The Gloves in the Drawer
Chapter 02 - The Gloves in the Drawer
Luca had imagined a thousand different last evenings with Catherine. In some, he had answered his phone and persuaded her to stay home. In others, he had driven after her, caught up at a traffic light, and asked why she was trying to carry the whole broken city on her shoulders. None of those inventions had included Vanessa.
“Explain,” he said.
Vanessa sat, not because he invited her but because her knees seemed suddenly uncertain. The red gown spread around her like spilled wine.
“My father wanted Blue Door House sold,” she said. “Catherine was interfering with a perfectly lawful transaction. I went to tell Teresa there might be consequences if she kept helping her.”
“Consequences,” Teresa repeated. “Such a careful word.”
“I was twenty-eight. My father employed me. You make it sound as if I invented the company.”
“You were twenty-eight,” Teresa said. “Not eight.”
For a moment Luca saw something like the old Teresa, the woman who could silence his father across a crowded Sunday table with nothing more than a lifted eyebrow. Then she swayed. Hannah brought her a chair, and this time Teresa accepted it.
Luca called for water. He sent Marco to make sure the guests were safely on their way home. When they were alone, he took the brass key from the envelope. There was an address scratched into the metal: 18 W.
“You saw Catherine that night?” he asked Vanessa.
“Earlier. At the Bellini office. She accused my father of buying a charitable trust's properties through false debt. She threatened to go to the state's attorney.”
“And then?”
“I went to Teresa to ask her to stop it. Catherine wasn't there. Teresa was frightened. I told her Catherine might be making everything worse.”
Teresa watched her. “You brought me gloves wrapped in a napkin.”
Vanessa's eyes filled, but Luca had lived long enough to know that tears could be true and misleading at the same time.
“She'd left them in my car,” Vanessa said.
“Then why did you tell me you had found them beside the railway tracks?”
“I didn't want your son asking what she'd been doing with me.”
“What was she doing?” Luca asked.
Vanessa pressed her lips together. “Trying to persuade me to testify against my father.”
The answer was plausible. It was also incomplete. Luca had spent half his life distinguishing the two.
He asked Hannah to help Teresa upstairs. His mother refused until he promised not to call anyone from the family business. She said it twice. The second time he understood she meant Renato as well as his dead father's old friends.
“Catherine left me one other thing,” Teresa said. “A sentence I wish I'd listened to. She said, 'If Luca has to choose between the family name and the women behind that door, tell him they're both his family.'”
When Teresa had gone, Luca found Vanessa at the dining table turning Catherine's photograph over and over. In another life he might have comforted her. Now he put out his hand for it.
“Are we still getting married?” she asked.
“I don't know who I'm speaking to.”
“The woman you've shared a home with for eighteen months.”
“Then you know why this matters.”
He slept in his study, if the hour he spent in a chair could be called sleep. At five-thirty he telephoned the retired detective who had handled Catherine's death. Michael Dorsey had long since moved to Indiana, but he remembered the case without prompting.
“Old staircase,” Dorsey said. “Broken bulb. Winter weather. The medical examiner found nothing inconsistent with a fall.”
“Did you interview Vanessa Bellini?”
A silence. “That name wasn't in the file.”
“Could you send me the incident number?”
“Luca, the thing that bothered me wasn't the stairs. It was the service door. Somebody had slid the bolt from the outside. Management said they did that to keep trespassers out.”
“Did you photograph it?”
“Yes. But the property manager said the bolt was always like that.”
The property manager, according to the report Luca obtained that morning, had been a Bellini subsidiary.
At nine he drove himself to Wentworth Avenue. The house stood between a shuttered tailor's shop and a church whose sign had been missing a letter for years. Blue paint flaked from its front door. Pansies grew in two chipped planters, and curtains hung neatly behind three downstairs windows.
A woman of about seventy opened to his knock. She wore a denim apron dusted with flour and examined him without smiling.
“You look like your father,” she said. “That's not necessarily a compliment.”
“I'm Luca Moretti.”
“I know. I'm Rosa Alvarez. Catherine used to bring us groceries on Thursdays.”
He hadn't known that either. “My mother told me this place belonged to her trust.”
“It belongs to the women,” Rosa said. “Your wife understood the difference.”
Inside, the house smelled of coffee, toast, and old wood. Three women sat around a kitchen table mending a quilt. None of them stood when he entered. Luca found that he respected them immediately.
Rosa showed him a notice from Bellini Property Recovery demanding they leave within sixty days. In the kitchen behind them, a loose panel clicked when the radiator started. Rosa slapped it lightly with the flat of her hand. “This house has been talking back to us for fifty years,” she said. Luca scarcely noticed then; later he would remember the sound. The paper was dated the morning of his engagement dinner.
“Catherine thought she'd stopped the sale,” Rosa said. “Then she died, and the papers started coming again. Your mother paid lawyers until she couldn't.”
He read the small print. A debt secured against the house had been transferred to a holding company. Two years earlier, a Moretti logistics partnership had guaranteed that debt. Renato had signed as managing member. Beside his name was Luca's typed approval.
“Do you have originals?” he asked.
Rosa pointed toward an upstairs room. “Your wife hid things here. She said if somebody came looking, I should hand them to a person who asked after the blue ribbon, not the money.”
He held up the key, suddenly grateful for the old woman's caution. Rosa led him to a narrow sewing room. From a drawer she took a small velvet pouch tied with an identical ribbon.
Inside were black leather gloves, one pair, Catherine's initials stitched under the cuffs. There was also a business card folded in half.
Luca opened it. On one side was the name Vanessa Bellini. On the other, in Catherine's hand: She came to warn me. Ask who sent her afterward.
“Why did Teresa give you the gloves?” Luca asked.
May you like
“After the funeral she brought them here,” Rosa said. “She told me she couldn’t stand seeing them in a drawer at home. I kept them because Teresa asked me to, and you didn’t ask.”
He touched one cuff. There was a loose stitch where Catherine had once caught the leather on the gate at their old apartment. He remembered kneeling to fix it with a needle too blunt for the job. Rosa gave him time to put the gloves away before she spoke again. “Your wife wasn’t keeping secrets because she enjoyed mysteries, Mr. Moretti. She was trying to make sure the right people could still tell their own stories.”
