City of Dreams, page 6
“Hey, the Mexicans got their money,” Chris says. “They have no beef with us. But I’m thinking coke instead of horse. Better class of customer.”
“What? Crack whores?”
“No, rich white guys,” Chris says. “Doctors, lawyers, Indian chiefs. Those motherfuckers on the golf course, they’re always looking for blow.”
“You got the money for it?”
“I’ve got credit.”
“You think so?”
Yeah, I do, Chris thinks. That’s why I said it.
Next day, him and Frankie get in Chris’s Caddy and drive to Ruidoso, New Mexico, where one of Popeye Abbarca’s top guys has a horse ranch.
Vinnie can fuck.
The man is tireless.
Celia gets out of bed and starts to dress. She debated with herself whether to shower at the motel or wait until she got home, but decided on the latter because Peter won’t be home anyway, and the less time her car sits outside the Holiday Inn the better, even though she parks it out back.
Vinnie lies on the bed with that smug look on his face.
Yeah, I know, Celia thinks—you got me off. But I got you off, too. Christ, it was like a busted hydrant shooting into me.
“So, Wednesday?” Vinnie asks.
“Here?”
“We should mix it up,” he says.
Fucking the boss’s wife, you can’t be too careful.
Peter goes to the meetings. They’re boring as shit, but the stories these drunks tell can be kind of funny and they have coffee and cookies. After a few meetings, he gets to almost liking them. There’s something about the quiet, the peacefulness, the soulfulness of it.
His sixth one, he sees a young woman with long red hair and a sad expression.
He hasn’t seen her in years.
Cassie Murphy.
She recognizes him.
In another lifetime they were even sort of friends, used to hang out on the beach, go to Pasco Ferri’s clambakes together. That was back when she was clean and sober, doing pretty well, off the booze, off the smack.
Before all the shit happened and the Murphys and Morettis went to war against each other. Back before her brothers were killed and her father went to prison and she started shooting up again. Now she’s trying to get clean, she’s back in the church basements, but it isn’t going so well.
They come face-to-face on the steps outside the church.
“Cassie.”
“Peter.”
They don’t know what to say. What is there to say? He destroyed her family, ruined her life.
No, that’s not exactly true, Cassie thinks. Everything we did, we did to ourselves. She had begged Danny Ryan, her good friend, not to do the heroin boost with Liam, but he did it anyway.
Peter Moretti didn’t make them do that.
She says, “This is one of the last places I’d expect to see you.”
“DUI,” Peter says. “You?”
“You know, it’s an old story with me.”
“Yeah, I kind of remember.”
A long silence but neither of them walks away. They’re the only ones on the steps now; everyone else has gone.
Peter says, “I know this is weird, but you want to get coffee or something?”
It is weird, Cassie thinks. Very weird. But she’s still a little high from her last fix, and she knows that unless she does something different she’s going to go out and fix again, so she says yes.
They have coffee, that’s all.
Talk about the program.
Peter finds himself talking about Gina.
How he tries to pay more attention to her because he sure as shit isn’t going to ship her off to some five-star booby hatch in Vermont.
But paying attention to Gina isn’t easy because she spends most of her time in her room with the door locked. And he isn’t home a lot, because he’s out scuffling money.
Cassie, she sits and listens. Surprised that Peter Moretti, a stone goombah, is opening up like this.
“You should share in the meeting,” Cassie says.
“Fuck that,” Peter says.
Chris actually has to explain to Frankie V that “quarter horse” doesn’t mean one-fourth of a horse.
“It’s a breed of horse,” Chris says in the car as they’re going up the road to Neto Valdez’s ranch. “They use them for herding cattle.”
“Then why do they call them quarter horses?” Frankie asks.
“The fuck do I know?” Chris says.
The fuck do I care?
There must be a lot of money in horses, though, because the fucking ranch is beautiful. Chris is impressed as he drives beside long white fences that border beautiful green pastures.
Irrigation sprinklers hiss rhythmically.
Neto meets them outside the house.
White cowboy hat, denim shirt with mother-of-pearl snaps, brown Lucchese boots.
Neto is one handsome motherfucker.
He greets Chris warmly. “Chris, it’s been too long.”
Yeah, they ain’t seen each other since Chris arranged for the heroin shipment.
“Neto,” Chris says, “this is a friend of ours, Frankie.”
“Bienvenido,” Neto says.
He shows them around the stables. Turns out his quarter horses go for about $150K or more. “The real money, though, is in stud fees.”
He explains how they freeze the semen and ship it to buyers.
“You mean there’s money in horse come?” Frankie whispers to Chris.
“I guess so.”
“Who knew?” Frankie asks.
And Chris knows that no racetrack in America is ever going to be safe again because even now Frankie is figuring out how he can go around jacking off the horses.
After the tour, Neto leads them to a patio for lunch. Beautiful lunch, beautiful food—carne asada, shrimp, fresh fruit, ice-cold beers.
They get down to business. Chris says he wants to buy some coke.
“How much do you want?” Neto asks.
“I’m thinking ten kilos,” Chris says.
“I can give you that,” Neto says, “for seventeen K a kilo.”
