“Louie, this moke,” Uncle Sonny shot his thumb over his shoulder, indicating Angelo, “tried to keep us outta here, saying you was being interviewed.”
“Detective, I’m so sorry,” Angelo cried, elbowing through my uncles. “They pushed right through the guard at the front door. I tried to tell them you couldn’t be disturbed, but they wouldn’t listen—”
“No worries, Ange. I’m acquainted with these two…gentlemen.” His lips pinched in annoyance and a long breath full of resignation blew from his nose. “It’s okay. You can leave us.”
Angelo’s head snapped from my uncles back to Tony. “You sure?” he asked in a voice that told me he thought Tony should be anything but.
“Yeah. It’s fine. Close the door again, okay?”
Angelo pulled back his shoulders and gave my uncles what I figured was his I mean business cop glare as he walked back out.
“Ange is actin’ too big for his britches these days,” Uncle Joey said once we were alone.
“What’s going on here?” Uncle Sonny asked, adopting his typical intimidating stance: his knee length wool coat drawn to his sides as his hands shot into the back pockets of his trousers, shoulders tight, chin dropped, and rocking back and forth on his feet. I’d witnessed this power posture often while growing up, usually when one of my brothers or cousins needed to be taken in hand and Sonny was the adult in the room in charge of dishing out discipline.
Tony ignored the question, his attention, instead, focusing back on my father.
“I assume you called them?” he asked.
“I did,” I said, wanting my father to be absolved of all blame and therefore not subjected to scrutiny. Tony said he knew I hadn’t killed Chico, but he never said anything about my father not being a suspect, though, only that he was honest. Honest people commit murder the same as crooks do. Given enough incentive, anyone could.
“After I told her to,” my father said, shunting a steely eye my way.
“Daddy—”
“I don’t hear nobody answerin’ my question,” Sonny said. I had to stifle a giggle at the sixty-something bear of a man sporting a petulant pout like my toddler nephews did when they didn’t get their way.
It was apparent in the way he continued to ignore my uncle Tony wasn’t a man easily intimidated. With his attention still on my father, he asked, “You’re sure Chico never got any visitors here at the store, anyone he had to, say, go take a break with? Something out of the ordinary like that?”
My father shook his head.
“Donna?”
“Nothing. Like I said, he was a good worker, never gave us any trouble, and I didn’t know anything personal about him.” Which, considering the current situation, now felt so sad to me.
“Okay. I’m gonna have to ask you to leave the store after you show me that parking lot footage. The crime techs need to sweep the place and we don’t want anyone trampling on any evidence more than already has.”
Uncle Sonny looked as if he was going to say something, but I cut him off before he could. There was something I wanted to give a voice to.
“When can we open the store? I know it sounds a heartless, but we are running a business here and people are depending on us.”
“That’s not gonna happen today. For now, you two need to know the deli has to stay closed at a minimum three days—”
“We can’t afford to stay closed for three days during the holiday rush,” I cried.
“You’re gonna have to. Your store is an active crime scene and can’t be released until I know what’s what. I’m sorry, but that’s it.”
“You don’t sound sorry at all,” I said, then mimicked my uncle’s pout.
“It is what it is, Donna. Now, do you two want me to have an officer escort you home?”
“We’ll take them,” Uncle Joey said. “They should be with family.”
“Come on, little girl,” Daddy took my arm. “Get that footage for Tony, then we got calls to make and we’d better get started.” To Tony he asked, “You’ll keep us in the loop? Let us know when we can reopen?”
“That’s a promise.”
And I knew that statement for the lie it was.
He’d made me a promise he’d call me after those seven minutes of heaven in his back seat.
My phone had never rung.
Three
Advice for surviving in a big Italian family: Family comes first, last, and always. No excuses.
The parking lot footage was grainy at best since it was the dead of night and a poorly lit area. All we could see were three guys, one who looked like it could have been Chico, alighting from a car. The look-alike did something to the security code and then they all walked into the store.
Well, that solved how they got in. Our secret code obviously wasn’t so secret.
After viewing the footage twice, Tony said he’d have the tech guys go over it and see if they could sharpen up the images. After that, we left the store in his hands.
“You shoulda called me first,” Uncle Sonny declared as he sat down at the dining room table across from my father as soon as we got back to my parent’s house.
Uncle Joey sat next to him and nodded.
“Now that the cops have taken over, we lost our window to figure out what went down last night and to keep a cap on it. Everyone in the neighborhood knows now a guy got dead in your store. That’s bad for business, Louie.” Sonny shook his head, his mouth flattening in a line of rebuke.
“It’s worse for Chico,” I said as I went around the table filling their espresso cups.
Sonny tossed me a squinty-eyed glare. “That goes without saying, Madonna, but there’s nothin’ we can do for him now. We gotta concentrate on helping Louie get the deli back open.” To my father he asked, “Roma give you any reason why the kid was capped in your store?”
I sent up a prayer to St. John the Silent in the hope it would keep my father from divulging what Tony had informed us about Chico. I should have saved myself the trouble because with no thought to the promise he’d given the good detective, my father vomited everything up to my uncles.
“Christ on the cross, what a mess,” Joey said, rubbing his fingers over his eyebrows.
“I heard’a this piece’a work, Archetti,” Sonny said after sipping his espresso. “Low-level drug scum. Got dead. Good riddance.”
I was cut short from adding something when my mother blasted into the room.
And that’s not an exaggeration.
Grace Liliana Chicollini San Valentino is a force of nature. There’s really no other way to describe her.
At five foot eight, she towers above all her siblings, leading some in the family to ponder if nonna had done the nasty with the milkman when nonno was off fighting the Fascists. She’d been born and blessed with the northern Italian DNA of fair hair, blue eyes, and light skin, unlike my father’s Sicilian genes, which were dark, dark, and darker. I’d always considered it a crime against nature my brothers all took after my mother while I got the lion’s share of Daddy’s genetic makeup.
At sixty, my mother appeared ten years younger in any light. Nary a line warped her skin, due to the religious rubbing of extra virgin olive oil she applied to her face and neck nightly. When I’d been a little girl and plagued with night terrors, the familiar smell of my mother’s skin while she hugged me, soothed away the fears. It’s probably the reason to this day pizza or pasta dripping in oil still calms my soul.