Sons of the City

by Scott Flander

  No response. I banged again, trying to sound impatient, like maybe I was Angela or somebody. Finally I could hear Michelle pushing the horizontal handle on the other side of the door, and it cracked open. There was only darkness, then Michelle peered out in surprise.

  “What are you doing here?” she whispered.

  I reached my hand up and pulled the door open and stepped inside. When the door clicked shut behind me it was almost pitch-dark, with the only light coming from the lamp Michelle had turned on in the front of the shop.

  “You have to leave,” she said, raising her voice a little. My eyes were slowly adjusting to the gloom, I couldn’t see much more than her backlit profile.

  “Are you really getting married to Bravelli?” I asked.

  “Shhhh. Angela’s upstairs, nobody’s supposed to be down here now.”

  “I want to know. Are you getting married?”

  “I can’t talk about it now,” she whispered back. “I have to get back upstairs.”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  Her head twisted a little in surprise. “You have to leave, now.”

  “Your father knows you’re here.”

  “Did you tell him?”

  “You want to talk down here?”

  She looked around, then shook her head. “OK, we’ll go up to my apartment. But you can’t stay for more than a minute.”

  “Fine.”

  I followed her upstairs. As soon as we were inside her apartment, she closed the door and turned to me.

  “How does my father know I’m here?”

  “He got it out of Theresa. He doesn’t know exactly where you are, just that you’re on an undercover investigation somewhere in Westmount. He got in touch with me, he wanted me to help find you.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him I’d pass along the message.”

  “He must have asked you what I’m doing here.”

  “Yeah, he did.”

  “And?”

  “I told him you were trying to find out about Steve. I didn’t go into any detail, but I basically told him what you’re doing.”

  “Why did you do that, Eddie? We talked about that, you said you wouldn’t.” She seemed almost too upset to be angry.

  “He doesn’t know where you are.”

  “It doesn’t matter. He’s going to do everything he can to get me out of Westmount.”

  “Are you going to call him?”

  “No, I’m not going to call him. What I’m doing here isn’t any of his business. You can tell him that when you talk to him again. Which I’m sure you’re going to do.”

  The phone on the coffee table rang, Michelle grabbed the receiver. “Hello?” She listened, then said “OK,” and hung up.

  “That was Mickey,” she said. “He’s coming by to pick me up. You’re going to have to leave, right now.”

  “You still haven’t told me, Michelle. What about this marriage thing?”

  “It’s none of your concern. Everything’s under control.”

  “What does that mean?”

  She pulled open the door. “It means it’s time for you to leave, Eddie.”

  “Michelle,” I said. She was staring out into the hallway, where I was supposed to be headed.

  “Michelle,” I said again. I wanted to know there was still a connection between us, I wanted to see it in her eyes. But she wouldn’t look at me.

  There was a loud, brief ringing. The doorbell. Michelle’s face filled with panic.

  “It’s Mickey!” she whispered, quickly closing the door. “He must have been over at the clubhouse.”

  “Go ahead down,” I said. “I’ll lock up behind you.”

  “No, no, he’s coming up here.”

  “You have to buzz him in …”

  “The lock’s broken. He always comes up.”

  “Always?”

  She gave me a fierce look. We could hear the downstairs door opening, and then slamming shut.

  Michelle started dragging me away from the door. “You’re going to have to hide.”

  “I’m not hiding from that scumbag.”

  “What, I’m supposed to get killed?”

  We could hear Bravelli coming up the stairs, fast.

  “All right,” I whispered. “Where?”

  She opened up a closet filled with dresses and other clothes, and started pushing me in. It was like I was in a sitcom or an old joke—husband comes home, boyfriend hides in the closet …

  Except I wasn’t the boyfriend and Bravelli wasn’t the husband. At least not yet.

  I squeezed in between the dresses and she closed the door and I was suddenly enveloped in darkness. There was only a thin line of light coming from under the door. I heard a quick knock and Bravelli coming in the apartment. I found myself listening for a kiss, but I couldn’t tell, they started talking right away.

