“Sounds like a good idea,” said Lanier.
Michelle thought about it, then agreed. “Though I want to go upstairs for a second,” she said. “I’m going to throw some clothes in a duffel bag.”
When Michelle had gone back inside, I looked around. Nick was gone. Donna and Buster were standing next to their patrol car, and I asked whether they had seen him.
“I think he’s at district headquarters with his prisoner,” said Donna.
Good, I thought, that means he’ll be tied up half the night. By the time he goes back to Lucky’s to get his car, Bravelli will probably be gone. I didn’t want Nick killing anybody tonight, even that asshole.
I walked back over to Lanier.
“I have to tell you, Captain,” I said, “All this time I really thought you were the enemy.”
“Yeah, I know you did, Eddie. But I’m not. I’m just a plain old cop.”
TWENTY-TWO
In twenty minutes Michelle and I were on the Pennsylvania Turnpike’s Northeast Extension, heading up to the Poconos, watching the open fields and farms give way to mountains.
Michelle was quiet for much of the ride. I wanted to tell her about her father, about the videotape, about how he had tried to kill me in the park. But she was deep in thought, like she was sorting things out, so we drove in silence.
An hour later, just past the Allentown exit, she finally spoke.
“You were right. Mickey was the one who had Steve killed.”
I glanced at her. “How do you know that?” I didn’t say anything about her calling him Mickey, I figured this wasn’t the time.
“He told me last night,” said Michelle. “I asked him and he told me.”
I waited for her to go on.
“Steve was innocent,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean he was innocent. He didn’t have anything to do with the black Mafia, or the Italian Mafia, or anybody else.”
“And Bravelli told you this?”
Michelle was silent for a while, looking out the window. Then she turned to me.
“When Mickey asked me to marry him, I put him off at first. But then I said yes—because I figured out I could use it to finally find out about Steve.”
She said Bravelli called her at the beauty shop yesterday afternoon and told her he wanted to take her to the casinos in Atlantic City.
“I knew you were going,” I said. “I tried to find you down there last night.”
“Really? Well, it’s good that you didn’t, because you might have screwed things up. With that article coming out, I had only one shot at making this work.”
Michelle said they had dinner at an expensive restaurant, then spent a few hours going from casino to casino. Sometime after midnight, when they were ready to head back to Philly, Michelle suggested they go to an all-night diner to get some coffee before getting on the road. She made sure they sat in a quiet booth in the back, out of earshot of the other customers.
As they drank their coffee, Michelle told Bravelli she had been following the news stories about the investigation into the killing of the Commissioner’s son. Police were saying they believed Bravelli’s criminal organization was somehow involved. Bravelli told her it wasn’t true, the cops were just trying to make him look bad.
“So I said to him, ‘I know what you do, Mickey, and that’s OK, I know you’re not a saint. I love you, and I want to marry you. But I need to know why you do these kinds of things.’
“Mickey looked at me for a while, I think he was trying to decide what to say. So I said, ‘I trust you, and I assume that if you did this, you had to have a pretty good reason. I just want to be able to understand what it was.'”
Still, Bravelli had remained silent.
“I won’t ever ask you about this kind of thing again,” she told him, “I promise that. I just have to know that you had a good reason.”
“Let me tell you, Leez,” he said, “if I ended up doin’ something like that, I would have a good reason, don’t worry.”
“I’m sure you would, Mickey, I’m sure of it. And if I had to guess, I’d say it was because you were trying to protect yourself.”
“That’s always why you do things you might not want to do, remember that. To protect yourself and your family.”
“It was so you wouldn’t have to go to jail for something?”
Bravelli had shaken his head. “Not me, Leez. Frankie.”
“That’s when I knew it was true, Eddie. He did have Steve killed after all. I started to feel sick, I was thinking, oh, my God, I can’t believe this, how could I even be with this monster?”
“I would have killed the fuckin’ scumbag right there,” I said.
“I had to hide how I felt so I could find out more. So I said to him, ‘See, this is what I’m talking about, this is why I trust you. I know how close you are to Frankie.”
“I’ll tell you,” Bravelli had said, “when we were runnin’ the streets, Frankie saved my life more than once.”
“So, help me understand,” Michelle went on. “You were trying to keep Frankie from going to jail? What did that have to do with the Police Commissioner’s son getting killed?”
“It was just a little warning to the Commissioner.”
“The Commissioner? What do you mean, the Commissioner?”
Bravelli didn’t answer, he just laughed.
“What’s so funny?” Michelle asked.
“That I’m even talkin’ about this with you.”
“You don’t feel you can tell me?”
“No, that’s just it. I do feel I can tell you. I feel I can tell you anything.”
Michelle looked at me. “Eddie, here I am thinking, this son of a bitch killed my brother. And now this has something to do with my father, I don’t know what it is, I don’t think I want to know. But I have to keep going. I said, “Why would you want to warn the Commissioner?”
“You really want to know this, don’t you?” Bravelli asked.
“Yes, Mickey, I do.”
“OK. I told you the DA’s goin’ after Frankie, right?” “Yeah, you did tell me.”
