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street.”
    Against my better judgment, I informed Anthony, “Your father
gave
Alhambra to the government.”
    “Yeah. They put a gun to his head, and he gave it to them.”
    I should have just ended his unannounced visit, but he had a few more points to make, and I was . . . well, maybe worried about Susan. I mean, she was still the mother of my children. I looked closely at Anthony. He didn’t
look
like a killer, but neither did his father. Neither did Susan for that matter. I’ll bet Frank was surprised when she pulled the gun and popped off three rounds.
    Anthony was expanding on his subject and said, “They used the fucking RICO law and grabbed everything they could get their hands on after he . . . died.” Anthony then gave me a historical parallel. “Like the Roman emperors did when a nobleman died. They accused him of something and grabbed his land.”
    I never actually thought of Frank Bellarosa as a Roman nobleman, but I could see the Justice Department and the IRS in the role of a greedy and powerful emperor. Nevertheless, I lost my patience and informed him, “The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act is tough, and not always fairly applied, but—”
    “It sucks. What happened to due process?”
    “Do you have a law degree, Mr. Bellarosa?”
    “No. But—”
    “Well, I do. But let’s forget the law here. I happen to know, firsthand, that your father agreed to hand over certain assets to the Justice Department in exchange for . . .” I could see that Anthony Bellarosa knew where this was going, and he did not want to hear that his father had broken the only law that counted—the law of
omertà
—silence.
    So, under the category of speaking only well of the dead, I said to Anthony, “Your father owed some back taxes . . . I was his tax advisor . . . and he settled for turning over some assets to the Treasury Department, including, unfortunately, Alhambra.” Frank had also forfeited this property, Stanhope Hall, which he’d purchased, I think at Susan’s urging, from my idiot father-in-law William. But I wasn’t sure Anthony knew about that, and I didn’t want to get him more worked up, so I just said, “It wasn’t a bad deal.”
    “It was robbery.”
    In fact, it was surrender and survival. I recalled what Frank Bellarosa had told me when he was under house arrest, trying to justify his cooperation with the Feds. “The old code of silence is dead. There’re no real men left anymore, no heroes, no stand-up guys, not on either side of the law. We’re all middle-class paper guys, the cops and the crooks, and we make deals when we got to, to protect our asses, our money, and our lives. We rat out everybody, and we’re happy we got the chance to do it.”
    Frank Bellarosa had concluded his unsolicited explanation to me by saying, “I was in jail once, Counselor, and it’s not a place for people like us. It’s for the new bad guys, the darker people, the tough guys.”
    Anthony glanced at me, hesitated, then said, “Some guys said . . . you know, my father had enemies . . . and some guys said he was . . . selling information to the government.” He glanced at me again, and when I didn’t respond, he said, “Now I see that it was only tax problems. They got him on that once before.”
    “Right.”
    He smiled. “Like Al Capone. They couldn’t get Capone on bootlegging, so they got him for taxes.”
    “Correct.”
    “So, bottom line, Counselor, it was you that told him to pay up.”
    “Right. That’s better than facing a criminal tax charge.” In fact, it was Frank Bellarosa who had helped
me
beat a criminal tax charge. Frank had actually engineered the tax charge against me, as I later found out, so the least he could do was get me off the hook. Then I owed him a favor, which I repaid by helping him with his murder charge. Not surprisingly, Frank’s role model was Niccolò Machiavelli, and he could quote whole passages of
The Prince
, and probably write the