by Guy Johnson
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” LaValle retorted haughtily.
“That’s the real problem. You have no standards, so you can’t understand what I’m talking about.”
“Don’t fool yourself, you ain’t nothing but a nigger with a couple of suits! Everything you own was given to you by Papa! You just jealous because I’m trying to get my share.”
“Damn, LaValle, you’re more fool than I thought!” Jack shook his head indignantly and tapped his chest. “Because I’m your brother, I’ve always wanted you to succeed. I loved you. I’ve been there for you. But you lost it with Eartha and you’re still sinking. You’re beginning to act like common scum. You beat your woman. You gamble away the handouts that you get and you blame your problems on other people. And what’s worst of all is that you’re a coward. A goddamn coward!” Jack leaned forward to give his last statement the necessary emphasis.
King stepped out of the way and looked at LaValle, waiting to see what he would do. King didn’t expect LaValle to pick up his brother’s challenge, so when he stepped out of the way of his sons, he was merely proving that LaValle was indeed a coward.
LaValle looked from his father to his brother. He saw the set in their jaws and the look in their eyes and he knew that he had somehow failed again. He didn’t want to fight Jack. He just wanted to get through with his request and take whatever scraps his father threw and leave. “I just want to work for the family,” LaValle began weakly. He looked at his father. “I’m your son too. Don’t I have a right to something? The family’s got money. All I’m asking is something to take care of my family with.”
It was a pathetic plea that had no chance of being answered. In a family that valued strength, LaValle had none. The lack of that one trait alone would have made him an outcast, but added to his other failings, it doomed him to banishment. Jack turned away. Even though he detested him, he couldn’t watch his brother abase himself.
“For yo’ information,” King said in an even tone, “I have only one son and his name is Jack Tremain. You don’t look like me and you don’t act like nobody I know. Nobody who has the name Tremain should be treated the way you treat yo’ wife and children. If yo’ wife is stupid enough to stay with you, that’s her business, but I don’t have to watch you bring any more shame on the name of Tremain. I’ve been a witness and ain’t said a thing. So, let me say it now.” King picked up the revolver then walked over and stood in front of LaValle. “You don’t have a share of anythin’! Yo’ wife and children will always have money for food and clothing, but I ain’t givin’ you a damn thing! You ain’t even welcome in my presence. If I see you on the street, I want you to go the other way. If I come into a place where you are, I want you to leave. The only time that I want to see you is at Sunday dinner. And when you come, don’t bring that woman here with bruises on her face!”
“I’m your son. You’re going to disown me like that?” LaValle protested. “I’ve got no money. I have some big debts. I—”
“Then get a job!” King said coldly. He raised the revolver and pointed it at LaValle. “If you’re still here sixty seconds from now, I’m gon’ to shoot you in one of yo’ legs. See if I don’t.”
“Sometimes I can’t believe you, Pa!” Jack said as he stepped in front of his father’s gun. “You’re not going to spill blood in here!” He turned and with a wave of his hand said, “Get out of here now, LaValle!”
LaValle began to back rapidly up the stairs toward the door. When he reached the door, King stopped him with “Oh, LaValle.” LaValle turned, hoping for a change of heart. King continued, “Don’t ever come down here again.”
King saw LaValle once during that next week, when he brought King a message from his enemies. They wanted to set up a meeting. The Fillmore District was in transition. There was a new force on the street. It was created with money gleaned from the sale of heroin. The people behind the source were Italian and well connected. They were trying to extend their organization into the Fillmore. The Tree brothers had been their agents. King stood against them not only because he didn’t like heroin, but because he saw them as encroaching on his power. So far, he had held them off pretty well. There were a few skirmishes. They shot up one of his bars. He blew up their office building in North Beach. They raided his headquarters on Sutter. He allowed them to set his building ablaze, then killed almost all of their men when they unsuspectingly returned to their cars. Next, he dynamited their warehouse. He had learned a lot about demolitions in World War I.
