the lock as it came sliding into her hand. It felt soft, fine, and seemed to have almost no weight in her palm. She prodded the strands with an index finger, as if the lock were something alive, then held it under her bedside lamp, watching the filaments catch the light. The hair wasn’t as black as it looked in the envelope, but was a deep brown, shot through with russet highlights. Whose hair was it? Amadeo’s son’s? His wife’s? Mary held the hair to the heads in each photo, like a fright wig. Funny, but not good detective work.
Mary fingered the lock. Amadeo’s effects only reinforced her sense of him. He was a simple man whose world was small, yet perfect. Wife Theresa. Son Tony. Growing business. Three boats. He had his family and his fishing. Love and work. Rich by any standard, even Freud’s. She opened the billfold in the wallet, where money would be kept.
A thick stack of white papers nestled inside, and she slid them out. They were five pieces of scrap paper, and on each were a series of drawings. The drawings were of a circle of some sort, with a tiny bump on the side. Each page had several different views of the circle, drawn with a crude pencil. There was no writing on it, not even in Italian. The circle drawing was repeated at least twenty times. Was that obsessive? Not really. When Mary doodled, she’d usually draw the same things over and over; her name, a pair of large eyes, or for some reason, a ballet slipper. But she wondered about it, with Amadeo. Was it an early sign of depression? And why did he keep it in his wallet?
For no reason, she held the papers up to the lamp, so the light shone through. There was no watermark or secret inks. It told her nothing more, which was the problem with things you do for no reason. But they were drawings of Amadeo’s, Mary felt sure. It was the only tangible thing she had seen – apart from his
She found herself closing her hand around the paper, then opening it again. She thought of her mother in the kitchen, playing hand tricks with the steam. She couldn’t help but feel that she was closer to Amadeo, connected to him, and she admitted to herself that Judy had been right. It was as if she had a crush on Amadeo, not because he reminded her of George Clooney, but because he reminded her of Mike. She didn’t know if Mike had gotten justice and she didn’t know if Amadeo could either, but the confused tangle in her heart told her she had to try. She slid the papers back in the billfold, closed the wallet, and snapped it shut. Then she gathered the photos, set them neatly back in her briefcase, and switched off the light.
Mary lay back in bed alone, as she had almost every night since Mike had died, except for one love affair that hadn’t worked out. She had changed apartments, hit thirty, and still didn’t own a house. She didn’t even have a cat anymore and had grown used to being on her own, kept company at night by Jay Leno, HBO, the Discovery Channel, Lifetime, or at last resort, Paid Programming. She had grown so accustomed to being on her own that it didn’t feel lonely anymore. It was just the state of things. Her friends would send her on blind dates, and she would go because it was easier than resisting, but being alone wasn’t so terrible. She was a single girl, and it felt like enough. Especially with cable.
Her room was dark except for the orange rectangle glowing from the Westclox and a white slice of the moon, so bright it shone through an opening in the curtain. She tried to ignore it but couldn’t, so she climbed out of bed and trundled to the window. She pulled the curtain closed just as she saw a dark Escalade leave a parking space across the street and drive away.
Mary blinked. Which one of her neighbors had an Escalade? None that she knew of. It looked like the same car she’d seen the other day, on Mercer Street. What was going on? She couldn’t decide if she was being paranoid.
Mary tried to banish the voice, but couldn’t. She returned to bed and climbed under the comforter, her body stiff with a bad feeling.
The bad feeling was fear.
Seven
First thing Monday morning, Mary stopped by Frank Cavuto’s law office to take him the FBI memo that she, Judy, and Saint Anthony had found. She sat across his desk in a slippery leather chair, waiting for him to finish reading it. Frank’s shave was so fresh she could smell the minty Gillette on his softening cheeks, and he wore a three-piece pinstriped suit, because lawyers still dressed up for work in South Philly. Down here, they were proud to wear ties. A tie meant you were a high school grad.
“Interesting document, huh?” Mary asked, but Frank merely held up an index finger as his large, brown eyes darted across the page. His head was pitched slightly back to see through his black-rimmed reading glasses, and she wondered what was taking so long. The document was all of two paragraphs.
She looked impatiently around the office, which was over-stuffed, downscale, and even dirty, like most of the solo practitioners in South Philly. They made good money doing wills, contracts, and the occasional slip-and-fall in the produce aisle, but you’d never know it from their offices. The walls were covered with thin wood paneling, a backdrop for diplomas from a Catholic university and law school, mounted in a precut frame from CVS. In the self- promotion department, there were certificates from the Knights of Columbus, the Masons, Kiwanis Club, and framed thank-yous from the Boys’ Club, PAL, and the ASPCA, this last telegraphing that Frank was a soft touch. Puppies don’t hire lawyers.
Next to that hung group photos of the girls’ softball team he’d sponsored over the years, posed in red jerseys on the weathered bleachers of Palumbo Field. A nine-year-old Mary DiNunzio grinned from the third row of one of them, next to her old best friend, Marti Funnell, her face partially obscured by a dust-covered corn plant that struggled for air behind Frank’s desk. The desk itself was of dark veneer, cluttered with correspondence, manila files, and white curls of adding machine tape. There wasn’t a single law book in the office. In South Philly, you didn’t need books if you wore a tie.
Frank set down the document and slid his glasses off, folding the eyepieces together with the faintest
“The FBI monitored Amadeo in the internment camp. Surprising, huh?”
“I guess so, sure.”
“The memo says that Joe Giorno met with Amadeo to tell him about his wife’s death. Did Joe represent Amadeo?”
“I think so.”
Mary blinked. “You didn’t mention that when you hired me. You told me that you represented his son, Tony, but not that Joe represented Amadeo.”
“I didn’t remember, or I didn’t think it mattered. My firm represents the family, going back. So what?” Frank shrugged, which got Mary thinking that although she had known him a long time, she didn’t know him that well.
“How was Joe connected with your firm?”
“Joe founded it. It was Giorno amp; Locaro, then it became Giorno amp; Cavuto.” Frank eased back in his chair, leaving his glasses and the memo on the desk. “Joe was the one who picked this building, bought it bargain- basement, which was key. The man was legend. He owned lotsa property down here, and he could see how important the office location would be, you know.”
“Of course.” Mary did know. The law firm of Giorno amp; Cavuto owned the prominent corner of Broad amp; Columbus Streets, in a limestone Victorian that marked the start of the Italian neighborhood. Its turn-of-the-century turret looked like a lighthouse, especially to South Philadelphians who had never seen one. “How well did you know Joe?”
“Not that well. I’m old, but not that old.” Frank smiled. He was about fifty-five, with a surplus of thick black hair, coarse as a boar bristle and not at all tamed by tap water. Crow’s feet appeared whenever he smiled, which was as frequently as a city councilman, and his eyes were ringed with dark, almost tubercular, circles. “Joe was a smart man, an okay lawyer. But cheap! Cheapest man on the planet.”
“How so?”
