Chapter 24: The Table

Dad saw me, and his eyes went wide over the tape.

He shook his head at me, once, hard.

"Sit him down," I said. "He can't stand that long."

Vito laughed, but he nodded, and they put my father in a chair against the wall.

Damiano was beside me. Not in front. Beside.

The captains were watching him, waiting for him to do something.

He didn't.

"The books," Vito said. He held out his hand, palm up, rings shining.

I took the black notebook out of my mother's handbag.

I didn't walk it down to him. I opened it.

"You invited your friends tonight," I said, "so they'd see who keeps his word."

"Give it here, sweetheart."

"I'd like them to see," I said.

I turned to the first page.

"My father paid you for ten years. He wrote down every envelope, and who picked it up."

I looked down the long table.

"I'm not going to say anybody's name. I don't need to. He wrote down what you were wearing."

"April, ten years ago. The parking garage on Wacker Drive. Envelope one, forty thousand dollars, for the family."

"Picked up at the site trailer by a man in a green tie with ducks on it."

Halfway down the table, an old captain with a white mustache went very still.

"Envelope two," I read. "Forty thousand dollars. Handed to V.L. personally, in the back of his car, in cash. Not for the family."

The captain with the mustache put his fork down.

"We were told twenty that year," he said slowly. "On Wacker. Joe was paying twenty. You told us."

"Joe Morelli was a liar who ran from his debts," Vito said.

"Joe Morelli asked me to wear that tie to his sites," the captain said. "So his foreman would know who got the envelope."

He looked at my father.

My father nodded at him over the tape.

I read the next one. The new library annex. Envelope one, thirty. Envelope two, thirty. V.L., in the car.

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