Someone to Watch Over Me

“After my near fatal brush with death, I decided to limit my excursions with Angelo’s gang to an occasional one that would be unlikely to get me killed or arrested. I also did a little research and discovered that the moronic teachers at my high school were actually telling the truth: Without an education, I didn’t have a shot at the big bucks.”

“Yes, but why did you still

do some illegal things with Angelo and the gang after that? Why didn’t you just give it up and—” Leigh faltered, trying to think of the right term.

“And stick to the straight and narrow?” he suggested.

“Exactly.”

He feigned a look of horror. “I had a reputation to maintain! Anyway, it all ended one night in June when I was seventeen.”

“How?”

He reached for the bottle of scotch on the liquor tray and poured some into a glass; then he took a long swallow as if to wash away the taste of what he was saying—or about to say. “Bill was pushing drugs by then, but he was using, too, and my cousin Angelo was just as high as he was that night. They got into a fight, and Bill killed him.”

“My God.”

“The cops came to tell my aunt, and she went crazy with grief.”

“What did you do?”

“I went looking for Bill. I found him within an hour, still high. He hadn’t washed his hands, and he held them up and showed them to me. They were covered with Angelo’s blood.”

“And?” she whispered.

He shrugged and took another swallow of his drink. “And I killed him.”

Leigh gazed at him in stricken silence, unable to assimilate that he could have done that, that he could have told her this so unemotionally, and then shrugged and taken a drink. Except—she realized—he had taken the drink before he told her. He put down the empty glass and folded his arms over his chest, looking at her as if waiting to hear her conclusion and not particularly interested in it, one way or another. He was no longer the compassionate, civilized man he’d become in her imagination lately; he reminded her of someone else. . . .

He reminded her of the cold, hostile young man she’d known fourteen years ago—a rude, indifferent man who wouldn’t give her the time of day. Except he’d evidently cared enough about her even then to remember now that she liked pears and shrimp pizza.

She stared at him, searching his inscrutable features and hard face, and a thought suddenly occurred to her. Hesitantly, she said, “Did you actually mean to kill him?”

Instead of answering, he asked her a question, but there was a barely perceptible softening of his jaw. “Why wouldn’t I have meant to kill him?”

“You said he was your best friend. You shared a playpen. You said Angelo was high on drugs and so was Bill. You didn’t sound like you thought Angelo was innocent.”

“You’re right,” he said with an odd expression in his eyes. “I didn’t intend to kill him. But I didn’t intend to make nice with him either. I probably would have beaten him half to death if I’d have been able to get the gun away from him.”

“But you couldn’t?”

“I should have been able to do it. I was a hell of a lot bigger and stronger than he was, but he was high and I was in a blind rage. He waved the gun at me, and I went for him. The gun went off in the struggle. He died in my arms.”

“And that’s why you went to prison?”

He nodded and poured more scotch in his glass. “Angelo’s funeral was the same day as Bill’s. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to attend either one of them.”

“But what I don’t understand is why you went to prison for what you did. It was self-defense.”

“Bill’s uncle disagreed, and by then he was a precinct captain. He had a good point—I was a lot bigger than Bill and almost a year older. He held me completely responsible for the death of his namesake and his sister’s only child. He told me he was going to spend the rest of his life making sure I never enjoyed mine, and he meant it. William Trumanti is a man of his word.”

“William Trumanti!” Leigh exclaimed, leaning forward. “You killed Commissioner Trumanti’s nephew?”

“That’s right.”

“My God . . .”

“I went to prison for four years for it, and I spent every minute of my free time in the library, studying.”

“Studying what?”

“Law,” he said. “I figured that since I kept running into the law, I needed to find out how to get around it. Later, I decided there were more interesting things to study. When I got out of prison I enrolled in college, and then I went to graduate school.”

Leigh got up and uncovered the Caesar salad Hilda had made. “And then what?” she asked.

“I discovered I had a knack for making money—legitimately—particularly in construction at first. I’d grown up on the streets, and I could deal with construction workers on their level, but I also knew how to put together a profitable deal and keep it profitable.

“For the first few years, everything went fine; in fact, it went even better than that. And then my business started getting big, and Trumanti heard about it. The next thing I knew, I was being arrested for ‘attempted bribery of a city inspector.’ The rest is history. The bigger I became, the bigger and more damaging were the accusations.”

He paused, and looked at her hands. She had scooped salad out of the bowl and was holding it in midair, riveted. “Are you planning to put that on a plate?”

