After the service, Quinn spoke with Rose Gallardi and told her the president sent his personal condolences. They hugged each other before Quinn moved on.
Quinn stopped along the way to his car to shake hands with a few of the dozens of supporters who had gathered. Minutes later he was ready to return to the airport.
Leonard Antonio Magliacci had tuned out the eulogies and prayers and remained in his seat when the service was over as his mother Molly, Rose Gallardi and the others emptied out. In the days since Gallardi’s murder Magliacci had dwelled on a phone conversation that took place in Frank’s office one early evening several years ago and now possibly held some potential for Magliacci. Magliacci had been in his cubicle near Gallardi’s office that night and heard Frank get upset with a caller. A few minutes later, Frank had summoned someone to his office. When he came, Lenny couldn’t hear what was said even though he had moved as close as he dared risk.
All of this came back to Lenny when he read the newspaper account of Gallardi’s murder. The story said an underworld character named Matty Figueriano was killed across town on the same night as Frank. Police said there was no known connection between Gallardi and the gangster known as Matty Fig, or their deaths.
Lenny Magliacci wasn’t so sure.
He walked out of the chapel and looked for his mother. Some of his cousins who were talking with her finished their conversations and left as he approached. He had grown up with them, played on the same little-league teams at Kimble Park, but all that was long ago and Lenny felt he and his cousins had little in common now. Lenny had gone to law school and none of his cousins made it through college.
Magliacci skipped the family gathering at the Gallardi home and drove to the Golden Touch. Frank had moved him downstairs years earlier but he had kept a key to the executive elevator. He got off at the third floor where the executive offices were located and walked through the empty, large reception area where Gallardi’s collection of art was displayed, past the windowless room Lenny once occupied and on to Gallardi’s office suite. He half-expected the area to still be sealed off and was glad to see that the police and FBI had released it. He’d never had the courage to venture into Gallardi’s private office before, but Frank was dead now and the executive offices were officially closed for the day. So Lenny was surprised that the feelings of apprehension that had kept him away reappeared now.
He stood in front of Gallardi’s huge desk and thought of the first and only time he sat there across from Gallardi. There had been no small talk or family news to start the meeting off, even though the two men hadn’t seen each other in months. Gallardi had opened a tan folder that held Lenny’s papers and frowned as he studied it, a deep vertical crease appearing between Gallardi’s thick brows as he spoke.
“Molly tells me you got into a little trouble,” Gallardi said that day. Lenny remembered Gallardi’s chilling voice as he sat forward in the big leather chair and formed a steeple with his hands as they lay on the desk. Lenny understood that it was time to grovel.
There was no doubt in Lenny Magliacci’s mind that Gallardi already knew every detail of his nephew’s problems — a malpractice case that cost him his license to practice law and put him into bankruptcy — but he wanted them extracted through Lenny’s pores in small pieces with sharp edges. Magliacci was flat broke and had no alternative to the offer Gallardi made him that day sitting at the desk he now stood in front of. Lenny’s mother Molly said she had forced her brother’s generosity, but the way Lenny saw it he had been made to pay the price by once again humiliating himself before the high-and-mighty family patriarch.
On the rare occasions when Frank spoke to Magliacci after that, he would stand at the door to Lenny’s office, never quite entering, and deliver a reprimand over something Frank couldn’t blame on someone else. That was the way Lenny saw it. Never any small talk. The work assignments Frank’s legal staff gave him weren’t even worthy of a beginning paralegal, and over time they grew into mountains of paper seldom asked for. Once a month or so, Lenny trashed them.
Lenny wandered around the large room now, taking in the luxury. Gallardi had selected exotic leathers and rare woods for the furnishings. One wall was all glass and took in the Boardwalk and the Atlantic Ocean. Magliacci watched the waves lap the Boardwalk below for a minute, tried Gallardi’s chair for size and then moved to one of the walls covered with photos. There were more than a hundred of them on the tall wall, Lenny estimated, showing his uncle with entertainers, government officials including President Cross, former President McNabb, Austin Quinn, numerous New Jersey politicos, local charity officials, several military officers, and members of his family. Noticeably absent to Lenny was even a single photo of himself.
In the center of the cluster was a portrait of the Gallardi estate, the mansion framed by brick pillars in the foreground that guarded the entrance to the property, from which the driveway curved to the right and ran beside verdant gardens anchored by towering oaks before reaching the grand mansion in the distance. This photo was as close as Lenny had ever been to Frank’s home.
Molly never missed a chance to hold Gallardi up to him with stories of her brother’s rise from kid dishwasher in the restaurant of the old Staffordshire Hotel on the Boardwalk, long before the casinos were even thought of. Gallardi had attended law school at night while supporting himself selling real estate, and years later bought the Staffordshire. “If you did something besides eat and watch television all the time, you could go out there like Frankie did and make yourself rich,” Molly would say. Lenny thought she had always placed her brother above him, her very son, but that might be about to change. Once he uncovered all the facts of that mysterious night of a few years back, perhaps his mother would see her brother in a different light. Her son, too. Perhaps there would be a new patriarch.
As Lenny continued to explore Gallardi’s office now, he ventured into a closet that turned out to not be a closet at all. A fierce-eyed eagle logo peered down from above the door of a bank-like vault that had an ancient combination knob in the center of its door. The cold steel door wouldn’t budge and Lenny went through the retro Rolodex on Frank’s credenza (he wondered why the investigators had not taken the Rolodex) and any drawer he could open hoping to find something resembling a combination. After twenty minutes searching he found a tiny sliver of paper bearing a set of numbers taped to the top edge of a door and was trying to make the combination work when he heard the back elevator start up. He closed the closet door, looked around to be sure nothing was out of place, turned out the lights and went back down on the executive elevator.
Next day at work, Lenny thought about nothing but the vault and the opportunities that might arise from a Gallardi and Matty Figueriano connection. After work, he went home and settled on the sofa in front of the television and watched The Simpsons. He set an alarm clock to go off at ten p.m. in case he fell asleep.
Lenny Magliacci was sure no one noticed when he got on the executive elevator at ten-thirty that night. The red exit directionals on the executive level afforded enough visibility for him to get through the familiar reception area and around the corner to Gallardi’s office, where the Boardwalk lighting reflected off the office ceiling and cast a soft glow on the walls and furniture. The Ferris wheel out on Steel Pier stood out against the black ocean like a giant roulette.