An Offer He Can't Refuse (47 page)

"You're Nobody Till Somebody Loves You"

Dean Martin

This Time I'm Swingin'
(1960)

Rachele rocked back as if her father had struck her with his
fist. "Papa?"

He took a step toward her, then halted. "My little girl. My Rachele. I never wanted you to know I killed Salvatore."

Téa's mother, Bianca, tried to put her arm around him. "Beppe, you must not be feeling well."

He spun away from her touch, his lumbering movements making him look like an overwound mechanical bear. "It's true, Bianca. I killed Sal."

"Beppe?" Old Mr. Caruso could have been carved from stone. His voice was hard too. Cold and hard. "
Calmati
. Get ahold of yourself."

Rachele's father laughed. "I haven't had ahold of myself in sixteen years."

Rachele crossed to her father. He didn't know what he was saying. He
must
be sick. "Let me take you home, Papa. After a good night's sleep—" She reached for his hand.

He jerked away from her and she froze, stung by the rejection. But he'd been rejecting her for years, she reminded herself. She'd just been too immature to see it clearly.

"It's been eating at me all this time," he said, looking at Téa's mother. "I know you won't understand, Bianca, but I thought I was helping you."

"By killing Sal?" she answered, her voice faint.

Eve moved to stand beside her mother, but Joey seemed transfixed, all her earlier attitude gone. Mr. Caruso's stiff posture gave nothing of his emotions away. Rachele felt as frozen as Johnny and Téa looked.

"I was working on the rockwork around the lagoon," her father said, his gaze still on Bianca. "It was getting dark and I'd sent the other laborers home, but I had cement mixed in my wheelbarrow that I wanted to use before I called it a day. Then Sal showed up. He'd been in Vegas the past week and said he'd stopped in at your house, but you and the girls were out shopping so he came here."

He looked down and shook his head. "You know Sal. Couldn't stand to be alone with his own company. Always had to have some action going—somebody to talk to or something to do."

His head came up and he looked over at Cosimo. "Remember that, Mr. Caruso? Sal was always the life of the party. Hell, he
was
the party. I always loved that about him."

"I remember, Beppe," Mr. Caruso said, his voice soft. "I know you loved him. So what happened that day?"

"Night," Beppo corrected. "It was almost night. I'd been working a lot of hours because the house seemed so empty with my Maria gone. Rachele was invited to a friend's for dinner. There wasn't any reason for me to hurry." He stared off into the distance. 'The house seemed so cold and empty without Maria."

Her mother would have been dead for about a year, Rachele thought. Taken by pancreatic cancer that had been as quick as it was deadly. Rachele's only real memory of her mother was a white face on a white pillowcase. Pale lips, pale, chapped lips, that had smiled at Rachele even while her eyes had filled with tears. 'Take care," she'd whispered. 'Take care of Papa." And Rachele had tried to live by that promise.

"Beppe, we know you were hurting over Maria," Bianca said. "Sal and I both worried about you."

His head swung toward her and he smiled. Rachele couldn't remember the last time she'd seen him smile. "You were so good to me, Bianca. To me and to Rachele. Always. It's why I couldn't stand what Sal was doing."

"What was he doing?" Cosimo Caruso asked. "What bothered you, Beppe?"

His smile faded away. "I don't want to say."

"It was a woman," Bianca said, her voice matter-of-fact. "I always knew when there was another woman."

"But they didn't mean anything to him," Rachele's father protested quickly. "That's what made me so mad. He was hurting you without good reason."

Hurting Bianca. And that was what had bothered her father, Rachele figured out. With her mother gone, her father had found himself another woman to love. Bianca Caruso. Rachele had always suspected it was more than mere concern he felt for his best friend's widow.

He'd loved her sixteen years ago.

Perhaps he loved her still. She wondered if he realized.

"I talked to him about it that night," her father said. "I told him he shouldn't be so foolish. I told him maybe you'd get angry and fed up enough to file for divorce and take the girls away from him."

"What he'd say to that?" Téa asked. She was still standing near Johnny, but she'd put a bigger distance between them and was hugging herself.

"He got angry. If there was one thing that Sal cared about more than a good time, it was you three little girls. When I said your mother might take you away from him, he went a little crazy. He swore at me, and when I said it again, he came after me."

Rachele's father shifted his gaze to Bianca and Cosimo. "You know what a hothead he was. I was only trying to defend myself. I was standing by the wheelbarrow, stirring the cement with a hoe, when he went for me. I held the hoe across my body." He pantomimed the scene, showing how he gripped the handle of the tool chest-high.

"Sal ran into it and then stumbled back. He tripped over the rocks I had piled up and he fell, his head slamming against the section of the ledge I'd just finished. He was gone. It only took a few seconds for the whole thing to happen. But he died the instant his head hit. The instant. I swear that on Maria's grave."

"But why didn't you call an ambulance—or at least the police?" Téa asked.

Rachele's father blinked. "I couldn't risk it. What if they didn't believe me? Who would take care of my little girl? She didn't have a mother, so how could I possibly put her in a position of losing her father too?"

What? Had Rachele heard right? He'd hidden the accident because of her?

Rachele felt the freaky numbness that had overtaken her begin to wear off, pins and needles pricking her skin and then her heart. Perhaps her father had confronted Salvatore Caruso because he'd loved Bianca, but afterward he'd kept quiet about what happened out of his concern for Rachele.

Oh, Papa.

"So you buried him here, Beppe," Cosimo said. "And his car?"

"I drove it home and put it in my garage. A few days later, I took it out to a desert wash I know about and torched it."

"So that's what happened to the damned Loanshark book," Eve murmured. "Up in flames."

"I felt sick when someone else got the blame," Rachele's father went on, looking over at Johnny. "But I didn't know he had a son. Giovanni Martelli's murder only made me more determined to keep my mouth shut."