  “It’ll just take me a second to get ready,” Michelle said, and then I heard her footsteps pass by the closet. She’s getting ready, with me in here?

  I could hear Bravelli padding around the living room. If this were really a sitcom, right about now I’d be trying to suppress a sneeze. But I didn’t have to sneeze, or cough, I could stay where I was, silent, for as long as I needed to. I wondered how familiar he was with this place. Had he spent the night here?

  Michelle’s footsteps came past the closet. “I’m ready,” she said.

  “I wrote you a poem,” Bravelli said.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Here, go ahead and read it.”

  There was silence, and then Michelle said, “Oh, that’s sweet, Mickey, thanks.”

  “Hey, Leez, why don’t we just stay in tonight?”

  Leez? Why couldn’t he just call her Lisa?

  “Stay in?” Michelle asked.

  “Yeah, you know. We can order a pizza, rent a video.”

  “I don’t want to stay here, Mickey, let’s go out.”

  “Aren’t you the one who’s always sayin’ we don’t have to go out all the time, you’re always accusing me of havin’ to put on a show?”

  “Usually, yes.”

  “And you know what? I kind of like the idea of just takin’ it easy sometimes. Most girls don’t want to do that.” “Any other night but tonight, Mickey.” “Oh, so now you’re gonna be like all the other girls?” “Is that what you really think?”

  “No, maybe not. But I don’t want to go out. And I don’t want to argue about it no more.”

  I put my hands on the closet door, ready to push it open, ready to come out of the closet and grab that motherfucker by the throat and squeeze until he had no more breath and no more life. But I didn’t push, I just stood there in the closet with all those fucking dresses and let my chance go by.

  “Fine,” Michelle was telling Bravelli. “You can stay here and read the latest issue of Today’s Manicurist, and I’ll go see the movie by myself, and then I’ll have a nice dinner and then maybe I’ll go out for a drink.”

  “Oh, that’s very funny, Leez.”

  “You coming?” Michelle’s voice was echoing in the hall—she was already out there, waiting for him.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said reluctantly, and then the door closed, and I was alone, so angry with myself I was almost shaking. I pushed open the closet door and stepped out. I couldn’t leave the apartment just yet, I’d have to wait a few minutes. I walked around, trying to calm down. The living room windows were half open, and a warm summer breeze was blowing in, billowing the gauzy white curtains. From time to time I could hear a car passing by on Locust.

  Michelle had rented the place furnished, and there was an upholstered blue couch and brown chair, and a couple of coffee tables and lamps, and they were all plain and depressing. I pictured some old guy silently living out his days here, year after year, until one day an ambulance comes to take him to the hospital, and a week or so later there’s an ad in the paper about an apartment for rent over a beauty shop.

  Off the living room
, separated by French doors, was the darkened bedroom. The bed was neatly covered by a blue comforter, and there were three or four fluffy pillows and even a small white stuffed bear.

  Here’s where Michelle spends every night, I thought. I wonder what it would be like to sleep here. I sat on the edge of the bed, and then gently lay back. The room was dark and cool, and I closed my eyes and imagined that Michelle was lying next to me. It’d be nice to be here with her, I thought, we could just he here in each other’s arms and listen to the traffic and drift off to sleep. Just drift off, in the cool darkness …

  My pager started vibrating, and I quickly sat upright. What the hell was I doing? I looked at the phone number—it was the district, probably Sammy. I straightened the pillows a little and then walked out into the living room, to the phone on the coffee table. I punched in the number, and Sammy answered.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “Where are you?”

  “Why, what’s going on?”

  “They’ve been trying to call you on the radio. We got some trouble on the street.”

  I had left my portable police radio in the Blazer. “Just tell me,” I said.

  “You better get over to Sixty-fifth and Baltimore, they got a big crowd. Somebody hit V.K. on the head with a bottle. It was pretty bad, they had to take him to HUP.”