The local newspaper reported that the Mob bosses were fighting it out. The editor surmised in his column which families might be involved in the war. Not once did he mention a black family. That was fine with King; he had no need of notoriety. His business functioned best when it operated in the shadows. He had all his people on alert, waiting for a counterstrike. Three days after King had told LaValle not to come down to the office, Serena came down and told him that LaValle had a message for him from the people at 2325 Filbert Street; that was the address in North Beach of the DiMarcos’ headquarters, a building that King had destroyed. When King went up the stairs and saw the smiling face of LaValle, he truly considered killing him.
LaValle, on the other hand, was happy with himself. In one brilliant stroke, he had forced his father to forsake all that he had said about not wanting to be in the same place as him. His father now had to talk to him, whether he liked it or not. LaValle wanted to go into the sitting room to convey his message, but his father refused. King made him stand in the hall by the stairs, where their voices echoed through the house. The conversation progressed rapidly, because King responded in monosyllables. The DiMarcos wanted an interim truce until a meeting could be convened. King could choose the site. King could come with two escorts; that was all Marcello DiMarco would bring.
King operated under the assumption that anyone who brought news of a deal with the enemy had to be in bed with them. Why else would the enemy approach LaValle to carry a message? The question in King’s mind was, who set LaValle up to be the intermediary? LaValle didn’t know the DiMarcos. One possibility was that they could have bought his outstanding markers and approached him through his debt. No, he seemed too smug for that; LaValle had the air of a man who had a sweetheart deal. To get a sweetheart deal, you had to have something of value, or give something of value. King’s mind was rapidly sifting through the potential options. What did LaValle have that they would want? King looked at the triumphant, smiling face of LaValle and asked, “What do you get out of all this?” He was trying to determine whether LaValle was a traitor or just a dupe.
LaValle looked down at his nails, which had been recently manicured, before he spoke. “I’m performing a service.” He looked his father in the eye and continued. “I’m getting paid to perform a service.”
“You’s here representin’ our enemies? And you take money for this?” King was incredulous.
“I ain’t with the family,” LaValle explained with a slight trace of anger. “You told me to get out. I had to do for my own family.”
“Yo’ family?” King challenged. “You don’t know the meaning of family! You take money to bring me a deal that smells of double cross.” King took a bat out of the closet under the stairs and took several slow steps toward LaValle. He smacked the bat in his palm and said with a quiet malevolence, “I don’t think that I want to see you again. I don’t even want you to come to this house while I’m here.”
LaValle, his eyes wide with fear, was backing away toward the front door when Serena floated down the stairs dressed in her overcoat. It was obvious that she had been listening over the banister. “Are you ready to go, LaValle?” she asked as she tied a plastic rain scarf over her hair.
LaValle blurted out gratefully, “Yes, Mama. I’m ready to go!” King threw back his head and laughed at LaValle’s fear. He returned the bat to the closet and stood with his arms crossed, watching. LaValle was breathing a sigh of relief. His mother’s appearance may have saved
his life or, at the very least, saved him from some broken bones. He waited gratefully for her by the door.
On her way out the door with LaValle, Serena said to King in a low tone, “You can’t stop my children from coming here. You gave me this house. If my children can’t visit me here, I’ll move somewhere else.”
“It’s yo’ house, woman,” King conceded. “Just be careful who you invite; they may look like somebody you know, but it may turn out that you don’t know them at all.”
King didn’t see LaValle again until the night Jack was killed; however, he had him followed. The evening before Jack’s death, LaValle was trailed to a bathhouse on Market Street, where he met with some men. Parked across the street, watching the traffic move in and out of the bathhouse, was John Tree. He had been in hiding nearly a year. The men King chose to follow LaValle wouldn’t have seen Tree sitting across the street in an old Ford pickup if he hadn’t lit a cigarette. In the brief flare of the match, Tree’s distorted smile was clearly visible. One of the men followed LaValle into the bathhouse, the other waited outside. In the steam and poor lighting of the sauna, only two of the men that LaValle was meeting were identified. The third escaped detection. One man was Charles Witherspoon, the general contractor for King’s construction company, and the other was muscle for the DiMarcos.
