CHAPTER TWENTY
IT CAME TO me in my sleep. Who knows, maybe a roach whispered it in my ear. More than likely it was Wit’s article. What can I say, the man’s my good luck charm. Six years ago, it was his exposé on the career of a New York politician that was the key to my discovering Moira Heaton’s true fate. But this time it wasn’t so much one detail or a particular sentence that made it come together for me. I had simply drifted off reading Wit’s piece, “Said the Spider to the WASP,” and when I woke I up, I knew it all revolved around ’72.
Although there were guesses I was making to help things fit snugly into place, I felt pretty confident. I also felt like an idiot for not seeing what was in front of my face from the day of the grand opening party. Larry had been trying to give himself away, not only at the party but that last time we spoke on the boardwalk. I just hadn’t been listening carefully enough.
“Rico.” I jostled him, Bento’s file spread over him like a paper quilt. He stank of cigarettes and sour scotch.
“What?”
“I’m heading out.”
“Whatever.”
I left most of the money in my wallet on the shelf in the bathroom. When I closed Rico’s door behind me, there were the usual ambient odors of urine and crack smoke in the air. Mostly there was a weary silence, emptiness. Even one-eyed cats have to sleep sometimes.
IT WAS EARLY yet, so I rode back into Brooklyn, back to my house. I showered and made some calls. Waited for some answers. My house felt even emptier than the Mistral Arms and nearly as desperate. I was
reminded of what my life was like before Katy, before Sarah. That’s why I was so distraught when I was injured and kicked to the curb by the NYPD. That’s why I was so eager to jump onto Aaron’s dream and ride. I felt empty and alone and untethered. Before Katy, all beds were too big. My apartment, too. There didn’t feel like there was enough of me to fill up even the small spaces. Katy made me fit into the world.
At a little after ten, I headed out the door and bumped into our regular mailman, Joey.
“Hey, Mr. P.”
“Joey, no more vacations for you, man. That guy who replaced you was—”
“—a dick. Yeah, I know.”
“There are guys on death row with a happier outlook on life than him.”
“Not only is he a miserable fuck, but he’s an incompetent one too. Here, Mr. P.” Joey handed me a neat stack of banded letters.
“What’s this?”
“That shithead delivered some of your mail to the Bermans even though he knew they moved.”
“Thanks for looking out for us, Joey.”
“No sweat, Mr. P.”
I tossed the banded pile of mail on the front seat and drove to Mill Basin.
Mill Basin is sort of Brooklyn’s anti-Ditmas Park. The area’s unifying theme seemed to be bad taste. Surrounded by water on three sides, it’s the kind of place where people who make a little bit of money turn perfectly lovely houses into things that would make Salvador Dali scratch his head.
Yeah, it may be ugly, but it’s big and it’s mine!
Just lately it had become quite popular with the Russians, who had recently began to wander beyond the confines of Brighton Beach. I took perverse pleasure in the fact that most of Frankie “Sticks and Stones” Motta’s neighbors were people he probably despised.
I came fully prepared to do battle, my .38 in its usual spot and my replica shield in my back pocket. I might as well have come with a cap gun and cowboy hat. The big but tasteful brick house on National was, as near as I could tell, unguarded. There were no obvious security cameras, no
Beware of Dog
signs, no nothing. The toughest thing I had to cope with was avoiding a medical supply truck backing out of
the driveway, its bomb-like metal tanks clinking against one another as it rolled past me down the street.
I parked at the curb, strolled up to the front door, and pressed the bell. It didn’t play the theme from
The Godfather
, but did the usual
bong—bong—bong—bong
. The way I figured it was that Motta was the shooter in Rip’s that night, that his kid had gotten in way over his head, and Dad was trying to fix the damage. When the door pulled back, I got the sense that maybe I needed to reassess the situation.
A petite Filipino woman in a white nurse’s outfit smiled up at me. “Can I help you?”
“I’m here to see Fran—Mr. Motta.” I was reaching around to my back pocket, ready to produce my fake shield. I needn’t have bothered.
“Oh good,” she said. “Visitors really perk up Mr. Frankie’s days. Come with me.”
I followed her through the house, barely noticing the décor or layout of the place.
Just outside a door, near what I assumed was the back of the house, she stopped and whispered.
