Sons and Princes

by James Lepore

  The albino, keeping his right hand inside his jacket, used his free hand to tilt his dark glasses forward, to get a better look at Chris, who came to a stop no more than fifty feet away. Before either could make a move or say anything, a silver Mercedes, coming from the next street over, pulled up and double parked in front of the building. Rodriguez quickly descended the worn brownstone steps and got into the front passenger seat. As the car drove by, Chris mouthed the words “fuck you” to Rodriguez, who, through the car’s tinted glass window, looked like a rare species of deep water fish deprived of light for millions of years. Chris watched until the Mercedes turned right at Delancey Street, and was swallowed up by the city.

  The door to Michele’s apartment was off its hinges, the jamb splintered, and she lay on the floor in the middle of the tiny living room in the fetal position. An outsized old kitchen knife was stuck in the hardwood floor about six inches from her head. Please don’t be dead, Chris said out loud, as he knelt down and turned her onto her back. Her right eye was swollen shut, her left eye open, but glazed, her face raw with ragged bruises, but she was breathing – softly hissing – through her mouth. Her denim mini-skirt was hiked up above her waist. Chris pulled it down and straightened her torn blouse and bra before picking her up and laying her on the sofa, propping her head up with a cushion. He could see the fear in her good eye as it began to focus on him, and feel her body stiffen then release. She was awake and frightened, but there was no fight left in her.

  “Who’re you?” she whispered.

  “I’m Chris, Allison’s friend. I was here on Sunday.”

  “Allison’s dead.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you know who killed her?”

  “The guy who just beat you up.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I’m calling an ambulance.”

  “No. No ambulance, no hospital.”

  “You could have broken bones in your face, around that eye.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “You’re not okay.”

  “They’ll arrest me, or try to clean me up. I’m high. I’m always fucking high...”

  Michele’s open eye was a regulation, farm girl blue, incongruous beneath an arched, severely plucked dark brown eyebrow and a head of spiked, harshly bleached, nearly white hair. Chris could see that under her bruises and her heavy make-up her face was a sickly green. Her street toughness had not stood up well to a dose of Mickey Rodriguez’ unfiltered evil.

  “I’ll clean you up,” he said, “then we’ll talk some more. Don’t move.”

  He poked around in the small, shabby kitchen and bathroom – the only other rooms in the apartment – and returned with peroxide, paper towels, ice in a dish and a clean washcloth soaked in cold water. Michele closed her good eye as Chris wiped off her make-up, cleaned the open wounds on her cheeks, nose and mouth with peroxide and then used the wash cloth to make an ice pack, which he placed against her swollen eye, picking up her hand – surprisingly delicate and pretty – and guiding it to her head so that she could hold it in place herself.

  “Any other injuries?” he asked.

  Michele shook her head.

  “When did you get high?”

  “This morning.”

  “Do you have more?”

  “I bought two dime bags last night. There’s one left. Why? You want some?”

  “No. I was thinking you’d need it later.”

  For an answer, she closed her eye and turned her face to the back of the couch.

  “What did Mickey want?”

  No answer.

  “Michele,” Chris said. “I need to know what happened. If you won’t talk to me, I’ll call an ambulance. I’ll make sure you’re here when they get here. They’ll fuck you up with methadone. You won’t get high for a week, maybe two. You’ll go through withdrawal. I can’t play games with you. There’s too much at stake.”

  No answer. Chris took his cell phone out of his pocket and dialed three random numbers. Michele turned and reached for the phone, but Chris pulled it away.

  “Turn it off,” she said, her voice raspy, tired. “Turn it off.”

  Chris clicked the phone off, his eyes locked on Michele’s open eye.

  “They killed Heather,” Michele said.

  “Who did?”

  “Labrutto and the freak. They filmed it.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Allison told me. She saw the video. She had given Labrutto my name, to be in a porn film. She called to warn me not to do it. She told me about Heather.”

  “You knew this when I came here?”

  “Yes, but who the fuck are you? Another killer for all I know.”

  “What did Mickey want?”