As far as King was concerned, the unknown third man was the key. He was the one who brought LaValle, Witherspoon, and the DiMarcos together. King laughed to himself. He would take odds that LaValle didn’t know about Tree, but that Tree knew about him. LaValle would probably be Tree’s prize after whatever they were planning was completed. The question was, who was this third man and what was being planned?
On the night of Jack’s death, after the dinner dishes had been cleared away, the family sat around the dining room table. Jack and King were talking. Jackson was leaning against his father and playing with a rubber band. Serena and Lisette were discussing which was the better actor, Victor Mature or Richard Conte. All conversation stopped when the phone rang. Jack sent his son back into the kitchen and went to answer the phone. When he returned his face was grave. He excused himself from the table and went down to the office. King joined him a few minutes later and discovered him laying out guns and ammunition on the pool table.
“They’ve got LaValle,” Jack said, glancing up at his father as he continued to load bullets into magazines.
King stared at Jack and asked, “What makes that important?”
“Pa, I talked to LaValle,” Jack explained, his voice hoarse with tension. “They cut off one of his fingers while he was talking to me. They’re going to kill him if we don’t meet them in three hours at the old Genaro warehouse near pier fourteen on South Embarcadero.”
“Why is that important?” King asked again, looking his son directly in the eye. “And why you gettin’ ready to do somethin’ about it?”
“Pa, it’s different for you than it is for me. LaValle’s my brother and I can’t forget that. I just can’t forget that. I grew up with him. He’s been part of my world my whole life. Even though he’s a dog, I don’t intend to stand by and let somebody kill him. I’ve got to do something.”
“It’s a goddamn trap, boy!” King exploded. “LaValle got himself into this mess, just like he had a hand in Eartha’s death!”
“You’re right on both counts, Pa, but that doesn’t change a thing for me.”
“LaValle ain’t worth dying for! He wouldn’t even be in this spot if he hadn’t turned traitor on his family. You committin’ suicide!”
“I don’t intend to commit suicide, but I’m going. Are you with me?” Jack looked at his father. “I’ve been with you every time that you needed me. Now, I need you. Are you with me?”
There was a long silence while King considered his options. He would have preferred to let them kill LaValle then wreak his vengeance later. LaValle was a liability and would continue to bring shame on the family for as long as he lived. What could be more ideal than to have someone else kill him? If Sister Bornais had not specifically warned King against killing LaValle, he would have done it himself long ago. King looked at his son and said, “You my blood. I’m with you.” He had a bad feeling about meeting the DiMarcos on the ground of their choosing. Now, he was risking his life to save the fool in order to protect the son he cared for. King closed off his thoughts and commented as he picked up his shotgun, “In a warehouse, we can probably use tear gas. Did you pack some?”
“That’s a good idea, Pa,” Jack acknowledged with a smile. “I’ll get some masks too.”
The two men began strapping on holsters and ammunition belts. King packed several bundles of stick dynamite along with detonator caps in a small canvas bag. He also packed a Thompson machine gun with a collapsible stock and loaded magazines, and put the bag by the stairs. Jack placed a larger bag next to King’s.
“I think a team of seven can do it if we enter from the roof,” Jack suggested. “I’ve been to Ciachetti’s, which is right next to that building at pier fourteen. Both buildings were built at the same time. I think that they are identical. We’ll have to take out their sentries on the roof, then we can cross with two fifteen-foot ladders between Ciachetti’s building and theirs. We leave two men on the roof to take care of our exit. The top floor is administrative offices; we leave two men there to cover the hallway. Three of us will go down to ground level.”
King mused, “For this to work, everybody got to use silencers and every shot got to count, because surprise is our only advantage.”
“I have silencers for everything but the shotguns.”
