The Vendetta Defense (25 page)

Her mood was going downhill again. She had passed up sex with an Italian, now for no reason. Was there really a funeral today? She reached the leftover newspaper with her bare foot and slid it toward her hand. She opened it, turned to the obituaries, and found Angelo Coluzzi’s.

Loving father,
it began, which got Judy right there because she had never had one. She imagined her father’s obit.
Stern father. Militaristic father. Bad father, but really good lieutenant colonel.
She decided on the spot against making the phone call that Bennie had ordered. If the Colonel hadn’t read that his daughter had been fired upon and almost killed, she wouldn’t ruin his roast-beef-and-butter sandwich.

Judy skimmed the rest of the tiny print but felt no guilt. How could they say all these nice things about such a rotten person? How could the surviving sons be bereft when they spent their spare time using little old men for target practice? The last line said that donations may be made to Our Lady of Sorrows Church, and a viewing would be held at Bondi Funeral Home in South Philly, with a funeral mass there today.

It gave Judy an idea.

25

T
he Bondi Funeral Home was one of several that lined South Broad Street, the main thoroughfare of the city, and Judy stood in the midst of the growing crowd across the street. Dressed in a black silk scarf, oversized sunglasses, and black raincoat from the spy wardrobe in the office closet, Judy looked more like Boris’s Natasha than a mourner, but at least she didn’t look like the lawyer suing the bereaved. She might not be welcome at the viewing.

Cigarette smoke blew past her face, and the man standing next to her swilled wine from a bottle inside a bag. Two old women behind her were gossiping about a neighbor, but a couple of students who had stopped on their way to the College of Art were talking about the car bomb. Judy flipped up her raincoat collar. No doubt that the morning’s press coverage had attracted residents, onlookers, and the press to the viewing, which wasn’t set to begin until three o’clock, according to the obit. Judy checked her watch. It was only two, and uniformed cops were already arriving to control the crowd.

“Back it up, folks,” called out one of the cops, stepping out of a squad car and signaling to a slow-moving municipal truck that followed. He and a cadre of other policemen hurried to unload blue-and-white sawhorses from the tailgate of the truck and set them up in front of the curb to prevent the crowd from spilling onto Broad Street and getting hit by cars. Judy could never understand the South Philly tradition of locating funeral homes on the busiest street in town, ensuring either congested traffic or dead mourners, or both, but there was much about South Philly she didn’t understand. Twirling your spaghetti and attempted murder, for starters.

“Yo, back it up, sports fans,” the cop said again. The art students edged back, leaving Judy standing next to them at the opening between two sawhorses, giving her a clear view of the entrance to the funeral home. She was hoping to see the Coluzzis, to get a bead on how John and Marco were getting along, and also to learn anything else she could. She didn’t know what could happen, and even attending a viewing was better than calling her parents.

A murmur ran through the crowd, and Judy followed the heads turning south down the street. From the oohs and aaahs she would have expected the Mummers Parade, but it was an inky line of shiny black limos snaking their way to the funeral home. Judy stood on wobbly tiptoe. It had to be the Coluzzis. Her pulse quickened.

Gray-jacketed men from the funeral home scurried down the marble steps and took stations at the bottom of the stairs as a limo pulled up, a triple stretch with curved smoked glass more suited to Elvis than a contractor. Its mammoth engine idled at the curb awaiting the others, which pulled up slowly behind it, inadvertently building interest in the crowd. Press cameras flashed, and one of the students next to Judy giggled as she raised a disposable Kodak camera.

Judy looked over. That could come in handy. “I’ll give you twenty bucks for the camera,” she said to the student. The woman had a cartilage pierce, a nostril pierce, and a lower lip pierce, and Judy, who had considered herself counterculture until this moment, felt very sorry for her.

“It
cost
twenty bucks,” the art student retorted, but Judy was reaching into her backpack for her wallet.

“You can punch a lot of holes with this.” Judy opened her wallet, extracted a fifty, and handed it to her.

“Whoa,” the student said, and she and her friend left.

