The Famous Mafioso Hired Me to Hear Him, and the Man in the Cell Is Not Who They Convicted novel · Chapter 14 of 24
Chapter 14: The X-Ray
Nobody offered Leona Tewksbury a chair, and she did not ask for one.
She stood just inside the door of the Deaf club in her wet coat, and she looked at the old men one at a time, the way you read names on a wall.
I did not tell her to leave.
I wanted to hear what she would say first, with my father at my shoulder and six strangers at my back.
"I signed the complaint against you," she said.
"I know," I said.
"I signed it because I was told to, and because I have been signing what I was told for twenty-five years.
"I would like you to know that I know what it was."
"Then why are you here?"
She took off her glasses.
Without them her eyes were small and red-rimmed.
"Because you said the true thing in that room," she said.
"On camera.
"In front of her.
"And I stood there and let a girl half my age do what I should have done nineteen years ago."
My father touched my elbow.
WHO IS SHE, he signed.
THE LAWYER, I signed.
THE ONE WHO HIRED ME.
His face did not change.
TELL HER SHE MAY SIT.
I told her.
Leona sat down at the end of the long table, across from the old man with the gray beard, who looked at her as if she were something he had found in a drain.
She set a leather portfolio on the wood and kept both hands on it.
"I will say it plainly," she said.
"I have said it to no one.
"I have been rehearsing it in the car for an hour, and I will probably say it badly."
She did.
She said it in short, flat sentences, with her eyes on the portfolio, and she touched her pin after each one.
The night of the ferry, nineteen years ago, she had been sitting in Gianna Brancato's kitchen on Hertel Avenue at one in the morning, drinking coffee, when the call came from Palermo.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of The Famous Mafioso Hired Me to Hear Him, and the Man in the Cell Is Not Who They Convicted are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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