3. Chain of Custody
CHAIN OF CUSTODY
VALERIA
The house tells me before anybody does.
At twenty to seven there’s one pair of boots outside my door. By five past there are three. The man who brings up the tray isn’t Tazio and won’t look at the middle of my face, and somewhere under the floor a phone has been ringing on a two-minute cycle since before the light came.
A sniper is a fence problem. Fence problems put men on the roof and on the water side and nowhere near a guest room on the third floor of the east wing. Three men on my door means whatever changed overnight didn’t change outside this house.
I’m dressed and standing when Lorenzo comes, which is deliberate, because a woman sitting down is a woman being visited, and a woman on her feet is a woman receiving.
“The medical examiner called at twenty to five this morning,” he begins.
“His heart stopped before the bullet.”
He stops with his hand still on the door.
“There are two findings that would put three men outside this room instead of six on that roof, and only one of them is medical.” My right hand is behind me on the bedpost, where it can shake without being interesting.
“If the tower had given you a name, you’d have gone out the front door with thirty men and not up my stairs alone.
So it came from Fountain Street, and the only thing Fountain Street could find overnight that rearranges this house is a finding that moves the death backward, in front of the shot. ”
“Go on.”
“A rifle at four hundred meters is a stranger’s weapon. Something that stops a heart is not. It’s the cook, the valet, the driver, the wife.”
“I had my mouth on your brother’s mouth for eleven minutes yesterday in front of four hundred witnesses, and by tonight every man downstairs will have decided that’s either the cleanest alibi in this county or the reason I never needed to learn to shoot.”
He doesn’t tell me I’m wrong, which is the first courtesy anyone has paid me since Thursday.
“Kelleher wants us at the county building at one,” he adds. “Courtesy briefing before she files.”
“Us.”
“Your hands were on him. She’d rather hear you than read you.”
Fabrizio catches me at the bottom of the stairs and puts a cup into my hands, half full, no sugar, with a splash of cold water in it so I can drink it standing up in under a minute.
“How did you know how I take it?”
“You drank four cups at the contract meeting in May and left three of them half finished because they were too hot to be useful.” He’s got his phone against his shoulder, running two conversations and my breakfast at once.
“Your father has called this house nine times since six, and I’ve lied to him beautifully.
I’d like it noted that I have never enjoyed anything less. ”
The county building on Fountain Street smells like floor wax and old coffee, and Dr. Anne Kelleher meets us in a conference room with a sleeve of vending-machine crackers in her cardigan pocket, wearing Thursday’s clothes, because she hasn’t been home.
“I’ll give you the shape of it before the report goes out.” She thumbs a folder open without looking at it. “The preliminary panel came back this morning. It’s clean. Everything we screen for, negative.”
“Then the finding stands on the tissue,” I offer.
Her eyes come up.
“The tissue stands on its own, yes. The cardiac muscle shows arrest with a chemical character. Contraction band pattern, and no occlusion, no thrombus, no infarct, nothing structural at all. A thirty-eight-year-old heart with a known condition and a very good cardiologist didn’t simply give out on his wedding day, and it didn’t die of a bullet it had already stopped bleeding for.
” She takes a cracker out of the sleeve and doesn’t eat it.
“Something told it to stop, and then it stopped being present in the body.”
Lorenzo hasn’t moved in ninety seconds.
“Say the last part again.”
“There’s nothing left to find. I can tell you what happened to the muscle. I can’t tell you what did it, and I don’t expect that to change with the full panel on Tuesday.”
And there it is, sitting on the table in front of three tired people.
“Then nobody bought this.” My voice comes out level, which surprises me.
“Everything you can buy shows up on a panel, because it was made in a batch, for a market, by people who needed it stable in a jar for two years. A thing that arrives, works on a schedule and then removes itself isn’t a product.
It’s two stages and a clock, and it was built for one man’s heart, which means somebody paid a chemist, and waited, and could afford to wait.
Your brother wasn’t poisoned, Lorenzo. He was the delivery date on a commission. ”
Nobody speaks for a while. Kelleher puts the cracker back in the sleeve.
Nadia Ferrante comes in at a quarter past two with the port file, in a good gray suit and white running sneakers, and she puts the Monday problem on the table beside the murder.
“The consortium transfer executes at nine on Monday. Seventy-two hours less some change.” She uncaps the highlighter she keeps behind her ear.
“Counterparty counsel has been on the phone twice since noon asking whether the D’Amato block will be encumbered by a live homicide investigation, which is lawyer for we would love an excuse.
If the marriage doesn’t stand up by Monday, the block splits, and the two families that were going to hold it together instead hold thirty-eight percent apiece and a border. ”
“Which is a war with a bank behind it,” I note.
“Which is a war with quarterly reporting, which is worse.”
By six the monitor bolted above the lobby security desk is running the local broadcast with the sound off, and my wedding photograph from Thursday morning is full frame, my hand on Giulio’s sleeve, both of us mid-laugh at a priest’s head cold.
The lower third reads BLACK WIDOW: THIRD HUSBAND DEAD.
They’ve used the same font all three times. I’d know it in my sleep.
