Sweetheart

  SWEETHEART

  A Novel of Revenge

  by ANDREW COBURN

  a division of F+W Media, Inc.

  For my wife,

  Casey Coburn, and our brood,

  Cathleen, Krista, Lisa,

  and Heather

  Acknowledgments

  Ignatius Piscitello, the late Carl Velecca and Don Kiley, Mary Ellen Evans, Captain Joe Fitzpatrick, Norma Nathan, Ned Chase, Rosemary Ford, Peter Grose, Rose Moudis, and Peter Skolnik, for help past and present.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  Epilogue

  Also Available

  Copyright

  1

  IT WAS the heart of the winter in the western part of Massachusetts when two ski-masked youths, smelling of the hide and dung of cows, funneled through the bitter night and invaded the farmhouse of Santo and Rosalie Gardella. They were a proud and handsome couple in their eighties, with a youthful vigor that belied their age. Santo Gardella still had a wave in his white fluff of hair, and his wife was almost as trim as she had been as a young woman. Three nights ago, under a comforter of warm colors, they had made love. Now they stood threatened.

  “That’s all we have,” Santo Gardella said, spreading fifty-three dollars on the table. He had come to the United States at age eight and spoke English without an accent. His wife, who had a slight one, said in an honest voice, “We swear to you.”

  The youths sweated in their masks. The wood stove in the next room pounded heat into the kitchen, and the heat clawed at their clothes, melted the mess on their boots. They were brothers, and the sockets of their identical blue eyes were punched deep. They were quick of hand if not of mind, their weapons the raw knuckles of their fists. The bigger brother said, “Where’s it hid?”

  “Don’t make us ask twice,” the shorter one said, his nose leaking through his mask.

  Everyone in the rural town believed, correctly, that the Gardellas had money. The brothers believed, incorrectly, that it was squirreled away in the house. “Liar!” the bigger brother said when Santo Gardella tried to convince them of the truth, and the smaller brother spewed obscenities, mostly ethnic. The old man shot an arm around his wife and turned his face to hers with a helplessness that seemed to mock every year of his life, all but twenty married to her.

  “They’re going to hurt us,” he murmured, but she already knew that. Her eyes stretched up to his. Each wanted to protect the other.

  “Her first,” the bigger brother said, instantly pleased with his decision. “ ’Less you say quick where it’s at.”

  The other one, breathing through his mouth, said, “That old stove in there must be plenty hot.”

  “Do it!”

  The old man lunged. He never had a chance. The bigger brother had the kick of a horse in each fist. The old woman had no chance either. The smaller brother tore at her hair and spun her toward the stove.

  Neighbors heard nothing, there was no way they could. The nearest of them lived a half-mile away. Some thirty minutes later, however, a man named Silas Rogers chugged along in his pickup truck and saw fire clutching an upper window. In the moonlit night he also saw two youths scrambling into a Thunderbird, rusted and shattered at the edges.

  • • •

  Chunks of cloud filled the early morning sky, and the wind whistled over the small farmhouse, which stood shattered from the fire. The black remains of the roof gave off wisps of smoke. The cold air was acrid. A crowd had arrived, mostly in pickups and vans, but they kept a respectful distance, faces sharp with a mixture of curiosity and fear. An hour earlier an ambulance had taken away the bodies. Victims of a murderous assault, mostly fists and feet, according to the quick eye of the medical examiner.

  Detective Lieutenant Christopher Wade of the state police had been summoned in from a day off. He arrived in an unmarked car and was greeted by a trooper named Denton and a local cop named Hunkins. Placing his back to the wind, Lieutenant Wade said, “Was the motive robbery?”

  “Seems that way. Place was ransacked.” Trooper Denton tightened his fur-lined gloves. “We’ve got what you might call a witness.”

  Officer Hunkins, wearing a fur cap and a mackinaw, interrupted. “They sat the old woman on the wood stove and fried her ass. Can you imagine that?”

