“Chief McDonald, no way. That was a textbook suicide, pal.”
“Exactly.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“How well you know Larry Mac, Captain?”
“Well enough. We weren’t friends or anything.”
“He strike you as the suicidal type?”
“What’s the suicidal type? Half the fucking people who commit homicide aren’t the murdering type. You push anybody hard enough and they can kill you or themselves. It’s just a matter of how much of a push and in what direction. Type is besides the point.”
“All right. Let’s say Larry killed himself. It doesn’t change the rest of it,” I said. I was doing an awful lot of talking for someone who intended to listen. “So what about the wire?”
“McDonald came to me and told me he had heard a few things, that stuff had filtered back to him about some of my detectives.”
“What kinda things?”
“Drug stuff. You know, the same old bullshit about shaking down the local dealers, protecting the bigger ones for a fee, stealing cash and drugs. Blah, blah, blah. Nothing new under the sun, right?”
Just ask Rico Tripoli
. “Which detectives?”
“Now you’re crossing the line, pal. I’ll talk to you about McDonald, but that’s where it ends.”
“Okay, skip it. So Larry Mac comes to you and he says he’s heard some things and . . .”
“And he says he don’t want a scandal involving detectives, not on his watch, not while he’s their chief.”
I laughed with no joy. “He wouldn’t. It might hurt his ascendency. I used to joke with Larry that he thought ‘Stairway to Heaven’ was his theme song.”
“You musta known him pretty well, huh?”
“I used to think so. We came up together.” I sipped my tea. “So, Captain, he comes to you and says he’s heard some things. It’s a leap from that to planting a wire in an interview room.”
Martello squirmed in his chair so much that it made me uncomfortable watching him. The beer seemed to turn to vinegar in his mouth and he spit it out onto the grass.
“The chief said he wanted to handle things quietly, that if he could get some proof on these detectives that they were using trumped-up arrests or threats to shake people down . . . You know, he could pull them aside and warn them to put in their papers before it got ugly for them, their families, and the department. This way the whole thing goes away and nobody gets hurt. It worked for me.”
“That’s an interesting view of justice,” I said.
“Look, Prager, no C.O. wants to get caught in the middle of a corruption scandal. My head would’ve rolled along with those guilty motherfuckers.”
“But even so, what’s this got to do with Malik Jabbar and a seventeen-year-old murder case?”
“I don’t know. McDonald said I was to call him any time a drug suspect came in wanting to make a deal. After my detectives—”
“Murphy and Melendez?”
“Yeah. After Murphy and Melendez came to me, I phoned Chief McDonald. He sounded weird.”
“Weird how?”
“Just weird. I don’t know. Different. Strange. Unnerved, maybe. Anyway, he told me that he’d handle everything. He came down, talked to this Jabbar guy and had me release him. He took that cassette from my office and told me to just keep my mouth shut and that he’d protect me.”
“And you believed him?”
“What choice did I have?” Martello asked, crushing his beer can. “I was fucked no matter what I did. I had knowingly let a wire be planted in my house without a court order and by someone who had no authority to do it. I have the fucking receiver in my office, for chrissakes! Even if I could convince somebody it wasn’t my idea in the first place, I’d failed to alert anyone about what the chief was doing. And besides, McDonald had juice. Everybody with a brass button owed him favors. If anybody could protect my ass, it was him.”
“I guess I see your point. What did you do with the paperwork on Jabbar?”
“C’mon, Prager, you were on the job. Shit gets misplaced all the time. It’s a fucking miracle more shit doesn’t disappear.”
“But with the new computers . . .”
“Never got entered into the system.”
“And you didn’t called the Brooklyn D.A.?”
“Nope. So . . .” He strummed his fingers on the arm of his deck chair. “What are you gonna do about the tape?”
“This?” I twirled the cassette on the table. “I got no beef with you and I’m not looking to jam anybody up. All I want are some answers about why a small-time shithead like Malik Jabbar scared Larry so much. Nothing really scared Larry. Like you were saying, he had juice and he had balls. What could this Jabbar guy have known that got him and his girl killed?”
