Funeral Hotdish (2 page)

Chapter Two

Friday, October 15, 1999

Like all journalists, Joya Bonner didn’t want to admit her scoops were often due to dumb luck. Skill. Smarts. Intuition. Observation. Cleverness. She’d opt to all of these. But she preferred no one ever knew dumb luck led her list.

Still, plain old dumb luck got her the Sammy the Bull scoop. If she’d been honest with the audiences that asked, “How did you break the sensational story about Sammy’s dirty Arizona connection?” she would have answered, “I was interviewing a student in the Goldbar Coffeehouse in Tempe when a character like actor Joe Pesci walked in.”

Short, strutting, black leather jacket over a white tee-shirt, dark hair slicked back with a grease Joya didn’t know was available these days, the guy looked like a Central Casting Mafia hitman. She wasn’t the only one who saw the resemblance—the piano player pounded out the first few bars of the theme song from
The Godfather
. The strutting man beamed and waved at the tribute.

Joya chuckled to herself and wondered who he was, but decided that you see the strangest types on a university campus. Probably a history professor. Or poli sci.

She turned back to her interview with an earnest graduate assistant blowing the whistle on research fraud. Millions of dollars were at stake. The reputation of Arizona State University was on the line. This was a really big story.

The explanation was complicated and compelling. Joya riveted her attention on the young woman who promised she had documents to prove everything she was saying. Joya listened attentively—one of her best traits, one that came from years of listening to relatives visit back home in Northville, North Dakota. She’d learned there that if you listened, folks would tell you almost anything. It was a major secret of her success.

Her focus would have stayed on research fraud, except the girl left for the bathroom. While Joya waited, she scanned the room to catch the Pesci impersonator holding court in a corner, surrounded by students. She couldn’t hear what he was saying, but she could tell he was pontificating. He’s sure full of himself, she thought. A student handed him a paperback, and the guy signed it with a flourish. Then she heard the most astonishing thing. A pretty coed in a Sun Devils tee-shirt and jeans without knees interrupted, yelling, “Mr. Bull, Mr. Bull.”

The other students tittered, the girl looked flummoxed, and “Mr. Bull” smiled like a streetwise bad-ass.

The girl was so excited she yelled her question so Joya could easily hear. “You didn’t really kill nineteen people, did you?”

Joya Bonner stopped breathing as skill-smarts-intuition-observation-cleverness met dumb luck.

It couldn’t be, she first thought. Nah. Impossible. Or is that why the guy looks familiar? Is that why he resembles a Mafia character? If that guy in the corner really is that guy, then what the hell is Sammy “the Bull” Gravano doing in Arizona?

Joya dismissed the grad student with an excuse, promising to resume the interview soon. Their next meeting would be months off, although she didn’t know that then. What she did know was this—
nothing
trumps a university scandal like discovering you’ve found the most famous Mafia snitch in the nation right here in your own backyard.

She nursed a cup of coffee until he left, and followed him out of the coffeehouse. He got into a Lexus. Naturally, Joya nodded. She scribbled down the plate number: AZ476D.

Joya rushed back to her office at
Phoenix Rising
and rummaged through the library. Hadn’t they just reviewed his book? Yes, they had.

Underboss: Sammy “the Bull” Gravano’s Story of Life in the Mafia,
by Peter Maas. A promo blurb promised, “Sammy ‘the Bull’ Gravano is the highest-ranking member of the Mafia in America ever to defect. In telling Gravano’s story, Peter Maas brings us as never before into the innermost sanctums of the Cosa Nostra as if we were there ourselves—a secret underworld of power, lust, greed, betrayal, and deception, with the specter of violent death always waiting in the wings.”

Next, Joya found their review by Peter Roman, whose lifeblood pumped Mafia red. Oh, he loved this book. There was even a hint of admiration for the man whose testimony sent thirty-six of his former associates to prison, including John “the Teflon Don” Gotti.

“To get the head of the Gambino crime family behind bars was so valuable,” Roman had written, “that Sammy’s own crimes were basically forgiven. He admitted to personally carrying out nineteen murders, but got less than five years in prison. Then he and his family entered the federal witness protection program.”