My father calls a few minutes later and I take it in the stairwell, because the stairwell is the only room in a public building where nobody can watch your face.
“A car is coming. It’s ten minutes out. You’ll be home by half past seven, and you won’t leave the property until I decide.”
“No.”
“Valeria.”
“If I go home tonight, you and Silvio Corva start shooting at each other before Sunday. You’ll both be right, and I’ll spend the rest of my life as the reason.
” I put my forehead on the cold rail. “If I stay, both families have a reason to keep me alive until Monday morning, and I stay in the room where the information is. That’s the entire ledger. There isn’t a third column.”
“You’re talking about marrying the brother.”
“I’m talking about the only position on this board that isn’t a coffin.”
The line goes quiet, and I can hear him working through a roll of antacids twenty minutes and one whole life away from me.
“Your mother would never have…”
“My mother went down at a dinner table in front of me, and I did the compressions on her too. I was fourteen, and I was better at it yesterday.” My voice cracks in the middle of that, and I let it, because he’s my father and it’s free. “I have to go, Papa. Eat something that isn’t chalk.”
Lorenzo is waiting by the service elevator with my coat over his arm, because the lobby is a shooting gallery of telephoto lenses.
He puts me into the coat like a man defusing something, and where his knuckles cross the back of my neck, my pulse files its report, the way it did at the altar rail. Promptly. To nobody’s benefit.
The doors close. We’ve been in the same rooms for thirty-one hours.
He stands where he always stands, half a step ahead of me, on the door side, and I’ve been two days watching this man put his body between me and every opening in every building we’ve entered.
I turn and put both hands flat on his chest and walk him into the back wall of the elevator.
“Tell me to stop and I stop.”
“Don’t stop.”
“Then keep your hands down until I tell you.”
He does. He puts them flat against the paneling on either side of his hips, and he goes still, and he lets a woman his men have spent two days calling a murderer stand between him and the only door out of a steel box.
Something in the speed of it undoes me. He takes direction like a man who has practiced.
I get his tie loose and my mouth on the underside of his jaw, and the sound he makes goes straight down my spine. My hands go inside his jacket, up over his ribs, and he’s shaking as badly as I am, which is a piece of information I’d have paid money for this morning.
“Where do you want them?” His voice has dropped into something with gravel in it. “Tell me.”
“Here.” I take his right wrist and set it on my hip.
“And here.” The left, higher, under the open coat, flat on my ribs where he can feel exactly what my breathing is doing, and when his thumb moves once against the wire of my bra, I make a noise into his collar that I have no intention of taking back.
He kisses me like a man who has been told to wait and has finished waiting. He kisses the corner of my mouth first, twice, the corner, the exact place, and I don’t have time to ask about that before he opens my mouth with his.
“Valeria.” His hand fists in my coat and doesn’t go anywhere I haven’t put it. “Say it again.”
“Don’t stop.”
“Say the other thing.”
“Keep your hands where I put them, Don D’Amato, and don’t let go of me.”
He groans against my throat and obeys, and the obeying is the hottest thing that’s happened to me in a decade.
The car sounds its tone for the ninth floor.
We come off that wall like two people who have never met. He straightens his tie, I close my coat, and the doors open onto an empty sky bridge and a deputy at the far end who isn’t looking at us and wouldn’t care if he were.
In the car he checks his collar in the mirror and finds the print of my mouth on it.
“Leave it,” I advise. “It’s the least incriminating thing on either of us today.”
He laughs. It’s four seconds long, and it comes out of him like something being pulled. I laugh too, in a parking deck, on the day after his brother, and then we both stop at the same time and look out opposite windows, and the price of it arrives.
“I’m not going to apologize for that,” he offers.
“Don’t. Apologies are just interest on a debt nobody agreed to.”
The county returns Giulio’s effects to the house that evening in a paper sack with a signature block on the front, and Ottavia won’t have it opened in the dining room, so I take it upstairs and do it on the window seat with the inventory sheet flat beside me and my hand shaking less than it did yesterday, which I resent.
I write the county’s list down the left of a fresh page in the pad before I open the bag, because I want them in my hand and not in theirs.
Wristwatch, steel, cracked crystal. Cufflinks.
A tie bar. A comb. A handkerchief. A wallet with two hundred and forty dollars and a punch card for a bakery in Belmont with nine of ten squares filled.
Eighty cents in change. His phone, screen down, dead.
Keys. A Saint Christopher medal on a worn chain.
The fountain pen his grandfather carried, capped, dry, the one that was supposed to sign a civil registration and never did.
Eleven items on the list. Eleven items in the bag. Somebody did their job.
During the vows, twice, between the third promise and the fourth, my husband put two fingers against his own breast pocket the way a man checks that a thing he’s frightened of losing is still there.
I watched him do it. I was holding both his hands, and he did it anyway, so it was worth letting go of me for.
There’s no folded page on the list, and there’s no folded page in the bag.
The shooter was four hundred meters out and down a rope before the second casing landed, so that page didn’t leave Santa Caterina with him.
It left in a pocket, between the altar rail and a steel drawer on Fountain Street, and every single hand that touched my husband in that hour belonged to this family or to mine.