SEVEN

One night, soon after we move to Barrington, I feel stabbing pains in my right side during dinner.

“I don’t feel good,” I say. “Can I be excused?”

Dad and Ann-Marie roll their eyes at each across the table. It just so happens that we are eating beef stew that night, a dish I hate. The more I chew the chunks of stringy meat to get them down, the more flavorless they become until it feels like I’m gnawing away at gobs of tough leather.

“Finish your dinner,” says Dad. He always shovels food into his mouth as fast as he can, as if someone is going to steal his plate away. Always suave in other circumstances, his eating habits are embarrassing. A lot of the time, he eats nothing all day and by dinner would be shoving food into his mouth, leaving a giant smear of sauce on his chin. Everything that goes down his throat is first filtered through the salt-and-pepper hairs of his mustache and sometimes hangs there, dangling, until he wipes it away with the back of his hand.

I take another bite of the stew and this time the pain in my side sharpens. It’s like someone is jabbing a jagged broom handle into my right hip and then wiggling it around for good measure. I jump up from the table to vomit but don’t make it to the bathroom in time. I hunch over, heaving beef stew all over the thick gray carpet in the living room.

“The toilet, Leah!” screams Ann-Marie, and so, still heaving, I toddle a few steps toward the bathroom dripping a trail of vomit behind me. “No, just stay!” Ann-Marie screams. “Just finish there!” And so I do, on my knees in front of the coffee table heaving and weeping as Dad holds my shoulder-length brown hair away from my face and rubs my back.

When I’m done and lying on the couch, Derek holds our dog Shilo back as Ann-Marie scrubs the carpet with an old rag. Dad stands over me, puts his hand against my forehead, and gives me a Kleenex to blow my nose. I hand him back the balled-up tissue when I’m done and say, “I told you I wasn’t faking.” I can still feel a pain in my side, duller now, and my head hurts from throwing up, but still it’s satisfying to be proven right.

My mystery illness continues for weeks, and I miss more and more days of third grade. Some days I’ll feel fine; sometimes I’ll feel a pain like someone pinching and twisting my insides. Finally, after a third visit to the emergency room, Dad tells me I need to have surgery. He says the doctors don’t know exactly what’s wrong but that the surgery will fix it.

“You’re a pretty sick kid but I promise to be there the whole time. I will never leave. I’ll wait right outside the door the whole time.” I hold on to Dad and breathe in his spicy, Polo scent. It makes me feel better to put my nose against his chest and inhale, knowing he’ll be there to keep me safe, no matter what happens.

I can’t eat anything for dinner that night, because I need an empty stomach for the surgery. Dad says the anesthesia will feel just like going to sleep and hours will go by, but it will feel like minutes and then the whole thing will be all over. And when I’m in the hospital I’ll eat ice cream and Popsicles, and the best part will be that I won’t feel so sick anymore. He makes up a bed for me on the couch and we sit together watching a movie of Moby Dick on television.

Dad explains that New Bedford, where the serial killer is, had been the whaling capital of the world in the days before electricity, when people used whale blubber to light their lamps at night. I fall asleep on the couch next to Dad after the white whale destroys Ahab’s ship and Ishmael floats away on a coffin.

THE NEXT MORNING in the hospital, two nurses come and lift me onto a gurney. Dad holds my hand as they wheel me into the hallway. “You’ll be here when I wake up, right?”

“Of course.” He has to stay on the other side of the swinging metal door as the orderlies push my gurney through.

They wheel me into the operating room. One of the nurses squeezes my hand and though she’s wearing a surgical mask, I can tell by the way her eyes crinkle that she’s smiling. “I feel weird,” I tell her. The whole room seems far away and up close at the same time, like I’m watching what’s going on from outside of myself, like the whole thing is on TV.

“That’s just the medication,” the nurse says. “You’ll feel better soon.” It seems like that is something people say a lot in the hospital. The same nurse holds a plastic mask next to my face and tells me that she’s going to put it over my mouth. The doctor standing next to her says, “Now, the gas is going to smell funny, so what I want you to do is breathe it away from you, okay?”

“Okay.” My heart pounds in my chest and the faraway feeling gets worse. I feel very trapped in the room, everything happening so fast, and the bright light above hurting my eyes. The nurse places the mask over my mouth and I jump. She holds my arm down and strokes my hand. From what feels like miles away I hear her say, “When I put this in your arm it’s gonna feel icy,” and then a slow coldness creeps into my fingers as she slides in the IV. “Okay, okaaaay, okaaaaaaaaaay,” the nurse repeats, like a record in slow motion as I slip into unconsciousness.

