Sons of the City (13 page)

We didn’t know what to call it, so we just gave it our own name. At night, purse-snatchers and other criminals were always running in there to hide, and we were always running in after them, and when we came out we usually had to scrape off the bottoms of our shoes on a nearby patch of grass. No one knew exactly who came up with our new name for the park, but I would have put him in for a commendation.

When I arrived at the park, protesters were still gathering under the trees. I pulled my police car to the curb and got out and just started chatting with people, hoping to ease the tension a little. I knew some of the people there—residents, store owners, community leaders. They were friendly to me, and I even ran into a woman who called me by name and thanked me profusely for finding the thief who stole her VCR. I didn’t remember her at all. Still, most of the people there watched me with suspicion, a low anger in their eyes.

Finally, the march began, as protesters spilled out of the park and onto the street. Leading the way were two police jeeps from Traffic, side by side, their red and blue lights flashing.

There were men from the neighborhood, but also a lot of women with young kids. Some people were carrying signs with such heartwarming sentiments as this is not a police state and philly cops are racist. Nearly all the marchers were black, but here and there were a few young whites. They looked like Penn students, full of self-importance. I figured maybe they got in the wrong line and thought they were in a march for better cafeteria food.

One young guy near the front of the march was walking backwards with a bullhorn, leading a singsong chant with the words “GESTAPO POLICE, YOU’RE WHITE AND MALE, YOU’RE THE ONES THAT BELONG IN JAIL.”

It took me a second to recognize him—it was Homicide, the guy we picked up the night Steve was shot. As I was watching him fade noisily into the distance, Marisol got on the radio and asked me to come to 64th and Pine, about halfway along the route. She was calm, but from the sound of her voice, I had a feeling there was trouble. When I got there, two boys, both about thirteen, were standing on top of Nick’s car, kicking at the red and blue lights. It didn’t look like the protest was exactly instilling respect for the police among the young.

One of the kids had on a red Phillies cap, the other had a red Sixers cap. Nick was furious, his face was as red as the hats. He was yelling at the kids to get off, and he was trying to grab their legs, but they kept jumping out of the way, playing a game with him. Meanwhile, the street was full of people marching by, chanting about putting police in jail, and they were all watching Nick. It was not a good situation.

Marisol and her partner, Yvonne Shelley, were standing nearby. “We figured you better handle this,” said Marisol.

I walked up to Nick. “Calm down, just ignore them for right now.”

Nick looked at me like I was crazy. “Just try it,” I said, and turned my back on the boys. I motioned for Nick to do the same. Reluctantly, he turned around. It worked—they just stood silently on the car roof, and eventually joined us in watching the march. I told Marisol and Yvonne to take off, we had it under control. After a few minutes, the march had passed, and everything was quiet. I turned back to the boys.

“All right, time to get off.”

“You can’t tell us what to do,” said the kid in the Phillies hat, pointing his finger at me. With that, both of them kicked at the red and blue lights again. They just had sneakers on, but they were kicking hard, and we heard a crunch and pieces of blue plastic flew across the top of the car. More kicks, more crunches, now red plastic was flying. The kids were laughing, having a great time.

“Get off my fuckin’ car, NOW!” Nick yelled. They just laughed and kept kicking. Nick’s face got red again, and he climbed on top of the hood of the car and took out his nightstick.

Before I could even tell him to put it away, he whacked the boy with the Phillies hat in the leg, and the kid yelped in pain and fell to one knee. He looked at Nick in astonishment, like how could he ever do such a thing. Meanwhile, his pal slid down the back window onto the trunk, then onto the street, and took off running.

“That’s enough, Nick,” I said.

It should have been over then. The boy in the Phillies cap had given up, he was ready to come down, just looking for a way to do it. Nick was still standing on the hood of the car, he could have just grabbed the kid’s arm. Instead, he put one foot on the windshield to brace himself, and then swung his stick again, catching the back of the boy’s knee. Without a sound, without resistance, the kid collapsed forward, toward Nick. “Nick!” I yelled. I knew what he was going to do. I could see it coming. I tried to grab Nick’s leg, but he had reared back, he was swinging as hard as he could, and his stick caught the kid’s head with a crack. The boy fell onto the hood of the car, unconscious, blood streaming over the bright white paint.

