Date: Thu, 3 Oct 1996 07:48:28 MDT From: Robyn Meta Herrington Subject: SUB:CONTEST:Nothing to lose Submissions to: rmherrin@acs.ucalgary.ca Critiques to: rmherrin@acs.ucalgary.ca I'll see they get to the authors. ---------------------------------------------------------- Nothing to Lose "Dom, we're going to close the case on the poisoning. I guess you know why and I guess you know it's for the best." Chad Richards leaned across the table to stub out his cigarette in the distant ashtray. As he resumed his former position, he sighed and ran his fingers through his hair. "You do what you have to do, Dom. You know you can, and I know you can. We've both lost a child. The score is tied." With this, Chad Richards, D.A. for Baxford county, rose and sadly shook Dom's hand. His eyes were red, his pallor pale, his face haggard. He wished Dominic Petrucci luck and shuffled out the door, his body bent with the burden of his past six months. Dom pitied him. Dom poured himself two fingers of whiskey and poked the fire slowly dying in the stone fireplace to renewed life. He sat down in his easy chair, took a healthy swig of the drink, and reflected on his next action. "Pia", he thought, "sweet, funny, smart Pia." Pia was the Dom and Sophia Petruccis' only child. As the warmth of the whisky flowed through his body, Dom smiled at the memory of the first night he and Sophia had spent exhilarated with their new knowledge of an expected child and full of the wonder of it all. "You know Dom," Sophia told him as she looked up from her book of baby names, "we must not be foolish to think this child will be a beauty queen or a handsome prince. Neither of us are particularly pretty people." Dom remembered how he lunged across the room and grabbed Sophia in a huge bear hug, telling her he would beat her within an inch of her life if she continued to deny her beauty. Sophia had giggled and pulled away, berating Dom for being so foolish. Taking a small sip of the whisky, Dom reflected on his Sophia and all she had meant to him. Sure, she was not beautiful, Dom mused. In truth, Sophia was a tall, large women with a plain face that shouted peasant more often than princess. But she was comfortable and warm and devoted to her family. Dom loved Sophia with all the dedication of a working man. He had never looked at another woman and could not even imagine doing so. For himself, Dom knew he had been no Romeo either. He was short of stature in that typical Italian manner. His body had always ran to pudginess and by the time he was 20, he was a short, rotund ball of a man. Dom looked into the flames, now rising to consume another log. Even here, by the fire, he could find no warmth in his life. He had loved Sophia, and then their daughter Pia, with all his heart and during every second of his life. He arose every morning and went to work with the eagerness of a man who would provide for his family. Even during the bitter cold, when he laid bricks that would rip off pieces of his skin without his protective gloves, Dom had never minded the brutality of his occupation. Men worked and provided for their wives and children. It was how Dom lived and how he had loved to live. Dom lost Sophia five years ago to breast cancer. Pia, always the apple of his eye, then became his whole life. He had promised Sophia that he would take care of their daughter. She was always a morose child, even with her parents who adored her, the only child they could ever have. Sophia would constantly fret about it. "Dom, that girl does nothing but sit in her room sometimes, all day. Why doesn't she have girl friends? I know she will probably be older before boys date her. I love her but she is ....homely. Still, she should have girl friends or an interest...or something...." Sophia would complain. Dom would take her in his arms. "Calm down Sophia. She is not out shoplifting? She gets in no trouble? She brings home all A's! She is just very intelligent and cannot relate to girls her age, maybe." Dom shifted in his chair as he remembered the somber Pia. She was not beautiful, Dom knew this. Pia was tall like her mother and pudgy like her father. Her face was round with no exceptional features. The kind would call her plain, the unkind-homely. Dom had dismissed Pia's looks as unimportant. She was intelligent, Dom had always known. She would be a professor or a doctor someday. How proud he had been of her excellent grades. Even when the teachers had commented that Pia seemed such a sober child, Dom would wave the comments away. She was intelligent, Dom had told Sophia. Intelligent children are quiet and withdrawn. She will be famous someday, he promised Sophia, a rich doctor woman. Dom got up to add another log to the fire. As he settled back in his chair, he finished off the whiskey. Reaching down to the magazine rack, Dom pulled the suicide note out between the periodicals. He stared down at the folded pages, and twisted them back and forth slowly. He flipped his thumb down to the top of the fold, and opened the pages to full length. "Papa, By the time you read this, I will be dead. I am so sorry, Papa, but I could not bear this life any more. You always told me I was beautiful, Papa, but I am not. I am horribly ugly, Papa. I could never tell you how awful it was being an ugly child. Last week when I turned 18, I knew then I could not go on. I weigh 250 pounds Papa. I am 5'9" tall. I am a monster. Life will never get any better for me. I have decided to join Mama, hopefully in a life that is happy but knows no physical form." Dom re-read this paragraph that had