Impulse (7 page)

“Be quiet, my boy, and enjoy what Coco’s doing for you.”

“I want to talk to those goons first thing in the morning, Dominick.”

“Fine,” Dominick said just as Coco probed deep and long and Marcus moaned.

Marcus spent a quiet night, heavily drugged, but he awoke to loud shouts early the following morning. He was struggling to get out of bed when his bedroom door opened and Link stuck his head in.

“Mr. Giovanni told me to make sure you stayed put. The Dutchmen poisoned themselves.”

Marcus fell back against the pillows. “They’re dead?”

“Deader than week-old mackerel.”

Margaret’s Journal
Boston, Massachusetts
July 1986

I just kicked Gabe Tetweiler out of our house. God, I can’t believe I could ever be so wrong about a person, about a man in particular. Which sounds excessively dumb, doesn’t it, after Dominick Giovanni. But he was so sincere and appeared to be so rich, and that being the case, of course he wasn’t interested in my money.

Will I be a fool for the rest of my life, Rafaella?

You can’t answer that, of course, my darling. You won’t ever see this. You’re ten years old now, a skinny little kid and so bright it sometimes scares me. I’m no intellectual giant, God knows, and here you are as bright as the sun, as your teacher, Miss Cox, likes to say. It’s from him; I guess I’ll just have to admit it. Miss Cox also says you’ve got a real smart mouth, which I’ve mentioned to you. I tried to tell her that your one-liners are quite astounding for a ten-year-old. Dominick was amusing too, when he chose to be. His was a dry wit, I suppose you’d say, unlike yours, which is straightforward, open, guileless. His was also cruel, now that I remember it.

I guess I’d forgotten just how smart Dominick was.

He was brought before a Senate committee some weeks ago on an organized-crime probe. Senator Wilbur from Oregon spearheaded it. He wasn’t very bright. Dominick made him look like a fool. He looked so calm and controlled, but I could tell by his eyes that he was angry. Here I go again on Dominick! But sometimes it’s tough not to, because every time I look at you, Rafaella, I see his pale blue eyes. I’m so glad your hair isn’t dark like his. No, you have such lovely titian hair, like your grandmother’s, not like his or like my light hair.

I digress. I was meaning to sort out my stupidity with Gabe.

He was sincere. He was a good talker. He was an even better lover. You hated him. I realized that, but I didn’t want to see it, to accept it. And of course you were right.

He wasn’t after my money, I was right about that. He was after you, which makes me want to slit his throat. I don’t understand why you never said anything. You just turned sullen whenever he was around, and were so rude when you had to speak to him that I wanted to smack you.

But you knew. You felt he wasn’t right. Ah, I’m sorry, Rafaella. Please forgive me. I’ll never forget this night, never so long as I live. I wonder if you will. You didn’t cry, you didn’t reproach me at all. I wonder if I will ever understand you properly. There that bastard was, in your bedroom, trying to fondle you, and you were fighting him, so silent you were, not screaming, not making a sound, just fighting that bastard with all your strength.

I realize now why he didn’t wait. He knew, guessed, that I was drawing back, and I guess he is so ill that he couldn’t help himself.

He’s gone now. I’ve decided to hire a private detective to follow him. I want to know where he goes. I’ve decided to ruin him. It finally occurred to me that I’m very, very rich. And money can buy lots of things, like revenge. What do you think about that, Rafaella? Revenge tastes sweet. How I wish I had taken my revenge upon Dominick. Maybe that would have put it all to rest. Now he’s so far out of my reach. Perhaps he was already far out of my reach ten years ago.

Do you know that he still looked so handsome on TV that I wanted to cry? How about that for a fool of a mother….

Gabe’s gone but I’ll find him and I’ll make him pay for what he tried to do to you. And to me.

And Dominick? I pray he will meet a rotten end, but
I have become a cynic now and I tend to doubt—divine intervention in particular.

I hope you will get over this thing, Rafaella. I’ve tried to talk to you about it. Please don’t freeze up on me, don’t repress this thing.

It’s been over ten years and still Dominick haunts me. I’ve not written about him all that much, have I? Not more than perhaps fifteen percent of all my pages? Not more, truly. All right, then, maybe forty percent of my pages. Obsession perhaps? No, it isn’t true. It’s simply a deep hatred of a man with no moral instincts in his makeup, a man with no compassion, no empathy, a man who is completely and utterly immoral.

