“Blind trust and loyalty to family is foolish, Mr. Gallo. Whatever I know about family loyalty was learned later on.”
“I don’t understand,” Gallo says.
“When I was a kid, my brother was abducted. He was my whole world. My dad was a hustler and my mom was a drunk. My parents took off and left my older sister and me alone to fend for ourselves. I was seven at the time. My sister grew up to be a hustler herself and tried to exploit my children and me at one of our most vulnerable times. So if you’re a bad person, you don’t get a pass just because you’re blood.”
“You have a hard view on life.”
“In all due respect, I believe you’re a decent man, taking in your nephew like you did. And I bet you’re pretty disappointed Rossi took over your business and turned it into something you’re ashamed of. But I think you’re covering for him now. If the police find out you’re withholding information about Rossi’s involvement with the bombing, you could face charges yourself.”
Gallo leans back in his chair and lets out a humorless laugh.
“You’ve been hanging around too many cops. You’re starting to talk like one.”
“Will Rossi try to leave the country when he gets out of jail?” Julia asks.
“My nephew is a grown man with a successful business. He doesn’t call me up every time he takes a trip. Now, is there anything else you want, Ms. Gooden? If not, this meeting is over.”
Julia stands up, feeling foolish she thought for even an instant that she’d get anything out of Gallo. She turns toward the exit, but Gallo grabs her arm and gently pulls her back.
“What you told me about your family growing up, you have a chance for redemption with the family you have now. But if you pursue things you shouldn’t, all that you’ve worked so hard to create for yourself could get taken away.”
“Is that a threat?” Julia asks.
“No. Not from me. But it’s a warning of things that could come. I owed you a favor, and by telling you of what could transpire should you pursue my nephew, the debt has now been paid in full.”
Gallo holds the door open for her, and Julia feels a cold shiver run up her back as she hurries out of the restaurant.
She ignores Gallo’s warning as she grabs her cell phone. If Gallo won’t help her, she turns to another longtime source, her only other ace in the hole.
CHAPTER 12
Julia heads over to Corktown and parks her SUV on Bagley Street in front of Hello Records. She can hear the dull thump of an overamplified bass coming from a squat brick building across the street from the humble vinyl record store’s location.
Julia hustles to the rear of the building and hits the buzzer three times, just as she was told. A giant of a man with skin as smooth and lustrous as pure ebony opens the door. The man wears a long, loose shirt made up of patches of brightly colored, mismatched fabrics and a knit Rasta tam hat. His other accessory is a gun holster and what looks like a Smith & Wesson tucked inside.
“What you want?” the man asks.
“I’m Julia Gooden. I have an appointment with Tyce,” Julia says. “He’s expecting me.”
“So you say.”
The thick back door slams shut, and Julia stomps her feet against the frozen mud to try to get the feeling back in her toes.
The door opens and the giant Rasta beckons her in. Before Julia can walk through the door, the man puts a hand the size of an NFL football on her shoulder.
“You carrying?” he asks.
“No. I don’t even own a gun.”
“So you say,” the Rasta repeats, and begins to pat down Julia. She holds her breath, not out of worry Tyce’s guard will find anything but more out of how uncomfortable she feels having a stranger’s hands move across her body.
“You’re good,” the man says, and leads Julia inside. The walls of the first floor are covered in distressed brick, and the floors are a shiny cherry wood. Autographed pictures of rappers and R&B artists line the walls, and Julia is startled to see a picture of Tyce Jones shaking Acting Mayor Anderson’s hand.
Julia follows her armed guide up to the second floor to a music studio. Tyce Jones’s torso sways back and forth as he hovers next to a skinny, bearded white guy wearing a Beastie Boys T-shirt who is busy working the mixing console. In the sound booth, an ample female with a mane of red curls belts out what sounds to Julia like an aria from an Italian opera, and a black twenty-something young man wearing a bow tie, small square glasses, and a fur hat that looks like it came from Siberia lays down a rapid-fire rap to juxtapose the mood.