After what feels like only a few moments, I wake with a start. All around my bed the faces of doctors and nurses stare down at me. I try to sit up and one of the nurses pushes me gently backward. I try to speak but my throat is parched and I seem to have forgotten how to make the words in my brain come out of my mouth. I’m crying.

“Ssshh,” says the nurse. “It’s okay, Leah. It’s okay. You’re waking up from surgery. We’re going to give you this pain medicine and you’ll feel better.” She holds a syringe in her hand. I flail in my gurney, tugging at my IV. “I don’t want a shot,” I say, panicked. “I don’t want a shot!”

“Leah.” The nurse looks at me sternly. “After what you’ve been through, this shot is nothing. It’s going to make you feel a lot better. I promise. And this”—she points at my IV—“if you pull this out they’ll make me tie your arm down and I don’t want to do that, okay?”

“I feel weird,” I say.

“You’re in the recovery room,” says the nurse. “You’re on a lot of medication. You just had a really big surgery.”

“I want my dad,” I say.

“Your mom is waiting for you in your room. You’ll see her as soon as you’re out of recovery.”

I know she’s talking about Ann-Marie. “She’s not my mom.”

“I’ll keep an eye out,” she says, looking intently at one of the machines by my gurney and making a note on my chart. “In the meantime you rest and feel better. We’ll try to find your dad.”

When they roll me into my hospital room from Recovery, Ann-Marie is waiting for me.

“Where’s Dad?”

“He’s on his way,” she says. Her eyes are puffy and she’s clutching a balled-up Kleenex.

“I want Dad,” I whine, growing more desperate. The haze, the pain, I wasn’t expecting any of it, and it seems like only Dad can make it better. “I’m so thirsty,” I say. I have never been thirstier. I feel deep, dry cracks running along the insides of my mouth.

“Can she have some juice?” asks Ann-Marie.

“She can have some ice,” says one of the nurses. “Just ice for right now.”

Ann-Marie disappears into the hallway and comes back with a small plastic cup filled with shards of ice. She swirls the cup around and puts her hand on my forehead.

“I’m so thirsty,” I say again. “I want juice.”

“I’m sorry, Leah,” she says. “The nurse says just ice right now.” She holds the plastic cup to my mouth and gently shakes free a few chunks of ice. I suck at them, parched and desperate. In that moment, even as she takes care of me, after waiting hours for me to come out of surgery, I hate her. I hate that ice.

When I wake up next, Dad is sitting by my bed and Ann-Marie is gone.

“Hey kiddo,” he says. His voice cracks and he starts to cry.

I’ve never seen my dad cry before. It makes no sense. But I’m so happy to see him I don’t want to say anything that might make him leave again.

He looks smaller than normal from my angle on the bed. His mustache is droopy. His suit jacket hangs limply from the arm of his chair. The tears that fall from his eyes are long and slow.

“I love you,” I tell him.

“I love you, too,” he says. “Go back to sleep.”

The next day, the doctors show me my scar—an eight-inch-long line held together with staples. The doctor says it’s bigger than normal because they hadn’t known exactly what they were looking for in there. What they found was a twisted fallopian tube. I’ve never heard the word before.

“Is that like my appendix?” In the weeks before, everyone had been telling me I might have appendicitis.

“It’s a reproductive organ,” he says, but doesn’t explain anything else.

Dad keeps his word and is there every day. Together we poke at my hospital food. He pretends to steal bites of my Jell-O and I squeal in protest. He holds on to my saline drip as I hobble down the hallway, clutching the tender muscles of my sewn-up abdomen. He holds my hand as two nurses discover my head is covered in lice. They come to my hospital bed with a plastic washbasin filled with cold water, a metal hair pick, and an industrial-size bottle of shampoo.

“Please stop,” I plead with them. “Please, please.” The water is freezing and the metal picks sting my scalp.

“My goodness,” says a nurse to my dad. “I’ve never seen so much thick hair!” She looks at the metal comb, holds it up to the fluorescent light. “Or, to be honest, so many lice. They like clean hair, you know. No need to be embarrassed.”

Dad smiles at her and tips his tall body back in the chair. “Well, Leah is attached to her little pets.”

