Sons of the City (9 page)

For a few hours the night before, the house had been the center of our universe. Now, in the quiet afternoon light, it looked like just what it was: an old abandoned row house, nothing more. I stood on the porch and tried to peer through the gloom inside.

“Nick,” I called. “Nick, you in there?” I stepped through the doorway and froze. Standing in the darkness was Nick, arms at his side, totally still, like he was a ghost, chained to the place where his partner had died. It was pretty spooky. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I could tell that Nick was looking at me but not really seeing me.

“Nick,” I said. He didn’t move. “NICK!” He seemed startled, like I had woke him up.

“Eddie,” he said in a low voice.

“Nick, what the hell you doin’ here?”

He seemed puzzled. “I don’t know.”

“You OK?”

“Yeah. I guess so.”

“C’mon, let’s get out of here.”

I reached out and put my hand on his elbow, to help guide him out the door. He coughed, and I caught the scent of warm beer. I didn’t say anything at first. I just led him out onto the porch, under the yellow police tape, and down the steps. He blinked in the bright sunlight, and tried to shade his eyes.

“Nick, you hitting the bars at four in the afternoon, in uniform?”

He shrugged.

“What’d you do,” I asked, “just walk in, sit down and order a beer?”

He looked back at me, unwilling to argue. I thought I would be angry, but I wasn’t. If I were in his situation, I might have spent the afternoon in a bar myself.

“Why don’t you go home,” I said. “Get your car at headquarters and just go, don’t talk to anybody.”

He nodded obediently, and I walked with him to the curb. When we reached his patrol car, I said, “Nick, something weird happened today.” I told him about Ru-Wan Sanders showing up in the Lexus trunk. That got Nick’s attention, I could see his clarity starting to return as he listened.

“Did Steve ever mention the black Mafia?” I asked.

“You kiddin'? He probably didn’t even know who they were.”

“That’s what I would have figured. But you know how Steve sometimes took the car out on the street by himself, and left you at headquarters for a while?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Where did he go?”

Nick shrugged. “I don’t know, he never told me, he didn’t want to tell me. He’d just get this smile—you know, the Steve smile, the one he gets when he’s up to something—and he’d say, “It’s my little mystery, Nick.”

“You’d think he’d at least tell his partner,” I said.

“Yeah, you would, wouldn’t you?” said Nick. “I don’t know, Eddie, I don’t know why he didn’t confide in me. But now I can’t ask him, can I?”

L
ike a sleeping lion that has been unwisely awakened, Commissioner Ben Ryder rose up with sudden fury at the black Mafia. Late that afternoon, he assembled the media outside police headquarters in Center City and vowed that the criminal organization would be shut down, obliterated. No longer would it be allowed to kill cops.

Those sentiments, naturally, were greeted warmly by the press, the public, and the Fraternal Order of Police, though word spread through the Department grapevine that some top commanders were questioning the Commissioner’s wisdom. There was no real evidence yet that the black Mafia had killed Steve—wasn’t this just a knee-jerk reaction?

It wasn’t hard, though, to figure out why the Italian mob would rat out the black Mafia. The two organizations were deadly rivals, and if Bravelli saw an opportunity to bring down heat on the black Mafia, he wouldn’t hesitate to use it.

But there was one major problem with the police going after members of the black Mafia. We didn’t know who the hell they were.

There were only a few we could even identify, like Ru-Wan Sanders, and we could only guess at their roles. Doc had once been assigned to make an organizational chart of the black Mafia, with little boxes showing who reported to whom. I thought he did a pretty good job, considering that none of the boxes had any names.

Part of it wasn’t our fault. Every so often, leaders of the black Mafia would go off to jail on drug charges, and the organization would seem to dissolve. It would always reemerge, though—just as strong, with a new set of leaders. Sooner or later, of course, the old members would get out of jail and want their jobs back, and a certain amount of gunfire would ensue. Doc wouldn’t even bother to get his chart back out.

But we weren’t entirely free of blame. Cracking down on the Italian mob was much more glamorous, and got bigger headlines. For up-and-coming prosecutors and police commanders, that’s where the glory was—not in making drug and gun pinches in poor black neighborhoods. Now, we were paying for our neglect.

