His Betrothed Read online

  “But I left because—”

  “I know why you left,” he whispered. “I know. But it was a long time ago, and our father was found innocent by a jury. Three times.”

  “Not guilty,” Angel corrected. The verdicts for each of the three trials had been controversial.

  “Same thing,” he said, touching her lips to override her response. “We’re not monsters, Angel, we’re your brothers. And we’re just businessmen trying to turn a profit in a tough market. Say you’ll at least stop by the house. We can talk, can’t we? We can show you the plans for the new Winnetka Shopping Mall—we have a scale model in the study. You’ll see that we’re so busy with this new project we couldn’t do half the things Patrick O’Malley gives us credit for.”

  Angel shook her head.

  “I can’t, Tony. I can’t”

  He stiffened but said no more.

  After a few moments of silence Bishop Ferrigan withdrew to his limousine. Tony led Rocco and Salvatore through the crowd, stopping occasionally for a handshake and a hug.

  Tony’s wife, Maria, who had been in Rocco’s class in school, stepped forward to give her a kiss, leaving a waxy, ruby imprint that Angel wiped off her cheek with the back of her hand. Tall, lanky Isabel, who was introduced without explanation, gave her a puzzled look but dutifully kissed her cheek.

  Angel swallowed hard, took in the blank stares of the mourners and stepped out of the way as discreetly as she knew how.

  Guy Martin, Sr., the elder Sciopelli’s closest friend, walked to the vault, with his wife and firstborn son holding tight to each of his arms.

  “Angel, you have become such a beautiful woman,” he said, withdrawing his arm from Guy, Jr., to place it squarely into Angel’s care. “You have married, no?”

  “No, I haven’t, Mr. Martin.”

  “Oh, so formal,” he teased. “So no husband and no bambinos, huh?”

  “No, none of that,” Angel answered, helping him to place two red roses on the steps of the tomb. He stood apart from her for a moment, his grief making him look even older than his sixty years.

  Then he motioned for Guy, Jr., to help him to his wheelchair and take him to the limousine.

  “It’s not too late for you and Zach,” he croaked, squandering his last energy on his words.

  She would have answered him, might have even told him that now wasn’t a time to be thinking of marriage, but the conversation had cost him plenty. He slumped into his wheelchair and Guy wheeled him away.

  As other mourners stepped up to offer their flowers, Angel walked in the direction of the cemetery gates.

  “Can I take you anywhere?” Zach asked, slipping his hand into hers.

  She pulled away.

  They had not spoken a word during the short drive from the cathedral to the cemetery, but Angel wasn’t sure that she could keep up the silent treatment all the way down to the city, to her hotel. She could say no, but there was the practical problem of being a mile and a half from the nearest train station.

  She also had the sense that to say no would only provoke him, make him more insistent and stubborn. And if she remembered one thing about Zach, it was that he got his way…or else.

  “You can drop me off at the station,” she suggested. “I’ve got to get back into the city.”

  “Good idea,” he said.

  He drove her directly to the train station, keeping up a spirited monologue about the prospects of the Chicago Cubs winning the pennant. She didn’t make any comments and, thankfully, he didn’t ask for any. He parked at the Hubbard Woods park across from the tracks. Angel got out and read the schedule taped to the station house window.

  “Train’s coming in ten minutes,” she called out.

  “I’ll wait,” Zach said, slamming shut the driver’s side door.

  “No, that’s all right,” Angel said. She sat down on the curbside bench and pulled a paperback out of her purse. “I’ll be fine. I wanted to catch up on some reading. Thank you for the ride.”

  “But I could stay.”

  “I’m sure my brothers could use some company.”

  “The house will be filled with mourners.”

  “You can talk to the company so that my brothers can be alone.”

  “It’s just another ten minutes.”

  “You’ve exhausted the topic of the Cubs,” she informed him. “They don’t win pennants, they win the hearts of their fans.”

  “We could talk about the weather, politics, religion, physics.”

  “You don’t have ten minutes worth of physics in you. And I don’t recall you having an interest in politics. And you always believed whatever the sisters taught you, so religion’s out.”

  “That leaves weather. It’s early June. Tornado weather. That’s exciting.”

  This was the limit of her patience!

  “No. Please, Zach, I want to be alone. Really alone.”

  She could have been no more effective at harming him than if she reached out and slapped him in the face. But he was at heart a stoic. His red flush diminished to the bronze of early-summer tan.

  His startled eyes blinked twice and then became a placid and charming gray.

  “I understand,” he said with a courtly bow. “It’s been a very rough time for you. So I guess it’s time for goodbye.”

  He reached to kiss her cheek, but she turned her face away. He took the rebuff without comment and walked back to his car.

  “Zach?”

  “What?”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  She didn’t want to ask, but she couldn’t help herself. She had lived with the question unanswered for ten years. And she didn’t have the self-control necessary to squelch the curiosity—and the need for closure.

  “Why didn’t you come? To the airport?”

  “I don’t think you really want to know the answer to that question.”

  “I can’t help myself. I think about it way too much. Consider it a favor to me to just tell me flatout why. You don’t need to sugarcoat it.”

