Sons and Princes

by James Lepore

  Labrutto seemed pleased with himself at the telling of this lie.

  “And the thing on the cliff?” Junior Boy asked. “What happened?”

  “Scarpa went nuts. It was botched. I’m sorry, Junior Boy.”

  “You know you need my permission to do a hit?”

  “Yes, of course, but they were stealing. I thought you’d approve.”

  “If it looked like an accident, I’d never find out.”

  “Yes, that was the idea. I wanted to solve it easily and quickly, with no headaches for you or anybody else.”

  He was gaining confidence, this Labruttto. More pleased with himself by the minute.

  “Did Massi say why he came along with Scarpa?”

  “No, maybe they’re old friends. I don’t know.”

  “So you were stuck with him?”

  “Right. I couldn’t let him go out with Nick and the girl. I offered him a drink.”

  “Well, there’s no harm done,” Junior Boy said. “But I’m sending someone to live with you. You teach him the pornography business, he’ll teach you the ways of the family. You bring in a lot of money for us, and I want it to stay that way. I can’t have any more fiascoes like this one.”

  “You mean live with me at my house?”

  “Yes. I’m told it’s a big house.”

  “Fine. Good. Who will you be sending?”

  “I’m not sure yet. Probably Rocco.”

  “When?”

  “Today.”

  “I see.”

  Labrutto, the don knew, did not see. He was confused, no longer quite so pleased with himself, which is how Junior Boy wanted him to be. Was Rocco Stabile a blessing or a curse? Would he – Labrutto – soon be made a member of the family, or dead? Did the don believe him or not? He had no choice but to go along, to let Stabile, potentially his killer, into his home. To protest would be a sure sign of guilt, and, worse, to reject a gift offered by Junior Boy: the possibility of being asked to join the DiGiglio family, of becoming a made man.

  “Who knows,” Junior Boy said, watching Labrutto as he sat in obvious dismay, “maybe, we can come up with something for you to do for the family, something you can make your bones on. Let me think about it.”

  “Thank you, Junior Boy.”

  “One last thing,” the don said, holding the DVD out toward Labrutto.

  “Yes?”

  “How do you break these things?”

  “You want it destroyed?”

  “Yes.”

  Labrutto took the DVD from the don’s extended hand, removed it from its case, and, using his two hands, snapped it into several pieces. As he did this, Junior Boy watched, taking note of Labrutto’s stubby, hairy hands. When he finished, the don smiled for the first time, but it was not a warm smile, not a smile meant to encourage confidence or a sense of security. Far from it.

  9.

  The next day, a week to the day from the murder of Nick and Allison, Chris went out early to buy coffee and a bagel at a bakery on Elizabeth Street around the corner from La Luna. He had gone out twice in the past few days, both times to see how Michele and John Farrell were doing, which was both good and bad. Though her physical injuries were beginning to heal, Michele, terrified by the memory of Mickey Rodriguez breaking her door down and repeatedly pounding her face and head with his fists, craved her heroin more than ever. This was not the time for a forced withdrawal, especially without the help of methadone, which Farrell could not get without a prescription.

  When her small stash of dope ran out, Farrell went on the street and bought more, cooking and injecting it himself, trying to spread out the time between fixes as much as possible. He would wean her gradually, he said, but in a week or two, she would be strong enough to go out on her own, and how could he then prevent her from selling her body to get high? In addition, though there was a good deal of leeway in his emeritus status, he could not stay away from LaSalle indefinitely. On reflection, Chris realized, the scenario on Suffolk Street was mostly bad. Michele would soon be among the walking dead, and Farrell could be arrested for what he was doing, and, worse, tossed out of the Christian Brothers in disgrace after fifty years in the order.

