She felt her shoulders slump. Maybe her Saracone search was a dry hole. Maybe it really had been a robbery and murder. Maybe huckleberries didn’t have superpowers. She sighed audibly and lowered her head, resting it on her arm as it lay on the open file drawer, which was when her gaze fell on the two bottom drawers, after the Z s. BILLING, read the label, with last year’s date, then this year. Of course! Why hadn’t she thought of that? Every lawyer kept a copy of his bills in a separate file, in addition to the copy that would be in the case file, for tax and accounting purposes.
Mary closed the drawer, squatted on the carpet, and pulled out the drawer for last year’s bills. The first manila folder read JANUARY, and the others were the months of the year, in chronological order. She flipped through January, reading bills sent to a variety of South Philly residents and small businesses, most of them for a few thousand dollars. Nothing. Mary paged through February, which was more of the same, then continued through March, April, and May. By June, she was beginning to lose hope, but then she hit the middle of June and stopped cold.
There it was. Right in the middle of the stack. A bill, and under the client name, at the top, it read: Giovanni Saracone. Mary read the bill, which merely stated: Payment on semiannual retainer. The amount – $250,000.
What? A retainer of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars? Mary almost laughed out loud. That was insane! Not only was it way out of line with Frank’s other bills, even her old white-shoe firm, Grun amp; Chase, didn’t have more than a handful of clients with retainers of that magnitude. A case demanding those fees would be in the news every day! What type of case could Frank be handling for Saracone that would justify those fees? And twice a year?
Mary skipped back to the year before that, and thumbed through the bill copies. Again, midway in the pack, on the fifteenth, was a file copy of a bill to Giovanni Saracone. The amount was $250,000. Again, unlike the other bills, not even a brief description of the services rendered. What kind of client accepted that for a retainer accounting? None. Mary could barely contain herself.
What gives? Five hundred grand a year billed to Saracone? For what? For how long? And did it have anything to do with Amadeo? It must have. Here was a link between Saracone and Frank. Mary just didn’t know what it meant. Her gaze shifted to the drawer with even older bills, and it took her only five minutes to find the June and December bills to Saracone, again totaling $500,000. She checked the year before that and the two before that, going back a total of five years. Each year had the same bill copies, coming to half a million dollars for five years. Two and a half million dollars. It bought a lot of softball jerseys. How long had it been going on, and why?
If there had been a Saracone case file, it had been taken, but Mary didn’t think there had been a case involving Saracone at all. Ever. The timing didn’t make sense; most small litigation matters didn’t last that long. And the killers hadn’t thought to look here in the billing files because they didn’t know about them – for once, the bad guys weren’t lawyers. Mary’s thoughts raced ahead. These had to have been some sort of payments from Saracone to Frank, disguised as legal bills. Did Frank know something – maybe about Amadeo’s murder – that Saracone wanted silenced? If so, why not kill him a long time ago? And who invoiced for blackmail?
Mary’s hands trembled as she held the folder. She didn’t want to risk Exhibits A through F disappearing when the bad guys figured out what they’d left behind. She’d lost enough documents for one case, in the drawings. She took the Saracone bill from the file folder, then went back to the other folders and took out all the Saracone bills going back all five years. She stacked the bills, folded them over, and stuck them in her purse; then she replaced the file folders, closed the drawers, and left the file room, turning off the light. Good girls conserved electricity and avoided detection.
She hurried down the hallway, climbed back out of the shattered window, and headed down the street in the rain. She had broken at least one commandment, THOU SHALT NOT STEAL LEGAL BILLS, but she was too jiggered up to question her conduct or even to feel guilty. She clutched her purse protectively to her chest, out of the rain. Because inside were the bills, with a very valuable address.
So she knew exactly where to go next.
Twenty-Three
The thunderstorm showed no signs of letting up, and rain pelted the roof of Mary’s ancient BMW and struck her windows, clouding what her breath didn’t fog. She’d gone home for her car and never once thought about turning back or even stopping for coffee, she was so excited. She drove pedal-to-the-metal past acres of dark hills, shadows of cornfields, and winding country roads, to a place called Birchrunville, then looked around for the house. It wasn’t hard to find in such a small, apparently exclusive place. The town boasted one intersection, a quaint post office, and an elegant restaurant called the Birchrunville Cafe, and was moneyed in a completely tasteful way. Mary never would have guessed that an Italian from Philly would end up in such ritzy country. But then again, she didn’t know enough about Giovanni Saracone.
His house was at the end of a long, narrow road, and she pulled up across the street from an apparently indestructible green mailbox, cutting the ignition. She’d broken a sweat that she knew wasn’t from the humidity. Mary couldn’t believe she was actually here, at Saracone’s house. A man who had been with Amadeo when he died. Was Saracone even still alive? The bills indicated he was, and Mrs. Nyquist had said he was one of the youngest in the internment camp. What had really happened the day Amadeo died? Had Saracone actually killed him? Part of Mary believed it already, but that was the part of her that jumped to conclusions. She told herself to calm down, then rubbed the steam from her car window with a fist and looked outside.
Colonial glass lanterns mounted atop stone pillars cast the only light on a seven-foot-high cedar gate that blocked the driveway and the entrance. It had to be an electric gate, because a gold-toned keypad on a gooseneck stem sat beside the cobblestone driveway. Mary tried to see over the gate, but rain and dense trees obscured her view. She rolled down her window, blinking against the rain, when suddenly the front gate started to open.
Mary slumped in the driver’s seat just as a black sedan glided from the gate and took a left turn down the road. She followed its red lights with a nervous gaze, and when it had driven out of view, she slid up in the seat. The cedar gates were closing. She only had a minute to make a decision. She wanted to see inside. She flung open the car door, grabbed her purse, and bolted into the rain. The gate was closing, narrowing her entrance to three feet, then two. Mary darted through the opening as the gate closed noiselessly behind her and she ran for the shelter of a huge, leafy oak tree and looked around.
A winding driveway slick with wet cobblestones and lined with low lamps curled to a huge stone mansion, four stories high and constructed entirely of fieldstones, their natural earth tones vivid with rainwater and illuminated by bright lights aimed at the house. How did Saracone come to afford such a place? What did he do for a living? How had he come so far? And the mansion was only part of the compound. Beyond the house along the driveway sat a large stone carriage house, and next to it, a barn converted to the most swanky four-car garage in history. In front of it were parked two black Mercedes sedans, the model favored by Eastern Bloc diplomats. Mary looked over the cars to a stone cottage, also of fieldstone, and to the cedar fence beyond that apparently enclosed a built-in pool.