Judy raised the camera just as the doors of the first limo opened and John Coluzzi stepped out, his stocky frame encased in an expensive suit, and reached a hand out to help his mother, wearing a black dress and a shawl like Judy’s, and then his wife, a petite woman in a trim black suit with a black lace doily pinned to the top of her stop-time bouffant hairdo. Judy snapped a picture, and only a half second later another limo arrived. The smaller Marco Coluzzi climbed out with his wife, a corporate version of John’s wife with normal hair and two young boys in Holy Communion suits holding on to each of her manicured hands.

Judy took another picture, remembering the newspaper feature about who would be king of Coluzzi Construction. You didn’t have to be Italian to know that the son with the sons would make a better successor, since the royal line would be assured. Judy took another photo.

The third limo pulled up and a group of men and women Judy didn’t recognize got out. She snapped a few photos on the assumption they were named defendants, and then the limos started coming down Broad, fast and furious as string bands. Judy shot all of them, at least in profile, and got lots of photos as mourners arrived in a black river that moved as slowly as tar through the crowd and traffic.

But as the mourners went inside, she began to feel sidelined, even as she snapped away and finished the entire roll in the camera. The viewing was open to the public, and Judy could go in if she wanted to. It was risky, going into the belly of the beast you were suing blind, but she hadn’t been recognized so far, even by the art students, who had read about the car bomb. And if she got inside, maybe she could overhear something. Judy slipped the camera into her raincoat pocket, ducked through the sawhorses, and hurried across the street.

Her heart beat faster as she ascended the marble steps to the funeral home, under a gray plastic awning whose scalloped edges flapped in the wind whipping down Broad Street. Mourners filed up the stairs next to her, meeting a bottleneck at the top as people greeted each other, talking and plunging cigarettes into tall ceramic urns filled with sand. Judy waited for the crowd to move, her eyes on the cigarette butts that stuck like a nightmare forest from the sand. She had never been to a viewing before, much less an Italian viewing, and told herself to stay cool and go with the flow. When in Rome and all.

The crowd edged inside and when it hit the thick red carpet, filed to the left. Judy couldn’t see ahead of the burly man in front of her. A surreptitious scan of the male mourners revealed a collection of rough-hewn faces weathered from outside work and large, hammy hands bearing high school rings. The men looked even less accustomed to their stiff suits than Judy was to hers, and her stomach tensed as she realized that they had to be subcontractors on the Philly Court strip mall and other Coluzzi projects. Unless she missed her guess, they would be very jumpy today, looking to the Coluzzis to protect them. It could be a lawyer’s gold mine. She tried to keep her head down, her ears open, and her eyes attuned to detail. The first detail she noticed was that nobody around her was crying.

The line flowed slowly into a room on the left, and Judy took it in quickly. It was a huge room filled with folding chairs that faced toward the front, which she couldn’t see for all the people milling around, clapping each other on the back and laughing. The metal folding chairs were covered with slipcovers of ivory plastic, matching the ivory-colored walls of the room, which were flocked with curlicues of gold velveteen. The air was thick with the scent of refrigerated flowers and Shalimar knock-off. Judy tried not to breathe.

The line edged forward, and she could hear snippets of conversation from the seated areas. “Yo, Tommy, I only see you at wakes and weddings.” “So, Jimmy, you back on the Atkins shit?” “I tol’ him, the Eagles don’t get themselves a new RB, they’re fucked.” “They never shoulda got ridda Reggie.” “She’s a real nice girl, real nice. Goin’ to Villanova inna fall.”

Judy kept listening, but so far it wasn’t promising. Maybe nobody was going to chat about confessing today. The line shifted forward along the fuzzy wall. It was almost at the front of the room, and Judy peeked up. A gleaming bronze casket with chrome handles sat on a massive dais of roses, freesia, gladiola, and white carnations spray-dyed rainbow colors. To the left of the casket in front of a similar floral backdrop stood a somber John and Marco Coluzzi, stiff as bookends that didn’t match. They didn’t say a word to each other, nor did they stand close, but Judy was suddenly too preoccupied to notice more about their body language. The line of mourners flowed directly to the casket, and the people were kneeling in front on a padded knee rest and making the sign of the cross on their chests, then moving on to speak with the Coluzzi brothers.

Judy’s eyes went as wide as her sunglasses. She was in a receiving line! She didn’t want to kneel in front of Coluzzi’s casket. She didn’t even know how to cross herself. If she didn’t get out of the line fast, she’d be shaking hands with the men who were trying to kill her.

