Witsec (34 page)

Sal guarding government property—what a joke. He bought this big Cadillac with some cash he got as a reward for testifying. We fought a lot about money. Sal had never been any good with it. If he had cash, he spent it. If
he needed more in Brooklyn, he just went out and took it. He couldn’t do that now. We had a budget, or I had one. Our relationship was a mess. All we did was fight, but to tell you the truth, I didn’t care. I didn’t love him anymore. I hated him. Before we left Brooklyn, I thought he was a good husband. Now I’d seen how Dan treated Carol. I saw normal people who were happy, you know. Not that there weren’t any normal people in Brooklyn—it’s just we never hung around them.

No one could find Sal. I rushed to the emergency room. I could see John. The doctors and nurses were working on him and then everyone stopped and I knew he was dead. Carol and her husband were there with me but Sal never showed up. He comes home late that night and he doesn’t even know what’s happened. He told me he was at work but I knew he was lying. Those next few days were hell. I would have gone nuts if Anna hadn’t flown out to be with me. We buried John in a cemetery in Rapid City. He didn’t even have his real name on the monument. Anna stayed on for a while. Sal was useless. Our daughter, Marie, was too little to understand. She’d ask me why I was crying and then she’d keep saying, “Where’s John?” Anna and I got real close again. She was out of the witness program and had gotten married to a really nice guy. She was working in a beauty parlor that she was buying. She told me she had gone back to Brooklyn without telling the marshals because one of her best friends was getting married. She said a cousin of Tony’s was at the wedding and he told her Tony had gotten sent to prison for life because of Sal and Tony
wanted revenge, but not against her or me or the kids. He tells her, “Tony ain’t like that. He ain’t gonna punish a man’s family, but Sal, he’s filth, garbage. Everybody in the neighborhood hates him for what he’s done.” Anna acted like she agreed and she played dumb when he asked where Sal was hiding. She got out of there because she was scared. As soon as Anna left Rapid City, I got real depressed again. I’d go into John’s room and just sit there and cry. Somehow I felt responsible. I kept thinking, what if we hadn’t left Brooklyn, what if I’d married a square, what if Sal had just toughed it out in jail?

Sal wasn’t coming home at all. A week would go by and I’d not see him. I was spending a lot more time with Carol. We decided to start a preschool where other mothers could drop off their kids. It was her idea, I just helped. Carol was the teacher. But I had a real knack with kids and enjoyed reading them stories. It made me feel closer to John somehow. One afternoon me and Marie were coming home from Carol’s house and the deputy’s car is parked in front of my house. I thought Sal was dead or had stolen something. Then I got scared because I thought something had happened to Anna. Maybe Tony’s crew had tracked her down. The deputy tells me Sal is gone. I said, “What the hell are you talking about?” He says Sal had come to see him and told him about Anna’s visit and how she had gone to the wedding in Brooklyn. Sal told the Marshals Service he didn’t feel safe anymore in Rapid City because Anna knew where he was hiding and she hated him. He wanted to be relocated. The deputy said the government was required to move him because me and Anna had violated his security. He said Sal had taken all of our money out of the bank. He says, “I couldn’t legally stop him because both of your names were on the accounts. Besides, this is all your fault for contacting your sister.”

I was really angry at that creep. I looked in the house and Sal had left the furniture. By this point, the deputy is acting strange and then he tells me Sal is being relocated with another woman. I ask, “Who?” and he tells me the name of this bitch I knew back in Brooklyn. At first I couldn’t understand how Sal got in touch with this girl and why him seeing her wasn’t a security violation and then it falls into place. Back when we all lived in Brooklyn and Sal was part of Tony’s crew, I’d heard Sal was messing around with this eighteen-year-old neighborhood slut named Rose. He’d been seen by a girlfriend of mine with her. I never said nothing but I was mad. Lots of Tony’s crew had girlfriends. They would take us wives out on Friday night and then on Saturdays they’d take out their whores. Sal swore he didn’t have no one like that.

The deputy tells me Rose was relocated with
us
when we was moved out to Rapid City! I said, “You moved her out here when you moved us?” He said they had to move her because they was afraid Tony would hurt her because she was Sal’s girlfriend. They’d tried to put her somewhere else, but Sal and she insisted on being together. All the sudden, all these things begin making sense—like where Sal was going at night, why we was short of cash, even where Sal was when John was killed and no one could find him. I lost it. I screamed at this deputy. I said, “You knew that bitch was here the entire time and you never told me!” I freaked out. He said Sal and Rose had left that morning on a flight. I am boiling mad. It’s like the government is giving them a honeymoon. I can’t believe the deputies brought that woman to Rapid City and dumped me here with her, and now Sal and this whore are like a prince and princess and me and Marie are all alone. I screamed: “Where’d you send them?” and he says he can’t say because Sal
and Rose are getting new identities. I’m so angry I can’t even talk.

He says I am going to be relocated. He doesn’t ask if I want to. He tells me I have to move because the deputies don’t want Sal to be able to find me. That’s how they do it when there’s a divorce. I start screaming again. I say, “How about Marie? Is Sal going to pay child support?” The deputy says he don’t know. He tells me, “Look, I don’t even know where Sal and Rose are being taken.” I tell him, “I’m not changing my name or Marie’s neither.” Then I started crying and he says, “Isn’t there someone you can call?” And that really puts me over the edge. I yell, “Like who? I’m not supposed to be talking to my sister, right? Just who in the hell am I supposed to talk to?”

