Act of Revenge bkamc-11

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  After a few seconds’ hiatus to demonstrate who was in control, or something like that, Colombo released the button and Karp walked out.

  On the ride downtown, he mused about the impossibility of his ever working for somebody like Tommy Colombo. Keegan was very nearly as ambitious as the other man, but Karp thought he could usually shame Jack Keegan into behaving by playing the Francis P. Garrahy card. Keegan needed at some level to feel himself right with Garrahy, his mentor, the greatest D.A. in New York’s history. Over Colombo Karp would have no such control. He dismissed the man from his mind and pulled out his calendar. A meeting about handicapped accessibility around the courthouse. Wonderful!

  At his office, there were two people in wheelchairs and a guy with black glasses and a white stick waiting for him. He smiled, sighed, and waved them in.

  Back at the Crosby Street loft, Mrs. Karp, nee and still to all the world Marlene Ciampi, sat at her kitchen table and gazed mindlessly at the smoky surface of a cup of Medaglia D’Oro coffee the color and consistency of tire paint, waiting for her personality to reassemble itself from the chaos of sleep. Flanking her were Zak and Giancarlo, four and identical, sloppily munching a brand of cartoon cereal sugary enough to cause hypoglycemia in the average adult and with little nutritional value. An enormous black Neapolitan mastiff circulated under the table, grunting and licking up spills. Mrs. Karp disapproved, mildly, but she was not in charge of breakfast.

  The person who was, Posie the Hippie Slut Nanny, sat opposite, crunching the same garbage, and regally handling the remote for the small Sony depending from a corner of the ceiling. She switched channels rapidly, in a manner designed to mollify the twins, who, though alike as two eggs to the eye, had radically different tastes in morning TV, Zak preferring trashy cartoon violence, Giancarlo doting on Sesame Street and, strangely, game shows. Mrs. Karp ordinarily found such channel surfing unbearable, but said nothing. Officially, she was not really there, and she was bottomlessly grateful to Posie for handling the boys’ mornings. The girl could have fed them human flesh and run little Satanic rituals without Marlene making much of a fuss. Morning was not her best time.

  She was snapped into real consciousness because Posie’s thumb happened to falter on the switch and the set rested for a moment on a morning news program. Marlene heard, “. . further developments in last night’s double murder in the stockroom of a Chinatown shopping center. The police are questioning Mr. Louie Chen, owner of the Asia Mall, where the bodies of two men reported. . zzsk. . He-Man, we’ve got to get to the castle before Skeletor uses his death ray-”

  “Wait! Posie, go back!” cried Marlene.

  “What, the news?”

  “Yeah, do it!”

  But when the morning show came back, the screen showed only the front of the Asia Mall with an attractive young Chinese-American newscaster named Gloria Eng standing in front of it, saying, “. . the possibility of a gang war in Chinatown. Back to you, Ron.”

  Posie grinned broadly and pointed. “Hey, that’s the Chens’ place on the TV. Wow! I was just there the other day.”

  Giancarlo said, “I was there, too.”

  “That’s where we get lichee nuts,” Zak added. “Posie, could we go there today?”

  “Today is probably not a great idea, kids,” said Marlene, rising. She slurped some more coffee and took the cup down the length of the loft to her home office, where she put in a call to the Chen residence. As she had feared, she got nothing but a busy signal. After the fifth call she gave up and dialed another number which, since it was a police station, was answered. Marlene asked to speak to Detective James Raney, waited, was told he was out, and left a message. After that she trotted through the shower and dressed in her informal work outfit: black cotton slacks, black Converse footwear, and one of her large collection of Hawaiian shirts, the discreet pistol-covering kind, this with mauve orchids, clouds, and moons against bright yellow.

  She was checking out this outfit in her mirror when the phone rang and it was Raney returning her call.

  “You’ve decided to leave him and marry me,” said Raney. “I knew today was going to be my lucky day.”

  “Yeah, well, we’re almost there, Raney; as soon as the pope comes around on divorce, I’m yours. Meanwhile, what have you got on the thing yesterday at the Asia Mall on Canal?”

