Authors: Scott Flander
“Might be a fella inside there sleeping,” he said. “A real deep sleep, if you know what I mean.”
Doc had two features you noticed first: he was completely bald, and he had a big stomach under his Dallas Cowboys T-shirt, so that he was round on the top, and very round in the front. He had a soft face and an affable smile, like he had never really had a bad day in his life. Basically, he looked like a hick. You’d never know he was a sergeant. Hell, you’d never even know he was a cop. We always told Doc he seemed like he’d be more at home slopping hogs on a dusty farm out in West Texas, gettin’ his giant blue overalls all muddied up. Whenever we’d ask him what the hell he was doing on the streets of Philadelphia, he’d drawl, “I belong here.”
And we’d look at him and laugh and say, imitating his accent, “Why, Doc? Some of your hogs get loose?”
Today he had on his Cowboys T-shirt, as usual, and also a Cowboys baseball cap, so it looked like he happened to be on his way to a game at Veterans Stadium when he got sidetracked. The Cowboys weren’t particularly popular in Philly, and more than a few people in the crowd were glaring at his cap and shirt.
Doc told me that about an hour before, someone had called Southwest Detectives and suggested that cops check the trunk of a Lexus at 75th and Pine. When asked why, the caller had replied, “All right, don’t check, I don’t fuckin’ care, when the neighbors start complaining about the smell, don’t come fuckin’ crying to me.” Then he slammed down the phone.
“Wonderful,” I told Doc. “An anonymous caller with an attitude.”
Michelle was looking at the trunk of the Lexus. “Any idea who’s inside?” she asked.
Doc shook his head. “We checked the VIN. Car’s stolen.”
As Doc took off to talk to Lanier, Michelle and I gazed at the Lexus.
“Hell of a coffin,” I said aloud.
Considering that we were in Westmount, it was a good bet this was Bravelli’s work. But who was inside? One thing for sure, a lot of people had come to find out. The spectators, at least three hundred strong, had pressed so close that Lanier had ordered barricades put up, yellow-and-blue police sawhorses. People had gathered behind them four-deep, craning for a view.
It was wild—men, women, even children were everywhere, hanging from windows, peering down from roofs, standing on newspaper boxes, perched on traffic lights. One young neighborhood guy had even set up a lawn chair on the top of his car, and was sitting there drinking a bottle of beer and listening to rock music on his car radio.
Lanier came over to where we were standing, and looked at my battered face with mock alarm.
“Forget to wear your seat belt again?” he asked.
One thing about trying to bust somebody’s balls, you have to at least be friendly with the guy or it doesn’t work. I just looked at Lanier and shook my head.
By now, though, he had turned his attention to Michelle. He noticed her nameplate, and asked, “Are you any relation?”
“This is the Commissioner’s daughter,” I said. I was hoping they wouldn’t shake hands, but they did.
“Captain Lanier,” I explained cheerfully to Michelle, “was the fine commander who had me transferred out of the Organized Crime Unit.”
“C’mon, let’s not get into this now,” said Lanier.
“I had my own squad,” I told Michelle. “And we were doing great, we were closing in on Mickey Bravelli. We had witnesses, evidence, wiretaps, everything.”
“C’mon, Eddie …”
“But then anonymous calls started coming in saying that I was taking money from the mob. Isn’t that right, Captain?”
I turned to Michelle. “Instead of treating the calls like bullshit, which they were, Captain Lanier dutifully reported them to his bosses. The next thing I know, I’m pushing a patrol car around West Philadelphia.”
“It was a little more complicated than that,” Lanier said to Michelle.
“It wasn’t any more complicated than that,” I said.
Lanier hesitated. He was obviously reluctant to leave things where they stood, but he knew arguing with me wasn’t going to get anywhere.
He smiled at Michelle. “Nice meeting you, but it’s time for me to get to work.”
He turned and walked back over to the Lexus, where he was joined by Doc and the other detectives. The new activity was sending a surge of electricity through the crowd. Knots of young guys, who had been standing around bullshitting, turned in unison toward the barricade.
Lanier called for a nearby police wagon to be brought behind the Lexus. He wanted to at least partially block the crowd’s view, and the crowd didn’t like it. As the wagon pulled into place, people started booing, like they were at a ball game and the center fielder had just dropped the ball.
