12. Chapter Twelve
Chapter Twelve
Emilia
I pull my hand from Silas’ slowly and stand, needing some space.
“How did we get from them doing business with my father, and wanting to buy the gallery, to them killing him? Explain it to me, Si, because I am not following the threads here.”
With a sigh he turns on the bed to face me, his eyes pleading with me to understand.
“Because I looked into the transactions too, Emmy. The paintin’s, they don’t exist. They have never been for sale on the galleries site, and they aren’t listed anywhere on the incomin’ financials as a purchase.
We know your father didn’t take in forgeries, so with no paper trail to be found then we have to assume there were no paintin’s. ”
“Okay, so I get that is a bit suspicious, but how did you get from fake purchases to murder?”
“I did some diggin’, and it seems that the Rossi family was after the gallery before your father died, but he refused to sell it to them.
So maybe the money was a sweetener; they pay off your father’s debts to give him incentive to sell.
I don’t know exactly what happened, cher, but one day your father was almost in foreclosure and still refusing to sell the gallery, and the next his debts were cleared.
He turned up dead the day after that. So maybe he still refused to sell.
The cops began investigating the suspicious death, but then suddenly dropped the case without tellin’ you, and then they give you a spiel about accidental death with no real evidence to support the theory they’re suggestin’ it was.
We all know that the cops in this city are in the mob’s pocket!
It wouldn’t have been hard to get them to look the other way.
I don’t know, Emmy, but it just seems like too many coincidences to me. ”
My back slides down the wall I’ve been leaning against, my legs crumpling beneath me. The reality of his words bringing the world crashing to a halt. Tears spring in my eyes, and even though I open and close my mouth a few times to try and speak, nothing comes out. I can’t say anything.
Silas rushes off the bed, falling to his knees beside me, and gathers me in his arms. “Maybe I’m wrong. But maybe, I’m not. And if I’m not, then you need to tread very carefully here.”
“I have a meeting with Vincenzo tomorrow to discuss the sale of the gallery,” I say quietly.
“What? When did you arrange that?” Silas all but shouts as he pulls away from me like I burned him.
“When you went to get the car after the wake. I called Vincenzo and set up a meeting at a cafe tomorrow morning. I thought I would get the sale wrapped up and we could be on a plane back home tomorrow, just like you suggested.”
“You can’t go to that meetin’ tomorrow, Emmy.
It’s not safe. Let me take care of this for you.
I will call Vincenzo’s office and leave word you were just not up for it after today.
If you still want to sell the gallery to them, I can take care of that too, but you cannot meet with them.
Any of them. Do you understand?” Silas grabs both of my arms and almost shakes me as he vehemently replies.
“Si, stop,” I shrug his hands off my arms, “I need a minute to think.”
My mind is a whirl with the new information, and I feel so overwhelmed. I stand to pace, unable to sit still while my brain works overtime trying to process everything as Silas just sits on the floor in silence, watching me, waiting.
“Okay, so what we know for sure is that Rossi Enterprises paid my father large sums of money in the days before his death?” Silas nods in confirmation, understanding my process to work through everything.
“And they were after the gallery, but my father refused to sell?” Another nod from Si. “How do you know he refused?”
“I may or may not have hacked the email account of an assistant in the company and seen an email from your father in the deleted folder sayin’ that he had considered the offer to purchase the gallery but was politely declinin’.”
“May or may not have?” I ask, my brow quirking as I look at him pointedly.
“Okay, I absolutely did,” he confesses without remorse. Given the situation, I’m grateful that my friend goes to the lengths that he does.
“Alright. So, they wanted to buy, but dad wouldn’t sell.
They weren’t going to take no for an answer, so they tried to sweeten the pot by paying off his debts.
My dad was happy to take the money obviously, or he wouldn’t have bothered to try and hide it behind fake purchases.
But then he still turned them down? Surely, he had to know taking money from the fucking Italian mob but still refusing their ‘offer he couldn’t refuse’ would not end well. Why would he risk it?” I asked Silas.
“That I cannot tell you, cher. All I know is he loved that gallery and your home there, and it meant somethin’ to him to be able to still offer you that base to return to.”
I nod in agreement. Silas is right, but things still aren't adding up. “Okay, so play this out with me. They don’t take my father’s refusal well, so they just kill him, and cover it up to look like an accidental poisoning?
I mean, I have seen enough mob movies to know that after the reasonable offers have been made, the next step is the unreasonable ones.
So why not just break his legs or something?
Force him to accept the offer. Why kill him?
And why, if they did kill him, would they not use it as an example to anyone else who refuses them.
I mean, come on, even I can see the advantage of using his death to convey a very clear message to anyone else who thinks of saying no. It doesn’t make sense.”
“I agree, Emmy. It’s the part I can’t work out either.
But there was nothin’ else goin’ on in your father’s personal or professional life.
I mean, literally nothin’. He had no dates.
He worked and he slept. He called or emailed you once a week.
Went grocery shoppin’ once a fortnight. He hardly went out to eat.
Money was obviously tight, so he’d just been living a very quiet, simple life,” he says with a shrug.
“Surely, they would know or at least suspect that if my father died, the gallery would go to me. So maybe they had his death covered up, so I would agree to sell? But why not just let me know they killed him? The threat of the same happening to me would be a pretty strong incentive for me to agree to sell to them.”
“I don’t know, cher. It doesn’t make sense to me either,” Silas says gently. I sit down on the floor beside him once again and he pulls me back into his arms. The wind going out of my sails with so many unanswered questions.
I draw comfort from his embrace for a while, just going over everything I’ve learned again and again in my head. But it just leads me around in circles and I know I’m getting nowhere.
“Si?”
“Yes, cher?”
“You understand I can’t leave now without knowing what happened to my father, right?”
“I know, girl,” he sighs in response, his breath ruffling my hair as he lays his head on mine.
“And you know I can’t sell the gallery to Rossi Enterprises until I work out if they had anything to do with my father’s death,” I say firmly. Silas merely nods, not bothering to argue.
“I will fly out first thin’ and have the Monet sent directly back on the jet. You will have to work on it to get it finished in time, though, girl. You don’t need to be facin’ threats on two different fronts, yeah?”
“I know and I will. But first, I need to meet with Vincenzo Rossi in the morning and see if I can get some answers from him. Maybe he will let something slip.” I feel rather than hear Silas’ huffed laugh in response.
“I highly doubt the heir to the Italian mob in Australia will accidentally confess to killing your father over coffee no matter how hard you bat those lashes or give him the blowjob look from those pretty eyes, cher.”
“You’re right,” I sigh in response, “but I have to try.”