  On Friday night, Chris had had dinner with Joseph, Vinnie Rosamelia and Lou Falco in Lou’s apartment. Although Joseph had a high tolerance for heroin, and could function almost normally under its influence, Chris could tell that he had started using again. He could spot the signs, where others might not, especially in his brother, who was fastidious about his appearance: the long sleeved shirt, the tiny pupils, the lack of interest in food, the slower speech patterns. In the past, Chris would immediately raise the issue, get in Joseph’s face about it, but on Friday, he didn’t. Even when they were alone at the end of the night saying goodbye, he let it go.

  There was something else in Joseph’s eyes besides the glaze of heroin, and something in his voice, as well. Chris had not been able to put his finger on it. Fear, bitterness, resignation? Something new and unusual was lurking beneath his brother’s customary casual hipness. Chris, losing patience, and getting claustrophobic holed up in La Luna’s back room, had announced his intention to leave Lou’s the next day, Saturday, to find a more comfortable place to live, but Joseph had prevailed upon him to stay at least over the weekend.

  Chris had not spoken to Joseph since, and, returning from the bakery, sipping his coffee in what passes for dawn’s early light in New York, he made up his mind to immediately check into a decent hotel and call his brother. His share of the proceeds from the sale of his parents’ house had arrived in his bank account, and so money was, for once, not an issue. He did not doubt the seriousness of the trouble he was in. He continued to assume that someone in the DiGiglio-Labrutto-Barsonetti triangle wanted him dead. He would be foolish to act on any other premise. But a week of inactivity was enough. It was time to be proactive; precisely how, he did not know, but he would figure that out once he was settled someplace with some air and light, where the thinking would be easier, less oppressive.

  He assumed that the Barsonetti proposal was now moot, and his reaction to this thought was one of disappointment. He looked back with something like nostalgia to the day – just a week ago – when the only problem on his plate was whether or not to become a hitman for the Mafia.

  These were Chris’ thoughts as he reached the corner of Elizabeth and Hester streets, where he stopped to take another sip of coffee. When he finished, bringing the Styrofoam container slowly away from his lips, his attention was drawn to a petite blonde woman confronting Lou Falco in front of La Luna. It was Marsha Davis, and she was shouting at Lou, who was trying to quiet her, holding his arms out in the classic “there’s nothing I can do” configuration. Marsha, hugging a large tan envelope to her chest, tried to step around Lou, who blocked her way, the two of them moving in dance-like tandem for a few seconds, stopping abruptly when Chris approached.

  “Chris,” Marsha said, “tell this man who I am.”

  “What are you doing out?” Lou said to Chris.

  “I go out every morning for coffee,” Chris replied. “This is Marsha Davis, Joseph’s girlfriend.”

  “We have to talk, Chris, please,” Marsha said.

  “Let’s go inside,” Lou said, dragging them both into the restaurant.

  Lou locked the door behind them and then guided them to a table in the back corner, flicking on the lights – in wall sconces at intervals around the rectangular room – along the way. The round table was set with a service for four over a white tablecloth. Chris sat in the corner, with Marsha opposite him and Lou to his right.

  “What is it, Marsha?” Chris said. “You don’t look good.”

  “When Joseph left yesterday morning, he gave me this envelope. He said if he hadn’t returned by ten p.m. to give it to you.” She handed Chris the envelope. “I was up all night. When he didn’t come home, I took a cab down here.”

  Chris slit open the envelope with a butter knife and extracted its contents: a letter to
him in Joseph’s handwriting, three copies of “Candy Meets Ron” and three mini-cassette tapes in opaque plastic cases. Clipped to the letter was a check for a hundred thousand dollars and change payable to Joseph from the lawyer in Jersey who handled the sale of Rose and Joe Black’s house. It was endorsed on the back by Joseph to the order of Christopher Massi.

  Dear Chris, the letter said,

  If you are reading this, then I am dead. Don’t waste your time trying to find me, thinking that I am alive. I’m not. Listen to the enclosed tape and you will understand what happened. I have been thinking lately about my life, and I finally realized the only person who ever really loved me was you. Mom hated pop and used me as a weapon. Pop had no room for a weakling son in his heart. You were a great athlete, then a big lawyer. You could have dismissed me from your life, but you never did.

