Vincent nodded. He gazed down at Pat’s high-school ring, which he wore for luck.
Beth wanted to jump up and run out of the room when Sissy Spacek picked up the cream-colored envelope.
Ben wished he were back in the hotel room, singing to Stella.
Candy whispered something under her breath that could have been a string of expletives or a prayer.
Sissy Spacek looked up at her moony counterpart and smiled as if to split her face. Then she turned to face the audience. “The winner is No Time to Wave Goodbye, by Rob Brent and Vincent Cappadora.”
At first, no one moved. The audience broke into the kind of accolade saved for the dark horse. Michael Moore’s beautiful wife, Kathleen, stood and made the victory gesture. Vincent sat blinking, as though he’d just been awakened from a sound sleep.
Finally, Candy, with tears streaming from her impeccable Nars front-row eyes, said, “I think that was your name, Spanky. Hey, Vincent. You won?”
Rob bounded away through the crowd. By the time Vincent got up there, Rob had said, “I thought my esteemed partner was crazy to make this picture at all. Especially for our first big one. But Mom, Pop, Rita, I got that thing you were looking for to put on the bookshelf next to the graduation pictures!”
Vincent stared down at the podium. Pat knew he hadn’t prepared a single line he could use as an acceptance speech. A second passed, then another.
Finally Vincent said, “Obviously, I want to thank the Academy and question your sanity.” Appreciative laughter. “My brother, Sam, and my sister, Kerry, should be standing here. This would be nothing without you. And I would be nothing without these people, my grandfather Angelo, who taught me to love art in all its forms, my mother for teaching me which form of art was mine, and Candy Bliss and my pop, who suggested that filmmaking might be a good alternative to prison.” More laughter. “And I have to thank Marco Ruffalo for seeing people and places as I never could.” Both the Charleys, Two and Seven, sobbed openly—huge men with bulging red child’s faces. Markey himself sat with his face pillowed in his rough, stubby hands. “But mostly, I want to take this moment to remember five people. They are DuPre Dicksen, Jacqueline Whittier, Luis Rogelio, Alana Cafferty, and Laurel Hutcheson. If this statue is really magic, it will bring you home.”
The audience applauded wildly. Sissy Spacek hugged Vincent with a mother’s sweetness.
“Dude won the Oscar,” Cole Dicksen said to his little sister, Toni Lynn. But she was already asleep. Unexpectedly, Janice had been called to work. All her friends had insisted on turning the TV in the break room on. Janice’s work friends surrounded and hugged her.
“Good for him,” Eileen Cafferty said, smiling past eyes bright with tears. Al hugged his wife. Their son, Adam, asked, “Can we get his autograph?”
In Washington State, Walter Hutcheson said, “Well, God bless him.”
“God bless Laurel,” said his wife.
As they watched Vincent make his way back, stopping for a quick photo with Sissy Spacek, Charley Seven shrugged off the urgent tap on his shoulder. “I put it out,” he said, without looking back, referring to his single panicked puff on his cigar. There was a roped-off corner for the smokers at the theater but he hadn’t dared leave during the most amazing moments.
“Sir, there’s an urgent message for you outside,” said one of the ushers. “I believe the man is a police officer.”
“What the hell?” Charley Seven suddenly felt his beeper buzzing like a trapped hornet under his belly. Hauling himself to his feet, he told Beth and Pat he would be right back. When he dialed the unfamiliar number, he found himself on the phone with a young woman whose voice was so drowned in hysteria that at first he couldn’t understand a syllable. “Calm down,” he told her. “What are you saying? Nothing can happen if I can’t hear you.”
“I saw Eliza sitting right there on TV!” the voice keened. It was his niece. It was Adriana. What the hell? Charley thought.
“Yeah, and so? Is the baby sick? Are you okay?” Blinking in the sunlight, Charley Seven nodded to the police officer and held up one finger.
“She called me, Uncle Charley. Eliza called before and said Beth’s brother and his wife were coming to pick up the baby and Liza would meet them outside the theater as soon as they found out who won so that the baby could nurse before they went to the party…. And she said I could go home because Beth’s brother and his wife would take care of Stella for the rest of the night.”
