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My reward was to ride with Covaletzki back to the station. He cried most of the way. Through his sobs, and in between telling me he must have been out of his mind and that he had kids in college and that everything since he was born had been a struggle for him, he explained the frame: “Janasek paid off the Chester PD Vice once a month, and they laid off the old Body & Soul. Then the head of their Vice took care of us through Hanrahan. It was goin’ on for a long time before I even got involved. Hanrahan worked it out with Janasek years back when Hanrahan ran Vice. Anyway, we laid off Janasek’s Hotel in Delaware. The gamblin’. That’s all. Then us guys on Vice got a taste on payday. Includin’ DiGiacomo. Ask him yourself. He was in Vice three years. The fuck. He got his full cut, and he got his dick wet at the Body & Soul whenever he got a hard-on. Just like everybody else. Take my word for it. That’s all the fuck there was to it. You can see it. Can’t you? You started blabbin’ to Janasek about the Body and Soul and about DiGiacomo leavin’ Vice and becomin’ your partner — Janasek got worried the Wilmington dicks were gonna start shakin’ him down, too. Pretty soon everybody on the department’s gonna have their hand out and he can’t be supportin’ everybody. So he gives me a bunch of shit and wants to know what he’s payin’ for, and I call Hanrahan. Hanrahan knew you weren’t on the take and so he assumes you were on to his deal with the Chester PD. So he figures he’s gotta nail you first before you nail him. A total misunderstanding. Everybody thought you was talkin’ about the Body & Soul Lounge when you was talkin’ about the old movie. Everybody panicked. Honest to God. That’s it.”
I believed him. It was just that stupid. Still, it really did make me feel free to hear his words after all those years. And you know, even he looked better after he told me. We both relaxed a lot, like the war was over. I can still hear the sound of his voice, word for word, and I can still close my eyes and feel the effect it had on me.
The whole frame was so quick and so mindless, so apparently motiveless, that Rocco didn’t figure it out in ’61. He just convinced himself that I grabbed a little money for myself and stuck it in my locker. I guess when you’re on the take you have a tendency to believe it of everybody. But what Rocco considered his real crime of silence against me was that when Figaro’s story surfaced in ’76 and Rocco learned that I’d been framed, he said nothing to me about the regular paydays from Janasek. With Rocco it was understandable. He thought slowly. He always relied on a partner to do his thinking, his catcher to call his pitches. Rocco viewed his secret as not very useful information because he figured I’d never get to Figaro, so why expose himself for no reason? Besides, he had no idea that Covaletzki was involved. And he wasn’t alone on that score. All my old friends thought it was just Hanrahan and Figaro. Rocco cried like crazy when I confronted him. He admitted the truth with a great sigh of relief, a palpable unburdening. I put my arm around Rocco and told him to forget it, that he couldn’t know how his silent piece of the puzzle would have helped me get the picture sooner. I had to hear the real McCoy from Covaletzki, anyway, and that took what it took. Rocco took his pension with no further repercussions — thanks to Honey’s going to bat for him with the city administration — and he and Rocco, Jr., started a small construction company.
Elmo Covaletzki, it seems, ran true to form for his entire career. As Hanrahan said on January 9, 1961: “Covaletzki here works a private-pay job every chance he gets. It’s a sign of ambition.” And then some. Janasek paid him. Professor Cruset paid him, and who knows how many other private paydays he had.
One tidy headline in the News Journal on the morning of November 11, 1976, tells the rest of the story about Covaletzki holding a gun on me and Dershon monkeying with the rules: CHIEF: TEN IN THE CAN; CHIEF DEPUTY: CANNED. I paid my driving-under-the-influence fine, but that didn’t make the paper.
Every Brazilian opal mogul should have a Wilmington office. One never knows when the DuPont Company might close and Delaware need a new industry. So I opened up in Wilmington, and I keep tabs on the growing Lopes family by “interurbano America” and by having become a frequent flyer. The operation in Brazil is so smooth and successful that Lopes himself picks me up at the airport in Belém. Especially when I bring my American lawyer, Honey Esquire, now in private practice.
Somehow Figaro got wind of everything and one fine day he called me at the Wilmington office. He offered to meet with me for an hour some place in public in broad daylight for $10,000 in small bills, in advance. I told him I already owned the story he had for sale, but for him to do keep in touch.
