Sons of the City (18 page)

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.

B
ravelli 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?

T
hat 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.

“No,” said Donna. “Have you?” “This’ll be my first time.” “Yeah, right, like I believe that.”

“Gimme a break, you think I go around having sex in the back of police cars all the time?”

I almost ran my car off the road. I could just imagine who was listening to this—not only every cop in the district, but supervisors, maybe even commanders. And then all the civilians with scanners—like newspaper reporters listening for shootings, tow-truck drivers waiting for wrecks, retired guys sitting in their living rooms, killing time …

The dispatcher came on again. “All units, we have a hung carrier.”

“No shit,” I said, half aloud. The dispatcher could break in all she wanted, I doubted it would make any difference. When you’re transmitting you can’t receive, so unless Donna and Buster happened to have their portable radios turned on, they wouldn’t be able to hear the warnings of a hung carrier.

“I just don’t want anyone seeing us,” Donna was saying.

“No one’s going to see us—as long as we find the right place.”

If the bosses find out who you are, I said to myself, the only place you two are going is the Front. That was our disciplinary board. So far, though, they were in the clear—they hadn’t called each other by name. Three police districts operated on this radio band, the 18th and 20th in West Philly, and the 12th in Southwest. Despite what a lot of cops thought, there was no way a transmission could be traced back to a particular car.

“How about by Penn’s ice rink?” Buster suggested.

This was great—now they were actually talking about where they were going to go to have sex. I had to hand it to Buster, though, the ice rink wasn’t a bad idea. It was on the eastern edge of the campus, not far from the river, and you could park behind it, on a lower level, and not be seen from the street. Some nights, when it was quiet, we’d go down there and have snowball fights with the snowdrifts of crushed ice dumped from the Zamboni.

“Forget that,” said Donna. “You never know when some hockey team is gonna come by for a practice.”

Good point, I thought. I had forgotten that there were people coming and going at strange hours.

“OK, then you pick a place,” said Buster.

“How about Cobbs Creek Park? That road down there is pretty hidden by the trees.”

Not a good idea, Donna, I said to myself.

“You never heard about that park guard?” Buster was asking.

“What park guard?”

“You never heard about that?”

“What, are you deaf? I just said I never heard about it.”

“I thought everybody knew about that.”

“Well, I ain’t everybody,” said Donna. “You gonna tell me or what?”

“This park guard was down there one night, just sitting in his car, someone just came right up and blew him away.”

“Maybe we should skip that one,” said Donna.

“You think?”

I had been worrying about Michelle all day, but now I was beginning to relax a little. And as diversions went, this one was pretty good. I even wanted to have some fun with it. I got on the radio, and asked to have Nick meet me at the 7-Eleven by Penn. I also called for Jeff and his partner, Mutt.

Mutt’s real name was Alan Hope, but since Jeff was Jeff, he had to be Mutt. He was a big, stocky guy from Mayfair, a working-class white neighborhood, and he only cared about four things in life: the Phillies, the Eagles, the Flyers, and the Sixers. All he wanted to talk about was sports. No matter what the conversation was, he’d always bring it around to what this team or that team was doing.

He’d listen to sports-talk radio in his patrol car, and then pull over to a pay phone and call and start arguing on the air. He had a crewcut and enormous forearms, like Popeye, but he was a lot smarter than most people thought.

I got to the 7-Eleven first and parked along the curb in front of the store. A minute later, Nick pulled up behind me. He could hardly get out of his car he was laughing so hard. “This is fan-fuckin'-tastic,” he yelled. “I hope somebody’s making a recording of this.”

Jeff and Mutt were right behind Nick, and they were cracking up, too. We all gathered in front of my car, half sitting on the hood, listening to the
Donna and Buster Show
on our handsets.

Mutt couldn’t believe our good fortune. “This is some-thin’ to tell your grandchildren about,” he said. “This is gonna go down in history.”

It was a warm night, and though it was summer, there were still some students around the campus. Two pretty young women in super-short gym shorts and tight T-shirts passed in front of us, heading toward the 7-Eleven. We all paused to admire the scenery.

“I knew I should’ve been a U. of P. cop,” Nick said, as we watched the girls disappear into the store.

We all smiled. This was the old Nick, this was the way he had been before his father died, before Steve died.

I waited until the girls were safely out of sight, then got everyone’s attention again. “Here’s what we’re gonna do,” I said. “When Donna and Buster pick a spot, we get there first. They come around the corner, we turn on our lights and sirens and scare the shit out of ‘em.”

Everyone agreed that this was an excellent plan—though first we had to figure out where the hell Donna and Buster were going. We sat there and listened as they considered and rejected three more places to get laid—the golf course (too out in the open), under the 30th Street train station (too many homeless), and in the parking lot behind the zoo’s giraffe habitat (too weird).

“You know where I’d go,” said Nick. “The parking garage under the Civic Center. No one’s ever down there.”

It was amazing—five seconds later, Buster said, “I got it—under the Civic Center.”