  The pain on his face was quick and sure. And so vital that Angel thought for a moment, a bare moment, that he felt the same way as she did. But then he shrugged, the instant of torment replaced with a rakish smile.

  “It was a long time ago, Angel. We were kids, a couple a silly kids in the throes of puppy love. I hardly remember it clearly myself,” he said with apparent ease. “I’m sorry if your feelings got hurt, but you look like you’ve done all right for yourself. And life goes on, right?”

  Sucker punched by a stone-cold lover.

  As he drove away in the Camaro, Angel stood at the curb, shocked into silence. Of all the stories she had told herself in the past ten years, this was not one of them. He was confused, she had said to herself. He feels loyalty to his father, she had told herself. He was simply not as in love with her as she was with him.

  But never that he was this offhanded.

  Puppy love? She might have been young, but her love for him was everything.

  Well, he hadn’t put any sugar on it!

  Shaking her head, she watched the red Camaro until it was swallowed up in traffic on Green Bay Road.

  She didn’t see the black Pontiac sedan pull up to the curb until she felt the heat of the exhaust brush against her leg. The back smoked window eased down and a grizzled, gray face peered out.

  “Ms. Sciopelli, I’m Patrick O’Malley,” he said, his voice as choppy as if he were gargling rocks. “We need to talk.”

  “I know who you are from your picture in the paper,” Angel said. “What were you doing at my parents’ funeral?”

  “I wanted to pay my respects.”

  “Sure.”

  “I have a certain respect, a certain bond, with your father, even if I don’t like the things he did. Anyway, like I said, we need to talk.”

  “About what?”

  “About the fact I need your help.”

  “No. I’m going home.”

  She stood and
headed for the platform.

  “Ms. Sciopelli,” he called after her. “You’re a teacher. You understand how important it is to think of the future of your children. To think about how to make a better world, one in which businessmen don’t use their legitimate interests to hide the profits they make from kickbacks and extortion schemes.”

  She stopped in her tracks.

  “How do you know I’m a teacher?” she asked.

  He leaned out over the open window of the car.

  “A district attorney has many sources of information,” O’Malley replied easily. “Even in Davenport, Iowa. We know everything, Angel. Or should I call you Jennifer? Jennifer Smith is the name you’ve used for the past ten years, isn’t it?”

  A sudden rush of revulsion and dread swept through her.

  “Why don’t you get in the car?” he asked, and the driver got out and opened the passenger door on the other side of the car.

  “Damn you, O’Malley” she said, surprising herself.

  Her preschoolers had never heard her say anything more inflammatory than “fiddlesticks.”

  He shrugged. Obviously he had been called worse.

  She sat as far away from him as she could, in the groove of black leather interior. A dark-suited man who offered no introduction sat on the jump seat across from them with an open notebook and a pencil. With no directions given, the driver pulled north on Green Bay Road. O’Malley placed a folder on the seat between himself and Angel.

  “Here’s your life, Angel,” he said. She opened the first page to a birth certificate, a copy of the one she had purchased for herself ten years ago. “It’s a nice life, Jennifer Smith. Preschool teacher. Playing piano for the church choir. Nice two bedroom apartment next to the bike path. A quiet life, keeping to yourself, not much in the way of dating. Some would say it’s a little boring.”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “In any event, kiss it goodbye if you don’t intend on cooperating.”

  She leafed through the file. It was all there. Photographs, canceled checks, bank statements—O’Malley knew more about her than anyone else on earth.

  She closed the folder.

  “So I left home and changed my name. Big deal,” she added with more bravado than she felt

  “Would you want your brothers to know where you live? Would you want the men who worked for your father or the ones who worked against him to call you Jennifer and visit your classroom?”

  “It…it depends.”

  The agent across from her scribbled in his notebook. Angel tried to read what he was writing, but it was upside-down and utterly illegible.

  “It depends on whether you believe your father was a criminal,” O’Malley said lazily. “And if you believe your brothers are equally guilty.”

  “My father was a building contractor,” Angel said. “He built office buildings and shopping malls. When I left ten years ago, my brother Tony had just gotten into the carpenter’s union and Rocco was an electrician’s apprentice. Salvatore hoped to become an architect. His drawings of buildings are first-rate.”

  “Salvatore is very artistic,” O’Malley agreed. “Sometimes I think he’d be happier as a starving artist in a garret. But all your brothers worked for your father. In construction. They say.”

  “Yes.”

  “Was he clean all those years?”

  “He was never convicted. You indicted him three times on bribery, money laundering and squeezing protection money from small businesses. But nothing ever stuck, did it? So he must have been clean.”

  “Not guilty is different from innocent.”

  Angel looked out of the smoked-glass windows at the voluptuous oak trees that lined Green Bay Road. She tried to forget that she had, just a half hour before, thought of that same logic when talking to Tony.