  “He told me the cops would want to talk to me, since I lived right across from Allison. He said if I told them anything, he’d kill me. I tried to stab him, but he laughed and beat the shit out of me. He said Labrutto still wants me to do a movie for him, with him – the freak – as my male lead.”

  “Were the cops here?”

  “A cop was here yesterday afternoon, interviewing the people in the building. He caught me in the hallway. He wanted to know if Allison had visitors over the weekend. I told him about you. Then early this morning, about seven, they came back and went through Allison’s apartment. I could hear the super letting them in. They knocked on my door, but I didn’t answer. They slipped a card under the door. It’s in the kitchen. A guy named Magnuson from the U.S. Attorney’s office.”

  “Did Allison set Heather up to be killed?”

  “Not on purpose. She thought it would just be a porn movie. When she saw the video, she freaked out.”

  “Did she tell anyone else about the film?”

  “She said she told the cockeyed guy, Nick. He was supposed to help her escape. She figured if she couldn’t get them another girl to kill, she’d be next.”

  “So Labrutto doesn’t know that you know about the snuff film?”

  “No.”

  “And he still wants you to be in one of his movies?”

  “Right.”

  “So he can have another snuff film to sell, and at the same time, get rid of a key witness against him: you.”

  “Why am I a witness?’

  “You’re the only person who knows that Allison was living at Labrutto’s house for the last two months. He has to kill you. He’s greedy though: he figures he might as well make money off of your murder. Am I getting through to you?”

  “I’m a junkie, but I’m not stupid.”

  “Do you have someplace you can go?”

  Michele was fading, her speech slurred, her voice barely audible, but she came semi-alive at this question.

  “Someplace I could go?” she said, trying to smile.

  “Yes.”

  “If I had someplace I could go, I’d have gone there a long time ago. It’s time for me to die.”

  “You can’t die. You have to help me kill Labrutto, and Mickey.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Chris.”

  “Then we’ll die together, Chris.”

  “No, we won’t. We’ll live. I will, anyway. Don’t fall asleep. With that head injury, you could go into a coma. I’ll make some coffee. And some calls. Do you still have Allison’s keys?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. You’re moving into her apartment.”

  Chris found the makings and put coffee on. While it was brewing, using the phone on Michele’s kitchen wall, he dialed information and asked for the number of LaSalle Academy in Manhattan. Michele, through whom Chris could get to both Labrutto and Rodriguez, assuming he could fashion some kind of a plan, needed to be nursed, fed her drugs, and – for want of a nicer word – imprisoned for the next few days. If John Farrell felt he needed to make amends for what he did to Chris twenty-seven years ago, then here was his chance.

  6.

  “Joseph?”

  “Yes?”

  �
��It’s me, Jodi.”

  “Hi. What’s up?”

  “Someone else is looking for Woody.”

  “What?”

  “Someone else is looking for Woody. I thought you should know.”

  “Who?”

  “A guy named Rocco Stabile.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Patrice called me. This guy Stabile stopped by the bar today.”

  “What did he say, exactly?”

  “He wanted to know who Woody hung out with last night, and where.”

  “Did Patrice tell him about your girls?”

  “No. She thought he was a cop. She said she hadn’t seen Woody in a couple of weeks.”

  “Woody’s dead, Jodi.”

  “Dead?”

  “Killed by Stabile’s people.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Do you still have your place in Florida?”

  “Yes.”

  “Get on a plane. Take Nicole and the other girl that was with Woody. I’ll call you in a few days.”

  “I’m not going anywhere until I know what’s going on.”

  “Woody did a hit. A mob connected hit. He killed two people. He was eliminated as a witness. Now they’re wondering if he spilled his guts to somebody, to eliminate them, too. Are you following me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Things will calm down, but you have to go away for a week or two.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “I talked to Woody, then I saw him get shot.”

  “Christ.”

  Joseph had arrived home, that is, at Marsha’s twentyfirst floor apartment overlooking the East River, taken ten milligrams of Valium, and fallen asleep on the plush sectional sofa in the living room. The buzzing of his cell phone had awakened him with a start. Now, his head clear, he was standing on the balcony, the phone to his ear, watching with one eye as the light from the setting sun turned Queens’ industrial riverbank into a magic kingdom of shining smokestacks, geometrically shaded rooftops and glittering windows.

