I dialed the number on the cork float from the little table on the boat, with my hands trembling so badly that I had to start over twice. A man answered on the first ring. “Brennan.” I said my name, and the name of my husband, and, after a pause, the name that had been typed at the top of the letter. There was a silence so long I thought the call had dropped. “Mrs. Teague,” the man said at last, in a voice gone rough, “I have waited thirty nine years for that call. Where are you right now? Do not move. Do not go home.”
Two deputy marshals of the United States Marshals Service arrived at the marina in a dark sedan within three hours, a gray haired man in his sixties and a young woman with a notebook. The man was Agent Brennan, the same Brennan who had once escorted a frightened twenty four year old from a courthouse in Newark, and had never forgotten him. He took off his hat when he came aboard. He looked at the table, the shelf of westerns, the bunk, and said, in an unsteady voice, “He kept it clean. Of course he did.” Then he sat down across from me and told me who my husband had been.
Walter James Ricci had been a bookkeeper for the Moretti family, who owned a restaurant and had a second business in the back. In 1985, at twenty four, he had watched a man named Sal Moretti order the death of a young dockworker and had testified in open court against the whole family. Eleven men went to prison. “Your husband gave up his mother, his sister, his name, and his city,” Brennan said. “We moved him to Kentucky, where the Morettis had no friends. He met you, and for the first time, I think, he stopped looking over his shoulder.”
A man who loses his name for love has not lost himself; he has only hidden it in the hands of the one who loved him.
“The man at the grocery store,” I said. “The one in March.” Brennan nodded slowly. “Carlo Moretti. Eighty years old. He was released in 2019 on a medical parole. We lost track of him in the fall. We did not know he had come to Owensboro until you called.” He laid a photograph on the table, and I felt the room tip. I knew that white suit. I had seen it at the funeral of Walter, at the back of First Presbyterian, in the last pew, with a white carnation in the buttonhole. A man had left the church before the final hymn. He had left the carnation on the casket.
The cassette tape in the shoebox was not a keepsake. Walter had recorded it in 1985, for himself, in the cabin of a rented boat in New Jersey, the night before he took the stand: forty minutes of his own voice, laying out the names, dates, and payments in the order of his memory, and one thing more. The location of the body of the dockworker, a boy named Tommy Greco, who had never been found. “We never knew,” Brennan said quietly. “Not in thirty nine years. His mother is alive in Bayonne. She is ninety one.”
For three days the Marshals watched my house. A woman officer slept on my sofa. They parked a sedan across from the magnolia tree, and I made them coffee every morning and watched the street through the lace curtains. On Friday afternoon a white car drove slowly past on Griffith Avenue, then turned around and drove past again. The marshal on my sofa lifted her radio and said four words. That night they took Carlo Moretti from the lobby of the Riverfront Hotel in his white suit, with a revolver in his jacket and a white carnation on his lapel, and he did not say a word.
He had come for revenge, not for the tape. He did not know there was a tape. He had come because he had spent years in a cell imagining the face of the man who put him there, and he wished, at the end of his days, to see that face once, at close range. He never saw it. Walter died of a stroke in August, and Carlo found out the way strangers find out: from the obituary in the newspaper. But the obituary named me. And somewhere in the mind of an old man, a final plan took shape.
The tape was played in a federal courtroom in Louisville on a gray morning in April. Brennan sat beside me. The voice of my husband filled the room, young, steady, a little hoarse, reading the names of the dead and the living into the record of a country that had promised to protect him. When it reached the part about the boy, Tommy Greco, the lawyers stopped writing. A juror in the front row bowed her head. Carlo Moretti, in his wheelchair, with a blanket over his knees, stared at the ceiling. The jury returned after ninety minutes. Life, for the murder of Tommy Greco.
Tommy Greco was found in June, under a slab of concrete behind a restaurant in Newark that was soon to be demolished, exactly where the tape said. His mother, who was ninety one, was driven to the site in the back of a police car and sat in a folding chair, in the sun, watching the men dig, with a rosary in her hands. When they brought him out, she touched the box with the flat of her hand and said, “Thank you, Walter.” She had never met the man. I stood behind her. Brennan stood beside me and took off his hat again.
The Marshals released Walter, at last, from his borrowed name. His sister Rosalie, who is eighty six and has lived in Newark all her life, was told that her brother had spent forty years in Kentucky as Walter Teague, and she took a taxi to the airport that very afternoon. On the Fourth of July, the two of us, who had never met, stood on the dock of Kenlake Marina. Harlan the dockmaster untied the lines. For the first time in forty years, SECOND CHANCE left her slip. I held the wheel. Rosalie sat in the stern with the photograph of the young man in front of the restaurant, and we went out into the open water, into the wide blue light, where nobody was following anybody anymore.