No, please, I mustn’t still hate him. The whole purpose of this journal was to excoriate him, then to expunge him, to keep his ghost from touching you by cleansing myself of him. Lord, he doesn’t even know your name, or mine for that matter. He never cared enough to find out.

I wonder if he ever got his precious son. I wonder if he’s got six precious sons. God, am I stupid. Here I’ve been talking about hiring a detective to get Gabe when I could hire a detective to get me all the information I ever wanted about Dominick Giovanni.

Wait. Is that sick of me? Is it an obsession? I must think about it, truly think about my motives. What should such information mean to me? He’s nothing to me save the man who betrayed me, who took my innocence—doesn’t that sound Gothic?—the man who made me feel like dirt.

The bitterness is still there, deep and grinding. And now another man has betrayed me. One a man who didn’t want you in any manner whatsoever, the other a man who wanted to molest you, a child. I have failed you twice, my darling Rafaella. I promise it will not happen again.

The Bridges
Long Island, New York
February 2001

Rafaella closed the journal, slowly fastening the clasp. It was a particularly fine Spanish red leather, intricately tooled, and just as finely locked.

And she’d picked the lock. This was the second volume on which she’d picked the lock. She closed her eyes a moment, leaning back against her mother’s desk chair, the chair Margaret had very probably sat in to write in her journals since she’d married Charles Winston Rutledge III some eleven years before.

Rafaella had come into her mother’s room several hours before, looking for some stationery, and searched through her desk. She’d found the stationery and she’d also found the small latch that, when manipulated properly, released two hidden drawers. And in those two drawers she’d found the journals. She’d never known they existed. She’d hesitated only briefly, then begun reading.

Rafaella remembered the phone call that had jerked her awake at midnight. Her stepfather, Charles, sounding calm and controlled, but Rafaella could make out the underlying fear and anxiety.

“Your mother was struck by a drunk driver, Rafaella. You must come right away. The doctors don’t know. She’s in a coma. They don’t know.”

His voice had broken and Rafaella had stared at the phone.

“No,” she whispered.

Charles, drawing in his breath, regained his poise. “Come right away, my dear. I’ll have Larkin meet you at JFK. Catch the seven-
A.M
. flight, all right?”

“She’s alive?”

“Yes, she’s alive. A coma.”

Her mother was still in a coma two days later. Peaceful, her face not older, but strangely youthful,
her lovely pale blond hair combed and fastened with barrettes behind her ears. And all those damnable lines running in and out of her arms.

So quiet. Her mother lay there, so very quiet.

“Rafaella!”

It was Benjamin, her stepbrother, calling from the hallway.

“Just a moment,” she called back. She rose stiffly, carefully laid the journal back in the desk drawer, re-locked it, and went to have dinner with the family.

Pine Hill Hospital
Long Island, New York
February 2001

Rafaella sat on one side of her mother’s bed, Charles on the other. She was looking at her mother, but her thoughts kept returning to the newspaper clippings that had been stacked in neat piles in one of the secret drawers. So many photos, some grainy, others quite clear. And she couldn’t stop telling herself over and over that her real father was a man whose name was Dominick Giovanni, and he was a crook.

Her mother was lying in a private suite in the east wing of the private hospital, Pine Hill. The decor reminded Rafaella of the suite she’d stayed in once at the Plaza—muted colors, and very expensive. Except for the regulation bed, the slender tubes in her mother’s nose, and the lines in her arms, her mother could have been sleeping. They’d been here, sitting quietly, for nearly a half-hour now.

Rafaella’s stepfather, Charles Winston Rutledge III, was the quintessential WASP, old money, prep school at Bainbridge followed by Yale, a wealthy entrepreneur in his own right. Odd that he had eyes very nearly the color of hers—pale blue—when she now realized that it was also the color of her real father’s eyes. Mrs. McGill had been wrong about Dominick
Giovanni being pure Italian. Those pale blue eyes had to have come from a more northern country.

There was only one other similarity between the two men besides the color of their eyes. Dominick Giovanni and Charles Rutledge were nearly the same age. Only a year separated them, Dominick Giovanni being the older.

“You’re very quiet, Rafaella.”