“He’s having a good day, but don’t let it fool you. He becomes tired very quickly. My name is Anita. If you need me, just call out. There’s a monitor in the room so I can hear if he should fall or have trouble breathing. Okay?”
“Thank you, Anita.”
“I’ll be just down the hall.” She pushed open the door.
It was a spacious room, probably once a den, with high, angled ceilings. Long-necked fans hung from exposed beams, their lazy, spinning blades creating a gentle breeze. Large rectangular skylights let in the sun and the smell of salt air. There was a large stone fireplace surrounded on either side by a black granite ledge. The mantle was black granite as well, but that’s as far as the “den-ness” of the room went. Now a hospital bed sat where a leather sofa or loveseat might once have faced the big French doors that looked out onto the back deck and canal behind the house. Next to the bed was all manner of medical equipment and two large oxygen tanks.
In spite of the sun and salt air and fans, the nose-stinging medicinal tang and the stink of decay were heavy in the air. Frankie Motta was sitting in a wheelchair, staring through the glass of the doors that stretched from one end of the room to the other. A forty-foot boat
crawled along the basin behind the house, slowly working its way toward Jamaica Bay and the Atlantic beyond. It was hard to tell if he even noticed my presence. Maybe he had or maybe he just didn’t give a shit. His nickname might have been “Sticks and Stones,” but “Sticks and Bones” was now far more appropriate. There couldn’t have been more than a hundred and thirty pounds of gray flesh hanging on his big, bent frame.
“Used to have one a them myself. Big motherfuckin’ boat. Didn’t do shit with it except let it impress my friends. Sat at the marina a few blocks from here. What a waste a fuckin’ time and money, boats. But now I like watchin’ ’em, you know?”
I didn’t say a word.
He turned the electric wheelchair at an angle away from the French doors and toward me. “I know you?”
“I’m an old friend of Larry McDonald’s.”
If I laid a glove on him, he didn’t show it. He rolled the chair closer to me and gave me a squint. “I seen you before. You was on the TV a few years back. Solved that girl’s murder, the cop’s kid.”
“Moira Heaton.”
“Yeah, her. I watched the press conference. Larry Mac got the big bump after that case.”
“You got a good memory there, Mr. Motta.”
“I got lung cancer, idiot, not Alzheimer’s.”
“Sorry.”
“Makes at least two of us. You got me at a disadvantage. You know my name, but I only know your puss.”
“Moe Prager.”
“Oh yeah, the Jew. Larry used to talk about you sometimes.”
“That’s funny, because Larry never once talked about you, Mr. Motta.”
“Frank.” It wasn’t a suggestion. “He wouldn’t, now would he?”
“I guess not, Frank.”
That pleased him, me calling him Frank. “Larry was always the smartest guy in the neighborhood when we was kids. He picked things up right away.” Motta snapped his fingers weakly. “Took stuff in like a sponge, you know? He always understood shit without being taught it.”
“Sounds like Larry,” I agreed. “Always knew how to get what he wanted without asking.”
Motta laughed at that, but the laugh transformed itself into a coughing fit. I grabbed a white towel and handed it to him. He sounded like he was hacking up what was left of his lungs. When the coughing subsided, he put the towel down and slipped a green plastic oxygen mask over his nose and mouth. He took shallow breaths. Shallow was probably the only option left to him. Finally, some color came back into his face, and the panic in his eyes, which he hadn’t bothered hiding, subsided.
He removed the mask. “You ain’t from Meals on Wheels and you ain’t a respiratory therapist, so what you doin’ here, Prager? Not that I don’t enjoy the company.”
“Wanted to talk about Larry with you, talk some old times.”
“Old times is all I got. No time to make new memories.”
“Does it scare you, dying I mean?”
“I used to be scared of it, but when you die this way, in little pieces . . . Hey, when it comes, it comes. This!” he said, making a sweeping gesture, “This ain’t really living and it ain’t really dying, pal. It’s waitin’. I always hated waitin’.”
“I hate waiting too. Bad news is better than no news.”
“Exactly. I jus’ hope the lungs crap out on me before the shit spreads into my brain. I can see why you and Larry Mac got along. You think like he thought.”
Finally, an opening. “Not really. I wasn’t an ambitious cocksucker.”
If I thought that was going to make an impression on Frankie Motta, I guess I was going to be disappointed. Coughing out his lungs might have concerned him, but he was still a tough motherfucker.
“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.”