  Lieutenant Wade hiked the collar of his dark overcoat. He had a lean and faintly handsome face, deep-set greenish-gray eyes of a somewhat somber cast, and a rangy hard-muscled frame, which the quick cut of his coat accentuated. His terse yet unhurried manner made him seem controlled at all times, though at the moment he was wincing inside. Homicides of the savage sort never ceased to sicken him, and more so when a woman was a victim. It seemed a direct threat to his own wife and daughters. He said to Trooper Denton, “What witness?”

  “Man named Rogers.”

  “Silas Rogers,” Hunkins butted in. “He was driving by and saw the fire and two guys running to a car. Too dark to see their faces. This was like ten o’clock.”

  “There was a moon,” Wade said. “He must’ve made out the car.”

  “Says he didn’t.” Hunkins lowered the earflaps of his cap. His face was bluntly shaped, like the badge pinned to his mackinaw.

  “He still might’ve recognized them,” Wade said. “Maybe by their clothes.”

  “He was more interested in sounding the alarm. Good thing he did, otherwise there wouldn’t be a house standing there now.” Branches creaked in the wind, as if the nearby trees were full of doors. “Those suckers, you know, were stupid. They started the fire upstairs, and it never did get down. I found the Gardellas the way they left them. Turned my stomach!”

  Wade shifted his eyes, as if from a disturbing glimpse of himself in some inner mirror. His last murder case, three towns away, involved the rape and strangulation of a child. There were no witnesses and not enough evidence to convict the man Wade knew was responsible, and he had watched the man walk.

  With a swift glance at Trooper Denton, he said, “Where’s the witness?”

  Hunkins answered. “Home. I told him to stay there.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “Old Yankee, tight-mouthed, you know the type.”

  “The type that keeps to himself?”

  Hunkins shrugged. “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking he might’ve seen more than he let on. Possible, isn’t it?”

  Hunkins shrugged again. “Hell, I don’t know. That’s hard to tell. Hey!” he said suddenly as some of the curious began venturing onto the gray frozen ground of the front yard, bare except for a few fierce patches of ice. “What the hell do they think they’re doing!” With the flourish of an arm, he stomped toward them.

  “Takes over, doesn’t he?” Wade said from the side of his mouth and moved toward the house, Trooper Denton following. The smell of the damage was rank. Fire fighters had battered back the storm door nearly off its hinges. The inner door stood open a crack. Wade paused on the middle step and shivered. “I don’t like winter, do you, Denton?”

  “I try not to think about it, sir.”

  “Most murders are in warm weather. Suicides are for the cold. Nothing growing, nothing co
ming. More nosebleeds in the winter than the summer, did you know that?”

  “No, sir, I didn’t.”

  “Statistical fact. What did you think of the witness?”

  “Scared out of his wits,” the trooper said. “He wouldn’t talk to me, only to Hunkins.”

  “Why waste time?” Wade said, stepping up and reaching for the door. “We’ll give him a polygraph.”

  “Sir, if you go in there you’re going to ruin your shoes and freeze your feet. The floors are soaked.”

  “Tell me about it,” Wade said and went in, nearly slipping where the water had iced over near the threshold. There was blood in the water that puddled the kitchen and traces of more in the next room, where furniture was broken. The wood stove was hot, still pumping heat.

  Lieutenant Wade could not take his eyes off the stove.

  • • •

  Rita Gardella O’Dea came out of the ocean complaining of tar balls and tugging at her bathing suit. The Florida sun had baked and burnished her wide-boned face and nearly charred her shoulders. She had beautiful black eyes and was robustly overweight. Her feet left deep dents in the sand.

  “They were looking for you,” the towel attendant said as she approached her chair. Her drink, an exotic emerald-green concoction, quivered in its holder staked into the sand.

  “Who’s looking for me, Alvaro?”