“Hey, c’mon, let us see!” people were yelling, as they pushed and shoved to get a view again. Doc had a crowbar in his hand, and Lanier said, “OK, Sergeant, pop it.”
Doc bent down with the crowbar, and a woman in the crowd shouted, “It’s show time!”
The street was suddenly quiet, like someone had pushed down all the city sounds, so that even the traffic passing at a nearby intersection seemed to glide by in silence. The crowd, hushed, strained forward toward the Lexus. Even the guy with the lawn chair had shut off his car radio and was now standing on his car.
Doc worked the crowbar for a moment, and then with a loud creak and a thump the trunk popped open, and the crowd gasped at what it saw and heard.
What it saw was a thin, nattily dressed black guy, half propped up between two large stereo speakers, his dead waxy face looking out over the astonished crowd. On his chest was a white placard, with the words, in black Magic Marker, “COP KILLER.”
What the crowd heard was music, somehow set to start playing when the truck was opened, blasting from the two speakers.
It was the rock anthem by the group Queen, heard at every sporting event: “WE WILL … WE WILL … ROCK YOU!! (Stomp-stomp clap. Stomp-stomp clap.) WE WILL … WE WILL … ROCK YOU!!”
The music was so loud that Doc and the other cops staggered back a few steps, and then a huge cheer went up from the crowd, and they were all clapping and whistling and yelling approval.
“WE WILL … WE WILL … ROCK YOU!! (Stomp-stomp-clap. Stomp-stomp-clap.) WE WILL … WE WILL … ROCKYOU!!”
Doc reached into the trunk and ripped the wires from the speakers and the music went dead. The crowd booed, but then cheered again, louder than before. They were whistling and clapping in appreciation—it was a great show, and they had gotten their money’s worth.
I glanced at Michelle. Her face was ashen. She just stood there, staring at the body, staring at the placard. The moment I saw it, I thought about what Bravelli had said on the street—about how we were going to get help finding who shot Steve. This was it. This was what he had been talking about.
Doc came over to us, embarrassed. “I’m sorry you had to see this,” he said to Michelle. “We had no idea.”
“It’s all right,” she said.
Doc turned to me. “Eddie, you know who that is in the trunk, don’t you?”
“Never seen him before.”
“Well, I have. That’s Ru-Wan Sanders.”
“No shit. You sure?”
“I don’t know too many of those guys,” said Doc, “but I do know him.”
“One of what guys?” Michelle asked. “Who is he?”
“Black Mafia,” I said. “Ru-Wan over there was—what, Doc, second-in-command?”
“Something like that. They’re always switching around.”
Michelle looked at us. “I don’t understand, what does this mean?”
“It means,” I said, “that there’s something going on here we don’t know about.”
“But why would the black Mafia …” began Michelle.
We were all silent for a moment, taking it in. It was just too hard to believe.
“Maybe we should ask Mickey Bravelli,” I said, and told them what he had said that afternoon.
Doc tilted his head and squinted, like he just had heard that a neighboring farmer was growing giant tomatoes.
“Bravelli sure found out awful fast,” he said in his Texas drawl. “We didn’t have a hint, not even a hint of a hint.”
“Tell you what bothers me,” I said. “The black Mafia doesn’t have anything to do with the crackhouse where Steve got killed. It’s just a place for pipers—the street dealers don’t even go inside.”
Doc saw where I was going. “So there’d be no reason in the world for Ru-Wan Sanders to ever be in there.”
“Well, one reason,” I said. Doc thought for a moment, then nodded.
“What?” said Michelle. “You guys aren’t going to tell me?”
Doc and I looked at each other. He was about to say it, then hesitated, so I took over.
“Maybe Ru-Wan was there because he knew Steve was going to be knocking on that door. Maybe he was the one who made the call to 911.”
Michelle put her hand to her mouth. “They were waiting for Steve?”
“It’s very possible,” I said. “And I think it’s also very possible Bravelli knows why.”
A
few minutes later, we were pulling into the Yard at district headquarters. Michelle had asked me to take her back, she wanted to talk to her father about Ru-Wan Sanders.
As I stopped the car in front of the police entrance, Michelle said, “We have to find out what Bravelli knows.”
“It’d be nice.”
