Another few days go by and I try my best to stop thinking about Dante. It's over, whatever we had, and I need to accept that. I need to let it go and make my peace with that. We had a good run, we said our goodbyes, it's done. I didn't think that saying goodbye to somebody, especially Dante Berardi, would ever be this hard. I still can't stop thinking about him.
Today, I am meeting with my father and Sergei to go over everything that I'd found at the Berardi to see what we can do with that information and to see if I had retrieved the information that my father was looking for.
"There's nothing about Alma coming back," I tell my father at the beginning of our conversation. "Not one mention of her name in the entire system."
"What else did you find?" He asks me.
"I got a lot of stuff," I explain. "Shipment schedules, employee profiles, income statements, emails, all of that. It's too much to really show you but there's nothing that we can really use."
"What if they weren't talking about Alma by her name?" Sergei suggests. "They could have been using a pseudonym for privacy's sake. We can't rule out that she's still in the equation."
"I don't think that it's happening," I shake my head at them. "Whatever you heard about Alma coming back was either a lie or it was bait to get you to retaliate."
"What were you talking to Dante Berardi about?" My father completely changes the subject. "He was here for over an hour the other day and you turned off your security. What business do you have with him anymore?"
"We worked closely when I was there," I try to explain to him without telling him the extent of the situation. "And he was angry when he found out who I was. He just wanted answers."
"And so you gave him answers?" He asks me disapprovingly.
"No, I just talked to him," I say. "It's irrelevant to anything that we're doing here."
"I heard that you had found a lake house," Sergei changes the subject. "What did you find there?"
I pause, trying to think of what I should say. I can't tell my father about what I found in that basement, all of that stuff about my mother, because I don't know where he stands on it. I don't know if he knows about it and that he was looking for it to destroy all of the evidence that Giovanni has found. Maybe he doesn't know about it at all because he doesn't know that Giovanni wasn't in charge of my mother's death. Either way, I'm not going to tell him what I found until I get the truth for myself.
"Nothing," I respond after a moment of thought. "It's just a place of leisure, there was nothing."
"How did you find it?"
"Somebody told me about it."
"Dante?" My father assumes.
"No," I lie quickly. "Will you stop with that? You told me to get close to the Berardis and so I did so why are you giving me shit for that now? I did what you told me to do."
"I'm worried that you took it too far," He leans back in his chair, watching me to assess my reaction to his accusation.
"Well, I didn't," I mutter. "So let's just go over what I did find instead you patronizing me for doing my job."
He is losing his temper; I can see his old fist starting to curl which is something that he does when he gets angry. I calm down my attitude so that I don't get backhanded.
"These are all of the logs that I deemed important enough to point out," I hand over a thick file of documents that I'd found in the Berardi system with Coleman's help. "I'm not sure how much use you'll get out of them but that's your job."
"This is a lot of stuff," He observes.
"Yeah, Coleman helped a lot," I inform him. "He died because he was helping me with this stuff so it better be worth something. Is that all? I have a lot of work to get back to."
My father gives me an irritated look but he also nods, letting me get out of this meeting room to return to my office. He keeps pressing this Dante subject and I know that if he continues to do so, we'll have an argument and I'll end up getting hit, which I don't desire at all. I'm pretty much all healed from the beating I got from Dante almost three weeks ago but that doesn't mean that I need new bruises to replace the old ones.
Back at my office, the first thing that I do is check my email. I have three unread emails but the thing that catches my eye is that the sender of one of those emails is Wyatt Coleman.
I stare at the email for a moment without opening it, rereading those words back to myself a few times just to make sure that I'm not hallucinating. With a shaky hand, I finally click on the email to open it.
Dear Vera,
If you're reading this, I'm probably dead. That's a really cheesy line but this will probably be the only time that I'll ever get to use it and I've always wanted to say that. Anyway, you're most likely sad that I'm dead but I just want to let you know that you shouldn't be. I know that I've done a lot of bad things in my life. I've been angry about my parents dying and I've taken that anger out on other people, taking other lives. And so I'm okay with dying because I know that I have it coming. And I guess that you could say that you have it coming too but I would disagree.
Because you did not choose this, you did not actively choose to start killing people, it was pushed onto you since the day that you were born. It's all that you've ever known and that is not your fault. You can't fight me on this, I'm dead. And who knows? Maybe there's an afterlife. Maybe, as you're reading this email, I'm chilling with my parents in Heaven. Or maybe I'm in hell or maybe there's just nothing.
Anyway, I'm writing this to you and I'm scheduling it to be sent in a few weeks, hopefully you've healed a little bit from my death. I know that we're family and that losing me will be hard for you but I hope that you heal quickly because I don't want this to hurt you. I just feel like it's the right thing to do, to protect you. If I am in heaven, I want to look down and see you trying to do what makes you happy. Whether that's staying here working under your father or moving away to start a new life, I want you to be happy.
I love you a lot, Vera. Take care of yourself.
P.S. Earlier today, I finished filtering through the pictures in all of our databases and I found a few pictures of your dad with some men I've never met before. Maybe this will help in your hunt for your mother's killer?
Goodbye,
Coleman
There's an attachment on the email and so I curiously open it. It's a slideshow of my father taking pictures with other men looking tough and serious, probably on business meetings. None of them are of the man that I shot, who killed my mother. I continue to go through the slideshow, studying each man's face until I'm sure that it's not the man that I'm looking for.
Until it is the man that I'm looking for.
My father standing right next to the man that murdered my mother, smiling at the camera and shaking hands. He's wearing the Pantera crest on his lapel which pretty much proves that he was part of the mob—our side of the mob—and not someone under Giovanni.
My father knew my mother's killer. He probably hired him for the job because he knew that my mother was having an affair with Giovanni, and was pregnant with his child. My father killed my mother.
I just sit there at my desk for what is probably a few hours as I register this to be the truth. I had suspected it ever since I made it down to that basement but I had been hoping that I was wrong, that there was some other explanation. I can't ignore this evidence though, that my father had taken away the one person that had really cared about me at the time. After she died, I felt so alone and depressed and he did that to me. And he doesn't even care. Always just using people to get what he wants, even me.
Eventually when I get my mobility back, I print out the picture and I'm prepared to march back to my father and demand answers. I wasn't ready to confront him until I had some solid proof but this right here is solid proof and he will answer for what he'd done.
Not only murdering my mother but forcing me to watch just so that I could clean up his dirty business so that it couldn't be traced back to him. Except for this one photo that was archived deep in our system that would have never been found if it weren't for Coleman. Saving me, even from the dead.
My father isn't in his office and so I go into the back of the building. Like the Berardis have their basement, we have the left side of the casino building where we keep everything under lock and key and barely anybody has the clearance to get in. I get back there to see where he is, he has to be around here somewhere.
I see a few men coming out of a room down the hall and so I go through that door and find my father.
"I need to talk to you," I say to him, my voice snippy and angry but I want to get him into a private room so that just in case I'm wrong, nobody knows the false accusations. Or maybe, if I'm right, nobody will see me shoot my father. In the leg or in the head, I haven't decided yet.
But then I look around the room and realize that maybe he has his hands full here. There are two other men in the room standing by a chair with somebody tied to it. This isn't out of the ordinary so at first, I don't think anything of it. But after one of the men shift to the left, I see that this situation isn't ordinary at all.
Because tied to the chair in the middle of the room isn't a normal low-level Berardi or some wimp trying to stiff us on his gambling debt, it is Sergei. Bleeding from the face and looking very upset.