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whatever.
    I missed a lot of this media fun by sailing off, and Susan missed some of it by moving to Hilton Head. The New York press quickly loses interest in people who are not in the contiguous boroughs or the surrounding suburban counties.
    Anyway, to be honest, objective, and fair, the people who suffered the most in this affair—aside from Frank—were the Bellarosa family. They were all innocent civilians at the time of this crime of passion. Anthony may have made his bones since then, but when he lost his father he was a young student in prep school.
    So I said to him, “I knew your father well enough to know that he did what he had to . . . to get the Feds off his back so that he’d be around for his wife and sons.”
    Anthony did not reply, and I used that silence to change the subject. He was wearing a wedding ring, so I said, “You’re married.”
    “Yeah. Two kids.”
    “Good. A man should be married. Keeps him out of trouble.”
    He thought that was funny for some reason.
    Rather than beat around the bush, I asked him, “What business are you in?”
    He replied without hesitation, “I took over my father’s company. Bell Enterprises. We do moving and storage, trash carting, limo service, security service . . . like that.”
    “And who took over your father’s other businesses?”
    “There was no other businesses, Mr. Sutter.”
    “Right.” I glanced at my watch.
    Anthony seemed in no hurry to get up and leave, and he informed me, “My father once said to me that you had the best combination of brains and balls he’d ever seen.” He added, “For a non-Italian.”
    I didn’t reply to that, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about hearing it. Aside from the fact that it was a qualified compliment (non-Italian), I needed to consider the source.
    Anthony’s visit obviously had a purpose beyond reminiscing about the past and welcoming me to the neighborhood. In fact, I smelled a job offer. The last time I’d worked for a Bellarosa, it had ruined my life, so I wasn’t anxious to try it again.
    I started to rise, and Anthony said, “I just need a few more minutes of your time.”
    I sat back in the wingback chair and said to him, “Please get to the point of your visit.”
    Anthony Bellarosa seemed lost in thought, and I watched him. He had none of the commanding presence of his father, but neither was he a weenie trying to fill Pop’s handmade shoes; Anthony was the real thing, but not yet a finished product of his environment. Also, I had the impression he was toning down his inner thugishness for my benefit. And that meant he wanted something.
    Finally, he said, “I ask around a lot about my father, from his friends and the family, and they all have these great things to say about him, but I thought since he really respected you . . . maybe you could give me some . . . like, something about him that his paesanos didn’t understand. You know?”
    I know that people want to hear good things about their dearly departed from those who knew them, and clearly the boy idolized his father, so the alleged purpose of Anthony’s visit was to hear John Whitman Sutter—Ivy League WASP—say something nice and grammatical for the record. Then why did I think I was on a job interview? I replied, “I knew him for only about . . . oh, six months.”
    “Yeah, but—”
    “I’ll think about it.”
    “Okay. And maybe think about how I can repay you for what you did.”
    “What did I do?”
    “You saved his life.”
    I didn’t reply.
    “The night at Giulio’s. When someone shot him. You stopped the bleeding.”
    What in the world was I thinking when I did that? I mean, by that time, I was sure that he was screwing my wife. Not only that, it’s not a good idea to interfere with a Mafia hit. I mean, someone—in this case Salvatore D’Alessio—paid good money to have Frank Bellarosa clipped, and I screwed it up. So under the category of “no good deed goes unpunished,” Frank, after he recovered,