Chapter 2
North Shore Mercantile Bank still had Box 314.
Carmine learned that the next morning.
His father, Vittorio, had opened it seventeen years earlier.
The official access list contained only two names.
Vittorio Lucchesi.
Rosanna Lucchesi.
After Vittorio died, Rosanna remained an authorized co-renter.
There was one problem.
The bank required both identification and one of the two original physical keys.
Rosanna did not have one.
Carmine sat in Claire Donovan’s office while she reviewed the access history.
Claire had handled his legitimate businesses for more than a decade. She was one of the few attorneys in Chicago with enough experience around the Lucchesis to know when not to be impressed by a family surname.
“She tried to access it?”
“Three times.”
“When?”
“Five days after your father died. Again two months later. Again last spring.”
Carmine leaned back.
“What did she tell the bank?”
“That she had misplaced her key and wanted the lock drilled.”
“And?”
“Your father placed a written restriction on the box.”
Claire turned the copy toward him.
Any forced opening after Vittorio’s death required notice to the executor of his estate.
Carmine.
“I never got notice.”
“Because Rosanna withdrew the requests before the bank sent anything.”
That mattered.
She did not want the box opened badly enough to let Carmine know it existed.
Claire tapped the old bank card from the hutch.
“The physical key you found is almost certainly Vittorio’s.”
Carmine looked toward the repaired evidence bag containing it.
“Why put it in Elliot’s bear?”
“We don’t know.”
He hated that answer.
Claire continued.
“Do not turn the most dramatic explanation into fact.”
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
He gave her a look.
She had known him too long.
Carmine thought back to his father’s final months.
Vittorio had been seventy-six when heart failure began limiting his movement.
He spent more time at the estate.
More time with Elliot.
The stuffed bear had belonged to Carmine when he was a child.
Vittorio found it in an attic, had it cleaned, and gave it to his grandson.
Rosanna had objected even then.
Carmine remembered the exchange.
“That thing should have been thrown away twenty years ago,” she had said.
Vittorio answered, “Some things survive because people stop deciding what they’re worth.”
At the time it sounded like another old man’s sentimental comment.
Now Carmine wondered.
Claire said, “There’s something else.”
Rosanna had been the administrative chair of the Lucchesi Family Relief Trust for fourteen years.
Carmine knew the trust.
Everyone did.
It paid emergency expenses for widows, children, retired employees, and families of long-serving men who died or became disabled.
Vittorio had established it long before Carmine became head of the family.
“How much money?”
“Currently?”
“Yes.”
“According to the latest report, approximately twenty-two million in liquid assets and another thirty-one million in investments.”
Carmine frowned.
“Healthy.”
“On paper.”
He looked at her.
Claire slid another document across the desk.
A preliminary reconciliation prepared six months before Vittorio died contained a handwritten notation:
Unverified discretionary advances: $8.7M.
The notation was initialed by his father.
No explanation followed.
Carmine stared at it.
“Who administered discretionary advances?”
May you like
Claire already knew.
“Rosanna.”
