Chapter 6 - LOCKER 409
Nobody moved on the porch.
Thirty people were sitting in Luca’s dining room back on the Gold Coast—captains, cousins, business partners, and family friends who had raised their glasses to him less than an hour ago.
“Who?” Luca demanded, grabbing Vanessa by the shoulders of her silk gown. “Who did Clara see in Milwaukee? Give me the name!”
“She didn’t know his name!” Vanessa cried, wincing under his grip. “She only saw him once through a car window five years ago, the afternoon before Marco died! She said he was older, in his sixties, with a silver ring on his pinky finger and a scar across the bridge of his nose. She thought he was just one of your father’s drivers until he showed up in Milwaukee watching Leo!”
Beside me, Sal went rigid.
I saw the way the old chauffeur’s eyes widened under the porch light, his breath catching sharply in his chest.
Luca heard it too. He let go of Vanessa and turned slowly toward Sal. “You know who that is.”
Sal’s face looked carved from gray stone. “Corrado Vanni,” Sal said quietly. “Your Uncle Corrado’s right-hand man. He got that scar across his nose in ’84 during the dock strikes.”
“Uncle Corrado?” Luca repeated, disbelief warring with the dark realization creeping into his voice. Corrado Moretti was Luca’s late father’s younger brother—the white-haired, soft-spoken man who currently sat at the right hand of Luca’s table, managing the family’s construction unions and real estate holdings. When Luca’s father had his final heart attack three years ago, Corrado had been the one who stood behind Luca at the funeral, steady as a rock, urging him to make peace with the Bellinis so the family could go legitimate.
“That’s impossible,” Luca said, shaking his head once, hard. “Corrado loved Marco. He was Marco’s godfather.”
“Then why is Corrado’s man hunting Marco’s son?” Elena asked from the doorway, her voice trembling with maternal terror. She reached behind her and clicked the lock on the wooden front door, as if Corrado Vanni might come marching down West Addison that very second. “Mr. Moretti, you have to let me take Leo away from here! Tonight!”
“Nobody is going to Mexico alone,” Luca said, his voice snapping back into the crisp, decisive command of a man built for crises. He looked at Sal. “How long to get to Union Station?”
“Fifteen minutes if I take the Kennedy,” Sal said, already putting his chauffeur’s cap back onto his head.
“What about Leo?” I asked, stepping forward before Luca could head down the stairs. “You can’t leave Mrs. Gatti and a four-year-old boy sitting in this house if someone in your own family is looking for them. And you can’t take him back to the mansion while thirty people—including your uncle—are sitting in your dining room.”
Luca stopped on the second step and looked back at me. Under the porch light, the exhaustion and shock of the last hour showed in the fine lines around his dark eyes, but something else was there too—respect.
“She’s right, kid,” Sal said firmly. “They come with us in the armored car. Right now.”
Ten minutes later, the seven of us—if you counted the ghost of Marco Moretti that seemed to ride in the silence between us—were speeding south toward downtown Chicago.
Sal and Luca rode up front. In the wide back seat of the Maybach, Elena sat behind the driver with little Leo curled sleepily in her lap, wrapped in a thick wool blanket from his bed. I sat in the middle, wedged between the boy and Vanessa, who was pressed against the far right door with her wrists crossed in her lap, staring blankly at the passing highway lights.
Leo wasn’t crying. He was too sleepy to be scared, though his wide dark eyes kept drifting from Vanessa to the back of Luca’s head in the front passenger seat.
Halfway down the expressway, the little boy wriggled his hand out of the blanket. Clutched in his small fingers was a folded square of thick construction paper, worn soft at the creases. He reached across my lap and tapped Vanessa’s knee with it.
“Mommy,” Leo murmured around a yawn. “You forgot the picture for the big house.”
Vanessa flinched as if he’d struck her. She didn’t reach for the paper. She turned her face entirely toward the window, pressing her forehead against the cold bulletproof glass, her shoulders shaking with silent, bitter sobs.
Leo’s little hand stayed suspended in the air, his lower lip starting to quiver at being ignored.
My heart squeezed. Without thinking twice, I gently took his small hand in mine, warming his fingers. “Hey there, Leo. I’m Emma. Can I see your picture? I take care of the big house.”
Leo blinked up at me with those unmistakable Moretti eyes—dark, long-lashed, and solemn. Slowly, he nodded and unfolded the blue construction paper on my knee.
It was a child’s crayon drawing. On the left side was a tall yellow building with a big clock on top. In the middle stood three stick figures: a woman with long dark hair holding a little boy’s hand, and beside them, a tall man wearing a black hat and a long black coat, standing next to a big black car. Up in the corner, written in a woman’s neat, curving handwriting, were the words: Uncle Sal will always bring us home.
