Seeds of Deception (24 page)

“Actually, I am, since I remodel older buildings. I haven't had a chance to get up close and personal with many from this era—the 1920s, right?—and I'd be interested to see how construction techniques have evolved. But the truth is, I'm just muscle for Meg—I get to move stuff around and carry it down if she finds anything she likes.”

“That sounds familiar. Well, I'll let you go. And don't be surprised if Elizabeth and I take a nap later—one of the perks of growing older. Or we could watch your New England Patriots playing.”

“Okay. We'll try not to make too much noise upstairs, Daddy. See you later.”

Meg led the way up to the third story. “The guest room and bath are down at that end.” She pointed to the end opposite the stairs. “The maid's room is at the front,
there—it has its own bath. And the attic—what there is of it—is at the back.” She opened a closed door, and a chill gust of musty air greeted them. The space was unheated, but not unpleasantly cold. It had a solid floor, but the rest of it was unfinished, and poorly lit. They stepped into the room, and Meg pulled the door closed behind them, then turned to survey the scene. “This is really very tidy, which makes our job easier, I guess. I'm impressed that they've gotten through thirty-plus years of marriage without accumulating more stuff. Or maybe they've dumped a lot of it along the way.”

“I don't see much from earlier generations,” Seth commented. “What about your grandparents? Didn't they leave anything behind?”

“Apparently not. I never knew them, you know.”

“Why?” Seth asked. “I can't imagine that.”

“A variety of reasons, I guess. Died young, moved away, hated each other on first sight. We didn't discuss it. I probably know more about them from my genealogy research than I ever heard from my parents. Anyway, Mother kept the family jewelry, which was pretty modest, and a few odds and ends like sewing boxes or china, and some photographs, but I don't remember any furniture or big stuff—oh, except for one wing chair. There”—she pointed again, to a neat stack of Bankers Boxes grouped together in a corner—“that looks like the best candidate for Daddy's legal records. You want to split them between us?”

“Fine with me. Remind me what I'm looking for?”

“We're assuming that anything from Daddy's current practice is kept at his office. He set up that practice about five years ago. So anything older than that but not the product of the New York firm is the best bet, I think.”

“And what do I do if I find something? Mark it? Pull it out?”

“Damn, I should have thought this through better—I would have brought sticky notes. For now, just leave the covers in place but stick them on end, and I'll look at them. Is that okay?”

“This is your idea—I'm just along for the ride.”

“Then let's get going before it's too dark to see up here.”

They worked in silence for a while. At least the contents of the boxes were neatly arranged and labeled, which helped, and the outside of the boxes bore the approximate dates of the files. Meg had no idea what she was looking for, apart from her suspicion that it was something that had happened at least fifteen years earlier and it might involve someone from Madison. Joe Caffarelli had mentioned that her father had helped his own father out, when they'd first moved to the town around thirty years ago, but that case had come to nothing, according to her father. Would he have bothered to keep any records of that?

After half an hour of digging through files, Meg reached the conclusion that her father had kept every scrap of paper that had anything to do with any legal matter. One box contained nothing but instruction manuals and guarantees
from a range of appliances she was pretty sure he hadn't owned for years. She doubted that he'd done the filing himself, but he'd instructed someone to take good care of the files, and he'd moved the records to Montclair with him. So if there was something of a legal nature to be found, that had precipitated the recent events, it would probably be here somewhere.

Seth had pulled out his share of boxes and lined them up in chronological order. “Got something,” he called out.

Meg straightened up, stretching her back, and went over to join him. “What?”

He handed her a slim file. “Labeled ‘Caffarelli, 1987.'”

“That would have been not long after we moved to Madison.” She took it from Seth and looked around for a place to sit and check it out, but the attic offered few comforts.

“You want to take it downstairs and read it?” Seth asked.

“No, I think we need to finish up here first, while there's light. There can't be too much more to go through. But I'll put this by the door so it doesn't get lost.”

After another half hour they'd been through all the boxes, with no new discoveries, and shadows were collecting in the corners. “I guess that's it,” Meg said reluctantly. “I hate to pin all my hopes on that one file, but I don't see anything else that fits.”

“So let's look at it and decide if it's relevant,” Seth suggested.

“In a moment. You see anything up here we want?”

Seth scanned the room. “I don't see much of anything. Sad, kind of. You should see my mother's attic—she must have at least four generations' worth of stuff up there.”

