Sons of the City (21 page)

“What?”

“Exactly.”

“What?” I asked again.

“Exactly,” he said. “Sometimes ‘What?’ is a trick question.”

It was definitely Max. Our conversations always sounded a little like Abbott and Costello.

“I got to talk to you, pal,” he said. “How about lunch?”

“Listen, I’m not in the Organized Crime Unit anymore.”

“I know that. You’re in the Twentieth. I don’t care, I still got to talk to you.”

I hesitated. I couldn’t imagine what Max could tell me that would be very important.

I heard a woman’s voice in the background, and then Max said, “Gotta go. How about our McDonald’s on Ridge, at high noon?”

I told him OK. At least he had picked a classy restaurant.

W
hen I pulled into the McDonald’s a few hours later, I spotted Max’s big yellow Lincoln Continental in the parking lot. The bright sunshine glinted off the Lincoln’s shiny chrome bumpers and side-view mirrors, and slid off the roof and hood in all directions, so that it looked like the car was generating its own light.

I parked my Blazer a few spaces away, and headed for the entrance. The smell of French fries washed over me in a wave, opening my nostrils and making my mouth water. Nothing like McDonald’s fries. It was one of those clear July mornings that can trick you into thinking the summer’s never going to get stifling hot. I had on khaki shorts and a light blue golf shirt, and as I walked through the lot I enjoyed the feel of the cool breeze on my arms and legs. I almost forgot why I was there.

Almost. The sight of Max waiting in line snapped me out of it. Max was in his late twenties, and was big, hulky, not really all fat or muscle, but something in between, like he was just born that way and couldn’t help it. His face, which was big to match his big body, had a warmth and expansiveness, like it could draw you in, envelop you before you knew what was happening. Today, Max had on a gigantic red sweatshirt with the sleeves ripped off, gray sweatpants with the legs pushed up to just below the knee, and spanking-new white high-top basketball shoes. Could have been just another happy-go-lucky overage Philly corner boy.

Max spotted me and gave a big toothy smile.

“Yo, Eddie,” he said in his deep South Philly voice. “You can stand with me.”

I glanced at the man in line behind him, a quiet-looking bald guy, cradling a book on computers under his arm. He looked way up at Max and then down at the floor and started blinking a bunch of times.

Max paid no attention. He was next at the counter and carefully gave his order to a pimply kid in a maroon McDonald’s outfit.

“Two Big Macs, two large fries, two milk shakes—one vanilla, one chocolate—two apple pies.”

He turned to me.

“You want anything? My treat—on the house.” “Fries and black coffee.”

Max ordered for me and then asked the kid whether the shakes were low-fat.

“Well, sir, they’re lower fat.”

“I don’t want no lower fat ones. I want the low-fat ones.”

“Sir, I’m sorry …”

“Check in the back, maybe you got some.”

The kid nervously scratched his neck. A thin young woman with a pinched face and a greasy maroon sun visor appeared and asked Max if there was a problem. I glanced around for a place to sit down. This kind of thing happened every time we came here.

The first time was about three years before, when Max had just become an informant and we needed a place to meet. How about the McDonald’s on up Ridge Avenue, he suggested. I tried to talk him out of it. Even though that was on the northern edge of the city, far from Westmount, I was worried about someone chancing by. Anybody could get the sudden urge for a Big Mac. But Max insisted no one he knew had ever been up this far—usually his friends never left the neighborhood except to go to prison or maybe the Jersey shore.

I had asked him where on Ridge Avenue the McDonald’s was.

“Never been up there,” he said.

“Then how do you know about it?”

“I
don’t
know about it,” Max said.

“Max, is there a McDonald’s up on Ridge Avenue?”

“There has to be,” he said. “There’s McDonald’s everywhere.”

This was classic Max: he was proposing that we meet at a place he was only guessing existed, but which turned out actually did, because he was right: there
is
a McDonald’s everywhere.

I glanced over at the counter, where the drama was continuing. There was a lot of talk about low-fat and lower-fat and what about no-fat and can you mix the chocolate and vanilla and do you have carrot sticks they’re supposed to be healthy no we don’t have them anymore sir, and finally Max was lumbering away with a tray piled high with his trophies from the war.