“It’s simple. I wanted the Commissioner to get him to back off.”
The waitress came by to refill their coffee, and when she left, Bravelli began to open up more. He told Michelle he and the Commissioner had a “partnership,” but the Commissioner was refusing to uphold his end.
“Do you see what he was saying, Eddie? He was saying my father was a dirty cop. My stomach was just twisting, I really thought I was going to get sick right there.”
“Did Bravelli notice?”
“I don’t think so, he was going on about it, he was telling me how angry he was that my father couldn’t get the DA to kill the investigation.”
“And he expected your father to be able to do something like that?”
“Yeah, he said my father kept insisting that it was because there was a new DA, he couldn’t get the new DA to back off mob cases like the old one did. That’s what he said, ‘like the old one did.'”
“No wonder Bravelli didn’t believe your father,” I said.
“Yeah. He said he kept telling him, ‘Don’t give me that bullshit, Mr. Police Commissioner. You did it in the past, you can fuckin’ do it now.’
“And he had some kind of leverage over my father, too. He didn’t say what it was. But he said he’d already tried to use it, and it didn’t work, my father still wasn’t getting the DA to back off. So he had to take stronger measures. That’s what he called it. ‘Stronger measures.'”
“That motherfucker,” I said. “He meant killing Steve.”
“Yeah, that’s exactly what he meant, killing my brother. Just murdering him in cold blood. He said he knew my father would get the message.”
“I don’t know how you were able to listen to all this.”
“I don’t either. And I still had to ask him about Steve. I said, ‘What about the Commissioner’s son? Did you have a partnership wit
h him, too?’
“You know what he said, Eddie? He said no, he didn’t even know the son. It was just a way of threatening the Commissioner.”
“So Steve didn’t know anything about this.”
“No. My father being dirty is what got Steve killed. And then I found out something else. I don’t even know if I want to tell you about it.”
“That’s OK.”
“No, I’m going to tell you. Mickey said he got my father to believe the black Mafia did it—that’s why he put that black guy in the trunk.”
“So your father would crack down on the black Mafia.”
“Exactly. And then later, Mickey sent someone to give my father the message that he did it after all. And you know what the message was? ‘We know you have a daughter on the police force, too. We killed one of your kids, and if you don’t stop the DA, we’re gonna kill the other.’ That was the message.”
“Jesus.”
Michelle looked at me. “I swear to God, Eddie, if I would have had my gun with me I would have shot him right between the eyes. I wanted to kill him right where he sat.”
Michelle took a deep breath, and let it out. “I couldn’t ask him any more questions after that. I just wanted to go home.”
“I don’t blame you.”
“But there’s a lot more I wanted to find out that I never did. Like, what was this leverage he had over my father?”
“That,” I said, “was a videotape.”
I told her about it, how it showed her father taking payoffs from Canaletto. She just kept her eyes on the floor of the truck, she didn’t say anything.
I knew I also had to tell her the worst part—what had happened in the woods. She had her hand to her mouth as I described how her father had tried to kill me.
“That was my fault,” she said, her voice trembling, when I had finished. “He knew I was going to tell you everything.”
Michelle said that after Bravelli drove her home, she took a cab up to her father’s house in the Northeast.
No wonder the Commissioner had canceled the detail in front of Michelle’s apartment—-she was with him.
When Michelle got to the house, her father was still awake, and she confronted him with what Bravelli had said.
“He denied everything. He said Mickey Bravelli was lying, there wasn’t any deal. How could you expect a mobster to tell the truth?”
“Did you believe him?” I asked.
Michelle shook her head. “No. And he knew I knew. I could see it in the way he looked at me. My father and I have always had a very close relationship. We even joke about how each of us always knows when the other one’s not telling the truth—it’s a thing between us.”
“What’d you do?”
“I told him he had to turn himself in. I said for Steve’s sake, and for his sake. And you know what? He kept denying it.
“I’ll tell you, Eddie, I completely lost it. I just got so angry, I started shouting at him. I said, ‘Because of what you did, your son got killed. Your son, the good cop. How can you live with that?’
“He started yelling back, and that got me even more angry, and then we were just shouting back and forth, and I said, ‘If you won’t get the truth out, I will.’
“My father asked me what I meant. I said, ‘I’m going to find a way to prove this. I’ll tell Eddie, he’ll help me. I’m not going to let you just live your life like this never happened.’ ”
They argued with each other for a long time, neither one giving in.
“I spent the night in my old room,” Michelle said. “And when I got up in the morning, he was gone. I never thought he’d try to kill you, Eddie. I really didn’t.”
“There’s no way you could have known.”
“If anything, I would have expected him to go after Mickey, not you.”
“I don’t think so. It sounds like by the time he learned that Bravelli had your brother killed, he had already found out you were working undercover in Westmount. He couldn’t go after Bravelli until he got you out of there first. But he could still go after me.”
“I’m so sorry, Eddie.”
