“Come over by the doors a second,” he said, the electric motor whirring as his chair moved ahead of me. “How long you figure it’s been since that boat passed? Thirty seconds? A minute?”
“Something like that.”
“You see the water? Even though the boat’s gone, the water’s still telling you it was there. I hear there are some weird little seafaring cultures in Asia where they can read the ripples in the water like the Indians here can read tracks.”
“And this relates to Larry how?”
For the first time since I stepped into the room, the real Frankie Motta reared his head.
“Shut your mouth and pay some attention, then you won’t have to ask no stupid questions.”
“Your house, your rules,” I said.
He liked that too. Maybe he’d give me a gold star on my Delaney card for being such an apt pupil.
“See,” he continued, “Larry didn’t understand that stuff like about the boat. It was a big blind spot for him. He thought you could sometimes float a boat by without leaving a wake. Maybe I thought the same thing there for a while, but I learned. There was this time once when I had a boss, a foolish old man who had some silly ideas of honor.”
“A guy like Tio Anello, for example.”
“Yeah, hypothetically speakin’, a guy jus’ like him.” Motta smiled at me. He had a smile not too dissimilar from my father-in-law’s, as warm and welcoming as a lobster claw. “Well, old men, they lose focus sometimes and look backwards instead of the way ahead. They forget what’s important and what’s not. They think because a thing used to work one way for a long time, it should always work that way. You catchin’ this, Prager?”
“You mean like this old man maybe having rules against getting involved with the drug trade? Like that?”
He showed me the lobster claw again. “You’re pretty fuckin’ sharp.”
“Sometimes.”
“What does a guy like me do with an old man who taught him everything about the world, about survivin’, about all the important things? What does a man like me do when he can see the future in a way the old man he works for can’t?”
“Depends on what he thinks is more important, the future or the past.”
“From where I’m sitting today, it’s the past. But that’s only because I got no future, so that don’t count. Back in them days, I thought the future was important. I thought survivin’ was everything.”
“And anyone who thinks the future is important has to plan for it.”
“So I planned, but I tried to do it without hurtin’ the old man. I hid it from him, because if he found out about it-”
“You’d have to survive and that would mean clipping him. . hypothetically speaking, of course. And he meant too much to you for that.”
“There was that, but even if he had a sudden change of heart and decided drugs was the best thing since cheese fries at Roll-n-Roaster, he’d a had to. . you know. . make an example of me for challengin’ his authority.”
As Motta spoke, things about the past were falling surely into place like tumblers on an old combination lock.
“Dexter Mayweather! You bankrolled D Rex.” I could feel my mouth turn up into a self-satisfied smile.
Frankie Motta bowed his head in respect. “That’s good!”
“This way Anello couldn’t connect you to the drugs, but you could salt away the profits and have a network in place for when the old man died.”
“Hey, that Dexter, he was one sharp fuckin’ nigger, let me tell ya. A little too sharp for his own good, maybe. We coulda been the fuckin’ kings of Brooklyn, the two of us.” He was screaming. “We coulda run this town and them cocksuckin’ Russian scumbags woulda had to come beggin’ to us for a piece a the pie. But-” Motta was gasping for air again, his chest racking violently.
“Anita!” I shouted and slid the green mask over Frankie’s face.
Motta flailed his left arm at the little table next to the bed. He made a C out of his right forefinger and thumb and squeezed the tips together. “Inhaler! Inhaler!” he gasped.
I found a mustard yellow inhaler on the bedside table and curled his fingers around it, then removed his mask. He took two blasts from the little plastic device and his breathing eased almost instantaneously. Anita bolted through the door, took a glance at the inhaler, and eyed me in that same disapprovingly way Ronnie had. I was beginning to feel like Typhoid Mary’s intern.
“Mr. Frankie cannot get excited. It puts too much strain on his lungs.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’ll have to go now.”
“No!” Frankie rasped. “He’s stayin’. I’ll keep calm, Nita.”
“Mr. Frankie, this is not good for you to get excited.”
“I promise. Cross my heart and hope to die.”
“You are not dying yet!” Anita chided as if she had a vote in the matter. She turned and wagged her little index finger at me. “Don’t make me have to come back in here. I come back and you are out, no matter what Mr. Frankie says. Understand?”
“Perfectly.”
“Okay.” She eyed me skeptically as she closed the door behind her.
“She’s a tough cookie, that one,” Motta said. “Woman cares more about me than my ex-wife did.”
“She gets paid to care.”
“So did my ex-wife. We pay ’em all, one way or another.”
Argue that.
“Before, you said something about D Rex being too smart for his own good.”
“Everybody’s a team player up to a point. Dexter thought he saw an opening and he went for it.”
“Got him killed, huh?”
He rolled the chair over to me and began patting me down before I could answer. His movements were practiced, familiar, but his touch was weak. “You wearin’ a wire?”
A wire! Talk about coming full circle. Then again, it wasn’t the wire Larry had planted that started this mess. The wire and Malik Jabbar’s taped interrogation simply marked the end of the intermission, an intermission to a drama whose opening act was played out nearly two decades ago.
“You’re clean.”
