Blood of My Brother (7 page)

“I know a way to get even, though,” said Dan. “But first you have to get better. It can wait a week or two.”

Two weeks later Jay and Dan went to the park, and Jay rode Dan’s bike on the same cinder path for an hour while Dan crouched in the bushes nearby. They did the same the next day, and the next. On the fourth day, the two bike thieves appeared on the path.

“Motherfucker,” said the bigger one, smiling, as Jay came to a stop. “The boy brought us another bike.” The smaller of the two—still a head taller than Jay—stepped up quickly and
shoved him off the bike, but Jay was holding a baseball bat at his side, which, taking a stance and rearing back, he swung as hard as he could at the boy who had punched him in the mouth two weeks ago, hitting him in the elbow, which snapped in two. As this was happening, Danny flew out of the bushes and headbutted the bigger boy in the chest, knocking him to the ground and flinging himself on top of him. Jay stood still as Danny—ten years old and all of fivetwo—pounded the boy’s face, his fists working furiously, like pistons gone haywire. The first black kid, his forearm dangling from his elbow joint, seeing this, fled. When Danny got to his feet, his dark face was flushed, his eyes wild. Jay stared at him, getting the only glimpse of the devil in Dan Del Colliano he’d ever need to see. The boy on the ground was half conscious, his face swollen and bruised.

“Who’s a motherfucker, now?” said Dan, kicking him in the ribs and spitting on him. “You are, you motherfucking cocksucker. I’ve got two brothers bigger than me. If you try something again, they’ll fucking kill you, and they’ll burn your fucking house down with your family in it.
You’re the motherfucker now!
”

The riots left Seventh Avenue and its environs in ruin, and A.J. was forced to abandon the bakery, leaving behind the new ovens and counters he purchased in 1965, but taking with him the nine thousand dollar note he signed to finance them. He also lost the four-story tenement that housed Cassio’s, inherited from his father in 1962. Two of the apartments were already vacant, and the remaining two tenants fled after the riots. His new tenants, when he could get them, either destroyed their apartments or didn’t pay their rent, or
both. He had three thousand dollars in savings, which he used to make repairs, but when this money ran out, he fell behind on his taxes and, after trying with no success to sell the building, in 1972 he deeded it to the city.

He had moved only once in his life, in 1957, from the second to the fourth floor of his father’s building with his new bride, but in the years from 1967 to 1976, he moved his family four times, each time to an apartment in smaller and smaller Italian-American enclaves within the Ward. Carmela did not complain, but those years aged her, and sometimes, when she didn’t think he was looking, he saw something close to despair in her eyes. Though he seemed outwardly the same—steady, methodical, optimistic—A.J. Cassio was not a happy man as he set out, at the age of forty-one, to rebuild his life.

He took a job in the bakery of an A&P supermarket in nearby Belleville where, in a midnight-to-eight a.m. shift, he made white bread and party cakes for mass consumption. Carmela tried to resume teaching English and Greek and Latin Mythology at Webster Junior High in the Ward, but she quit after a forearm from a two hundred pound fourteen-year-old girl broke her jaw one spring day in 1968. In the fall she began substituting in grammar schools in the city. They did not intend to stay in Newark as long as they did, but the rents were cheap, and it took them a long time—seven years—to pay off the loan for the ovens and put aside money for the down payment on a house.

In July of 1976, one of A.J.’s coworker’s at the A&P told him about a house that was for sale in his neighborhood in Montclair. The owner was a woman whose husband had died, and who was moving in with her daughter in a house on the same block. She was willing to take back a mortgage, at less than the market rate, so that she could have a steady
income to supplement her Social Security, and she did not require much of a down payment. When A.J. and Carmela went to look at the house, Jay in the backseat, they made a wrong turn and saw parts of Montclair that left them speechless : spectacular homes with broad lawns running down to leafy avenues presented themselves in all their splendor. Only the very rich could live in such mansions, they thought, and they were right, but the house they looked at was in a modest neighborhood, a few blocks from Bloomfield Avenue, a busy thoroughfare that ran for miles through the thickly populated suburbs west of Newark. The house, a yellow ranch with three bedrooms, a fireplace, two tall pine trees in front, and a quiet backyard, was more than A.J. and Carmela had let themselves dream of, and they made the deal immediately. By the middle of August they had moved in, and their last nine years in Newark were soon a distant memory.

Earlier that summer, the Del Collianos had moved out of Newark as well, but under different circumstances. In March, Dan’s dad, Dominick, a gambler with a violent temper, had been killed, presumably by loan sharks or book-makers, his body found in the trunk of his car in the parking lot of a discount store in Kearny, a factory town on the banks of the Passaic River. To Kay, her husband’s death could not have come a minute too soon. The week before, Dan, who had just turned fourteen, had intervened while Dominick was slapping her around the kitchen of their apartment, and Dan had wound up with a broken nose, blood streaming down his face as he and Kay watched Dominick fling himself out the door.

Two weeks after he was buried, a representative of Dominick’s mason’s union appeared at Kay’s door with a check for twenty-five thousand dollars, the proceeds of a life insurance policy that the union gave as a fringe benefit to all of
its members. A fatalist, like many Italian-American women of her generation, Kay saw in her husband’s death, and the miraculous life insurance policy, the hand of God at work, compensation for putting up with an abusive husband for fifteen years. She used the money to buy a small house in Bloomfield, where her son would no longer have to run the streets and where she planned on living out her days in peace.

