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Mr. Foley fell to the floor screaming faintly, but in obvious agony.
Mr. Cassandro watched him contemptuously for a full minute.
“Stop whining, you Irish motherfucker,” he said conversationally, “and stand up, or I’ll really give you something to cry about.”
With some difficulty, Mr. Foley regained his feet. He had great difficulty becoming erect, because of the pain in his groin, and because his entire right side now seemed to be shuddering with pain.
“Now I’m going to tell you something, and I want you to listen carefully, because I don’t want to have to repeat myself. You don’t even know shit about the law, so I’m going to educate you. You know what happens when you plead guilty to murder?”
Mr. Foley looked at Mr. Cassandro in utter confusion.
“Nine times out of ten, it don’t mean shit,” Mr. Cassandro said, “when you confess and plead guilty, which is what you’re going to do.”
That penetrated Mr. Foley’s wall of pain.
“Confess?” he asked.
“Right. Confess. What happens is your lawyer can usually come up with something that will make the jury feel sorry for you, so they won’t vote for the death penalty. Even if he can’t do that, the judge usually knocks down the chair to life without parole, and what that means is that you have to do maybe twenty years.”
“Why?” Mr. Foley asked, somewhat piteously.
“I told you. You dishonored the Italian people of Philadelphia. And if there was a mob, you would have dishonored them too. How would it be if it got around that a stupid Mick asshole like you was associated with the mob? If there was a mob.”
“I didn’t say any—” Mr. Foley began, only to be interrupted again by Mr. Cassandro striking him a third time in the face with the heavy cast-metal stapler. This blow caught him in the corner of the mouth, causing some rupture of mucous membrane and skin tissue and a certain amount of bleeding.
“You know what’s worse than going to the slammer for twenty years, Frankie?” Mr. Cassandro asked conversationally after Mr. Foley had again regained his feet. “Even worse, if you think about it, than getting the chair?”
Frankie shook his head no and then muttered something from his swollen and distorted mouth that might have been “No, sir.”
“Dying a little bit at a time, is what would be worse,” Mr. Cassandro said. “You know what I mean by that?”
Again there came a sound from Mr. Foley and a shake of the head that Mr. Cassandro interpreted to mean that Mr. Foley needed an explanation.
“Show him,” Mr. Cassandro said.
Mr. Joey Fatalgio went to Mr. Foley, this time grabbing his left hand, which Mr. Foley was holding against his body with his upper right arm, and twisted it behind his back. Then he grabbed Mr. Foley’s right wrist, and forced Mr. Foley to place his right hand, so far undamaged, on the desk at which Mr. Cassandro had been standing.
Mr. Cassandro moved away from the desk. Mr. Dominic Fatalgio then appeared at the desk, holding a red fire ax in his hand, high up by the blade itself. He flattened Mr. Foley’s hand on the desk, and struck it with the ax, which served to sever Mr. Foley’s little finger between the largest and next largest of its joints.
Mr. Foley screamed again, looked at his bleeding hand, and the severed little finger, and fainted.
Mr. Cassandro looked down at him.
“We don’t want him dead,” he said conversationally. “Wake him up, wrap a rag or something around his hand, and make sure he understands that if I hear anything at all I don’t want to hear, I will cut the rest of his fucking fingers off.”
Mr. Dominic Fatalgio nodded his understanding of the orders he had received and began to nudge Mr. Foley with the toe of his shoe.
Mr. Cassandro left the office, and then returned.
“Make sure you clean this place up,” he said. “I don’t want Mrs. Lucca coming in here in the morning and finding that finger. She’d shit a brick.”
Both Mr. Dominic and Mr. Joey Fatalgio laughed. Mr. Cassandro then left again, carefully closing the door behind him.
There were a number of problems connected with the arrests of Mr. Atchison and Mr. Foley for the murders of Mrs. Atchison and Mr. Marcuzzi.The first problem came up when Chief Inspector Matthew Lowenstein telephoned the Hon. Jerry Carlucci, Mayor of the City of Philadelphia, on his unlisted private line in Chestnut Hill to tell him that the Honorable Thomas Callis, District Attorney of Philadelphia County, had been his usual chickenshit self, but had come around when he had told him that he was going to arrest the two of them whether or not Callis thought there was sufficient evidence.
“He already called me, Matt,” the Mayor said. “To let me know what a big favor he was doing me.”
