American Gangster (26 page)

Richie, finally finding an opening, said, “I have good information that the target of my squad's investigation was smuggling dope into this country on that plane.”

The attorney thought about that, giving it all of half a second. “And that target is?”

Toback winced.

Richie said, “Frank Lucas.”

The attorney looked up and over at his federal colleagues. Their blank expressions and shrugs spoke volumes.

Then the attorney turned a fish-eyed gaze on Richie and said, “Really. And just who the hell is Frank Lucas?”

The attorney got no help from the various assistants around him.

“Who does he
work
for?” the attorney demanded. “What
family
?”

“He's not Italian,” Richie said.

“Well, what is he?”

“Black.”

A long silence followed, and you could have heard a pin drop—a grenade pin.

Finally the attorney said, “Is this supposed to be some kind of joke? Do I look like I'm easily amused, Director Roberts? Because coming from an individual like yourself, this close to the end of his career in law enforcement? Making jokes would seem ill-advised.”

“No joke, sir. Our investigation indicates . . . no,
establishes
. . . that Frank Lucas is above the Mafia in the dope-trade hierarchy. We believe he is buying direct from the source in Southeast Asia, cutting out all the middlemen, and that he has been using U.S. military planes and personnel to smuggle pure No. 4 heroin into the United States.”

While Richie spoke, the faces of the officials before him started out confused and then turned skeptical and finally openly derisive.

Toback sat forward. “Gentlemen, Director Roberts has plenty of experience in—”

“Plenty of experience,” the attorney cut in. “Does he now? And how many arrests have you made so far, Director Roberts, in your so-called investigation?”

“I was promised when I took on this job,” Richie said, “that it would be about
real
arrests. We aren't focused on pushers and—”

“Would that be
no
arrests, Director Roberts?”

“We're well on the way, building cases against most of Lucas's organization. Not him, as yet. Like all
American gangsters from Capone on, Frank Lucas is well-insulated.”

“You're comparing him to Al Capone now. I see. And he has an
organization
. . . .”

“That's right.”

The attorney's eyes were tight, and his voice was edged with scorn: “You're saying a single fucking nigger has accomplished what the entire American Mafia hasn't managed in one hundred fucking years.”

Richie stared at the man. Then he shook his head. “Yeah, you'd
know
, right? Just sitting here. Ever been on the street? Sir?”

“Get this fucking kike out of my sight,” the attorney said, with a sneer and a disgusted wave.

Richie was out of his chair and smacked the bastard, twice, the second one taking the guy right out of his desk chair and onto the floor before the others could pull Richie back.

The attorney's remarks had been out of line enough that no charges were brought against Richie; but as he and Toback walked across the hangar, Richie was already thinking about his next move.

But Toback was saying, “Rich, it's over. You're shut down.”

“Right,” Richie said.

Then he exited the hangar and his squad members fell in behind him as they headed toward their cars.

Behind the wheel, with Spearman in the driver's seat, Richie said, “We couldn't intercept the heroin here, well, fine.
Somebody's
got to pick it up.”

“Some Country Boy or other,” Spearman agreed.

“So we tail their asses, every one of them.”

Richie wasn't worried about being fired. What with the federal government and their endless red tape, hell, days would go by before the team was officially disbanded.

And all he needed was the next twenty-four hours.

When Frank Lucas saw
Doc waiting for him at the baggage terminal, he knew at once from the big man's expression that something was wrong, really wrong. . . .

Doc filled him in as they headed for the Town Car, and Frank felt the rage rising in him like flames consuming a building. He sat in the back of the Lincoln and thought of a hundred ways to kill that bastard Trupo, and none of them were good enough.

Then, as he tried to shake off the rage and regain control, Frank experienced something rare for him: guilt. He should have provided better safety for Eva and his mother, made sure his brothers never left them at the house alone. The kind of people who drove by a Chinese restaurant in the middle of the night shooting up the place had seemed unlikely to invade a suburban housing development in broad daylight.