  “Oh, no small talk? No how’s it going, Jim, how’s your life been, no tell me the secrets of your inner heart, Jim, we been pals for I forget how many years?”

  “I’m sorry, Jim,” said Marlene, adopting a concerned therapist’s tone, “please, tell me the secrets of your inner heart. Did you ever get help for that sexual thing? The dribble?”

  Raney cracked up at this, and they chatted amiably for a few minutes. Raney was Marlene’s best friend on the cops and, of course, her primary source of cop information. She quizzed him again on the Chinatown killings, and he made some information-free noises.

  “Are you going to make me describe my underwear again, Raney?”

  “Um, always a thrill, but I don’t think I know enough for a fair trade. A mystery, is what I hear. Two guys, Hong Kong passports, shot twice each, head and back, in the stockroom of the Asia Mall. Nobody saw nothing, as usual.”

  “The news said something about a gangland slaying.”

  “The news would. But it’s possible. Like the man said, it’s Chinatown. What’s your interest? Oh, wait, it’s your Chens, right?”

  “Right. My Chens. Is there any idea that they’re involved?”

  “This I don’t know. I could find out who caught the case and what they know, if you want.”

  “Oh, that’d be great, Jim! I’ll owe you one.”

  “And I’ll collect, too,” he said, laughed a nasty laugh, and hung up.

  Marlene got her gun from the gun safe, clipped it on, logged thirty seconds of quality time with her boys, whistled up the dog, and punched for the elevator. Marlene was in the security business, although the Chens were not clients.

  They lived in Confucius Plaza, a seven-year-old structure that had been fully rented before the first spadeful of earth turned over. That the Chens had a nice apartment was an indication that the family was somebody in Chinatown. There were a couple of news vans parked on the street outside, and a small crowd of photo and video journalists lying in wait. Clearly, the cops had suggested, or maybe it was just a media rumor, that the Chens were connected to the “gangland slaying.” Hype about a new tong war was in the air, and the press was drooling. As was Sweety, of course. Marlene hooked him to his leash and walked toward the building entrance.

  “Sweety, si brutto!” she ordered, and the dog went into his rabies impersonation, heaving at the leash, snarling and flinging long, disgusting ropes of sticky saliva. The media backed away in panic, tripping over cables and dropping mike poles.

  “Oh, sorry, oh, gosh, excuse me,” Marlene chirped. “Oh, dear! Monster, behave yourself!. .” until she was at the glass doors. The security guy, who knew Marlene well, was having a hard time keeping his face straight as he opened it for her.

  “Way to go, Meilin,” he said. “I’ll call up for you.”

  Marlene had known the Chens for nearly fifteen years and had been to their home-originally an apartment on Mott and now this one-innumerable times, to deliver and pick up her daughter. On every occasion she had been offered tea and cigarettes and engaged in a short conversation, almost always about children and the unbearable difficulties brought on by their slovenliness and ingratitude. She had thought that she had, through her daughter at least, a good relationship with the Chen family, not intimate, but sufficient to make this visit perfectly natural and, with the offer of help she had in mind, even welcome. She was soon disabused of this idea. At her ring, Walter, the Chens’ eldest son, came to the door and stood there, looking at her as at a stranger. Walter was a senior at Columbia, and Marlene knew him as a bright, often amusing, regular (by which she meant Americanized, predictable) kid.

  “Hi, Walter,”
she said, expecting him to move away from the door and usher her in. He didn’t move. His eyes were very black, and flat and (she actually thought the word) inscrutable. “Walter,” she said, urging a smile to her lips, “aren’t you going to let me in?”

  He did not return the smile, but said, as to a stranger, “Marlene, that’s not a good idea right now. My parents are extremely upset. .”

  “I bet they are. That’s why I came over, to see if I-”

  “. . and they can’t see anyone today,” he concluded, and closed the door firmly in her face.

  Karp’s intercom buzzed. The handicapped were gone and he was dealing with the aftermath, drafting a memo. He threw down his pencil, pushed the button. O’Malley said, “They’re ready for you.”

  “This is the Catalano meeting?” asked Karp, well knowing it was.

  “At long last, and may God have mercy on your soul,” said O’Malley fervently.