We found a booth around the corner near the rest rooms, and settled into the hard plastic yellow seats. There was no one around.

Max pulled the lid off one of his milk shakes, tilted the cup over his mouth, and just poured the whole thing down his throat.

“Max, you don’t even know what those things taste like, do your?”

“What do you mean? They taste like milk shakes.”

Max was a mob associate, which meant he wasn’t actually a member, he wasn’t a “made” guy, but he was part of the larger organization. He reported to Canaletto, and his job was to be a salesman. Whenever the mob would have something that “fell off the back of a truck,” Max’s job was to find a buyer. Once he did, he’d haggle out the price, take the cash, and arrange for delivery.

It was easy work, unless the buyer happened to be an undercover cop. Which was how I met Max. He was already on ten years’ probation for receiving stolen goods, and he took my suggestion to become a snitch rather than an inmate. For a few months after that, he’d meet me at the McDonald’s and pass along information—after he ate all the food in the place.

One day he didn’t show up for a meeting, and I lost all trace of him. He just dropped off the radar. I always wondered whether he got whacked, maybe for snitching. Part of me felt bad about that, because I liked him.

“Where have you been?” I asked him. “It’s weird, Max, but I’ve actually missed you.”

He smiled for a moment, but then turned serious. “I messed up on a couple of jobs, and they didn’t want nothin’ to do with me no more. I’m sort of workin’ my way back.”

“Good for you.” I meant it.

“But you gotta know right off, Eddie, I ain’t a snitch no more. I got some information, but it ain’t snitchin'.”

I nodded, as if that made perfect sense.

“I’m doin’ odd jobs now, you know what I mean? Whatever they want.”

“Sure.”

“Like, one of these jobs was takin’ the big guy’s computer into the shop.”

I knew he meant Mickey Bravelli. People in Bravelli’s crew never mentioned his name in public, in case law enforcement was listening in. Of course, Max was now sitting across the table from law enforcement, but he didn’t seem to factor that in.

“What computer?” I asked.

“The one at his house. I went and picked it up yesterday and took it to Hotshot. It was broke or somethin'.”

Hotshot was a computer store near Penn. It was really a front for Bravelli’s central bookmaking operation.

“What’s on this computer?”

“How would I know? They want me to take it in, I take it in, I don’t ask questions. But maybe something good’s on it. If I was you, I’d go right over to Hotshot and grab it.”

“Maybe I will, Max, thanks.”

“Don’t say I never did nothin’ for you.”

“OK, I won’t. But if this isn’t snitching, Max, why are you telling me?”

He drained his second milk shake. “Because of one of the other jobs they had me do.”

I waited.

“I need your help, Eddie, I figured maybe if I did some-thin’ for you, you’d help me out.”

“I might.”

Max smiled, like I had already said yes, which I hadn’t.

“What was the other job?” I asked.

I could see he didn’t want to tell me, he really didn’t.

“Go ahead,” I said. “Just say it.”

“All right. OK. All right, I’ll say it. I was with Goop that night.”

“What night?”

“The night that cop got killed. Me and Goop went to that house, got these two people out.”

“That was
you?”

Ronald was probably the only person in the world who would have thought that both Goop and Max were cops. To him, all white people really did look alike.

“I didn’t know what was going to happen, Eddie, I swear to God, I swear on a stash of Bibles. I just did what Goop said.”

“But you knew there was going to be a hit.”

Max tried to gauge how much he needed to say to me.

“It’s better if you tell me everything,” I said.

“Yeah OK. I figured they were going to whack somebody, but I thought it would just be some moolie. I mean, look at the neighborhood we were in.”

“But why’d they kill Steve Ryder? Why’d they pick him?”

Max fished around in all his McDonald’s wrappers for something else to eat, and when that failed, he examined both his empty milk shake cups. Finally, he looked up at me.

“I didn’t want to tell you this, but I will. We were all in the clubhouse watchin’ the news, and the funeral comes on, you know, the funeral of that cop. And the big guy says, “I hope Ryder learned his fuckin’ lesson.”

“Did he say what lesson that was?”

“No, and I wasn’t gonna ask him. I didn’t want to become a lesson myself.”

