Admission of Guilt (The detroit im dyin Trilogy, Book 2) (The Detroit Im Dying Trilogy)

by T. V. LoCicero

  “What were you fighting with your mom about?”

  “About this here.” Mark glanced for only a second in the mirror.

  “You mean rollin’ dope.”

  “Yeah, but she really just tryin’ to keep me in a damn closet, man. And I ain’t gonna live like that. I got too much to do.”

  “You’re only fifteen. What do you have to do? Except go to school and get a damn education, which you’re not doin’ either. I can’t believe you’re still out here after what happened to Eric.” John turned into the abandoned gas station and stopped.

  “That ain’t gonna happen again,” said Jimmy. “Vices got a truce.”

  “And that’ll last until the next get-down on the corner. You guys really piss me off. I got better things to do than wasting my time on a couple losers. See you around.”

  The two boys looked at each other, then climbed out of the Ford. Turning in his seat, he watched them walk back to the corner. The girl had her head in a car down the block. Jimmy flagged another to the curb.

  Chapter 29

  He drove back to the street Eric had turned on and for a long time looked for the boy in the chair, driving up and down these sweltering residential streets on the southwest side. Small groups of black people sat on stoops and steps, looking for a breath of air. On top of everything else this summer, the city has been hit with the worst heat wave and drought in recent memory, lawns withered and brown, leaves on bushes turning yellow. That devastating Dutch Elm disease afflicting the city had left only a few sheltering trees, standing on this street, and these old homes and flats without air conditioning were surely like ovens. On some days when the temperature had moved over 100 and was still close to 90 after sundown, he had seen families take the mattresses from their beds and toss them in their front yards to sleep on during the night.

  He thought of Maria Mendez’s house with the shooting gallery in the back and the mattress on the floor. The house was only a few blocks away, and he wondered if he should stop by to see if Maria was going to summer school.

  Instead he asked himself aloud, “What’s the use?”

  Having driven aimlessly for a while, he found himself passing Lincoln’s old redbrick facade. At the entrance to the parking lot he turned in and drove to the rear of the building. With the playground entirely deserted, he moved the Ford past the spot where Eric had been shot and through an opening in the fence to park next to the rusted old jungle gym. Getting out of the car, he walked under the gym, gauged the height of one of the bars, and began doing chin-ups. For a while he moved smoothly, up and down, but soon began to sweat and struggle, his strength giving out. Finally, he dropped heavily to the ground.

  On his back, breathing hard and flexing his hands to relieve the painful ache in his arms, he told himself he was a fucking weakling. He gazed at the windows of the second-floor room where he used to teach and wondered if he had the balls to do what he was thinking.

  Chapter 30

  In his ill-kept kitchenette, next to the sink full of food-caked dishes, he made himself a glass of instant ice tea. Stirring the brew a few strokes with his last clean spoon, he carried the tea to his tattered old armchair.

  With the glass on the dusty linoleum floor, he slumped down in the chair and took a large red spiral notebook from the ottoman in front of him. The bulb glaring from the adjacent floor lamp was the only light in the room.

  On the notebook’s first page, he gazed at the photo of Monelli cut from the cover of the magazine. The guy looked as if he had tried for pride and conviction, and yet around the dark, wide-set eyes a slightly bemused quality turned the total effect into cruel arrogance. Taped to subsequent pages, as he leafed slowly through the notebook, were the other clipped photos.

  A family portrait with Catherine Monelli—the face still somehow vaguely familiar—standing to the side and behind her husband, who was seated with a proud, possessive arm around the waist of their daughter Megan. An exterior of the Monellis’ large home in Grosse Pointe Park. An old news photo of Michael “Cigar Mike” Monelli testifying before a senate subcommittee on organized crime. A shot of Steven and Catherine with friends around a table at a social gala at the Bayside Yacht Club. And a picture of a fleet of garbage disposal trucks, each with the Monelli Sanitation logo.

