with a fear he had never known.
“Silvana!” he screamed, the sound so unaccustomed coming from the gentle farmer that baby Frank began to cry even harder, covering his ears in horror amid his birthday decorations.
“Silvana!” Tony ran to the kitchen. No Silvana. He ran to the bedroom and through the small house, yelling. “Silvana!” He ran outside to the pasture.
“Silvana!” Only the sheep looked over, peering with their slitted eyes. He ran to the olive groves, hill after hill of flowering trees, their fragrance usually intoxicating to Tony. But not tonight. Where
“Silvana!” he bellowed, cupping his mouth with his hands, but only her name came back, a hollow echo.
Tony’s thoughts were panicky. Where had she gone? She had few friends, her sister had moved and she had lost both parents. Silvana never went anywhere alone. What woman did? He racked his brain. What hadn’t he checked? The pigeon loft? Perhaps she was visiting them. She liked them as much as he did.
Tony sprinted for the loft and threw open the wooden door. Birds fluttered on their perches at the intrusion, sending pinfeathers into the air. No Silvana. Tony ran from the loft for the house, but then he heard the sound of the horses neighing.
He stopped in his tracks.
The stable. It was the only place he hadn’t checked, for Silvana never went in there. She was afraid of horses. Still. Tony ran for the stable and yanked open the rolling door.
The only sight worse than the one before him was the one behind him.
“Mama?” asked the boy, his eyes wide with shock at the body that lay lifeless in the hay.
Chapter 38
“All rise!” announced the court crier, and everyone packing the largest courtroom in the Criminal Justice Center rose as one. “All rise for the Honorable Russell Vaughn!”
Judy stood up next to Pigeon Tony, dressed in a dark blue suit that fit him better than the last one and matched her regulation courtroom wear, with navy pumps. In the four intervening months, she had sprung for a boring new wardrobe and her first pair of lawyer pumps. In her view, it wasn’t progress.
Judge Vaughn, a tall man, gray-haired and ruddy-faced, whose voluminous judicial robes couldn’t conceal the power of his frame, swept into the courtroom from a pocket door, ascended the walnut dais, and took his leather seat as if he were born to it. In fact he was. His father had been a common pleas court judge before him, and both were equally respected. Judy considered his assignment to this case a good sign.
“Good morning, all,” he said. “Please sit down. Court is now in session in the matter of Commonwealth versus Lucia. This trial has been expedited on request of defense counsel, and it’s already taken two weeks to pick a jury, so let’s not waste any more time.” Judge Vaughn glanced at the bailiff. “Please bring them in, Bailiff.”
Judy watched as the jury filed in through another pocket door and took their seats, in bucket swivel chairs of black vinyl. The jury consisted of two rows of seven, including alternates; there were an equal number of men and women. Judy felt lucky to have gotten five people over age sixty-five onto the panel, in the hope that they’d be sympathetic to Pigeon Tony. But since it was a case of murder in the first, they had been death-qualified. So as sympathetic as they seemed, every one of them had sworn that he or she would be able to sentence Pigeon Tony to death.
Judy gazed at them now, one by one, behind a sleek panel of walnut veneer. In time she would come to know their faces and they hers, in the oddly remote familiarity that occurred in every jury trial. But right now the jurors sat as stiff as the courtroom furniture, avoiding meeting anyone’s eyes, almost blending in with the beige acoustic panels on the wall, a wool carpet of a graphite color, and walnut pews of the gallery. The only odd element of the courtroom’s modern decor was the expanse of bulletproof glass that separated the gallery from the bar of court.
Judy glanced back at the gallery through the clear shield. In this case, security would be in order. The two guards Bennie had hired sat solidly in the front row; they had become Judy’s new best friends, shadowing her everywhere, advising her when it was time to change hotels. They’d even followed her to her few visits with Frank, and between the guards and Pigeon Tony, ensured that the affair remained unhappily chaste. Judy sought Frank out in the gallery, and he was sitting in the front row next to Bennie, Mr. DiNunzio, Tony-From-Down-The-Block, and Feet, wearing new glasses. Judy tried to catch Frank’s eye, but he was watching the Coluzzi side of the aisle.
John Coluzzi, in a black suit and tie, sat on the right side of the gallery with his meaty arm around his mother, who was also dressed in black, next to Fat Jimmy Bello. No one had been charged in the death of Marco, and the police said they still had no leads. Like Frank, Judy found herself glaring at John, unable to look away. Flashing on the image of Marco, dying in her arms. Judy hadn’t been able to get far even in her lawsuits against them, without a live witness in Kevin McRea, but he was still nowhere to be found.
“Let’s get started. Mr. D.A., Mr. Santoro?” Judge Vaughn was saying, and Judy turned around. The judge was slipping on a pair of black reading glasses, with half frames. “Your opening statement?”
“Yes, sir.” Joe Santoro drew himself up, buttoned his well-made Italian suit at the middle, and strode to the podium facing the jury. His dark hair glistened in moussed waves, and his fingernails shone with nail polish, but his self-important grooming belied the time he had to have spent on case preparation. Judy knew it had matched hers, and she picked up her pen to take notes. The Commonwealth had turned over its evidence, which was predictably overwhelming. Given the evidence, the case was his to lose.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” he began, “my name is Joseph Santoro, and I represent the people of the Commonwealth. I’ll keep this short and sweet, because I prefer to let my witnesses do my talking for me, as you will see.”
Santoro took a breath. “In my view, lying at the core of every murder case is a simple story. This case is no exception. This case is a story about defendant Anthony Lucia, a man who has hated Angelo Coluzzi for sixty years and has harbored malice against him, going back all the way to when they both were young men in Italy. The reason for this hatred? Defendant Lucia mistakenly believed that Angelo Coluzzi killed his wife sixty years ago and even killed his son and daughter-in-law in a traffic accident. Of course, this is pure fantasy, the imaginings of an angry man, who lives alone, with nothing but his malice.”
Next to Judy, Pigeon Tony emitted a low growl, but she put a hand on his to calm him. She had warned him to behave during the trial, as she had Frank and The Tonys. She couldn’t afford another courtroom war between the Lucias and the Coluzzis. It would play right into Santoro’s opening argument. Santoro had been clever to bring the vendetta into the case, recasting it as one-way grudge, or pure malice.
“Defendant Lucia’s hatred for Angelo Coluzzi has been brewing for all of these years. And the defendant carried his malice with him when he immigrated to America, where Mr. Coluzzi built a successful construction company in his adopted homeland. In contrast, the defendant’s construction company, essentially a one-man bricklaying business, failed to thrive, feeding his hatred for and jealousy of Angelo Coluzzi. It was then that the defendant began planning to kill an innocent man.”
Pigeon Tony’s mouth dropped open in offense, but Judy squeezed his hand, though she was equally outraged. None of what Santoro was saying was true, but she couldn’t disprove it.
The proof of Silvana Lucia’s murder was long gone, and the accident reconstructionist who had examined the Lucias’ charred pickup had reached a disappointing conclusion:
“Acting on this mistaken belief, defendant Lucia took his brutal revenge, and after lying in wait for decades, killed Angelo Coluzzi on April seventeenth. That morning, which was a Friday, defendant Lucia entered the back room of a pigeon-racing club that both men belonged to. Angelo Coluzzi was inside the room alone. You will hear that a fellow club member was sitting nearby and heard the defendant shout at Mr. Coluzzi, ‘I’m going to kill you.’” Santoro paused for dramatic effect, and the jury looked predictably surprised. One of them, an older woman in the front, glanced at Pigeon Tony, then looked away.
“You will hear, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that this same club member heard a scream, then a crash
