“Not from me, but I can’t say if Chief McDonald told anyone.”
“I doubt it. Not Larry’s style to share. Besides, whatever his reasoning, this was way beyond kosher, even for a chief.”
“So what’s the plan?”
“The plan? The plan is you dig up what you can on the Dexter Mayweather murder while I try and figure out what Larry Mac was up to with this wire.”
“You think they’re related, the wire, the Mayweather thing, and the chief’s suicide?” she asked.
“If it was suicide.”
“Right, if it was suicide,” she agreed. “But do you think it’s all related?”
“Maybe, maybe not. Depends what Larry was fishing for.”
“Huh?”
“Sometimes trawlers catch sharks in their nets. Even if you go to throw the shark back in, it doesn’t mean it won’t bite you.”
HER NAME WAS Nancy Lustig, a forlorn little rich girl whose looks bordered on the ugly side of nondescript. I’d met her in 1978 when I was looking for my
now-you-see-him-now-you-don’t
brother-in-law, Patrick. They’d dated long enough for him to knock her up and abandon her after the abortion. I hadn’t thought about Nancy Lustig in years, but as I drove home along the Belt Parkway in the suddenly un-welcoming fog, she was on my mind.
I guess maybe there was something in Melendez tonight that brought Nancy to mind. Not her looks, certainly, but there was something in Carmella’s eyes, a sadness, a yearning, an old wound that struck the same chord Nancy had struck a dozen years ago.
I don’t know, maybe it was my guilt again, screaming at me like the cranky old steps. It wasn’t lost on me that in the midst of Melendez’s revelations about Larry Mac and her planting the wire, I had kissed a woman in a way married men are not supposed to kiss women who are not their wives. Sure, from the outside it probably didn’t look like much of a kiss, but it was on the inside, and on the inside there was fire.
In a way, I think I was grateful for the bomb Carmella had dropped on me about her dealings with Larry Mac. It put the fire on hold, at least for now. There was only so much I could handle all at
once, only so many hands to juggle so many balls. Tonight, I’d run out of hands.
CHAPTER TWELVE
FISHBEIN MET ME at a coffee shop in Elmont, just over the Queens border with Nassau County. The D.A. didn’t like being summoned. He was careful not to say so, though his expression spoke all too clearly. Fishbein may have been good at keeping his yap shut when the situation called for it, but he wore his heart on his face. It was forever getting him in trouble, especially during his ill-fated run for governor. His media-savvy handlers spotted the problem right away, making certain Fishbein never appeared on camera in his own commercials. His ads were always full of testimonials, newspaper clippings, and still photos.
The bigger problem was that his handlers couldn’t control the TV news, and whenever they showed tape of Fishbein making a stump speech, the D.A.’s boredom and condescension showed through. It was especially evident when he’d be in some upstate county speaking to a bunch of dairy farmers. Bad enough that he looked so out of place to begin with—Groucho Marx in a Dickies shirt, stiff Levis, and Wolverine boots—but when he started talking about price supports . . . Jesus, you could just see the man wanted to be any place else.
“So, what can I do for you, Mr. Prager?” Fishbein asked, pulling a face as bitter as the coffee. He put his cup down.
“That’s the right question, Mr. D.A., but first I wanna talk about my brother-in-law a little bit. You said—”
“I know what I said, but you might as well not ask. Results. Results. Results. They’re the only things that’ll get you answers, so I suggest you get to work.”
“Can you find out if there was any monkey business going on in the Six-O?”
“Monkey business?”
“Was anyone in the precinct a target of an I.A., local, or federal investigation? Do I really have to spell it out for you?”
“Not really, but can you be a little more specific? Even with good hearing, it helps to know what you’re listening for.”
Clever man. I knew we’d eventually get to where we now were. I just hadn’t counted on it being so soon. I’d spent the better part of my sleepless last night trying to sort through everything I had on my plate, never mind the kiss.
The kiss
. It was all I could do not to let it consume me. But looking across the table at Fishbein’s snide expression made the task that much easier. I went with the truth. An edited version of it, at least.
“Chief McDonald had a wire installed in an interview room at the Six-O.”
