“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?”