my coffee-it was ice cold-and folded my arms to fight off the chill. “Do you know why Dad turned against the Santucci family?”

Connie paused. Her expression told me that she had never thought of it in terms of a trigger event, that she’d simply accepted Mom’s mantra over the years that our father had searched his soul and finally found the courage to do the right thing.

“I’m not sure I do,” she said.

“An underboss ordered him to whack a guy.”

“You mean a genuine mob-style hit?”

“Yup. It was like an initiation rite. The natural progression of things on his way to a made man.”

“I assume he didn’t do it.”

“No. But the family wasn’t going to take no for an answer. They kept up the pressure for him to prove his loyalty, and he found himself in a kill-or-be-killed situation. He didn’t see a way out. That’s when he went to the FBI.”

“So, ‘doing the right thing’ was just an exit strategy?”

“Not exactly. It was a matter of principle. It’s how I know Dad didn’t kill Gerry Collins.”

“I’m not seeing the connection.”

“Dad gave up everything-his wife, his kids, his existence -because he refused to whack some two-bit thug who probably deserved to die. Yet we’re supposed to believe that he killed Gerry Collins for losing his money?”

She considered it. Connie was a bright woman, but she thought things through before rendering a verdict. “It doesn’t compute,” she said.

“It sure doesn’t for me,” I said.

Connie sighed, her breath steaming in front of me. “I wish Mom had packed us up and we had all disappeared with him.”

I shook my head. “Mom was right. The marriage wasn’t strong enough to survive that kind of trauma. Why would any woman take her kids into witness protection, away from extended family and friends, only to go through a divorce?”

“It would have been safer.”

“That’s easy to say in hindsight. She had good reason to believe that no one would touch a woman whose maiden name was Santucci.”