“I guess I lied. Go figure.”
“Yeah, go figure.”
Violence put Kenny in a talkative mood. “Good thing for me your pal Rico got cold feet that night or I woulda missed out on a big pay-day. You may be a cunt, but he’s a real fucking coward. I’m gonna enjoy killing him.”
“Not if I get to him first.”
“I like my chances better,” he said, making some guttural noises that passed for laughter.
“Shut the fuck up, the both of you,” Martello groused. “Prager, go stand over by the fireplace.”
I did.
“Shoot Frankie!”
At first I didn’t think I’d heard Martello right. Several scenarios ran through my head, none of them any good. I might be able to get one shot off at either Martello or Kenny, but not both, and I’d be dead before I found out if I’d hit the target. Didn’t seem like a good option, not yet, anyway. Besides, Motta was spasming and coughing up wads of blood-laced phlegm. He was twitching so much I wasn’t sure I
Martello had other ideas. “Then shoot at the fucking floor, but shoot.”
“Fuck you!” I thought I heard myself say.
A moment of clarity. He wanted me to be found with gunpowder residue on my skin and sleeve. Considering the volume of raw violence over the last few weeks, I thought this all very silly and elaborate. Homicide according to Robert’s Rules of Order. Apparently, the Caveman agreed with me.
“This is bullshit!” Kenny whined, raising up his nine mil. “I shoulda just killed you first at Rip’s the other night.” He saw the stunned look on my face. “That’s right, Moe, I was standing so close behind you I coulda licked the wax outta your fucking ear. You’re a lucky bastard, you know that? If that asshole Bento wasn’t there, you’d be-”
“Shut up, Burton, and let’s finish this up.”
“Fuck you, Martello.” Kenny had chafed at authority when we were on the job together. He didn’t seem to tolerate it any better now.
For the second time in as many minutes, I opened my mouth to say something but was interrupted, this time by gunfire.
Bang!
I looked down at my gun hand to make sure I hadn’t pulled the trigger. When I looked back up, Kenny Burton-legless as a drunken teenager, his expression asking, “Hey, what the fuck?”-was doing a London Bridge. He fell down, all right, his head smacking the hardwood floor with a nauseating, hollow thud. I felt it more than Kenny did. He was beyond feeling. Then again, he had always seemed to be beyond feeling.
“Don’t worry about him,” Martello said to me. “He was gonna die anyway. Now shoot the fucking gun, Prager. If you can’t tell, I’m not in the mood for any more bullshit.”
My gun hand felt completely detached from my arm. It took all my strength and focus just to raise it up and pull back the hammer. I pointed it away from Frankie, who was now desperately groping for his inhaler. For the heck of it, I peeked at Martello, but he wasn’t stupid. He had assumed the proper shooting position, his Police Special
I closed my eyes and squeezed the trigger, but there were two bangs, then a third. When I opened my eyes, Frank Motta was crumpled in a heap in front of his wheelchair, a chunk of his neck torn out, the blood barely pumping. Apparently that wasn’t his inhaler he had been groping for. If it had been, he wouldn’t be needing it now. Martello was down too, but alive, rolling around on the floor in agony, the right side of his abdomen soaked with blood. He was too busy screaming, “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” to worry about me or his lawn or to contemplate his future.
I ran over to him, kicked his gun out of the way, and pressed my foot down hard on his shoulder. That got his attention. With Martello flat on his back, I reached down and stuck the short barrel of my.38 into his mouth. I made sure he saw the gun was cocked.
“Now, you won’t have to tell me to shoot. Understand?” He did.
I had to hurry as I wasn’t sure how long he’d stay conscious and I could hear sirens in the distance.
“I want answers-short, quick answers,” I said. “If I believe them, I won’t kill you. It’s that simple. Ready?”
He was.
“You, Larry, and Kenny killed Dexter Mayweather.”
He nodded yes.
“Was Burton telling the truth about Rico?”
He nodded again.
“Where did you fit in?” I yanked the.38 just far enough out of his mouth so that I could I understand his answer.
“I was Frank’s man inside the Six-O. He made Larry take me along for insurance. Now get me a fucking doctor, for chrissakes! I’m bleeding to death here.”
