Chapter 40
“No,” Dante said. “You won’t.”
They took him away in the second car, and the gravel crunched, and the rain started again, very lightly, and the elms moved over the grave, and the reporters went down the drive to their own cars, and Dante Moretti stood at his mother’s stone with his hands at his sides and did not move for a long time.
Allesia came and stood beside him.
She did not say anything. There was nothing to say. She stood beside him in the cold with the ledger under her arm, and after a while she reached out and took his hand, and he held it, and the two of them watched the light come up over the wall.
CHAPTER 15 — THE PAYOFF
The story broke on a Tuesday, and by Wednesday the city was talking about nothing else.
GHOST OF THE NORTH SIDE: HOW A DEAD MAN RAN CHICAGO FOR FOURTEEN YEARS, said the Trib. The Reader ran the ledger pages in facsimile — Bianca Moretti’s handwriting reproduced at full size, every circled name, every margin note, every number. The wire service picked it up and sent it out, and by the weekend it was in newspapers in eleven states.
Vittorio Moretti was charged with eleven counts of fraud, three counts of criminal conspiracy, and one count of second-degree murder in the death of Bianca Moretti, on the strength of his own admission in a cemetery, in the rain, in front of four reporters and two detectives, that he had stood at the top of the back stairs for four minutes before he called for help.
His lawyers were very good. It did not matter.
The company survived.
That was the part nobody expected. Dante Moretti had spent three days preparing for the collapse — for the regulators, the shareholders, the board, the suits — and instead the share price dipped for a week and then steadied, because it turned out that a company that had been the victim of a fourteen-year fraud was, in the public mind, a company worth buying. Charles Aldridge called him on the fifth day and said, in the mild voice of a man who had buried two wives and made three fortunes, “You did the right thing, and it cost less than you thought. That’s the rarest thing in business.”
Mrs. Conte was not charged.
She had come in on her own, three days after the funeral, and given the investigators everything — the room, the folder, the security codes, the thirty years. She was not a good woman, and she knew it, and she said so, in a small room with a recorder on the table and her hands folded in her lap. The district attorney put her in the witness program and gave her a new name and a small apartment in a city three states away, and she sent Dante one letter, which he read once and did not answer.