Eddie Kapp lied to me. He lied to me.
The Organization didn’t kill my sister-in-law.
He lied to me. In some ways, in every way, in how many ways I didn’t know.
Why did he lie to me? So I would stay with him.
But if he wanted me to stay with him, then his lies should have been the truth. His lies made sense, or there was no sense in his wanting me to stay with him.
He said I was a symbol, around which his cronies would gather. Was that a lie? If so, it had no purpose. His cronies had gathered around him. Nick Rovito had tested me. No one had asked what I was doing there. So how could that have been a lie?
He said Ed Ganolese knew about the symbol, and was trying to destroy it. Was that a lie? But a tan-and-cream Chrysler had killed my father, and had tried to kill me. And the same tan-and-cream Chrysler had tried to kill Eddie Kapp. And the same tan-and-cream Chrysler had been parked at the farm where Ed Ganolese was hiding out. So how could that have been a lie?
Or was it only half a lie?
I was alive. I was alive.
The tan-and-cream Chrysler had pulled up beside us, thirty-eight miles from New York, and the man on the right-hand side had reached out his arm and shot my father. That was all.
They must have known my father was dead. They must have seen their bullets hit. And they had driven on.
They hadn’t stopped to be sure that I was dead. They hadn’t even fired a shot at me.
They hadn’t been trying to kill me. They had killed the man Ed Ganolese had pointed at. Will Kelly.
He was the symbol. The trusted lawyer, the right-hand man from the old days. The others might have objected that Eddie Kapp was too old, that he couldn’t handle the whole operation by himself, or that he might die very soon after they’d made their coup, and then there’d only be another power fight, and they wouldn’t want two fights like that so close together. So there was a second man, a younger man, the trusted lawyer, who knew the operation and who could handle its administration, a man they could all agree on to succeed Eddie Kapp. Will Kelly.
Without Will Kelly, Kapp couldn’t rally the others around him. So Ganolese had Kelly murdered.
And Eddie Kapp had given up. He’d written his sister, he’d planned his retirement. And then I came along.
He hadn’t been sure it would work. He’d had to talk and argue and reason and explain for a week on the telephone at Lake George, before the others would go along with it.
I could almost hear the way he’d put it: “Here’s my son, Ray Kelly. Will Kelly took care of him for me while I was out of circulation. Will trained him, gave him the background, explained the set-up to him. The boy’s young, but he knows what’s going on, and he learns fast. He’ll take over when I’m gone, and he won’t be greedy, he’ll be content with New York. And there’ll be forty, fifty years in him.”
It took him a week, and probably a lot more arguments than that, but he talked them into it. And he gave me that song-and-dance about me as a symbol because he knew I didn’t want to have anything to do with his mob. Once he was in the driver’s seat, after the coup, he didn’t care how many of his cronies knew the truth.
I’d told him about Bill’s wife being killed. That gave him the idea to sell me that family-purge story. Because then all he had to do was point me. I was a loaded gun, held by Eddie Kapp.
Bill. My brother Bill.
When I’d left Lake George, I thought I was ridding myself of Eddie Kapp forever. I wasn’t. I had to find him again. Now.