Final Stroke (27 page)

As Tony spoke, Jan recalled Marjorie’s funeral and how different he seemed from Max. Two completely different men with completely different goals. Not a pair one would expect to launch a devious plan together. She wondered if she should mention Max, perhaps say some thing about Marjorie’s use of “Max the fly” when referring to the “fly
in the ointment.”

After Tony hung up he swiveled his chair back to face Jan. “So, where were we?”

“You were saying your mother was sometimes paranoid about things at Saint Mel’s.”

“Right. She used to tell me stories about aides who steal things and sell them back. And perhaps some do. Perhaps she saw some
thing, or someone else saw something and told her about it. If that were true, and if your husband had some hard evidence … well, I guess it wouldn’t be hard for someone to get away with things at Saint Mel’s they couldn’t possibly get away with in the outside world. What I’m saying, Mrs. Babe—Jan—is maybe I’d like to pursue this. Not jump in with both feet, because both of us know we don’t have any
thing definite. Unless, that is, you’re holding something back.”

“No,” said Jan. “Not at all. It’s just like I told you. My husband has these feelings about things your mother said and I’m following up on it.”

He leaned back in his chair. “I’ve got to leave for a meeting, but I’d like to follow up on this. Where do you suggest we go from here?”

“I guess I should go back and tell Steve what you’ve told me and see if he has anything else to say.”

“I guess that’s the best plan.”

The way Tony sat there, waiting, she was certain he wanted to see if she would say anything else. Like he was the one probing for information instead of her. She decided to bring something up out of the blue.

“One more thing your mother used to say that my husband recalls. She used to mention Jimmy Carter a lot.”

Tony studied her for a moment before answering. It seemed he had been about to stand. He said he had to leave for a meeting, but
now he sat back and stared at her.

“My mother mentioning Jimmy Carter is both interesting and un
derstandable. Back in the 1980s, when I was a teenager, my father was a big Reagan supporter. This support often came out in tirades against Jimmy Carter and what a lousy President he’d been. He used to refer to the 1970s energy crisis and to Carter’s 1977 energy policy speech. You might not remember it. Carter talked about not being selfish and about providing a decent world for our children and grandchildren. He talked about our being the most wasteful nation on earth and how we needed to sacrifice for the good of the planet. He talked about oil companies profiteering. In my humble opinion, Jimmy Carter’s big
gest problem was that he was two or three decades ahead of his time.

“Yes, your husband might have gotten the impression through my mother that my father hated Carter. However, in later years, when I began publishing environmental articles, my father changed. He even told me once that Jimmy Carter had gotten a bum rap. He said our family—he was referring at the time to the organized crime family from the past—our family had been just like any political family. He said political families don’t care about the environment, and that their main interest is business as usual.”

Tony paused, pointed to a small poster on the wall. It consisted of the letters “BAU” in a circle with a diagonal line through it.

“A few months before his death my father took me aside. I’d done some articles on the environment in the school paper. He told me something he did not want my mother to hear. He said that during the Carter years an environmentalist and political writer disappeared under mysterious circumstances. At school I’d chosen this same profession as a career goal. My father told me he admired what I’d chosen to do but that he wanted me to be careful. He said when I turned eighteen he wanted me to carry a gun. He said he would give me one.”

Tony turned back and stared at her. “So you see, there’s always more than meets the eye. Even when you’re talking about a mob boss there’s always more than meets the eye. Do you know when my father was killed?”

“Somewhere in the mid-eighties?”

“He was killed days after the Chernobyl disaster. There’s been speculation that whoever killed him chose that date because it would diminish news coverage given to the murder. It’s an old mob trick. Kill one of your own when everyone is busy thinking of other things.”

“So you think it was someone in another organization who killed your father?”

“That’s the prevailing theory. But it could have been anyone.” He turned, pointed to the “BAU” poster. “Especially someone with a very tough business as usual attitude. In a way, I think that day my father took me aside he knew the end was near for him. Perhaps he even knew his killers.”

Tony seemed to come out of a trance. He stood, held out his hand. “But that’s enough for now. Sometimes I go on and I’m sorry if I did.”

She stood and held out her hand.

As Tony shook her hand, he said, “Again, regarding these notions my mother had about aides stealing things at the facility, what we agreed to do is for you to go back and tell your husband what I’ve told you and see if he has anything else to say. Please disregard that last part of our conversation about my father. And by the way, thanks to both of you for coming to the funeral. I appreciate it.”

She continued holding onto his hand, recalling for a moment how she held Steve’s hand while they spoke in order to help the conversa tion along. “Well, there is one more thing I should tell you. This is very difficult, but it seems your mother was unhappy for some reason
about your cousin Max.”

Tony pulled his hand away and stared at her, looking upset with her for the first time. “Did Max send you?”

“What?”

“I said, did Max send you?”