“Not yet,” I said. “Is Bento dead?”
“Yeah.”
“Where’s the body?”
“Coney Island Creek.” He put a clammy hand on my forearm. I shook it off.
“And Motta’s kid?”
“The Gowanus Canal.”
“How were you and the kid involved?”
He didn’t answer. The sirens were close now. Martello’s eyelids were fluttering and he’d begun to shiver.
“Okay, listen to me,” I said, slapping his face to get his attention. “You tell the cops anything you want about what went on today. You put bullets in two men, so I wouldn’t stretch the truth too far. Otherwise, I don’t care what kind of bullshit story you come up with to explain what happened here between you and Kenny and Motta. But you mention word one about what happened back in ’72 or about Larry, and I’ll fucking kill you. That’s a promise.”
His eyes shut, maybe for the last time. Maybe not. The cops were at the front door. I holstered my gun, stood up, and walked quickly over by the French doors. I slid one open and tossed something into the water behind the house. I did it knowing Katy would understand.
All dreams have a shelf life. The expiration date on my dream of pitching for the Mets or playing point guard for the Knicks had long since passed. And now, finally, I had acknowledged that my dream of getting my career back, of carrying that gold and blue enamel shield, had gone the way of the Mets and Knicks. I took out my silvery old badge, the only one I had earned the right to call my own, and waited for the cops to sort things out.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
After telling the same bullshit story over and over again to detective after detective, my mind pretty well went numb. I said I had come to talk to Frankie Motta on behalf of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Yancy Whittle Fenn. Wit, I told them, was researching a project on the fall of the old organized crime families and I sometimes helped him do his early background work. The last part was true enough. I did sometimes help Wit with his research. Of course, the rest of it was utter crap.
As to the shootings, I feigned ignorance. There seemed to be, I said, some sort of dispute between the three men that had something to do with the Red Hook Massacre and Frankie Motta’s son dealing coke. Sure, I knew Kenny Burton a little bit from when I was first on the job, but I was shocked to see him walk through the door with Martello. I guess if they looked hard enough, the cops would find someone who had seen the Caveman and me at O’Hearn’s in the city or with me and Rico at Larry’s burial. And as no one had seen me at Captain Martello’s house out in Great River, I swore that I’d never met the man. Whether anything I said would jibe with what Martello would tell them was something I’d worry about tomorrow. Besides, when they rolled Martello out to the ambulance, he wasn’t looking very spritely.
The cops didn’t believe five words of what I said. I could see it in their eyes, hear it in their voices. Shit, I wouldn’t have bought it either, but they had run out of questions to ask and ways to ask them. And when I got a chance to use the phone, I called Queens D.A. Fishbein. After I gave him a bit of a preview of what I’d learned-specifically that Burton was responsible for the murder of at least two NYPD detectives-he sounded quite pleased for himself and with me.
Whether it was the detective’s choice or a fit of pique by the Brooklyn D.A. at being trumped by Fishbein, I am still unsure, but for whatever reason, I was not allowed to
go home. The best they were willing to do for me was to let me wait out in my car. There, alone in the front seat, I don’t suppose I ever felt so alone. It was difficult to say by whom I felt more betrayed, Larry McDonald or Rico Tripoli. I think Larry Mac-even more calculating and cutthroat than I’d imagined-had tried to warn me in his own way, but Rico had basically let me stroll into my own execution. I couldn’t get past the gnawing feeling that he had put in a call to Martello.
I think I was exhausted beyond sleep. After about an hour alternating between forcing my eyes shut and watching aircraft lights glide over the Atlantic, I stretched my legs a bit. As I walked between all the official cars and stared at the curious faces who stared even harder back at me, I realized there were things about the case I would never know. Unless Martello survived, found God, and spilled the parts of his guts that weren’t all over Motta’s floor or removed in surgery, I would be at a loss. In some ways, not knowing would be the worst part of it for me. I dreaded not knowing.
