Elizabeth Street - Laurie Fabiano [61]
“Did you like that pasta pot drawing? He showed it to me before he mailed it.”
“I laughed so hard. It was in that same letter Nunzio told me it was you who named the first foreman ‘Linguine con Pomodoro’!”
Lucrezia was anxious to get to the heart of the matter. “Signore, Signora Siena is suing Brooklyn Union Gas and the construction company for negligence.”
Carmine leaned back in his chair and whistled. It only took him a moment to recover. “Good! Good for you!” A lawsuit, while within the confines of the system, appealed to his anarchist tendencies. “What can I do to help?”
The older woman continued, “Her lawyer needs to prove negligence. He has eyewitness testimony, the police reports, and the press, but he still doesn’t know precisely what they were doing wrong. Everyone said that Nunzio had doubts about the job and discussed them with you. Is that true?”
“Signora, you should consider becoming a lawyer yourself,” commented Carmine, appraising her with an interested eye. Lucrezia flashed him a “stop the nonsense” look, and he continued, although Giovanna could tell Lucrezia was flattered.
“Yes, it is true. I’ll tell you everything that I remember that wasn’t lost to liquor and sorrow,” answered Carmine dramatically.
Giovanna, with pencil poised, allowed Lucrezia to continue the questioning. Giovanna didn’t understand much of what Carmine said about timbers and compromised metal and load ratios, but she dutifully wrote it all down.
“You see, signora, your husband was smart,” said Carmine, tapping his temple with his finger. “He knew from the start that they were constructing that floor ass backwards, and then he knew that they were trying to lower it in a dangerous way.”
“Did he tell anyone that?” asked Giovanna.
“Of course! And the foreman called him a stupid dago that should mind his own business.”
Giovanna winced at the thought of her maestro husband being treated with disrespect. “Why didn’t he leave the job?”
“Signora, I think you’ve been here long enough to know you do not leave a steady job with good pay. Besides, at first he thought that they knew something he didn’t and it would soon all make sense. When it didn’t, I think he figured the job was engineered by asses, but he didn’t know it was going to kill him.”
Carmine dug in his pocket. “Here, take these tickets to the show. I have to go, but I’m here for a few more days if you need to ask me anything.”
“Carmine,” whispered Giovanna as he rose, “grazie…” She tried to say more, to thank him for finding Nunzio’s body, for his loyalty, but she could not. Since becoming pregnant, she couldn’t control her emotions the way she usually could and did not want to chance crying in public.
“Say nothing, signora. It has been my honor,” answered Carmine, sweeping his cap with a flourish. Giovanna could see tears in Carmine’s eyes.
When Giovanna and Lucrezia reported on their meeting to Signore DeCegli, he insisted that they bring Carmine to his office to swear an affidavit. The lawyer felt he had to get what he could, even if it was the testimony of a dead man delivered secondhand by a traveling show-man. Unable to locate Supervisor Mulligan, who was no longer with the company, and certain that there was no complete set of blueprints for the project, although he had subpoenaed them months ago, Signore DeCegli felt he had little to make a case.
DeCegli was born in America. In fact, if he didn’t say his last name, or had changed it like many of his colleagues had, he could “pass.” He had been drawn back to his old neighborhood to practice in part because his parents were still there and in part because he believed that with a good lawyer, an Italian immigrant in the American justice system would be treated the same as any American. This case was forcing him to question his conviction.
Ironically, up until now, his belief hadn’t been tested. By locating himself in an Italian community, most of his cases were Italians vs. Italians, because he was a civil attorney whose work consisted mainly of