“So?” I ask. “What were you doing there?”
He pokes around in the bowl while he chews. “Maybe I was visiting my home out of some sense of nostalgia.” He gives a bitter smile and looks up before I can snarl again. “Louie texted me to meet him there. Said he’d figured out who was picking us off, but he wanted to talk in person.”
“Why didn’t you join up with your cousin before then? Safety in numbers and all that shit.”
“Louie had no interest in teaming up. He ignored my calls and texts. But then, he always saw me as a weak link.”
His mistake. Caligula Clemenza is just as wily as his grandfather was. “Didyou kill your cousin?” I ask, because I’m still not a hundred percent sure he didn’t.
“I keeptellingyou,” he says wearily. “He was dead when I got there. I would have checked his phone to confirm that he was really the one who texted me, except right after I saw his body, that guy jumped out and tried to kill me, too. I ran.” He gives me a defiant glare. “And then I ran intoyou. Now it’s your turn to spill, Dami. Why are you asking me these questions in the first place?”
“I got orders to look into these Clemenza killings.”
He stares at me. “Orders from whom?”
“You don’t need to know that.”
“Not your Boss,” he says speculatively. “Big Gee never struck me as someone with much political savvy. Besides, he was happy when the Clemenzas went down. Luca D’Amato let him take over part of our territory.”
“Doesn’t matter who gave the order. You just tell me what I want to know.”
But Caligula is still thinking, and there’s a spark in his eyes when he inevitably figures it out. “His half-brother, the Underboss. Sebastiano Conti. He had a reputation as a reasonable man, last time I heard.”
“Fine. It was him. Now, whose idea was it for you to go talk to Jesse Foster?”
He snorts. “My own. Not my finest moment, but I was out of choices. I even went to our Family lawyer right before then, hoping he could get me out of the country. But Tony Stuccio hadno interest in helping, to put it mildly.” He tilts his head to one side. “How long have you been following me, Dami?”
That’s a question I don’t want to answer. But the longer I pause, the more he’ll read into it. “Since your father’s funeral.”
It hits. It hurts. I see the wince, though he tries to hide it.
“Who wants the Clemenzas dead?” I ask him, moving on.
He shrugs. “Throw a dart and you’ll hit someone. There were personal as well as professional grudges. Just look at the feeding frenzy that happened after Nonno Lou was whacked. At one point, I assumed the Morellis were involved.”
“Well, it ain’t them. Not to hear Seb tell it.”
There must be a note in my voice, because he immediately asks, “You disagree with him?”
Do I? I’m not sure. “Luca D’Amato’s priority is stability,” I say slowly. “Has been since he took over. He made a lot of money after your grandpa went down, and the rest of us got ours, too. Everyone was happy.” Caligula is looking pretty pale. I guess it’s not much fun hearing how much his kin were hated. “But a while ago, D’Amato put out an order that the rest of you weren’t to be touched.”
I meant it as a small comfort. It lands as anything but. The Clemenza gets that red blotchy stain spreading up his neck and his cheeks as he spits, “Hemurderedmy grandfather. Now he’s trying to take credit for protecting us?”
I’m not used to seeing him so angry. Most of the time he’s cold as ice. I watch his color ebb and flow with interest before I say, “You’re missing the point, golden boy.”
“Whatpoint?”
“Whoever’s doing this is going against the king of the jungle. They either don’t know or don’t care that D’Amato put a protection order out. Ain’t no way they don’t know about it, if they’ve got beef with the Clemenzas. And if they don’t care about D’Amato, well, that means they’re either powerful enough or hidden enough to get away with it.”
It might be the longest thing I’ve ever said to him. But Caligula takes it all in and then takes a deep breath. “Yes,” he says on the breathe-out. “You’re right.” He’s kickstarted his brain, that thinking machine that’s always running in the background except when he gets mad, or…when he has an orgasm.
He asked why I jacked him off in the bathroom. It was mostly to dumb him down a little. I was hoping to get the intel I needed without sharing any of my own.
I’m almost impressed how fast he regained his focus.
“The man at the opera who attacked—” he begins, but I shake my head to save him the breath.
“No one knew him. So either he’s a ghost—an operative, maybe imported from overseas to do the job—or more likely he was some street guy looking to make a few bucks. Because you’d have to be out of your mind or out of the loop to try something like that in a roomful of the big cats.”
