I did not call my brother. I did not call my lawyer. I stood in my own garage for a long time looking at a stack of snow tires, and then I moved them one at a time, the way you move the furniture of a dead person. Behind the last tire, against the wall, sat a blue gym bag with a broken zipper. I knelt and opened it. Bundles of twenties bound with rubber bands. Forty thousand dollars, almost to the dollar. I looked at it for a full minute. Then I took out my phone and called the Scranton police and asked for a detective.
Her name was Lisa Burke, and she arrived within the hour in a plain car with a young officer who carried a camera. She was in her forties, with dark hair pulled tight and the careful eyes of someone who has seen too many families fall apart. I played her the tape in my kitchen. All of it. Twice. When it ended, she took off her glasses and pressed her fingers against the bridge of her nose. Then she said, quietly, “Mrs. Esposito, this is the first real break we have had on this fire in two years. Thank you.”
My husband sat in the living room with his hands on his knees while the officer photographed the bag. He had not moved since I got out of the car. He did not argue, and he did not beg. When Detective Burke asked if he wished to make a statement, he nodded and said, in a flat voice, “I want to tell you everything.” I stood in the doorway and listened as the man I had been married to for twenty nine years described, to a recorder on a coffee table, the worst thing he had ever done in his life.
The truth sometimes hides in a gym bag behind the snow tires, waiting for one person to refuse to look away.
He said it plainly, with no excuses. In September, my brother had told him the plan at a bar in Dunmore. Paul told him it was insane. Vinnie said he would only burn the building at night, when nobody was in it. Paul said Dad slept in the office half the nights. Vinnie said, “Not on a Thursday.” But it was a Thursday, and Dad was there, because he had lost his house key. Paul had called the shop at 11:52 that night, and when my father did not pick up, he stood in the driveway with the phone in his hand and did nothing.
The police lab in Harrisburg worked on the tape for two weeks. A technician named Marcus Doyle, a quiet young man with thick glasses, cleaned the audio with a program I could not begin to explain. When he called me in, he said there was something at the end of the cassette that no one had heard. Forty seconds of sound after the message ended, buried under the hiss. He said, “Mrs. Esposito, I think you should sit down before I play it.” I sat. He pressed a key.
First came the sound of a door. Then footsteps on a concrete floor. Then, faint and close to the microphone, the voice of my father, thin and calm. “Vincent. What are you doing here? Put that down.” A pause. A cough. “Vincent, it is your father. I am your father.” There was a long, terrible silence. Then the hiss swallowed everything. I did not scream. I did not make a sound. I sat very still in a plastic chair in a basement in Harrisburg with my hands in my lap and listened to my father speak the name of his son for the last time.
They arrested Vinnie at a marina in Lake Wallenpaupack, on the deck of a forty foot cabin cruiser he had bought with the insurance money. He was wearing a captain hat and sunglasses and holding a beer. He did not run. When the officers read the charges, he looked at the water for a moment, and I am told that he said, “He was not supposed to be there.” That sentence, repeated on a recording to a federal agent, was the end of whatever was left of the brother I had grown up with.
The trial lasted eleven days. Paul pleaded guilty to conspiracy and was sentenced to eight years. Vinnie, who refused a plea, was found guilty of arson and felony murder and received life without parole. I sat in the second row for every hour of the trial, in my navy blue suit, and when the verdict was read, I did not look at the defense table. I looked at the photograph of my father on the easel at the side of the room, a smiling old man in a pair of grease stained coveralls, holding a torque wrench like a scepter.
I divorced Paul in the fall. It was the saddest piece of paperwork I ever signed. Joe Kowalski, the man who bought the lot, called me that winter. He had intended to build a car wash, he said, but he could not do it. He had been to the lot every Sunday since he found the tape, and he said the place felt like it belonged to someone. He asked if I would let him build a small garage in the spirit of the old one, with a bay and a bench and a plain sign. I said yes before he finished the sentence.
The insurance company reclaimed the money, as they should. What they could not take was the other thing, a modest sum my father had left in a savings account for me, which I used to endow a scholarship at the vocational school on Mulberry Street. The Sal Esposito Garage Scholarship, for young people who want to learn to fix an engine. The first winner is a seventeen year old girl named Dolores who wants to work on diesels. At the ceremony, I gave her the torque wrench of my father, still smelling of oil, and I told her to hold it like a scepter.
Sometimes in the evening I put the little cassette in the old player and listen to the first twelve seconds, before the awful part. It is the outgoing message that my father recorded in 1987. “You have reached Sal Esposito Auto Repair on Moosic Street. If you need a car fixed, leave your name and number, and I will call you back as soon as I can. And if you are a priest, say a prayer for me.” Then a laugh, a gravelly little laugh, and a beep. I hold the cassette in both hands. I never rewind it.