broken his heart six months ago. The tears still insisted to well up in his eyes at the tragic loss of his intelligent daughter Pia who could not see beyond her physical self. Dom waited for the tears to dry as he slowly bent the pages of his heartbreak back and forth. He looked down to re-read the horror. "Papa, I have something now to tell you," Dom read the careful cursive of the Catholic school penmanship, "it is very important that you understand why I did what I did. Remember, it was you, Papa, who told me to always go out with a bang." Dom almost smiled at this. How many times had he played Scrabble or Chutes & Ladders or Chess with Pia who always beat him? And every time he knew he was about to be defeated by his daughter, he would do something outrageous in spite of his impending defeat. Pia would laugh as he moved his King to take Pia's rook, only to be checkmated. "Always go out with a bang, Pia, " he would laugh. "When you know you've lost anyway, just do anything to let your victor know you still got pride." He explained this as the same principle as the hit and run in baseball. "You got two outs, the count is three and two, anybody on base runs like hell on the next pitch....what do they have to lose?" Dom looked back down at the suicide note. He sighed as he continued to read. "Papa, I am going out with a bang. I am taking someone with me, someone who deserves to go. I beg you Papa, as you read the following, not to be angry or hurt. When you see the wisdom of what I have done, you will understand. "Papa, five months ago I was raped. The guy was Jerry Richards. You know him, Papa? The DA's son?" Dom remembered Jerry Richards very well. He was a handsome fellow and could often be seen loping down the street, cavorting with his equally handsome private school friends. The neighborhood in which the little brownstone that Dom and Sophia had purchased after ten years of scrimping had come to be known as Little Sicily. The neighborhoods on either side of this small area heavily populated by third generation Italians had, in the last ten years, become hip urban renewal places to live and be seen. The affluent were moving back into the city, Dom had commented to Sophia, and making our property values soar. "It was that week I said I wanted to visit Aunt Maria, you remember? I was gone two weeks? I went, Papa, because Jerry Richards had beat and raped me." Dom set the pages back down in his lap. He also remembered that week. It was one of the few times he and Pia had argued since her mother died. She had called him at work and said she would not be home for two weeks. She wanted to visit her Aunt and she was sorry if he would be lonely. "I didn't want you to see the marks, Papa. I told Aunt Maria I got a black eye from a chemistry experiment that backfired on me. But it was Jerry Richards, Papa, and I will tell you why I am telling you this. "If you are reading this letter, than what I have done has probably already happened. I wanted you to know, Papa, so that you would be proud that I went out with a bang. Tonight is the night of the Sons of Italy Halloween Party. I will not be alive to attend the party, but Jerry Richards will not live long after the party. Papa, I have put a poison in a six pack of beer I know he will sneak into the party. The poison is thallium Papa, and I prepared it in my Chemistry class. I have planned this for two weeks. It only required that I follow Jerry and his friends to the liquor store. When I saw Jerry come out with his six pack, he put them in the saddle bags on his motorcycle, Papa. At my first opportunity, I managed to inject the poison in the cans of beer. He will die slow, Papa, and he should. "For it was not only the brutality of the rape, Papa, but it was the awful things he said to me while making me suffer. He told me how I was so ugly, that this was probably the only sex I will have in my life, how he was doing me a favor. "Papa, I wish I could you spare you the pain of reading this. But I find the pain is with me every minute of my life and I cannot live this life anymore. I could not tell anyone, Papa. He is the DA's son. Even more, Papa, and I don't know if you could understand this, I could not bear to repeat the details of his attack on the witness stand, assuming it would ever come to that. Haven't I spent enough years of my life fat and homely? Would I have to get up in public and tell of my humiliation and repeat those awful words. He held a knife to me, Papa, and I was scared. When he was done, he laughed and told me I should thank him. He said he knew I would never tell anyone, that no one would believe me. He was right." Dom carefully re-folded the letter. He had read enough. He rubbed his fingers over the seal of the notary. Smart Pia, Dom thought yet again, having the letter notarized that no one would doubt it was her suicide note. It was because she had it notarized that caused the police to come looking for it. Pia had instructed Dom to do what he wanted with this knowledge. If he wanted to give the note to the police, it was up to him. If not, Pia understood. It did not matter, she wrote, I will be dead, and Jerry will die. Pia explained the obvious, that she had nothing to lose. Struggling up from his arm chair, Dom stirred the fire to send him warmth. He tried to place the memories of the night of Pia's suicide from his mind. Leaning his arm on the fireplace mantle, he found he still had sobs left within him. He remembered the race to call the ambulance, the prayers that Pia was okay, the ambulance driver who did not want to tell