The mammoth Rasta taps Tyce on the shoulder to get his attention, and Tyce glances over at Julia.
“Okay. Let’s take five,” Tyce tells his crew. “Bromo, good delivery, man, but I want more feeling from you. Otherwise, you sound like you’re doing karaoke at a piss bar in the projects. Cynthia, girl, you’re killing it with the high notes.”
Tyce Jones spins his wheelchair around in Julia’s direction and reaches out his hand.
“Damn, Gooden. You don’t come see me no more. You just use me for my body and my connections when you need ’em,” he says, and flashes Julia a naughty smile. “What you got? I’m hoping it’s what I think it is.”
Julia hands her source a plain brown paper bag that she retrieved after a pit stop at home following her meeting with Gallo.
“Mmm, mmm. Nothin’ else smells like that. Helen made these?” Tyce says.
“Her very own. She still won’t give you her pierogi recipe, though.”
Tyce places the brown paper bag in his lap and wheels up a ramp that leads to the building’s third floor. Julia follows Tyce into an office filled with white leather sofas and a gaudy red desk in the center of the room. Tyce wheels behind the desk and starts going to town on the Polish dumplings.
“You want some? I skipped lunch, so don’t mind me,” Tyce answers.
“No, I’m good. I need information on Nick Rossi again. This isn’t for a story.”
“Everything’s about a story with you. What you want it for?”
“I need to know where Rossi is.”
“And you think I know somehow? I’m a legitimate businessman these days. I don’t run in the same circles as Rossi anymore,” Tyce says.
“I think you keep track of your enemies, especially ones who put you in that chair,” Julia answers.
Tyce’s eyes narrow into angry slits, and Julia starts to second-guess her blunt approach.
“That’s why I like you. You never bullshit. You’d be a tough adversary on the streets. Why you want to know where Rossi is at? He’s probably hanging out in his penthouse apartment drinking Cristal and smoking Cubans now that he’s out of jail.”
“You watch the news?”
“Not if I can help it. It’s too depressing. My life is filled with positivity. But I know what happens on the street. That’s my business. You here about the courthouse attack?”
“Yes. My husband was the assistant D.A. who was trying the case against Rossi, and my husband was hurt in the bombing. He’s got a long road to recovery, and we’re still not sure if he’s going to be the same as he was before. I know Rossi planted the bomb to take out his former employee who was going to testify against him.”
“So you want revenge because the cops can’t get it for you. I know a little something about that.”
Julia tries to keep a poker face as she wonders if Tyce was the one who ordered the hit on Rossi’s three-year-old daughter and her nanny.
“This is all off the record, right? Because if it’s not, I like you, Julia. I really do. You were real nice to me and my momma when I was in the hospital after I got shot, and I knew it was genuine, not just you trying to hustle for a story. But I used to think I liked Nick Rossi as well and look how that turned out.”
“I’ve never burned you.”
“That’s true. Okay. Here’s what I can tell you about Nick Rossi. He never belonged back here in Detroit, and he knew it too. He was Hollywood, man. But he had
loyalty to his uncle.”
“Salvatore Gallo.”
“Salvatore is a good guy, but small-time. He’s your weak link in all this. He doesn’t like the way his nephew has muddied up his business, going into drugs and killing people. Sal is old school, and in his eyes Nick has brought shame to the family. Gallo might turn if you work him hard enough, make him feel badly about the bombing and what it did to his city.”
“I tried,” Julia says. “Gallo owes me a favor, but he wouldn’t help me.”
“So he’s loyal. Blood, even if it’s bad, that’s more important to him than his word.”
“I think my husband had something on Rossi that was going to come out in the trial.”
Tyce leans back in his wheelchair and thumps one hand across his chest as he weighs giving Julia what she wants.
“First of all, you’re thinking about this all wrong. Nick Rossi wouldn’t plant the bomb. He was cooling off in a holding cell in the courthouse when the thing exploded, right? Mr. Pretty Boy ain’t going to be putting himself in harm’s way. If Nick wanted to take out the witness, he would’ve done it clean with a sniper.”