The nurse giggles, shakes her head, and dips the metal comb into a bowl of soap and water. Dad has amassed a small fan club of nurses who slip us extra rice pudding and are always popping in just to say hi. They all love Dad. The nurse from the recovery room comes by to check on the little girl who asked only for her dad and not her mom.

Dad sits next to my hospital bed and reads me a book called The Enormous Egg, about a boy in New Hampshire who hatches a dinosaur egg on his farm. At every chapter break Dad tells me I have to get up and move around or I will have to stay in the hospital longer. We walk slowly up and down the green-and-white hallways of the hospital, and the next chapter of the book is my reward for the effort.

One morning, a man in an enormous Alf costume walks into my room carrying a bouquet of balloons. I creep as far back into my bed as I can, afraid to look at the horrifying character.

“Hellooooo!” Alf says, his snout looming over me. “I heard you were a very sick lady so I brought you some balloons!”

I reach silently for the balloons.

“Shake my hand?” asks Alf.

I feel terrible being so rude, but there is just no way I can do it. He holds out his tan furry paw and it comes at me in slow motion. “No,” I say, then in rapid succession as I begin to panic, “no no no no no.”

Alf chuckles. “Enjoy your balloons,” he says and waddles out of the room. I hear him as he makes his way down the halls, saying hello to the other sick children: the boy with whooping cough who hacks all day long, the girl with asthma so bad she sleeps inside a tent, the baby twins with some kind of rash. I wonder if they are all as freaked out as I am.

“Dad?” I ask.

“I think the guys from work thought it would be nice,” he says. “Six-foot Alf is not too cool when you’re high on morphine?”

“Can we finish the book?” I ask.

IN JUNE 1988, around the same time I am having surgery for my twisted fallopian tube, Peter Gilbert, one of the two men who’d murdered my mom, is headed down Connecticut Route 101 on his way to go skydiving. As he suddenly stops short, the man in the car behind him hits his brakes, curses at Gilbert, and drives away. Gilbert follows, infuriated, pushing both cars to ninety miles an hour before they pull off into a gas station parking lot. Gilbert gets out of his car brandishing a lead-filled blackjack, while an off-duty Connecticut State Police trooper who happens to be at the scene rushes to break up the fight. He arrests Gilbert and asks his permission to search the car, which comes back as registered to the Providence police. Gilbert, sweating and shaking, opens the trunk, pops a pill, and falls to the ground. He’s pronounced dead, at age forty-four, of a massive heart attack when he arrives at a nearby hospital.

In his trunk is a parachute bag and nineteen packets of cocaine.

SO HOW DID Peter Gilbert wind up dead, alone, with a weapon and drugs and a vehicle belonging to the police?

In February 1985, four months after he and Gerald Mastracchio Sr. murdered my mom, Gilbert’s home was raided by the Providence police and he was taken into custody for possession of drug paraphernalia and illegal weapons. He was hopelessly hooked on cocaine at this point, having his wife inject him every morning and walking around wearing a tourniquet so that when it was time to shoot up, he wouldn’t have to waste a moment. When the police brought him in he was five foot five and weighed just 110 pounds.

He’d recently committed three murders. First, my mom. Then another man named Joe West, whom Gilbert shot in the head as West sat in his car under an overpass. With the help of Gerald Mastracchio Jr. he’d killed a man named Joe Olivo who, like my mother, was suspected of being an informant. They strangled him with a necktie but it broke. They shot him but he continued to gurgle. After a second shot, he died. Later, Gilbert helped saw Joe Olivo into pieces, pour acid over tattoos that might identify him, and toss his body parts into various dumpsters around the state.

An independent investigation into how his protective custody had gone so awry would later conclude, “Given the nature of his crimes… it appears Gilbert received far greater benefits from his bargain than did the State of Rhode Island.”

GILBERT WAS ARRESTED that morning in February at nine o’clock. By eleven that night he’d confessed to armed robbery, murder, and being the second in command of a wholesale drug operation: All of these crimes, he promised, were overseen by the Patriarca family. He was fearful for his life, he told the police, and for the lives of his family. In exchange for testimony, he wanted protection. When he was done detailing his crimes, he and his arresting officers, Detective Oates and Lieutenant Tamburini, settled in for a “nice Italian meal” they ordered and ate at the Providence police station.