  As a symbol of his authority, Karp got to use the D.A.’s conference room, a stately, paneled office with a long, mellow oaken table and high, stately green leather chairs. The D.A., on attaining the office, had attempted to reproduce, in detail, in the whole executive suite, the decor favored by his predecessor-but-one, Francis P. Garrahy, of sacred memory. Keegan had run the Homicide Bureau under Garrahy, and Karp had been trained in it, and both men were subject to nostalgia for those departed times, when crime seemed slightly less overwhelming. Both men entertained the suspicion, unvoiced to be sure, that even Phil Garrahy might have trimmed a little more than he did, might have had trouble keeping his integrity untarnished under such a collapse of civil order. To his credit, Keegan tried to keep up the standards, and if his own integrity had a grungy spot or two, the symbols were at least kept brightly polished and dusted. For the conference room Keegan had even located in some forgotten Centre Street attic the framed oil portraits of Franklin Roosevelt and Fiorello LaGuardia that Garrahy had hung on his walls and had added one of Garrahy himself, done from a photograph.

  It was not a good portrait. In it the old man looked stiff and surprised, neither of which was a characteristic of himself, but it was what they had. This painting looked down upon where Keegan himself now sat at the head of the long table, in his shirtsleeves, toying with a large claro cigar that he never smoked. He was a big, florid Irishman, heavy-shouldered, carrying an elegant head: the requisite pol’s mane of white hair, blue, deep-set eyes, an aristocratic beak, no lips to speak of, and a chin like an anvil. He’d played offensive end for Fordham, and retained the grace and the twisty moves. He looked up and popped the cigar into his mouth when Karp walked in, smiling cordially around it. (He never got the end damp, and so no one knew whether he didn’t smoke the same one every day or retired the thing at intervals.) Karp nodded to Keegan and to the other three men, and took a seat at the end of the table, where he always sat.

  Karp took the notes at these meetings, a somewhat unusual role for someone with his rank, this necessary task being regarded by the average legal bureaucrat as suitable only for peasants, or women. Karp had assumed it for two reasons. First, it made him appear to pompous idiots less important than he was, which made them tend to ignore him, which made it easier for him to sneak up behind them if need be and yank their pants down. Besides that, he understood that who takes the notes at executive meetings controls the memory of an organization, and since Karp had never cultivated a political base, any control he could develop was welcome. While he respected Jack Keegan’s skill and competence, and actually liked him well enough as a man, Karp was under no illusions about the district attorney’s ambitions. He understood perfectly (for Keegan, to his credit, had made it no secret) that if a sacrifice had to be made to that altar and if Karp was at hand and unprotected, the D.A. would not hesitate for a New York minute before yanking his plug.

  Karp took meeting notes in thick accountant’s ledgers bound in pale green cloth, items not much in demand at the supply room since computers had come in. He had rows of them in his office in a locked steel cabinet whose sole key was ever in his custody, and he never showed the notes therein to anyone. Thus no one knew what Karp had written down, which tended to make Keegan’s more haughty satraps less willing to get into arguments about who had promised what to whom. The note business was an absurdly simple ploy, but it worked to the D.A.’s advantage and polished the luster of Karp. Swiftly, using his idiosyncratic quasi-shorthand, Karp wrote down the purpose of the meeting-“strategy for Catalano murder”-and the date and the names of the three participants besides himself and the D.A.

  The first of these, sitting to Keegan’s right was Roland Hrcany, the chief of the Homicide Bureau. Hrcany had the look and build of a professional wrestler, and, like many of them, he wore his straight blond hair combed back from a cave-man brow ridge and long enough to reach past his collar in back. Despite this brutish appearance (or perhaps because of it) he was the best homicide prosecutor in the office, next to Karp, a fact that rankled him, as did Karp’s former incumbency as homicide chief. Some months ago he had been shot by a Mexican felon trying to introduce south-of-the-border criminal justice practices to the New York area, and he was still not back on duty full-time. The event, and its wasting effects on his massive body, of which he was inordinately proud, had oddly enough improved his disposition, which had been churlish and of an aggressiveness outstanding even in the testosterone-rich precincts of the D.A.’s office.

