...And Never Let HerGo

back in Wilmington with the family again. Tom studied for the bar exam all summer and he passed, but in Delaware, that didn’t mean he was officially an attorney; he still had to serve six months as a clerk. After his apprenticeship in a law firm, Tom’s first job as a lawyer was with the Public Defender’s Office. He enjoyed it; he had always been more interested in public service than in high-powered business. There, he and Louie—and even Joey—seemed to differ. For a year, Tom defended the indigent. It didn’t matter to his father where he worked; it was enough that his oldest son was officially a lawyer. He was very, very proud to be able to say, “My son the lawyer.”
    Tom moved from working as a defense attorney to being a prosecutor. For the next two years he was a prosecuting attorney for the Delaware Attorney General’s Office, assigned to New Castle County and working in Wilmington. He hadn’t made much money as a public defender, and he made exactly the same as a prosecutor, but he was excellent in his prosecutorial role and he was very popular around the courthouse.
    One of the cases Tom successfully prosecuted was a murder charge against a man named Squeaky Saunders, convicted in the shooting death of an associate. Squeaky, a habitual offender, had shot one of his cohorts in the head, and then ordered the two men with him to fire into the body, too—so that they wouldn’t be inclined to tell. They attempted to dump the body in the Delaware River, where it would eventually drift to the Delaware Bay and then into the seemingly bottomless depths of the Atlantic Ocean. Squeaky’s plan went awry early on when the body was caught in some sluice gates and was recovered with an obvious bullet wound in the skull that made authorities dismiss the possibility of accidental drowning.
    Tom studied autopsy reports that showed the path of the fatal bullet, the entrance and exit wounds. Although he had no plans to choose criminal law as his ultimate goal, he was, for the moment, caught up in the intricacies of his first murder case. With his coprosecutor, George “Butch” Seitz, Tom presented a case that sent Squeaky to Gander Hill Prison for a long time. Squeaky always claimed misconduct on the part of the investigating officers, but that was a common complaint among convicted felons.
    Tom still had the natural ease with everyone he met that made them all feel special, that he was truly focusing on them. “He had a God-given
knack
for friendship,” one court reporter recalled. “It seemed to come so easily to him to treat people kindly, and everyone really liked him.” He was friendly with everyone and it didn’t matter if it was a judge, a court reporter, or a janitor. Women around the courthouse were captivated by his sex appeal and by his voice. “He was
not
soft-spoken,” one woman who’d worked two decades in the courthouse said. “Tom was gentle voiced, and there’s a difference. Some people call it charisma, but he had something more than that.”
    Tom remained the “good” son, and Marguerite and Lou sometimes compared his steady dependability with Louie and Joey’s more flamboyant style. Even so, all three of their older boys were considered the good Capanos, as opposed to the “bad” Capanos—some of Lou’s brothers’ boys had gotten into scrapes with the law, and that made Lou and Marguerite just a little smug about their sons. They never looked down on their nephews, but they were aware that people around Wilmington made a distinction between the various family units.
    Family was family, however, and they all stuck together against outsiders who might snipe at any of the Capanos who had come from Calabria almost fifty years earlier to settle in New Castle. Lou always found jobs in his construction business for his relatives.
    By bringing Louie into the Cavalier project, Lou Capano had assured not only his fortune, but a fortune for all of them. When that enterprise boomed the way it did, he knew he would never have to worry about having an income in his old age; with apartment houses and malls and whatever Louie visualized next, the Capanos were unbeatable. But even though Louie had brought that about, Tom was still the golden son. It was a fact that they all appeared to accept; there was no overt jealousy among the brothers, and probably no jealousy at all. There was so much to go around, so much of everything: money, love, social standing, and wonderful houses.
    In