S ARGENT MORETTI’S 6'4" frame filled the door to the hospital room. He was being admonished by a 5'2" nurse. “Don’t you go in there and get him all agitated like you did Tuesday. The doctor said if Mr. Dolan starts getting excited again you will have to leave.”
“Well, I have bad news for him, so you might want to stick around with your blood pressure cuff. There just isn’t much I can do to sugar coat this for him.
“Can it wait?”
“No.”
“Well, break it to him as easy as you can. And I will be watching.”
Sargent Moretti nodded.
RICK DOLAN had heard the conversation from his bed. Speaking through the little slit in the bandages he said, “Are you going to tell me you still can’t arrest that Goombah bastard?” The words were slow and halting, almost unintelligible due his broken jaw and the wires holding them together. He could talk using his lips but not his jaw. His jaw was in a cast.
“Yea. But don’t get your bowels in an uproar. I ain’t saying we’re giving it up. I want that son-of-a-bitch too, but a man saying, ‘I’m going to get you,’ isn’t proof that he did, and since you are the only one that would be the one that would testify, and he has five men that would testify that he didn’t say that. It just makes him a suspect, and that’s a long way from an indictment and a hell of a lot further from a conviction. We need more than that. Someone or something that places him at the scene. Then we would have something.”
“Do you mean that a bunch of men can gang rape my wife and daughter, for what must have been an hour in the early evening, and then brutally murder them and no one heard or saw anything? Rick winced from trying to sit up.
“Mr. Dolan, please calm down, or Nurse Ratchet there will throw me out. Oh, I’m sure someone heard or saw something, but trying to find one that will talk, let alone testify to it, will be like finding chicken teeth. I’m sure you know, Parilli is ‘mobbed up big time. He’s a ‘made man’ with the Sandretto family.”
“So?”
“So, you’re not from New York, are you?”
“No. I was transferred here about four years ago. By my employer, Best Communications.”
“That explains why you don’t understand how things work here. The mob runs things in certain areas of this city. As a cop I’m ashamed to admit it, but that is the fact. No one will buck them, they’re afraid they’ll put themselves in the same boat you are in. And they’re right. The goons maintain this ‘ring of fear’ for the protection of the gang. Even if they don’t happen to agree with what one member does, they’ll back him, all the way against any outsider. My guess; old Don Dominic Sandretto, he’s the head of the Sandretto crime family, he’ll probably chew Parilli’s ass out for causing such an unnecessary stink, but he’ll back his play to protect the family respect as they call it.