  “You wouldn’t have left if you thought he was legit,” O’Malley said, leaning back and studying her carefully. “And you would have gone to the house to be with your brothers in their hour of grief if you had any faith that they were clean, too.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “I want help in nailing your parents’ killer,” O’Malley said. “They were gunned down outside that restaurant as if they were dogs. Your mother took eight shots altogether and your father took twelve. Your brother Rocco passed out when he was IDing the bodies at the morgue. Your father didn’t have a face. Rocco had to look for a scar on his finger.”

  “But I would think the police would take care of this,” she said, swallowing her horror at the grisly details.

  “The police will be working under my office. We’re treating this as being related to your father’s criminal activities.”

  “And my mother?”

  “An innocent. A true innocent. In the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “So where do I fit in?”

  “I think we want things from each other,” O’Malley said, taking her soft, unlined hand in his own gnarled fingers. “You want to return to your life. I want to close up this investigation and clean up a little portion of the city. We both want killers in jail and our streets to be safe. I don’t have any children, was never blessed with marriage, but if I did I wouldn’t want their safety any more intensely than I want safety for all the children right now. The Sciopelli and Martin companies both hide businesses that do dirt and put danger on the streets.”

  “I’m not part of it.”

  “You can get. in the house.”

  “My house?” Angel recoiled.

  “The Sciopelli house. Your brothers still live at home, on the family compound. We want an insider there. And I think your brothers may have been involved in the killing.”

  Angel shook her head.

  “I can believe a lot of things about my brothers, but that they would kill our parents is out of the question.”

  “Still, it would be a good thing to prove them innocent…or guilty,” O’Malley countered. “It might even put your heart at ease, once and for all.”

  “I wouldn’t think you’d care who killed my father.”

  “No, that’s not true. Even though I think your father did many, many terrible things, I still believe he didn’t deserve to be killed or to have his wife killed beside him. And furthermore, as an officer of the court, I am sworn to find his killer.”

  “I’m not looking for vengeance.”

  “But, Angel, doing the right thing is very different from running away.”

  She leaned forward, reaching past the anonymous assistant to tap on the glass partition separating her from the driver.

  “Excuse me. Please stop the car now.”

  No response.

  “Excuse me.” She knocked more frantically on the smoke glass. “Excuse me, I want to get out of the car. Now.”

  The glass slid down. She looked back to see O’Malley’s finger at the control for the window. She felt vaguely humiliated that she had had to rely on him, but she wasn’t going to give another inch.

  “Stop the car,” she ordered.

  The driver glanced back at his boss.

  “Do it,” O’Malley concurred.

  “Thank you,” she said as the car slid to a stop in front of a row of quaint Tudor-style shops.

  “Before you go,” O’Malley said, “I want you to consider something. You’re a preschool teacher, right?”

  “You know all about me.”

  “In Davenport, they don’t have a lot of drugs. Not much prostitution. Not much illegal gambling. Am I right?”

  “Yes, that’s true.”

  “Chicago’s a little different. It’s a rough-and-tumble town that tries so hard to be civilized. But there’s drugs. In the schools, even. Prostitution and drugs, illegal weapons sales. Your average preschool teacher in the Chicago public schools has already seen the fallout. It’s bad, but the most terrifying part is that Chicago now is what Davenport will be in ten years. Your children will not be spared.”

  “O’Malley, your office has spent a lot of resources
targeting my family,” Angel said, mimicking the rationale she knew her father would use. “Three acquittals. Don’t you think you should pick another target?”

  “No.”

  “Why not? You seem to have such a personal thing going.”

  “Oh, Angel, it’s always personal.”

  “I’m going,” she said.

  “Fine,” O’Malley said, directing the agent sitting in the jump seat to open the door for her. “I’ll make sure this gets to the right people. Tony’s never seen your apartment And Rocco would get such a kick out of visiting your classroom. Zach would want to come see you, wouldn’t he?”

  She paused, one foot on the curb, the other still in the car. O’Malley held up the file. It was her life. Her own life, the one she had spent ten years making for herself.

  “Angel, if you thought they were good men, you wouldn’t be afraid. And, Angel,” he added, leaning forward out the window, “you should be afraid. We all should be very afraid.”

  Chapter Three

  Angel pulled the brass lion’s head of the Sciopelli house and let it fall. The vibration of the heavy knocker echoed her heart’s fearful rhythm. The taxicab glided down the flagstone driveway, taking with it her means of escape.

  The house hadn’t changed much. Built more suitably for mild Mediterranean climate than for Chicago’s rugged extremes, its walls were bleached stucco, the roof terra-cotta; arched windows soared and the oak doors were intricately carved. The senior Sciopelli had added on to the house with each business success—an octagonal turret, flagstone paths; expert landscaping with ornate wrought-iron furniture and voluptuous blooms imported from Europe.

  Angel ran her fingers across her envelope purse, feeling the outline of her lipstick, her hairbrush, the roll of mints, a camera no bigger than her thumb and the slim little tape recorder that O’Malley swore would pick up even the slightest sound in the study.

  Isn’t there a parable involving sheep being led to slaughter? Angel thought grimly, looking back over the sun-dappled lawn of her childhood home.

  The grass was green and shorn to a luxurious but neat three inches. The first summer cicadas buzzed ominously. Red poppies and white hostas waved gaily from the border on the street.