  I also realized that I was a junkie, which must sound funny since I’ve been a junkie for fifteen years, but not until this week did it hit me that I really am one, that I’ll always have to inject heroin into my veins. I returned your love all these years by sticking a needle into my arm. I tried to make up for it by helping you in this situation you’re in, but I failed. I have to give you some advice: Ed Dolan will not fight you clean, so don’t fight him clean. Don’t rely on the courts or the law. You are in a different kind of battle with him. I remember when you beat him up after pop killed his old man. You came home with your hands all bruised and bloody, and you were heartsick at what happened. You hated pop. But you were wrong to feel that way. Pop fought for his life, and now you have to fight for yours.

  With love, your brother,

  Joseph

  When Chris looked up, Marsha was crying, and Lou was shaking his head.

  “What is it?” Lou asked.

  “Do you have a tape player for these?” Chris asked, pointing to the cassettes.

  “It’s upstairs,” Lou replied. “I’ll get it.” He rose from the table and went into the kitchen, where there was a stairway that led to his apartment on the floor above.

  Marsha was wiping her eyes with the napkin from her place setting. When she finished, Chris handed her the letter. She read it, and then said, softly, “I loved him, too.”

  Chris did not reply. He felt, irrationally, that by remaining silent, he was keeping Joseph alive. Lou returned with the tape player and inserted one of the cassettes, pressing the play button and adjusting the volume.

  “Joseph Massi,” they heard.

  “Ed Dolan.”

  Pause.

  “You look good. Have you quit using?”

  Pause.

  “You haven’t changed.”

  “You want some kind of royal treatment? You’re a junkie. State your business...”

  They listened to the full conversation between Joseph and Dolan at Dolan’s office, then inserted the other two tapes, which turned out to be copies of the first. Then Chris put the tapes, the DVDs and the letter back in the envelope.

  “Can I borrow this?” he asked Lou, picking up the tape player.

  “Yes.”

  Chris put it into the envelope, which he then clipped shut.

  “Is he dead?” Marsha asked.

  “Yes,” Chris answered. “Ed Dolan is a federal prosecutor here in New York. He sent Joseph into Junior Boy’s house wearing a wire. He probably figured if he got something on Junior Boy, fine; if the wire was discovered and Joseph killed, that would be fine, too. I was an assistant U.S. Attorney for five years. Dolan never would have gotten approval for that kind of an operation. There was never any backup. He didn’t count on Joseph taping their conversation, though.”

  “And Junior Boy is some kind of a mobster?”

  “Yes, the real life kind.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “That Joseph is dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “I know Junior Boy. No one gets a private meeting with him without being searched first. Once the tape was found, he would have to kill Joseph. He could never let it get out that he let someone caught with a wire live. It would be a sign of weakness, an encouragement to others.”

  “I’m afraid he’s right,” Lou said.

  “But what’s to be done?” Marsha said. “Shouldn’t we notify the police. Where’s Joseph? Where’s his...his body? We surely have to find his body and bury him.”

  Chris and Lou looked at each other. It would be a miracle, they knew, if Joseph’s body were found.

  “We’ll have a service some day, Marsha,” Lou said, “but it’ll have to wait. For now, we don’t want anyone to know what we know. Not the police, not your doorman, no one. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “You’re saying that both Dolan and DiGiglio would want to kill anyone who knows what we now know.”

  “That’s it exactly.”

  “But why would this Dolan man do such a thing?”

  “My father killed his father,” Chris said, “gunned him down in a bar. He’s hated me and my family ever since.”

  “The fucking bloody swine,” Marsha said.

  “Will you be all right, Marsha?” Chris said. “I’m sorry to be abrupt, but it’s not safe here, and I have things to do.”

  “I’ll get a cab.”

  “Do you have someone you can be with?” Lou asked.

  “Yes, but I’d rather be alone.”

