Angelina Bonaparte Mysteries Box Set by Nanci Rathbun (surface ebook reader TXT) 📗

for a spectacular ventilation system that spewed the foul air outside. I had to give him that. Even so, I would stink when I left and tried to minimize the cleaning bills by using Mary’s shelf.

As I did so, Mary called upstairs. “Mrs. Conti, Ms. Bonaparte has arrived. Shall I send her up?” Bertha was always ‘Mrs.’—and forget it at your peril! Mary put the phone in its cradle and gave a nod to the old marble stairs leading to Bart’s second-floor office.

Bertha looked up when I opened the door. “Ms. Bonaparte,” she brayed, lit cigarette in the ashtray next to her computer mouse. Her office uniform—white blouse, dark skirt, glasses on a chain around her neck—encased a tall, big-boned German woman of almost eighty. Her Sicilian husband died young in an internecine war. The Family stepped in to provide financial support and, eventually, the job with Bart. Bertha was as dedicated to the Family and the code of omerta as any soldier in its service.

“Afternoon, Bertha. Can I go in?” I nodded at Bart’s shut door.

“One moment.” She reached for a steno pad and pen and pressed a key on a mid-century intercom. “Ms. Bonaparte to see you,” she told him.

“Send her in, please,” his raspy voice directed.

When she followed behind me, I considered how to eject her without future ramifications. “Hi, Bart,” I said. “Thanks for seeing me on short notice. This probably won’t take a full hour, but I’m happy to pay for it. One thing, though. I’d like it to be off the record. No case notes.” I studiously kept my gaze on Bart and away from Bertha.

He bent forward in his reinforced chair, all three-hundred plus pounds of him, and took a drag on his cigarette. “It’s a bit unconventional, but we can handle it that way. I’ll stop you if it seems problematic.” He glanced at Bertha. “Bill it as legal consultation, no specifics. And we won’t need notes unless I buzz for you.”

With a scowl, Bertha marched to Bart’s desk, where she hauled open his middle desk drawer. The sudden movement caused his heavy chair to roll back. Bart’s mouth gaped open as she took a marker from the drawer and methodically blacked out the entry for my visit on his blotter. Then she exited and almost-slammed the door.

“Wow, that was intense,” I said.

Bart looked at me. “Most unusual, but she can be overly zealous about her duties.” He shrugged. “The Family owes her, and it’s not easy to find someone who’s willing to accept the nature of my clientele.”

I settled in a chair across from Bart’s desk, my feet not quite hitting the floor. “I’m in a bit of a quandary, Bart,” I said. “First, I need to confirm that this falls under the aegis of attorney-client privilege.”

He nodded.

“To be totally clear, nothing that I say here can get back to anyone in the Family.”

He raised an eyebrow. “What you ask may signal a conflict of interest. I can’t act as your legal representative if it will impact an existing client.”

“I understand that, and I wouldn’t put you in that position, except … Bart, you’re unique in your area of practice. There’s no one else I can go to. So let me present a hypothetical situation to you. No names, no identifying information. Just speculation.”

“Go on.”

I hesitated for a second, just long enough to assess how much I could trust Bart. When the Belloni case heated up to the level of personal threats against me, he urged me to step away, for safety’s sake. And a few months later, when I investigated a Serbian attorney’s involvement in the deaths of my client’s parents, Bart connected me to Spider and Bram York—again, to preserve my safety. But will he keep my confidence if revealing what I say would benefit a mob boss? The alternative was to drop the case and let Marcy and her little family swing in the breeze. I had to take the chance.

“A person in another area of the country has a job within the Family that puts him—and I’ll use the masculine pronoun, although the person might be female, because ‘he or she’ gets old—it puts him in a position to know privileged information. He decides one day to leave his position without notice. He takes nothing with him and causes no harm to the Family by his leaving. He disappears. For decades.”

I stopped to assess Bart’s interest. The cigarette lay unheeded in the ashtray, and he leaned back, arms resting on his belly and index fingers steepled under his chin, scrutinizing me closely.

Gotcha! “Here’s what I want to know. Is it safe for him to stop running and hiding? Can he build a new life, a legit life, without worry that some wise guy might make him and decide to cash in on his dead body? Can you broker a deal with the other organization to that effect, and can you do it without exposing him?” I pushed back into my chair and waited.

The question hung in the room for some time. I stayed quiet, unmoving, while he considered.

“Whether it’s safe or not depends on many factors—what he knew, who he knew, if the organization is still led by the same men, if any of them feel threatened by him or hold a grudge against him. It is too complex for me to know the answer, Angie. As for whether I would broker a deal, that answer is simple. No. To do so would be tantamount to making myself the repository of information that the other organization wants. That is not wise.” His eyebrows lowered. “Not for me, and not for you, Angelina. Disassociate yourself from this person and do it immediately. Burn anything that links him to you. Establish bona fides that will make it appear impossible for you to have been where he was … or is. This could be a matter of grave and urgent danger. Do you understand?”

Bart’s intensity shook me. “There are others, innocent others,