“Would it have mattered if I was wearing a wire?”
“I guess not.”
“Then why don’t you just tell me what happened, Frank?”
He thought on that. “Sure. Why the hell not?”
“I’m listening.”
“We had the distribution network in place. We had a ton a cash to expand as soon as Tio died. We were gonna be patient with him, wait him out. He was a man of respect and if we whacked him it woulda caused trouble with the other families. Then he did us a favor and he had that fuckin’ stroke.”
Another tumbler fell. “You jumped the gun. You thought Anello was gonna die when he had that stroke.”
“The fuckin’ doctor said he was a dead man. That it was a twenty-to-one shot that he’d ever regain consciousness, never mind anything else.”
“But he did.”
“Like three weeks later, the stubborn old fuck. Sometimes I wish that society bitch had just fucked him to death. He was months in therapy. Even so, he talked like he had rocks in his mouth and walked like a fuckin’ gimp. But he still knew what was what. He heard things. Those was dangerous days to be me.”
“I bet. D Rex saw his opening.”
“He knew I was in a bad place and he tried to renegotiate percentages.”
“Pissed you off, huh?”
“Nah, like I said, he was a sharp nigger. He was only doin’ what I woulda done in his shoes. Problem was, once the old man recovered, it wasn’t about percentages no more. It was about survival, my survival, my crew’s survival.”
“D Rex had to go.”
“I had no choice. I hated doin’ it. I kinda liked him and he had a real head for business. With the money we woulda generated, we coulda turned the Anellos into a powerful family, not a fuckin’ afterthought. But Dexter was the only link to me. He’s the only person I ever dealt with directly. Wi
th him dead, Tio coulda heard all the rumors in the world and it wouldn’t a mattered.”
“But you didn’t kill him,” I said. “You had him killed.”
“If word ever got out inside the family that I clipped Dexter Mayweather, people would start to wonder why. I couldn’t risk that. Had to keep my distance, you know?”
“So you couldn’t use anybody from your crew or even bring in a guy from another family. You had to use outside help, people who were insulated from the family and maybe even from the law. And it had to be done messy, nothing that could look like a pro hit. Something that would seem to be the work of one of D Rex’s rivals or an ambitious one of his own looking to move up the quick way.”
“You musta been a helluva detective, Prager.”
I let that go. “It’s easier to see things looking down when you’re standing on seventeen years of history. I guess the guys working the case back then thought exactly what you wanted them to think. It’s what everybody would think. And who would really give a shit about some black drug dealer?”
“Good question. Why do you give a shit?”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass about the vic. I’m interested in his killers.”
“Why?”
“Because one of them was a cop and a friend of mine, someone I thought I understood.”
“Oh, I get it. This ain’t about him. It’s about you, huh?”
I thought about that. So far I’d barely touched Frankie Motta, but he’d gotten a few hard, straight rights in through my gloves.
“Yeah, Frank, I guess maybe it is about me. Larry must’ve owed you something big to do this for you.”
He started laughing again, laughter even blacker than his lungs.
“Larry didn’t owe me shit. Wasn’t you payin’ no attention before when I was talkin’ about not leavin’ a wake?”
“I thought I was.”
“Larry McDonald was a friend a mine too, you know? We went back a long fuckin’ ways, him and me. He was just as hungry for stuff when we was kids as he was the day he took the pipe.”
“Fuck!”
“That’s right, Prager. Larry Mac come to me with the idea, not the other ways around. He was smart and, like Dexter, maybe too smart.”
“But you said no one else knew about you and Mayweather.”
“He didn’t exactly know, but this is Larry we’re talkin’ about here. He was on my pad to keep an eye on Mayweather and he was on Mayweather’s pad too, to keep an eye on the cops. How long you think it took Larry to figure out what was really going down?”
“Probably not too long, knowing Larry.”
“When Tio come outta the coma, Larry Mac came knockin’.”
“And you answered the door and let him in.”
“You bet your fuckin’ ass I did. Listen, it was like havin’ my prayers answered. I could trust Larry and with him being on Mayweather’s payroll, he could get in close to Dexter. He wasn’t connected to me business-wise, not so’s anybody knew about it, and, like you said, he was insulated from the law.”
“Perfect.”
“Almost.”
“Something’s perfect or it isn’t,” I said. “The difference between almost perfect and perfect is like one and infinity.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind. So what went wrong?”
He smirked. “The ripples in the water.”
“We’re back to that again.”
“We never left. See, Larry found out that muderin’ somebody leaves ripples in the water that don’t never go away. He had trouble living with that.”
“You’re telling me he had a conscience.”
“Nah. . Well, maybe a little one, but that wasn’t the thing of it.”
“Then what was the thing of it, Frank? You don’t mind me asking?”
“Dexter was a big boy, wide and country strong.”
“I remember.”
“Took more than just Larry to do what needed doin’. Yeah, they fucked up poor old Dexter pretty good: broke his fingers, smashed up his knees, beat him bad.”
“I heard, but what’s. .” Then it dawned on me. “The guys who helped him. The ripples in the water.”
“Pat yourself on the back there, Prager. You got long arms.”
“So who helped him?”
