Sons of the City (32 page)

If there were any stoplights on the way, I didn’t notice them. Each intersection we hit, Nick checked his side, then yelled, “Clear!”

Finally, we were there, swinging around the corner onto Locust. We could see the Honda parked in front of Angela’s. The door to the stairs that led to Michelle’s apartment was open.

Something was happening—two men burst out of the doorway and fell to the ground, punching each other. I skidded my Blazer up to the curb and leapt out, Junior Vicente’s gun in my hand.

It was one of the guys from the Honda, and … Jesus, it was Lanier. What was he doing here?

The young guy kept trying to get up and Lanier kept dragging him back down, but then Nick and I were on the guy, knocking him to the ground. Nick flipped him facedown and jumped on top of him so he couldn’t move.

“Another one’s upstairs,” Lanier yelled, getting to his feet. “I heard a gunshot.”

I ran through the doorway and pounded up the stairs, past the second floor, up to the third floor. Michelle’s door had been torn open, splintered at the lock.

I swung my gun arm through first, then stepped in, ready to pull the trigger. But it was Michelle my gun was pointing at, and she had a gun, too, she was holding it with both hands, aiming right at my head.

By some miracle neither of us fired. And then I saw, at her feet, the other guy from the Honda. He was lying on the floor, writhing in pain, holding his bloody chest.

I
t turned out Lanier had been sitting in his car across the street from Michelle’s apartment. He had seen the Honda make its first two passes, a half hour apart, and then a third, just as Michelle was coming home, opening the door at the bottom of the stairs.

“I had a feeling they might be coming back,” Lanier told Michelle and me, as we all stood out front on the sidewalk. The two young guys had already been taken away—one to the hospital, the other to district headquarters—and the street was full of police cars.

Lanier said that when he saw the story in the
Post,
he was afraid Bravelli’s men might go after Michelle. He knew the Commissioner had canceled the detail in front of her apartment about 6 a.m., but he didn’t know why. And he couldn’t get in touch with the Commissioner to ask.

“I didn’t want to put another detail here without knowing what was going on,” Lanier said. “But I didn’t want to leave the place uncovered.”

“So how long were you here?” I asked him. “Couple of hours?”

“Other than when you saw me at OC headquarters this afternoon,” he said, “I’ve been here all day. And I only went back there to get these.”

He reached into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out two Glock clips.

“Didn’t know how many bullets I’d need,” he said.

“Wow,” said Michelle, giving him a nice smile. “You must have really been worried about me.”

“Well, I’m sure you saw the article.”

“Yeah,” I said to Michelle, “you did see the article, didn’t you?”

“Of course.”

“Then what were you doing back here?” “I didn’t want to leave this behind.” She had a locket on a gold chain around her neck, and she picked it up from her blue T-shirt to show us. Inside was a tiny photo of a small boy and girl, arms around each other.

“Me and Steve,” Michelle explained. “Steve gave it to me on my last birthday. And I wasn’t worried about coming back here to pick it up—I had my gun.”

“Fortunately,” I said.

“Not fortunately. I wouldn’t have come here without it. And as you can see, I put it to good use.”

“But if the captain hadn’t been here—”

“Then I would have shot both of them.”

Lanier and I laughed.

“I’m sure you would have,” I said.

“Not that I don’t appreciate you being concerned about me, Captain,” Michelle said.

“I’m still concerned,” said Lanier. “I have no doubt that Bravelli will try again.”

“I agree,” I said.

“I’d like to see if we can get him locked up,” said Lanier. “Maybe one of those two assholes from tonight can help us out. In the meantime, Michelle, you’ve really got to get out of sight. Go somewhere where they’re not going to find you.”

“I can’t go back to my old apartment,” she said. “I can’t put Theresa in that kind of danger. And I’m sure they know where my father lives, maybe even my mother, too.”

“I’d suggest my house,” I said. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve already been followed home at night.”

“Can you get out of the city?” Lanier asked Michelle. “Way out?”

“There’s always Vic’s cabin,” I said.

“Who’s Vic?”

“Vic Funderburke, a sergeant in the Third. He’s got a cabin up in the Poconos. I can use it anytime I want.”

“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.”

I
n 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 with 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.