Chapter 6 - THE AUNT WHO TOOK THE CHECK
Giulia Moretti wore pearls to the police station.
I noticed because Detective Ortiz allowed me to see a photograph from the voluntary interview. The woman who had collected a payment linked to the Bellini transfer sat upright in a hard plastic chair, her silver hair perfectly pinned, her hands folded over a handbag worth more than my yearly wages.
"She looks like she came to a charity luncheon," I said.
"She's a woman who's spent sixty years being watched," Ortiz replied. "Appearance can become armor."
I had met Giulia twice during my three years at the mansion. The first time she complained that the staff had set the silver candlesticks too close to a painting. The second time she left a generous tip after I helped her find a missing earring. She had always struck me as the sort of woman who thought disasters happened in other people's neighborhoods.
Now she wanted to tell us what her brother had known before he died.
Her lawyer permitted Ortiz to share selected portions of her interview with Adrian and me, after consulting the prosecutors overseeing the reopened crash investigation. Giulia said the money she had received from Bellini Holdings was labeled as a board transition fee. She claimed she hadn't understood the full transaction when she signed the acknowledgment. But she admitted she had deliberately avoided asking questions.
"My brother was difficult," she told Ortiz in the recording. "Vittorio believed everything could be solved by showing someone where the money went. Then he discovered the people he trusted were involved. He became frightened. He never used to frighten easily."
"Did he speak about Daniel?" Ortiz asked.
"Only once. He said Daniel was loyal to the family name, not to any person who wore it. I didn't know what that meant."
"Did he mention the Ash Street docks?"
Giulia pressed a tissue against her lips. "He said there were buried environmental reports. That transferring the land without disclosing them would make innocent people pay for decades. He wanted to stop the sale."
That gave Adrian's old argument with Nico a different meaning. The docks weren't merely valuable land. A transfer could conceal a liability and put nearby residents at risk.
Ortiz played another short section. Giulia admitted receiving a letter from Vittorio two days before his crash. In it, he asked her to preserve certain records and deliver them to his sons if anything happened to him. She hadn't done so.
"Why not?" Ortiz asked.
"Because after the funeral a man from the Bellini office came to see me. He knew the letter existed. He told me Adrian would suffer another tragedy if I made trouble. I believed him."
"What did you do with the letter?"
"I hid it in a cookbook. My mother used to say nobody in our family opened those."
I almost smiled. Then I remembered how many people had died while the cookbook waited.
A week later the letter was recovered, along with copies of site reports and a handwritten list of meetings with Bellini advisers. The investigators began checking dates and names. Giulia wasn't suddenly innocent because she had finally spoken. She'd taken money, withheld information, and let people draw conclusions that protected her. But her testimony moved the case beyond Daniel and a single night of violence.
Adrian asked to see me at the clinic after hearing her statement. Rebecca approved a short visit. He arrived with a cane and a manila folder, looking more tired than powerful.
"I wanted to tell you about Nico," he said.
"Has he been arrested?"
"Not yet. His lawyers say he was negotiating a legitimate succession plan. He insists Daniel was acting alone in the crash."
"Do you believe him?"
Adrian took a long time to answer. "I want to."
"That's not the question."
He looked at me. "No. I don't think I do."
He showed me a photograph from when the brothers were boys. Adrian, perhaps thirteen, stood in a backyard holding a fishing rod. Nico, eight, clung to his shoulder with a gap-toothed grin. Their father was behind them, smiling into the afternoon sun. There was no sign of the man who would one day ask his sister to hide evidence inside a cookbook.
"He used to follow me everywhere," Adrian said. "When our father died, I told him I would keep us together. I took responsibility for the business and left him the numbers because he was good at them. Maybe that was a mistake."
"Trusting someone isn't the same as authorizing what they do," I said.
"I know. But ignoring their choices can be."
He set the photograph aside and looked toward the therapist's parallel bars visible through the glass door. "How far today?"
"Across the whole length. With support."
He smiled. "That's farther than last time."
"It feels like crossing a bridge made of toothpicks."
"Most bridges feel that way when you're the one building them."
It was such an unexpectedly foolish thing to say that I laughed. He laughed too, and for a second neither of us was surrounded by betrayal.
Then Rebecca returned with troubling news. The Bellini attorneys had requested my mother's employment records from the pharmacy, arguing that I might have financial reasons to make false claims. They also demanded documents about my hospital bills and preexisting medical conditions.
Adrian stood abruptly. Pain crossed his face.
"They can't do that."
"They can ask," Rebecca said evenly. "We'll oppose improper requests. What matters is that Clara has counsel who will answer on her behalf."
"It's intimidation," he said.
"Then don't respond with intimidation of your own. It will make her position harder."
He sat back down. I was grateful to Rebecca for speaking to him exactly as she spoke to me.
After he left, I asked why powerful people always reached for someone's private life when the public facts became inconvenient.
"Because private lives are messy," Rebecca said. "And making a witness feel ashamed is cheaper than disproving a recording."
I thought of the watch returned to our apartment. The investigators traced the purchase through a secondhand dealer. A Bellini investigator had bought it using a cash payment and a description of the original owner. It was not a gesture of kindness. It was proof that someone had studied my family closely enough to locate a childhood possession.
The revelation left my mother furious. She didn't cry. She wrote her own statement for the police and took the morning off work to submit it.
"I may be frightened," she told me, "but I am not going to let strangers use your father's memory as a lever."
That night I received a call from Mrs. Carter. She was back at the mansion, supervising the removal of the damaged door. A preservation specialist had arrived to document the hinges before they were taken for forensic examination. He was a quiet man named Owen Price who worked on historic buildings.
"He asked who maintained the brass fittings," she said. "I told him Clara knew every scratch."
"I used to polish them," I replied. "I didn't know how they were built."
"You always wanted to know. You asked more questions about that house than anybody ever answered."
She said Owen had offered to show me a workshop when I was walking again, not as a favor from Adrian but as a possible introduction to a trade. It was the first conversation about my future that didn't begin with the words 'after the investigation.'
I wrote Owen's name on a slip of paper and placed it beside my therapy schedule.
Two days later Ortiz called with the forensic findings from the oak doorway. The upper hinge screws had been replaced with shorter fasteners that could not carry the door's weight. A retaining bracket had also been deliberately cut. The work did not resemble ordinary neglect.
"Can you identify who did it?" I asked.
"Not from the hardware alone. But we've recovered work orders and access logs. Pavel Driscoll entered the service hall on the day of the banquet. His keycard was issued by Daniel's office."
"And Nico?"
"He authorized an emergency maintenance expense under the same project code."
I swallowed.
"So both men had a part."
"There is mounting evidence of coordination. We still need to establish intent and the full chain of instructions."
As she spoke, I looked at the slip of paper bearing Owen Price's name. Someone had used knowledge of old doors to make one fall. Someone else might use that same knowledge to make doors safer.
For the first time I could picture a life beyond the mansion, one built not from secrets but from visible work.
Then Ortiz said, "There's one more development. Vanessa Bellini's attorney contacted us this morning. She wants to make a statement, but only if she can speak before Nico does."
"Is that good?" I asked.
"It means someone is afraid of what another person might say. Whether that helps us depends on what she tells the truth about."
I thought of Vanessa's red gown beneath the chandelier, her hand resting on Nico's arm beside the arch.
For months she'd insisted on being the center of every room.
May you like
Now she wanted to be first in line to explain why I had nearly died.
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