“…and it was Dominic Ricci,” I said aloud, to the empty store, and Andre looked up from his laptop in alarm. Dominic. My oldest friend in the world. The man who had stood up at my wedding in 1969, in a brown suit too tight in the shoulders. The man who had stood beside me at Rosemary service, in a cold rain, and wept in my kitchen afterward. Eighty one years old, gray haired, in his usual gray cardigan, turning my key machine by flashlight at 11:40 at night, with a guilty look at the camera, like a boy caught in a pantry.
I sat down on the stool where Rosemary used to count the till. I could hear the old refrigerator hum, and the traffic on Marconi, and my own pulse. Andre brought me a glass of water in a paper cup. He is a good boy, that Andre, with the broad shoulders of a hockey player and the manners of a priest. He did not speak. He only stood next to me, with one hand lightly on my shoulder, while the footage looped on the screen. Dominic looked right at the lens. Then he looked away.
I did not understand. I tried, in the way an old man tries to fit a key to a lock that does not match. Dominic had no need of money. He had a pension and a paid off house and a daughter in Ballwin. He had never wanted anything from me but a game of bocce on Sundays. And yet there he was. I said to Andre, “Please play it again.” And on the third viewing I saw, behind Dominic at the edge of the frame, the small shadow of a woman in a long coat, holding a phone.
Three copies of a house key, a PIN on a card, and a doctor letter dated for next Friday.
I walked the four blocks to St. Ambrose. It was ten in the morning, and the church was nearly empty, with the votive candles flickering. Dominic was in his pew, the fourth from the front on the left, with his rosary, as he has been every morning for thirty years. I slid in beside him. I did not say a word. I put the three copied keys on the wooden rail between us, in a row, with the envelope. He looked at them. His hands began to shake, and the beads clicked together. He said, “Frankie.”
He told me in a whisper, because we were in the house of God. Tiffany had come to him in September. She had found out that Dominic grandson had run up gambling debts at the casino in Alton, forty thousand dollars. She had told him that she could make it all go away, quietly, with a loan, if he would help her with one small favor for the family. She said I was becoming confused. She said it was only for my protection. He said, with tears on his face, “I wanted to believe her, Frankie. I swear to you on my mother.”
He had cut the keys, taped the envelope to the wall, and helped her type the letter about my mind, in which she had inserted a date in the future, by mistake, in her hurry. He had put the PIN on the card because he had watched me type it at the Schnucks checkout, once, over my shoulder. He said, “I am so ashamed. I have not slept a night since.” I looked at the stained glass above the altar. The saints seemed to be looking at me too. I took a long breath, and I said, “Dominic, you are going to help me.”
That afternoon, we sat in the kitchen of my brick house, the two of us, with a plate of cannoli, and called my lawyer, Mr. Pugliese, on speakerphone. He asked a dozen precise questions. By evening he had spoken to the clinic in Chesterfield, whose director confirmed, in a shocked voice, that no doctor there had ever examined me. By morning he had called the police. A detective named Nowak arrived at nine, with a notebook, and listened to Dominic for an hour and a half. She said, “Mr. Moretti, this is the most thorough confession I have ever received from a church usher.”
On Friday, Tiffany came to the store to meet the representative of the home supply chain, to discuss a final signature. She wore a cream suit, and a smile. In the back office, I rose from my chair, and took out the three keys, and laid them on the table in front of her. I said, “Tiffany, these are mine. I would like to see yours.” Her smile slipped. From behind the curtain stepped Detective Nowak, and Joey, my son, in a rumpled coat, who had not slept in two days, and who looked at his wife as though seeing her for the first time.
Tiffany was charged with attempted fraud and forgery. Joey filed for divorce and moved into my spare room, where Rosemary sewing machine still sits under a quilted cover. Dominic cooperated fully, and the court, hearing his age and his cooperation, imposed a year of probation and community service. He has spent that year mending kneelers and polishing pews at St. Ambrose, and every Sunday, I walk him to the church steps. We do not speak much about it. We play bocce afterward, as always, and I let him win.
I kept the three keys. I hung them on a nail by the kitchen door, on a red ribbon, as a reminder. And I changed every lock in the house, on my own machine, with my own hands, and gave the spare to Andre. He is my real heir, I sometimes think. On the first of the month he calls me to ask about the store, and I tell him which customers like their keys with a little burr on the shoulder. He says, “Yes, Mr. Moretti.” And I say, Frank, please. And he never does.