“If we got to use the shotguns,” King observed, “we won’t worry about surprisin’ them.” The two men chuckled humorlessly as they commenced working out the details of their plan. They identified and contacted the men they wanted on the team. Two of the men were directed to steal two vans. The team convened at a vacant apartment in a building that King owned in Hunter’s Point. The men all knew one another, having worked together on various assignments in the past. There was Doke and Joey from the Blue Mirror. For the sharpshooter, they had chosen Herbert Broadhead, a tall, angular man with a gaunt, brown-skinned face. Broadhead could hit a letter-size piece of paper at two hundred yards, ten out of ten times. He had served with Jack in World War II in the 761st Colored Tank Battalion and had proven his marksmanship many times in life-and-death situations. The remaining two men were friends of King’s from Mexico. One was a stocky, swarthy man named Rico Ramirez and the other was a wiry, taciturn man called El Indio.
The Port of San Francisco functioned nearly twenty-four hours a day loading and unloading cargo and large passenger liners. Piers 14 and 16 were centers of activity. Under the glare of bright lights, there were the grinding sounds of engines, the mechanical squeal of large cranes and hoists, and the shouts of men as heavy crates and equipment swung from ship to shore and back again. Genaro’s and Ciachetti’s warehouses were on the street side of pier 14, but were blocked off from view of the Embarcadero by a long, three-story office building which was dark and vacant during the night hours. One van was left three blocks from Genaro’s warehouse. It would provide a second means of escape, should the first van be recognized during the raid. The remaining van, with two fifteen-foot ladders and two twelve-foot lengths of thick pine protruding from the rear, was driven into the shadows of Ciachetti’s warehouse, on the opposite side from Genaro’s. The van pulled to a stop underneath the outside fire escape. Standing on top of the van, Jack and Herbert caught the lower rung of the fire escape and ascended to the roof. They both had 3.08-caliber rifles with silencers and sniper scopes. The principal source of lighting came from the dockside pier, which possessed a bank of high-wattage lamps to allow for around-the-clock loading and unloading of freight and passenger shipping. Once atop the roof, they easily spotted the first sentry; he was making regular circuits of the roof, occasionally peering down at the street for signs of movement. The other sentry had placed himself in the shadows and
would not have been seen except that the barrel of his rifle reflected the pier’s lights. Herbert directed Jack’s attention to the man’s movement in the shadows. Only the top of his head and his legs were visible. Herbert took careful aim and Jack signaled when the other sentry was on the other side of the roof. Herbert squeezed off a shot that made a soft popping noise and the man’s head disappeared. The sound of his gun hitting the roof brought the other sentry at a run. Jack caught him in the chest with a shot from his rifle and saw his body jerk backward as if pulled by some invisible wire. Herbert put another bullet into him as he fell.
Communicating by military walkie-talkie, Jack informed the men below that the roof was cleared for entry. The two fifteen-foot ladders were lifted to the roof and the pieces of pine were tied tightly to the ladders to reinforce their strength. The men assembled to discuss the crossing. With Doke and Joey holding each ladder upright and Jack and Rico holding ropes fastened to the topmost ends, each ladder was gently lowered across the ten-foot span that separated the buildings. The ladders were laid side by side. Carrying lead ropes Jack and Herbert walked across the ladders, balancing themselves on the pine boards. They fastened the lead ropes to metal stanchions projecting from the roof and the other men crossed with benefit of the guide ropes.
King crossed the ladders without any overt evidence of concern, but as he looked down at the ground thirty feet below, he thought, Gettin’ too old for this. We gon’ to have to leave by the front door. Upon reaching the other side, he spurned Jack’s hand and jumped down to the roof without assistance. He watched as Jack assigned the men to various tasks. Herbert would take the roof. El Indio would be the first man inside, and his job was to take out anyone patrolling the balcony and hallway, then he was to search the upstairs offices. Joey and Doke would hold the second floor hallway and balcony. Jack, King, and Rico would descend to ground level, where Jack figured LaValle was being held. Silently, King admired the way his son commanded respect. The men listened attentively as Jack laid out the plan once more. He explained that there were only gas masks for five men. If the gas was used, two of the team would have to exit through the roof and go across the ladders again.