“What the hell you doing?” I yelled.

Nick was almost surprised by my question.

“You saw him, he was fuckin’ up my car, you think I’m gonna let him get away with that?”

“So you’re going to get us both fired, is that it? Is that what you’re trying to do?”

I looked around—there was no one anywhere. It was like a ghost town. All the onlookers on the sidewalks and the front porches were gone, they seemed to have been simply swept away by the protest march. Was it possible that no one had seen what happened?

What I should have done was call for Rescue, and then filed a full report. But had I done that, Nick would have been charged with assault and fired before the end of his shift, and I probably would have gotten jammed up for letting it happen. You just don’t beat a black kid senseless at a protest march against police.

I had no doubt the Department would hang Nick without a second thought. It wouldn’t matter that maybe he was acting a little crazy because his father had just died, and because his partner had just died. They wouldn’t take that into consideration. They wouldn’t care.

Which meant I had to choose between my cousin and the Department. It took about one second to make a decision.

“We can take him to the hospital ourselves,” I said, taking another look around. “Help me get him into the car.” There was still no sign that anyone had seen.

Together we picked the boy off the hood, carrying him under his arms, and put him in the backseat. He was still unconscious, still bleeding badly. I checked the trunk for the first-aid kit that was supposed to be there, and somehow wasn’t surprised it was missing. I did find a reasonably clean white towel, though, and I got in the back with the kid and held it to his head.

“St. Mike’s,” I told Nick. “Let’s go, now.”

It was a small hospital, only a few blocks away. At one point I took the towel away and looked at the kid’s wound.

“Damn, Nick, you really split the kid’s head open.”

“He had it comin', Eddie.”

As we pulled up to the emergency room area, the boy was beginning to wake up. I quickly unpinned my badge and my nameplate, and dropped them into my shirt pocket. When the car stopped, I pushed opened the door and helped slide the kid out.

“Think you can make it to those doors?” I asked him, and pointed at the two large sliding glass doors to the ER. He was still groggy, and I don’t think he really knew where he was. Without a word, he staggered off in the right general direction. I ran around the back of the car and jumped in the front passenger seat, and Nick oh-so-casually put the car in gear and glided back out into the street. As we made the turn we looked back and saw the ER doors close behind the kid.

There was still blood on the hood, which is not the kind of thing people wouldn’t notice. The only place I knew that had a hose was the Yard at headquarters, but since that was where the march was headed, it probably wasn’t exactly the best place to go. Nick said he had seen a hose behind the supermarket at 54th and Baltimore, it was probably used to clean out the Dumpsters.

We pulled behind the supermarket, and hosed off the car and cleaned out the backseat. Nick gave me a smile as he started to get back behind the wheel.

“Thanks for saving my ass, Eddie.”

I grabbed his arm and pulled him back out. “You think this is a good time?” I said. “This was a fun thing that you did?”

“No, but like I said, he had it comin'.”

“The fuck he did, Nick. First you deck that guy on Fifty-second, now you try to kill this kid. What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“C’mon, Eddie …”

“I should beat the shit out of you right here, Nick. If you weren’t going through such a tough time, I swear to God I would, right here, I would just lay you the fuck out on the street.”

Nick’s eyes were full of surprise and hurt.

“You may not have to deal with Internal Affairs,” I said, “but you’re going to have to deal with me. And I’m going to be a lot fucking worse.”

“What do you want me to do, Eddie?”

I just looked at him. I didn’t know what I wanted him to do. And now what was I supposed to do? What could be worse than him getting fired and locked up?

Nick saw what I was thinking. “You look out for me, don’t you, Eddie?”

I shrugged, like it was no big deal. But it was true, ever since he was a kid, he had counted on me. I was ten years older, he looked up to me. I was the one he could talk to. He never felt he could go to his father, or his brothers, Chris and Matt.

