Authors: William Lashner
“Victor, what we are telling you is the truth. Use this
information however you want. But what I don’t want to hear anymore, Victor, is anything about my family in this trial. Do you understand?”
“I didn’t bring it up.”
“No, Jimmy’s lawyer did. But I have had representatives speak to Jimmy already and he has given his assurances. What I want from you is your promise that you won’t bring my daughter into it either. Can you promise me, Victor?”
Jasper leaned over and whispered in my ear, “You should promise the man, Sport.”
“I promise,” I said.
“That’s good, because I know you to be a man of your word. I know that Victor. And the reason I know that is because Dominic and Jasper also heard that promise and these are men who believe nothing is more important than keeping one’s word.”
“Nothing,” said Dominic.
“I understand completely,” I said.
“Yes, I think you do,” he said calmly. “I am not a violent man, you must believe that. I should have been a sculptor or a farmer, anything but what I have become. I don’t really have the temperament for it. But sometimes, when it comes to my family…” He shrugged. “When that happens, I become like an animal. Listen when I tell you this, Victor. It’s been known to happen. Now there is something else. You know that while we do much for the community…”
“We protect and serve,” said Jasper. “No different than the cops.”
“Though we do much good,” continued Raffaello, “we are not a charity. Like all businesses, we are forced to take our share of the economic benefits our protection allows.”
“A modest sum,” said Jasper.
“And we require that those involved in activities that aren’t government sponsored and thus not subject to normal taxation pay an even larger share.”
“Think of it like a baseball game,” said Jasper. “And
we’re home plate. No matter how big a hit, you need to touch base with us before you score.”
“Do you understand the concept?” asked Raffaello.
“Yes, sir,” I said quickly.
“Now, our information tells us there is a quarter of a million dollars unaccounted for, money that was given by Mr. Ruffing but never received by Jimmy Moore’s organization. A quarter of a million dollars. Whoever ended up with that money never touched home plate. Inadvertently, I assume.”
“Mr. Raffaello is a very forgiving man,” said Jasper, shifting closer to me and leaning so close to my face that I could smell garlic and a touch of rosemary on his breath.
“But still,” said the boss of bosses. “We expect our share. Now one third of a quarter of a million dollars is…”
“Eighty-three thousand,” said Dominic. “Three hundred and thirty-three.”
“Let’s call it an even hundred thousand,” said Raffaello. “I always liked clean numbers. So, Victor, we’re missing one hundred thousand dollars. It is as if someone walked into my house, opened a drawer, and took one hundred thousand dollars from me. I’m a forgiving man, Victor,” but now his voice rose until he was screaming once again, “but to just march into my home and open a drawer and take from me, that I cannot forgive.”
“What happened to the money, Sport?” asked Jasper, still leaning close to me.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Find it for us, Victor,” said Raffaello, “and I’ll forget all about your disrespect for my daughter. You see, I can be forgiving.”
“You should thank the man,” said Jasper into my ear.
“But I don’t know where…”
“Find it, Victor,” said Raffaello, interrupting my pathetic whine. “And we’ll forget about the unpleasantness at the poker game. Otherwise…” He shrugged.
“Thank the man, Sport.”
“Thank you,” I said obediently.
“All right, we’ve taken care of our business,” said Raffaello. “Lenny, do you have something for our friend Victor?”
“Sure thing, Mr. Raffaello.”
Lenny pulled the car over and reached down for something and then turned around quickly. I ducked, expecting another shot to my eye. I was getting sick of these rides around town. But Lenny didn’t turn around to sock me with the back of his hand. When I recovered and opened my eyes he was holding a small white paper sack with slight grease markings on the bottom.
“This is for you, Victor,” said Enrico Raffaello. “It’s a cannoli, from my own special recipe. I hope you like vanilla custard. Now take my advice, Victor. A cannoli this rich you must not eat too fast. I never created the great art I dreamed of, but my cannoli come close. Eating one is like having sex. If it’s too fast, you just end up nauseous. But eat it slowly, carefully, let the custard melt in your mouth. You eat it right and the joy you experience will fill you with an unaccountable joy. You like sex?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, trust me, Victor, you eat it right, you’ll like my cannoli better. We’ll be hearing from you, I assume.”
