Playing Dead (16 page)

Last night, I’d done a little drunk Googling, unearthing a portrait of Anthony Marchetti worthy of a bad Hollywood script.

I found it on a website run by Horace Finkel, a native Chicagoan and twenty-four-hour plumber, who declared himself the “leading historical blogger of Chicago’s top ten crime lords.”

Marchetti’s primary racket before the slaughter of the Bennett family was flooding Chicago’s South Side with heroin. The blog casually linked him to ten gangland slayings and thirteen individual hits in the seventies, but nothing the cops (or Horace) could prove.

Horace painted Anthony Marchetti as a romantic figure known for striding down Rush Street in a black designer trench coat with a red scarf whipped around his neck and a seven-foot bodyguard at his side. Marchetti considered the red scarf to be a lucky charm because he was wearing it during a failed assassination attempt. Later he used a symbolic red scarf to strangle people who betrayed him.

It really didn’t matter if any of it was true. What mattered was that Anthony Marchetti was a man about whom it
could
be true.

I cleaned my face with a cold washcloth and scrubbed my teeth for five minutes to wash the taste of bile out of my mouth. I brushed mascara around green, slightly bloodshot eyes, applied a little base to smooth out the sunburn. It didn’t help.

I pushed away a brief recollection of Hudson and me tightly wrapped, dancing slow on the boot-scuffed floor to bad Santa’s off-key karaoke rendition of Garth Brooks’s “Friends in Low Places.” We’d left the bar around eleven-thirty and, when I refused to follow him to the Dallas hotel where he was holed up, Hudson ordered a large cup of thick black coffee to go and walked
me back to Daddy’s pickup parked in an open city lot near the courthouse. He watched me drink half of it before letting me drive off. No kiss. A good thing, I told myself.

My hair was already beginning to dry and I combed it and left it straight. I kicked aside last night’s clothes, tossed carelessly on the creaky wood floor, and made my way to the five-foot-tall dresser in the bedroom. The two top drawers had always been Sadie’s, the other three mine.

I opened the bottom one and moved aside a disintegrating homecoming mum, a crown with three rhinestones missing, and a half-full box of tampons. The cigar box hid out in the corner, under a pile of fading horse show ribbons, where I put it a week ago after finding it in a drawer in Daddy’s office. I lifted the lid, overwhelmed by the smell of tobacco and the ache of loss. I raked through the mementoes—cuff links, a few old photographs, a faded red handkerchief, a watch, Daddy’s silver U.S. Marshal badge.

My fingers rubbed over the words stamped underneath an eagle’s wings. “Justice. Integrity. Service.”

Sadie and I were too young to remember his career as a federal marshal. I always had the feeling it was a career path chosen for him by our grandfather.

Either way, Daddy never talked about those years. He didn’t talk much, period, about anything personal. As long as we could remember, he was the caricature of a Texas rancher. He hung his cowboy hat on the same hook in the kitchen every day as soon as he walked in the door.

He was sexist in the way that men of his generation could be. He didn’t touch dishes or fold clothes. He expected his dinner on the table at five sharp and all of us kids to be there, seated. We could get grounded for not making our beds with hospital corners. If he and Mama had a disagreement, we knew she’d always defer.

But he was always
there
. When Mama disappeared into her room or into her head, he remained present. A rock. If he favored one of us, it was me, not Sadie. We hunted, fished, rode—all with a comfortable silence I’d never achieved with anyone else. I dropped the badge back in the box and dug until I found the old snapshot I’d been looking for.

A little girl with long, messy blond hair sat on a Palomino horse grinning at the tall man in a cowboy hat holding the reins. He grinned back, his tanned face prematurely lined from years in the Texas sun. It had been a good day, but I couldn’t remember why. Daddy apparently thought so, too, or I wouldn’t be tucked in this box.

Why didn’t you tell me I wasn’t yours?

I slipped the picture into my back pocket for luck or comfort. Or maybe a little of both.

My phone beeped on the bedside table. An early-morning email from Lyle, with an attachment. Maybe he was able to clean up the image already.

Subject line: Sit down first.

I didn’t sit down or read the text of the email.

Instead, I clicked the attachment. Then I stood frozen as the screen filled with a tiny, lifeless form in Sesame Street pajamas, crumpled in a pool of blood.

I barely made it to the bathroom before I threw up again.

Hudson’s friend Rafael escorted me by my elbow through a seemingly endless gray corridor, my sock feet padding on the waxed linoleum. I’d been asked to remove my shoes and all my jewelry by the stocky female guard who’d frisked me, like a gentle massage. I almost wanted to tip her.

I couldn’t even remember the details of my half-hour drive
over from the ranch. The beginnings of a hangover headache, the nasty kind that lies on one side of my temple, pounded out the thump of my heartbeat. My stomach still rolled around like a choppy lake, in no condition to be up and about.

Still, I kept moving.

Move or Maddie could die like that little girl
.

“Hudson told you the drill, right?” Rafael slid his passkey through the slot of a heavy gate lined with black steel bars. “Stand two feet back from the cell at all times. You have ten minutes. Maybe less. We’ll see how he does. He’s been a good boy. Nice and quiet. We don’t want you to mess that up.”

Five identical cells lined either side of this block, usually used as a holding facility for prisoners destined for more dangerous quarters in the unforgiving state of Texas, where we boast the all-time record for legally killing people. The cells measured about the size of my walk-in pantry. A shiny stainless-steel toilet and a narrow built-in cot with a one-inch mattress took up most of the space, leaving no room for a morning session of yoga.

