We had another problem: crowds were already gathering behind the yellow tape at each end of the block, and they were hot. During the foot-pursuit, the guy had occasionally turned to fire at Randy and Dave as he ran. They fired back, which wasn’t such a good idea. There were a lot of people on the street, particularly kids.
Fortunately, Randy and Dave didn’t hit anybody. But you had the sight of two white cops, blazing away with their guns as they ran after a black guy in a crowded black neighborhood. Not the kind of thing to help police-community relations.
As we stood down the street from the house, separated from the crowd by the yellow police tape, first one bottle, then another came at us. One young woman, holding a small child in her arms, called out to me, “You could have killed my baby, you know that?”
I glanced over at her. She couldn’t have been more than seventeen. Her black sundress barely hung on to her scrawny frame, but her face was full of fury. I didn’t know what to say to her, and she shrugged, like she didn’t expect me to say anything.
“You police just don’t care at all, do you?” she asked.
I figured the television reporters would be pulling up in about five minutes. Maybe a little longer—after all, they had to spray their hair before they came out.
An hour later nothing had changed, except that we were all on live TV. One section of the yellow tape had been designated for the media, and we could see the TV reporters giving their breathless updates every few minutes. They must have thought they had hit the lottery: a botched hit on a mob boss had led to a tense hostage situation with racial overtones. This was why ratings were invented.
SWAT was on the scene and in control now, and a hostage negotiator had arrived. He had a portable cell phone, and was calling the phone at the house every few minutes. Each time, the guy would pick up the phone and say “Hello,” like he lived there, like he had no idea who might be calling.
When the negotiator would identify himself, the guy would immediately say “Fuck you,” and hang up. But every time the phone rang, he’d pick it up again. Maybe he was expecting a call from Publisher’s Clearing House saying he had just won $10 million.
I’d never seen this hostage negotiator before. He was in his early fifties, black, a little overweight, neatly trimmed mustache, clear eyes. You looked at him and could tell there was no way he could ever be bullshitted. He was wearing plaid shorts, sandals, black socks that stopped just below the knee, and a light blue Caesars Atlantic City T-shirt with a fresh mustard drip right in the front. I had no doubt he had been cooking hot dogs on the backyard grill behind his row house when he got the call. One moment he’s grabbing the pickle relish from the refrigerator, the next he’s trying to keep a fifteen-year-old girl from getting killed.
We still hadn’t found any of the guys who had shot the Toyota’s driver. Not that I expected we would—they were probably all inside their houses, watching us on TV.
“Hey, Eddie.”
I looked up, it was Nick.
“I heard about the drama you got goin',” he said brightly. “Which is the house?”
“It’s about halfway down the block,” I said, pointing. “Dark brown brick, black metal railing on the steps, gunman in the window. The usual.”
“Yeah, I see it,” said Nick. He seemed very cheerful, almost chirpy. This wasn’t Nick, even on a good day.
“You on something?” I asked.
“You mean like drugs?” He laughed. “Look at my eyes, do these look like drug eyes to you?”
No, they didn’t, they looked normal. There was no alcohol on his breath, either. Maybe Nick wasn’t drunk or high, but then it was something else.
“How long has everybody been out here?” he asked, glancing around.
“Over an hour.”
“Oh, man, you should have called me sooner. I’ll get ‘em.”
And with that, he started walking down the middle of the street toward the house.
“Nick!” I yelled. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Don’t worry, Eddie,” he said over his shoulder. “Be back in a minute.”
Kirk appeared at my side.
“What’s going on?” he demanded.
I couldn’t give him an answer. I yelled to Nick twice more, but each time, he turned and waved and gave me a big smile.
Finally, I ducked under the tape and ran after him. We were a few doors down from the house when I reached him and grabbed his arm.
“Nick,” I said. “Where you going?”
“It’s no big deal,” he said, almost surprised that anyone would think it was. “Somebody’s got to go get this guy, right? I don’t mind doing it.”
We were still in the middle of the street, maybe forty feet to one side of the house. Close enough to see the upstairs window, close enough for the gunman to see us. His face appeared for a moment, then vanished.
Nick turned and walked the rest of the way to the house, leaving me there. The gunman was back again, this time holding the girl half in front of him as he pointed his gun out the window, first at me, then at Nick.
“Get back or I’ll shoot,” he yelled.
It was Nick he was more worried about. Nick was now in front of the house, casually walking toward the porch like he was just going to visit a friend. He didn’t even have his gun out.
The guy fired a shot at him, and missed, then fired again. Nick kept walking, like nothing was happening, like he was Superman or something, and the bullets were bouncing right off him. Then he was on the porch, out of sight of the shooter, and he simply opened the door and walked in. I glanced up at the window. The gunman had a panicked look, then he was gone.
This was insane. What did Nick think he was going to do? And what was I going to do, stand there with my thumb up my ass while my cousin got blown away?
I ran toward the house, listening for gunfire, and then I was on the porch, and through the open door and into the living room. A music video was blasting from the TV.