“But there’s no way, is there? Bringing him in isn’t going to do any good.” “Not likely.”
“How about somebody going undercover?”
I shook my head. “It could take months to get inside Bravelli’s crew—if we could get in at all.”
She thought about that for a while, then opened the car door. “We have to find out.”
Once I had dropped Michelle off, I got back on the street and asked Radio to try to raise Nick. He didn’t respond. I figured maybe he had one of our famous nonworking radios. Other cops in the squad could hear me trying to reach him, maybe one of them would get on the air and say where he was. No one did, but no big deal.
I tried the 7-Eleven at 40th and Walnut, across the street from the Penn campus. It was a favorite cop hangout, primarily because you could sit in your patrol car all day and watch a steady stream of Penn girls pass by. In the summer, when the girls all wore tank tops and shorts, the parking area in front of the 7-Eleven was like a police mini-station.
I didn’t see Nick’s car, but I wanted some coffee anyway. I walked in and my heart jumped a little—there was Patricia, getting a small plastic bottle of orange juice from the glass case. She turned, and then stopped in surprise when she saw me.
“Eddie. You back in uniform now?”
She looked more relaxed, prettier than when I had last seen her, when our divorce came through a year ago. Her black hair was shorter now, shiny and curled in above the shoulders. She was dressed up—tight navy blue dress, black pumps, black leather purse on a long strap over her shoulder.
“You have a job around here?” I asked.
I had almost asked her whether she was going to Penn—I knew it was her dream to go there, to get a master’s in archaeology. But Penn’s tuition was something like $25,000 a year, hard to afford on the salary of a fifth-grade public school teacher.
“We haven’t talked for a while,” she said. “I’m not teaching anymore, I’m a secretary at Penn. In the president’s office.”
My stomach dropped. She deserved better. She was worlds above the girls at Penn with their daddies’ credit cards.
Patricia smiled. “But, I’m also in the archaeology program here.” She explained to me how employees of Penn could enroll as part-time students without paying a penny.
She said she had just gotten engaged. A Center City architect.
He was designing the house they eventually wanted to build.
“So in other words,” I said, “we split up and the gods start smiling on you.”
She laughed. “C’mon, we had some good years, didn’t we?”
“Yeah, we did.”
At least until we started having our troubles. I was in OC, working permanent four-to-midnight. I had to leave for work before Patricia got home from the elementary school, and she’d always be asleep when I came in.
I was in love with the job, in love with being a cop—I couldn’t get enough of it. But it was like being in a self-contained world. The stuff you saw, you couldn’t talk about with your wife, so you talked about it with other cops. After work, everyone in the squad would go out drinking to three or four in the morning. We were all too keyed up to go home.
I’d get up late and hang around the house until I had to go into work. Sometimes Patricia and I would go days without seeing each other—we didn’t even have enough time together to fight about it. There were no kids as an excuse to stay together, and one day, she just decided to leave. It happens to cops all the time.
We talked for a while longer in the 7-Eleven. She told me her father had died five months ago, and that shook me up because I really liked the guy, we had shared a lot of beers together. Patricia said she had heard about Commissioner Ryder’s son, and she asked how the investigation was going.
“Not so good,” I said. “You know, he was in my squad.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. One of your family.”
At first I thought she was being sarcastic, but then I saw she meant it. It was something I always felt she had never understood.
“Family’s important,” she said. “Whatever your family is.”
She straightened my collar, the way she did when I first became a cop, and then we walked to the counter. She bought her orange juice and insisted on paying for my coffee as well. When we were outside, I offered to give her a lift to wherever she was going, but she said her car was just down the block. She was on her way home.
“Bye, Eddie,” she said, and stood on her tiptoes to kiss my cheek. Then she turned and walked away.
I
decided to cruise by the crackhouse on Tyler Street, I wasn’t exactly sure why. The block looked a lot different during the day. Kids were playing on the sidewalks; old folks were on their porches, relaxing on their metal lawn chairs. At night, the trees had created vague, ominous shadows as we searched for Steve’s killer. Now they just provided a friendly shade.
I was only half surprised to see Nick’s empty patrol car in front of the house. I parked my car behind his, and walked up the sidewalk. The yellow police tape was still stretched across the porch, but the front door was open. What was Nick doing in there? He shouldn’t be in there.