Chapter 4 - THE RED IN THE BOXWOOD
Back at the Valente estate, the house was not dark. Every chandelier in the grand hall had been switched on, blazing down upon the empty marble floor with a white, clinical intensity that made the shadows look like ink stains.
Dominic Valente sat at his desk, his sleeves rolled to the elbows, his forearms flat against the walnut surface. Before him lay the red leather ledger, page by page, torn from its binding with the steady, rhythmic efficiency of a butcher dressing a carcass.
He wasn't burning them. He was reading every line, his eyes tracking the names he had forgotten—judges who had taken their pay in real estate in Avalon, police captains whose pensions were funded through dummy corporations in Delaware, and right beside them, in the margin of every fifth page, Marco’s small, neat initials: M.F.
For fifteen years, Marco hadn't been an employee. He had been the auditor. He had held the knife while Dominic swung it, cataloging every drop of blood to make sure the balance sheet came out even at the end of the fiscal quarter.
A floorboard creaked in the outer hall.
It wasn't the heavy, measured tread of a man trying to hide his entry. It was light, almost dragging—the sound of someone wearing shoes that were slightly too large for their feet.
Dominic didn't look up from the ledger. He reached down beside his right knee and lifted a heavy, short-barreled Smith & Wesson Model 29 from its holster clipped to the underside of the kneehole. The steel was cold against his palm, smelling faintly of gun oil and brass.
"You left the back gate open, Marco," Dominic said, his voice carrying clearly into the high, vaulted spaces of the hallway. "The frost is going to hit the boxwoods before dawn. The leaves will turn brown by Monday."
The footsteps stopped just outside the study door.
For three seconds, there was only the sound of the grandfather clock in the corner ticking off the seconds—tock, tock, tock—heavy and mechanical, like a heart being wound by someone else's hands.
Then the door swung inward on its brass hinges.
It wasn't Marco.
It was Frankie, the twenty-four-year-old kid from the docks, holding a nickel-plated automatic low against his thigh, his jacket soaked through with rain at the shoulders, his young face gray with a terror he hadn't yet learned how to hide behind a pocket square.
"He's not coming back, Mr. Valente," Frankie whispered, his chest heaving as if he had run all the way from Camden. "Marco took the northbound train an hour ago. He left the car at the station with the keys in the ignition."
Dominic slowly laid the Smith & Wesson flat on the open pages of the ledger. The blue steel barrel came to rest right across Marco’s neat signature on page forty-two.
"Did he leave a message for me, Francis?" Dominic asked, his voice so quiet it barely reached the doorframe.
"He said... he said you always spent too much time looking at the window, sir," Frankie stammered, his eyes darting toward the desk, toward the gun, toward the empty chair by the door where a three-year-old child had sat every morning for four years. "And he said... he said the girl isn't the only one who doesn't belong to you."
Dominic looked at the kid. He saw the tremble in the boy’s lower lip, the cheap suit from a discount warehouse on Broad Street, the way his left hand twitched toward his pocket every time the grandfather clock struck.
"Your father’s name was Thomas," Dominic said softly.
Frankie swallowed hard, his throat working. "Yes, sir."
"Thomas died on the pier because he couldn't keep his mouth shut about the union dues," Dominic said, standing up from his chair. His shoulders were broad, filling the space between the bookshelves like an ancient oak that had weathered fifty winters on the same hill. "Marco told me he went into the river because he was drunk. Was he drunk, Francis?"
The boy didn't answer. He couldn't. His eyes filled with water, the rain dripping from the brim of his cheap cotton cap onto the polished marble threshold.
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Dominic walked around the desk. He didn't pick up the gun. He walked straight toward the boy, his stride steady, unhurried, the walk of a man who owned every inch of stone between the Delaware River and the state line.
"Go home, Francis," Dominic said, stopping two feet from the terrified kid. "Tell Marco that the boxwoods look better in the gray."
