“Perfectly.”
“Okay.” She eyed me skeptically as she closed the door behind her.
“She’s a tough cookie, that one,” Motta said. “Woman cares more about me than my ex-wife did.”
“She gets paid to care.”
“So did my ex-wife. We pay ’em all, one way or another.”
Argue that.
“Before, you said something about D Rex being too smart for his own good.”
“Everybody’s a team player up to a point. Dexter thought he saw an opening and he went for it.”
“Got him killed, huh?”
He rolled the chair over to me and began patting me down before I could answer. His movements were practiced, familiar, but his touch was weak. “You wearin’ a wire?”
A wire! Talk about coming full circle. Then again, it wasn’t the wire Larry had planted that started this mess. The wire and Malik Jabbar’s taped interrogation simply marked the end of the intermission, an intermission to a drama whose opening act was played out nearly two decades ago.
“You’re clean.”
“Would it have mattered if I was wearing a wire?”
“I guess not.”
“Then why don’t you just tell me what happened, Frank?”
He thought on that. “Sure. Why the hell not?”
“I’m listening.”
“We had the distribution network in place. We had a ton a cash to expand as soon as Tio died. We were gonna be patient with him, wait him out. He was a man of respect and if we whacked him it woulda caused trouble with the other families. Then he did us a favor and he had that fuckin’ stroke.”
Another tumbler fell. “You jumped the gun. You thought Anello was gonna die when he had that stroke.”
“The fuckin’ doctor said he was a dead man. That it was a twenty-to-one shot that he’d ever regain consciousness, never mind anything else.”
“But he did.”
“Like three weeks later, the stubborn old fuck. Sometimes I wish that society bitch had just fucked him to death. He was months in therapy. Even so, he talked like he had rocks in his mouth and walked like a fuckin’ gimp. But he still knew what was what. He heard things. Those was dangerous days to be me.”
“I bet. D Rex saw his opening.”
“He knew I was in a bad place and he tried to renegotiate percentages.”
“Pissed you off, huh?”
“Nah, like I said, he was a sharp nigger. He was only doin’ what I woulda done in his shoes. Problem was, once the old man recovered, it wasn’t about percentages no more. It was about survival, my survival, my crew’s survival.”
“D Rex had to go.”
“I had no choice. I hated doin’ it. I kinda liked him and he had a real head for business. With the money we woulda generated, we coulda turned the Anellos into a powerful family, not a fuckin’ afterthought. But Dexter was the only link to me. He’s the only person I ever dealt with directly. With him dead, Tio coulda heard all the rumors in the world and it wouldn’t a mattered.”
“But you didn’t kill him,” I said. “You had him killed.”
“If word ever got out inside the family that I clipped Dexter Mayweather, people would start to wonder why. I couldn’t risk that. Had to keep my distance, you know?”
“So you couldn’t use anybody from your crew or even bring in a guy from another family. You had to use outside help, people who were insulated from the family and maybe even from the law. And it had to be done messy, nothing that could look like a pro hit. Something that would seem to be the work of one of D Rex’s rivals or an ambitious one of his own looking to move up the quick way.”
“You musta been a helluva detective, Prager.”
I let that go. “It’s easier to see things looking down when you’re standing on seventeen years of history. I guess the guys working the case back then thought exactly what you wanted them to think. It’s what everybody would think. And who would really give a shit about some black drug dealer?”
“Good question. Why do you give a shit?”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass about the vic. I’m interested in his killers.”
“Why?”
“Because one of them was a cop and a friend of mine, someone I thought I understood.”
“Oh, I get it. This ain’t about him. It’s about you, huh?”
I thought about that. So far I’d barely touched Frankie Motta, but he’d gotten a few hard, straight rights in through my gloves.
“Yeah, Frank, I guess maybe it is about me. Larry must’ve owed you something big to do this for you.”
He started laughing again, laughter even blacker than his lungs.
“Larry didn’t owe me shit. Wasn’t you payin’ no attention before when I was talkin’ about not leavin’ a wake?”
“I thought I was.”
“Larry McDonald was a friend a mine too, you know? We went back a long fuckin’ ways, him and me. He was just as hungry for stuff when we was kids as he was the day he took the pipe.”
“Fuck!”
“That’s right, Prager. Larry Mac come to me with the idea, not the other ways around. He was smart and, like Dexter, maybe too smart.”
“But you said no one else knew about you and Mayweather.”
“He didn’t exactly know, but this is Larry we’re talkin’ about here. He was on my pad to keep an eye on Mayweather and he was on Mayweather’s pad too, to keep an eye on the cops. How long you think it took Larry to figure out what was really going down?”
“Probably not too long, knowing Larry.”
“When Tio come outta the coma, Larry Mac came knockin’.”
“And you answered the door and let him in.”
“You bet your fuckin’ ass I did. Listen, it was like havin’ my prayers answered. I could trust Larry and with him being on Mayweather’s payroll, he could get in close to Dexter. He wasn’t connected to me business-wise, not so’s anybody knew about it, and, like you said, he was insulated from the law.”
“Perfect.”
“Almost.”
“Something’s perfect or it isn’t,” I said. “The difference between almost perfect and perfect is like one and infinity.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind. So what went wrong?”
He smirked. “The ripples in the water.”
“We’re back to that again.”
“We never left. See, Larry found out that muderin’ somebody leaves ripples in the water that don’t never go away. He had trouble living with that.”
“You’re telling me he had a conscience.”
“Nah. . Well, maybe a little one, but that wasn’t the thing of it.”
“Then what was the thing of it, Frank? You don’t mind me asking?”
“Dexter was a big boy, wide and country strong.”
“I remember.”
“Took more than just Larry to do what needed doin’. Yeah, they fucked up poor old Dexter pretty good: broke his fingers, smashed up his knees, beat him bad.”
“I heard, but what’s. .” Then it dawned on me. “The guys who helped him. The ripples in the water.”
“Pat yourself on the back there, Prager. You got long arms.”
“So who helped him?”
Motta stared at me in a way that could’ve frosted glass. “I ain’t never ratted nobody out in my life. I coulda saved myself a ten-year stretch in prison, I opened my mouth. What makes you think I’m gonna talk now? And to you?”
“You talked about Larry.”
“Larry’s dead, God rest his soul.” Frankie crossed himself. “Nothin’ can hurt him now. Not even sticks and stones can break his bones no more.”
“That’s almost funny. Well,” I said, “at least I know the guys who helped Larry out are still alive, otherwise you’d talk about ’em.”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
I didn’t pursue it further. He wasn’t going to discuss it. And though I would have been happy to waste every second of time he had left on earth, I wasn’t inclined to waste mine.
“Marge tells me you and Larry had a falling-out.”
“She still hot, Marge? Man, Larry had some good taste, always the finest threads and finest pussy.”
I ignored that. “So what happened?”