Sons and Princes (19 page)

I haven’t fooled him, Chris thought. He knows I’m going to try to kill him to avenge my brother. It’s almost as if he wants me to try. Labrutto and Dolan are throwaways somehow.
I’ll accommodate you, Junior Boy, I promise. I’ll kill Aldo and Frank, too, if they get in my way, but first things first.

5.

“I think I found him, Ed.”

“Good, where?’

“On Suffolk Street, the building that the McRae girl lived in.”

“What’s he doing there?”

“I don’t know. The list of tenants turns up nothing, but I followed Rosamelia here twice, and the super told me that a gay guy with a goatee paid the rent on McRae’s apartment and on a woman’s named Michele Mathias.”

“Who’s she?”

“A local addict, a friend of the brother’s, maybe.”

In the pause that followed this statement, Ron Magnuson, sitting in his car on Suffolk Street, with a clear view of the front of number one-twelve, wondered what his boss was thinking. After ten years of working with him, Magnuson thought he had grown accustomed to Dolan’s strange ways, but recently – just within the last week – the prosecutor’s behavior had reached a new level of weirdness.

“Have you seen Massi?” Dolan asked.

“No.”

“How long have you been there?”

“An hour. Rosamelia left a few minutes ago. Are you sure you don’t want me to pick up Massi?”

“I’m sure.”

“I can serve the order for the hair sample.”

“That can wait.”

“You want him followed if he comes out?”

“No. I just wanted to know where he was, in case we need him.”

“He may not be in there.”

“I think he is. Rosamelia’s his good friend.”

“I’ll pack it in, then.”

“Go ahead, and you might as well go to your seminar upstate. I can use Rick or Dean if I need something over the next few days.”

Magnuson clicked off his cell phone, started his car, and sat for a moment as it idled and the gray dusk turned to night around him. It had been a long, and, in his opinion, wasted day. He had worked hard, not only to track down Chris Massi, but on the entire investigation into the double murder on the Palisades. And now it appeared that Ed Dolan, incredibly, was backing off. On reflection, the turning point occurred sometime last Monday afternoon, a week after the murders. Until then, Dolan had directed a very aggressive investigation. Antoinette Scarpa, in shock at the news of her husband’s death only a few hours before, had been worked hard; Labrutto, Massi and Junior Boy DiGiglio hauled in and braced for more to come. Forensics had been all over Labrutto’s house, and hair samples collected there were being matched to the McRae and Scarpa corpses, both still in the Bellevue morgue. A hair sample was wanted from Chris Massi, as well. He had moved from his Bedford Street apartment, but no doubt he would be found soon enough. Detectives were looking into Labrutto’s story about his BMW sedan being in a body shop in Queens on the day of the murders. Others were tracking down the actors in the dozens of West Coast Productions’ porn flicks to see if anyone knew or remembered the McRae girl.

Magnuson had no doubt that Massi, Scarpa and McRae were in Labrutto’s pretentious house in Alpine on the day of the murders, and he felt equally certain that either physical evidence or independent witnesses would confirm this. Arrests could then be made, and there was nothing like an arrest for first-degree murder to get someone to open up, perhaps point the finger further up the food chain. Magnuson had only a passing interest in Chris Massi. He had watched him for two weeks as, a year ago, he stood trial on Dolan’s flimsy stock fraud charges. and, in his gut, did not believe the ex-lawyer was involved in the Scarpa/McRae murders. Labrutto on the other hand was a scumbag of the first order. It would be nice to nail him, and even nicer – an extraordinary coup – to make a case for murder against Anthony DiGiglio, probably the last and certainly the smartest and most elusive of the old school Mafia dons.

Last Monday – the day of Dolan’s strange one-eighty – an intriguing NYPD report came across Magnuson’s desk. A small-time drug dealer named Woody Smith had been gunned down, gangland-style, in front of his home in Bed-Stuy. A neighbor, though she claimed not to have seen or heard the killing, had been suspicious enough of a car parked outside her door for several hours that morning to take down its plate number, which traced to a lessee named Marsha Davis. Davis, in a brief interview, told detectives she leased the car for her boyfriend, one Joseph Massi. Distraught, looking ill, she claimed she had seen neither Massi nor the car in several days. Because the Smith murder had all the earmarks of a Mafia hit, the NYPD had reported it, along with its findings, to Ed Dolan’s task force. It struck Magnuson as too much of a coincidence that both Joseph and Chris Massi had been connected to Mafia hits occurring within a few days and a few miles of each other.

Magnuson did not know, and did not care to know, its genesis, but it had become clear in the last year or so that Dolan had a personal vendetta against the Massi family and Chris Massi in particular. Perhaps it had to do with another never-caught Mafia figure, the hitman, Joe Black Massi. It didn’t matter. Magnuson had had a few vendettas himself over the years. In his business, personal motives to put criminals behind bars were not uncommon, and often fueled good work. When he brought the Smith report into Dolan to get authority to re-interview Marsha Davis and to start looking for Joseph Massi, he, therefore, expected the prosecutor to react not just positively but with near manic glee at having
both
Massi brothers in his sights. Instead, Dolan, his face drained of color, looking traumatized by something, waved him distractedly away and told him to come back in an hour. An hour later, some, but not all, of his color back, trying but not succeeding to make his request sound routine, Dolan told him to drop everything, including running down Joseph Massi, and find out where Chris Massi was staying; no more, no less: just his current address.