  Marsha rose, as did Chris and Lou. At the front of the room, sunlight was streaming through the restaurant’s picture window, casting the words “La Luna” in shadow across the first row of tables. The mundane, as it is wont to do, had bumped up hard against the sublime. Another day, like millions of others before it, was beginning, but this one without Joseph Massi, a failure in many respects, but one who had managed to be a friend, a lover and a brother, respectively, to the three people who stood, brokenhearted, facing each other in the shadows at the back of the room. It was a morning each of them would remember vividly for the rest of their lives, especially Chris, who, in the time it took him to read Joseph’s letter, had gained and lost a brother. It had fallen to him to be the last living member of his small family. A torrent of memories, of Rose, Joe Black and Joseph, both bitter and sweet, were pushing hard against his heart, but he held them back. He had to get away, to a place where he could grieve, and think, and plan his revenge.

  Book III

  Chris

  1.

  Chris had not planned on staying at Suffolk Street until he arrived and saw the state of things there. Brother Farrell, who had called him while he was packing a bag at La Luna, did not look well. There was something in Farrell’s veined and lined face that was beyond weariness: the long inward look that a dying person begins to take when death becomes inevitable, something Chris did not know at the time. He only knew that Farrell needed a break. And it was obvious that Michele, nodding out on Allison’s bed, in the same tee shirt, jeans and sandals she was wearing when he first met her just eight days ago, was not about to give him one. The consumptive look common to all deeply strung out addicts on her gaunt, sallow face, she lay there quietly enough, but her stillness was deceptive. Both Chris and Farrell knew that her facial tics and arm jerks were signs that her current high was coming to an end.

  “I need to go out,” Farrell said. “She’ll need a fix soon, but I don’t want to leave her. She’s getting stronger and could go off on her own.”

  “When was the last one?”

  “Four a.m.”

  “You’ve been going on the street?”

  “Yes.”

  Farrell had never bought drugs before, and did not know that, with the advent of the reliable cell phone, cold street transactions were nearly a thing of the past. The ones that did go down were fraught with danger, involving, as they did, the bottom muck of the inner city drug culture: desperate junkies and crack heads with box cutters, as likely to be selling rat poison as heroin; transvestites hoping to score sex with a man; speed freaks with anger and energy to burn; hookers looking to lure a stranger with cash to
a mugging in an abandoned building. Neither had he ever cooked heroin and shot it into a junkie’s veins before. Finding one that wasn’t collapsed, in a part of the body not covered with scabs and scar tissue, was not an easy or pleasant task.

  “I’m sorry,” Chris, who knew the street heroin and crack scene vicariously through Joseph’s many entanglements with it over the years, said. “I shouldn’t have asked you to do this. I wasn’t thinking straight.”

  “She’s starting to bitch,” Farrell said, “because I’ve been buying lousy stuff, cut like crazy, rip-off stuff.”

  “Has anybody been here?”

  “Someone came to fix the door to her apartment, but that’s it. I watched through the peep hole.”

  “What kind of money have you spent?”

  “Let’s not talk money, Chris.”

  “I’ll reimburse you.”

  “Reimburse me? Shall I go out and get receipts from the scum I bought from?”

  “I never should have gotten you into this.”

  “I offered to help, if you’ll recall. It’s obvious you’re in some kind of trouble. As to my money, I’m required to give it away, or have you forgotten that, too?”

  “Brother Farrell, I do have a problem on my hands, but I can’t leave this girl like this. Take a break, I’ll watch her for a few days.”

  “Call me John. The Brother business isn’t necessary, anymore.”

  “I couldn’t do that.”

  “Our friend will be in lots of trouble if she misses just one fix,” the cleric said. “Once I got back late from a buy. Bang it in! she said, pump that fucking thing!”

  “I’m not fixing her,” Chris said. “I’ll take her through withdrawal. She’s young, and her injuries are mostly healed.”

  “You mean force her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  Chris shrugged. “I’m not sure, but I’m not going out and buying heroin, and I’m not leaving her alone.”