“What? Oh. Yes. Go on—then what happened?”

“You know the rest. Trumanti has influential friends on the state and federal level, too, and with my history of arrests, he has no problem convincing a federal prosecutor or a district attorney to look into my affairs. I’ve spent millions of dollars in legal fees alone defending myself in various courts. It’s become a game he and I play—an ugly one. He’s dying of cancer now, but it hasn’t softened his attitude one bit. Vendetta is an Italian word, and he believes in it. Now,” he said finally, “have I kept my part of the bargain?”

Leigh gazed at him in silence and nodded, trying to assimilate what he’d said. She had no reason to believe he’d told her the whole truth, but she did believe it. For some reason, she believed it completely. Suddenly she remembered how eager Trumanti had been to help her, how willing to commit all of the NYPD’s resources to hunt for Logan. At the time, she’d been too demented with fear to question her entitlement or his actions, but now she wondered if Trumanti had known that Logan had been meeting with Michael Valente, and if that had anything to do with his willingness to help her.

Wordlessly, she picked up the salad plates, and he reached for the open bottle of red wine that Hilda had left on the counter. As Leigh put the plates on the dining room table, she belatedly realized that he hadn’t asked her if she believed what he told her.

She watched him pouring wine into goblets, his proud, hard face an expressionless mask in the candlelight. He wasn’t going to ask if she believed him, she realized. He would never stoop to that or try to persuade her to believe him. She remembered the incredible things he’d said to her when she first got home and walked into the kitchen. When she couldn’t put her own feelings into words, he’d sensed it and done it for her. . . .

“I ache all over, but mostly inside. Everything I believed in turned out to be wrong, and the people I trusted betrayed me.” He’d forced her to cry, because she needed to cry, and then he’d held her in his arms while she did, cradling her face against his chest, his hand drifting soothingly over her back. He’d held his best friend in his arms when he died, too, and she had a feeling he’d been as tender then as he’d been tonight, with her.

He stopped in front of her, waiting to pull out her chair for her, and Leigh gazed up at him, shaken by a myriad of emotions. “Leigh?” he said, his brows drawing together into a frown. “Are you crying?”

Dishonestly, she shook her head; then she said fiercely, “I hate Trumanti!”

He burst out laughing and snatched her into his arms.

Chapter 45

* * *

A week and a half later, Michael stood in the private elevator foyer outside her apartment with Leigh beside him, waiting for the elevator to take them to the main floor. “Are you sure you don’t want me to have O’Hara bring my car around to the alley?” he asked.

“I’m sure,” she said.

In the week and a half since he’d told he

r about his misspent youth, the police had subpoenaed all her husband’s business papers from his office at home, and on New Year’s Eve, a local television station broke the story that she was supposedly a suspect in her husband’s murder. Michael had witnessed her reaction: She’d stood up slowly, her arms wrapped around her middle, her face turning deathly pale. He’d put his arm around her shoulders—and she’d leaned into him, closed her eyes, and turned her face into his jacket. She’d been devastated, but not angry enough to fight back or even make a phone call in her own behalf.

Since then the media speculation had gone completely wild. Depending upon which newspaper, magazine, or news program was doing the story, everyone was a suspect—and as of that morning, Michael was now one, too. Up until then, brief mentions of his comings and goings to her apartment had appeared in the press, but that morning the Daily News had run a headline that read:

VALENTE IMPLICATED IN MANNING MURDER

According to the story that accompanied it, the police had “new evidence” to support a theory that Michael had killed Logan Manning in order to free Leigh of her cheating husband, take over his business, and then claim Leigh for himself.

Before the Daily News article, Michael hadn’t been able to convince her to leave the apartment and go out in public for her own sake, but when Leigh saw the Daily News headline that morning, she’d been so angry she’d phoned him and invited him out to dinner. She was absolutely certain William Trumanti was responsible for the leak to the press. “It sounds just like the things he’s done to you in the past,” she told him on the phone, “but he isn’t going to get away with it this time. I think the worst thing we can do is hide from everyone as if you’re guilty of something, don’t you?”

She’d been too humiliated and crushed to stand up and fight for herself, but now she was determined to be his champion, and the realization filled Michael with tenderness. He didn’t give a damn about Trumanti or the Daily News story, and he assured her of that, but she had a new cause—a distraction from her own woes—and he was willing to let her run with it. “Hiding could be a mistake.”