She looked around wildly. There was nowhere to go but the seats on the left and moving there at this point would be dangerously obvious. Nobody in the line was breaking ranks before paying proper respect to the dead. And anybody who had seen
The Godfather
knew that respect counted in this crowd.

The line shifted forward two rows, bringing Judy only twenty feet from the front of the room. She didn’t know what to do. She thought fast. Only one excuse was acceptable on this occasion. “Excuse me,” she said loudly. “Does anybody know where the ladies’ room is?”

An older woman two couples up turned around and pointed right with a slim finger. “Other side of the hall,” she said sympathetically, and Judy nodded.

But the only exits were back the way she came, or to the right of the casket. Only one way to go. If Judy acted suspicious, the Coluzzis would suspect her. She held her stomach as if she’d had a sudden attack of dysentery and hurried to the front of the room, took a quick right at the red gladiolus, and looked for signs to the ladies’ room.

LOUNGE, read one softly lighted sign, and she followed the euphemism to the ladies’ room. But when she opened the door, it wasn’t a bathroom at all but a large, gold-flecked room ringed with covered folding chairs, supplied with prominent boxes of Kleenex, and occupied completely by crying women. One group sat in one corner weeping theatrically and clutching soggy tissues, and the other sat in the other corner sobbing even louder. Judy looked from one to the other and wondered fleetingly if it was an Italian Battle of the Bands.

“Oops, sorry,” Judy said, but nobody took notice except a strawberry-blond woman with bright blue eyes. Tall and very pregnant in a black linen maternity dress, she stood alone by the door, examining the bad prints.

“You needn’t be sorry,” the woman said, with a heavy Irish accent. A light sprinkling of freckles covered her nose, and her skin was a poreless pale pink.

“I was looking for the ladies’ room.”

“It’s down the hall.” The woman leaned over, her blue eyes dancing with mischief. “I made the same mistake. You’re not Italian either, are you?”

“How could you tell?” Judy smiled, nervous that the Irish woman would recognize her.

“Why, you’re nice and tall, too, and I can see under your scarf that you’re a blonde.”

Renewed sobbing surged loudly from the groups of women in the corners, like tears in stereo. Judy considered leaving the room, but the woman was so obviously alone, a clear outsider. Judy leaned to her and whispered, “We’re the only women in here not crying. I think it’s the price of admission.”

The woman laughed softly. “Now that’s the difference between the Italians and Irish. We Irish know how to throw a grand wake. Everybody has a good time. The whole point is
not
to cry.” Her eyes lit up. “Wakes last for days in Ireland. County Galway, where my family’s from. Do you know it?”

“No,” Judy told her, counting it as a measure of the woman’s naïveté that she would expect an American to be familiar with Ireland’s counties. Judy had always felt guilty she knew no geography but America’s own.

“It’s a lovely place, lovely. I’m from a town called Loughrea. I came over only two years ago, after I met my husband, Kevin. I’m Theresa, by the way.”

“Great to meet you,” Judy said simply, and got away without supplying her own name, in Theresa’s enthusiasm for someone to talk to.

“Well, my husband, Kevin, he’s American. He came to town on holiday, and he was looking for the ATM machine. You know, the MAC machine, you call it? And I told him it was right in front of him, pretty as you please, on Dublin Road. We fell in love right there.”

“ ‘Where’s the MAC?’ Quite a pickup line,” Judy said with a smile, and Theresa laughed warmly.

“It was. We got married and now we’re having the baby, and it’s been grand.” She paused, uneasy. “Not that it hasn’t taken some getting used to, a new marriage and all, and the way things are over here. Of course I’d read so much about America, we have all your TV shows and movies and your books, and I thought I knew what to expect. But then again, you can never tell what turn your life will take, can you?” The woman shook her head as if in a memory, and a sudden wetness sprang to her eyes.

“You want to sit down?” Judy asked, taken aback, and helped the pregnant woman to a shaky seat near the door.

“I’m sorry, I’m being so silly. It must be my hormones.”

“No, that’s okay.” Judy yanked for a Kleenex from a box left on the seats and handed it to her. “You’re in the crying room. You might as well cry.”