Dead Ringer

“I second that emotion!” yelled South Philly Rocks, with a wink at Bennie. “Anything you need, you got it! And Mary, too. Alla youse!” Heads around him nodded in instant agreement.

“Thank you,” Bennie said, pulling the case file over while the Circolo resettled, hopefully permanently. She opened the file, skimmed Brandolini’s will, and read the bequest with a sinking heart. The will earmarked nine thousand dollars to fund the litigation. It was a lot of money, but it wasn’t enough to take on the United States.

Mary read her mind. “Bennie, I told Frank how expensive it is to sue the government, and the Circolo has taken up a collection to raise money for the lawsuit. They’ve already pledged to match the funds in the will. That’s almost twenty thousand dollars.”

From across the table, South Philly Rocks was nodding again. “We got three Easter raffles going at church. And Goretti and St. Monica’s are gonna do a real big basket of cheer. We got three different parishes working on it!”

Bennie sighed inwardly. You can’t stage a lawsuit with a bake sale. “Frank, this is a very complex question. I’m not even sure the Brandolini estate has standing to bring suit, and there are issues of sovereign immunity and constitutional law. This is an expensive-”

“Bennie,” Mary interjected, “I would donate all my time and do it pro bono. I would even work on my own time, outside of regular business hours.”

Bennie didn’t have the lira to let an associate work for free. “Mary, I’m sorry but-” she began to say, when there was a loud shout from the back of the room.

“Vide! Vide!” a woman shrieked, and Bennie jumped. The hard-eyed old woman at the end of the table was on her feet, yelling in Italian and pointing at Bennie with an arthritic finger. Bennie didn’t understand anything until the end, when the woman lapsed into broken English. “You! You, Benedetta Rosato! You are evil! Evil!”

Bennie’s eyes widened. She had no idea what she’d done. She’d never even met the woman. Who was she?

“Mom!” Mary shouted, leaping to her feet. “No, please! Mom!”

Mom? Bennie looked dumbfounded from her associate to the shouting woman and back again. Madame Defarge is DiNunzio’s mother?

“Mom, no! Dad, please! She promised!” Mary was rushing over to the woman, whose thin skin had turned red as marinara. “Ma, no! You promised! Dad, she promised!”

Mom? Dad? Bennie watched as the older man got to his feet and tried to hug his wife into a state less hysterical. She kept waving her finger at Bennie, even as the rest of the Circolo tried to calm her down with help from Mary.

“Mom, please, be quiet!” she kept saying, joined by Carrier, who sprang from the side wall and hurried over to Mrs. DiNunzio. Fuchsia hair blossomed like a petunia among the brunettes. Murphy was right behind her.

Bennie rose to her feet, amazed. The conference room had gone nuts. Everybody left their chairs. People shouted at one another, and Mrs. DiNunzio was on a Neapolitan tear. Bennie turned to Cavuto. “Frank, do you speak Italian? What is she saying?”

Cavuto grabbed Bennie’s elbow and took her aside. “Well, she says that you’re evil and she hates you.”

“How can she hate me when she doesn’t even know me?” Bennie was confounded. “You have to know me to hate me.”

“She says that you don’t care about nobody but yourself. Sorry, but Italian uses the double negative.” Cavuto translated as the raving intensified. “You don’t appreciate Mary. You don’t care about nothing but yourself. Again the double negative.”

“Me? I don’t care about Mary?”

“You aren’t good enough to her daughter. Or to her daughter’s friends.”

“Carrier and Murphy?”

“Yes. You almost got them all killed on some murder case.” Cavuto’s dark eyes narrowed in accusation. “Is this true?”

Ouch. “Well, yes. But it was on three different murder cases.”

Cavuto turned away. “She says you don’t pay them enough.”

Bennie had no immediate reply. Mrs. DiNunzio was in the zone.

“She says your hair is always a mess.”

“Does this matter?”

“And you walk like a man.”

“I’m trying to get somewhere!”

“You’re all alone. No man will ever marry you.”

Whoa. Bennie bristled. “Now she’s getting personal.”

“You should leave immediately.”

“She has nerve, throwing me out of my own conference room.”

Cavuto met Bennie’s eye. “She didn’t say you should leave, I did.”

“Why? It’s my conference room. She should leave, not me.” Bennie folded her arms. “I’m as capable as anyone of being childish. I have a First Amendment right to be childish.”

Cavuto shook his head. “Rethink your position. I know Vita DiNunzio. She can go on like this for an hour or more. She only gets stronger as she goes, like a house on fire.”

Bennie eyed the scene. The group was practically wrestling Mrs. DiNunzio to the ground, and she was still yelling. Her finger stuck up from the throng, like the Statue of Liberty in a hurricane.

Cavuto tsk-tsked. “At some point, she gets completely out of control. A whole city block can be consumed. She’s a natural force.”

Bennie snorted. “Okay, tell Mary I’ll meet her in my office. I’ll get back to you about the Brandolini representation. You put me on the spot here, you know.”

“Forgive me, but it’s for a good cause. Buona fortuna.”

“For that I don’t need a translation.” Bennie gave him a pat on the back, then went back to her office to find her goddamn wallet.

4

Bennie combed the dhurrie rug and crawled under her desk and chairs. She wasn’t giving up on that Filofax. She didn’t have time to replace her driver’s license, and she needed an organizer to feel organized. She went over every cluttered surface, then peeked under stacks of correspondence, old court decisions, and law books. She rummaged through every drawer in her desk and didn’t find the wallet, but did find an old picture of her ex-boyfriend, Grady Wells, from a weekend trip to Cape May. She stopped at the sight of the photo. Maybe if they’d spent more weekends together. That was what he’d said anyway, but she’d had a business to run.

Just then came a timid knock on the door, and Bennie didn’t have to guess who it was. The secretary was out, Carrier knocked like a freight train, and Murphy never knocked at all. Bennie shoved the photo in the drawer and closed it quickly, so as not to reveal that she had Normal Human Emotions and/or Chinks in the Armor. She called out, “You’re fired, DiNunzio!”

No laughter came from outside the door.

“I’m only kidding! Come in, silly!”

The door opened slowly, and a stricken Mary DiNunzio peeked inside. “I’m not coming in if you’re going to fire me.”

“I’m not going to fire you.” Bennie waved her inside. “Come in and sit down.”

“Thank you, thank you so much, Bennie, I can explain everything. First off, I’m really sorry and my mother is not crazy.” DiNunzio hurried to the club chair across from the desk, perching on the edge of the seat cushion. Her words tumbled over each other and she gestured as rapidly as sign language. “She’s really great, and I love her a lot, but I never would have let her come to the meeting if I had known she was going to act that way. She said she’d behave,