  Another page turn and there was the body of the article, also cut from the magazine and taped here. A yellow marker highlighted several passages and in the margins were little notes scribbled to himself. Again his gaze moved to the highlighted passage that opened the piece.

  “He sits there in his handsomely appointed office, offering you his impeccable three-piece suit, his calm brown eyes and engaging smile, and says quietly: “Look, I run the day-to-day operations of three successful companies. I’m a husband and father, a pretty good one, I think. I’m a member of the Symphony Society and a Friend of the Zoo. I belong to the Bayside Yacht Club and the Detroit Country Club. I spend a lot of my time with my family on our 47-foot cruiser and playing golf with my friends, who are car dealers, judges and successful businessmen. So how in the world would I even have the time to be involved with organized crime?’

  And you find yourself nodding in agreement and wanting to say, “Well, yes, of course. It’s out of the question.”

  But then you remember the retired Strike Force Commander Thomas Terranova telling you, “Old Cigar Mike, his father, used to run the outfit with an iron fist, and then for awhile, after the old man’s heart attack, it was the older brother Vince until that suspicious car accident. Now this kid is younger, smoother maybe and better educated, but he’s just as crooked and just as ruthless as his father and his brother were.”

  His eye skipped back and forth across the pages as he read and re-read the passages in yellow.

  Steven Monelli has a younger sister, Felice, who lives with her husband Sam Cotaldo, the son of a prominent Chicago Mafia figure, in suburban Phoenix, not far from her parents’ ranch. But Cigar Mike’s only surviving son has always been the apple of his father’s eye. Born December 18, 1955, he grew up in the Fifties, when the family was heavily involved in traditional Mafia activity, gambling, loan-sharking, prostitution, and the Sixties, when Cigar Mike began to add narcotics and a number of legitimate-looking businesses.

  ~ ~ ~

  Ask Steven Monelli what is most important to him, and he’ll look you straight in the eye and answer quickly, as if he has been waiting for the question, “Two things: respect and my family.”

  Ten years ago, at the age of sixty-two, Michael Monelli suffered a heart attack and was reportedly told by his physician that if he wished to have any reasonable chance at a ripe old age, he must retire to a warmer climate. So Cigar Mike bought a small ranch in Arizona and left the reins to his businesses—of whatever legitimacy—in the hands of his oldest son Vincent.

  Thirty-one at the time, Vincent had been running the family’s restaurant, bar and home delivery orange juice company, while sitting at his father’s right hand, according to one source, learning about all of the family’s various enterprises.

  For the next five years Vincent Monelli ran things pretty much as his father had, with his younger brother Steven keeping a low profile, running his own accounting office and handling the family’s books. Then came the accident in Colorado in which Vincent and his wife Emily were killed when their rented BMW plunged off the side of a mountain road. Police were never able to establish a cause for the accident. All the family businesses were now in the hands of Steven Monelli.

  ~ ~ ~

  At DePaul University as an accounting major, Steven, according to some, was not a particularly dedicated or serious student. “I always thought he was quite bright,” said business law professor George Armbruster. “But he seemed unwilling to put forth anything but the minimum effort.”

  It was at a party in September of his senior year at DePaul that he met a pretty, blond Irish-Catholic coed named Catherine O’Brien, and a whirlwind courtship promptly followed. “Cathy’s family were
working-class,” recalled a mutual friend. “And of course she wasn’t Italian, and Steve’s family were pretty much opposed to it. But Steve was bound and determined. I heard he even threatened to elope, and he finally got his way.”

  “I thought he was the brightest, most attractive man I’d ever met,” says Catherine Monelli today. And she is adamant about reports of the family’s Mafia connections. “Steve told me his father did some rum running back in the old days when everybody else was doing it. And that and because he was Italian is the reason the police have always given the family a hard time. It’s been sixteen years now, and I still can’t believe how awful the police and the media have been to this absolutely wonderful family.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Five years ago Steven Monelli embarked on a bold new plan that, according to police and DEA sources, eliminated the family’s lame and ailing traditional activities, such as gambling and loan-sharking, and established a world-class cocaine connection with a carefully arranged and apparently impenetrable buffer between himself and his sources and distributors.