  On my way out, I saw the poem. A sheet of lined paper, lying on a small bookcase by the front door. The words were printed in blue ink from a cheap ball-point pen.

  ON A DESERT ISLAND WITH YOU

  If I were stuck on a desert island

  You’re the one I’d want with me

  We’d lie out on the sun-warmed sand

  And gaze out at the sky-blue sea

  When rescuers would come, and say,

  We have a ship to take you home

  I’d say no thanks, please go away,

  And then your hair I’d gladly comb

  I never made it to 65th Street. Neither did Jeff and Mutt. Just about the time I was getting back into my Blazer, they were heading down Chestnut in my car, crossing 67th, the border between Westmount and West Philadelphia. Whites lived on one side of 67th, blacks on the other. On both sides of the street were stores, with people living above. During the day, blacks and whites freely shopped on both sides of 67th, talked, joked, traded stories with each other. A stranger might have thought it was an integrated neighborhood. But at night, the blacks all went to their homes on the east side of the street, the whites all went to their homes on the west side. I never understood it, but it had been that way for as long as anyone could remember.

  At the moment Jeff and Mutt reached the dead center of the intersection, a high-powered rifle bullet ripped through the air and into the driver’s door. Jeff, behind the wheel, stepped on the gas, but a second shot went through the open window and into his neck. Blood was spurting out everywhere, and Mutt had to grab the wheel to keep the car from smashing into a light pole.

  I had just got into my truck and turned on my police radio when the call came over. Mutt was on the air yelling, “Officer down, officer down,” and it was happening again, everything going into slow motion like it did when Steve died, and I drove as fast as I could but it wasn’t fast enough, it was like trying to get somewhere in a dream and you never do.

  When I got there, Jeff was still alive. Mutt had dragged him out of the car and laid him on the ground, and he was using a towel someone had found to try to stop his neck from bleeding. Mutt was yelling at Jeff to hold on, hold on, but Jeff’s eyes were closed and I doubted he could hear.

  Buster came up and said let’s take him in a wagon, but a fire station was only a couple of blocks away, and the Rescue unit was just pulling up. We moved aside to let the paramedics do their job, and they worked quickly, strapping an oxygen mask over his face, sticking needles in his arm, putting thick pads over the torn flesh in his neck. There was blood all over Jeff’s blue uniform and under his head, just the way it had been with Steve.

  The paramedics were ready, and Mutt, Buster, and I helped them get Jeff onto the flat board, and then from that onto the stretcher. The clean white pillow started turning bright red, and as the paramedics lifted the stretcher, its legs—with wheels at the bottom—popped out and extended. They wheeled Jeff toward the back of the Rescue unit, and I ran over first to make sure the doors were open enough.

  It wasn’t until Rescue screamed away that we had a chance to look around and talk to witnesses. No one had seen a gunman on the street, so we figured the shots probably came from a roof. I got the Fire Department to send over a ladder truck to get us up on the tops of all the houses. We were only checking the west side—the black side—of 67th. That’s because we all assumed the shooter was black. Jeff and Mutt had been coming from the white neighborhood. and as soon as they hit the black neighborhood, Bang. It was an easy assumption to make.

  But as I stood there in the intersection, it occurred to me that the shots could have come just as easily from the white side of the street. I asked Mutt to show me exactly where their car was when the shots were fired. He walked to the middle of the intersection, looked around, and said, “Right here.”

  “Did Jeff turn his head after the first shot, do you remember?” I asked.

  Mutt thought, then nodded. “He did look over his shoulder, yeah.”

  “Like that’s where he thought the bullet might have come from?”

  “Exactly like that.”

  If Jeff had looked over his shoulder, then he was looking at Westmount. And if that’s where the bullet had come from, that meant the shooter had to be white. No black person was going to be hanging out on a roof on the white side of the street.