Sarah is a tough subject to talk about. The day after Covaletzki’s arrest and Carlton’s exposure, and with Marian’s help and Honey’s help, I got Sarah to agree to see a psychiatrist that Honey knew, one who specializes in the needs of rape victims. For the first time Sarah told the three of us about having had severe anxiety attacks and recurrent nightmares since shortly after the rape. It was quite a moment. Here, I had just brought about the downfall of the only father Sarah had ever known, yet incredibly she was opening up to me. The freedom to break silence, to confess things, to open up, to talk, had an immediate healing effect on her. In the past she had waxed eloquent about this basic human need to speak the truth, yet she had been herself denied the right to practice it for far too long. One night a few weeks later in Montreal, she told us that the worst influence on her life was not the rape but the fear of death during the rape, the fear of any moment becoming cold, stiff, and lifeless forever. As everlastingly harmful as was the rape, compared to the imminence of death, the rape was like the wallet you give to a robber to keep him from killing you. At least that’s what she believes it was in her case. She continues in therapy. She’s faced up to the fact that Carlton’s crime of silence — keeping the rape a secret to “protect” Sarah and to foreclose any questioning of his own masculinity — has done her more harm than good. Because treatment was delayed, the scars are uglier and the wounds incompletely healed. But she also knows that her adoptive father acted, in part, out of ignorance, and she keeps in touch with him. Her sexuality and her feelings toward men are tangled, but not irretrievably so. There are no easy answers for my daughter, but little by little I see a sense of humor coming out like a recessive gene. So I know the therapy is working. God bless. And God bless her for trusting me and God bless Marian for encouraging it.
While we were up in Montreal later that summer with Sarah watching Nadia Comaneci set the world on fire, Honey asked me why I had used her and not Rocco to nail down my Target Nine — my getting of a brand-new usable conspiracy against Covaletzki. Why I had approached her outside the chief’s office on my way to the city clerk, made her my backup, and bombarded her with orders: “Tail Covaletzki to Cruset’s. If he leaves his car and goes into the house, get into his car any way you can. Smash the window if you have to. Turn on the battery-operated reel-to-reel and tune us back in from a Kel Kit they’re going to put on me. Call for help on his radio and then leave the mike on to broadcast our conversation. Beep the horn once to signal to me that everything is done. Then sit tight and listen. If it gets hairy, scram.” Well, I explained my threefold reasoning: (a) “it would make a more interesting story if a woman did it,” (b) she “deserved a chance” to atone for her betrayal, and (c) Covaletzki would be less likely to notice her little yellow Subaru following him than Rocco’s blue Plymouth. She wasn’t satisfied with my answer and kept on me until I finally broke. “Honey,” I confessed, “I didn’t have a whole lot of time to explain what I needed, and if and where and how. I needed a smart cookie in a hurry, a speed listener, my very own Flushing, New York, hot momma with big brains.”
Because of the information contained in the Target files, ironically, the attorney general had to release several convicted people before their time. They got what the courthouse regulars called a Cruset pardon. Who knows, maybe they were all innocent to begin with. Because of the illegal way I had gathered Target files and the fact that Carlton
refused to testify against any of them, the attorney general could not prosecute the false witnesses.
Target Seven, Harrison Lloyd, was never arrested for the unspeakable murder of Shy Whitney, but he’s still doing time for everything else. Maybe lucky for him. Target Eight, John Gandry, never came out of his coma and died in the hospital. We never did get a new conspiracy or any usable evidence against the professor, so he too escaped prosecution. At the height of all the “sordid” media exposure, Marian divorced him. He settled nicely on her, liquidated his assets and moved alone to — guess where — Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, the bloody battleground of his hero John Brown the abolitionist and the home of Professor Andrew Bliss, Carlton’s fictional hashashin. So far he appears to have retired quietly without ever getting to his Target Nine, “whatever it would normally be,” in the words of Dershon.
Honey told me that an old college friend of hers took a security job at the U.S. Supreme Court. On her first day they handed her a gun, a name tag, and a recent candid photograph of Professor Carlton Cruset.
I said, “Oh my God, I hope the old boy’s not still pissed off.”
Honey said, “If I were in your shoes, buster, I wouldn’t be losing any sleep over his Target Nine. I’d be worried about his Target Ten.”
“Hmm,” I said. “Just how effective do you think you’ll be at throwing your body across mine to shield me when the shooting starts?”
“I honestly don’t know, Lou, but you have the right to remain silent while I practice. If you can.”
The Right to Remain Silent Page 26