The FBI program gave these witnesses a new name, a new home, and a new start. She’d heard that Arizona was the favorite dumping ground for people hiding out to stay alive.

So Arizona got Sammy too, she thought to herself. But isn’t he supposed to be lying low? Isn’t he supposed to be underground so the Gambinos can’t find him and get their revenge? Why in the world is he holding court in a public ASU hangout where everyone knows his name?

Unless, she thought as her journalistic skepticism kicked in, this guy is an imposter and the real Sammy is safely socked away someplace else.

The possibilities swirled around in her head. What she should do is tell Peter Roman what she’d discovered and they’d work the story together. But she wasn’t going to do that because she wasn’t stupid—she’d already been burned enough times by that egomaniac who didn’t play nice with others.

Last July still stung. Peter would steal this story as his own again. She wasn’t going to let that happen.
Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
Plus, wouldn’t it be tasty to break a big Mafia story smack under Peter’s big nose? She could already see the headline: “Guess where the infamous Sammy ‘the Bull’ Gravano ended up? Arizona, of course.”

It would kill Peter Roman to see her break a story like that. Which would be just fine with her, thank you very much.

She headed home, reminding herself to be careful.

Rob Stiller was already there, his Camaro parked on the street because the driveway was only long enough for one car, and since this was Joya’s home, she got the honors.

She came in the front door, as she always did—the key to the kitchen door had been lost long ago—to see the dining table strewn with his badge, his holster, his black notebook, his car keys.

“I’m home,” she yelled.

He answered from the backyard, where he was having a beer. “Hi. How was your day?”

“The same.”

“Mine, too.”

They always started that way—“dancing around the potato salad,” one of her friends called it—cautious and noncommittal, as though he weren’t a police detective nor she a reporter and their days were ever “the same.” But they had rules in this house, because that’s the only way it worked. He wasn’t supposed to ask what shit she was stirring up and she wasn’t supposed to ask what shit he was cleaning up.

They met a year ago, when Joya was probing problems at the city’s morgue and Rob was getting autopsy results on a case he was working. He wore street clothes that day and didn’t identify himself as a cop. Preoccupied with trying not to upchuck, she didn’t ask, assuming he was one of the lab technicians.

Her struggle amused him as they sat in the viewing room, watching a murdered druggie get cut up. Rob had been here countless times, but this was Joya’s first.

She’d later write, “The American Heritage Dictionary defines ‘autopsy’ as ‘the examination of a dead body to determine the cause of death,’ It sounds so civilized. It’s anything but. ‘Brutal’ is a far more accurate word to describe what happens inside the Maricopa County Medical Examiner’s Office several hundred times a year.

“It’s not an unkind brutality nor an uncaring brutality, but there is no gentle way to get beyond the skin and fat and muscle that give us our worldly appearance.”

On the other side of the viewing window, Dr. Janet Hans wore green scrubs under a pale-blue paper gown. Her face was covered with a green-and-white-striped mask with a plastic face plate.

“That’s called a splash mask,” Rob offered. Joya gulped as she wrote it down.

Dr. Hans adjusted her microphone so she could not only make the recording she needed for the record, but could keep Joya informed on each step. “This is the standard Y incision,” the doctor said, and in three quick swipes of her scalpel, she cut the man’s chest apart. Joya was surprised there wasn’t much blood and what there was seeped out slowly.

“There’s no beating heart to push blood through the body,” Rob explained. Joya nodded like she should have been smart enough to figure that out herself, then added, “Oh God, dead skin cuts just like bread dough.”

Rob had to admit she was right, although he’d never seen it that way before.

Joya held her breath as Dr. Hans peeled away the skin and fat of the man’s chest to reveal his rib cage, then took a long-handled tree clipper to cut apart his ribs to get at his organs—the lungs and stomach and liver and spleen and guts. Each one was measured and a piece cut off for testing, then thrown into a plastic bag nestled between the man’s legs.

Her eyes got big when Dr. Hans fired up the electric drill to cut apart the man’s skull, then peeled away his scalp and face to get to the brain. Rob watched her closely now, but she didn’t lose it. She gulped a couple times, fighting her gag reflexes, but she didn’t vomit, she didn’t faint, and she was really proud of herself. She took notes furiously, and Rob decided that was her way of coping.