  Also part of the new approach was the liquidation of the family’s losing businesses, including the home juice operation, and the purchase of a number of legitimate companies—lucrative and stable—in trucking, waste disposal and linen supply.

  ~ ~ ~

  “He’s a wonderful father,” said Catherine Monelli, sitting on the back deck of their beautiful Tudor home in fashionable Grosse Pointe Park. She gestured at her husband and 12-year-old daughter Megan cavorting with a frisbee in the large backyard. “He absolutely adores her, and she thinks he’s the greatest thing since rock‘n roll. I don’t know what he would do if anything happened to that child, God forbid. We wanted to have more, but after Megan, I wasn’t able, unfortunately.”

  Finally, flipping a page, he came to his hand-written entries. At the top of the first page was his heading in large printed caps: THE PLAN.

  Below, his tight, neat handwriting covered the next four pages. When he arrived at the final sentence, he pulled a ballpoint from the breast pocket of his shirt, paused for a moment, then continued his writing.

  Chapter 31

  The lawn glistened as the morning sun lit the elaborately landscaped Monelli home. Down the drive from behind the house came a gleaming black Cadillac, quietly, nose first. Inside, with Robert driving, Steven lounged in the backseat and spoke into a phone. “Yeah, Pa, everybody’s fine here. How’s Ma?”

  He gazed out the window at his front lawn and decided the new landscaper was finally getting it right. “So, she read it too?” He listened, then shook his head. “Look, Pa, I was given certain assurances by that magazine, and now I’m gonna sue their ass.”

  After listening again with a frown: “Yeah, well, Pa, you’re behind the time. In your day, yes, stonewalling and the low profile, no doubt about it. But today’s different. They’ve been takin’ pot shots for thirty years, Pa, and I finally decided it’s time to whack back. Do a little PR work for myself. Show I’m not afraid of the light. And that’s why I’m gonna sue.”

  He glanced out the window as they passed an old black clunker parked at the curb, a guy with a beard, black T-shirt and jeans at the rear just finishing with a tire change. Obviously not a neighbor, probably a refugee from the wrong side of the city limits at Alter Road, just a half-dozen blocks away.

  As they rolled on, the guy seemed to have no interest in the Cadillac or its contents. With the trunk lid up, he moved deliberately, picking up and stowing the old tire, with the jack and tire iron to follow.

  Back at the Monelli home a gray BMW sedan was in the driveway now, Catherine waiting behind the wheel as the front door of the large house opened, and Megan in a yellow top and white shorts bounded out. She was still stuffing a red bathing suit into a beach bag as she climbed into the passenger side. Her mother moved the car down the drive and turned away from the Ford.

  Chapter 32

  The large pool at the Bayside Yacht Club was a popular place on this already hot and humid morning, the scene dominated by teens, the boys showing off, the girls flirting. Although a little younger than most of the kids in the group and just beginning to fill out her red swim suit, Megan seemed to be holding her own.

  The club and its grounds occupied a small sprit of land jutting into a bay on Lake St. Clair. The pool and its large patio sat between the clubhouse, and the extensive docking facilities, accommodating an array of expensive pleasure craft. Tennis courts lined one side of the drive from the clubhouse to the gatehouse guarding entry to the private club from Grosse Pointe’s Lake Shore Drive.

  At a spot on the shoreline maybe a hundred yards from the club’s entrance, John sat on the down slope of a grassy berm at the lake’s edge, tending a fishing rod. Placing it in a holder stuck in the grass next to him, he trained a pair of high-powered binoculars on the pool and patio adjacent to the clubhouse. With a mostly unobstructed view, he scanned slowly across the kids playing in and around the pool, stopped when he centered on Megan in her red suit and then followed wherever she moved.

