Chapter 8 - THE SERVICE ENTRANCE
At eleven-fifteen at night, the Moretti mansion blazed with crystal light against the dark Chicago sky.
Sal cut the headlights of the Mercedes half a block down the quiet tree-lined lane behind the greenhouse.
“Miss Clara, you stay in the car with Leo and the doors locked,” Sal whispered, handing the older woman his spare phone. “If we aren’t out in fifteen minutes, you drive straight to the nineteenth precinct and ask for Captain Miller.”
Leo grabbed the lapel of Luca’s suit jacket before Luca could step out of the car.
“Uncle Luca?” the boy whispered, his dark eyes wide in the dashboard glow. “Don’t leave Mr. Sal behind.”
Luca leaned in and kissed the top of his nephew’s dark curls. “Never again, Leo. I promise.”
Vanessa had walked up the front drive three minutes earlier, her red silk gown sweeping up the marble steps as she played the part she had been raised her whole life to perform: the furious, humiliated Bellini heiress.
Sal, Luca, and I slipped through the chained service gate behind the greenhouse. Sal’s brass key turned smoothly in the oiled padlock, and we moved silently across the stone courtyard to the exact door Vanessa had ordered me to push Sal through three hours ago.
The service entrance.
Inside the lower corridor, the garage was empty, the overhead fluorescent lights humming quietly.
As we reached the foot of the back servants’ staircase, we heard Vanessa’s voice echoing clearly from the grand foyer above:
“He lost his mind, Daddy! He threw me out of the car on Michigan Avenue over some ridiculous story that old driver made up!”
Footsteps moved rapidly across the marble floor upstairs—the two hallway guards leaving their post by the kitchen corridor to join Marcus Vance and Hector Bellini in the front hall.
Luca gave me the silver briefcase and nodded toward the kitchen pantry door. “Get Aunt Teresa and Mrs. Gable secure. Sal and I will handle the hall.”
I hurried into the dark kitchen, slid back the heavy iron exterior bolt someone had thrown across the walk-in pantry door, and pulled it open.
Seventy-eight-year-old Aunt Teresa was sitting on an upturned milk crate wrapped in Mrs. Gable’s flour-dusted apron, clutching her silver rosary beads.
“Emma!” Aunt Teresa gasped, gripping my hands as I helped her up. “Marcus told the guests Luca took Vanessa for a private drive by the lake, and when I tried to go down to the garage to check on Sal, he locked us in here and said the wiring had shorted in the hallway!”
“Wait right here with the bolt on the inside until Luca calls for you,” I whispered, pressing my hand to her cheek before slipping through the butler’s swinging door into the dining room.
All twenty-eight remaining guests had risen from the long banquet table and crowded toward the wide double archway leading into the grand foyer.
Hector Bellini—a heavy-set man in a tuxedo with cold gray eyes—stood at the center of the marble hall beside Marcus Vance.
“I told you six years ago that boy didn’t have the stomach to run this family after Vincenzo got sick,” Hector was saying loudly to the circle of family captains and businessmen. “First his brother drives off a bridge in the rain, and now Luca abandons my daughter in the middle of his own engagement dinner. As of tonight, under the provisional board agreement, Marcus and I are assuming operational control—”
“On whose authority, Marcus?”
Luca’s voice wasn’t loud, yet it cut through the marble foyer like a blade through silk.
The crowd parted instantly.
Luca walked down the main hallway from the study entrance, Sal Russo one step behind him in his buttoned chauffeur’s coat, and me beside them carrying the silver aluminum briefcase.
Marcus Vance’s polite, silver-haired composure flickered for a fraction of a second. His right hand shifted slightly toward the inside of his dinner jacket.
“Luca,” Marcus said smoothly, spreading his hands as if calming a troubled nephew. “Thank God you’re back. Vanessa just came in distraught. We kept the guests here hoping to avoid an embarrassment for your father’s house.”
“Don’t put my father’s name in your mouth,” Luca said, stopping ten feet away.
He took the silver briefcase from my hands, set it on the marble center table beneath the chandelier, and flipped it open in front of the thirty most powerful men in Chicago.
“Six years ago, on the night of October fourteenth, my brother Matteo died when the brake line on my gray coupe was severed in our garage,” Luca said clearly, his voice carrying to every corner of the hall.
Hector Bellini scoffed, adjusting his cuffs. “The police ruled that an accident on wet pavement six years ago, Luca. You’re grieving and erratic.”
“The police flagged it as a homicide at six in the morning,” Luca replied, lifting the yellow carbon-copy impound sheet and holding it out to Frank Rizzo, the oldest captain at the table and Vincenzo’s lifelong friend. “And Marcus Vance used my dying father’s fear for Matteo’s pregnant fiancée to trick him into crushing the car before detectives could trace the cut brake line back to this house.”
A murmur rippled through the guests as Frank Rizzo put on his reading glasses and stared at the police document, then at the three Cayman Islands bank books Luca laid across the marble table.
“Every month for six years, seventy thousand dollars from our South Branch dock accounts went into a numbered trust controlled jointly by Hector Bellini and Marcus Vance,” Luca said.
Vanessa stepped away from her father, walking slowly across the marble floor until she stood on Luca’s side of the foyer.
“Vanessa, get back here,” Hector snapped, his face turning dark crimson.
“Wait until you hear the rest of it, Father,” Vanessa said, her voice shaking but clear. “Camilla didn’t die alone in Florence. She had Matteo’s son. And Monday afternoon, Marcus sent two men to West Addison to kill my sister’s six-year-old boy so he wouldn’t stand in the way of your dockyard proxy.”
The entire room went dead silent.
In these families, business betrayals were argued over tables; hunting the six-year-old orphan of a dead brother was an unforgivable sentence.
Frank Rizzo and three of the senior captains took two slow steps away from Hector Bellini and Marcus Vance.
Marcus saw the room turn against him in a heartbeat.
His hand dove inside his tuxedo jacket—not for papers, for his gun.
Before Marcus could clear the holster, a sharp metallic click echoed two inches from his right ear.
Sal Russo hadn’t stepped back with the guests. While every eye in the room had been on the silver briefcase, the seventy-one-year-old driver in the uniform everybody overlooked had walked quietly around the marble pillar behind Marcus.
Sal held his snub-nosed .38 steady against Marcus’s temple.
“Drop your hand, Marcus,” Sal said calmly. “I may be seventy-one, but at this range, I don’t even need my glasses.”
Marcus froze, his fingers opening slowly as Frank Rizzo’s men stepped forward and pulled the pistol from his jacket.
Luca walked straight up to Marcus, reaching into his own pocket and pulling out the worn gold signet ring with the chipped onyx stone.
“My father gave you this ring because he trusted you with his life,” Luca said quietly, taking it back. “And you let him die believing he had helped bury his own son.”
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Then Luca looked past the open front doors of the mansion, where flashing blue and red police lights suddenly turned into the driveway—not the local patrolmen on Marcus’s payroll, but the federal port-authority task force Frank Rizzo had quietly signaled the moment he read the wire fraud receipts.
Except as the first cruiser pulled up to the marble steps, Sal’s spare cell phone began ringing violently inside my coat pocket—Clara’s number from the car behind the greenhouse.