“Why would he send me?”

He continued staring at her, but appeared to regain his compo
sure. “Sorry, it’s just that my mother never cared much for Max, but always kept it to herself. It wasn’t like her to say anything negative about him. And if you ever spoke with Max, outside of yesterday at the funeral, you’d know he and my father were not on good terms. Max’s business is his own business. He was always fond of my mother, perhaps because he lost his own mother when he was a boy. And she was always good at covering up what she really felt about him. He vis
ited her from time to time at Saint Mel’s. But now that she’s gone, I doubt if I’ll see much of Max. I guess you gathered we don’t exactly share the same interests in life.”

Tony smiled again. “You certainly caught me at a weak moment. I’ve revealed more about my family than I should. Now I’ve got to leave for my appointment.”

CHAPTER

SIXTEE
N

While Jan headed south on the Tri-state Tollway in a
driving rain, traffic slowed to a bumper-to-bumper pace. Inching along in traffic gave her time to think. Not only did she wonder why Tony assumed his mother had bad-mouthed Max, she’d also been thinking about Tony’s big house and his hybrid car. On the way out to her Audi, even though it was raining, she made a point of looking fur
ther up the driveway. She’d seen a red Toyota Prius, and on the Prius was a bumper sticker, the same “BAU” with a line through it.

She thought about Tony’s environmental activities and his gay rights organization. Ironically, a lot of his activities these days were probably funded by his father’s organized crime ventures from the sev enties and eighties. She wondered if Tony’s father was rolling over in his grave or if he was happy with his son’s life. She thought about whether it would be wise to try to talk to Max Lamberti. Then, while wondering about how to find Max Lamberti and while looking at road signs, she visualized a map of the Chicago area and recalled looking at a map with Steve not long ago when they were trying to solve the
riddle of what Marjorie could possibly mean by the U.S. routes litany she had recited in rehab. Steve said the therapist had gotten out a map and been unable to figure out what it could mean. Then she remem bered that when she and Steve got out a map, she had written the rid dle down in her notebook.

Why hadn’t she put it together earlier? She’d gotten ahead of her
self, thinking about Max Lamberti instead of working with what she already had. If Steve were here he wouldn’t try to see Max because that would tip his hand. No, Steve would go with what he’s got. And she had almost let it slip through her fingers until she thought of Steve looking for details, always details, and trying to connect those details in a systematic, logical way.

The first detail was the Buster Brown jingle Marjorie recited from time to time. Steve told her Marjorie had two slightly different versions. In speech therapy the therapist named Georgiana had asked around in rehab trying to see if anyone knew which was the correct version.

“Hi, my name’s Buster Brown. I live in a shoe. Here’s my dog Tag. Look for him in there, too.”
Or was it,
“My dog’s name is Tag. He lives in there, too?”

It didn’t matter how the jingle went. What mattered was the man on the phone with Tony Gianetti. Tony had called him Buster, and the maid had definitely referred to Mr. Brown.

The next detail was Marjorie’s litany of U.S. routes. While traffic was stopped, Jan got out her notebook and found the litany.

“
U.S. 6 and 45, U.S. 30 and 50, U.S. 20 and 41, U.S. 14 and 94,

U.S.
14 and 45, U.S. 20 and 83, U.S. 30 and 34, U.S. 7 and 30, U.S. 30 and 45
,” and it repeated over again starting with U.S. 6 and 45.

So there it was, staring her in the face and she almost missed it. On the phone Tony had said, “Route 45 and 6,” and right now he must be driving in his Prius to meet someone named Buster Brown at that
first intersection listed on the litany of routes. It was too much for co incidence. Steve was right. There was something here. Something.

When the crawling traffic merged to the left lane and finally cleared the scene of a multi-car accident, Jan stayed in the left lane behind a limo and took the Audi up to seventy. Tony had said his Prius had rain tires. Months earlier, before his stroke, Steve had put rain tires on his old Honda and wanted to put them on her Audi, say
ing rain tires would go well with the four-wheel-drive. As she passed through the spray from a line of trucks, the Audi skittered slightly because she never did get a chance to purchase rain tires. While cor
recting the slight skid, she had a quick memory of the strong smell of rubber in a tire shop. Steve, days before his stroke, standing in the brightly lit store running his finger down the deep center groove of a rain tire on display, the deep center groove branching off to side grooves resembling arteries providing lifeblood to brain cells so they can think their crazy thoughts.

The intersection of U.S. Route 6 and U.S. Route 45, Orland Park, Illinois, was about twenty-five miles southwest of downtown Chicago. Jan had been to Orland Park several times, most recently with Lydia Christmas shopping last December at Orland Park Shopping Mall. It had been a few weeks after Steve’s November stroke and she hadn’t wanted to go, but Lydia had insisted. She remembered buying the new computer for Steve. She and Lydia had driven south of the Or
land Park Mall to a Best Buy. She remembered the Best Buy had been in another shopping center at the intersection of Route 6 and Route

45. All she could recall about the intersection was that it was busy and there were various shopping centers with huge parking lots and
numerous stores and restaurants and maybe a gas station or two on the corners.

