Soul Patch

couldn’t escape the feeling that they should. Einstein spent the last decades of his life looking for a unifying theory, one thing that tied all the forces of the universe together. He failed. Thinking about it that way, my task was considerably less daunting. Trouble was, I didn’t have decades to putz around, and failure didn’t seem like a viable option.

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 expose 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

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

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 decor 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

“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