I sold everything we owned. I didn’t want to keep a damn thing that reminded me of Sal. Get this, Sal took my great-grandmother’s ring—the one the Captain gave me. He stole it. Anyway, the deputy had me and Marie relocated. He said me and Marie could keep our names but he lied. We had to change our last names again. I didn’t care anymore about Sal. It was saying goodbye to John that hurt. I hate he is buried there and don’t even have the same name he was given. That wasn’t right.

The night before we left, I went to see Carol and I told her everything. I didn’t care anymore about the marshals and security and I figured I’d never see her again anyway. It was funny. She told me she thought something was weird about us, especially Sal, but they didn’t know the government hid people like that. I think she was afraid of me because when I went to go, she didn’t even want to give me a hug. I don’t know why I told her. I just needed someone to listen to me, I guess. I just needed to tell someone the truth. It didn’t change anything at all but I felt better.

I
had to explain to Marie why we had a new last name. I said sometimes people change their names when their mommies got married or when they moved to new towns. She was only five and she believed me. She asked about Sal, but not as much as I thought she would. He had never spent much time with her but she knew he was her daddy. After a few months, I began telling her Sal was really her uncle and he had moved back east. One day I told her her real daddy had been a pilot in the air force and had been killed. I told her he had loved her a lot but she probably was too young to remember him. She remembered seeing all the big airplanes in Rapid City at the air force base there so this lie made sense to her. It was what I was telling people in Phoenix, too—that I was a widow whose husband had died. Marie seemed to me to believe it. She thought Sal was her uncle and her daddy was dead. I didn’t feel bad about lying. Sal was a scumbag and I didn’t want Marie to
know anything about the mob and Brooklyn. That was behind me and her now.

We lived in an apartment and the deputy got me a job working in an office at the courthouse. I’d never really had a job and it was really, really tough at first. But the other girls who worked there were great and they helped me a lot. I started trying to lose my Brooklyn accent and I tried to become more like everyone else. I dressed like they did. I avoided talking about my past. I’d say my husband was dead and it was too painful to talk about and no one would hassle me about it. There were a couple of good-looking guys at the courthouse but I didn’t date any of them. I was afraid. I told them I still loved my husband. I remember when Marie was about ten, she was looking through old shoe boxes of photographs and there was a picture of Sal holding her and John in South Dakota. I’d kept it because of John. I couldn’t bear to throw pictures of him away but I thought I had got rid of all the ones of Sal. Anyway, Marie asked me who Sal was! She had forgotten completely about him in the five years we’d been in Phoenix. I was happy about that. I thought, “If Uncle Sam can lie about stuff, why can’t I?”

My sister, Anna, had a baby and me and Marie flew out east to visit them. I’d forgotten what big old cities are like. Anna said I should move back east to Philadelphia but I didn’t want to. Marie was doing really good in school and she seemed happy. I liked my job at the courthouse, too. Besides, I had started buying a house. It was old and small but it was mine. I was feeling good about myself, you know? Before, I only did what Sal wanted to do but now, I was doing what me and Marie wanted. When we got back from visiting Anna, someone had burglarized my house. I was pissed. It was like a rape. You felt violated. These bastards took a big jar of pennies from Marie’s
room. Stealing from a kid. I was really fuming and then it hit me like a brick in the head: Sal used to be a thief. When he was a teenager, he broke into lots of houses and stole things. I’d never thought about none of those things before. I never thought about the people who he stole from or beat up or whatever. I was ashamed of what he’d done.

The cops came and had me write this long list of everything stolen and a few days later, they called me. Some neighborhood kids had my stuff. They was trying to pawn it. I went down to the police station and my heart almost stopped. There was this metal box me and Sal kept papers in. I had my birth certificate in there—the one my parents got when I was born—and the real birth certificates for John and Marie, not the new ones the deputies gave us. I had some stories from the newspaper in the box, too, about Sal and Tony and how Sal was testifying. Sal brought them back when we was in South Dakota. I don’t know why I kept those stories but I had ’em in there. The burglars had broken open the box and I could see the birth certificates and articles were still in it. I thought: “Jesus Christ, the police got to be wondering why I got these certificates and articles.” This officer says to me, “Lady, is this here your box of documents?” and I thought about lying but I thought maybe that’s what they wanted me to do, you know, lie about it, so I said, “Yeah, it’s mine,” and he hands it to me. He hadn’t looked inside. I decided to burn them—the articles—when I got home, but I kept the birth certificates. I put them in an envelope in my closet. Jesus, that was a close call.

I started dating Ted when Marie was about eleven. He had been watching me for several years at the courthouse. He’s a lawyer but he was married back then so he didn’t really say anything besides hello when he saw me. One day this lady who worked with me in the
office said Ted’s wife had died. She had a heart attack just like that even though she was young. This lady says to me, “You should help him out with advice,” because everyone thought I was a widow. The next time I see him, I told him how sorry I was about his wife and he says, “Yeah, you know what it’s like,” and we started talking. In a way, I did know because Sal wasn’t dead but he was not in my life anymore.

Sal was a show-off, really loud, macho, and stupid. Ted was quiet and very, very smart and that really scared me because I only finished high school and I didn’t do good when I was a student. The first time Ted asked me out, I said, “Sorry, I don’t date,” and he says, “Let’s just have coffee, like friends, not people on a date.” I said okay. I remember thinking how kind he was when we talked. No one in Brooklyn I knew dated lawyers. He laughed a lot at my jokes. It was my way of throwing people off. I got a great memory for jokes and I tell jokes whenever I want to change the subject or if I start feeling uncomfortable around people. I started doing that in South Dakota. I used to answer questions by asking people questions back to throw them off. Another thing I did was ask people about their lives. Most people forget to ask about you once they start talking about themselves.