“Adriana! Slow down! Who would meet Beth’s brother and his wife?”
“Eliza and Sam! Eliza said she was going to come out and get the baby.”
“Eliza is inside.”
“I know! I just saw her! But on the phone, she said that Beth’s brother would come for Stella. As soon as they made the announcement. And they did come. Eliza said she would come out to get Stella the minute they found out. Or else Sam would. But they were right there. I saw them! I waited awhile and they did this little feature story about the family and stuff and they were still there …”
“Sam? Who’s Sam?” Charley Seven asked.
“It’s Ben! It’s Vincent’s brother. He uses that name.”
“Jesus Christ, Adriana! I can’t make heads or tails of any of this. Okay, okay. Now, this was Beth’s brother … Bick?” Bick could have arrived late; Beth’s father, Bill, had been too ill to come with the rest of them, so Bick and his wife had stayed behind to be with him. Maybe they had all come ahead. Of course.
“No, Uncle Charley! It was her brother Paul and his wife. Sandy. Not Bick. I know Bick. Her name was Sheila. Or something. But then I remembered that Paul brought his daughter Annie, not his wife. Annie’s my age! I met her the first day, Annie Kerry. And this lady wasn’t her. I was so excited that I forgot! This lady was older, like Beth’s age!”
And Paul and Annie are sitting inside there clapping their heads off.
Only a few other times in his life, Charley Seven had encountered a situation beyond his power to salvage.
Once there had been a meeting under the bridge, out by O’Hare Airport, for which three guys scheduled to show up did not and he and his older brother Tory found themselves alone in the dusk, surrounded by Anthony Taliaferro and five of his eight large and jubilantly psychotic brothers, who even as teenagers never bothered with fists or even bats but opted for vehicular mayhem of all kinds. He could feel the way it had been, surrounded in the parking lot of the bindery on Mannheim Road by the wolf-eyed Taliaferros, as they sat on the hoods of their old, long, ruined Pontiacs, with their arms folded over their chests. Back then, Charley, who was a slow but thorough thinker, had overcome his agitation and found escape not through fleeing but through backing off—assessing his plight from a bird’s-eye view. He’d surveyed the area and seen two black-and-whites parked adjacent, next to Alexander’s Diner, cops chatting through their windows over coffee. Sliding his hand through the window of Tory’s vehicle, Charley laid on the horn until one of the police got annoyed and came to see what was up. The Taliaferro brothers scattered like roaches under a kitchen light.
Now, there surely was a logical explanation for what Adriana was saying; he knew that. But when Charley drew back, to scan for the explanation and the key to the lock, he saw only a broken landscape. He scanned the lines of gawkers leaning over the velvet ropes and the long lines of identical, idling black cars that stretched away for blocks.
Information was the best thing. Charley Seven needed more.
“So Adriana, honey, how long ago was this?”
“It really was Eliza who called, Uncle Charley! I recognized her voice!” she screamed.
“How long ago was this, Adriana?” Charley asked in the voice that could make men forget that they had learned to control their bowels when they were four.
“It was maybe half an hour ago, Uncle Charley? I didn’t know when they would give the award for those kinds of movies. Documentaries. I thought they might be way near the end. I forgot they sprinkle those kind in with t
he big ones. I changed Stella and then the phone call came and I turned on the TV and Beth’s brother shows up. He kind of looked like Beth. But afterward, I thought, why wouldn’t Eliza have told me before if she was going to send her uncle for the baby?”
Slowly, Charley Seven said, “A half hour ago? Half an hour ago you gave Patrick Cappadora’s grandchild to a stranger?”
Adriana began to sob. “Uncle Charley! It was Eliza who called me! She said to give Paul the milk she pumped. Who else would know that but Liza?”
Anyone who knew what most six-month-olds lived on, Charley thought.
He told Adriana to sit and wait, not to move. Perhaps a mistake but an innocent one. Jesus, Holy Mother, please let it have been Beth’s younger brother, Bick. Charley swiveled his eyes, concealed by his dark D&G sunglasses, back toward the entrance and saw no delighted Eliza, opening her arms to receive her baby.