The Philadelphia Police Department, however, was not about to let facts get in the way of an investigation. And so for the next two days and nights, we locked up everyone even rumored to be part of the black Mafia. And who knows? Maybe we accidentally snagged somebody who was.

One thing was certain: a lot of young black guys in the neighborhood were getting a firsthand look at the inside of a police station. It was a good bet that not everyone was being treated gently, and if the black community was hot before, now it was steaming.

Then Nick made things a lot worse.

It happened on Wednesday, the day of Steve’s wake. We were growing angry and frustrated that no progress was being made. All the arrests, all the countless hours of questioning, had come to nothing. Even the gun from the crackhouse had yielded nothing—no fingerprints, no way to trace it.

That day, I had the bright idea of asking for Jeff Bouvier’s help. Jeff was a young black guy in my squad who was maybe the smartest cop I ever met. He had a way of rapidly sizing up situations and then dealing with them, fearlessly and efficiently. In the movies, cops are always getting people to hand over their guns rather than shoot. That never happens in real life—we’re usually crouched around the corner of a building, calling for backup. But I had seen Jeff do it, twice. People just trusted him.

We gave him the nickname “Commissioner,” because that’s what we all figured he’d be someday. He didn’t like it, but that was too bad. You don’t get to choose your own nickname.

Jeff had grown up in West Philadelphia, and knew a lot of the guys on the street. He’d arrest somebody, stick him in the back of the police car, and on the way in to the district they’d talk about what was happening with friends from high school.

That Wednesday after roll call, I took Jeff aside and asked him whether he knew any of the guys in the black Mafia.

“Sure, Sam Epps. Though I think he calls himself Hakeem somebody now. He just got out of prison, maybe six months ago.”

“And he’s in the black Mafia?”

Jeff thought about that. “Well, he was, before he went away. I don’t know about now.”

A slight detail, maybe, but one I wasn’t particularly worried about at the moment. We could bring him in, sweat him a little, see what we could find out. Anything would be better than what we had.

So, Jeff, Nick, and I went off to find Hakeem somebody.

Jeff said he had recently seen the guy hanging out at 52nd and Market, so that’s where we went first.

There were nicer shopping areas in Philadelphia than the 52nd Street strip—places like Chestnut Hill, where doughy-faced white couples in shorts slurped ice cream cones and strolled past designer clothing stores.

In West Philadelphia, things were a little different. This was where poor and working-class black people went to get bargains on makeup and shoes and paper towels, and loud music blasted from every third or fourth store. And always, there was tension on the block—the tension of survival.

Hakeem was right where Jeff said he’d be, standing on the crowded corner of 52nd and Market, next to the newspaper stand, calling after every young woman who passed by.

Nick was in his police car, Jeff was with me. When we pulled up a couple of stores away and got out, Jeff pointed to Hakeem.

“There he is. Guy in the glasses and goatee.”

“Let’s go get him,” said Nick.

As I was deciding whether to call in another unit, just in case Hakeem tried to run, Nick started to walk toward him.

“Nick, hold up,” I said. But he just kept going. And before I could call out again, Nick walked right up to Hakeem, and with a fierce, quick motion, punched him in the mouth. Hakeem went down like a rock.

This was not a good thing. The street was crowded with people—old guys, teenagers, women holding shopping bags with one hand, kids with the other. They had all just seen a white cop go up to a black man and hit him in the face without a word.

Fortunately, Hakeem wasn’t hurt too badly, and Jeff and I were able to get him on his feet. When I glared at Nick, he seemed surprised.

“Just wanted to make sure he wasn’t going to give us any trouble.”

I looked around, and everybody had just stopped what they were doing, they were all staring at us.

We handcuffed Hakeem and took him to Southwest Detectives. And that’s where we discovered that he had already been brought in, the day before. And that since he had been released from prison, he had gotten a good job, and had stayed out of trouble, and had nothing to do with the black Mafia anymore.