“That’s the gringo price,” Chris says. “What’s the price to a Mexican?”
“You’re not a Mexican,” Neto says, but he’s smiling.
“But I think of you as a brother,” Chris says.
“I like you, Chris,” Neto says. “You up your order a little bit, I could go down to fifteen.”
“Fifteen at fifteen?” Chris asks.
“Done,” Neto says.
“I have fifty of it in cash,” Chris says. “I’ll put that down, pay you the rest when I lay it off.”
“Oh, Chris.”
“Come on,” Chris says, “you know I can get double the money in Minneapolis, Omaha, any of those Midwest towns. In a heartbeat.”
“I can’t forward you one-seventy-five,” Neto says. “I like you, Chris, I don’t want to see you get in over your head. Tell you what, I’ll sell you five at that price, carry you for the rest. You sell it, you come back and pay it off, we do it again.”
“Deal,” Chris says.
“But I’ll need collateral,” Neto says.
“I’m a little short on that,” Chris says.
“You’re on the run,” Neto says. “I heard all about it. But you have to leave me with some security, Chris.”
Chris does.
He leaves him with Frankie V.
It’s like a pawn shop.
If Chris comes back with the money, he redeems Frankie.
If he doesn’t . . .
Frankie’s seriously fucked.
Peter gets home and walks through the door just in time to hear the screams. They’re Celia’s and they’re coming from upstairs. He takes the stairs three at a time and sees that Gina’s door is open.
Celia is standing there.
Her screams are shrieks, the worst thing he’s ever heard.
Peter shoves her aside and sees Gina on her bed.
The covers are red, Gina’s head is thrown back across the edge of the mattress. Her eyes are open, staring at the ceiling, her mouth agape, her tongue lolling to one side of her mouth.
A knife lies on the floor by her left hand.
Peter grabs her and pulls her up. Her body is limp. He sees the long, deep gashes down her wrists.
Peter slaps her face. “Gina! Gina! Wake up!”
She doesn’t answer.
Peter turns to Celia. “Go call 911!”
Celia stands there and keeps shrieking.
“Go fucking call 911!”
She looks down at him.
“It’s too late,” Celia says. “She’s dead.”
“No, no, no . . .”
Celia says, “She’s dead and you killed her.”
Gina Moretti’s funeral is pathetic.
Well attended, for sure. Every made guy, connected guy, most politicians, more than a few cops, all the friends and neighbors and all their wives are there, at both the church and the cemetery.
Peter Jr. came home on compassionate leave to bury his sister.
It’s so sad.
The bereaved parents stand together but don’t talk to each other. Celia is tragically beautiful in her black dress, but even under the veil you can see she’s tranquilized with pills and probably booze.
Peter is silent as stone.
The whispers, the questions . . . How could a girl so pretty . . . a girl who had everything . . . What was going on in that house . . . You never know what happens behind closed doors . . .
Peter is a pallbearer, carrying his child to a hole in the ground. Peter Jr. is another, with Paulie, Vinnie, and two of their crew.
Celia loses it at the graveside. She tosses a handful of dirt onto Gina’s coffin and then her knees buckle. Peter tries to hold her up but she shrugs him off. Paulie and Pam grab her before she falls and hold her up as they walk her back to the limousine.
Peter can hear her sobs and howls from the graveside.
Paulie Moretti looks through the open bathroom door of the motel room and watches his wife get out of the shower and wrap herself in a big white towel.
Which she could have bought at fucking REI, he thinks, because Pam has put on a few pounds, more than a fucking few. He liked her better when she was doing coke and skinny; now any white powder under her nose probably comes from a doughnut.
It wasn’t always like this. It wasn’t all that long ago—a handful of years—when Pam was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, hell, the most beautiful woman anyone had ever seen.
Which was what started the whole fucking thing in the first place—Liam Murphy jealous that Paulie had a woman like that, getting drunk and assaulting her after a beach party, Paulie and Peter and Sal, God rest, beating the shit of Liam. Then Pam had gone to see the Irish fuck at the hospital and ended up leaving with him.
It started there and didn’t stop.
How many bodies? How many funerals?
And then Chris came with this fucking genius idea to set the Irish up with this drug boost and here we are. The Irish are finished, we got New England, and I got Pam back, but was it worth it?
Pam is starting to look like the “Before” picture in a Weight Watchers ad.
“That was so sad,” Pam says, coming into the bedroom.
“Gina? Yeah.” The kid was always a fucking fruitcake, Paulie thinks.
Pam unwraps the towel, lets it drop on the floor and gets into bed. Great, Paulie thinks—a damp towel on the rug.
Fucking slob.
“You want sex?” Pam asks.
“Not really.”
She rolls over with her back to him.
Paulie turns up the volume on Letterman.
Pam’s relieved that Paulie doesn’t want sex. When she first went back to him, it was all he wanted, and it was always the same thing—Am I better than Liam? Did he do this to you, did he do that to you? Did he make you come? Did he make you come like I do?
She knew the right answers—You’re the best. Liam never did this, never did that. I never came with him. You’re the only one who can make me come.