But the same could not be said for the likes of Trupo and his SIU goons.

At the penthouse, seated on the edge of their bed, Eva told him everything. She seemed bothered most about her inability to protect their getaway money.

“Ten million dollars means nothing to me, baby,” he said, and slapped a clip into the butt of a nine-millimeter automatic.

“I'm sorry,” she said, her eyes on the floor. “It just seems like it's getting worse, and worse. . . . We had a chance to get out, and we missed it.”

Frank was too preoccupied to notice the rebuke her gentle voice delivered, that she had tried to get him to run but he had refused.

Instead he just brushed his wife's bruised face with tender fingertips and said, “
This
. . . what he did to you.
That's
his death warrant.”

He kissed her forehead and, sticking the automatic into a shoulder holster under a dark suitcoat tailored not to show the bulge, stalked out.

Moving through the living room with Doc, toward the front door, Frank heard another female voice: “Frankie. . . .”

He stopped and his eyes went to his mother, who he'd brought to the penthouse for protection; she was sitting on the sofa in the living room, hands folded prayerfully in her lap. Doc had gone on and was at the door. Frank gave him a nod, indicating the driver should go on ahead and get the car—Frank would be down in a minute.

He went to his mother, stood before her and said, “Eva's in the bedroom if you need her. I have a man in the kitchen, who can cook for you. . . .”

His mother smiled but sadness made it a smile he hadn't seen for a long, long time. Not since childhood.

“I think I can cook for myself, Frankie.” She patted the sofa next to her. “Sit. Please sit.”

He sat.

He could feel her eyes on him in a searching way that also took him back to childhood, specifically the days when he had first started to bring home money and nice things, a boy without schooling somehow managing to make a man's living. She had been suspicious then. She was suspicious now.

She took his right hand into both of hers. Her tone was not scolding, not lecturing, rather it was matter of fact. “You do know, don't you, Frankie, that if you'd have been a preacher, your brothers would be preachers. If you'd been a soldier, why, they'd be soldiers. You do
know
that?”

He shrugged, just a little.

“They all came up north because of you,” she said, and there was pride in her voice and yet a certain tinge of shame, too. “You called and they came running. They look up to you. They expect you to always know what's best.”

“I hear you, Momma.”

“Do you? You know they're not as smart as you. Not as accomplished. You're not just the older brother, but the father, the only father they remember. And yet even
with all their foolishness, they
know
a person doesn't shoot a policeman.”

Frank stared at the floor.

“Even
I
know that, and I bet you didn't think your momma knew anything that was happening in your world. But mothers know. So do wives. Eva knows you don't go around shooting policemen, no matter how much they may richly deserve such treatment.
You
seem to be the only one who
doesn't
.”

“What makes you think that's where I'm off to?” Frank asked her defensively, meeting her eyes. “I might just be looking after my business interests, like any other day.”

She shook her head and her eyes were slits. “I have never asked you, son, where all of this came from. Do you know why? It's not that I don't want to know, or couldn't handle it. You know where you grew up and what we all lived through. What
couldn't
I handle?”

“Not much,” he admitted.

Her voice had no pleading in it—she was just telling him. “I'll tell you what I couldn't handle: you lying to me. Don't lie to me, Frank. Do what else you have to, but don't you ever lie to me about it.”

He looked away. He couldn't abide her gaze. His hand in hers was a tribulation.

She said, ever so gently, “Do you really want to make things so bad for your family here up north, so bad that they'll leave you? Because they will. They'll have to. And son, so will
she
. . . .” Momma nodded
toward the bedroom. “She loves you with all her heart, but she will leave you. And I
know
I will.”

She released his hand.

He couldn't quite look at her.

Finally he rose, and walked over to the front door; he was halfway out when he stepped back in and shut it again, then walked slowly toward the bedroom, and Eva.

His mother had done the impossible. She had won a reprieve—at least for now—for Detective Trupo.