She described it all in the story she’d write, ending, “When they’re done, they put his scalp and face back in place, stuff the plastic bag that now contains his organs into his empty chest cavity and sew him up. Viewing one autopsy is enough to last anyone a lifetime.”

Rob thought she was cute—not beautiful, but not hard on the eyes, either—and he was struck by how resolute she was. It was only later, when they were outside and she was gulping fresh air, that she admitted she’d been fighting off nausea all afternoon.

“But I knew the guys in homicide were just waiting for me to fold, and I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction,” she told him. When he laughed, she begged him, “Please don’t be a homicide guy.”

Everyone back at police headquarters loved that story. Her investigation forced changes they’d all been wanting at the morgue, so Rob gave her points for being a reporter who actually made a difference.

She had noticed him right away. Robert Stiller was a hard man to ignore, unless shoulders the width of a plow didn’t impress and a dimple didn’t entice. He might not be everyone’s version of handsome, but he was hers. She liked how he smiled at her. He oozed cool sureness. She was thankful she was on the down side of her yo-yo dieting the day they met—and the putrid smells from the autopsy room assured she had no stomach for any food the rest of that day. Still, she never expected him to call.

When he did, she surprised herself by saying yes. She’d never before even considered dating a cop—a firefighter, sure, but a cop? Not a good fit with a journalist. Cops were conservative and militaristic and by-the-book kind of guys, and none of that was part of her DNA. How could she dress him up and take him to an ACLU dinner, or a gay rights fundraiser or a theater party? He’d never fit. Besides, getting him to rent a tux would be impossible. No, she was used to men who owned their own tuxes and fit in just fine with the formal dinners where she wore her fancy gowns and elaborate rhinestone jewelry.

He had to think twice before he made that first call, because she wasn’t his idea of the perfect match, either. His buddies on the force wouldn’t trust her, and she’d never fit in with the other wives and girlfriends. Besides, his ex was still a friend in this crowd and nobody was ready for him to bring someone new. But there was something about her, and he gave it a shot.

She said yes, thinking it would be a lark. What could it hurt to have a drink with him? But the drink went into dinner, and then a second date, and before long, well, he wasn’t
so
conservative and militaristic. And he was
so
scrumptiously sexy. At least he didn’t watch Fox News, with its fixation on destroying President Clinton and fueling every right-wing fantasy.

It wasn’t long before he started staying over and then bringing over some clothes, and for the last four months, he’d spent most of every week here.

Social engagements weren’t an issue because his weekends were spent with his kids. She was free to do her own thing, which gave great relief to both sides.

She told her mom and dad back in Northville that she was dating a cop, but left out the living together detail and didn’t mention he was divorced. Ralph and Maggie Bonner thought thirty-eight was a good time for her to be settling down and her dad especially liked the cop part.

But Sheriff Joe Arpaio almost screwed it up, just as it was getting good.

Back in July—two weeks after Rob started staying over regularly—local stations led their evening news with an explosive story. “Sheriff’s officers today foiled an attempt to blow up Sheriff Joe Arpaio with a car bomb. The sheriff was unavailable for comment, as he rushed home to comfort his terrified wife.”

They showed “undercover” footage of a fresh-faced kid wearing a tee-shirt and Levis, arriving at the Roman Table restaurant on Seventh Avenue with a bearded man who slipped away as the kid walked toward the sheriff’s car with a homemade bomb. Officers rushed in and nabbed him. Arpaio’s chief deputy called a press conference in that parking lot, saying they’d caught the dangerous bomber through the help of an informant and good police work.

“Holy shit.” Joya watched the footage of Jimmy Saville being caught red-handed in a city where the most famous crime of the last thirty years was a car bomb that killed
Arizona Republic
reporter Don Bolles. Saville’s going to fry, she thought to herself.

Robbie came home that night like an uncaged tiger. He threw his things down and started pacing—swearing and mumbling and ranting. His phone would ring and he’d go off for privacy, but she could hear him yelling. She couldn’t make out the subject and verb of his rant.