There was a long moment of stunned quiet.

"I'm sorry," Beppo said again, and his shoulders bowed as he aged before Rachele's eyes. "I'm so very sorry."

It was Joey who next found her voice. "What now?"

"Now…" Cosimo Caruso inhaled a long breath. Then he looked around the small group. "Now I put some men to stand guard down here and we go back to the party. We've been away too long already."

"Back to the party?" Joey started to protest. "But—"

The old man cut her off by holding up his hand. "We'll deal with this tomorrow. Tonight, there's too much at stake. We need to show happy faces. Happy, strong, united faces.
Avete capita
? Do you understand?"

Rachele shivered at the steel beneath the words. This was the Mafia don in control, the CEO of crime who had ruled California for decades. Tonight they had a reprieve, some time for these new facts to sink in. But tomorrow, her father's fate would be in the mob boss's hands.

Rachele moved to her father and slipped her arm through his. He didn't pull away this time. "Papa, let me drive you home now."

He let her take the lead. When she stopped in front of Cosimo Caruso, her father seemed not to notice. "He's a good man, Mr. Caruso," Rachele said, remembering her promise to her mother and pinning the old man with her gaze. Her heart pounded and the spit in her mouth dried as she gave her voice its own edge of steel. "What happened to your son was an accident and I expect you will treat it as such."

The head of the California Mafia dropped his neutral expression. For an instant he looked surprised, then admiring, then—nothing again. Perhaps she'd imagined it. But he nodded his head at her. "All will be handled fairly, Rachele."

"Is that a promise?"

His dark eyebrows rose. "Must you ask?"

"Yeah, I think I must."

"
Le donne
!" he remarked, the tiniest of smiles crossing his face. "Then it's a promise."

Giving him her own dignified nod, Rachele set off, keeping her father close to her side. She didn't know exactly what would happen now. Maybe she and her father would finally talk, adult to adult. Maybe her father was going to break her heart all over again. But not because he'd never cared for her.

Her father knew how to love. Perhaps he'd even loved too well. He'd cared enough to try to intervene in his best friend's marriage. He'd cared enough about his best friend's wife to stick up for her. He'd loved Rachele enough to keep a secret buried here and in his conscience for the last sixteen years.

She
had
been immature.

Before now, she hadn't known that bad things could happen to good people. She hadn't known that good people could do bad things in the name of love.

Because it wasn't simple or easy. Love wasn't the bam-slam lightning bolt that made all things possible. After what her father had done, she couldn't believe that anymore.

She saw Cal in the distance and gave a little wave. He'd be there tomorrow when she needed him, she didn't doubt that. She still believed in love; her father's actions had proved its very real power, too.

Perhaps she was finally, truly, growing up.

Thirty-seven

"The Best is Yet to Come"

Frank Sinatra

It Might as Well Be Swing
(1964)

They were in a collective state of shock, Téa decided, as
they followed her grandfather's order and returned to the party. It was the only explanation for why they stayed silent and obedient.

Her father was really dead.

An accidental death, kept secret by his best friend for the last sixteen years.

It was going to take a while to process that.

But until then… hey, it was time to pa-a-arty!

Johnny disappeared somewhere between the lagoon and the tents. She couldn't imagine what he was feeling right now, though she hoped he was as numb as she.

Her family had murdered his father for no reason. Because of what she knew was in the Loanshark book, the timing had always made her suspect about Giovanni Martelli's involvement. Of course, that was before she'd known about his son.

That his son had been close by at the time of the hit.

That she was in love with his son.

Her mother took a place at an empty table near the dance floor and Téa and her sisters followed like automatons. Cosimo linked up with a couple of his ubiquitous lieutenants—Nino and another man she didn't recognize—and proceeded toward the bar.

She could really go for a zombie mai tai herself right now, Téa thought. She wanted to nurse this numb feeling for as long as possible.

But there was only time for the wish, as the bandleader suddenly signaled for attention with a crash of cymbals. Then came the familiar tune of "Happy Birthday." Cosimo strode back out of the tent as the dance floor cleared and the three hundred or so partygoers sang along. He smiled and nodded as if he hadn't a care in the world, then walked to the bandleader and murmured something in his ear.

The musicians segued into a new song, "My Way," as the bandleader leaned into the microphone. "Ladies and gentlemen, tonight's guest of honor will lead off the next dance with his eldest granddaughter and the desert's rising star of interior design… Téa Caruso."

The crowd applauded as Téa's grandfather approached her. The desert's rising star of interior design didn't know what to do.

Cosimo gave her a small bow, then held his hand out for hers.

She swallowed.

"
Per favore, cam
," he said, his hand still extended.

She didn't want to talk with him, let alone dance with him. But even if she could rind the energy to stamp her feet and scream at the top of her lungs, she couldn't make a scene in front of all these people. Old habits died hard. Old bargains were impossible to forget.

And there was information she needed from him.

So she put her hand in his. It was warm and dry. The skin felt thin, fragile even.

Cosimo, fragile? The notion sent an odd sympathy through her. But then her sandal strap caught in the hem of her long dress, and his grip tightened. His steely hold steadied her. No, Cosimo—nickname the Cudgel—would never be fragile.

On the dance floor, he took her in a loose embrace. With her high heels they were almost eye-to-eye. "Desert's rising star of design, eh?" he said.

"Don't try that on me. You told the man what to say."

Cosimo sighed. "You were always so smart."

In silence, he led her into a stately fox trot. They had danced together when she was little at other birthdays, weddings, holidays. Always patient, always willing to slow down for a little girl's short legs. While her father would grow restless at such a pace and end up snatching her off her feet and dancing her around the room like a rag doll, Cosimo would bend himself to accommodate her size.