My breath caught. I didn’t say a word; I simply leaned forward and held the crayon drawing between the two front seats so Sal and Luca could see it in the glow of the dashboard lights.
Sal looked down at the paper for one second before returning his eyes to the road, and a single tear rolled down the deep crease of his weathered cheek. He reached out with his right hand and touched the edge of the construction paper with his gloved fingers.
“She told him about me,” Sal whispered, his voice thick. “All those years away, and she taught the boy to look for my coat.”
Luca stared at the drawing, his jaw working silently as he swallowed hard. Then he reached back between the seats—not for the paper, but to lightly touch the top of Leo’s dark curls.
“Hey, buddy,” Luca said, his deep voice remarkably gentle. “You like trains?”
Leo nodded sleepily against Elena’s chest. “Blue ones.”
“We’re going to the biggest train station in the world right now,” Luca told him, managing a tight, crooked smile that made him look ten years younger. “You stay right here with Nonna Elena and Miss Emma while Sal and I go inside for five minutes, okay? Then we’re going somewhere safe.”
Sal pulled the heavy sedan into the lower-level cab stand at Union Station, right outside the old brass doors of the Jackson Boulevard entrance. He left the engine running and engaged the security locks on the rear doors from the dashboard console.
“Emma,” Luca said, turning in his seat to hand me his heavy black cell phone. “The doors are bulletproof and nobody can open them from the outside while Sal’s key fob is in his pocket. If Vanessa tries to open her door from the inside, let her go—she doesn’t have a dime or a coat. If anyone approaches this car who isn’t Sal or me, hit the red speed-dial button on this screen. It goes straight to the security gatehouse at my estate, not the main house. Understand?”
“Yes, sir,” I said, gripping the phone with both hands.
I watched through the tinted windshield as Luca and Sal walked through the revolving brass doors into the grand, cavernous marble hall of Union Station. Even at nine-thirty at night, the station was busy with late commuters and travelers pulling suitcases.
Five minutes passed. Then eight.
In the back seat, Leo’s eyes finally drifted shut against Elena’s cardigan.
At the ten-minute mark, the revolving brass doors spun open, and Luca and Sal walked out at a fast clip. Clutched under Luca’s arm was a battered, dust-covered brown leather briefcase with brass buckles.
Sal unlocked the front doors, and they both slid inside, bringing a rush of cold exhaust-scented air with them. Luca didn’t wait for Sal to pull out into traffic. He popped the tarnished brass latches of the briefcase right there on his knees and lifted the lid.
Inside were three thick blue ledger books, a bundle of canceled bank checks held together with a rotted rubber band, and a large manila envelope from Northwestern Memorial Hospital.
Luca tore open the hospital envelope first, tilting the page toward the overhead dome light.
I leaned forward over the center console, reading over his shoulder. It wasn’t a birth certificate for Leo, which is what I expected. It was a toxicology and cardiology report dated three years ago—the exact night Luca’s father, Don Antonio Moretti, died of a massive heart attack.
Clipped to the top of the report was a handwritten note in Marco’s bold black scrawl: Sal—Dad isn’t having heart attacks. Check the insulin vials in his bathroom safe. Uncle Corrado has been paying the pharmacist on Taylor Street since October.
“Dear God,” Sal breathed, his hands gripping the steering wheel so hard the leather creaked. “Your father wasn’t sick, Luca. Marco figured out Corrado was poisoning your old man slowly so it would look like natural causes—and when Marco went to confront him, Corrado had his brakes cut.”
Luca’s hands were shaking as he shoved the hospital papers aside and opened the top blue ledger book to the bookmarked page near the back.
His eyes scanned the columns of dates, wire transfers, and signatures. Halfway down the page, his finger stopped dead.
The blood drained from Luca’s face so fast I thought he might pass out. Slowly, he turned his head and looked into the back seat at Vanessa.
“Wait,” Luca whispered, his voice hollow. “This ledger ends four months ago. Three years after Marco died. Why is my Uncle Corrado wiring fifty thousand dollars a month to a private clinic in Geneva under your sister Clara’s name… when Clara has been in Milwaukee?”
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Luca flipped the page, and a laminated visitor’s badge from the Lake Geneva hunting lodge fell out into his lap—stamped not with Vanessa’s name, but with Corrado Moretti’s.
“Vanessa,” Luca breathed, grabbing the headrest as his eyes widened in horror. “If you didn’t know Corrado was behind this… who told you to take Clara to that lodge in Lake Geneva four weeks ago?”