Every cell I passed was empty, a set of stiff, bleached sheets folded neatly on each cot for its next guest. It was colorless, freezing, claustrophobic.

I shivered. Even in the brief time I’d been there, I wanted to let out a scream. This was my idea of hell.

We stopped abruptly in front of the last cell on the left. Anthony Marchetti was already front and center, gripping the bars with clean, well-manicured hands, the faint sound of classical music, something familiar, drifting from the headphones on the empty cot.

I couldn’t place it.

“Hello, Tommie,” he said softly.

His icy blue eyes sent over a shot of electricity that I thought existed only in the pages of pulpy fiction. It shocked me, this demand
for immediate intimacy, the sensation of falling down a dark, infinite space. I had the bizarre thought that I was the one trapped, not him.

He did not look like an old man beaten down by life in prison. The faded newspaper picture had not done him justice. He’d grown more distinguished with age, his black hair threaded with gray, his lean, muscular six-foot frame a testament to prison workout facilities.

I knew from my research that he was remarkably well-educated for a drug lord, with a master’s from Northwestern’s prestigious Kellogg School of Management. Strap him into an Armani suit and he could slip easily into place as a corporate predator. But right now, I felt like his prey.

“They told me you were coming. Are you afraid of me?” he asked, with a slight Italian inflection. I tried to switch my expression from one of panic, but the muscles in my face did not cooperate.

I wondered for a second if he could see into me, if he knew that less than an hour ago, I’d gagged over the picture of a child he murdered.

Lyle’s email said it hadn’t been hard for his “technician” to sharpen the picture, just a little tweaking with Photoshop. The “technician” had also traced where the sender had downloaded the photo, a circuslike site that promised true crime scene pictures for a monthly rate of $19.99.

Alyssa Bennett, the little girl now stored on my phone, had 527,453 hits. She was the daughter of FBI agent Fred Bennett, whose entire family was slaughtered more than thirty years ago.

Madddog12296 was going to be trickier to trace, Lyle wrote. No luck on that yet.

Lyle never sugarcoated a thing, Daddy said. On balance, I liked that, but not so much right now, because I couldn’t get that
girl out of my head while Marchetti leaned casually against the bars, arms crossed.

Rafael, standing at my side, shifted uncomfortably. “Ask your questions,” he urged me.

The speech I’d practiced obsessively broke into fragments. “I want to know whether … you know my mother,” I began nervously, and started to pick at the dry skin around my thumb, a habit since childhood whenever I worked myself into a jam. I could tell Marchetti noticed, intent on making me as uncomfortable as possible.

“I have not had much opportunity to meet women in the last thirty years.” He gestured at the tiny cell.

“Your wife … Rosalina Marchetti says I’m her daughter,” I blurted out. “She wrote to me.” I reached in my pocket for her letter, the single thing the guard allowed me to carry through.

I held it out, now folded small and tight like a paper football. A symbol of my desire to bend and crease myself into something as tiny as possible.

“I need your help,” I told Marchetti. “I have to know if this is true.”

As I spoke these words out loud, it struck me how odd it was that I stood there pleading with a murderer, a stranger. He looked at me with something like pity, if that’s possible from a man who reputedly thought up a torture technique that involved water and electricity generated from his custom-made silver Porsche.

He glanced at Rafael, ignoring the piece of paper in my outstretched hand.

“Why did you let her in here? She’s a crazy girl, eh? As for Rosalina, she’s a liar. And a whore.”

He smiled tightly. “I’m done here.” And then, nodding at me: “Be careful.”

A threat? Or a warning? I couldn’t tell.

He moved away from the bars and fell back on the cot, turning up the volume loud enough for me to hear the strains of a sonata. He flicked his hand toward me like I was a bug in his face. Dismissed. I wondered how many lives besides Alyssa’s he had ended as casually.

“I’m sorry,” Rafael said, genuinely feeling bad for me, drawing me away.

The music hummed.

I could place it now.

Marchetti was listening to the third movement of Sonata in C Major, K. 309, which Mozart improvised in a performance more than two hundred years ago.

I knew this arcane detail because Mama played it on Sunday nights before Sadie and I went to bed.

Anthony Marchetti was toying with me, pulling me along his dark highway.

Sending a message.

We had reached the exit door at the end of the row, Rafael already sliding his keycard, when Marchetti’s voice traveled down the cellblock.

“Tommie.”

So commanding that I stopped and turned back.

“No time left.” Rafael’s hand was on my shoulder.

All I could see of Anthony Marchetti were his fingers wrapped around the bars of the cage.

But in the stillness of the empty concrete chamber, I could hear.

“Tell your mother hello,” he said softly.

T
ell your mother hello
.

You twisted bastard. Playing that sonata from my childhood
.

Tell me, Etta, was the picture of a dead little girl in a pool of blood not enough for the day?

Now I was talking to dead people. Why not? The live ones weren’t helping much. So far, Etta Place wasn’t talking back. A good thing. No bossy voice in my head but mine.

The green light on my cell phone blinked insistently as I walked to the truck, the sun rising over the top of the eight-story city jail, already promising another blistering ten hours. I looked at the list of missed calls. Seven of them. Four from Sadie and three from Mama’s nursing home. I glanced at my watch: 6:22. I immediately hit the “send” button on the last call. Sadie answered before I heard the first ring.