“Where would he go to hire a sniper?” Julia asks.
“This is the U.S. of A., baby. Anything can be purchased for the right price.”
“Then who planted the bomb?”
“Dunno. But I’m guessing it would be someone in his tight posse, someone real close trying to cover their boss’s ass. But whoever it is, they aren’t close enough to Nick that he’d confide in them about the sniper.”
“Who replaced Sammy Biggs, the Butcher, when he turned on Rossi?”
“Enzo Costas. Nicky hooked up with him in California. Now he’s the second big dog in the pack.”
“How would I find Enzo Costas?” Julia asks.
“You don’t. He’s a freak. Word is, he’s some kind of religious nut. And a badass killer. You got kids. Do me a favor. Don’t go near Enzo Costas or Rossi.”
“Would Rossi stay in Detroit, or would he leave Michigan to stay under the radar?”
“Nick? He wouldn’t hang around here. He only came back to Detroit to help out his uncle. After all the trouble he’s had recently, it’d give him an excuse to go back to Cali.”
“Where in California? I need an address.”
Tyce shakes his head. “Damn, girl. You’re stubborn. I’ll give this to you, but like I said, don’t get any ideas about trying to hunt this guy down yourself once he gets out.”
“Of course,” Julia lies, knowing nothing is off the table right now. “So he’d go back to L.A.?”
“Nah. He’s got some sweet real estate in L.A. and Malibu. But he’d be hiding out at his compound a couple of hours north of there in the Santa Ynez Mountains. It’s like his own personal panic room, but Big Nicky Hollywood style. He’d be hiding out there until stuff cools off about the bombing. He wouldn’t want to make himself available, if you know what I mean.”
“You’ve been there?” Julia asks.
“Once. I got business in L.A. too.”
“If Rossi goes out on the West Coast, who’d handle his local operation? Salvatore Gallo?”
“Nah. Gallo is clean. Jim Bartello is your man. He’s the former head of security for Detroit’s MGM Grand. You want something? I’ll give it to you. Bartello reached out to a colleague of mine to help him hire a contract worker, you could say.”
“A contract worker? You mean someone to take out Biggs? If Rossi can’t be retried on the drug or bribery charges, he could get nailed for attempted murder.”
“There you go,” Tyce says. “Now, are we good? I got business waiting for me. This opera-and-rap shit is going to be huge. Look for me at the Grammys, Gooden.”
“I need the address of Rossi’s West Coast place.”
“You ain’t afraid to ask big, are you? I’ll tell you, as long as you got no ideas about going there.”
“The address, Tyce. Come on.”
“Yeah, well, that I can’t deliver on because there’s no address. Nick’s compound is secluded on purpose. Way up in the mountains. But two roads can get you there, one back road up the northern side of the mountain that was closed a while back. There’s another road on the southern end of the mountain. That bitch is accessible. But Nick will have the road guarded.”
“So there’s no way into Rossi’s compound without being seen.”
“Not true. Nick, he’s a hard guy, but he’s all into history and stuff, like that cowboys and Indians shit. When I was up there a couple of years ago, he showed me this map that totally got him off. It looked like something from a scavenger hunt or something to me, just a rough sketch of some old path that Nick said was used by Indians and farmers to get up and down the mountain like a hundred years ago or something. So Nick tells me, this path, it runs parallel to the road. A person can make it to the top by foot, or in an off-terrain vehicle. There’s no signs or nothin’, just markers.”
“Do you remember what they are?”
“I didn’t become the success that I am today by being stupid. Sure, I did a picture in my mind to remember the thing, like a lickety-split mental snap of a camera, you know? In case I ever needed to come back and pop the guy. In my former line of business, mind you, alliances can turn pretty quick. Case in point,” Tyce says, and looks down at his withered legs. “Yeah, so the map. I remember the first marker is some joint named the Santa Maria Temple. It’s at the southern base of the mountain, where the path starts. The second marker is a convent that Nick said closed about fifty years ago or something. The third marker is an old-ass rickety barn. From there, the compound is about another three miles up past a grove of avocado trees. Or it might have been citrus trees. Anyway, there’re some trees up there.”
