Chapter 4 - THE SCARF IN THE RAIN
My hands shook so hard the phone slipped through my fingers. Luca caught it before it hit the parquet floor.
He took one look at the screen, and the ruthless boss everyone in Chicago feared took complete control of the room.
“Dante!” Luca barked, his voice cutting across the panicked whispers of the departing guests. “Lock the front iron gates! Nobody leaves the grounds—not the guests, not the valet crew, not the kitchen staff! Search Victor and Enzo right now and give me their phones!”
Within ten seconds, Dante laid two expensive smartphones on the dining table.
“Check their call logs and outgoing texts from the last twenty minutes,” Luca ordered.
I grabbed the edge of the table to keep from falling. “Mr. Moretti, my dad can’t walk more than five steps without his walker, and he needs his oxygen concentrator at night. And Lily—she’s only eight! My sister died three years ago; my dad and I are the only family she has left!”
“Look at me, Emma,” Luca said, stepping directly in front of me and gripping my shoulders. His dark eyes were fierce and steady. “Your father saved my father’s life in that fire, and he paid for it with his body and twenty years of poverty. Not a single hair on his head or that little girl’s head is going to be touched. You hear me?”
“Wait,” Frank Marino said, leaning over the table to squint at the two confiscated phones. “Neither one of these phones sent a message in the last hour. They’ve both been sitting in their coat pockets since cocktails started at seven.”
Luca frowned. He looked down at the prepaid phone in his hand, opening the details of the photo.
“Look at the reflection in the glass frame behind the wheelchair,” Frank said, pointing a bent forefinger at the corner of the image.
Visible in the dark glass of our living room window was the neon sign of Rosie’s 24-Hour Launderette across the street—and right below it, the digital time-and-temperature clock on the corner bank.
The clock in the reflection read 5:42 PM.
It was currently 8:30 PM.
“That photo was taken nearly three hours ago,” Luca realized, his eyes narrowing. “Before you even clocked in for the dinner shift at six.”
I stared at the screen, my mind racing backward through the afternoon. “Mrs. Gable came at five-fifteen to relieve me so I could take the bus here. Why would someone break into my apartment at 5:42, before Frank Marino even arrived at this mansion? Nobody knew I had any connection to Frank or your father until ten minutes ago!”
Luca slowly turned his head toward Vanessa.
She was still standing by the spilled champagne, her diamond engagement ring glittering under the chandelier.
“You didn’t take my dad because of what happened at this table tonight,” I whispered, the horrifying truth clicking into place. “You took him before dinner even started.”
“Why?” Luca demanded, stepping toward Vanessa until she backed up against the sideboard. “Why would you abduct my housekeeper’s family at quarter to six?”
Vanessa’s chest heaved. The helpless, tearful fiancée vanished, replaced by a cornered woman whose back was against the wall.
“Because she wasn’t supposed to let Frank into the dining room!” Vanessa hissed, her mascara smudged beneath furious eyes. “Three days ago, when Frank refused my twenty-five thousand dollars, I hired a private investigator to watch his apartment building. And guess whose house Frank visited yesterday afternoon with a box of groceries?”
I gasped, looking at Frank.
The old foreman’s face flushed with guilt and sorrow. “I didn’t know where Arthur Reed lived all these years, Emma,” Frank said quietly. “Last week, when Vanessa came to bribe me, I got scared they might come after anyone else who was on that shift log. I went down to the Teamsters pension office and pulled Arthur’s current medical disability address. I stopped by yesterday while you were at work just to warn your father to keep his doors locked.”
“My investigator followed Frank straight to your South Side apartment,” Vanessa spat at me. “Then he ran your name and found out Arthur Reed’s daughter was working right here inside Luca’s own house! My father thought you and Frank were working together to ambush us at the engagement party!”
“Where are they, Vanessa?” Luca’s voice was so quiet it terrified me more than if he had shouted.
“They aren’t hurt!” she insisted quickly, holding up her trembling hands. “My father’s driver took them to the old Bellini cold-storage facility on Archer Avenue just to hold them until after the merger papers were signed tomorrow morning! As soon as the dinner ended without incident, they were going to be dropped right back at their apartment!”
“Give me your phone,” Luca ordered her.
Vanessa pulled a rose-gold phone from her evening clutch and handed it over.
“Call the driver,” Luca said, putting it on speaker. “Tell him you’re coming down there with me right now to release them.”
We didn’t wait for the police. As Vanessa’s father had bragged earlier, half the precinct commanders in the district owed favors to the Bellini family. Within three minutes, Luca, Frank, Dante, Vanessa, and I were speeding south on the Stevenson Expressway in two black bulletproof SUVs, while four more of Luca’s men stayed behind at the mansion to guard Victor and Enzo.
Twenty minutes later, the SUVs pulled through the rusted chain-link gates of the abandoned Bellini meatpacking plant on Archer Avenue. Rain was pouring down in heavy sheets, pooling in the cracked concrete of the loading yard.
Two black sedans were parked near the dispatcher’s office, their headlights off.
Before the SUV even came to a complete stop, I threw open the door and ran through the rain toward the lighted ground-floor office window.
Inside, sitting near a space heater with a wool blanket tucked around his shoulders, was my father. Sitting on his lap, clutching her stuffed rabbit, was Lily.
Two men in dark windbreakers stood by the door. When they saw Vanessa and Luca step out of the lead SUV with Dante right behind them, the guards lowered their hands and stepped aside to unlock the heavy steel door.
“Dad! Lily!” I sobbed, bursting into the warm office and dropping to my knees beside his wheelchair.
“Aunt Emma!” Lily threw her small arms around my neck, burying her face in my wet collar. “The man said we had to wait here because a pipe broke at our apartment, and Grandpa forgot his medicine bag!”
“I’m right here, baby. You’re safe,” I whispered, kissing the top of her curls while my father gripped my shoulder with his one strong left hand.
Then Frank Marino walked through the open doorway behind Luca, shaking the rain off his old blue union jacket.
My father’s eyes lifted. For five seconds, neither old man breathed.
“Frankie?” my father whispered, his stroke-weakened voice cracking.
“Hey, Artie,” Frank said, tears spilling down his weathered cheeks as he knelt beside the wheelchair and clasped my father’s hand in both of his. “You’re a hard man to track down, you stubborn son of a gun.”
Luca stood in the doorway, looking down at the man who had taken a falling steel beam to save his father thirty years ago. Slowly, Luca removed his own cashmere overcoat and draped it gently over my father’s shoulders.
“Mr. Reed,” Luca said, his voice thick with emotion. “Everything my family has belongs to yours from this night forward.”
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My father looked up at Luca, his eyes bright and urgent. He didn’t care about the coat or the money. His trembling left hand reached into the lining of his orthopedic wheelchair cushion and pulled out a flat, waterproof plastic pouch he had hidden there for twenty years.
“You’re Michael’s boy,” my father rasped, pressing the plastic pouch into Luca’s hand while glaring past him at the rain-soaked loading yard. “Don’t go to Union Station, son. Locker 414 is a trap. Michael and I moved the real evidence out of that locker the night before they poisoned him—and the person who mixed the poison into his heart pills wasn’t Victor or Enzo.”