  Alvaro, the towel attendant, was a youngish Cuban, perhaps thirty, with a close beard that lay hot against his handsome face. His neon-red swim trunks bore the logo of the hotel. Ignoring the stares of other guests, she placed her back to him, and he toweled it.

  “You had a telephone call,” he said. “There’s a number for you to call back.”

  “Must be my brother,” she said with small interest. “He’s the only one knows where I am.”

  “They said it was important.”

  She freed her fancy drink from the holder and took a slow sip. Then she said quickly, “Help me on with my robe.”

  She shared the elevator with three elderly women who, as if threatened by her size, shied away from her. She glanced at their soft, privileged faces and then ignored them. Knowing she could probably buy and sell them all gave her a sharp feeling of comfort, and when the elevator hummed to a stop she elbowed them out of the way. “This is my floor,” she explained, though it was theirs too.

  In her room, sitting on the edge of the bright bed, she talked with her brother, who, without giving a reason, wanted her to catch the next flight to Boston. Her hand tightened on the receiver. She knew by his tone that something was terribly wrong, something to do with family. “Is it Ma? Has something happened to her?” Her voice quivered. “Is it Pa? Tell me, Tony!”

  “It’s both of them,” he said.

  She was no longer on the phone, though still sitting on the bed, inert, pale through her tan, eyes snapped shut, when someone slipped surreptitiously into the room and marked time with even breaths. Her eyes fluttered open, worked to focus, and saw the slim, straight waist of Alvaro. Sensing tragedy, he sat quietly beside her.

  She said, “Pack my bags.”

  “Why? Where are you going?”

  “Do as I say,” she said and pushed him aside as though he were a child.

  “Rita, be good.”

  She reached out and pretended to shoot a gun. “Someone’s going to pay.”

  • • •

  Anthony Gardella lived in a high brick house in Boston’s Hyde Park, well away from his businesses. His first wife had died four years before, and his second wife, considerably younger than he, was vacationing in the Caribbean with her mother. His children, two sons, no longer lived at home. The younger one was a senior at Holy Cross and the older was in the Marine Corps. Gardella stood in the front room with a small glass of Saint Raphael in his hand, several of his people hovering near him. They were ready to weep for him, wait on him, and do for him in other ways. In his tailored charcoal-gray suit he was a courtly presence among them and an object of respect. At age twenty-one, down in Providence, he had received a pat on the head and a kiss on the cheek from Raymond Patriarca, and when he had turned forty, Don Peppino, better known as Bananas, had honored him with a birthday card from Tucson. Here in Boston, four or five times a year, he broke bread with Gennaro Angello, whose blessings meant more than a priest’s.

  Abruptly he laughed. The sound was low and ugly. “I still can’t believe it,” he said, and the others fidgeted. His grief, bound inside him, expressed itself only in the tight set of his jaw. “Names,” he said in an undertone. “I want names.”

  His close friend and right-hand man, Victor Scandura, said, “You’ll get them.”

  Murmurs of support rose up.

  Scandura eased forward, a slight figure with vanishing hair and gold-rimmed spectacles that seemed screwed into the gray flesh of his face. He could smile and repel people. “Do you want me to handle it personally?”

  “Yes,” Gardella said, the ice faintly rattling in his drink. “Don’t disappoint me.”

  “Have I ever, Anthony?”

  2

  IT WAS a Monday morning, a freezing day with a glaring sun; snow was predicted for Boston by nightfall, which did not bother Russell Thurston at all. He took things as they came and, when possible, capitalized on them. He was situated in a remote space in the Kennedy Building in the heart of Government Square, his office a comfortable cubicle overlooking several desks jammed into a narrow room. He was tall and sober-looking, with faded brown hair combed flat to one side and with neutral gray eyes buttoned into a parched face that rarely revealed his deeper feelings, not even now when an excitement was building in him.