Nick and his brothers were the only cousins I had, and our families were pretty close. Although we lived up in the Northeast, and they lived in Westmount, we were always at each other’s houses. It was like I was the Bari kids’ extra brother. Chris, Matt, and Nick were all ushers at my wedding, though Nick, to his eternal sorrow, was too young to go to the bachelor party.

And though Nick always used to come to me for advice, I was never sure how much help I really was to him. There was the time, when he was in the fourth or fifth grade, that he had stolen a brass baseball paperweight off his teacher’s desk. The teacher suspected another student, but couldn’t prove anything.

It was just before Thanksgiving, which was at our house that year. As soon as Nick walked in with his family, he grabbed my arm and led me back outside onto the front porch.

He told me about the paperweight, and said, “What should I do, Eddie?”

I was nineteen, and here I was being asked to give moral guidance to a nine-year-old. I remember standing out there with him, watching the street get dark. It was one of those clear November evenings where you can see the stars even in the city. I couldn’t wait to get dinner over with and get back out onto the street with my friends.

I thought about telling him to just admit he stole the paperweight, and take his punishment like a man. You can’t let a friend take the rap. But I figured he had to come to that conclusion himself or it wouldn’t be worth anything.

I ended up sounding like one of those idiot older brothers on TV. “You have to do what you think is best. Whatever feels right to you.”

Nick nodded like he understood, and we went inside.

When our families got together at Christmas, I asked him how it had all turned out. He told me he had thought about what I had said, and decided to keep his mouth shut. It worked—nothing ever happened to him or his friend, and he got to keep the paperweight. Though one night he was using it to knock out streetlights, and it went through a neighbor’s upstairs window. So much for imparting my wisdom.

As Nick and I drove back to district headquarters, I remembered the paperweight. In all the times I had tried to help Nick over the years, had I ever really known what I was doing?

Nothing much else happened that afternoon, if you don’t count the woman who came down to file a complaint against police. Her thirteen-year-old son said he had been badly beaten by two white officers during the protest march. She happened to stop by as Barney Stiller was giving a speech to the crowd outside, and he got wind of it, and got the woman to tell her story through the bullhorn. The crowd was furious, and some young guys started yelling that they should storm our building. I thought we were going to have fright night at the 20th, but things eventually calmed down.

Kirk called me into his office, he was pissed as shit—he wanted to know who the hell those two cops were. I promised him I’d do my best to find out.

A
few minutes after eleven that night, my pager went off. It was at the end of the shift, and I was coming up the steps from the basement locker room after changing out of my uniform. I checked the phone number—it was Doc, calling from his house in Fishtown. He knew I’d be getting off work now.

I walked into the operations room and used one of the black rotary phones. We were probably the last police department in the world to get push-button phones, except maybe for some little town in India that used cows instead of police cars.

“Hey, buddy, I want you to see somethin',” Doc said when I called. “Need your advice.”

“What’s up?”

“Still wearin’ your uniform?”

“No, I just changed.”

“Good. Do me a favor and take a ride by Sagiliano’s. Stick your head in the door—don’t go in—just look around, see what you see.”

“What am I looking for, Doc?”

“You’ll see. Just don’t go in, OK?”

“Sure.”

“I could sure use your advice on this one, buddy.”

We hung up, and I headed outside to my Blazer. Sagiliano’s was a corner taproom in Westmount, and everyone knew it was a mob hangout. Neighborhood people mostly came there to drink, but it was also a restaurant, and there were a few booths and tables in the back. It was the kind of place that if you sat down at one of the tables, at the next one you’d see Mama making the ravioli by hand.

I’d been there a couple of times on jobs. It had a low, wood-paneled ceiling, and the dimly lit bar was in a long, narrow U shape, so people could sit all the way around and talk to the person sitting across.

Like most workingman’s bars in Westmount, Sagiliano’s had no pretensions whatsoever—the counter of the bar wasn’t polished oak, it was just cheap Formica, worn shiny in places by the bottoms of countless beer bottles. Against the darkened walls was the usual shuffleboard-bowling game, the video blackjack machine, the worn-out jukebox.