We didn’t speak much for the rest of the trip. It was about 1 a.m. when we took the Timbercreek exit off 1-81 and passed through the town of Pemberton toward Lake Asayunk. I didn’t tell Michelle that I had been there only once before, to go hunting, and I wasn’t exactly sure which road to take. But I think she figured it out after I kept stopping and making U-turns. By some miracle I found the gravel road with the sign for the lake. There were about a dozen cabins, scattered along the lakefront, and Vic’s was on the far end, apart from the rest.
They called them cabins, but they were nicer than that. Usually in the Poconos, a cabin means bare wood floors with big cracks in them, and old mattresses on bunkbeds. It’s BYOSB—bring your own sleeping bag. Vic’s cabin was more of a house—it was sealed up tight, and had real floors, a modern kitchen. It was small—just one bedroom—but it had a deck that extended out over the lake.
I had no idea where the key was.
“Vic told me once,” I said, as I went to look under the mat, and found that there wasn’t any mat. “But I think I was drunk at the time.”
It was very dark, and I didn’t have a flashlight in the Blazer. I got back in the truck and maneuvered it so that the headlights were pointing at the front door, but it didn’t help us to find the keys.
“I wish I could remember,” I said.
“Maybe we should hypnotize you,” Michelle said with a smile. She was relaxing now, the tension was leaving her face.
We looked for the keys in the woodpile, on the doorsill, under the steps, everywhere. I was just about ready to propose breaking a window, when Michelle came through the door—from the inside.
“How’d you get in?”
“Simple—the key was under the mat.”
“What mat?”
“The mat at the front door. This is the back door.”
I thought about that for a second, and then looked at her and said, “You know what? You’re right.”
We turned on the lights and took a look at the place. Small, but cozy. It was a warm night, and we opened up all the screened windows to air the place out.
Vic had left some beer in the refrigerator, and we each grabbed a bottle and stood in the kitchen, talking quietly. There was a big window over the sink, and Michelle was looking through it. She was so beautiful then. I found myself thinking about our kiss at her old apartment. But so much had happened since then, she had seemed so cold, so unreachable.
“You know,” she said, turning to me, “I never would have married Bravelli. Did you think I would?”
“Well, I did wonder. I mean, you really shut me out.”
“I had to. I felt I was really getting inside his head, getting him to open up. I was afraid you’d get in the way.”
“Was that all it was?”
Michelle looked at me and shook her head. “No, it was more than that. You’re right. You probably won’t understand this, but the more he opened up to me, the more I felt there was an actual human being in there. And I guess I responded to that.”
“Did you fall in love with him?”
“No. But I did start letting my defenses down. I began to wonder whether maybe what he did, you know, the mob thing, maybe wasn’t so bad. You saw how I was getting drawn into it—I told you what happened with me with Jumpin’ Jiminy’s. I really got into that.”
“So what do you think was going on? Were you trying to justify Bravelli being in the mob?”
Michelle shook her head. “It didn’t have anything to do with Bravelli. It had to do with Steve. You know what I think it was? If I could understand how Mickey Bravelli could be a good person and a criminal at the same time, maybe I could understand how Steve could be the same way. And then when I found myself slipping into that life, I wondered, hey, maybe I’m that way, too.”
“Do you really think you are?”
“No, I don’t. I know I’m
not that way. Finding out about Steve and my father last night snapped me out of it. I mean, I saw Bravelli for what he was. But I’m sure that even if I never had that conversation with him, I still would have come out of it. I’m not my father. I don’t have it in me to take it that far.”
“You know what? I never thought you did.”
“You’re just saying that, right?”
“I didn’t know what was going on with you. But no, I never thought you were really that kind of person. You were always Michelle.”
“It’s nice of you to say that.”
“It’s true,” I said.
Michelle looked up at me. “Thanks for watching out for me, Eddie.”
“Sure.”
I wanted to kiss her, to put my arms around her, but I just stood there, looking stupid. It didn’t matter—she stepped forward and stood on her toes and kissed me on the lips. And then I took her in my arms, and we kissed for a long time. I was just kind of melting onto the floor. It was so good to have her back.
“You know what?” she said at last. “I’d like to go to sleep, and not wake up for about three years.”
“Go ahead and make it four,” I said. “We’ve got plenty of time.”
She laughed. “If you want the bedroom, I’ll take the couch.”
“No,” I said, “you take the bedroom. I want to stay up for a while and finish my beer.”
I got some sheets out of the closet and pulled the fold-out bed from the couch. As I was putting on the sheets, I watched Michelle through the doorway in the bedroom, making up the bed. She saw me looking, and smiled.
When I woke it was just getting light. I lay there for a while, enjoying the cool breeze coming in off the lake. There was a dove cooing right outside the window, and I heard the faint sound of a motorboat, somebody up early fishing. I drifted off, and when I woke again, there was a gentle smell of coffee. I sat up and looked around, but didn’t see Michelle. The bedroom door was open, the bed made.
I got dressed, and as I walked into the kitchen I saw, through the sliding glass door, Michelle sitting on a chair on the deck in the morning sunlight, sipping coffee. She had made it in the white plastic coffee maker on the counter, and I poured myself a cup and stepped outside. It was warm out there, and very bright.
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