Last Dance, Last Chance

a vacation house there where he could live, and his brothers owned several Dairy Queen franchises. Anthony had assured Tami that he would reestablish his medical practice in either Mexico or Puerto Rico.
    Tami said they had talked about a future together, and in the beginning, Anthony had seemed quite untroubled about leaving his children with his wife after a divorce. But, gradually, Anthony had begun his familiar refrain about how unstable Debbie was. He said she was addicted to painkillers and that he was frightened for his children. How could he leave them with her?
    He said Debbie was “unresponsive” to the children and that she was “bloating up” and going to several doctors. He told Tami of his wife’s overdose but assured her that he had no further worries about her committing suicide. None of the doctors could diagnose what was wrong with Debbie, Anthony told her, but he felt it was pancreatitis, which she had inherited from her father.
    Anthony himself, Tami said, was deeply committed to fitness and good nutrition and had dreams of opening an anti-aging clinic in Florida. Still, Tami said she hadn’t been anxious to throw her lot in with Anthony. He had called her at either the end of July or the first part of August, leaving a message that he really needed to talk to find out what was going on in her life. He had been very resistant to ending their relationship.
    Tami mentioned a sentimental card he sent her in mid-August, proclaiming his need for her and wondering why she wouldn’t come back to him.
    Tami left the interview with the investigators, but she was back in about ten minutes. She admitted that she hadn’t told them everything. Either her attorney or her conscience had become so insistent that she had to tell them the whole truth. She now recalled an incident that occurred after Anthony got out of prison. She had gone with him to a house on Washington to get some heroin. She gave Arnie’s name and recalled that his girlfriend was there, too. She watched as Anthony injected himself with heroin there. She was under the impression that he was also using Darvocet, a painkiller.
    Tami Maxell had just confirmed what Arnie Letovich had told them. It looked as though Tony Pignataro was so confident that he never thought anyone would betray him. Not his prison buddy/drug procurer or his mistress or his family—and certainly not his long-suffering wife. He seemed to think he was completely bulletproof.
    He was wrong.

21
    D ebbie had been the complete wife, putting Anthony’s wishes first, but she had always had friends on the long street where she lived, the neighborhood where her father-in-law and his lifelong friend had carved a small housing development out of a field. During the long summer just past, her friends had seen her health fail until many of them feared for her life. She had looked so pale and bloated as Anthony drove her away that most of them didn’t expect her to come home from the hospital. As much as they hated to accept it, they thought she was dying.
    At first, they had felt so helpless. Most of them were housewives, ill-equipped to confront Anthony with outright accusations. How do you say to your neighbor, “I think you must be killing your wife, and I want you to stop?”
    Rose Gardner had come close to that, but in the end she walked away defeated. She sobbed in her husband’s arms that Debbie was dying, and she didn’t know how to save her.
    Although she was deathly ill, Debbie didn’t die. Debbie had recovered enough by the end of August to be moved to a rehab wing. She had been in the intensive care unit for almost four weeks when her doctors moved her to the rehabilitation floor. She needed a wheelchair, and she had braces on her legs. She had no balance at all and could do virtually nothing for herself. Her recovery wasn’t a steady progression toward health. There were setbacks.
    Although the move apparently wasn’t responsible for the change in her condition, Debbie suddenly had trouble breathing. She was whisked to the cardiac care unit when her oxygen saturation point tested much too low. Her doctor told her that he would need to do a tracheotomy and insert a tube in her throat if her inability to draw in oxygen stayed so low.
    “I immediately refused,” Debbie recalled. “I didn’t want to be kept alive by a machine. I fought so hard because my children needed me, and somehow I managed to breathe more deeply without any machine.”
    No one could