“Where is the key, old man? The one to the basement. Ronnie says you keep it on your neck, on that chain.” The mans voice was low and unhurried. Then the voice of my father, small and tired, said, “Go to hell, Vic.” I heard something that sounded like a hand against a face. I heard a chair. The recording ran for another four minutes, and I listened to all of it in the front seat of my car in the thrift store parking lot with the windows rolled up, and my hands pressed to my mouth, in the late August heat.
That night I did not go home. I drove to the Paducah police department and asked for a detective by name, a heavy, soft spoken man named Hollis whom I had known for ten years as a parent at the school. I set the melted cassette and the four dollar player on his desk. He listened in silence. When the tape reached the end, he took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Teresa,” he said, “do you know who Vic is?” I said I knew only that he wore a green tie.
“Victor Marchetti,” Hollis said. “He runs a loan operation out of the back of a pawn shop in Cape Girardeau. We have been trying to put him away for four years. Nobody will testify. People owe him money, and they are afraid.” He tapped the cassette. “This is the first thing we have ever had that has his voice on it.” I told him about the basement. About the key. I told him my father had died the next day, in his sleep, of what the doctor called heart failure. Hollis said nothing for a while.
What is burned can still speak if someone is stubborn enough to pull it from the ashes and listen.
We went to the house at dawn, Hollis and a second detective and I. The key was exactly where my father had always kept it, on a chain around his neck, in the coffin, which my brother had insisted on closing for the viewing. Hollis asked a judge for permission, and by noon we had recovered it from the funeral home. It was a small brass key on a loop of bootlace. I held it in my palm and cried, because it was warm from my hand and it was the last thing of my father that I would ever hold.
The basement door was hidden behind the shelves in the pantry, which I had never in my life known. The stairs went down into a cool, dry room with a concrete floor, smelling of cedar. In the middle stood the old sea chest of my father from the river, and on top of it, a note in his square printing: Teresa, I wish I had told you. I opened the chest. Inside, in neat rows, were forty two logbooks from his years on the tugboats, a photograph of my mother, and a bank passbook in the names of Teresa and Ronnie Gaines.
The account held ninety six thousand dollars. My father had saved it a little at a time over twenty years, in cash, from the river. A note was paper clipped to the passbook. “This is for the two of you. Ronnie is not to touch it until he has been clean of the casino for two years. If he cannot, then Teresa, you are to use it to keep him alive, in whatever way you can.” I sat on the damp floor of the basement with the passbook on my knees and thought about the nineteen thousand dollar loan and the second mortgage.
Ronnie came to my door that night with his hat in his hands. He had heard I had been to the police. He looked ten years older than he had at the funeral, with a gray stubble and red rimmed eyes, and he stood on my porch and said, “Tess, I did a terrible thing.” I let him in. He sat at my kitchen table and told me all of it, the debts, the casino, how Vic had come to him in March and said that if he wanted time, he would have to help get into the house of Daddy. He had not known they would hurt him.
“I did not think,” Ronnie said, over and over. “I did not think he would really do it.” I played him the tape. He listened with his head in his hands. When it was over he did not argue, or beg, or blame the casino. He said, “I want to testify.” I said that it might put him in danger. He said, “I put Daddy in danger.” I called Detective Hollis from the kitchen, and the three of us sat there until midnight, writing out the whole story on a legal pad.
Victor Marchetti was arrested in Cape Girardeau on a Thursday morning in the parking lot of the pawn shop, still wearing his green tie. The charges included extortion, illegal lending, and assault, and in the spring a jury added the death of my father, after an exhumation and a toxicology report showed what had been put in his coffee that last night. Ronnie testified for two days, with his hands shaking, and the jury believed him. When the verdict came, my brother wept openly in the hallway.
Ronnie went into treatment in Louisville for six months. I drove up every other Sunday, and we sat in a small garden with a statue of Saint Francis. He called the casino to ask for a self exclusion. He sold his car and paid every cent of what he owed. In October of the next year he came to my house for dinner, clean and quiet, and he put a small brass key on the table. It was the key to the sea chest. He had made a copy. “So you will not have to ask,” he said.
The logbooks are in my living room now, in the glass cabinet. On the last page of the last book, my father had written a line in a hand that was not shaky at all: To Teresa and Ronnie. The river runs both ways. I have thought about that sentence more than any sermon. Every Sunday evening, my brother and I sit on my porch and watch the sun go down over the Ohio, with the tugboats pushing their long barges against the current, and I play him one message from the tape, the first one, a man calling about a boat motor, and we laugh.