The Italian Dom by N.J. Adel
Chapter one
I lied under oath.
That was pretty much my job description. All the years of studying the human brain and the psychology behind our nature, the meticulous training, the catcalls, the spitting—prisoners were big on hauling their bodily fluids, and I was glad it was only saliva I’d received so far—the threat of violence every time the door buzzed locked behind me as I entered the interview room, and the confinement with the sickest and dirtiest of minds weren’t to make me a forensic psychologist. They were meant to make me a perjurer.
Why, did you ask?
Because I was a debt payment. To the Mob.
No, not the kind that was pretty enough or important enough to be collected in marriage. My flat chest and nerd glasses didn’t inspire made men to use me for their sick pleasures and call it a day. Neither did my no longer rich or powerful, drowning-in-debt corrupt ex politician of a father.
Instead I was given the best education to become the shrink who would lie under oath to free convicted mobsters in the state of Illinois.
That’s what you get when you skip two years and nerdly blurt out in a school built by the Mafia for the Mafia you wanna be a doctor instead of asking for a boob job like any normal teenager.
God, I fucking hate Chicago.
“Doctor Berlusconi?” Adam Polanski, the defendant’s attorney, yanked me out of my thoughts.
I shifted in the witness stand, clearing my throat. “Yes?”
“Can you tell us what the culprit was thinking when he did this?” He pointed at a magnified projection image of a bloody corpse of a woman with multiple stab wounds. The defendant’s murdered wife.
“Objection, Your Honor. The witness can’t know what the defendant was thinking,” the prosecutor said.
But I did. The defendant killed his wife after she knew he was cheating on her so she wouldn’t sue his ass and take his money. He’d told me himself with a proud smirk.
“Doctor Berlusconi is an expert witness, Your Honor. She was called in because she’s the defendant’s psychiatrist and she’s an expert in her field,” Polanski said.
Wrong. Despite my intelligence, dedication and Master’s degree, I wasn’t qualified to be an expert. I needed, at least, five more years in the field and a real PhD, not one that was falsified like my new birth certificate—I was almost twenty-two in reality, not twenty-seven—to make me more legitimate for the role. Just like Polanski was paid heavily to make sure a guilty murderer avoid jail time, I was called in to lie for the same reason.
“Overruled. Proceed,” the judge prompted.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Judge DeLuca was particularly selected for this case, too. He and my father played poker together and had bonded over a long history of gambling debts and shady favors. “After examining the defendant, Viktor Safin, who has been my patient for the past three months, my professional diagnosis for him is schizophrenia with paranoia. His paranoid delusions in particular focus on the constant fear of being poisoned. In my professional opinion, on the day of the crime, Mr. Safin, in a paranoid delusion of his, believed his wife was trying to poison him.”
“And in your professional opinion, do you believe Viktor intended to murder his wife?” Polanski asked.
“No,” I lied without batting an eye. I’d learned to lie without a single quiver to my body or voice since the moment my father was tied helpless, a knife to his eye, and a gun barrel was shoved into my mom’s mouth right in front of me and my baby brother. “In that moment, Mr. Safin was unable to distinguish reality from delusion. He felt threatened in the midst of his delusional state, and, in his mind, he was defending himself.”
“Thank you, Doctor Berlusconi. No more questions.”
Shame and revulsion tugged at my conscience, but I had to numb it or rather smother it. A violent murder had occurred, and the man sitting at the defendant’s table was as guilty as it got. I wasn’t any less guilty for helping him go free.
But I had no choice.
Well, I did. Everybody had a choice. I chose to free murderous monsters so other violent murders in my family wouldn’t occur. Selfish? Weak? Immoral? Absolutely. But what would you do when the lives of the people you loved the most were at the mercy of brutal criminals, and you were the only one that could spare them?
Say no? Fight? I did, at first. The result was a broken hip, a kidney that couldn’t be salvaged and a scar across my back that would never go away. Then I fought again, which made them realize I didn’t care enough about my life if I’d have to live it with blood on my hands. So they took a life I cared about. My baby brother’s.
Now, what would you have done next?
Yeah, that was what I thought.
“Doctor Berlusconi.” The prosecutor looked me in the eye as it was his turn to cross examine me. Could he see through my blatant lies? Did he know I was nothing but a tool passed among the hands of monsters? Would he do something about it? “You’ve provided a speculated reason as to the murder. In your professional opinion, he do you explain why Viktor Safin instead of simply walking away from the allegedly poisoned dinner chose to stab his wife, who was almost half his size, twelve times to defend himself?”
Polanski objected, of course. This entire charade was to prove Safin didn’t choose to murder his wife and didn’t think at any given moment taking her life was wrong or had any criminal intent.
My never-going-to-work-right-again hip screamed at me while I waited for the prosecutor to rephrase.
“You may answer, Doctor.” Judge DeLuca gave me my cue.
“Mr. Safin didn’t choose to stab his wife. In fact, when he grabbed the dinner knife from her hand and stabbed her with it, he wasn’t stabbing his wife at all.”
The prosecutor cocked a brow. “Then whom was he stabbing?”
“Stan.”
“Stan?”