With that the door opened and Jasper jumped to the street and jerked me out with him. “See you later, Sport.”
I leaned back into the car. “Thank you for the cannoli, Mr. Raffaello. By the way, sir, you didn’t, by any chance, just sort of happen to take a shot at me a few days back, did you?”
Raffaello leaned forward in his seat and smiled as sweetly as he could with a face such as his. “Victor. If we had taken a shot at you, you wouldn’t be around to ask such a question.”
ENRICO RAFFAELLO WAS
almost right about his cannoli, it was heavy and crisp and I ate it slowly, letting the white custard slide down my throat like sweet, perfumed oysters. It wasn’t quite as good as sex, but after an evening with Veronica it was all I could have asked for. I sat in my car and ate the cannoli and let the cinnamon tickle my nose and bite after bite my spirits fell because, along with giving me that superb cannoli, Mr. Raffaello had opened a door I’d rather have remained shut. On the other side were danger and loss, but there it was, open wide and waiting for me. I didn’t have much choice. I ducked my head and stepped through and found myself the very next morning at the Sporting Club.
The Sporting Club was swank, which wasn’t exactly what I wanted in a gym. Gyms should be sweaty, smelly places, where muscle-bound lugs grunt as they move around great discs of metal and the rubbery thwack thwack thwack of a basketball echoes from the court. That wasn’t the Sporting Club. The Sporting Club was swank.
“I’m interested in joining,” I said. “And I wondered if I could look around for a bit.”
“Of course,” said the woman in the membership office. She wore white, her top stretched by a very fit pair of breasts, worked out, I was sure, on a Nautilus breast machine until they were every bit as taut as her thighs. “Why don’t you fill out this form first.”
They wanted to know my name, my address, my credit card, they wanted to know what I did for a living, who I worked for, my estimated yearly income. It was almost like the way potential dating partners sniff each other out at a party or a bar. Out of pride, I lied to make myself sound like a better candidate for their club, even though I had no intention of joining.
“Well, Mr. Carl,” she said, “let me give you a little tour.”
“How about if I look around myself, get a feel for the place, would that be all right?”
“Of course,” she said. “Take this pass and go right through there. The men’s locker room is on the left and there are signs to the various rooms.” Her gaze drifted down to where my chest would have been had I had one. “Be sure to check out our free weight room.”
I smiled back anyway and left the office, waving the pass casually at the beefy man in white guarding the entrance.
It wasn’t very crowded at seven in the morning, a few haggard souls trying to sneak their workout in before they were awake enough to realize how crazy it was to take an elevator seven floors just to bound up an endless flight of mechanical stairs. In the men’s locker room I grabbed a couple of towels and found a locker and stripped. I couldn’t help but look at myself in the mirrors that surrounded the room. What I saw was pathetic. I would need to join a gym someday, but not this one, not one so swank.
With a towel around my waist, I followed signs to the men’s sauna and steam rooms. The sauna was empty but in the steam room, lying on one of the tiled tiers, was a hard mound of flesh with a towel around its waist and over its face. I sat on a lower tier where it was still possible to breathe and waited for a moment as the steam floated about me and the sweat started sucking from my body.
When sweat dripped from my nose to my knees I said finally, “Enrico Raffaello didn’t kill Bissonette.”
“Good morning, Victor,” said Jimmy Moore, without lifting the towel off his face.
Concannon had told me that Moore worked out at the Sporting Club every morning, primarily by sweating out the alcohol from the night before in the sauna or steam room, depending on his mood. It was directly to the councilman that the door Raffaello opened had led, it was Moore whose answers to the big questions I needed to hear.
“Where did you gather your startling bit of information?” he asked.
“From Raffaello himself.”
“So you had an audience with the pope and the pope told you he’s innocent.”
“And I believe him,” I said. “No reason for him to lie, his hands are already crimson. Which raises the question I have raised before and to which I still don’t have an answer. Who killed Bissonette? Did you?”
He grabbed the towel off his face, sat up, and let out a long grunt that was like the baying of a great wounded mammal.
“If you want, councilman,” I said, “you can have your attorney present when we have this conversation.”