Charley nodded to the officer. “We are going to need your help,” he said.
The officer asked a guard to bring Vincent Cappadora and his family out.
Vincent and Rob had just finished posing for photos with their statuettes while a CNN reporter asked them questions. But when Vincent saw Charley Seven coming toward Ben and Eliza, Charley’s face gray as cement, looking as though he’d walked a hundred miles on hot sand beside the tall police officer, Vincent consciously smiled for what he believed, simply from the sense in the air, like burning, would be the last smile for a long time to come.
Vincent could not imagine what could go so wrong it could cause a police officer to walk into the Academy Awards. Was someone ill? Hurt? The officer kept on walking toward them. Then, like a house of cards on fire, he flashed onto the only member of his family who had come to California but not to the awards.
Vincent began to run toward the doors and was close enough that it was he who caught Eliza when her knees buckled under her and her eyes rolled back.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Still clutching his statue, Vincent stalked the lobby, from reporter to reporter, from microphone to microphone, giving interview after interview.
He said he would tell anyone anything. He said that winning the Academy Award was the worst mistake of his life.
He offered the statue to anyone who would give him any information about the couple seen with his niece.
He offered a reward of $50,000.
He offered a reward of $100,000.
“My family is only a family,” Vincent said to the reporters. They saw a handsome young man, made beautiful by grief, with his shirt undone and tears in his eyes—appealing the way Beth used to think that Pat was at that age, like someone who needed a good meal and looking after, someone to wipe the grief from his gray eyes. The female news reporters felt their hearts pound in their stomachs and flubbed their openers. “I am only a guy. I don’t care about my movie or my award. I only care about Stella and my family. I’m Stella’s godfather. Ben is my only brother. We lost my brother. We … you have to understand. We all did this one time and no one can do this more than one time. My family can’t stand any more. All our lives, this thing has been like the only thing that made us who we were. We were the family who lost my brother and my brother came back. We hated it but we lived up to it. We shouldn’t have to—no one should have to—feel this ever … and not twice in one life.”
The lead detective, Bill Humbly, finally had to stop Vincent: His appeals were clogging the phone line with crazies who wanted a hundred grand and an Oscar statuette so that legit people were hanging up in disgust. They had eight hundred calls the first hour and one decent tip. It came from the doorman at the Paloma, who’d accepted three dollars from a couple with a baby who said the woman’s father was picking them up to let the dad park in the circle long enough to load the baby in. At around the same time, two young women, sisters, who had heard that Angelina Jolie was staying at the Paloma, although she was not, were nursing cocktails when they saw a couple slip into the backseat of a small Toyota SUV, brand-new, driven by an older man in a golf cap or a baseball cap.
Connecting the dots, the police determined that this happened just before Adriana made her call.
All the witnesses described the car as dark in color. They described the driver as white and middle-aged—eliminating two-thirds of the American population and leaving the other hundred million or so.
The only babies in the hotel that night were a starlet’s newborn and her ten-month-old son, in the care of her mother, and a nominated actor’s one-year-old twin boys.
And Stella.
Detective Humbly had decided to get his partner, Melissa Rafferty, to run purchases and thefts on the auto when he heard someone pounding down the lobby behind him, obviously in pursuit.
“Wait up!” Candy pleaded. “Wait up!” All the uniforms had identified him as the lead detective. “I need to talk to you. I know the girl who was taking care of the baby…. I know the whole family!”
“Stay right here,” the detective said. He flashed a gold shield. William R. Humbly. A supervisor, then. A detective sergeant, as she had been twenty-two years ago—a token, the first girl in the area and the youngest. The least likely to become chief and yet she had. “I’m going to get someone to talk to you. We have five interview rooms. We’ll put you next in line.”
As the detective took a step to guide her toward the line of conference rooms where a close-up of Stella in her baptismal gown, looking directly at the camera, was slapped over another placard, Candy stopped. The guy might not care much about what she had to say, but she gambled he would care enough at least to hear it. Simply stopping, she had learned, worked as well with a person as it did with a dog.
