Are you outta your fucking mind?
“Thanks for the offer, Mr. D.A. Let me think about it. I’ll give you my answer when we get together.”
“One thing, Prager, before you hang up,” he said. “Not that I minded keeping Chief McDonald’s name out of it, but why bother? This man was a cold-blooded killer; he lied to you for almost twenty years, and he almost got you killed.”
It was a good question, one I had asked myself a thousand times in the last few weeks.
Why did I care?
It would be easy to say I was trying to spare Margaret more pain and embarrassment, which I was. Or maybe it was my reflexive loyalty. Maybe it was a sense of nostalgia for a time when I believed in the love of my friends. But Frankie Motta’s words still rang in my head, “Oh, I get it. This ain’t about him. It’s about you.” In the end, I suppose it was. What I told Fishbein was that I owed it to the memory of an old friend no matter what he really was. It sounded good, even if it wasn’t the truth.
We were going to meet for lunch at the Pastrami Palace on Queens Boulevard in Forest Hills. Although I had neglected to tell Fishbein, I’d taken the liberty of inviting the devil along for lunch. I may have hated my father-in-law, but Katy’s dad had just as much right to know what had become of his son as I did. Besides, I wanted him there so I could see the look on his face when I told him I wasn’t going to play the game anymore, that I was done with secrets, that no matter the consequences I was going to confess my sins to his daughter once I found out what had become of Patrick.
It was a little after twelve thirty and Fishbein was more than fifteen minutes late. I didn’t like it. Robert Hiram Fishbein was a lot of things, but he had never failed to keep his word. I liked it even less because I had to sit there with Francis Maloney staring at me across the table. Though I have to confess it was almost worth it to see my father-in-law so unnerved. It was a sight one seldom got to see.
I’m not certain even now which happened first, whether I heard the sirens or felt the cold chill. Does it matter? All I know is that an old lady came through the doors, tears streaming down her face.
“What’s the matter, Sonya, for goodness sakes?” the counterman asked.
“He’s dead.”
“Who’s dead.”
“The man,
oy gevalt!
He was crossing the boulevard near Austin Street and he was . . . The bus, he didn’t see the bus.”
I didn’t quite run out the door. Well, maybe I did. All I know is that by the time Francis Maloney caught up to me, I was already laughing.
“What’s so funny?” he wanted to know.
“It’s Fishbein. He’s dead.”
My father-in-law seemed to exhale for the first time all day. Our secrets were safe.
As we walked back toward the restaurant, he asked me again about why I was laughing.
“You know what Oscar Wilde once said?”
Francis smirked. “No, wiseass, enlighten me.”
“He said that when the gods want to punish us, they give us what we pray for.”
“And that means what?”
“Forget it,” I said. “If it was true, you’d’ve been dead a long time ago.”
Now
he
was laughing, that familiar all-knowing look on his face. Order had been restored to the universe.
WHEN I GOT home that night from Motta’s, I still hadn’t opened the letter from Larry Mac. I just didn’t have it in me for any more revelations. I was all used up. The light on my phone machine was flashing madly. I ignored it. There were calls I should have made, needed to make. I didn’t. I showered and shaved and slept.
Shaved?
Yeah, I know. I’m not sure why I shaved. I guess I wanted to clean as much of me off as possible.
In the morning, I listened to the messages. They were from Katy and Sarah and Wit and Miriam and Wit and Wit and Wit and . . .
I called Katy first and told her to bring Sarah home. It was time, I said, to have that talk about Nebraska. Sarah was really happy to hear my voice, but not nearly as happy as I was to hear hers. Nothing like being a few seconds away from getting shot to death to make you appreciate what you have.
Miriam had heard the news about the shootout in Mill Basin and was relieved to hear I was alive. Wisely, I asked after the kids and Ronnie before checking on what had happened to Carmella.
“She’s doing fine,” Miriam said. “There was a bullet fragment Ronnie couldn’t see or feel that they dealt with as soon as he got her to the hospital. Ronnie called in some favors at Kings County and they kept her presence quiet. It’s not like they don’t get a ton of gunshot wounds there all the time. The cops had no trouble believing they were just too busy to report her wound immediately. There was no need to call that friend of yours.”
