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“Johnny Kurita,” I said. Moretti’s tan dialed down by half. He slowly returned to his seat, gripping the gun. “Jax wasn’t just here to take down your gun pipeline. He wanted you on personal business. It was the kind of personal business his bosses didn’t know about: the murder of Kurita by your grandfather, Eugene Costa.”
Now the pigments reversed: a stroke-red blush broke its way through the stony brown skin.
“Personal business? Now you’re talking nonsense. What was I to him, huh?”
“You helped your grandfather in the killing.”
That was just a wild pitch, an improvisation that suddenly came to me—I didn’t have any evidence—but it found its way across the plate and he went for it.
He nodded very slowly and stared past me. “You do live up to your reputation, Mapstone.” He idly stroked the pistol in his lap, trying to figure me out. The young Sal the Bug would have killed me by now. The man before me knew he was in trouble, knew there were now too many loose ends. He stood again, agitated, and for a moment I thought he would pull out his own box of mementos. Then he sat again and said what was logical: “How the hell do you know?”
“I talked to Johnny Kurita’s little sister today.”
He watched me in silence for long minutes. The grandfather clock chimed.
“They were both hotheads.” Moretti was reliving the long-ago moment. “Grandfather and that Jap kid. They argued, then they fought each other right out there in the flower fields. I wasn’t going to let that Jap disrespect my grandfather.”
The black brows, the only trace of hair on his head, narrowed. “He came back from the war, this Kurita, and thought he was a real American, that the world owed him something. He wanted that land back. It wasn’t his anymore! Japs couldn’t even own land down there on Baseline for years, you know. Then they started coming in like locusts. When the government took the Kuritas’ property during the war, we got it fair and square. Hell, we’d have even leased it back to them.”
“You stole it. And Harley Talbott made it all look legal down at the courthouse.”
His mouth crooked down. “So what? Talbott owed my grandfather. Talbott owed the Moretti side of the family back in Chicago. The Costa side, the heirs all became totally legit, and sold that land for millions in the nineties. Funny, we buried the Jap right behind the flower shed that night. Now he’s under a parking lot by the swimming pool.”
I didn’t speak until he stopped laughing.
“What is history but a fable agreed upon, right?”
He was silent. The pistol drooped slightly in his hand.
Then, “None of this had to happen. I was minding my own business when this Jax, this man who you say was an agent, shows up at my home and starts asking questions about my grandfather Costa. He was a Mexican, for Christ’s sake. Supposed to be a hit man, supposed to only go through Barney. How the hell did he even know where I live? How did he know what happened in 1947? He wasn’t even born yet. The flower fields are a goddamned bunch of apartments now.”
“Maybe he didn’t even care about the land.”
“What the hell would he care about?”
“Simple justice.” I waited two beats. “Because Johnny Kurita was his great-grandfather.”
A palsy ran down the left side of Moretti’s face.
“Before he enlisted in the Army, Johnny met a pretty Mexican-American girl who was working at the Poston relocation camp. When he came home, he married her, and they had a baby boy. That little boy’s grandson was Jax Delgado.”
“And you’ve come here unarmed to tell me this? You have a death wish because I killed your sister-in-law?”
“Yes. What about you?”
“What the hell do you mean, ‘What about me?’”
“Don Salvatoré, you’ve been double-dealing so long you don’t even know right from left,” I said. “Selling guns to Sinaloa, selling guns to the Gulf cartel, too. Having your buddy Tom assassinate four top La Familia men. Why? Because you were afraid of what they might tell us? Because you want to set one side against the other like back in Chicago? You think you’ll profit from it. Well, you’re not in Chicago anymore, asshole. You’re playing way out of your league.”
He raised the Beretta.
The front door crashed open.
Sal looked up, confused by the laser scopes dancing on his chest. He quickly put the gun on the table and smiled.
“This man tried to kill me, officers. Thank God you got here…”
The men I first encountered on Central Avenue moved with the same sinister efficiency. Sal was pulled up and handcuffed before he even comprehended what was happening. Then he saw the roll of duct tape. His panicked eyes met mine for a long ten seconds.