“Sorry, Prager, can’t help you there.”
“Okay, Captain, thanks for your time. I won’t say anything to anyone about your part in this mess.”
“Thanks. One thing I gotta say.”
“What’s that?”
“I wasn’t tight with Chief McDonald, and maybe I’m talking outta my ass, but I think you’re being a lot more loyal to him than he woulda been to you.”
“You’re probably right, but in the end, I don’t suppose it’s really about who Larry Mac was. It’s about who I am.”
I stood and offered my hand to Martello. He took it, looking mostly relieved. Mostly.
“About the tape . . .” he said, clearing his throat.
“Keep it. The answers I’m looking for aren’t on there.”
On the ride back into the city, it occurred to me that I probably should’ve kept the tape as a bargaining chip for Fishbein, but I wasn’t out to hurt people. There was already too much hurt to go around. In the end, I’d find Fishbein some raw meat to chew on. There was bound to be a lot of that around too.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE FIRST TIME Yancy Whittle Fenn and I met, we had drinks at the Yale Club across the way from Grand Central Station. It didn’t start out well for the two of us. I like drinking, but I don’t like drunks. An odd position to take, I realize, for a man who owns three wine shops, but there it is. Wit had been an especially nasty drunk, because he was a cruel drunk. As a cop, you kind of get used to belligerent drunks, fist-swinging assholes who start throwing punches at the first whiff of alcohol. Sad, stupid, angry, even hateful drunks were one thing, but I could never abide cruelty. Maybe that’s why I hated my father-in-law so.
Near seventy, Wit had begun to show his age. He was thinner these days, almost too thin without the Wild Turkey course of each meal. His perpetually tan skin now hung loosely off his jaws and there was a rounding of his shoulders that wasn’t there six years ago. But his gray-blue eyes still burned as brightly as ever behind the lenses of his trademark tortoiseshell glasses. And the man could dress. No matter how much my clothing cost, when I stood between Wit and Larry McDonald, I looked like a vagabond.
Wit and I had been back to the Yale Club several times since we’d met, but I don’t think I’d ever fully taken the place in. It was of a completely different time. A time when a certain class of white, Christian gentleman ruled the world, and proximity to Grand Central Station mattered in the scheme of things. It was of an era when black waiters wore white gloves and swallowed their anger like table scraps. Katy loved the place. Not me. I would always be more comfortable in steerage with the fish.
“A good day to you and your guest, Mr. Wit,” Willie said. He was an overly polite black man equal to Wit in age, if not older, who had waited on us that first time back in ’83 and every time since. Willie didn’t do white gloves, at least not anymore.
“And to you, Willie,” said Wit. “You’re getting a little old for waiting tables, aren’t you?”
“That well may be, Mr. Wit, but I’m not too old to stop eating, if you catch my meaning, sir.” We both caught it, but these two always went on like this. “Would either of you fine gentleman like a beverage this afternoon?”
“Dewar’s rocks,” I said.
“Club soda with a wedge of lime, please, Willie.”
“And for lunch?”
“A Cobb salad.”
“The same,” said Wit.
“Very good, gentlemen.”
Wit took a minute to look me over before saying another word. He did have a way of making me feel like a specimen under a microscope. For most of the rest of the world, he masked his electron beam beneath oodles of charm and tales of the rich and debauched. I guess I should have felt honored that he didn’t try to camouflage his inspecting me.
“Are you gonna wait till I squirm before you say something?”
“You’ve crossed the line, haven’t you?”
“You’re the second person to accuse me of that today. At least I knew what he was talking about, but what are you referring to?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
“The dark-haired beauty.”
“No, Wit. I stepped up to the line, yeah, but I didn’t cross it.”
“There’s only trouble there, Moses.”
“So you’ve said. Right now, that’s the least of my worries. What have you found out?”
“Very little, actually. The silence surrounding the late Chief McDonald continues to astound me.”
“You said you’ve learned very little, but very little isn’t nothing.”
“Our Larry was not beloved,” he said.
“Ambitious men usually aren’t.”