“Due to Mr. Safin’s paranoia, he believed his wife was having an affair with a man named Stan. He also believed Stan was his wife’s accomplice in the poisoning attempt and he was lurking in the house that night. During his delusion, Mr. Safin, after he walked away from the dinner table, refusing to eat, he turned and saw Stan in the dining room, sitting in his wife’s chair, holding a knife. He believed Stan lunged at him, and so he fought, grabbed the knife and stabbed him in self-defense.”
“Are you telling me and the court that when Viktor Safin plunged a knife into his wife’s body twelve times, he thought she was a man called Stan?”
“And Stan was attacking him with the dinner knife he held in his hand, so Mr. Safin defended himself against the attack, yes.”
His head jerked back, arms wide in the air. “Wow. During the course of your treatment of Viktor Safin, has he revealed the last name of Stan or given you any proof that his wife was in fact having an affair?”
“No and no. In my opinion, and after talking to the wife myself during the course of my treatment, Stan doesn’t exist. Only in Mr. Safin’s head.”
“How convenient.”
“Objection!”
“Sustained. Careful, counselor.”
The prosecutor gave a short sigh. “Has Mr. Safin given you a physical description of Stan, Doctor?”
“He has.” After coaching him. This whole defense plan was premeditated. From the moment Safin entered my practice, describing his delusions, I knew he was planning something horrible. It’d been the case with all affiliated patients who came to see me. Safin was Bratva and was no different. I wasn’t aware of his exact intentions at first, but it didn’t take a genius to know it was a future crime.
I’d pretended to treat him, given him medications—which I was certain he didn’t touch—and even provided counseling to his wife in couples’ therapy. But what he needed me for was filling the gaps and taking the stand. Despite the food poisoning history and infidelity in his family that could actually trigger the paranoid delusions I testified he had, Safin wasn’t mentally ill. He knew the difference between right and wrong, and when he stabbed his wife twelve times, he knew exactly what he was doing and who he was killing.
The prosecutor’s lips pursed in obvious irritation. “Care to share, Doctor?”
“Mid-thirties. Over six feet. Blue eyes. Dark brown hair and beard.”
He stared at the defendant and then back at me. “You’re almost describing Mr. Safin himself.”
“The wife had argued the same when she tried to exonerate herself in our sessions, too, and when she multiply urged her husband to stop fighting with Stan on multiple occasions both publicly and in their house. She mentioned she was severely embarrassed and humiliated by Mr. Safin’s episodes.” Which were staged to gather enough witnesses to prove the delusions. “But that was the description my patient gave me. Like I said, I don’t believe Stan exists in real life, and it’s not uncommon for paranoid patients to project an image of themselves in their delusions.”
“Do you think Stan could be a projection of Vikto Safin’s own infidelity?”
“Objection!”
The prosecutor referenced proven evidence of Safin’s affair so the judge allowed the question.
“It’s possible,” I said.
“Has Mrs. Safin revealed to you during your sessions that she was aware of her husband’s affair?”
“Yes.”
“How did she react?”
“She was devastated and angry. She said she was considering having a divorce.”
“Did the defendant agree to grant her a divorce?”
“Not that I know of. My observations state Viktor Safin was fond of his wife despite what he believed of her, and he didn’t want a divorce. Even his infidelity, to him, was a reflex to hers.”
“Is it possible, on the night of the heinous murder, Mr. and Mrs. Safin were arguing about the divorce, as the help has testified, and he suspected she was trying to poison him because he wouldn’t grant her the divorce?”
The prosecutor was digging the grave of this case. “It’s possible.”
“And is it possible, right in that moment, that he was lucid enough to end that argument in blood?”
“Objection, Your Honor. This is—”
“Overruled. Answer the question, Doctor.”
“Your hypothesis dictates the defendant wasn’t acting under the influence of his delusion when he thought the dinner his wife had made was poisoned. You’re suggesting it was a rational suspicion. If that was the case, then it establishes that Mr. Safin was indeed lucid enough to walk away from the dinner table after the argument, which clearly indicates he had no intention to retaliate or harm his wife. What would motivate him to return and stab his wife to death? If that was his intention, why didn’t he do it in the heat of the argument?
“On the other hand, his wife, if she did poison him, would be the one inclined to finish the task, don’t you think? So perhaps, based on your hypothesis, Mrs. Safin attacked her husband with the dinner knife, and he, whether you assume he was in a delusion or not, still killed his attacker in self-defense.
“But the witnesses—”
“The answer to your question is no, Counselor. In my professional opinion, which is the only thing I’m here to give, it was when Mr. Safin looked back at his wife’s seat on his way out that the delusion of Stan attacking him manifested and thus Mr. Safin defended himself. Your hypothesis contradicts my documented findings and diagnosis. Everything else regarding this case is your job to proof or discredit.”
A flash of anger stained his face. I was sure after this argument, Polanski’s irresistible impulse insanity defense would hold, and Viktor Safin would walk away with murder. I assumed the prosecutor had reached the same conclusion when he marched toward his table. “I’m done. No more questions, Your Honor.”
I wished I’d been done, too. With my profession, with the state of Illinois, with the Mob.
With everything.
*****
Preorder The Italian Son to know what happens to Leo, Nicky, Dom, Tino, Angel, the Lanzas and the Bellomos
Get the closure you’ve been waiting for now in The Italian Son