There was a loud thrashing and thumping upstairs, and I ran toward the staircase and smashed my shin against a heavy coffee table. I took the stairs two at a time, and as I came up the staircase I could see, in the front bedroom, the guy lying facedown on the carpet and Nick straddling him, cuffing his hands behind his back.
Nick looked up and smiled at me when I came into the room, it was like he had been expecting me. The girl was cowering in a corner, hugging herself, shaking, crying with open eyes. She was wearing a blouse and skirt, she looked like she had just come home from school.
Nick stood, then grabbed the handcuff chain and pulled the guy to his feet. I’d never seen a prisoner so shamefaced. He wouldn’t look at Nick, he wouldn’t look at me. Thirty seconds ago he had a hostage, he was in control—suddenly he’s captured by a cop who doesn’t even bother to take his gun out of its holster.
“Told you I didn’t mind doing it,” said Nick, with that bright, eerie smile. He picked up the guy’s pistol from the floor and started taking him out of the bedroom.
I walked over to the girl. “He hurt you?” I asked.
She shook her head no, and I helped her over to the bed. “Can you just sit here for a second?” I said. “I’ll get someone up here to take care of you.”
I stuck my head out the window and gave Kirk the thumbs-up. Cops started streaming under the yellow tape and running toward the house.
Nick, meanwhile, was taking the guy out the front door. He was so casual about it, he looked like he was just going out for a stroll. Think I’ll get a beer, oh, by the way, here’s that barricaded man you wanted. And here’s his gun.
A crowd of SWAT cops converged on the guy, and hustled him into the back of a police wagon that had pulled up in front of the house. I spotted Donna, and told her to go upstairs and try to comfort the girl.
Some of the SWAT guys were giving Nick dirty looks. Saving that girl was their job, not his. Who the hell did he think he was? I heard one of them mutter something about disciplinary action.
But Buster, Randy, and Dave had come up to the house, too, and they gave Nick high-fives. Nick was smiling, enjoying it.
Like nothing, nothing at all, was wrong.
Later, just about everyone who had played a part in the day’s events made an appearance at the 20th District. It was like the cast of a play coming out for a curtain call.
I had to go upstairs and get interviewed by the detectives, and so did Nick, and Randy and Dave. Bravelli and Goop were brought in to give their statements, and the two guys from the Toyota were being interrogated as well—I was right, the driver’s gunshot wound had been minor. The doctors took the bullet out and released him into police custody, like what he had come in for wasn’t anything more serious than something stuck between his teeth.
Even one of the punks who had chased down the driver was there. It was the blond guy with the eyes on the backs of his legs. His mother had seen the story on TV, simply assumed her son was involved, wormed it out of him, and drove him to the district. He admitted he was part of the chase for a while, but claimed he wasn’t there in the alley when the shot was fired and didn’t know who was. Even his mother couldn’t make him rat out his friends.
Detectives asked me, do you recognize the guy, and I said, Gee, I think so.
I didn’t get out of there until about ten. As I was leaving, I saw something so strange, for a second I didn’t know what I was looking at. Just inside the front entrance, Ronald the crackhead was arguing with Goop.
I knew that Goop had just been released. Detectives had wanted to charge him with reckless endangerment, but the DA’s office said to let him go. He had a license to carry the gun, the prosecutors pointed out, and had fired it only after Bravelli was fired upon. It would be hard to get a conviction, they said. Which of course was bullshit. They were just cowards, they didn’t want to take the chance of losing a case.
Goop was a member of today’s ensemble, but what about Ronald, what was he doing here? He wouldn’t let Goop out the door. Every time Goop tried to slide past him, Ronald moved to block his way. Goop was twice the guy’s size, he could have snapped him in two. But perhaps bearing in mind that he was in a police station, and that he had just narrowly avoided being charged, he was actually behaving politely.
When I walked over, Ronald glared at me.
“You cops are all the same,” he said. “You all just have to lie, don’t you?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Like you don’t know.”
Goop was avoiding my eyes, trying to get out the door.
“Hold up, Goop,” I said. “Ronald, you want to tell me what’s going on?”
“City came by today, said they were boardin’ up my house, said I had to get out.”
“I’ll take care of it, Ronald, but … why are you talking to this guy? Don’t go anywhere, Goop.” He was still trying to get past Ronald.
“I’m just tryin’ to get someone to let me stay in my own house,” said Ronald. “This detective here won’t even speak to me.”
“What detective?”
“Him, right here.” He pointed to Goop.
I laughed. “He’s not a detective.”
“Yes, he is.”
“What makes you think he’s a detective?”
Ronald was puzzled. “What do you mean? He was one of the ones that made me and Gail leave the house that night.”
I looked at Goop, he looked back at me. I could see him consider for a moment whether to make a break for the door, but I held his eyes, it was like holding a gun on him. He wasn’t going to move.
TWELVE
Bravelli again. Everywhere I turned, there he was. Goop in the crackhouse meant that Bravelli didn’t just know about Steve’s murder, he was part of it.