A haystack, she thought. I’m driving to a haystack to look for a Prius I saw briefly in a downpour. And who’s to say that wasn’t the maid’s Prius and Tony has a few more in his multiple-car garage? But she drove on, exited the tollway and cut over on Interstate 55 to U.S. 45 south.

The rain had let up some, but traffic, as she approached Orland Park from the north, was heavy. Typical Friday afternoon shopping center traffic. Tony Gianetti had said he’d be to the intersection in an hour and a half. She wasn’t sure exactly when she left his house, but she was certain the hour and a half must be up by now.

As she wound in and out of the slow traffic she got in behind a motor home that was going fifty-five instead of the forty-five limit. The motor home reminded her of another drive to a vague location to find something not yet defined.

She and Steve had gone to Montana because they had gotten a lead that the cult her husband had once belonged to, and the cult leader who turned out to be responsible for his death, had settled on an island in the middle of a large lake there. Then, when the lead turned out to be a trap and they were almost killed, they went into hiding, posing as an elderly couple traveling in a motor home. They had even gone so far as to put on gray wigs.

She recalled how, during the four hundred mile non-stop drive across North Dakota, they talked about cults and missing kids and raids on abortion clinics. She recalled how it all seemed so unbeliev able, even more unbelievable than Marjorie Gianetti being murdered, until the missing ingredient was added. And the missing ingredient had been money. Ten years earlier, when they were posing as an elderly couple in a motor home, a cult leader with money and connections had
gone underground. At first it sounded like a scandal sheet story. But add the fact that years of fundraising by the cult and its thousands of followers allowed the leader to take millions of dollars underground with him, and believability no longer seemed an issue. And now, driv ing south to an intersection in Orland Park, was it possible a quarter billion dollars from a botched drug deal was at stake?

As she followed the motor home, she saw through its large rear window that a woman was making her way down the center aisle. The woman stood in profile, swaying with the motion of the motor home. An elderly woman, perhaps making coffee. Or was it a young woman dressed as an elderly woman? Who could be sure because that’s the way she and Steve had traveled from Montana to Minnesota on that wild trip so long ago. She had made coffee in the motor home after she put on the cruise control and Steve slid in behind the wheel and took his turn driving. She recalled that Steve had brought his violin along on the ride and, before making the coffee, she stood in the cen
ter aisle in back trying to play Steve’s violin, but was barely able to get out a couple of screeches.

“Ah,” Steve had said, “a melody from my homeland. An old folk song entitled,
My Foot Rests beneath the Wheel
.”

“Very funny,” she had said, putting the violin and bow back in the case. “Gangsters used to carry machine guns in violin cases.”

“I know,” said Steve.

She remembered turning on the counter light and firing up the motor home’s generator. She remembered putting two cups of water in the microwave and returning to the cab with steaming cups of instant coffee. She remembered placing the cups in the holders on the con
sole. She remembered bending and kissing Steve on his ear.

“I wish this thing had an autopilot,” he’d said.

“So do I,” she said, as she sat on the floor between the seats and
leaned her head against his hip.

Beneath the vast console of the motor home, the engine throbbed endlessly, and on the console the ripples in the cups of coffee had looked like bull’s-eyes in the greenish glow of the dash lights.

She remembered all of this, and felt tears come to her eyes when the thought struck her that Steve might not remember any of it.

The intersection was a traffic jam with multiple stoplights for shop
ping center parking lot entrances. She turned into one of these and slowly made her way through the parking lot for Best Buy and other smaller stores. All she could think of to look for was a red Prius. Any red Prius.

After meandering in the Best Buy parking lot, she worked her way back to the stoplight and crossed over to the shopping center in which a Target store was central. She spotted a small red car, but when she got closer she saw that it was a Ford. After this shopping center, she turned out onto Route 6 and waited at the intersection to get across to a large restaurant at the opposite corner. She drove around the back of the restaurant, thinking there was a chance Tony Gianetti and Buster Brown might have planned to meet for a business lunch. But there was no Prius and she crossed back over to the other corner where there was a bank behind a gas station.

Suddenly, there it was. In the bank parking lot, partially hidden by a dividing wall between the bank and gas station, was a red Prius with a “BAU” bumper sticker. When she negotiated the left turn at the intersection and got into the bank parking lot via the crowded side entrance road, she saw what she needed.

The license plate on the Prius was PP2000, which made sense since
the name of the gay rights journal Tony Gianetti had shown her was
Pride and Perseverance
,
Gay Rights in the New Century
. And parked next to the Prius was a Mercedes with license plate BBROWN.