“Can I see her?”
“Sure, but there are a lot of cops around. Maybe you should wait a few days.”
“Thanks, Mir. Tell Ronnie I owe him one.”
“You owe him a lot more than one.”
“I knew you were going to say that.”
WIT, TOO, HAD heard about the goings-on in Mill Basin, but he seemed a lot less interested in my well-being than Miriam, and considerably more distracted.
“Did you go see Carmella’s grandmother?”
“I did,” he said.
“She’s okay, right?”
“Fine. She’s a lovely old gal. I’m going back to see her later today. You should accompany me.”
“Wit, I—”
“It wasn’t really a suggestion, Moe. There’s something you need to see for yourself.”
“Okay. I’ll pick you up in front of your building in two hours.”
He hung up before I could change my mind or ask more questions.
Once, years before, when we were first getting acquainted, Wit and I had taken a ride out to Long Island. It had been a quiet and uncomfortable trip because we were headed to Lake Ronkonkoma to see if the remains of a young woman were those of Moira Heaton. Our trip into Brooklyn from Wit’s place was similarly uncomfortable, but for less obvious reasons. Wit resisted all my attempts to engage him on the subject. I couldn’t imagine what was eating him. By the time I turned off Flatbush and onto Atlantic Avenue, I had grown weary of the subject and just wanted to get the visit over with.
The house on Ashford Street looked different in the daylight: older and a little frayed around the edges, but with plenty of character. As we stood at the front door waiting for Carmella’s grandmother, Wit said, “Take a close look at the photos in the living room.”
After Wit did the introductions, he took Carmella’s grandmother into the kitchen to make some espresso for us all. I hung back and did as Wit had instructed: I studied the photos in the living room. One thing was for sure, the woman did not lack for grandkids. She had pictures of them all at all different ages and stages, covering almost every inch of available wall space. But it was obvious that Carmella was her favorite. There were so many pictures of Carmella, you could follow her backwards in time, from her receiving her shield to her graduating from the academy to her high school graduation to . . .
Suddenly, I got the strangest feeling. I can’t quite describe it. I realized I was no longer staring at Carmella Melendez’s face, but rather at the people gathered around her at her high school graduation. There was something disturbingly familiar about these folks, especially about the man and woman standing to either side of her. I knew these people from somewhere, but where? The man, who I assumed was Carmella’s father, was particularly familiar. I gave up, figuring I was still too exhausted to do even simple math.
Then, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted another picture. This one featured a pretty little girl, maybe five or six years old, in the arms of her father. Her father was dressed in his New York City Fire Department blues. When it clicked, I might just as well have been hit with a bat. I knew these people, all right. I had once saved that little girl from the bottom of a water tank.
THE COPS HAD closed off the block of the Mistral Arms, so I parked illegally and walked back to the building. There were two blue and whites, two unmarked cars, a crime scene unit, and the M.E.’s meat wagon parked out front. Pretty fucking convenient, I thought, to have everyone on hand for when I pressed my gun to Rico’s liver and pulled the trigger. Or maybe someone had saved me the bother and had already killed the lying prick.
No such luck. Rico Tripoli’s wretched little room was empty. He was gone with the wind, or maybe he’d crawled back under the molding with the rest of the roaches. I’m not sure where people like Rico go
to disappear. I was beyond worrying about it, because in the pit of my belly I just knew Rico would fall back into my life again someday. He’d be even more desperate and lost, and my anger would have gone by then.
Marisa had been freed from all earthly worries. Apparently, one of her customers was displeased with the indifference in her eyes or her technique or needed money more than she did. Whatever the reason, she’d been beaten to death for it.
A detective stopped me on my way back downstairs and asked me what I was doing there. I showed him my old badge and explained about Rico. I wondered if he was a suspect.
“Nah,” he said, “it was the deceased’s ex. The kid saw him do it.” As I left, I noticed Marisa’s daughter, the chubby girl, sitting in the same wobbly chair in which she sat that first time. The one-eyed cat was in her lap eating meat out of a can held in the girl’s hand. The cat had on a fancy rhinestone collar with a bell and a name tag, but the chubby girl was still dressed in the same ill-fitting and dirty clothes she had worn the day we passed in the hall. Not all little girls get rescued.