Jay did not mind the smaller and smaller apartments and the successively more crowded neighborhoods they lived in those post-riot years in Newark. He did not learn until years later the price in lost pride that his parents paid as they watched their friends move to the suburbs to raise their children among trees and lawns and safe schools. Jay was too young to know about those things. He
did
know, however, that his friend Danny’s father, Dominick, was violent, and beat his mom, Kay. He had heard Danny say many times that he planned on killing Dominick when he grew up; and Jay, knowing Danny, believed him. So, although he was sad to see his friend go, he was relieved that he would not have to commit murder. At the time Jay thought it possible that he would never see Danny again. But the following Saturday—and every Saturday that summer—Dan rode his bike to Newark, and he and Jay played stickball in the schoolyard. In August the Cassios moved as well, and though the boys went to different high schools, Jay stopped thinking that he might never see Danny again, that their friendship would not last forever.

Jay took a week off after the funeral. On the following Monday he put on a lightweight summer suit, white shirt, and dark tie and went to work. Cheryl, a single mother with problems of her own, smiled quickly when he walked in and then returned to her typing. She had taken care of the office while he was home, putting everyone and everything off except for Melissa Powers, who had insisted on an appointment for today. He looked around his office for a moment and listened to the traffic below. The week’s mail, opened and sorted by day, was in a folder on his desk. On top of it were his calendar for the week and reminder notes. The case files that needed attention were lined up on the floor to his right, next to the large potted plant that Kay Del Colliano had sent him eight years ago when he left his former law partner, then under indictment for attempting to bribe a cop, and started his own practice.

Everything looked and sounded the same.

On the keyboard of his computer was a large note from Cheryl: “Melissa Powers coming in at eleven.” Jay looked at his watch—it was ten thirty—and opened the mail folder.

Melissa arrived promptly and, after greeting Jay, settled—slowly crossing her long, tanned legs—into a chair
facing his desk. She had on a short white skirt, gold leather sandals, and a light cotton pullover blouse. At twenty-two, her large hazel eyes deceivingly innocent, she did not need makeup and wore none, except for a hint of red lipstick.

“I’m sorry about Danny,” she said. “I tried calling.”

Jay nodded. He had not picked up the phone at home except for Cheryl. “Thanks,” he said.

Jay had gone to the Hyatt in Short Hills to meet Melissa and Marcy on the night of their parents’ deaths. They had a drink in the plush lounge on the twentieth floor, overlooking the lights dotting northern New Jersey’s rolling hills. He had not slept with Melissa that night, although she wanted to and he had been tempted. He did not blame her, knowing from experience how powerful an antidote sex was to grief, powerful but extremely temporary. He remembered seeing the Powers sisters’ thoughts in their eyes as they sipped their drinks. He knew what they wanted: their parents’ money, all of it, and as quickly as possible. He also knew the obstacles they faced.

“What’s up?” he said.

“They’ve put a freeze on all of my father’s assets.”

“Mesa Associates?” Jay said.

“Yes.”

Jay knew from the discovery in the now moot divorce case that Bryce Powers had been funding, out of his own pocket, a disastrous townhouse/golf course development in Arizona. Whatever could go wrong, had: the general contractor had filed for bankruptcy, the subcontractors had walked off the job, the bonding company was claiming fraud, the town fathers were upset; and somehow Bryce’s people had overestimated the market: sales were slow at first and recently nonexistent. Powers had kept it from failure, but still, at the time of his death, it was over six million
dollars in the red. His investors, all general partners, could not be expected to be happy about being potentially liable for a debt in excess of ten times their initial investment. They would certainly try to do something about it, that is, shift the blame to Bryce, hence the jeopardy to the Powers assets.

“What kind of a freeze?” Jay asked.

Melissa had been holding some papers in her lap, which she handed to Jay. “We were served these this morning at the house.”

Jay glanced at the top document, an Order To Show Cause and Temporary Restraining Order, knowing that the fifty pages below it would be affidavits from irate partners.

“What about Plaza I and II?” he said.

“The partners are having a meeting next week. They’ve actually invited us.”

Jay knew that the partners in Plaza I and II were the same, for the most part, as those in Mesa Associates. Bryce had made many people wealthy over the years. No one challenged how he ran his business, not even those who knew about or guessed at his daughters’ illegal “maintenance” contracts. They all wanted to be invited back into the next deal. But Bryce was dead now and, given the amount of money involved, lawsuits against Melissa and Marcy and the Powers estate would be sure to follow.

“Don’t go,” Jay said.

“What will they do?”

“They’ll want you and Marcy to repay the money your father paid you every year.”

“All of it?”

“You didn’t do anything to earn it. It was a total scam.”

“Can you represent us?”

“Yes,” Jay answered. “I can, but it’ll be expensive.”

“How long will it take?”

“A year, more or less.”

Melissa remained serenely silent, occasionally stroking her long, honey-colored hair from her face, while Jay explained some of the issues he anticipated would come up in the case, and told her that she stood to lose a substantial portion of her share of the estate in settlements and attorney’s fees. He could see her calculating her net share as he spoke.

There had been no real romance in Jay’s affair with Melissa, no emotional connection to help him rationalize what he had done. Was this good or bad? He did not know. Certainly falling for Melissa Powers would be painful. But then again he only dimly remembered the joy and the pain of being in love. He was not surprised now to see Melissa’s flawless amorality serving her so well in the face of the horror of her parents’ death. She had her way of surviving.

Did he? This was another thing he didn’t know.

When Melissa left, he looked at his watch. Noon.

“Jay, John Parker, how are you?”

“Yes, John. I’m fine, thank you, and you?”

“Good, thanks. I’ll tell you why I called. We just had a call from an attorney in Houston. He says he represents the Santaria family. Apparently you sent a subpoena to a Herman Santaria. Is that right?”