Fishbein’s eyes got big and greedy. It was all he could do not to salivate. “A wire, huh? And you know this how?”
“I heard a tape.”
“Of what?”
“For now, that’s my business and it’s beside the point. What I need to know is why.”
“You’re presupposing this wasn’t authorized,” said the D.A., taking a second sip of his coffee. He didn’t like this one any better than the first.
“I’m not presupposing anything. I’m eliminating possibilities. So, can you find out?”
“I can.” Fishbein stood over me. He liked that. Suited his personality much better than speaking to dairy farmers. “I’ll be in touch.”
I didn’t bother shaking his hand, nor did I wish him well. The better I got to know the D.A., the more I hoped he’d get hit by a bus someday. I stayed and finished my coffee. It was bitter, but not so much as Fishbein’s. His lips hadn’t touched my cup.
LIKE A LOT of towns on Long Island, Massapequa, or Matzohpizza, as the locals jokingly called it, was a popular destination on the white flight express. So many city cops, firemen, and school teachers fled there in the ’60s and ’70s that people said Massapequa was Algonquin for civil servant. If you screamed “Help, police!” at midnight, half the porch lights in town went on. One of those porch lights had once belonged to Larry McDonald—Larry having made the move to the Burger
King landscape of the Long Island suburb years ago. Margaret had gotten the house in the divorce settlement.
Long Island gave me the chills to begin with, and the thought of visiting Larry’s old house wasn’t making me feel any better. I parked in front of the tidy colonial on Harmony Drive in Massapequa Park and took a slow walk to the door. Yeah, even out here the stratification of neighborhoods had taken hold. The collars were bluer in North Massapequa than in plain old Massapequa, and the houses were a little nicer and the lawns a bit more trim in Massapequa Park than in Massapequa proper. But if you had some
gelt
, some ’scarole, you lived down by the water in Nassau Shores.
The first thing I did was look at the numbers on the front of the house when a squat man of sixty pulled back the door. Who did I expect, Larry McDonald’s fucking ghost? It’s weird how humans are so good at denying reality. I suppose I thought Margaret would answer. Maybe hoped is the better word.
“Is Margaret home?”
“She’s not around. Who are you?” he asked, but without guile.
“Moe Prager. I’m—”
“Sure, sure, Moe. I heard all about you. You were friends with Marge’s first husband. Come in. Come in.” I stepped inside. The interior of the house was as clean and tidy as the outside. “Frank Spinelli,” he said, offering me a thick hand. I took it. Had the grip of a working man, but the skin of a retiree. His accent was Bronx Italian, maybe with a taste of the old country mixed in.
“Pleasure to meet you, Frank.”
“Same here. Glad for the company. Gave up the pizzeria a few years back, but I can’t get used to this leisure thing. I tried golf a little bit, but I figured if I wanted to suffer so much, I’d just stick pins in my eyes. I’m home so much, sometimes I think I make Marge a little
ubotz
, crazy, you know?”
I liked this guy. “Yeah, I can see that.”
“For almost forty years I’m working twelve-hour days, and then this beautiful young woman walks into my shop and she takes my heart. She come in for calzone and winds up with a husband. Life is crazy, no? Hey, I’m being rude. You wanna drink? A little homemade red?”
“Sure, but only with some ice and lemon slices.”
That stopped Frank Spinelli in his tracks. “Hey, who taught you how to drink homemade like a guinea?”
Rico Tripoli
. “Another ex-cop. A friend of Larry and me.”
“Come on in the kitchen.”
Frank Spinelli stood at the island with two jam jars filled with ice cubes and lemon wedges. He poured the red wine into the jars from a big jug. He corked the jug and slid a jar my way.
“
Salude!
”
“
Salude!
”
“So, Moe, you know your friend Larry, he really hurt Marge.”
“I know, Frank.”
“Why did he do that? Marge is a beautiful woman, a good woman.”
“The best. But Larry’s loss was your gain, right?”
For the first time since I stepped inside the house, Frank stopped smiling.
“Marge, she loves me, but she never loves me like Larry. I knew that when I married her. That is a once in your life thing, the way she loved Larry. Me, I’m a chubby old wop from the Bronx who respects a woman, who knows how to treat her right, but I never fool myself. My poppa,” Frank said, crossing himself, “he always said the only real fools were people who tricked themselves. I’m no fool, Moe.”
