45. Lorenzo
CHAPTER 45
Lorenzo
I wondered if the person who designed interrogation rooms got some kind of royalty check because they were all exactly the same. Various shades of gray, uncomfortable chairs, conference table. Cameras in the corner that may or may not be on, depending on what the agents wanted recorded. I was sitting in my pajama pants, shirtless, because they wouldn’t give me time to get dressed before I was dragged out of my home.
A scowling Federal investigator, Special Agent Matthews, was sitting in front of me: they’d stopped trying to ask me questions when I told them that I was waiting for my lawyer, but they didn’t leave me alone either. Maybe they thought if they glared enough, I would say something.
Our staring contest was broken when the door opened, and an agent showed in my attorney, Elias Greco. His family wasn’t a part of the Cosa Nostra, but Elias’s law office took care of all of the families, legally speaking. He was carrying a bag.
“I would like a few minutes with my client,” Elias barked.
“What’s in there?” the investigator across from me asked.
Elias glared. “A shirt.”
The investigator’s glare didn’t fade, but I could see the color draining from his face. He stood and stomped out of the room, distinctly trying not to look like he was running away with his tail between his legs. “What have you said?” my attorney asked as the door shut. He handed me the bag, and I took out the dark tee shirt. It was new. I yanked off the tags and slipped it over my head, ignoring the stale department-store smell as best I could.
“I’m not a moron.”
A smile cracked through his serious visage. “You know I have to ask.”
“I know.” It had been drilled in my head since I was a kid, learning to take over for my father, to never talk to police. We had our moles, here and there, but I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of Miriam since I stepped foot in the building. “When am I getting out of here?”
“Two or three hours,” he said. “I’ll work as fast as I can, but you need to leash your anger. You know they’ll say anything to keep you here.”
I knew that too. Unless they had Alfie stashed somewhere, I knew that they didn’t have anything physical to tie me to what happened at Efram’s loft. The only thing they had was a coincidence and a hunch.
Elias and I sat together for another thirty minutes before the same scowling investigator came back; this time accompanied with a woman smiling far too much for a Federal agent. “Hello, Mr. Vitali. I’m Special Agent Lewis. How are you doing today?”
“We can skip the pleasantries,” Elias said.
The smile dropped from her face, and I understood why they sent her. “Okay,” she agreed. Her voice was less bright now. “Your client is being charged with arson for the fire that engulfed half of the Bronx. The origin of that fire was tracked to a bomb set off in a loft, where we found two bodies. Neither of whom died due to fire-related injuries. It was the same type of bomb that was used to blow up Mr. Vitali’s property weeks before.” She slapped a folder dramatically on the table in front of us, and I had to fight not to make a sound of derision.
Someone must like to watch cop procedurals.
Elias shifted through the contents of the folder with disinterest. “And this proves what, exactly?” he asked, voice neutral. “That the same person who blew up my client’s building and killed sixty people also set this fire?”
“You don’t find it odd that a ‘storage’ building had sixty people in it at the time it blew up?”
My attorney stared at the investigators with a look of pure disdain. “I believe there is a rental agreement on file between Mr. Vitali and his tenant. How the tenant chose to use the space has nothing to do with Mr. Vitali. If anything, that makes him even more of a victim because the space was permitted as storage. He had no way of knowing that his tenant, who paid regular rent and never gave him any issues, had violated their agreement.”
I watched Agent Matthews’s jaw clench. “You really expect us to believe that?”
“It doesn’t matter what you believe,” Elias said and gestured to the folder. “You don’t have any evidence to the contrary.”
“You understand that you’re looking at life in a federal prison,” Agent Lewis said, directing her words to me.
Elias wasn’t having it. “You have no proof that Mr. Vitali was involved with either of these incidents. He is a victim of whoever built these explosive devices, not the perpetrator.”
The agents stared at us for a long time. I knew it was a tactic that they used: silence for long stretches. It built tension in the room, and for someone with a conscience, it gave them time to spin out in their own guilt. Unfortunately for them, I had been well trained to settle into such silences. Hell, I used them myself at times to get what I wanted.
“You want to know what I think?” Agent Matthews asked finally.
I was getting really bored, and the fabric of the shirt Elias brought me was scratchy against my skin. “Enlighten me,” I replied, and Elias tapped my arm without even looking at me, reminding me to keep my mouth shut.
“I think you hired someone to blow up your property so that you would have an excuse to pick a fight with the Russian Syndicate.” Agent Lewis’s eyes went wide, and it became clear right away that he said something that he wasn’t supposed to.
“Agent Matthews.”
He ignored her. “But you fucked up because you used the same person to go after Efram Volkov,” he continued. “Even worse, you left Efram’s body, thinking it would be destroyed in the explosion, at least enough that no one would notice that he’d eaten a gun shortly before he started to burn.”
He was panting hard, as if he’d just revealed some kind of smoking gun. This was laughable. “Do you have any proof tying my client to this theory of yours?” Elias asked. “Recordings of him calling out a hit? Money moved from his accounts?” When the agents didn’t say anything, Elias made a soft tsk -ing sound. “I think you and I both know that if you take Mr. Vitali in front of a judge, you’ll be laughed out of a court room, so why don’t we skip the embarrassment, and you let him go now.”
Agent Matthews looked at his partner. “Maybe Isabella will be interested in telling us the truth,” he said.
“You brought my wife here?” Red hazed my vision. Isabella, wrapped in a bed sheet with tears in her eyes, was in one of these interrogation rooms. Did she have clothes on? Was she being stared at by some other contemptuous bastard? “You are the biggest bunch of morons that I have ever met. If you do or say anything to her?—”
“Lorenzo.” Elias’s voice was sharp, but the two agents were already grinning and slobbering as if I’d offered to sign a confession.
“Why don’t you start talking to us, Mr. Vitali,” Agent Lewis suggested. “Before we have to charge your pretty little wife as an accomplice and put her in a cell. I’m sure she’d be very popular with the other inmates.”
I committed Agent Lewis’s face to memory. One day, I was going to watch the light fade from her eyes.