Chapter 3 - Blood on the Ledger
Marco Moretti was seventy-four years old, had silver hair clipped so close it showed the pink skin of his skull, and still wore the bespoke charcoal overcoats he had favored when he ran the West Side numbers racket during the Carter administration. He was sitting in my high-backed leather wing chair in the library, a crystal tumbler of my twenty-five-year-old Macallan resting on the armrest, his silver-tipped cane balanced between his knees.
Behind him stood two thick-necked men in dark wool suits who didn't look at the leather-bound books or the oil paintings; their eyes stayed fixed on the three doorways leading into the corridor.
“Gabriel,” Marco said, not bothering to rise. His voice had the dry rattle of dead leaves being scraped across a concrete sidewalk. “You keep your guests waiting like you’re the governor. A man reaches fifty-one, he ought to have the decency to come down and let people see he’s still breathing.”
I didn't take the seat across from him. I walked behind my desk, picked up the silver letter opener, and turned it over in my fingers. Dante stepped into the room behind me, closing the oak door until the latch clicked shut with a sound like a small rifle bolt.
“You’re out of your district, Marco,” I said evenly. “The agreement we signed in eighty-nine said your people don't cross the Des Plaines River unless there’s a wedding or a funeral.”
“Maybe this is both,” Marco whispered, his thin lips stretching into a smile that showed yellowed teeth. He reached into his coat pocket with agonizing slowness, ignoring the way Dante’s right hand drifted toward the holster under his left armpit. He pulled out a folded document printed on old legal ledger paper—the blue-lined kind that hadn't been manufactured in thirty years.
He laid it on the edge of the mahogany desk.
“What is that?”
“Your brother’s signature,” Marco said.
The room grew so cold I could hear the electric clock on the mantel ticking against the wood.
“Julian never signed anything with you,” I said, every muscle in my neck locking into place. “Julian would have set his own arm on fire before he sat in a room with your father or you.”
“He didn't sign it with my father,” Marco said, tapping the paper with his bony fingernail. “He signed it with the federal prosecutor in Chicago three days before he went into the river. He gave them the shipping manifests from sixty-two to eighty-one. Every crate of machine parts, every shipment of scrap metal that had twenty percent copper mixed into the bill of lading. He was going to put your father, my uncle, and half the city council into Terre Haute for the rest of their natural lives.”
I didn't touch the paper. I knew every word that was on it without reading. It was the file my father had spent two million dollars to make disappear from the clerk’s office in the Dirksen Federal Building twenty-four hours after Julian’s funeral.
“Why bring this here tonight?” I asked. “Julian’s dead. The prosecutor died in an airplane crash in ninety-four. The paper is garbage, Marco. It’s antique stationery.”
Marco leaned forward, his watery grey eyes narrowing until they were like slits in an old turtle’s hide. “Julian didn't act alone, Gabriel. He had a partner. Someone who worked the inventory sheets in the south warehouse. Someone who kept the carbon copies in a metal strongbox under the floorboards of the Kelly house on Loomis Street.”
My fingers tightened around the letter opener until the brass edges dug into my palm.
“Thomas Kelly,” Marco said softly. “He died of smoke inhalation three years ago, they say. Very tragic. A grease fire in a repair shop. But his daughter... his daughter took that box before the fire trucks even turned the corner off 18th Street. And my people have been looking for that box for thirty-six months.”
May you like
He took a slow sip of the Scotch, savoring the burn, then pointed his cane toward the floor.
“Imagine my surprise when my nephew tells me he saw Thomas Kelly’s girl carrying a laundry basket across the courtyard of the Valenti estate yesterday morning. You’re keeping my retirement fund in your basement, Gabriel. And you didn't even know it.”
