Chapter 9 - The Mafia Boss Who Owed My Father
When Naomi told me Gordon Pell had named Dante, I did not feel betrayed.
Not immediately.
I felt tired.
Betrayal required surprise, and by then I had begun assuming every answer came with another locked drawer behind it.
We met at Naomi’s office the next morning.
Dante arrived without Marco.
That was probably intentional.
Naomi placed a recorder on the table.
“This is not law-enforcement questioning,” she said. “But Marin asked me to be present.”
Dante looked at me.
“Good.”
I folded my arms.
“Pell says you were involved in Dad’s fire.”
“No.”
“He says you paid him.”
“Yes.”
Naomi’s pen stopped.
I stared at Dante.
“For what?”
“To bury a different report.”
A pulse started in my temple.
“Explain slowly.”
Dante leaned back.
“Ten years ago, before I controlled the Vale organization, my uncle ran it. He trafficked stolen pharmaceuticals through shipping routes controlled by men like Howerin. I opposed him. Quietly at first.”
“You were part of it.”
“Yes.”
That answer was too simple to forgive and too honest to dismiss.
He continued.
“The night Ward saved me, my uncle’s men had beaten and shot me because they believed I planned to cooperate with federal investigators. Ward found me behind his old garage. He hid me, treated the wound, and refused money.”
“That sounds familiar.”
“He had a pattern.”
I almost smiled.
Did not.
“Years later, after I took control, I dismantled my uncle’s trafficking routes. Not for moral purity. At first I did it because they were his. Eventually the reason changed.”
“What does Pell have to do with it?”
“He was a fire investigator and a fixer. He knew which warehouses had burned because of insurance fraud and which had burned because people were erasing evidence. I paid him once to give me a copy of a report connecting my uncle to a warehouse fire.”
“You bribed him.”
“Yes.”
Naomi spoke.
“That payment can be prosecuted depending on the facts and timing.”
“I know.”
Dante looked at me.
“Pell kept records. When Ward’s garage burned, Pell assumed I would pay again—this time to make the report point toward Howerin.”
“Did you?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because Ward was still alive.”
That answer surprised me.
“I went to the hospital. He told me he did not want a false report even if it blamed the right man. He wanted evidence.”
Of course he did.
Dad would rather lose honestly than win with the wrong bolt tightened.
“So Pell took Howerin’s money instead.”
“Yes.”
“And now he is using your old bribe to drag you into the same case.”
“Yes.”
I stood and walked to Naomi’s window.
Below us, Providence looked ordinary.
People carried coffee.
Buses stopped.
A dog pulled its owner toward a trash can.
Inside, I was learning that my father’s death sat at the intersection of two criminal systems and one stubborn mechanic who had believed documentation could protect him.
“What are you?” I asked Dante.
Naomi looked up.
Dante did not pretend not to understand.
“To the newspapers?” he said. “A businessman with alleged organized-crime ties.”
“To yourself.”
He was quiet.
“I inherited an organization built on violence. I removed some parts. I legitimized others. I still have people around me who solve problems in ways you would hate.”
“Do you order crimes?”
“Not trafficking. Not drugs. Not harm to civilians.”
“That was not my question.”
“No,” he said. “It wasn’t.”
Naomi watched him carefully.
Dante continued.
“I have threatened men. I have used information as leverage. I have moved money to protect businesses from people worse than me. I have not lived a clean life.”
There it was.
Not a romanticized confession.
Not a claim that he was secretly good.
A fact.
“Why protect me?” I asked.
“Ward.”
“Only Ward?”
His gaze held mine.
“No.”
The room changed.
I hated that I noticed.
Naomi cleared her throat loudly.
“I am still here.”
“Tragic,” I said.
Dante almost smiled.
Then Naomi pushed a folder toward him.
“If you mean what you say about Ward, you have a choice. Gordon Pell’s allegation gives investigators reason to look at your older operations. You can fight every subpoena and turn this into a war, or you can preserve records and cooperate.”
Dante looked at the folder.
“What would Ward do?” he asked.
I answered before Naomi could.
“He’d tell you to stop asking dead men to make your decisions.”
Dante looked at me for a long moment.
Then he opened the folder.
“I’ll cooperate.”
Naomi’s eyebrows rose.
“That may cost you.”
“I know.”
“Businesses. Partners. Possibly criminal exposure.”
“I know.”
He signed the preservation agreement.
Two days later, his attorneys delivered thirty-seven boxes of records and encrypted drives to federal investigators.
The city lost its mind.
Headlines called it a mafia fracture.
Commentators speculated about wars.
Howerin disappeared from public view.
And Ashb Auto, blackened and closed behind temporary fencing, became the most photographed garage in Rhode Island.
I hated every camera.
Then, three nights later, someone slipped another envelope through my rental apartment door.
Inside was a photograph of Dad’s Chevelle.
Not an old picture.
A new one.
Taken after the fire.
The car sat inside a warehouse I did not recognize.
On the back, Breck had written:
YOU HAVE SOMETHING OF MINE.
I HAVE SOMETHING OF HIS.
I called Tobin.
He answered.
Then I called the storage company where we had moved the Chevelle.
The manager picked up on the second ring.
Before I could ask, he said, “Ms. Ashb, we have a problem.”
The Chevelle was gone.
Before Howerin called, Tobin and I spent an afternoon inside the garage cataloging everything Dad had ever altered on the Chevelle. Old photographs became diagrams. Receipts became dates. A faded pencil mark beneath the glove box became a possible clue and then, after twenty minutes, became a faded pencil mark again.
“I think we’re becoming ridiculous,” Tobin said.
“We passed ridiculous yesterday.”
He crawled under the dashboard of a customer’s similar model to compare factory seams.
“Dad welded an extra brace behind the Chevelle’s dash.”
“How do you know?”
“Because this one doesn’t have it.”
That was the first tangible sign there might really be a second hiding place.
Dante arrived with lunch and found both of us covered in dust.
“You understand the actual car is missing,” he said.
“Thank you. We had overlooked that.”
He set down the food.
“What are you looking for?”
“A reason Breck stole something worth less than half the SUVs parked outside your house.”
Dante crouched beside the photographs.
“He doesn’t care what the car is worth.”
“Exactly.”
Tobin pointed to the dash photo.
“He cares what Dad put inside it.”
May you like
For a moment, all three of us looked at the empty bay where the Chevelle should have been.
That was when my phone rang.