  He shouted for his assistant, Blodgett, but was answered by a man named Blue, the only black on a special team of agents under his supervision. He was occasionally civil to Blue but more often glib. Blue appeared in the doorway, slender, quite dark, meticulously groomed, as if his field were international banking, not investigation.

  “Where’s Blodgett?” Thurston demanded.

  “He’ll be back in a minute.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “He’s in the head.”

  “Get him.” Thurston watched Blue turn away and take two steps. On the third step, Thurston said, “Blue!”

  Blue returned to the doorway and placed a foot back inside the cubicle. “What is it?” he asked, and Thurston smiled cryptically.

  “You take a lot of crap from me. Ever ask yourself why?”

  “Never.”

  “Ever wonder why I picked you specially for this unit?”

  “Because I’m smart.”

  “That goes without saying. What’s the big reason?”

  “I figure you’ll tell me sometime.”

  “I’ll probably let you figure it out yourself.”

  “I’ll get Blodgett,” Blue said.

  “Do that.”

  Alone, Thurston swiveled in his chair to stare through the single window at Boston’s frigid sky. He had never regretted his assignment here. He relished the charms and contradictions of the city, the sedateness of much of its architecture and the eccentricity of its streets, the incestuousness of its neighborhoods and the corruptness of its politics, and he found a challenge in the anarchy of its traffic. He delighted in occasionally breakfasting at the Ritz and lunching at Maison Robert in a city small enough to rub elbows with venerables like Archibald Cox, rumpled Brahmins like William Homans, and vulnerable beauties like Joan Kennedy. His biggest wish was for them to recognize him.

  For many minutes his mind had been dwelling on the possible means to make that happen.

  He turned back to his desk, rummaged in a drawer, and came up with a pair of shears. Carefully he scissored a double-column story out of the Boston Globe and laid the cutting in front of him. He had read it before, and now he read it again, slowly, savoring each sentence and pausing after each paragraph to reflect. Then his eyes returned to the headline. Elderly Greenwood Couple Slain. He could scarcely believ
e his luck.

  “Where’s Greenwood?” he asked when Blodgett appeared. Blodgett ruminated.

  “Western part of the state, I think. Somewhere near Lenox and Lee. God’s country.”

  “Your geography’s good. Read this.”

  Blodgett sat in a chair to read the article. He was stocky and square-shouldered and had a businessman’s close-cropped haircut. The hair was blond, the face bland. His head tilted. He was a deliberate reader, which soon taxed Thurston’s patience.

  “Skip down to the end. The survivors. Son, Anthony. Daughter, Rita O’Dea.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Blodgett said, his eyes absorbing print. “Tony Gardella’s mother and father.”

  “You’ve got it. What else do you get?” Thurston’s voice was sharp. “Think, man, think!”

  Blodgett thought hard. His smooth forehead dominated his face, and his mouth pressed in on itself. He was slow to lift his gaze. “It means Gardella’s going to want the blood of the bastards who did it.”

  “Keep going.”

  “Give me a second.”

  Thurston’s smile was smug and fixed. He had his elbows on the desk and his unusually long hands fisted together under his chin. “Take your time on this one.”

  “We make it easy for him?”

  “That’s only the beginning. That’s how we sucker him in.” Thurston moistened his lips as if he had the special spit of a snake. “I’m going to make opera out of this. A big cast of villains. A grand production. You keeping up with me?”

  “You’re going too fast.”

  “I’m thinking big. That’s what you’ve got to do if you ever want my job.” Thurston’s mind raced on. “Who’s Wade? Do you know him?” Blodgett didn’t, and he began to read the cutting again. Thurston said, “Get me a rundown on him. Says there he’s a lieutenant, so he probably took the course at Quantico, which gives us a hook. I want to know all about him. Personal stuff. A complete profile.”

  Blodgett was nonplussed. “Why him?”

  “Because I’ve got a hundred thoughts buzzing in my head right this minute, and that’s the best of them. Get working on it. Blue can help you.”