“I suppose not. When people feel they’re being reduced to an exploitability quotient, I imagine they find it less than endearing. I have hit upon a number of sources willing to tell me this or that about how Chief McDonald screwed them or used them or walked on them. There’s no shortage of people griping about how Larry managed to get the bump to deputy chief and then over to chief of detectives, but no one’s talking about the suicide.”
“No one thinks it’s murder?”
“Why would they? There’s nothing to indicate it was anything other than suicide.”
“He didn’t leave a note,” I said rather feebly.
“Come, Moe, many, many people have taken the pipe and not left a note. There was a time not long after my grandson’s murder that I came very close to doing myself in. I had my neck in the noose and my feet on the stool. I didn’t leave a note.”
“But people would have known why. They would have understood it was grief over your grandson even without a note. Larry would have wanted people to know why.”
Wit opened his mouth to respond, but Willie came by with our drinks. He and Wit engaged in a second round of their patented banter before Willie politely excused himself. Wit and I clinked glasses, my host looking rather too hungrily at my Dewar’s. Discussing suicide and the murder of his grandson probably weren’t the best things for his continuing sobriety. Thankfully, I hadn’t ordered bourbon. The time had come for a change of subject.
“So Wit, in all your travels, you ever do a piece on organized crime?”
“I have had the occasion, but not in many years. Why do you ask, other than to change the subject?”
Not much escaped Wit.
“Frankie ‘Sticks and Stones’ Motta.”
“Quite a colorful moniker,” he said.
“Never heard of him, I guess. How about Tio ‘the Spider’ Anello?”
“Tio Anello, the man who had his arms in everything? Absolutely! He was the subject of one of my first pieces for
Esquire
back in the early ’70s. After Anello’s wife died, he started dating this society brat named Ceci Phelps Calvin. It doesn’t get any WASPier than that. Of course she was doing it to rub her parents’ faces in the shit. One
look at her and you knew why he was doing it. Once the story leaked, that was that. Broke his heart. Had a stroke a few months later and nearly died, the poor bastard.”
“Sounds like you liked the guy.”
“I’m not certain I had any great affection for the man. The Mafia holds no particular romance for me. However, I did respect Anello. He was very old school. And you realize how us Yale men feel about old-school types. He was never once arrested. Never sold anyone out. Avoided publicity like the plague. Moe, as foolish as it was, he really loved this girl, but he put a stop to their relationship before the ink was dry on the first newspaper story about their affair.
“And unlike Carlo Gambino, Anello had a serious no-drugs policy in his family. It’s the one thing he didn’t have a piece of. Gambino gave lip service to it and looked the other way while he shoved the drug money under his mattress. I know for a fact Anello had people in his own family seen to for selling drugs.”
“Seen to?” I teased. “Interesting turn of phrase.”
“Must I explain the facts of life to you, Moses?”
“No. But his no-drugs policy cost him in the end. Probably why he didn’t have the money or the troops to withstand the Russians moving in on him. The Red Mafia doesn’t have a no-drugs policy.”
“That’s a shame.”
“Stop it, Wit. You sound like the Spider’s campaign manager.”
“I’ll send you a copy of the piece.”
“I’d like that.”
Willie brought our salads and we were too busy stuffing our mouths with bits of bacon, chicken, and avocado to do much talking. But not a second had elapsed between the time his knife and fork hit Wit’s plate and he was back at it.
“You’ve piqued my curiosity, Moe. Why bring up Anello and this other fellow, Motta?”
“No reason, their names just came up in conversation. Larry’s ex and I had dinner the other night. I was hoping she might remember something, but it was sort of a waste.”
“Who was this Frankie ‘Sticks and Stones’ character?”
“Forget it, Wit.”
“Satisfy an old man’s curiosity, will you? I am paying for lunch, after all.”
“Capo in the Anello family. Real tough guy, hence the name. He did a stretch in federal prison and I haven’t heard about him in years. Apparently, him and Larry were tight when they were kids, but Larry never mentioned him to me.”
Wit rubbed his little gray beard and stared off into space. “And the dark-haired beauty, what of her?”
“Like I said, the line didn’t get crossed. Let’s drop it, okay?”