Page 8 of Falling for Carla
“It’s just my brother Dominic with his monthly check in to see if I’m going to come home or if I’m determined to disgrace the family name by becoming a cop. It’s easier not to waste my breath telling him to go fuck himself,” I said with a hollow laugh.
“That calls for some wine,” Brenda chimed in and got up to open a bottle for us while I turned my attention back to Channing Tatum.
CHAPTER 7
DRAKE
On Friday night, I was home by myself. I was going over notes for my upcoming classes. Usually, I’d be out with the guys, having a beer and talking shit about the new semester and some of the boneheaded things the students say in class. Hamilton was always good for a laugh with that one—mostly the young women asking him how they could get ahead in politics or pass the bar early, with the implication that they’d be really grateful.
I knew that as a single man in academics I attracted attention. Partly because most undergrads expected all the professors to look like they came from Hogwarts with frizzy hair and long black robes. But the number of female students who tried to flirt with me or ask for ‘extra help’ in class was appalling. Every year, I kept thinking it would get to be less and less as I aged, but apparently older men were hot now. I was mystified and irritated by it in equal measure.
Not a day went by without seeing some TikTok or Insta post about how the guy from the Office was considered sexy now that his hair was gray or that men like Keanu Reeves and Brad Pitt—men decades older than me—were aging like a fine wine or making some influencer ‘feral’ with their shirtless workout pics.
I checked the online submissions of work from today and saw Carla Russo’s name pop up. That name—something about it seemed familiar. Obviously, it was a common enough Italian name, and by her own admission in addition to her hint of an accent, she was from New York. Curiosity tugged at me until I did a basic search.
No judicial appearances or outstanding warrants---doesn’t everyone search for a criminal record before they check LinkedIn or social media? Just ex-cops, I guess. She didn’t actually have any social media presence under her first and last name. It was unusual for someone her age, but smarter than average for someone going into criminal justice. You didn’t want a bunch of party pics floating around online to embarrass you with a potential employer, but, more than that, you never wanted any identifying information like who your relatives were, where you lived, where you went regularly to be available to strangers. Potential stalkers, perps who walked free but held a grudge, lots of unsavory people would run with that kind of casually posted info. It made me respect her intelligence even more, the fact that she knew better than to flag her routines and habits online.
Failing at finding any activity on any social media platform, I did a news search. It was an automatic method for me, an ingrained habit from years of chasing down leads with just a name or nickname. After a few false starts referring to someone much older than her by the same name, I hit on a news cycle from nine years ago.
It was a series of three clippings on the murder of Carmella Russo of Brooklyn who left behind her husband Giovanni and her two teenagers, Dominic and Carla. Although the first article listed the death as an accident, a follow up stated that local police were investigating evidence of foul play, tampering with the automobile she was driving. No further information was given on the case, just the obituary providing the third hit on the name Carla Russo.
She was listed as a junior at St. Genevieve’s Academy, a private prep school, while her older brother was a freshman at Fordham—so heavily Catholic and with the wealth to back up the ambitions of what seemed like first generation money. Senators and Cardinals were cranked out at Fordham. I looked up more on the brother’s name for more info, but he was not listed as a graduate of the university in an alumni search.
I was thinking about how this woman was also a poor kid whose mom was killed when she was sixteen. Then it hit me. Giovanni Russo. He was a big guy in the Mob, on the way up the ranks when I was on the LAPD. I knew exactly where his son had ended up. He was at the right hand of the father, as they said.
I had worked Organized Crime when I was on the force, and I knew the names of the heavy hitters from the East Coast because they did business in Vegas. Russo was nicknamed Ruthless by our squad, because not only had he climbed the ranks through body count rather than retired mentors, but because his dealings in Vegas and occasionally in LA made the local gangs seem like gentlemen by comparison. When the local drug lords were afraid to mess with someone, it made an impression on the cops.
And this was how Carla Russo, the studious young woman in the front row of my Crim 4 class, grew up. Raised by a mother who was a casualty of her father’s business, and a dad who made his money by shaking down corporations for protection money and having people brutally murdered. Damn.
Her father was a monster, and notorious for it. If she was becoming a cop, that probably didn’t sit well with daddy and the big brother who stood to take over the organization. I felt a pang of concern for her safety, but she was the one who’d grown up in that life, and she was the one in a position to know what she was dealing with. Not me. I was her professor three mornings a week. A professor spending his Friday night off going down an Internet rabbit hole looking for information on her.
Why in the world would a woman with that background be studying criminal justice? The cynical view would say that her dad already had enough dirty cops on his payroll and didn’t need one in the family. But she had moved thousands of miles away from the family business and taken up the study of the one subject guaranteed to alienate her from the crime family she was brought up in.
Did she want to go straight? Clean up the metaphorical streets even though it put her in direct opposition to her father whose far-reaching power was only matched by his lack of scruples? If she put a foot wrong, he’d probably have her killed. I wasn’t exaggerating either. Russo’s younger brother Guido turned up in the East River about five years before Giovanni’s wife was killed.
He’d offed his own baby brother. There wasn’t a lot a man like that wouldn’t do. And the serious woman with the dark eyes and the no-bullshit expression who was in my class? She wasn’t going to go quietly. That much I knew already. If she had wanted to turn a deaf ear to the family business and live like a queen, she would’ve stayed in Brooklyn. Nothing in her career path suggested that was an option as far as she was concerned.
Respect, awe, and a little bit of fear warred for my attention when I thought of her. The Berkley website itself yielded the only photo I had seen of her. A group graduation photo from a couple of years ago when she earned her bachelor’s degree. Her dark hair was swept back properly, no sign of the wild curls I’d seen escaping their messy bun in class, and her expression was one I hadn’t seen before.
She was smiling. It was stunning—she was stunning. Bright and beautiful, and in more danger than I could even begin to imagine.
CHAPTER 8
CARLA
I knew that look. I’d had the same careful stare from staff at St. Genevieve when I was a teenager, before my mom died. It was the expression that said, I know who your family is. Your dad is an animal. I’m walking on eggshells around you from now on.
Sure, the professor was a former cop. He’d told us as much. So it wasn’t a stretch that he would figure out my pedigree, such as it was. My dad was notorious even this far from home.
Before I came out to Berkley, I’d been aware of a job going wrong out in LA, hearing about a ‘bloodbath’ and how someone with a Spanish name was going to pay for it. There was no getting away from that kind of legacy. I hadn’t changed my name, and it wouldn’t have done much good anyway.
The family’s illegal activities might have been securely encrypted, but there was no use hiding my identity in plain sight. As much as I had my mom’s smile, I looked a lot like my notorious father, too. The man whose one and only mugshot was in an Armani suit with a debonair half-smile on his smug face. I had his straight, prominent nose, that same dimple in my right cheek. No sense in pretending I was Carla Nobody from Nowhere.
It irritated me that the professor knew, though. I wanted to be scored on my own merit. I didn’t want him editing his lectures because of my connections. I didn’t want to study organized crime, but if I had to, the least he could do is act like he never found out. Changing the syllabus or making it weirder by tiptoeing around me would just worsen an already crappy semester for me. He kept giving me that odd look in class and I wanted to roll my eyes.
Great detective work, teacher, I’m a Mob princess.
There was no reason why I should be annoyed that Professor Sheffield knew about my family’s business and our checkered past. Plenty of respectable society girls from my high school had given me the cold shoulder—the very polite, careful not to offend but nevertheless unfriendly cold shoulder once they found out where my dad’s money came from. My roommate in the dormitory at St. Genevieve had been the closest I had to a sister—until we were exchanging family stories.