“I owe you one,” Julia says, and stands up to leave.
“You were always straight up with me. The cops didn’t bust Nick for trying to take me out. They figured my injuries would get me off pushing on their streets. But the stories you wrote, you connected the dots to Rossi.”
“He never got arrested.”
“Yeah, he had one of his grunts take the fall. Dude’s doing twenty years up at Wayne County,” Tyce says.
He wheels around the front of his desk and gives Julia a knowing nod.
“You’re smart and you’ve always had big-ass balls, Gooden. I’ll give you that. But your problem, you’re blind with emotion on this one. You try and bring Rossi down by yourself, it don’t matter how smart or ballsy you are. Dead is dead.”
“I’ll take that into consideration.”
Julia follows Tyce down the wheelchair ramp to the first story of the building.
“One more question,” Julia says. “How’d you get that picture of you and Acting Mayor Anderson shaking hands?”
Tyce gives Julia a beaming smile, showing off his two gold front teeth.
“He came to the grand opening of my recording studio. I even got an incentive from the city to refurbish this building. Detroit is revitalizing, baby, and I’m gonna be a part of it.”
Tyce reaches into his pocket and pulls out a business card on which he scribbles a number on the back.
“So here’s the deal. I don’t give this number out to just no one. This goes directly to me. We got an agreement, right?”
“This conversation never happened.”
“There you go. You nail Rossi, I won’t be crying.”
“Thanks, Tyce. I appreciate your help.”
Julia shakes Tyce’s hand, stuffs his number in her purse, and realizes she has to find this Bartello person fast.
* * *
Jim Bartello shoots up one last time before he flees to his deer-hunting camp tucked far away in the woods in an unincorporated area of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. He lies back on his fake leather couch, finally relaxed after enduring the constant onslaught of fear and paranoia over the past twenty-four hours. The junk, just a little bit this time, starts to flow through his body now, making his head feel as if it is dancing above him,
soft and buoyant like a giant helium balloon. Visions of his younger self nailing a three-point shot to win his Wyandotte Roosevelt High School’s basketball tournament melt across his memory. Bartello’s glory days slip toward the unconscious, and Bartello shakes himself hard before he starts nodding. He needs to be alert for the seven-plus-hour drive to Michigan’s hinterlands of the U.P.
Bartello moves to his bedroom, which is cluttered with the belongings he will take with him—two suitcases, one with clothes, and the other with the hidden compartment where he can stash his balloons of heroin, the ones he was supposed to give to Rossi’s guy in Flint. Next to the suitcases is his gun, a Sig Sauer. Bartello pushes inside his closet, his girth barely clearing its entryway, and gets on his hands and knees. At the very end of the narrow galley, Bartello taps until he finds his hidey-hole. He pulls away the frayed shag carpet and pries the loose section from the floor. Bartello plunges his fat little hands inside and retrieves a dozen neatly bound packets containing $25,000 in cash and what Enzo Costas slipped to him as he exited the MGM Grand, the flash drive with the surveillance footage that caught the uppity snitch banging the shit out of the blonde.
CHAPTER 13
Julia leaves the hospital, where she vowed to an unresponsive David that she is one step closer to bringing Rossi to justice, and waits impatiently at yet another private room in a restaurant—this time Chanel’s—for Navarro.
“You need to eat something, honey,” Bianca, Navarro’s girlfriend, says, and places a warm piece of chocolate bread pudding in front of her. “You look like you’d blow away if a gust of wind came along. I’ve never had that problem. I’ve got more curves than straight lines, but we’ve all got to work what God’s given us.”
Julia looks with disinterest at the dessert and wonders why everyone keeps trying to feed her.
“Why aren’t you at the hospital?” Bianca asks.
“I was just there. I need to talk to Navarro.”
“He’s been running around like a madman looking for that bomber. I’ve hardly seen him. Makes a woman nervous when her calls go straight to voice mail.”
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