A pregnant woman was coming our way, leading a little blond girl by the hand. They brushed past and disappeared into the women’s rest room.

“Who was the shooter?” I asked Max. “Ru-Wan Sanders?”

“Where’d you get him?”

“Remember, Max? He was the one who showed up dead in a trunk with a sign on him that said “Cop Killer.” You didn’t forget already, did you?”

“No, no way. But I think that was just a game the big guy was playing.”

“What do you mean, a game? The shooter was somebody else in the black Mafia?”

“I’ll tell you, Eddie, dimes to doughnuts, from what I heard I don’t think the black Mafia had anything to do with that.”

“Yeah, but the shooter was black.”

“You don’t think the big guy can find one of them to do a piece of work for him?”

“So you’re saying Bravelli just wanted to make it look like it was the black Mafia?”

“Pretty smart, huh?”

“Actually, yeah. It throws suspicion off of him, and gets the Commissioner to go after his enemies.”

I remembered Michelle talking about how happy Bravelli was with the crackdown on the black Mafia.

But why was Max telling me all this?

“You know, you didn’t have to come to me. Max,” I said. “We had no idea you were part of this—maybe we never would have found out.”

“Sure, I know. But what if you would’ve? I mean, without me telling you. What would’ve you done?”

I thought about it. “We probably would have charged you with every back crime we’re holding over your head.”

“And then I’d be in jail, right?”

“Hell, I would hope so.”

“And the big guy would figure you’d be trying to get me to rat him out.”

“Which we would.”

“I don’t think he’d like that. In fact, he already told me I can’t be trusted as far as I can throw him.”

“He said that?”

“Right in front of everybody. We were all coming out of the clubhouse one day, I forget what we were talking about. He says, Max, if everyone here got locked up, I’d bet you’d be the first person to snitch.”

Bravelli was smarter than I thought.

“Can you believe he said that, Eddie?”

“Max, you
are
a snitch.”

“I was a snitch. Not no more.”

“So Bravelli should trust you now.”

“Yeah, he should.”

“Max, you’re ratting him out right now.”

“But that’s only because he thinks I’m a rat.”

“Whatever you say, Max.”

“The bottom of the line is that if you throw me in jail, the big guy’s gonna think I’m snitching on this thing with Goop. And that’s gonna be the end of Max Tuba, Man About Town.”

“So in other words, you’re ratting Bravelli out so he won’t think you’re ratting him out.”

“Now you got the whole picture postcard. I’ll tell you everything I know, everything I don’t know. But you got to promise—you got to promise—you won’t let word get out that I was in that house.”

“It might be out of my hands, Max.”

He looked at me, pleading. “Why do you think I came to you, Eddie? I can trust you. I mean, nobody ever found out I was a snitch, right?”

“You and me are the only two people who know.”

“So you got to protect me now. I’m a confidential informant, right?”

I thought about it. “All right, Max. I’ll make sure we keep you out of this.”

He looked very relieved.

“By the way,” I asked him, “what does Bravelli’s computer look like?”

“You can’t miss if,” he said, excited now to be helping me out. “It’s white.”

“Max, all computers are white.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, really.”

He thought about that. “Oh, yeah,” he said, “it’s got a lot of little yellow things on it.”

“What yellow things?”

“You know, those little yellow things.”

“Max, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Those tiny pieces of paper, you know, you stick ‘em places.”

“Post-It notes?”

“No, Eddie, it’s not a cereal. It’s somethin’ you write on.”

“I get it, Max.”

“You sure?”

“Pretty sure.”

With Max, you could never be sure.

H
otshot was run by Bobby Mono, Bravelli’s uncle. He was an old-time made guy, very highly respected, and Bravelli put him in charge of his gambling operations.

Throughout Philadelphia there were a number of independent bookmakers handling basketball games, baseball, everything. Bravelli took 10 percent of their profits in exchange for letting them stay open, but he also provided a valuable service. Sometimes the bookies got so much action on a single bet, like on a playoff game, that an upset would wipe them out, put them in deep debt. So Bravelli—as part of his fee—let them edge off some of those bets to the mob. If there was an upset, the mob would pay everyone off and the bookmaker would be OK. If the mob lost big, well, it had deep pockets. It could never go broke.