Chương 6
“You never told me he bought it,” Lorenzo said.
“I did not know.”
“Does that bother you?”
“Everything about Enzo bothers me.”
At two fifteen, a lawyer arrived carrying a sealed envelope addressed to Lorenzo in Isabella’s handwriting.
Her attorney, Rachel Stein, was fifty-eight, silver-haired, and irritated by almost every man in the DeLuca office. She refused coffee, refused to surrender her phone, and refused to sit until Marco left the room.
“He stays,” Lorenzo said.
“Then I leave.”
Marco moved toward the door.
Lorenzo stopped him. “Why today?”
Rachel placed the envelope on the desk. “Because Mrs. DeLuca instructed me to deliver this if two conditions were met.”
“What conditions?”
“She died under suspicious circumstances, and someone attempted to replace you as head of your family’s principal business interests within ninety days.”
Lorenzo stared at her.
“You knew about the vote?” he asked.
“I received a call from a corporate attorney representing Matteo Russo this morning. He asked whether certain voting proxies held by your late wife could be transferred to an interim managing director.”
“Isabella owned no part of my business.”
“She owned nineteen percent of DeLuca Harbor Holdings.”
Lorenzo looked at Marco.
Marco’s expression confirmed he had not known either.
Rachel tapped the envelope. “Your father placed the shares in a trust when you married. Mrs. DeLuca was the beneficiary. Upon her death, the shares pass to her child. If the child predeceases her, they revert to a family trust controlled by three trustees.”
“Matteo?”
“One trustee.”
“The others?”
“Dominic DeLuca and Judge Francis Calabrese.”
Dominic was Lorenzo’s uncle. Francis Calabrese was the retired judge whose son controlled one of the seven captains’ territories. Both men had spoken at Isabella’s funeral. Dominic had kissed Lorenzo’s forehead and told him grief was a room with no doors.
Lorenzo felt the walls of that room close again.
“If Lucia is alive,” Rachel continued, “the shares belong to her trust. You remain voting guardian unless a court finds you unfit. If Lucia is dead, control shifts to the trustees.”
“Why did Isabella not tell me?”
Rachel gave him a look without warmth. “Perhaps the letter explains.”
Lorenzo picked up the envelope.
The paper had softened at one corner, as if Isabella had held it too long before sealing it.
Inside were six handwritten pages and a small brass key taped to the last sheet.
Lorenzo read the first line.
Lorenzo, if Rachel gives you this, then either I was wrong about your family, or I was not given the chance to prove I was right.
He stopped.
His eyes moved across the page while Marco and Rachel waited.
Isabella wrote that she had discovered unexplained transfers from DeLuca Harbor Holdings into companies connected to Matteo Russo and Dominic. She believed they were preparing to force Lorenzo aside by showing the captains that his legitimate businesses were failing. When she raised the issue with Dominic, he told her pregnancy had made her suspicious.
She had copied records and stored them somewhere only Lorenzo could access.
The brass key opened a safe-deposit box at a bank in Brooklyn Heights.
Her final paragraph was shorter.
I know what you will do when you read this. You will try to punish everyone before you know everything. For once, please choose the order differently. Find the truth first. Lucia will need a father more than the city needs another frightened man.
Lorenzo read that sentence twice.
Then a third time.
Rachel folded her arms. “Is there a child alive?”
Marco looked at Lorenzo.
He placed the letter facedown.
“There may be.”
Rachel sat without being invited.
“What does that mean?”
“It means the burial did not happen.”
“Where is she?”
“We are finding out.”
Rachel’s professional composure gave way to something more personal. She had been Isabella’s lawyer for eight years and, though neither woman used the word friend, had attended Lucia’s naming dinner and brought a knitted blanket no infant could safely use because the buttons were too large.
“Lorenzo,” she said, “you cannot handle this privately.”
“That is exactly how I must handle it.”
“No. A child has been abducted. Your wife was killed. Evidence has been manipulated. If you send armed men into a building—”
“We are not sending anyone.”
“Not yet.”
He said nothing.
Rachel looked at the letter. “She knew you.”
“She knew one version of me.”
“She knew the version that mattered when she wrote it.”
Lorenzo turned toward the window.
“What is in the safe-deposit box?” Marco asked.
“Financial records, according to the letter.”
“Anything connected to the fire?”
“She wrote this before the fire.”
Rachel checked her watch. “The bank closes at five.”
“The vote is at four,” Marco said.
Lorenzo looked at him.
Marco seemed to understand before he spoke. “That is why Matteo moved today. If he gains control before we open the box, he can challenge the records, alter access, pressure the trustees.”
“Can he take the shares?” Lorenzo asked Rachel.
“Not legally.”
“That was not my question.”
“He can create enough corporate confusion to freeze accounts, delay distributions, and argue that no lawful guardian exists if Lucia is presumed dead and you are declared incapacitated or criminally compromised.”
Lorenzo almost laughed.
“Criminally compromised?”
Rachel met his eyes. “Do not make me perform surprise.”
At three, Lorenzo and Marco drove to the apartment where the Bellini brothers had grown up. It occupied the third floor of a narrow building in Bensonhurst above a bakery that still sold sesame bread in paper sleeves.
Enzo opened the door wearing work boots, dark jeans, and a flannel shirt. He was three years younger than Marco and heavier through the chest. A pale scar divided one eyebrow. He looked at Lorenzo, then at Marco.
“You brought him.”
“He is the subject of the vote,” Marco said.
May you like
“He is always the subject of everything.”
The apartment had been restored without being modernized. The yellow kitchen cabinets remained. So did the dent in the hallway wall where Marco had once thrown a chair at Enzo when they were teenagers.
