Chapter 6 - Leo Answers
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The warehouse office above Pier Nine smelled of salt water and diesel and old paper records.
Gabriel sat behind a scarred metal desk that his grandfather had used when the family still unloaded ships personally.
Leo Marconi entered smiling with the ease of a man who believed his usefulness made him untouchable forever.
His two bodyguards waited outside at Thomas's quiet instruction and neither man argued with Thomas Pierce.
Leo took the chair across the desk and asked after Lana with concern polished to a professional shine.
Gabriel said she was resting and that the baby was alive and Leo's smile faltered for half a second.
That falter was enough for a man who had watched faces across negotiating tables for twenty years.
Gabriel laid the tiny yellow sweater on the desk because Lana had given it to Thomas from her box.
Leo looked at the sweater and understood the conversation had already moved far beyond his prepared lies.
Gabriel asked why Leo had entered Lana's apartment without invitation on a rainy Thursday night in October.
Leo said he had delivered a file and Gabriel placed her written statement about that night beside the sweater.
Leo read the first lines and his jaw tightened while the smile disappeared completely from his handsome face.
He tried a new story about concern for a colleague and Gabriel let the silence do the heavy work.
Silence had always been Gabriel's finest weapon because guilty men rushed to fill it with rope for themselves.
Leo said Lana was emotional and hormonal and confused and Gabriel felt his control tested by the insult.
He reminded Leo that Lana Hayes had corrected Leo's arithmetic in front of twenty men for four years.
He reminded Leo that her memory was the reason three shipping contracts had survived federal review last spring.
Leo shifted and said pregnant women sometimes imagined threats where only friendly advice had been offered.
Gabriel slid the hospital security report across the desk showing Leo had asked for Lana's room number.
He slid the pier log beside it showing Leo had removed a storage drive an hour after the collapse.
He asked where the drive was and Leo said it contained private material unrelated to company business.
Thomas stepped forward from the corner and set a second folder down without speaking a single word.
Inside that folder lay photographs of Leo meeting Victor Salerno at a marina restaurant on three occasions.
Victor Salerno controlled the rival port consortium that had bid against Costa for the new terminal contract.
Gabriel watched Leo calculate whether denial or partial confession offered the better chance of walking out intact.
Leo chose confession shaped like loyalty and said he had met Victor to gather intelligence for the family.
Gabriel asked why intelligence required three missing containers and a twelve minute camera outage at the pier.
Leo's face changed then because the containers had not yet been mentioned in any question that evening.
He recovered quickly and said port losses happened and Gabriel noted the recovery as another admission.
Gabriel opened the audit summary Thomas had prepared from copies Lana herself had archived months earlier.
Lana had backed up every contract to a secure server because she trusted systems more than she trusted men.
That habit now gave Gabriel numbers Leo believed had vanished with the drive he stole from the pier.
The numbers showed payments routed through a cleaning company owned by Victor's nephew for eighteen months.
The numbers showed Leo's signature on inspection waivers for the exact containers that later disappeared from custody.
Gabriel asked if threatening Lana had been Victor's idea or Leo's own contribution to their partnership.
Leo finally dropped every pretense and leaned forward with resentment burning openly through his practiced charm.
He said Lana had noticed the cleaning company during a routine review two weeks before her collapse.
He said she had asked him one innocent question about an invoice and he had seen his future collapse.
He admitted visiting her apartment to frighten her into leaving before she asked that question again anywhere.
He said he never intended physical harm and Gabriel asked whether staircases had entered his friendly advice by accident.
Leo went pale and said he wanted her gone and scared and silent and far from Gabriel's protection.
He said a pregnant secretary disappearing would have solved his problem and Gabriel's embarrassment in one clean stroke.
Gabriel stood slowly and Leo flinched despite the desk between them and Thomas watching from the corner.
Gabriel told him the embarrassment in the room belonged entirely to the man who betrayed his family for Victor.
He told Leo his employment and his protection and his access to Costa property ended in that moment.
Two federal investigators entered from the adjoining office where they had listened with Thomas's careful arrangement.
Gabriel had invited them that afternoon after his promise to Lana about lawyers and police and honest facts.
Leo stared at the badges as if they were a language he had never expected Gabriel Costa to speak.
He accused Gabriel of weakness and of letting a woman soften a family built by harder men.
Gabriel replied that his father had confused hardness with cruelty and had died feared and utterly alone.
He said Leo would face fraud charges and conspiracy charges and intimidation charges in a courtroom with records.
The investigators handcuffed Leo while Thomas collected his phones and keys and company credentials from the table.
Leo shouted Lana's name as they led him out and Gabriel did not answer the shout with anything.
Outside the warehouse windows the harbor lights glittered on black water and a freighter sounded its horn.
Gabriel sat alone at his grandfather's desk and realized his hands were shaking from restraint rather than fear.
He had wanted to break Leo's face against that desk for the staircase threat alone a dozen times.
Choosing the courtroom instead felt unfamiliar and difficult and right in a way violence never had before.
Thomas returned and reported the missing drive had been found in Leo's car beneath the spare tire.
He reported Victor Salerno's nephew had been arrested at the marina with ledgers in a waterproof case.
Gabriel asked him to send the audit to the investigators and to the company board without redactions.
Thomas raised an eyebrow because the board included men who preferred family problems buried under harbor concrete.
Gabriel said burial was his father's method and that method had produced Leo Marconi in the first place.
At nine that evening he returned to the hospital as promised with rain on his coat and exhaustion in his bones.
Lana was awake and reading the paperback novel from her duffel bag with a pencil behind one ear.
He told her Leo had been arrested and would answer in court and she closed the book very slowly.
She asked if he had hurt Leo and he told her honestly that he had wanted to and had not.
Something in her face changed at that answer in a way no grand gesture had managed before.
She said thank you for coming back and Gabriel sat in the familiar chair and felt the day finally loosen.
May you like
He fell asleep there near midnight with his head against the wall and his coat still damp from the harbor.
Lana covered him with the gray blanket before she slept and neither of them mentioned the tenderness of it.