It had taken Magnuson a week to accomplish this task, a week in which he had done no other work, a week in which Ed Dolan kept to his office and called him two or three times a day for updates, a week of trailing and losing Vinnie Rosamelia in the city’s sweltering heat. The detective had a life of his own, with two kids and a mother in a nursing home. He had gotten close enough to Ed Dolan over the years to know that no one got close to Ed Dolan. Talented, driven, lonely, moody was how he described him to his wife and colleagues. Magnuson pulled out of his prime parking space – in front of a hydrant – and drove off.

He did not know about Dolan’s deal with Joseph Massi, the snuff film or the anonymous telephone calls the prosecutor had been receiving. If he had, he would have seen his boss’ current behavior for what it was: not a mood swing, but a descent into dementia.

Fifteen minutes after Magnuson left, Ed Dolan turned onto Suffolk Street and parked in the space the detective had vacated. In his suit jacket pocket was the standardissue .38 caliber revolver that Dolan had reported stolen three years earlier, taking advantage of a legitimate break-in of his car one night while he was having dinner in Chinatown. On the seat beside him, in a faux-leather carrying case that looked like a point-and-shoot camera cover, was a cattle prod that he had found at a drug dealer’s apartment a few months ago and surreptitiously pocketed. Powered by a single nine volt battery, it had been re-rigged to transmit thermal heat to its two metal prongs rather than electric impulses. Operated by a simple trigger, it was capable, Dolan had found, of burning through wood with not much in the way of pressure. A pair of FBI regulationissue handcuffs and his cell phone were in the car’s glove compartment. Number one-twelve was right across the street.

Eying the building, Dolan placed three twenty milligram tablets of Adderall, a dexedrine-based stimulant prescribed by one of his rotating psychiatrists, in his mouth and washed them down with the coffee resting in the cup holder on his console. Sixty milligrams would easily keep him awake through the night and probably for twenty-four hours. He had no doubt that Joseph Massi was dead and that Chris Massi was the person calling him to play the tape Joseph had so cleverly made. No doubt Chris thought he was being clever, too. His cleverness would soon have a deadly payoff, just as his brother’s had, and Ed would be even with the Massis once and for all, their blood debt to the Dolans paid in full.

6.

While Ed Dolan was getting settled in his car, ready to wait the night out if necessary, Chris was sitting on the sofa in the living room of Allison McRae’s miniature apartment. He had a direct view into the kitchen, where Michele was scooping vanilla ice cream into two blue bowls at the counter next to the refrigerator. Watching her lean into the oversized Häagen-Dazs container that was among the items Vinnie had brought over earlier, he saw her as a woman for the first time since he’d met her. Her head was covered with a fuzz of blonde hair not too much darker than the yellow-white ice cream. Below it, unweighted by heroin, her brow had cleared, and her eyes had been revealed to be an arresting gray-blue and very pretty. Her injuries had healed, but her fine-featured face, in profile, still seemed tender and vulnerable as she concentrated on the frozen bucket of ice cream, unaware that he was watching her. She was wearing the low-slung faded jeans and sleeveless cotton top that seemed to make up her entire wardrobe. Her body, food-starved until recently, was still rail thin, but somehow, full breasts and the outline of a round and pert rear end had appeared.

Femininity, which is not the same as sexiness, although sexiness is essential to it, is a matter of attitude as much as anything else. There was a certain pride in the way Michele carried the ice cream, one blue bowl in each hand poised in front of her, into the living room. Chris knew that women were innately and rightly proud to be attractive to men, but did not expect Michele’s mental state to have progressed so far only four days post-withdrawal. Equally surprising was the fact that he was pleased to be the man she had decided to put herself on display for. This small surge of pride and femininity on Michele’s part, and minor rush of feeling on Chris’, came and went in a matter of a few seconds, but it is on such sudden and intuitive foundations that many relationships – good and bad – are built.

“When can I go back to my apartment?” Michele asked.

“I told you, never. You have to move. I’ll give you some money.”

They were facing each other in the living room, eating ice cream between sentences, Chris still on the sofa, Michele across from him on an old rattan chair, her back to the kitchen, her legs drawn up under her. They had eaten a mostly silent dinner together, which Chris had made, consisting of a tossed salad and macaroni and cheese from a box. Outside they could hear the sounds of the city as its night life began. The light from the kitchen spilled a few feet into the living room and mingled with the muted glare from the lamp on the end table next to Chris.

“Did Vinnie bring you a car?” Michele said. “I heard you talking about it.”

“Yes, it’s parked in the twenty-four hour garage on Delancey. I may have to leave quickly.”

“How quickly?”

“I’m going out tomorrow morning. I should know more when I get back.”

“I went to the woman’s clinic today at St. Vincent’s.”

“You don’t have to account for your day.”