  Opposite Roland sat Frank Anselmo, the chief of the Rackets Bureau. He was a dapper, dark man with a full head of thick black hair, well cut, and small, active, manicured hands. Anselmo, the son of a police inspector, and thus a man with important cop credibility, had pitched for Fordham during the same years that Keegan had played football. The two men were cronies from way back, and Keegan had brought him in as Rackets chief from the Queens D.A. shortly after taking over the New York office. This made sense, since the D.A. had to trust more than anyone else in his office the person responsible for, among other things, investigating public officials. Karp did not know him well. Rackets was a small bureau, its work was perforce somewhat secret, and it brought few cases to trial. The book on Anselmo around the office was that he was smart, ambitious, and, it seemed, temporarily content to play in the shade cast by Jack Keegan’s lofty oak. The relationship with the boss was, of course, well-known, and hardly anyone gave him any trouble. He was smiling and joshing with Keegan about a sports bet. He smiled a lot. In general, Karp was suspicious of people in the criminal justice business who smiled a lot, as he himself did not see much to be happy about there, but Anselmo always seemed to put Keegan in a better mood, which was never to be sneezed at.

  The last man at the meeting was clearly not in a good mood and not amused by Anselmo’s patter. Raymond Guma, slumped like a bag of dirty laundry in the chair just to Karp’s left, was one of the few ADAs who did not at all mind giving Anselmo trouble. Guma had on occasion been mistaken for the former Yankee catcher Yogi Berra, although he was less pretty than Berra, and unlike Berra he had shown (during a tryout for the Yanks, for he had been quite the star at St. John’s) that he could not reliably hit a major league breaking ball. He was nearly the same age as Keegan and Anselmo-late fifties-but carried his years more heavily, for unlike the other men there he had never been promoted to any position of authority, and never would be. He had been a homicide prosecutor for over twenty-five years, and he knew more about the New York Mafia than anyone in the building, which was why he was at the meeting. Some said he knew rather too much about the New York Mafia, which was one of the many reasons he had never been promoted. He was a sloppy, ill-disciplined man, a sexist in the current parlance, sour and cynical, but-and this is why Karp loved him-with boundless heart and a sense of humor made of Kevlar.

  In the normal course of things, Guma should have been in Rackets under Anselmo, but between the two men lay a morass of near visceral antipathy. This, even more than the hazards of the case on the agenda, accounted for the tension in the room. Keegan let the
sports talk peter away. “Guys, you all know how important this one is. We’re going to come under a lot of pressure, and I want some early resolution. Butch has my full authority on this one.” He looked up as O’Malley came in looking concerned and tapped her wristwatch. “The goddamn lieutenant governor,” growled Keegan. He stood, said, “I’ll be back,” and left. All faces rotated to the other end of the table. Karp nodded to Anselmo.

  “Frank, your meeting.”

  Anselmo’s smile broadened by an inch, showing even, small white teeth, and he ducked his head in a fetching gesture of humility. He shuffled some papers on his lap and passed out a set of neatly bound blue manila folders stamped confidential in big red letters. Guma turned his face toward Karp, out of Anselmo’s view, and flashed his gargoyle imitation-a convincing one, given his physiognomy.

  “All right: Catalano,” said Anselmo. “To review the bare facts: on the night of June ninth, a body later identified as that of Edward Catalano was found in a car parked under the West Side Highway at Vestry Street. He’d been shot from behind at close range with a small-caliber weapon. Five shots to the head, a typical gangland murder.”

  Here what might have been construed by an unsympathetic listener as a snort of derision issued from Guma’s direction. It was a low sort of snort, however, and if Anselmo heard it, he paid no attention.

  “That method,” he resumed, “and the fact that Catalano is known to be a capo regime of the Bollano family suggested that this was a professional hit having to do with the politics of the New York Mob. So-as you probably know, when they start hitting capos, it means that the power balances are shifting. There’s disorder in the ranks, shifting loyalties, the wise guys are all looking for where they’re going to end up after the dust settles, and so this is a prime time for us to do ourselves some good. Now, the first question we have to ask when something like this goes down is, naturally, cui bono. We look inside the family first, table one in your handout.”