All of which, as I loudly explained to Nick later, we could have found out without knocking Hakeem down in front of an audience. I told him he should be very glad that Hakeem probably wouldn’t file a complaint. Hakeem was no doubt aware that known criminals who file complaints against cops—even for legitimate reasons—usually find themselves getting harassed at least ten times a day by the cops’ pals.

Nick didn’t consider himself lucky, he just didn’t care. He was absolutely unrepentant.

O
n Thursday, four days after he was killed, Steve got a hero’s funeral.

That morning, more than three thousand cops lined the street outside St. Gregory’s Church on Bustleton Avenue, a mile or so from the Ryders’ home. The summer air was warm and hazy, and seemed to have a natural silence that everyone could feel.

Michelle had asked Nick and me to be pallbearers, and of course we said yes. I was extremely relieved that my deep blue dress uniform still fit. I hadn’t worn it in six years, since Tommy Moran’s funeral. I was a pallbearer at that one, too. Simple car-stop, bang, Tommy was dead. He was a good guy, a good friend.

Now it was Steve’s turn. The evening before, Nick and I had helped carry his casket, covered with an American flag, into the church for his wake. For half the night, the line of cops filing in stretched halfway around the block.

This morning, another stream of mourners was making its way up the steps and through the open doors. And as I stood on the steps with Donna and Buster and the rest of the honor guard from the squad, I was a little surprised to see so many politicians. I had wondered whether they would come—whether anyone would come. Ever since Ru-Wan Sanders had made his surprise appearance in the trunk, a dark question had swirled through the Police Department, spinning through every division, every station house, every group of cops standing together.

It was a simple question, simple and horrible: was Steve Ryder a dirty cop?

Homicide detectives had come to the same conclusion Doc and I had—that it seemed unlikely Steve’s death was random. It also seemed unlikely that the black Mafia would have targeted a cop unless it felt it had a very good reason.

Why would the black Mafia have taken such a chance? Steve was just a patrolman, he couldn’t have done much to hurt them. But there was another possibility: perhaps Steve was somehow involved with the black Mafia himself. Perhaps he had been working for them, and had crossed them in some way. That was the kind of crime these people would not be able to forgive.

Some of the politicians told the papers—off the record, of course—that they were reluctant to attend the funeral, but felt it would look worse if they stayed away. After all, there wasn’t any proof about Steve, at least not yet.

And so we watched them file into the church, all solemn and sympathetic and totally full of shit. It was pretty awful.

Once the services began, I walked in by myself and stood in the back, in an alcove under the balcony. It was nice and cool, the way churches always are, and there seemed to be a light breeze coming from somewhere. In front of the altar was Steve’s casket, still draped with the flag, surrounded by flowers.

“It is a loss for all of us, for all of Philadelphia,” the priest was saying. “Steven Ryder was more than a friend, a brother, and a son. He was a son of the city.”

We shouldn’t ask why Steve was taken, the priest continued, because God had a good reason, even if we didn’t know what it was.

That’s what they always said. Maybe it was supposed to make the family feel better, but it didn’t do much for me. I wanted to know. I walked back outside and waited with the others for the service to end.

Finally it was over, and the church doors opened, and I went back inside. When I reached the casket, the Commissioner nodded to me. Michelle, who like her mother was wearing a simple black dress, gave me a brave smile.

Nick and I and the other pallbearers lifted the casket and carried it down the aisle and out the doors of the church. Captain Kirk was leading the honor guard, and as we started down the stone steps toward the silver-gray hearse, he shouted, “Atten-shun!”

The honor guard snapped a salute, and held it. The order echoed down the street, and each unit, one at a time, came to attention and saluted. Three thousand cops, from Philadelphia, from up and down the East Coast. It was pretty impressive. But how many of them were here only because it was expected?

In the procession from the church to the cemetery, Nick rode with me in the front seat, and Donna and Buster sat in the back. I’d been to cop funerals where there would only be a hundred or so police cars, but today there were more than a thousand, snaking through the streets, red and blue lights flashing. Every intersection along the route was blocked off, and at many of them, drivers were out of their cars, watching. All along the way, neighbors gathered on porches and front lawns.