  From the high board, slim, good-looking, 16-year-old Danny Welland laid out in a well-executed half gainer. Climbing out of the pool he was treated to fetching smiles from two precocious 15-year-olds in bikinis walking past. He followed the girls to a group of a dozen kids hanging out together, spread out on deck loungers and towels. Megan was one of them.

  Danny grabbed a towel and waved it. “Listen up, space cadets. Time to blow this pop stand. My breeders are cruisin’ the Greek Isles, and we can have ourselves a nice little party.”

  “All right! Party at Danny’s!” A boy snapped a towel at Danny’s dripping rear end. Others whooped and hollered as everyone except Megan began to collect belongings.

  One of the bikini girls called back on the way out, “Hey, Meg, you coming?”

  “Yeah, I gotta go do something first.”

  “Well, com’on, space girl. Go do!”

  From his spot on the shore, his binoculars followed Megan’s red swimsuit as she moved away from the pool. She was walking quickly now toward the docks closest to him, and he watched carefully as she began to run past a number of large cruisers. When she reached the access for one of the largest, she turned in, and he lost her for a time. Then there she was again, stepping onto the back deck where her mother and three other women were playing cards.

  Megan on board: “Mom, Danny Welland is having a party at his house, and I’ve been invited.” Trying to anticipate her mother’s response, she sounded as if the invitation held no urgent interest.

  Catherine Monelli discarded. “That’s nice, dear.”

  “So can I go?”

  Her mother looked up. “When, now?”

  “Of course, why do you think I’m asking?”

  “Well, I didn’t understand.” Catherine raised an eyebrow at her partner across the card table. “Are his parents home?”

  “Ah, I think so,” said Megan and immediately knew she’d blown it.

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea,” said Catherine, shaking her head. “The answer is no.”

  Megan whined, “Mom!”

  Watching this back-deck scene from a distance, he saw the girl gesticulating with both hands and feet, obviously not giving up without a fight. Just as obviously, her mother was saying absolutely not. Finally, defeated, Megan stomped off the boat and walked dejectedly back toward the pool area. He followed the red suit until she moved behind a line of people near the clubhouse.

  Giving up on the binoculars, he faked fishing for a while, reeling in and casting a few times, then leaned back against the grassy bank and closed his eyes for a while, letting the sun heat up his face. After some time he sensed he’d been dozing and popped his eyes open. Something told him to gaze back at the yacht club guardhouse near Lake Shore Drive. And there was Megan, walking quickly in her yellow top and white shorts, carrying her beach bag and glancing back furtively at the clubhouse and the docks. Grabbing his binoculars, he watched as she passed t
he guardhouse, crossed Lake Shore’s divided lanes and headed up the side street on which he had parked the Ford. He quickly reeled in, collected his gear and moved across the road to his car, still watching Megan walk up the street.

  Chapter 33

  In Danny Welland’s backyard the gaggle of teens from the club had reassembled. A few were drinking pop; most had beer or mixed drinks. Whitney Houston’s “Saving All My Love For You” blared from an outdoor sound system, and several of the youngsters had paired off and were either dancing cheek-to-cheek or were curled up on lounges, necking.

  The Welland’s spacious backyard was quite secluded, but with the house on a corner lot, there was a spot up the street a bit that offered, between two large flowering bushes, a narrow view of the patio. On that spot the old Ford was parked.

  Inside, slumped low in the front seat, he stared through the binoculars. One of the shorter boys danced very seriously with Megan, his hands planted firmly on the white shorts covering her 12-year-old buttocks.

  Watching, he felt a strange kind of elation. But that was quickly followed by something disturbing. Why could he almost feel those hands on his own ass? The sensation was suddenly so upsetting that he lowered the binoculars and squirmed on the seat.