him his daughter was dead. He rode in the ambulance, begging Pia to live...please Pia...he had cried. She was dead even as he beseeched her to be alive. Five hours after he had entered the hospital's emergency room, a neighbor drove him home. He forced himself to enter the house. In the following months, he would often have to force himself to live. As he walked slowly through the brownstone that once resounded with Sophia's laughter and Pia's classical music. He found the suicide note sitting neatly in his chair. ------- It took almost six months for the police to hone in on Pia as the poisoner. This only came about because one of Jerry's private school friends had been arrested for drunken driving, and told the police he knew who had poisoned Jerry Richards, and why. Jerry, it seemed, had bragged to his friends about raping Pia. This friend remembered seeing Pia hanging around Jerry's motorcycle the night he was poisoned. The police had identified thallium as the poison used on Jerry Richards, and had found traces of it in the empty beer cans Jerry had consumed the night of the Sons of Italy Halloween Party. Investigators also discovered that the cans had been tampered with. They were stopped at this point, for there was no clues as to who had poisoned Jerry Richards and why. Until Jerry's friend was arrested for drunken driving and cast the suspicion on Pia Petrucci. As investigators questioned Pia's school mates and teachers, they discovered that Pia had something notarized the day of her suicide. The notary was a parent of one of Pia's classmates. She remembered Pia coming to her house so that her mother could notarize the papers. When the notary was questioned, she verified that she had notarized Pia's signature on some papers, but did not know what was on the papers. She was only required to verify the signature, the notary explained, and made it a practice to scrupulously avoid appearing to pry by glancing at the contents of the papers being signed. The notary did remember that she placed her seal on quite a few papers, something she thought unusual. When the police knocked on the door at the little brownstone owned by Dom Petrucci, he had already decided what he was going to do. Dom turned the notarized suicide note over to the police with no resistance. That had been two weeks ago. He then waited expectantly for some reaction from the DA's office. He did not know what it would be, and he did not care. Whatever happened, he would accept the consequences. He had nothing to lose. It was only until today that Chad Richards came by to say they were closing the case on the poisoning of his son. Pia would have been proud of her father, Dom mused, as he stirred the fire to send embers billowing about the firebox. She could not have known that the Halloween Party was postponed until the next night because a water pipe had burst in the Sons of Italy hall. For twenty four hours, Dom had held the note in his possession. He could have saved Jerry Richard's life. He did not. And when he turned the papers over to the police, Dom knew that Jerry's father would know. He did not know what the DA would do, and he did not care. The DA, Dom had reflected, could have arrested him for something, accessory to a murder, something like that. There must be something illegal about failing to prevent a death, Dom had thought. He also had pondered what would happen if the DA did have him arrested. For what? A long drawn out trial that would sling mud on the dead Jerry Richards and Pia Petrucci? To put a broken old-man in jail? An old man who had lost his wife to cancer and only child by her own hand? Based on a suicide note that had been notarized, a note that would no doubt be accepted as the truth. Deathbed confessions are given some credence, especially those that are notarized. This, in conjunction with the admission by Jerry Richards' friend who said, with no prior knowledge of the suicide note, that Jerry had told him about the rape of Pia. Chad Richards had to know Dom had a copy of the suicide note. Pia had, in fact, made a copy and had both of them notarized. Dom could expose his knowledge of the note, perhaps force the DA to resign with the resulting bad publicity. Chad Richards, it would appear, felt like Dom. He would close the case, he had said. He did not care what Dom did with his knowledge. Chad Richards felt he had nothing to lose. Dom rubbed his thumbs over the back of the folded papers, his last communication from Pia. She just was not a happy person, Dom mused. If she could have grown to an adult, had some achievements....perhaps he and Sophia had failed. The humiliating rape had to be more than the mentally delicate Pia could bear, Dom knew. He also knew he made the right decision. He had to help Pia along with her going out "bang", but he was not sorry. Poking a bit more at the fire, Dom thought of Chad Richards and the sorrow he must bear for his only son. The D.A. could not prosecute his son's murderer in the manner he is normally accustomed, all because Pia, who had nothing to lose, found her own justice. Grim yet determined, Dom thrust the papers into the fire and watched the black char creep up the papers until they were gone. ===================================================================== -------+++++++-------+++++++ +++++++-------+++++++------- Robyn Herrington Operations Manager, Microforms Services University of Calgary, MacKimmie Library Ph: (403)220-6903 http://www.ucalgary.ca/~rmherrin rmherrin@acs.ucalgary.ca -------+++++++-------+++++++--------------+++++++-------+++++++-------