Getting off the coke hadn’t been that hard—she’d mostly done it to keep up with Liam anyway, and because they were so miserable together—but she knows she’s replaced the blow with food, just like she knows on some level that she wants to get fat so maybe Paulie will leave her.
She’s afraid to leave him.
Afraid, with good reason, that he’ll track her down and kill her. He did it before, almost, except she seduced him into fucking her instead. It still comes up on the increasingly rare occasions when he wants sex. The gun comes out and it’s Suck on this first, bitch. What if I just pull the trigger, huh? Sometimes he keeps the gun barrel in her mouth while he fucks her, thinks she gets off on it too, like she pretends to, because what else is she going to do?
Pam knows now what she shouldn’t have done.
She shouldn’t have given Paulie the dope.
The ten keys of heroin that Liam—beautiful, too-clever-for-his-own-good, arrogant Liam—had left in his coke-fueled rush to get out of the safe house. He had shoved three bricks into a suitcase and the other ten under the bed and left them there.
They ran and kept running until she flipped on him.
The fed Jardine came and busted him and she never saw him again. What she did see was Paulie come into her motel room. Pointed the gun in her face and said, “Hello, bitch.”
She thought he was going to shoot her and she begged, “Please. No. I’ll fuck you, I’ll blow you.”
“You think I want Liam Murphy’s leftovers?” He pulled the hammer back.
“I’ll let you have my ass.”
“Murphy didn’t have that, too?”
“Please,” she cried.
“You got nothing I want.”
But it turned out she did. She knew where ten keys of heroin was, if Jardine didn’t get to it first. “Let me live, I’ll take you there,” she said. “We can get out, go somewhere together, have a life.
“I love you,” she said. “I’ve always loved you. Let me prove it.”
She took him to the safe house, and thank God, the heroin was still there. Paulie stashed it and a few weeks later headed down to Florida, where they stayed until they came back for poor Gina’s funeral.
The money from the dope bought them a decent house in Fort Lauderdale and enough cash to live on and do, well . . . nothing. Paulie never thought about helping Peter out of his financial jam by giving him some of the heroin money.
“Fuck him,” was what Paulie said.
Now he falls asleep.
She quietly takes the remote and turns the TV off.
Finally, finally, the mourners and the relatives and the morbidly curious leave the house and Peter Jr. and Heather are alone in the living room.
Celia is upstairs in the master bedroom, tranquilized, out cold; Peter is outside on the grounds smoking a cigar.
Peter Jr. says, “I thought they’d never leave.”
“They all love this shit,” Heather says. “Drama, tragedy.”
“It is tragic.”
“Strictly speaking, it isn’t,” Heather says. “It’s just sad.”
“Is Mom going to be all right?”
“Has she ever been all right?” Heather asks. “It’s Dad I’m worried about. He holds things in. And it builds. It eats at him.”
They sit quietly for a while, then Peter Jr. says, “Poor Gina. I feel like, I don’t know, we could have done more or something.”
“Don’t do that.”
“What?”
“Get all guilty,” Heather says. “Gina was always selfish and this was just her last, most selfish thing.”
“That’s harsh.”
Heather loves her brother but he’s so naive. Of course he is—he’s the only son in an Italian family, the Chosen One. Dad made every one of Peter’s games, every one of them. Gina, her events were an afterthought and Dad made more apologies than appearances. But he was busier when Gina was growing up, and Heather knows why.
She reads the newspapers.
In fairness to Dad, Gina stopped going to her events, too.
“She blames him, you know,” Heather says.
“Who blames who for what?”
Heather rolls her eyes. “Mom blames Dad for Gina killing herself.”
“Because he didn’t send her to that place in New Hampshire?”
“Vermont,” Heather says. “But yeah.”
“Maybe it would have helped.”
“I doubt it.”
“Don’t do what you’re thinking about doing,” Peter Jr. says.
Heather smiles. “What am I thinking about doing?”
“Dropping out of college to move back here and take care of Dad,” Peter Jr. says. “He’ll be okay.”
“Says the kid who ran away to the marines,” Heather says. “Don’t you do it, either.”
“Yeah, I don’t think the Marine Corps will let me.”
“You know what I mean.”
He knows what she means—come back from the Corps and join the family business, become the heir apparent and take over from Dad someday. It’s the last thing Peter Jr. wants—hell, it’s the last thing Dad wants. “Don’t worry, I won’t.”
Heather says, “I mean, this shit has to end.”
Sometime.
Eight
Reggie Moneta puts a cassette player on Brent Harris’s desk. “We have intelligence that Mr. Ryan might be here in San Diego. One of my brilliant subordinates finally noticed this on the old audio surveillance of the Murphys.”
She pushes play and Harris hears, “So what if the Morettis connect us to the hijacking? What are they going to do? Kill us? They’re trying to do that already.”
“That was Liam Murphy,” Moneta says. “This is Ryan—”
“They’ll try to get their dope back.”
“Which is why we should move it now. Don’t you want to get to California?”
“What’s this?”
“That was John Murphy,” Moneta says. “Now listen to what Ryan has to say.”
“I’ve been meaning to tell you, the right moment never came up, but yeah, I’m going to use this money to move out to the West Coast. I’m thinking maybe San Diego.”