IT WAS FOUR days before I went to see her at Kings County. By then, it was determined that she was no longer in danger and the guards outside her door had been reassigned. I didn’t have to say the words. She saw it in my eyes.
“You know, don’t you?”
“I do, Marina.”
Just mentioning that name seemed to transform her back into the girl I had found at the bottom of the water tank in 1972. Wit had explained that her grandmother had let Marina’s name slip a few times that first night he went to see her. It hadn’t taken Wit very long to piece the whole story together.
“My parents, especially my mother, were old-fashioned,” Marina said. “They were ashamed for me and for themselves. So they changed my name and moved me to Puerto Rico and hoped by never speaking about it that I would somehow forget. There is no forgetting what was done to me, Moe.”
“I know.”
“But some of the remembering was good. I always remembered about the man who found me. My father told me about you—not your name, but about you. That man who held me in his arms and told me everything was going to be okay was why I always wanted to be a police officer. I wanted to be someone’s hero someday.”
“When did you know it was me?”
“Not when we met at the precinct.”
“When you accused me of stalking you?”
She ignored that. “That day, when we drove you to Fountain Avenue, I knew. You mentioned saving the little girl. At first, it almost didn’t register. Then it hit me. That night I called my dad. He’s retired down in Florida. He told me your name.”
I had come prepared with a speech about the kiss, but somehow I just couldn’t say any of the words. I think she had prepared a speech as well. Our red faces seemed to say all that needed to be said.
After a few more minutes of uncomfortable silence, I stood to go.
“The doctors think it’s a million dollar wound,” she said. “I’ll need more surgery. I don’t know what I’ll do if I can’t be a detective.”
“You’ll learn how to swim, Marina. I did.”
I’m not sure she understood. I’m not sure I did, but it felt like the right thing to say.
“Thank you, Moe . . . for saving me.”
I walked over to her and held her chin in my hand. “Everything is going to be okay. I promise.”
LARRY’S SUICIDE CONFESSIONAL had found its way to me. Had it been delivered on time, there’s a chance Kalisha Pardee, Detective Bento, Frankie Motta, his son, and Ken Burton might still be alive. Martello, too, if, like me, you don’t consider a persistent vegetative state living. But I don’t know. Maybe I would have been slow to act or I would have gone to the wrong people. What I can say is that Malik Jabbar would have been just as dead no matter who delivered my mail, because it was Larry McDonald who killed him. I read enough of Larry’s letter to know that much.
I read enough of it to know that Frank Motta Jr. had somehow found out about the circumstances surrounding Dexter Mayweather’s execution and that he was using that knowledge to blackmail Captain Martello into protecting him and Malik from the cops. How Junior
found out about D Rex, the letter didn’t say. Probably because Larry didn’t know. But Martello understood that Frankie’s kid and his partner were incompetent fools who would eventually self-destruct and bring him down in the process. That’s why he had Larry plant the wire. If Martello was going to get into bed with these clowns, he would need to be aware of any trouble before it tainted him. He figured he could do damage control if he had enough advanced warning. And if Larry hadn’t killed himself, Martello would have been right.
Once Jabbar got arrested and yapped about Mayweather, as he must have been instructed to do by Junior Motta, Martello decided he wasn’t going down and he wasn’t going to do the dirty work himself. So he enlisted the help of his fellow executioners, Larry McDonald and Ken Burton. It wasn’t the first time either Martello or Burton had blackmailed Larry into aiding their causes. Martello’s making captain and Caveman Kenny Burton’s remarkable career survival were no longer mysteries. Larry had called in a lot of markers over the years on their behalf. After all, what choice did he have?
Like I said, I didn’t get through the whole letter. When he got to the part about how I knew him,
really
knew him, better than anyone and how I had always understood him, I stopped reading. Even in death he was trying to work an angle, to manipulate me, to gain the upper hand. He was right, of course. I did understand him. He hadn’t taken his own life out of guilt or some sense of justice. Larry Mac could live with the murders without losing a second’s sleep. What he couldn’t live with was the loss of control, because no matter how high he climbed he would never be able to climb past blackmail. The closer he got to being king, the better pawn he’d be.