  “Nicole can be a bitch,” Jodi said. “What if she won’t come?”

  “Someone else may have seen her with Woody at the Royalton, or at the hotel. They’ll kill anybody they think talked to him last night. Tell her that.”

  “Including you. Come with us.”

  “I can’t. There’s something I need to do. Maybe I’ll fly down next week. We can play.”

  “I’m worried, Joseph.”

  “That’s good. You’ll be cautious. But it’ll be fine. I have a plan.”

  Joseph did not have a plan. Plans did not play a prominent role in his life. The furthest ahead he thought was to the identities and hangouts of the people, usually women, he could borrow or scam money from. Occasionally, when desperate, he could be creative. He once staged an accident in which twelve street people in a van he was driving sustained whiplash injuries when he was rear-ended by a bus on Sixth Avenue. The lawyer he referred his passengers to gave him ten percent of each settlement, and he made an easy ten thousand dollars. But this was not an insurance scam he had on his hands now.

  Before taking his Valium and falling into a dead sleep earlier, he had called Vinnie Rosamelia, who told him that the albino had ransacked Chris’ apartment late last night, and that this morning, Rocco Stabile had stopped by asking for Chris. Earlier, from Lou Falco, he learned that Ed Dolan, knowing of the Scarpa-Chris Massi connection, was looking at Chris as a suspect in the Scarpa/ McRae murders. Dolan would soon discover, if he had not already, that Chris had visited Allison’s apartment on Sunday, which would make his case against Chris that much stronger.

  The hit on Woody by a DiGiglio soldier, the search of Chris’ apartment – obviously for the stolen DVD – Rocco Stabile’s inquiries, these all meant one thing: it was Junior Boy who was in the snuff film business, not Barsonetti. DiGiglio, proud of his reputation as an honorable, even noble, gangster, would kill anybody who could expose him: Scarpa, Allison, Woody, Chris. And Dolan – the psychotic cocksucker – now had compelling evidence connecting Chris to a double murder. DiGiglio or Dolan alone wanting Chris dead would be bad enough, but both of them at once pretty much guaranteed that his brother’s life was over – unless Joseph could think of something, could actually come up with a plan that would save Chris’ life. Standing on the balcony, his tailored gray slacks and dark blue silk shirt wrinkled from sleeping in them, gazing down at the river but not seeing it, Joseph smiled. No one took him seriously. He was a lackey, someone to be taken advantage of, or abused, to be tossed an occasional crumb in deference to his father. The last thing anyone saw him as was a threat.

  Marsha was in Northern California, painting. She would not be back until Saturday. The bargain they had initially struck – she could have a fling with a sexy, dangerous thirty-two year old as long as she let him roam at will and financed his life style – had lately turned into something else. They liked each other. It would be hard to say which of them was more surprised by this turn of events, Marsha, the never married workaholic – her drug was her art – or Joseph, clean of heroin but daily edging closer to the abyss.

  Marsha gave Joseph, who had never had a credit card, a thousand dollars a month, and paid his tab at two local restaurants. Searching through her desk for her checkbook, he thought of what she said when they got home from dinner with Chris and the kids on Saturday night: He’s a handsome guy, your brother, but you’re handsomer, and a lot more fun. He’s too serious. What cross is he carrying? His disbarment? That’s probably a blessing. Still, I knew you had a brother, but I never knew how much you loved him until tonight. I saw it in those beautiful eyes of yours all night long.

  7.

  Guy Labrutto had refused to say word one to the investigators sent by Ed Dolan to interview him, and the documents obtained in the search of his home revealed nothing incriminating. Corporate taxes were fully paid by West Coast Productions, his porn video company, and Labrutto paid the appropriate personal income tax on the substantial salary he took annually from the business. “Consultants fees” of close to two million dollars per year were paid to Claremont Enterprises, a New Jersey company that invoiced for services that included casting, script editing, talent development and marketing. This company was owned by the same two men, brothers named Alphonse and Achilles Cirillo, who owned and operated a strip club called RazzMaTazz on Route 46 in Garfield.