He pushed himself off his tier and stepped down, loosening the towel from his waist and letting it drop into the puddled steam slipping across the tiled floor to the drain. Beside the door was a cold-water shower and he turned it on. His muscles were turning slack and what was once a formidable chest was dropping, but what I noticed most clearly was the size of his prick, which was big, huge, like a bull elephant’s, it flopped down and hung there and the size of it was sickening. I wrapped the towel more tightly around my waist.
“I think I can handle this without Prescott’s help,” he said from inside the shower, water streaming down his face and body. “So you want to know if I killed the ballplayer.
If I am a murderer. Because the way you figure it, it was me who beat him to death with a baseball bat.”
“You’ve lied to Chester and me about who did it and you’re setting up Chester for a fall. It doesn’t make sense unless you killed him.”
“Get dressed,” he said, wiping his face with a towel and opening the steam room door. A blast of frigid air swirled in. “We have time for a morning drive before court.”
“Do you know how I was first elected to City Council, Victor?” asked Jimmy Moore. We were inside the limousine now, driving north on Broad Street. Henry and the car had been waiting in the alley next to the old Bellevue Stratford, where the Sporting Club was situated. Inside the limousine was a tray of danish and a steel thermos, out of which Jimmy poured us each a cup of coffee. “Cream?” he asked.
“No, thank you,” I said.
“I ran on an anti-busing platform,” he said. “I opposed integration. I promised to keep our neighborhoods crimefree, which is political shorthand for white. You don’t have to use Klan language to grab the racist vote. Talk about maintaining the integrity of the neighborhoods, talk about the scourge of crime, talk about protecting the American dream of home ownership and maintaining real estate values, talk about busing and the electorate understands. I even got into a fistfight in the Council chamber over a Gay Pride Day. I was opposed to it, of course. In my district the politics of hate were good politics and all I wanted was my city post, my city car, the power to make deals, so they were my politics too. The papers hated me, I was a joke, except that I carried my district with seventy-three percent of the vote.”
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Drugs were the other people’s problem,” he said,
ignoring my question. “You know much about the gospels? No, of course not. Saul, an agent of the Jews and the scourge of Christianity, on his way to Damascus has a vision, hears a voice. ‘Saul, Saul, why persecuteth thou me?’ It is the voice of Jesus. At that moment he becomes a new man, he changes his name to Paul, he becomes Jesus’s messenger on earth. Well, I didn’t hear any voice. What I heard was a silence. My own daughter’s silence. But it spoke to me just as clearly. ‘Daddy. Daddy. Why forsaketh thou me?’ And I didn’t have an answer for her. Not a one.”
He took a sip from his coffee and another, looking out the side window into the desolation of North Philadelphia.
“Now I do,” he said.
“One of our most important programs here at the Nadine Moore Youth House,” said Mrs. Diaz as she led Jimmy Moore and me through a tour of the facility, “is our community outreach program. Actually, it was at the councilman’s insistence that we began the program and it has become the cornerstone of our effort. So often the only place children in trouble can receive help is through the criminal justice system and by then it is often too late. Through our education and outreach programs we can get hold of these children and deal with their problems before they enter the criminal system. That makes all the difference, we’ve found.”
Mrs. Diaz was a handsome woman with broad cheekbones and strong hands. We were walking down a hallway running around the perimeter of the building. All the classrooms had windows facing the hallways, which gave the construction a large and airy feel, more like a fine office building than a prison school. We stopped in front of a classroom where a group of twenty teenagers, dressed alike in white shirts and navy pants, were sitting in a semicircle around a teacher in goggles performing a chemistry experiment.
“The day for our children starts early in the morning,” said Mrs. Diaz. “We have a regular school curriculum, supplemented in the afternoons with classes designed to meet the specific needs of the individual child. The afternoon classes include group therapy. What we have found is that these children go back to school with their scholastic skills improved to such a point that they excel, which is primarily why our graduates generally do so well on the outside. Through our monitoring and counseling program, which continues long after the children leave here, we have found that almost ninety percent have stayed off of drugs and out of trouble.”
“Explain to Mr. Carl where our funding comes from, Loretta,” said the councilman as we continued our walk down the hall.
“We get some support from the city,” she said. “Councilman Moore has been able to secure for us some federal funds. And of course there are private donations. Whatever you’d like to give, Mr. Carl,” she said with a warm smile, “would be greatly appreciated. And then CUP, Citizens for a United Philadelphia, has been extremely generous. In the past, whenever we have anticipated a shortfall, CUP has balanced our budget.”