In a way, I was relieved. For me, the idea that cops had cleared out the house for Steve’s killer had knocked the solar system out of kilter. Planets had been spinning around all over the place, out of control. Now things were back in order: cops get killed by the bad guys, not the good guys. Maybe not a pleasant thought, after all, but that’s the way it was.
Except that in this case one of the bad guys was Mickey Bravelli. And all I wanted to do was go up to him, put a gun to his head, and just pull the trigger.
I turned Goop over to Homicide, and got Ronald to tell the detectives what he told me. It now seemed clear the black Mafia and the Italian mob had teamed up to murder Steve. They probably had a falling out after the killing, and Ru-Wan ended up in the trunk. Detectives still couldn’t say why Steve was killed in the first place, but the assumption was that he had wandered into some very deep shit.
Goop, naturally, was no help at all. He was more than willing to talk all night about the shoot-out on Locust, and even took undue credit for the Toyota’s abrupt crash. But when asked why he was at the crackhouse, he played dumb. That wasn’t me, he said. That must have been someone else.
Of course, we couldn’t charge him with anything. All he had done, as far as the law was concerned, was tell people to leave a house. Unless we could connect him with the crime, there was no way we could prove conspiracy. It was very frustrating to watch him walk out the door, to watch that fuck-you smile he threw at me over his shoulder.
But Goop’s life was going to change. In the same way that we had harassed—or at least had tried to harass—the black Mafia, I knew we were going to go after the Italian mob.
I wanted to tell Michelle, tell her that the charming guy she was going out with maybe wasn’t so charming after all. But I couldn’t reach her that night—I paged her four times, she didn’t call me back.
I figured that she was probably out with Bravelli, and didn’t have a chance. But why didn’t she call me when she got back to her apartment? You get four pages, you have to know it’s important. Maybe she never went back to her apartment, or maybe Bravelli came to hers. I didn’t want to think about that. I preferred to assume that Michelle simply had her pager turned off.
She finally called me, about noon the next day, at my house. She said she was at a pay phone under the tracks of the Market Street El, and had only a few minutes left on her lunch break.
“Didn’t you get my pages?” I asked.
“I’m really sorry about that, Eddie, I should have called you back.”
I didn’t say anything, I was waiting to see whether she would fill the silence with an explanation. She didn’t, she just asked why I had paged her. I told her I wanted to talk face-to-face, could we meet somewhere tonight?
She said no, she was having drinks after work with some friends, and then going out to dinner with Bravelli.
“I think this is a little more important than drinks and dinner,” I said. “Cancel out.”
“I’m not going to do that,” she said flatly. “Just tell me over the phone.”
So I did, I told her all about Ronald and Goop. When I had finished, Michelle was silent for a while, all I could hear was the background noise around her, a car horn, people talking.
“I’m going to have to think about this for a while,” she said at last.
“Maybe you should get out.”
“Why should I get out? Isn’t this all the more reason to keep going?”
“But if he had something to do with Steve …”
“Then I should stay in and find out what it was.”
“Unless you get so upset that you can’t think clearly.”
“I can think clearly, don’t worry about that. I told you, I just have to let this sink in. I have to get back to work, OK?”
“Michelle, wait. I talked to your father last night.”
Silence. Then: “What … why?”
I told her how I had been trying to reach him, and that when he finally called me back last night, at the district, I was able to tell him about Goop.
“He was very grateful,” I said. “He remembered me from the funeral. You know, he asked me whether I had heard from you.”
“What did he say?”
“
Just that. Had I heard from you. I said no. What’s going on, aren’t you talking to him?”
“Oh, both my parents have been calling my apartment up in the Northeast, leaving messages. I just haven’t had a chance to get back to them.”
“Is that a good idea? Aren’t they going to worry about you?”
“They’ll live. You didn’t say anything to my father about me, did you?”
“No.”
“Good. You may not agree with how I’m handling this, Eddie, but I know you’re not going to betray me.”
And what was I going to say to that?
That night, as I was cruising in my patrol car past the Penn campus, a familiar voice came over Police Radio: “Well, do you want to?”
That sounded like Buster, but who was he talking to? Another voice responded, “Do you?” That sounded like Donna.
“If you do. Gimme a cigarette.”
Well, it was definitely Donna and Buster. But they were riding together—what were they doing talking to each other over Police Radio?
“So, you do want to?” Buster asked.
“I guess … yeah, if you do,” said Donna.
“OK, let’s do it.”
“What if we get caught?”
“We’re not going to get caught, OK?”
The dispatcher’s voice broke in: “All units, check for a hung carrier.”
Those two knuckleheads were just riding along in their car, talking, they had no idea they were going over the radio. It wasn’t hard to figure out what had happened. A patrol car’s radio has a handheld microphone about the size of a hockey puck, with a button you push when you want to transmit. A lot of guys are in the habit of keeping their mike next to them between the seats, but if it gets wedged in, the button can accidentally get pushed down. And you’ll be transmitting without even knowing it.
“You ever done it before in a police car?” Buster was asking.
I hoped he wasn’t talking about what it sounded like he was talking about.
Sons of the City Page 14