The next morning the attorney general’s office met with Gilbert. After agreeing that everything he said was credible they struck a deal. The murder 1 charges (premeditated) would be struck down to murder 2, and he wouldn’t be charged in the armed robbery or the drug conspiracy. In exchange for his testimony, his sentence for the murder charges would be ten years, to be served in the protection of the Providence police. He would also have outstanding warrants for his arrest in Florida and Maine eliminated.

He’d stay right where he was in Rhode Island. In return for his information that he swore would take down the mob, the state would foot the bill for all of his living expenses. The Providence police had no experience in witness protection or relocation. There was no plan for what they’d do with such a seemingly valuable asset. Somehow, someone, somewhere, made the decision to start construction right there in the station to build Gilbert a proper apartment where they could keep him safe. He had a small kitchen, a living room, and a bedroom. He kept a pet bird and a poodle named Cuddles. His wife and young children were allowed to stay with him and at night, they “played court” in the courtroom downstairs.

The state of Rhode Island and the Providence Police Department did whatever they thought would keep their star witness as happy as possible. And Gilbert took full advantage of the benefits he discovered he could extract as that star witness: free take-out meals, trips to Florida, a vacation home in Narragansett over Christmas with his family, and welfare checks for him and his wife. With no clear leadership, and no established set of practices, it was easy for a con artist like Gilbert to dangle his supposed connections to the mafia and demand more and more. He needed to exercise, of course, so he got some roller skates and skated through the halls of the police building. He needed transportation so he was given access to the vehicles belonging to the Providence Police Department; after he died and the state and journalists went through the receipts, they found he’d purchased, with the state’s money and help, a motorcycle, shoeshines, trips to the bowling alley, ammunition, throwing stars, and, of course, the skydiving lessons.

The longer he was around, the more he got to know some of the cops. Maybe he felt like he was a kind of cop. Certainly many of the officers, seeing him day in and day out, treated him like a friend if not a colleague. Gilbert may have actually begun to believe he was doing a great civic duty and that he should be rewarded for it, over and over again. And for nearly four years, the state of Rhode Island continued to reward him beyond any scope of what a protected witness was entitled to, until he died, on his way to skydive. Free fall must have seemed like the ultimate freedom.

Shortly after his death, the RICO indictment was vacated. Raymond Patriarca hadn’t even lived to see it filed. He died of a heart attack in 1984 and his incompetent son, his namesake, Raymond Patriarca Jr., allegedly took over the business. Nobody trusted him like they had his father.

WHEN GILBERT DIED, his strange deal was made public. It was a huge scandal; the evidence of such gross corruption and incompetence was shocking, even by Rhode Island standards.

There was an independent investigation into the matter but in the end, the attorney general’s office pointed the finger at the Providence police and the Providence police said they were just doing what the attorney general told them to do and the mayor said he didn’t even have any knowledge of this deal, and nothing, not one single good thing, not a single shred of anything gallant or fair came out of any of it. And when, two decades later, I called Lieutenant Tamburini, one of the officers who’d been in charge of Gilbert’s custody and testimony, and explained to him who my mom was and that I was looking for information about the details surrounding her murder, he told me, “I don’t really understand what any of this has to do with you. That was a very difficult time in my life and I don’t think I’ll be talking to you about it.” He’s now the chief of police in a town neighboring Providence.

They hadn’t cared about my mom then and they don’t care about her now.

THE PROVIDENCE JOURNAL, particularly a young reporter named Dean Starkman, wrote many comprehensive articles about Gilbert, the Patriarca crime family, and the drug trade in Rhode Island. Starkman came the closest to explaining how something like this could have happened when he wrote, “Gilbert’s testimony shines a harsh light on a layer of the underworld rarely seen by outsiders. It’s not the organized crime of high-ranking mobsters in limousines and $1,000 suits. And it’s nothing like the romantic popular mystique of the Mafia as a well-organized brotherhood of ‘men of honor.’ Gilbert’s world is a kingdom of ugliness, where men without conscience rule over drug users, enslaved both by their addiction and by their rulers’ breathtaking capacity for violence.”

FOR ME, IN all the piles of information that exist about the Gilbert affair, there is one small detail that stands out in particular. Among the many receipts is one for an electric typewriter. Gilbert was writing his memoirs while in “protective custody.” He was sure they’d be optioned for a movie. He wrote, “I gave the police my statements involving myself in three murders and a robbery… and having to do a few years wasn’t a bad deal.”

But Peter Gilbert doesn’t get to tell this story.

I do.