  I got sort of a weird feeling on the back of my neck. Bravelli and his crew knew I drove 20-C car—its identification was on the front, the back, the sides. They knew I drove these streets five nights a week. Wait a few hours, and there was a good chance you’d see 20-C cruising through 67th and Locust.

  It was perfect: Bravelli could have someone shoot me, and do it in a place that would make everyone think the shooter was black.

  I reached into the car and got a flashlight, and walked over to the Westmount side. A lot of neighbors were on the street now, and I asked whether anyone could let me up on their roof. An old couple, in their eighties, lived a few doors down from the corner. They said they’d take me up.

  They led me through their living room past the blaring TV, and then up a flight of stairs to the second floor. The woman, who was wearing a pink robe over her nightgown, opened the door of a tiny back bedroom and flipped on the dim ceiling light. There was a small bed with a red satin bedspread and ruffly pillows and a couple of stuffed animals, and you could tell it hadn’t been slept on in many years.

  “Your daughter’s room?” I asked the woman. She smiled and nodded.

  “Margaret,” she said. “Oh, but she’s grown now.”

  I had to maneuver between the bed and an old polished-wood dresser with a sort of lace mat on top, covered with tiny pink and purple glass figurines and other doodads. The old man tried to open the window, but his thin arms just couldn’t do it. He looked back at me apologetically, and I took a step forward and easily slid the window up. It opened onto a roof—probably over the couple’s kitchen downstairs—and from there I went up a set of wooden steps to the top roof.

  I took out my gun and switched on the flashlight, and went from one roof to another until I reached the building at the corner, overlooking the intersection. And there, right where the roof swept around the corner, I spotted a 7-Eleven coffee cup on its side and the metal glint of two rifle shells. There were also a half dozen fresh cigarette butts on the roof ledge. The guy had waited around for a while. I wondered how he had managed to get on the roof with his rifle and his coffee.

  Kirk was on the radio, asking whether there was any word on Jeff’s condition.

  Mutt was at the hospital with Jeff, he got on the air.

  “He’s gonna be all
right,” said Mutt, excited to be announcing the news. “He’s gonna make it.”

  I had tensed up when Kirk asked about Jeff, and now I felt weak with relief. I looked out over the intersection. Near the light pole was my car, where Mutt had brought it to a halt. On the car’s roof, 20 C was painted in giant black letters, like on an airport runway.

  I saw that, and knew for certain the shooter had been aiming for me.

  NINETEEN

  I didn’t get home from work until two in the morning. Fortunately, I had the day off. I slept for a few hours, made myself some breakfast, then headed to the hospital. Jeff was awake when I walked into his room, and his mother and father were there. I noticed a couple of flower baskets on the win-dowsill, and I knew that by the end of the day the place would be crammed full of them, along with balloons, cards, and the occasional skin-magazine-hidden-in-the-newspaper gift.

  I shook hands with Jeff’s father. He was very striking, with silver-gray hair and intelligent eyes that gazed out over half glasses. I remembered Jeff once saying that his father was a college professor, Villanova or someplace, he taught history or science, something like that. The father said he had heard a lot about me, and I assured him that anything good probably wasn’t true.

  Jeff’s mother had sort of a college administrator air about her, though she seemed a little brusque, like she would have no problem firing somebody, I’m sorry but we’ve already hired your replacement, by the way your stuff’s in boxes out in the hall, have a nice day. But with her son lying there in the hospital bed she seemed so vulnerable. They both did.

  Jeff’s neck was all bandaged up. When I asked him how he was doing, he smiled and gave a thumb’s up sign. His father told me that the bullet had narrowly missed his larynx. Although the doctors didn’t expect any permanent damage, because of the swelling Jeff wouldn’t be able to talk for a while. I asked the mother and father whether I could speak to Jeff alone for a couple of minutes. They said certainly, and went for a walk to the hospital cafeteria.

  When they were safely down the hall, I looked at Jeff and just shook my head. “Can’t talk, huh? How come something like this never happens to Buster?”