Chapter 4 - THE CRAYON DRAWING AND THE GREEN PORCH
Luca stopped dead in his tracks and took the crayon drawing from my hand.
It was drawn by a child’s careful hand: a narrow two-story house with a bright green porch roof, a crooked snowman in the yard, and a big black dog sitting by the fence. In the bottom corner, written in neat block letters, was the name LEO, and beside it, a small blue star.
Then Luca looked at the Western Union receipt I was holding.
Five thousand dollars wired from a check-cashing storefront on Belmont Avenue in Chicago to a woman named Martha Kowalski in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.
The sender’s signature at the bottom was messy, hurried, and unmistakable.
S. Moretti.
Luca slowly raised his eyes to Uncle Sal.
Sal didn’t run. At sixty-eight years old, with bad knees and a tired face, the old man simply took off his gold-rimmed glasses and set them neatly on the tablecloth beside his untouched wineglass.
“You moved him on Tuesday, Sal?” Vanessa gasped, staring at the older man in disbelief. “My father’s men checked St. Catherine’s yesterday morning! They said the wing was locked for asbestos repairs!”
“Because I paid the maintenance supervisor ten grand to slap biohazard tape on the third-floor doors until Friday,” Sal said calmly.
Luca crossed the room in three strides and grabbed the lapels of Sal’s suit jacket, hauling his uncle halfway out of the chair.
“You let me sit at that table for twenty-two years thinking my mother was in a grave!” Luca shouted, his voice echoing off the high ceiling. “You knew I had a son! Where is he?”
“Take your hands off me, boy, and think with your head instead of your temper,” Sal rasped, unflinching even with Luca’s fists bunched in his jacket. “If I had told you five years ago while Matteo was still alive, your father’s captains would have killed that child to keep you from walking away from the Syndicate. And after Matteo died, Robert Bellini had three men watching St. Catherine’s day and night.”
Luca didn’t let go, his chest rising and falling rapidly.
“Why move him Tuesday?” Luca demanded.
Sal glanced sideways at Vanessa.
“Because on Monday night, I overheard Robert Bellini telling his brother that once Luca signed the port authority contracts at tonight’s engagement dinner, they didn’t need the ‘insurance policy’ in Room 318 anymore,” Sal said darkly.
Vanessa’s face went chalk-white.
“That’s a lie!” she cried, standing up from her chair. “My father promised me the boy wouldn’t be hurt! He told me we were bringing him here after the honeymoon!”
“Your father has been lying to you since the day you bought that dress, princess,” Sal told her flatly. “A secret eleven-year-old heir is a liability to the Bellini takeover. Once Luca handed over the shipping signatures tonight, that boy was never coming out of Wisconsin alive.”
I watched Vanessa’s knees buckle slightly as she grabbed the back of the chair. For the first time, I realized she hadn’t known her father’s real plan either. She had been arrogant, cruel, and selfish—willing to blackmail her fiancé with his own child—but her own father had used her as bait.
Luca slowly released Sal’s jacket.
“Who is Martha Kowalski?” Luca asked.
“A retired pediatric nurse who worked with your mother at St. Catherine’s for fifteen years,” Sal answered, straightening his coat. “Lucia trusted her. Before your mother died last winter, she gave me this sewing box to hide in her old bedroom here at the mansion as a backup, in case anything ever happened to me. I didn’t know Vanessa had stolen the key from your desk today.”
I looked down at the walnut sewing box in my hands, then back at the crayon drawing of the house with the green porch roof.
Something about the drawing nagged at the back of my mind.
The paper wasn't ordinary school notebook paper. Along the top edge, faintly embossed in the white margin, was the crest of a local Chicago parish—St. Jude’s on Irving Park.
That was only twenty minutes from here, not in Wisconsin.
“Uncle Sal,” I said carefully, stepping between him and Luca. “Why did Leo draw this on stationery from a church on the northwest side of Chicago if you wired money to Lake Geneva?”
Sal’s eyes flickered toward me with a flash of warning.
“Martha picked up supplies in the city before heading north,” he said quickly.
Too quickly.
I looked closely at the drawing again. In the corner of the green porch roof, the child had drawn four brass wind chimes hanging in a row—three silver tubes and one broken copper tube tied with red yarn.
My breath caught in my throat.
Four months ago, Luca had sent me and another housekeeper to clean and air out a modest two-story brick house near Irving Park that his mother had inherited from her parents before she married Matteo. Nobody ever went there. And hanging on the front porch of that house was a wind chime with three silver tubes and one broken copper tube tied with red yarn.
Sal hadn’t sent the boy to Lake Geneva at all. The Western Union receipt to Wisconsin was a decoy in case the Bellinis searched Sal’s pockets.
Before I could decide whether to speak, the red light on Marco’s encrypted security radio began blinking furiously at his belt.
May you like
Marco pulled the earpiece out so Luca could hear the frantic voice of the gate guard at the end of the driveway:
“Boss, we’ve got a problem—Robert Bellini’s black Escalade just blew past the front gates, and he wasn't heading here. Our tail on the north side says Bellini’s crew just pulled up outside the old Irving Park house with bolt cutters!”
