Chapter 8 - THE WIRE IN THE POCKET
“Open the door!” I gasped, lunging for the freight elevator buttons as the heavy cab began to hum downward. “Sal, stop the car! Corrado’s man has a gun!”
Sal didn’t hit the emergency stop button.
His weathered hand stayed firmly over the manual key switch as we descended toward the basement loading dock.
“Luca told me not to stop until your father was in the ambulance bay with the campus police,” Sal said, though the muscles in his jaw were corded like rope.
“They’re going to shoot him in that hallway!” I cried, my father gripping my uniform sleeve from the stretcher in alarm.
“No, they won’t,” Sal said, pulling his own cell phone out of his dark chauffeur’s coat and holding up the glowing screen for me to see.
The phone was on an active call.
Connected to a second cell phone currently sitting inside the breast pocket of Luca’s suit jacket—and patched directly into the speakerphone of Aunt Teresa Moretti’s landline back at the Gold Coast mansion, where all thirty engagement dinner guests, including two Cook County judges and the Alderwoman from the First Ward, were still waiting in the dining room for word of why the bride and groom had vanished.
I stared at the screen as voices crackled clearly through Sal’s speaker.
Upstairs on the third floor of St. Jude’s, Luca had turned his suit pocket into a live microphone broadcasting straight to the powerful men Corrado and Arthur needed most.
As the freight elevator reached the basement and Sal and I wheeled my father out toward the security desk where two armed hospital officers stood, we heard every word coming from upstairs.
“Where is the old man’s stretcher?” Corrado snapped over the speaker.
“On his way to a secure room under hospital guard, Uncle,” Luca’s voice came through, calm and resonant. “Just like Elena Conti and Matteo’s six-year-old son.”
Through the phone, I heard Arthur Bellini bark a bitter laugh.
“So you finally found out your sainted little brother had a bastard with a waitress,” Arthur sneered. “I told Vanessa four years ago when my investigator tracked the girl’s neighborhood that the Moretti family was rotting from the inside. Wait—how did Vanessa know about the boy?”
“Because I intercepted your investigator’s file four years ago, Dad,” Vanessa’s voice rang out clearly, stripped of every trace of fake tears. “Right before Clara Conti died. Because I knew what you did to people who got in the way of your shipping contracts.”
“Shut your mouth, Vanessa,” Arthur hissed. “Everything I did, I did to secure your future!”
“By helping Corrado cut the brakes on Luca’s car five years ago?” Luca asked.
Silence fell over the third-floor hallway—and over the mansion speakerphone miles away, where I could faintly hear the clink of someone dropping a silver fork onto porcelain.
“You’re delusional, Luca,” Corrado said smoothly, still playing the grieving uncle. “Matteo’s crash was a tragedy on an icy road. The state police cleared the garage.”
“Marco Valli didn’t,” Luca replied. “Before Marco died at Rush Hospital six weeks ago, he gave Sal the brake inspection order he forged the night Aunt Teresa broke her hip—along with the key to his safety-deposit box at Old St. Pat’s. Four hundred thousand dollars wired from a Cayman account to cut my brake lines before Monday morning’s audit.”
“Marco was a drunk chasing a payday on his deathbed,” Corrado snapped, his smooth voice finally fraying at the edges. “A dead mechanic’s word means nothing.”
“What about my brother’s pocket watch?” Luca asked quietly.
I held my breath beside my father’s stretcher in the basement lobby while the hospital security chief listened in stunned silence beside Sal.
“Matteo didn’t die instantly in that ditch, Corrado,” Luca said, and the controlled grief in his voice was devastating. “Sal reached him four minutes after the crash. Matteo gave him the gold watch my father bought him for college graduation. Inside the casing were the Cayman routing numbers you and Arthur used to skim the pension fund—signed by both of you three days before you tried to kill me.”
On the speaker, Corrado’s breathing turned ragged and sharp.
“That watch was supposed to be at the bottom of the Des Plaines River,” Corrado snarled, the gentle accountant vanishing completely. “Your father treated me like a clerk for forty years, Luca! I built those dock contracts while he handed the company to a twenty-eight-year-old kid and gave twenty percent to a reckless boy like Matteo who wanted to marry a diner waitress!”
There it was.
Broadcast live to Aunt Teresa, the family board, and two sitting judges back at the mansion dining table.
“And Arthur?” Vanessa’s voice trembled through the speaker, heartbreak cutting through her anger. “Did you know Matteo was in that car, Dad?”
“We thought it was Luca!” Arthur snapped before he could stop himself. “Your engagement wasn’t even planned five years ago, Vanessa! Once Luca survived and took over, merging the families through your marriage was the only way to bury the Cayman transfers before the federal maritime audit in November!”
“My whole relationship,” Vanessa whispered. “You used me to cover a murder.”
“Take the watch from him, Paul,” Corrado ordered his bodyguard coldly. “We’re leaving through the roof stairwell.”
Down in the basement, my heart stopped.
“Sal!” I cried, turning toward the stairwell door as the hospital officers unholstered their tasers and ran for the stairs.
Through the phone speaker, a scuffle broke out—the sound of heavy shoes skidding across waxed linoleum, Vanessa screaming Luca’s name, and then the unmistakable metallic clack of a pistol slide being racked in the narrow hospital corridor.
“Step back, Luca!” Corrado shouted. “Give me the watch and the key, or I swear to God you’ll join your brother right here on this floor!”
A sudden, deafening crash echoed through the speaker—not a gunshot, but the sound of double fire doors slamming open, followed by booming voices shouting, “Chicago Police! Drop the weapon now!”
My knees nearly buckled with relief against the side of my father’s stretcher.
Sal slowly lowered his phone, letting out a breath he looked like he’d been holding since 1992.
“How did the police get to the third floor that fast?” I whispered, staring at the old driver in disbelief.
May you like
Sal reached into the pocket of his dark coat and pulled out the small framed 1992 photograph—only the wooden backing had been slid open.
“Wait until you see who else was sitting at that engagement dinner table listening to Aunt Teresa’s speakerphone, Miss Emma,” Sal said softly. “Only before we go back up there, there’s one more person waiting outside in the pickup who isn’t who she told us she was.”