That night, in the
basement of the U.S. Army hospital in Newark, body bags were lifted from wooden coffins and set down upon tables. The bags were unzipped, the bodies removed. A rack of clean uniforms was wheeled in by somber, matter-of-fact privates, after which morticians in white smocks began their grim ritual, dressing the deceased and applying cosmetics to ghostly gray skin.

The functional wooden coffins were replaced by a small army of white military caskets that the soldiers trundled in. Lids were removed, lifted off by gold handles, and bodies—in their fresh uniforms and make-up—were deposited on silk linings. Finally the coffin lids came down and cellophane bags containing folded flags were taped on top.

Soldiers removed the white caskets to the nearby loading dock, and set them individually, careful but efficient, into a waiting military truck. Papers were signed, copies exchanged and the truck rumbled off.

Deep in the night, two black privates on janitorial duty came into the chamber where the original plain wooden coffins had been discarded like candy wrappers. Methodically the pair removed the lids, and pried up the false bottoms, revealing four-inch cavities in each coffin—home to tightly packed bricks of Double UO Globe heroin.

Early the next morning, Sunday, a laundry truck idled in the loading dock area of the hospital. Stevie Lucas—who had traded his chance to play with the Yankees to be part of his uncle Frank's team (though he still wore a Yankee cap)—hopped down from the truck and gave the two GIs a hand, as they tossed a number of laundry bags into the back of the truck.

At the same time, in the cavernous Baptist church in Harlem where not so long ago Frank and Eva had been wed, a dignified, friendly pastor was greeting the members of his congregation as they climbed the church steps for early service. Frank, Eva, and his mother were among the flock. Soon they would be swaying in the pews in a sea of ladies' hats as the church's gospel choir praised God and Jesus, Lord Almighty.

Because no matter what was going on in Frank Lucas's complicated life, he always had time to spend Sunday morning in church with his mother and his wife. God had been good to the Lucas clan. Considering.

At the hospital, an innocent-looking laundry truck—driven by Stevie Lucas—rolled past the guard gate without inspection, leaving the base, driving past a stand of trees, which is where Richie Roberts sat waiting in an unmarked car.

Richie noticed the baseball-cap-wearing Lucas kid—Stevie wore that same Yankees lid in the surveillance photo tacked on the bulletin board in the bullpen—and took up pursuit, albeit at a discreet distance.

This was wise, because before long a beat-up van driven by a red haired black woman pulled in behind the truck, and then so did a nondescript Chevy driven by Huey Lucas. Riding with Huey was another Country Boy, likely a well-armed lad, providing security.

By the time the laundry truck approached a ramp onto the George Washington Bridge, Richie was still a couple of car lengths behind. And two more Narcotics Bureau unmarked cars had fallen in behind Richie. There was a brief moment where things could have gone wrong, as the truck kept on going, past the ramp.

Some time later, the red-haired woman's van made a right turn. Abruzzo, a car-length behind, took the same turn, but promptly slowed up as the infamous Stephen Crane Projects rose before him like a monument to poverty. The detective could see Huey's Chevy approaching the projects, too, from another direction, with Spearman tailing him. Spearman, the projects looming in his windshield as well, also slowed, and finally pulled over.

When the laundry truck's destination proved to be the same dismal towers, Richie, too, slowed to a stop outside the foreboding structures where, not so long ago, he had dealt with a corpse created by his late partner, Javy Rivera.

If the people who lived in those crumbling mammoth
tombstones knew that millions of dollars of heroin had just rolled in
, Richie thought,
what a riot there would be. . . .

And in Harlem, in the Baptist church, the gospel choir having finished their lively anthem, the minister began his sermon while Frank Lucas, nestled in his pew between the two women he loved, pretended to listen.

On this Sunday morning,
Lou Toback—relaxing on the couch in a robe and pajama bottoms, reading the
Times
—should not have expected to hear from Richie Roberts. After all, he had disbanded Richie's team yesterday. And this
was
the Lord's Day of Rest. . . .