I asked once again if I could leave or use the phone. The polite version of what I was told was to get the fuck back into my car and wait. I began sorting through the pile of mail Joey the postman had handed me just as I’d left my house to come talk to Motta. Finding three credit card bills ain’t exactly like finding a forgotten twenty in the pocket of your blazer. But there amongst the bills and expired coupons, last week’s edition of the neighborhood paper, and a letter from the PTA, was something I couldn’t quite get myself to believe.
In my hand was an envelope. The return address printed in the upper left hand corner was New York City Police Department, One Police Plaza, New York, N.Y. 10038.
My address was written by hand in blue ink. Larry Mac’s handwriting was as neat and distinctive as the man himself. I noticed my hands were shaking and that my heart was pumping so much blood so quickly I was lightheaded.
There was a sharp rap on the glass. I turned and looked up into the face of some detective or other and watched his lips moving. He rapped the window again and motioned for me to roll it down.
“All right, Prager,” he said. “You can go.”
I think he said some other stuff about keeping myself available, but I can’t really say.
EPILOGUE
1972 Redux
As it happens, my recounting of the events at Motta’s house that day is the only thing the cops have ever had to work with. Martello made it through the night and beyond. . sort of. He went into cardiac arrest on the operating table. The OR personnel managed to revive him, but not before the lack of oxygen had resulted in a near-total loss of brain function. These days what’s left of him lies in some long-term care facility upstate. If you think there’s some kind of justice in that, you’d be wrong. But I won’t argue the point. You’ll have to excuse me because nothing about this whole thing feels like justice to me.
The cops, as directed by Fishbein, found Bento and Junior Motta’s bodies where Martello had told me they were. The bullets they pulled out of both dead men matched Kenny Burton’s 9mm. Someone with half a brain might’ve thought to use a different piece to murder people, but Caveman was never the smartest guy on the planet. Besides, when you’ve gotten away with so much for so long, you start to think you’ll never get caught. He was right, I guess, in his own way.
Detective Klein, Bento’s partner, was about as happy to see me as a CAT scan of a brain tumor. As far as he was concerned, I was no different than Burton, worse maybe. If I had been more up front with Bento and him about the events surrounding Kalisha Pardee’s death, he said, his partner wouldn’t have been curious enough to tail me and he’d be alive today.
“He saved my life, you know,” I told Klein. “Apparently, Kenny Burton was standing right behind me and your partner fired over my head to give me cover.”
“His mistake,” Klein said. “Now get the fuck away from me before I kill you myself.”
I did as he asked.
Sorry is so often a meaningless word, but there are times when it’s more meaningless than others. This was one of those times.
Fishbein and Kings County D.A. Starr held a press conference about a week after the shit hit the fan. I had told Fishbein the whole truth, as far as I knew it, on the condition that he never reveal Larry McDonald’s part in any of it. Maybe I was foolish to trust him given the depth of his ambition, especially in the light of what Larry Mac turned out to be. But Fishbein had always been good to his word and I didn’t want to give him any excuse not to hold up his end of the bargain. If he could tell me where my brother-in-law Patrick had gotten to, I needed to know.
The two D.A.s spun an interesting tale of murder, deceit, corruption, and betrayal, including the solution to the seventeen-year-old execution-style murder of one Dexter “D Rex” Mayweather. In their telling, it was Frank Motta himself along with then Patrolman Martello of the 61st Precinct and Patrolman Kenneth Burton of the 60th Precinct who had tortured and murdered Mayweather. They claimed to have solved the Red Hook Massacre and the execution murders of Malik Jabbar, a.k.a. Melvin Broadbent, and Kalisha Pardee. They went on to say they had broken up a major new drug ring headed by Frank Motta Jr. This last part was a huge exaggeration, but since all the players were dead or as good as dead, no one was around to dispute their claims.
Fishbein was most happy with the turn of events and had begun interviewing aids to help run his campaign for state attorney general. Maybe he had finally learned a little modesty and realized that he wasn’t gubernatorial material quite yet. I didn’t think this case was enough to propel him back onto the state political scene, but that wasn’t my concern. Busy as he was, I gave him a few weeks before asking him to keep his end of the bargain. When I did ask, he was more than happy to make an appointment to meet me and discuss Patrick’s long-ago disappearance. On the phone the day we talked, he even asked me if I would consider working as the chief investigator for his campaign.
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.
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