The detective in the tee just a little too small, under a cotton-and-linen sport coat, did what she expected. He stopped too and looked back.
“This kidnapping was planned,” Candy said.
“It’s still not clear that this even was a kidnapping. Are you a member of the media?”
“No,” Candy said. “I was involved with the investigation of the kidnapping of Ben Cappadora, the baby’s father. I’m Candace Bliss,” she said. “I led the investigation …”
“I’m not sure what you mean by ‘leading’ the investigation. Were you … part of a team from the Center for Missing and Exploited—”
“They didn’t have assist teams on the ground then,” said Candy and took her badge out of her jacket pocket.
“You were a police officer,” said Humbly.
Candy replied evenly, “There’s no ‘was’ about it. How many years in are you? Ten?”
“Nearly twelve.”
Candy said, “I am twenty-nine years in. I’m the chief of police in Parkside, Illinois.”
“I apologize, Chief,” Humbly said and smiled briefly. “But I want you to know. We’re doing everything at warp speed. We issued an Amber Alert fifteen minutes in, so there’s been a preempt of regular broadcasting …”
“I’m familiar with the Amber Alert plan. We were one of the states that threw in for it early on. It’s magnificent. It doesn’t reassure me.”
“Pardon me, ma’am, but are you … involved in some other way?” Detective Humbly asked.
“I’m her grandmother.”
“Her grandmother? I thought her grandmother is the mother of the guy with the movie….”
“That is her father’s mother. I’m her mother’s mother. My daughter is the mother of the baby, Eliza Cappadora. The families became friends and our kids fell in love, long story short.”
“I see. I’m so sorry, Chief Bliss. We want you to know that we’ll do everything in our …”
“I know you will,” Candy said, kindly. “I know it’s balls to the wall for a kid. I just want to be kept in the loop. Somehow.”
Oh no, Humbly thought, but he said, “Okay. I’ll tell you what we’ve got going. Well, the Amber Alert …”
“Do you think anyone will tip to it? On Oscar night?” Candy asked.
“Absolutely,” Humbly said. “Th
e Oscar win makes it a double-shot news story. Now they’ll be running descriptions of Stella every ten minutes, breaking into whatever else is on TV, especially the awards ceremony. A bazillion people are watching. If it had to happen …”
“Don’t say it was a good time,” Candy said and smiled in case she sounded too harsh. “What’s your gut? I think she’s still alive.”
Candy’s hunch was not sentimental. The facts as she understood them from Charley Seven and his niece didn’t immediately turn her stomach the way the facts that surrounded Ben’s kidnapping had. For one, Ben was hauled away with such disdain for his comfort that one of his little shoes was pulled off and left behind. For another, he wasn’t the right age to be fake-adopted by someone who wanted a baby. Most babies looked like most other babies. Little boys, older than a year, had distinctive features. They were more likely to be the prey for people who loved little boys in ways that flattened the imagination. So Ben should have been dead by the time Beth and Candy met.
But Adriana Ruffalo described the couple who came to the hotel room to take Stella as relaxed, unhurried, and charming. They knew how to hold a baby. They commented on how big she’d gotten and made her giggle.
Humbly went on. “And we just got a picture of the baby printed up, maybe you saw that, and TRAK will disseminate that through agencies and volunteers to law enforcement and the media. We already have someone analyzing and enlarging stills from the security-cam footage of the couple walking away with her. And that’s going to be blasted out as soon as it’s in good enough shape, which should be in ten minutes … we’re trying to trace the car but we only got a view of the rear and the plate was removed.”
“You have a picture of the couple who took Stella?” Candy pressed her fingers to the place between her eyes. “Of course you do. The security here would be unbelievable. That’s amazing luck.” The Paloma had the kind of tony clientele who paid their $650 a night expecting thirsty towels and caviar-laced moisturizer, and it had its own computerized locking system. There was a routine security scan of each floor at two-minute intervals—not only on Oscar night but every night. Pissed-off beauties and beaux in event finery were now lined up behind tourists in pajama pants and Green Bay Packer T-shirts, waiting to be interviewed and released with instructions to remain in the area. No one expected to find the couple among the guests—only to find someone who’d seen them.