We followed Loretta Diaz up a flight of stairs into a gym where a large class of young men and women in their blue pants and white shirts were marching, in short-order drill, like soldiers on the parade ground. A teacher was barking out commands, “Left face. Right face. Quarterturn. About face,” and the marchers were chanting together, to the beat of their footsteps, “
We got to go home on our left, our right, we got to go home on our left, our right.
”
“There’s a consensus growing around the country,” said Mrs. Diaz, “that army-type discipline helps build self-esteem. So-called boot camps. I’m not so certain about whether it works or not, but the President is enamored with
the idea and so it helps with the grant monies. As our plans for the future are ambitious, everything we can do to increase our funding we do. Besides, the children seem to actually like it.”
“What exactly are your ambitions?” I asked as the footsteps of the marchers and the chanting rose around us.
Left. Left. Your left, your right. Left.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I thought the councilman explained all that to you. The Nadine Moore Youth Home is a pilot program. We only have room in this facility for one student out of every thirty who are referred to us. Our goal is to build fifteen more here in Philadelphia and then expand into other cities. This home acts not only as a center for these children but also as a laboratory, and we expect our success here will serve as the model for a great bloom of healing. Our great hope,” she said, as the councilman surveyed the troops marching to and fro on the basketball court, something wet and glistening in his eyes as they chanted,
Sound off, one two, little louder, three four, kick it around, one two three four one two
—
threefour,
“our great dream,” she said, “is that for every child in this country struggling with drugs there be a Nadine Moore Youth Home to help her through her time of deepest need.”
“This is our next one,” he said. Henry had driven us to a vacant lot on Lehigh Avenue, across from a stream of crumbling row houses and boarded-up stores. A school was up the avenue just a bit. “The Art Museum fund-raiser gave us just enough to complete the effort. We start construction in two months. This will be twice the size of the facility you saw.”
“It certainly is a grand ambition,” I said.
“It will be her immortality,” said Jimmy Moore. “After she died I realized that what had killed my daughter was not someone else’s problem. It was everywhere. And I was
in a position to do something about it. Something. For the first time I saw what politics could be about and it was not about hating or getting. That was when my passion reared and my mission began. First fight the dealers, then heal the children. We are making progress on both fronts and when I become mayor we’ll win it all. We’ll put the lords of death out of business and build those youth homes throughout the city. And not just homes, youth centers, boys’ clubs and girls’ clubs. I can do it. I will do it. It was as good as done before they set me up.”
“Who set you up?”
“I don’t know exactly. Maybe the mayor, maybe the dealers. I was in danger before the indictment. Why do you think I ride around in that limousine? My City Council car was shot up more than once by my enemies. But my black beauty is bulletproof now and I continue on. Then the feds, after consulting with the mayor, determined my fund-raising extortionate. And even if it is, so what? The money is going to the right place. But then came the murder and the arson and they decided to pin that on me too.”
“So you didn’t kill Bissonette?”
He turned to me and looked me square in the eye. “No,” he said without a flicker of his eye, without a hesitation in his voice. “Absolutely not. Why would I kill that boy? For money? That’s the problem with prosecutors, they’re so willing to sell out for a small piece of change they think everyone else is too. I’m on the track to something big, huge, and you’ve just seen the tip of it. Besides, did you know that the money Bissonette was able to mysteriously raise for Ruffing came from Raffaello?”
So that was what Raffaello had meant when he said Jimmy was too smart to kill as part of the extortion plot. What he meant was that Jimmy was too smart to fight him. “If you didn’t kill him, why are you setting up Chester to take the fall?” I asked.
“Because I don’t have a choice,” he said quickly.
“Bullshit.”
He let out a sigh, took out a cigarette, tapped it on its box, and lit it. “Maybe it is bullshit. Maybe I’m just a coward, I don’t know. I hire a lawyer, the best in the city, and I tell him to do anything he has to do to get me off and save my dream. He’s a hard bastard, clever, and what he tells me is that if he can’t prove who actually did the killing, the only way to get me off is to go after Chet. He told me we needed an attorney to represent Chet who wouldn’t get in the way. Someone he could control. First it was McCrae. But then he took his ill-advised trip to Chinatown and so we needed someone else.”