She jumped at the unexpected sound of Charles’s voice. It was pitched low, just above a whisper, so as not to disturb her mother, which was absurd, since her mother was in a deep coma.

I was just thinking about my father, who’s a criminal.
Rafaella wasn’t about to tell Charles of her discovery. It would be needlessly cruel. He loved her mother, and the knowledge of her mother’s journals, her seemingly endless obsession with Dominick Giovanni, would give him incalculable pain. No, Rafaella wouldn’t tell him a thing. “I was just thinking about things. I’m scared, Charles.”

He simply nodded. He understood, too well. “I spoke to Al Holbein. He called yesterday to see how Margaret and you were doing. He told me about you breaking that Pithoe case in Boston. He said it was par for the course—you were bright as hell and tenacious as a pit bull—but a cop, Masterson is his name, is trying to take all the credit, which, Al says, isn’t working, but is also par for the course.”

“Actually all the credit should go to a little old Italian lady named Mrs. Roselli.”

Charles cocked a beautifully arched brow at her. “Tell me about it.”

Rafaella smiled. “Al called me in and assigned me to the case. I didn’t want it. The press had sensationalized it, and it was particularly gruesome. And nobody really cared anymore, because the crazy who had done it—Freddy Pithoe, the son—had confessed right away. It just gave the media a chance to do another dance
on Lizzie Borden again. But you know Al, he got me going, made me so mad I wanted to slug him. He didn’t say a word about any anonymous tip he’d gotten, and of course he’d gotten one—from Mrs. Roselli. When I asked her later why she hadn’t told the police what she’d told Al, she said that the snot-nosed kid they sent had no manners and treated her like a
strega stupida.
Why should she say anything to a snot-nosed kid with no manners who treated her like a stupid witch? I had no answer for that.

“I then asked her why she’d told Al. She said that he’d done a series about ten years ago on the Italians in Boston and he’d mentioned her husband by name and written what a fine man he’d been. Guido Roselli had been a fireman killed in a runaway fire in the South End. She pulled out the yellowed clipping and read it to me.

“She told me too that she didn’t really like Freddy. She thought he was weird. It was the boy, Joey, she cared about.”

“Yet she cleared Freddy and showed the boy to be the guilty one. Interesting.”

Rafaella nodded.

“Why do you think Freddy Pithoe opened up to you? Was he another Mrs. Roselli?”

Rafaella gave him a crooked smile. “He told me over and over, when I asked why he hadn’t told the police about X or about Y, that they’d just called him a
fucking liar
—excuse the language, Charles—and told him to shut up. I listened to him and didn’t comment until I realized he wasn’t telling me the truth; then I kept after him until both of us were hoarse.” She raised her eyes to the ceiling. “Thank you, God, for Mrs. Roselli.”

“What will happen to the boy, Rafaella?”

“Hopefully he’ll get into a decent foster home and have a very good shrink.”

“And Freddy?”

“I spoke to Al. He promised to find a job for Freddy on the paper. He’ll be all right. Freddy’s one of the walking wounded, but he’s also a survivor.”

Charles fell silent. Rafaella watched as he carefully lifted her mother’s hand and kissed her fingers. Rafaella wished at that moment that Charles, kind, handsome Charles, was her father. But he wasn’t her father. Neither was her father a man named Richard Dorsett, a physician who’d been killed in a freak car accident.
A very brave man, a very good man.
All a lie. She should have realized it was a lie so much sooner—because she didn’t carry his name. She carried her mother’s. She remembered her mother explaining that to her, and since she hadn’t really cared, since that shadowy man had never been real to her, she’d paid little attention.

She wondered if there were a man whose name was Richard Dorsett. If there were, he’d sure be a better father than her real one was.

Her father was a criminal. There were six and a half journals covering twenty-six years. Rafaella had looked to see the last entry. Her mother hadn’t written a word since November. Was it possible that Charles knew about the journals? About Dominick Giovanni? She shook her head. No, her mother would protect him from that, just as Rafaella would.

She was nearly halfway through the third journal and she itched to get back to them. She looked down at the five-carat marquise diamond on her mother’s left hand, a gift from a man who loved this woman more than he loved himself, more than he loved his own life. She wished she could talk to him, pour out her fear to him, her questions. But she mustn’t.