“It makes me a little sad, too, I guess. There are no
memories here. I know—there's not much point in keeping useless stuff, but handling something that one of your ancestors owned or even made makes them more real, somehow. Like shaking hands with them across the years. Apparently I didn't inherit that feeling from either of my parents—maybe somebody up the line somewhere. Okay, let's go downstairs and see what we've got.”

Seth picked up the sole file on the way out the door, and Meg made sure the lights were off before she pulled the door shut behind them. Out in the hallway she couldn't hear any sounds of activity, so she and Seth made their way quietly to their bedroom and sat on the bed. He handed her the file.

“Okay, what've we got?” he asked.

Meg looked at the battered old file. “I'm almost afraid to look. If there's nothing there that matters, I don't have a Plan B. Which means we go to Daddy's office in the morning, meet Miriam, if she's willing, say hello and good-bye to Arthur, and head home, I guess.”

“You've done what you could, Meg.”

“I know. It just seems unfinished.” She opened the file and started reading.

It didn't take long. There were typed summaries of some conversations with the elder Joe Caffarelli, and copies of formal correspondence, as her father had said. But far more interesting were the handwritten notes her father had included. They were a bit cryptic, but knowing what she knew, they told a bigger story. When she was finished reading, she carefully closed the folder and sat staring at the cover, trying to think.

“Well?” Seth asked.

She looked at him them. “My father lied to us.”

“What do you mean? When?”

“When he told us about his dealings with Joe Caffarelli, in Madison. There's not much detail in the file, but here's how I'd reconstruct what happened. We know that Joe senior was related to a Mob family, at a time when that mattered. He tried to distance himself, but they wouldn't let him. The overtures were more or less as my father described them—they wanted some kickback from the sports store in exchange for expedited shipping and such. I think Joe was just exploring the options, legally, to see if he could put them off. That's why he came to my father, rather than an unfamiliar law firm. But he wasn't entirely honest with my father then.”

“But your father said he knew about the Mafia connection,” Seth said.

“Yes, he did. He wasn't blind or stupid. He offered Joe a strictly by-the-book opinion, and sent those letters he mentioned and got no response. And then Joe told him, ‘thanks, but we're done.'”

“So Joe accepted the inevitable?”

“Maybe. As my father suggested, maybe he figured out that to stay in business he had to go along with the plan. The store was pretty small potatoes then. And Daddy and Joe parted ways, apparently amicably.

“But the story doesn't end there. My father kept his eyes open or his ear to the ground or whatever you want to call it, and he realized that in the late eighties the sports business was just an opening wedge. He guessed that Joe got sucked in deeper. You have to remember, drugs were relatively new then. A sports store which sold to a lot of area high school and amateur teams would provide a lot of access to potential customers. So even if Joe looked the
other way, maybe there were employees he was urged to hire, or suppliers that included something extra in their shipments. I don't know, and my father didn't say much, because I doubt he had much proof. But he did leave a few handwritten notes in the file, and one of them says ‘drugs' with a question mark.”

“Okay, say your father knew there was something going on. What could or should he have done back then?”

“I don't know. He had no proof, or at least there's none here. He'd just moved to town, and he had a child in school—me. In theory he could have gone to the FBI or the state attorney or something like that, but I get the feeling he liked Joe Caffarelli and he didn't want to get him into any more trouble than he was already in. So in the end he did nothing, apart from watching. But I'm pretty sure he knew what was going on.”

Seth thought for a moment. “Say that's true. Why would anyone be so interested in that file now and want to get their hands on it? Has something changed?”

“Maybe,” Meg said. “Here, look at this.” She handed him a page of handwritten notes.

“What am I looking at?” Seth asked, bewildered.

“It's my father's notes on a conversation he had with Anthony Del Monte, at some social event. Off the record.”

“Why is that important?”

“Because Anthony Del Monte is the New Jersey attorney general, who made a name for himself prosecuting organized crime cases back then. And it looks like he was in bed with the bad guys.”

“That's a big jump to a conclusion, Meg. What part of these notes says anything like that?”

“I know it's thin, but often there's information in what
is
not
said. Daddy asked him about a hypothetical case, and Del Monte blew him off, politely, of course. Probably not surprising, taken by itself.”

“From these notes, it looks like he said ‘thanks for stopping by' and showed Phillip the door. That's not exactly incriminating. He must have been a busy man.”