Motta stared at me in a way that could’ve frosted glass. “I ain’t never ratted nobody out in my life. I coulda saved myself a ten-year stretch in prison, I opened my mouth. What makes you think I’m gonna talk now? And to you?”
“You talked about Larry.”
“Larry’s dead, God rest his soul.” Frankie crossed himself. “Nothin’ can hurt him now. Not even sticks and stones can break his bones no more.”
“That’s almost funny. Well,” I said, “at least I know the guys who helped Larry out are still alive, otherwise you’d talk about ’em.”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
I didn’t pursue it further. He wasn’t going to discuss it. And though I would have been happy to waste every second of time he had left on earth, I wasn’t inclined to waste mine.
“Marge tells me you and Larry had a falling-out.”
“She still hot, Marge? Man, Larry had some good taste, always the finest threads and finest pussy.”
I ignored that. “So what happened?”
“Guess Larry didn’t like having his balls in someone else’s hands.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means that if he killed for me once, maybe he’d have to do it again.”
“Did he?”
“Let’s just say Larry didn’t have much of a heart for me fter. .” He didn’t bother finishing his sentence.
Frankie Motta was spent. The frosty looks and lobster smiles were all gone now. Only strain showed on the scarecrow. He was exhausted, but couldn’t quite bring himself to admit it. Not only had my presence been a distraction, it had breathed a few minutes of life back into him. He remembered what it felt like to be powerful, to make decisions about other people’s deaths instead of watching boat wakes and waiting for his own.
“So, you happy now?” he asked. “You gonna sleep better tonight? A dead fuckin’ nigger and a dirty cop. . I mean, who really gives a shit besides you?” Motta spun the chair about and wheeled back over by the French doors. “It’s been nice talkin’ to you, Prager, but you’re startin’ to gimme agita.”
He was right. No one gave a shit. If that was as far as it went, I might actually have been inclined to let go and toss it into the water with the rest of the world’s sins. But this wasn’t just about Larry. There was too much blood and too many bodies to ignore and simply move on.
“You still here?” he asked.
“We’re not done.”
“I disagree. Now get the fuck out.”
“Can’t do it. You’ll miss the part about your son.”
Motta flinched. It was barely perceptible and he kept his eyes on the water the whole time, but I hadn’t imagined it. “What about him?”
“You should be proud of him. He’s following in your footsteps.”
“Stop talkin’ outta your ass, Prager. My kid ain’t like me.” But this wasn’t a proud father jumping to his son’s defense. If I could have
“Nice.”
“Nice got nothin’ to do with it.”
“I guess not.”
I opened my mouth to say something else, but I can’t recall what.
“Quiet!” Motta whispered, rolling his chair up next to me.
There was a conversation out in the hallway between Anita and a man. I couldn’t make out their words. I thought I recognized the man’s voice and though Motta didn’t quite tilt his head like a curious dog, it seemed to me that he recognized it, too. I didn’t like that. Why would Frankie Motta know Captain Martello’s voice? What I heard next, I liked even less. Something thumped hard against the wall-Anita? — and the conversation came to an abrupt halt.
Motta started panting again and there was real fear in
his eyes. It was hard to tell whether Frank’s concern was for himself or his nurse. I reached around for my piece, but when I brought it forward my hand slammed against the wheelchair and the pistol fell a few feet behind Motta’s back. Never mind retrieving it, I didn’t even have time to bend my knees before Martello strolled fully into the room. He was pointing a cocked.38 of his own vaguely in my direction.
“Ripples in the water,” Motta whispered to me.
“Shut up, Frankie! And don’t look so disappointed.”
“Whaddaya do to Anita, you cocksucker?” Motta asked, trying to slow his breathing and failing.
“I put her to sleep for a little while. I wouldn’t worry about it, she won’t feel a thing. And that asshole kid of yours, you don’t have to worry about him either. What an idiot, Frankie. You sure he was yours?”
Frankie Motta clamped his hands on the arms of the wheelchair, trying to raise himself up, but it was no good. He fell back, defeated, his coughing worse.
“That’s right, Frankie, sit the fuck back down. All this violence, because your kid had to walk in your footsteps. He had to bring up the past. Now I gotta put an end to it.”
“You helped kill Mayweather!” I said to Martello.
“Prager, you schmuck! Too bad you figured that out seventeen years and two minutes too late. Kenny, get in here!” Martello barked, tilting his head back slightly over his shoulder.
Caveman Kenny Burton walked into the room, a black 9mm dangling in his hand. If I had any lingering questions about who had helped Larry Mac murder Dexter Mayweather, Burton’s appearance answered them. No doubt Kenny had enjoyed breaking D Rex’s bones.
“Hey, Moe, I ever tell you you were a cunt?”
“At every opportunity.”
The corners of his lips turned up.
“Stop fucking around!” Ever the commanding officer, Martello shouted some more orders, then turned his attention back to me. “That was some fancy gun handling I saw when I came in, Prager. Pick it up.”
If I had any balls, I would have told him to go fuck himself. What I did instead was pick up the gun.
“You told me it was a bad day for you when D Rex was killed,” I said to Burton as I knelt to retrieve my gun.
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