“I know, I’m free to do as I please.”

“Right.”

“They gave me some Buprenorphine.”

“What’s that for?”

“To reduce the craving.”

“That’s good.”

“And some sleeping pills.”

“Good.”

“And they took blood, to test for AIDS and hepatitis.”

“When do you find out?”

“They told me to come back next Monday.”

Chris said nothing for a second, wondering how he would feel if he were waiting to find out if he had either, or both, of these diseases.

“Do you still feel like you were raped?” he asked.

Michele, awake, silent, had holed up in the bedroom for most of the last sixty-odd hours, drinking soda, chain smoking, occasionally nibbling indifferently at the odds and ends of the packaged food Vinnie had brought over on Saturday. She came out to shower – four times – and once this morning to go to the clinic, although she did not tell Chris her plans. Instead, she said, just before leaving, “I feel like I’ve been raped.”

“You should be grateful,”
he had said
.

“Why? Because you did such a wonderful and noble thing for me?”

“Because you’re clean.”

“And humiliated.”

“That’s a small price to pay.”

“What do you know about prices? On your high horse.”

Vinnie had knocked on the door then, and their first conversation since Saturday morning abruptly ended.

“No,” Michele said now in answer to Chris’ question. “Violated might be a better word.”

“If you have AIDS then you can really feel sorry for yourself.”

Michele, her ice cream finished, the bowl on the coffee table in front of her, gripped the arms of her chair when she heard this and leaned forward as if to reach across and rake her nails – painted a bright red that afternoon – over Chris’ face. Chris, remembering his last clawing a week ago, ran the fingers of his right hand across his cheek bone, where the deepest of her frantic scratches had only recently healed.

“I don’t feel sorry for myself,” Michele said, easing slightly her grip on the chair.

“I think you do.”

“I feel sorry for my son, who was killed in a fire that I started, and for my daughter, who was taken away from me. She lost her twin brother and her mother on the same day.”

Chris had taken Michele’s anger over the last few days as a positive thing. He had expected post-withdrawal apathy and listlessness, but instead, there was the ebb and flow not only of anger but of other real feelings to be seen in her eyes. A raw mix of embarrassment and humility, pride and fear that was evidence, perhaps, of the character so sadly missing in general in junkies, who had endless excuses for their inability to stay clean. In the same way, the tragedy that Michele had just recounted so succinctly did not overwhelm him with pity or even sympathy. If she could stop seeing it as an excuse, she might be able to live without heroin. It was her ticket into and out of addiction.

“When was this?” he asked.

“Last year. An eternity ago.”

“Were you high at the time?”

“Yes. I was at a party across the street. I left a cigarette burning in the apartment.”

“And your husband?”

“We weren’t married. He left after the twins were born.”

“Where are you from?”

“Right here, all my life on the Lower East Side – a loser who killed her son – a beautiful, innocent, five-year old boy.”

Chris listened for a moment to the noises on the street below: people talking and laughing as they walked by, cars stopping, starting, now and again honking. A couple of hip restaurants had opened up around the corner on Clinton Street, drawing college kids and yuppies to mix with the native hookers and drug heads. They could find a lot of local color in this room, he thought, shaking his head slightly, collecting himself before answering.

“I’m angry at other people, Michele,” he said. “Not you. I’m taking it out on you. I’m sorry.”

“Who are you angry at?”

“My father, because he was a killer. My brother, because he was a junkie; my mother, for making him a junkie. Myself, for living a good life while they suffered. They’re all dead now.”

There were tears in Michele’s eyes, and running down her face, which was otherwise still as she stared at Chris.

“I’m sorry,” he said again, realizing what it must have taken to talk about her lost children.

“You can’t die too, Chris,” she said. “You can’t. Please tell me you won’t. I can’t lose you, too.”

The world, which had receded during their conversation, intruded before Chris could answer, in the form of yellow lights flashing at the apartment’s lone front window. Chris got up to look out, and saw, five stories below, a city tow truck double-parked across the street, its strobe light breaking the darkness in jagged swirls. The driver, a stocky black guy with his sleeves rolled up and a Mets cap tilted back on his head, was leaning into the driver’s side window of a car parked at the opposite curb. A light came on in the car, a black nondescript sedan, and then went off, and the driver backed away, tipped his cap and went back to his truck. His two-way radio squawked for a second as he tuned it in to report to his station.

“What is it?” Michele asked.

“Nothing, a tow truck.”

Chris then walked the few steps to where Michele sat, and, standing behind her, put his hands on her shoulders, which were bare except for the thin straps of her blouse.

“I won’t die if you won’t,” he said.

Michele reached up, took one of Chris’ hands, and placed it against her cheek. Holding it there, she cried, and Chris could feel her tears mingling with her warm breath on his hand. Outside, the strobe lights abruptly stopped, and the truck could be heard driving off. Michele pressed Chris’ hand to her face as her sobbing – broken and childlike – subsided, and the room became silent. The world receded again, but they both knew that soon – tonight, tomorrow, soon – a cry would be heard in the night, or a fix offered, or a gun taken up, and it would return with a vengeance.