“No, Frank, I don’t suppose you are.”
“So why you wanna talk to Marge, you don’t mind me asking?”
“About Larry. Something was going on there. I knew Larry was an ambitious bastard, and he could do some incredibly cold and calculating things, but suicide . . .”
“Marge, too. She don’t understand.”
“That’s why I wanted to talk to her. Maybe she knows something she isn’t aware of. You know, something that happened a long time ago.”
“Sure. Sure. Makes sense.”
We went out to their back deck and stood in silence, drinking our wine and watching the cardinals and robins darting from branch to branch. Before I left, Frank promised he would have Margaret call me. We shook hands and said our goodbyes, but Frank wasn’t quite finished. With the front door nearly closed behind me, I could hear Frank mutter, “Why did he hurt her like that?”
It was a good question. Larry seemed to have left a lot of those behind.
I MADE ONE more stop on my way back to Brooklyn. I pulled off the L.I.E. at Queens Boulevard and drove into Rego Park. Mandrake Towers was a ten-unit apartment building complex. The buildings were red brick boxes that were as homey as an off-ramp and as cozy as a prison cell, but I wasn’t apartment shopping, thank God!
The security office was in the basement of Building 5. Although the incinerator had been replaced years ago by a garbage compactor, the stink of the fire and ash remained. Didn’t matter how many coats of fresh paint were laid over the cinder block walls, it seemed the odor was there to stay. Maybe it was in my head. My friend Israel Roth, forty-five years removed from the nightmare of Auschwitz, says he can still smell burning flesh in pure mountain air. He told me once, “There’s no forgetting some things. Some things, Mr. Moe, demand to be remembered.”
Who was I to disagree?
The security office was unchanged since the first time I’d seen it in 1983, but the man behind the desk had grown a little grayer, a little thicker around the gut. He no longer wore a trooper’s hat and there were now shiny captain’s bars on the collar of his khaki shirt.
“Shit!” he said looking up from his book. “Security sure do suck in this place they let broken-down old white people like you in here.”
“Security’s fine, but their leadership’s a little shaky.”
“Y’all don’t want me to come around this desk and kick your scrawny little Jewish ass up and down the block.”
“You’d have to catch me first.”
“Good point. Come over here and let me give y’all a hug, man.”
Preacher Simmons stood up in pieces. When you’re six-foot-eight and close to three hundred pounds, you’re allowed to unfold yourself one part at a time. In the mid-’60s, Preacher “the Creature” Simmons was an all-city, all-world forward from Boys High in Brooklyn. These days, he would have been drafted directly into the NBA and given a few million dollars to sit on the bench and learn the pro game. But back in ’64 he wound up at a basketball factory down South and in the midst of a point-shaving scandal. Unlike Connie Hawkins, Preacher didn’t have the resources to resurrect his career. He was a power player
and lacked the soaring grace of Hawkins. Instead, he fell on hard times and was rescued by a cop named John Heaton. Heaton was the father of the political intern who had gone missing in 1981. It was two years later, when I’d been hired to do a last-ditch investigation of Moira Heaton’s disappearance, that I met Preacher. We’d been friends since. We even played ball together sometimes in local two-on-two tournaments. We were quite the odd couple: me with one knee and Preacher lumbering in the paint, carrying forty extra pounds around his gut and the occasional defender on his back. But between my outside shot and his power game we made it work. Katy liked to bring Sarah to watch us play. Today, thinking about that stung.
“What brings you down to the bowels of hell today, Moe?”
“You busy tonight?”
“Busy? Nah, man, why?”
“Feel like helping me with something?”
“A case?”
“Yeah.”
“Help how?”
“Meet me in front of Nathan’s at nine tonight.”
“Coney Island Nathan’s or Oceanside?”
“Coney Island.”
“We investigating hot dogs and beer?”
“Maybe after.”
“After what?” he asked.
“After you teach someone a lesson in basketball.”
“Y’all talk some shit, Moe. You know that?”
“Can you meet me?”
“See you there.”
“I’ll explain later,” I said, waving my goodbye.