“…a search warrant,” said the man in the gray suit, holding up a folded paper and a gold badge on my front porch. “Mrs. Marchetti, I am Detective Raymond Sosa with the Las Vegas financial crimes unit. Your husband called our office on April the ninth, and Mr. Abernathy called us this morning, as promised. I apologize for arriving without notice. Mrs. Pruitt drove me here. She wanted me to see that she is cooperating.” Behind him, in the silver Lexus at the curb, Shannon sat with both hands over her face. The heat shimmered off the pavement. I stood in my doorway, in my best shoes, with a brass key in my fist.
I let him in. I made him a glass of iced tea, because that is what you do in Henderson in July, and we sat at my kitchen table with the legal pad page between us. He read Vince blocky handwriting slowly, then took out a pen. Shannon came in last, ashen, and stood against the counter with her arms wrapped around herself. “Linda,” she said in a small voice, “I am so sorry. I did not know it would go this far. Nicky told me it was a loan from Vince, a gift. I signed the paper he put in front of me. I never read it.”
I looked at her. Shannon was forty four, a nervous woman who had always laughed a half second late. I did not have it in me to be angry. “Honey,” I said, “sit down.” She sat. The detective cleared his throat and explained what he knew. The loan in February had been taken against my house, for three hundred and eighty thousand dollars, using a forged signature and a notary who had since left the state. The money had gone to a man in Laughlin named Gus Fenner, to cover Nicky gambling debts. The detective had been tracking Fenner for two years.
A voicemail at a will reading, a brass key behind the bark, and a stranger in a gray suit on the front porch.
We drove to Desert Sun Storage in the detective unmarked car, with Shannon following in the Lexus. Unit 114 sat at the end of a long concrete row, under a blue metal door. My hands shook so much that the detective had to turn the key. The door rolled up with a rattle. Inside was a single folding table, a metal filing cabinet, a small safe, and a cassette recorder like the ones Vince used to carry on the job. A fan oscillated slowly in the corner, left running from a battery pack. The air was cool and smelled of oil and dust.
On the table stood a framed photograph of the two of us at our wedding, in the courthouse, in 1999. Beside it was an envelope with my name. Inside, in his blocky hand, Vince had written four pages. He told me he had learned of the forgery from a bank clerk who owed him a favor. He told me he had gone to Laughlin himself, in March, weak as he was, and sat down with Gus Fenner, and made a deal. Fenner would return the money in exchange for silence. Vince had recorded every word on the cassette. If Fenner kept his end, the tape would stay in the storage unit forever.
The safe held the rest. The original forged loan papers. A cashier check for three hundred eighty thousand dollars, returned in full by Fenner. And a second envelope, a fat one, with ten thousand dollars in hundreds and a note: For the lemon tree. For the lemons. For every Sunday you made me pancakes. I sat down on the cold concrete floor and wept. Detective Sosa stood in the doorway with his hat in his hand. After a moment, he crouched beside me and said, gently, “Mrs. Marchetti, your husband was a remarkable man. He did my job for me, and he did it while he was sick.”
Nicky was arrested that evening at his timeshare office in Summerlin, in front of a lobby of customers. He did not resist. Shannon testified against him, and so did the notary, who was found in Boise. Gus Fenner took a plea in the fall. In the end the judge gave my stepson four years, and ordered him to repay every cent with interest. He wrote me a letter from the Nevada state facility, on lined paper, in a cramped hand. It was only three lines long. The first said: Linda, I am sorry. The second said: Dad was right about me. The third said: Thank you for the pancakes.
I read it standing in the backyard under the lemon tree, with the smell of citrus all around me. The knot in the bark was still there, a dark scar the size of a thumb. I had not been able to prune that branch. I put my hand on it, and I thought of Vince coming out at dawn in his undershirt to inspect the fruit, humming Sinatra off key, tapping each lemon with his finger like a banker counting coins. I stood there a long time, with the sun beginning to burn my neck. Somewhere in the neighbor yard, a screen door banged.
Shannon came to see me a month later, alone, in a plain gray dress with no jewelry. She stood on my porch and asked whether she could say something. I let her in. She told me that she had filed for divorce, that she was moving to her sister place in Reno, and that she would testify to everything she knew. Then she handed me a small bag. Inside was Vince watch, the one Nicky had been given with his letter. I looked at it for a long time. Nicky had never opened the letter. I put it in the drawer beside the bed and I did not open it either.
I kept the house. I kept the cassette, too, in a cigar box in the closet. Once a month, on a Sunday, I play the last minute of it. It is Vince, in a motel room in Laughlin, saying to a man across a table, “You will give me back my wife money, Gus. Because when I am gone, she will still be here, and so will the lemons.” Then he laughs, a short rough laugh, and the tape runs out. I sit with a cup of tea. And when the hiss ends, I go out back and pick one lemon, and I squeeze it over my tea.