  State records showed that Claremont was formed in 1992 by Thomas M. Stabile, Esquire, a known mob lawyer and, of course, Rocco’s brother. Alphonse and Achilles, dumbfounded that the authorities would be interested in them for any reason, referred Dolan’s investigators to Stabile, who politely refused to say anything unless and until he received a subpoena. The Cirillos, with their gold necklaces and onyx pinky rings, were no script editors, and were probably passing their “fees” on to Junior Boy via Tom Stabile, whose presence guaranteed that the don was involved. To make matters worse – excruciatingly worse – forensics had just reported that the fingerprints found on the water bottle and glass taken from Labrutto’s living room were a near match to Chris Massi’s but inconclusive for courtroom purposes.

  All of this information came to Dolan in a report he received on the Thursday afternoon following the murders. As he read it, a familiar mix of dread and anxiety began to drum its fingers in his gut. Of late, he had kept this old foe at bay with drugs: Paxil and Zoloft prescribed by a psychiatrist on Fifth Avenue who charged four hundred and fifty dollars for a fifty-minute session the sole purpose of which was to write a prescription. He was certain that a victory over Massi and DiGiglio would vanquish this enemy as well.

  And he was close. Without having to work very hard, or do anything rash, meaning illegal, he was very close. He had the Massi-Scarpa connection, he had Chris’ fingerprints in Allison McRae’s apartment with the hooker’s statement that she had let him in on Sunday. He had Labrutto’s name and address in Scarpa’s wallet, and he had the Labrutto-DiGiglio connection. But he was not clo
se enough to indict anybody. He did not have enough on any individual suspect to leverage them into a traditional testimony-for-free-pass deal, and empaneling a grand jury was out of the question. Everyone would take the fifth amendment and he’d be worse off than when he started, having tipped his hand with nothing to show for it.

  Dolan knew that the panic he was feeling came from his fear that this, his one, great opportunity to avenge his father’s death, was slipping away from him, that never again would he have both Junior Boy and Massi within such tantalizingly easy reach. The efforts of the Christian Brothers at LaSalle Academy and of the Jesuits at Fordham to instill in their students the simple premise of all morality – that the end never justifies the means – had had no effect on Ed Dolan. In fact, like all true believers, he saw his point of view as the morally correct one. He was perfectly justified in returning hurt for hurt, death for death. He had tried to terrorize Massi with a false indictment and a disbarment complaint grounded in lies, but he now saw the inherent softness of that approach. Indeed, Chris’ acquittal at the trial could be viewed as evidence of Dolan’s timidity. He would not let that happen again. All he needed was a better plan, a stronger will, and he would prevail. His faith in the tenets of his cult-of-one invigorated, lost for a second in his daydream, the ringing of his telephone jarred Ed Dolan forcefully back to reality.

  Picking it up, and listening to his secretary, it was as if the machinery of the universe had been all along operating quietly but efficiently for the sole good of Ed Dolan Jr. Joseph Massi was at the front desk, asking to see him, and only him.

  “What should I do?” his secretary asked.

  “Bring him back,” Dolan answered, “and then hold my calls.”

  Dolan had not seen Joseph Massi since the June day twenty-four years ago when he and Chris graduated from LaSalle. The younger Massi, a pretty, eight-year-old boy in a blue blazer and tie, with a mop of thick black hair and big, liquid eyes, had held his mother’s hand the entire day. That he had turned out a junkie and a punk was common knowledge and a source of satisfaction to Dolan. Anything that hurt the Massi family made him happy. But beyond that, Joseph did not interest him. There would have been little or no gratification in destroying such a weakling. Better that he lived to torture his parents and his brother. Entering his office, Joseph, still pretty, in his summer-weight, finely spun dark blue suit, creamy turtleneck and braided Italian shoes, looked more like a Ralph Lauren model than a habitual heroin user.