“I get that. But look at his name.”

“Del Monte? Why?”

“Because that's Miriam's last name.”

Seth stared at her. “Ah. So now you're suggesting that Miriam is not only Joe Caffarelli Senior's daughter, but she's also married to a relative of the attorney general? But that doesn't prove much by itself, other than that they all knew each other.”

“Seth, we now have a whole series of coincidence stacked up. How many coincidences does it take to make a fact?”

“Mark Twain probably had something to say about that. What's your point now?”

“One, the attorney general is now running for governor.”

“And you know this why?” Seth asked.

“Because since I grew up here, my brain is tuned to pick up the words ‘New Jersey' wherever I hear them. And there haven't been all that many governors in my lifetime.”

Seth shook his head. “And there's another point?”

“Miriam was helping her brother clear out their father's old files very recently, and maybe what they saved on their end, that corresponds to this one here, triggered some old memories and looked like it could be trouble, which Del Monte didn't want at this particular juncture. So Miriam took it upon herself to see if she could find and eliminate
whatever information my father had saved, just in case. But things got a little out of hand, with Enrique and then Arthur.”

Seth sighed. “Meg, you know I love you. I respect your intelligence. I know you aren't given to fantasy. But you have strung together a series of ‘what-ifs' and ‘maybes' that defies probability. Your thesis here is that Miriam is Joe senior's daughter. I'll buy that. She's married to a politically connected guy whose father is running for governor—it should be easy enough to verify that. Somewhere along the line she saw something or remembered something about her father's past that set off alarm bells, and she decided she needed to remove any evidence of it, if such evidence even existed, so that her hypothetical father-in-law wouldn't get blindsided by it. And there she was, by design or your favorite word “coincidence,” in the perfect position to check out all of your father's files. She knew what was in the office files, so she decided to look here at the house and unfortunately ran into Enrique, who she killed. Then she decided to take another pass at the office in case she had missed something, and had the further bad luck to run into Arthur and walloped him, too, but at least he survived her attack. Does that about cover it?”

“Seth, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Yes, those are the high points, except that I think for the last steps she needed an accomplice, and her husband—the candidate's son—is the likeliest contender for that role.”

“I'm glad you added some muscle to the scenario, in case it turns out that Miriam weighs a hundred and ten pounds and is only five feet tall. Do you have the ghost of a plan about what to do next?”

“Talk to Miriam tomorrow?”

“I agree that we should, but we need to talk to your father first, about that file we found.”

“And if he continues to lie about the file? The one he conveniently forgot he had? To pretend it was an innocent claim that went nowhere?”

“You've got me to back you up.”

“Do I need that?” Meg asked.

“I think so. Look, I never got along with my father, and I sure as hell know he didn't listen to me about anything relating to his business. I wasn't allowed to have an opinion, even when I knew I was right. So the bottom line is, I let him bully me simply because he was my father.” When Meg started to protest, he held up one hand. “I'm not saying your father is bullying you, but as you've already pointed out, in some part of his mind he still sees you as his little girl. Not an adult, running a business, and solving crimes. And that's just the way it is. So if we talk to him together, I'm the objective third party, and that means he'll listen to me in a different way.”

Meg smiled. “Yes, because you're male. Part of me wants to stamp my foot and say ‘me do it!'. And another part of me is grateful that I married such a smart man. Let's do this.”

They went down the stairs to the second floor. Her parents' bedroom door was closed, but Meg peeked into the adjoining office and found her father sitting there in the near dark. He looked up and saw her, with Seth behind her.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” he asked quietly.

“You knew what we were doing?”

Phillip sighed. “Ah, Meg, I may be getting older, but I'm not stupid. You've got a bee in your bonnet about
Enrique's death, and you can't let it go. You were always a stubborn child. But I will admit you started me thinking, and then I started putting two and two together. What did you find?”

“The Caffarelli file, with your notes.”

Phillip nodded. “That's what I suspected. And why do you think that's important?”

Meg glanced at Seth, who nodded as well. “Here's what I think happened. Let me run through it before you comment, okay?”

“I'm listening.”

Meg outlined her current thinking, setting out the steps that had led her to her conclusions. She tried not to apologize for the flimsy theories, but just stated the evidence as she saw it. Her father watched her face silently and did not interrupt, as he had promised. Seth stood near the door, like a statue.