Act of Revenge bkamc-11

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  “Where were they, do you know?” asked Tran.

  “Upstate, and in Connecticut, Hartford, pulling home invasions. Kenny’s telling everyone that the first thing he’s going to do is kill you.”

  Tran smiled unpleasantly. “Then I must flee for certain. Tell me, is Leung with them?”

  “No, still gone. What they say on the street is he has traveled to Hong Kong, to report, and that he will return with his own people.”

  Tran stood up, as did Lucy, who repressed the desire to massage her aching knees. Tran said, “That is interesting, and gives a certain urgency to our task. At this moment a freight container with ten assassins in it might be unloading at some airport. Where are the Vo now?”

  “Their apartment on Hester, off Lafayette. They keep girls there. What do you want to do?”

  “Oh, by all means let us visit, and join the party. Perhaps Lucy will read us passages from The Tale of Kieu, and we can all have a good cry.”

  Tran and Lucy mounted the motorcycle, and they followed Phat in his van out of the park and downtown to Lafayette, parking both vehicles some distance from the junction of that broad avenue with Hester Street. Lucy sat in the back of the van and watched Phat talk to the man he had set to watch the house. There was some agitated conversation, and Phat showed considerable irritation. Lucy gathered that the two brothers had gone out a few minutes before. Tran and Phat and two of his boys went up into the house. The driver and the man Phat had used to watch the house sat in the front seats. The windows of the van were tinted to near opacity, and they kept the engine running and the A/C on, drowning out the sounds of the street. It was like being in a spaceship. The two men ignored her, nor did she wish very much to converse with them. (So, how do you like being a gangster. .?)

  Instead she opened her Kieu and read about Kieu’s romance with the bandit-rebel chieftain Tu Hai, fairly hot stuff, and this kept her occupied, reading and thinking that she was uncomfortably close to hanging out with bandit chieftains herself, until the van’s door slid open and there was Tran, dragging by the arm a thin Vietnamese whom Lucy recognized from her kidnapping as Nguyen Van Minh, called Cowboy.

  Tran threw the boy facedown into the space between the two rows of seats and kicked him flat, wrenched his arms around, and secured his wrists together with plastic cable tie.

  “Do you recognize this garbage?” he asked Lucy.

  “Yes, he’s one of the kidnappers,” she said, and added quickly, “but he didn’t hurt me.”

  “Lucky for him.”

  “What will you do with him?” she asked.

  “I believe Ong Phat will offer him hospitality,” Tran replied, “and then perhaps his cousins, who seem to have stepped out for a while, will try to get him, and then we all sit down and have a talk about Mr. Leung and his various projects. You need not concern yourself.”

  He turned away to speak to Phat and Phat’s minions. Lucy leaned over the Vietnamese youth.

  “Cowboy, don’t be afraid,” she whispered in Vietnamese.

  The youth twisted his head around. Lucy could see the side of his face and the livid bruise along his jaw, and a bit of swollen and bloody mouth, and one eye, white-rimmed and staring like a cow’s.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t let them hurt you.”

  He replied, “What can you do? You are only a girl.”

  “So was Kieu. Listen: Phat is the dog of Tran, and Tran loves me. Be calm and don’t struggle or try to escape. I will see that you come out of this all right.”

  She left the van and went to Tran. Motioning him aside, she said, “I want you to promise me something, Uncle Tran.”

  “If I can,” he said.

  “See that no harm comes to that boy.”

  He frowned down at her, but she met his gaze. He said, “But, my dear girl, we require information from him. What if he does not wish to give it? These are dangerous people, and we must eliminate any danger that they pose to us. To you perhaps most of all.”

  “I will interrogate him myself.”

  Tran suppressed a smile. “Will you? I had not realized that was one of your talents. I look forward to learning much at your feet.”

  “You mock me, but I tell you he will speak to me. Now promise!”

  The Vietnamese gangsters were staring at this colloquy, which to them had much of the effect of Fay Wray dressing down King Kong.

  After a long, tense moment Tran grinned, nodded sharply, and said, “I promise. And I must say that this is a remarkable and romantic gesture. I had not expected such gestures from you, at least not for some time.”

  “Then you should not have given me that book,” said Lucy.

  Dinner that night at the Karps’ was a subdued affair. Desultory conversation, and the click of utensils, a monastery repast almost, with each member of the family locked in private thoughts. Lucy excused herself early, kissing both her father (with an especially close embrace) and her mother (a more formal yet still tender one), something she had not done for a while. Marlene set the espresso pot on the flame and sat down to finish her wine. Karp, she noted, had poured himself a glass too: rarer that, even than Lucy’s kisses.

  “You look a little tattered,” she said. “What’s going on?”

  “You look tattered yourself.”

  “No, I look destroyed. Ruined. You look tattered. What is it, the agony of command? Trouble being Queen for a Day?”

  “Oh, not really. A little spat with the Southern District.” He told her about Guma’s subpoena and its sequelae.

  “Jack will shit,” she said with assurance.

  “Uh-huh, but he’ll be pissed at Tommy C., not Guma.”

  “Mmm. I take your point about not hauling Mr. Lie before your grand jury without some better idea of who the hell he is and what he’s done, but is Jack going to sit with that, with all the political pressure he’s under?”

  “Roland thinks he’ll roll on it. I mean, the upside is pretty clear and straightforward. He gets a grand jury witness who’ll implicate Pigetti and maybe the Bollanos, and provide corroboration, give us the people who lifted Eddie, maybe physical evidence-”

  “But you’re concerned Lie’ll also say, oh, and by the way, I pulled the trigger on Eddie Cat and I also did some other little jobs for various people, and you won’t be able to touch him on those.”

  “You got it, and also there’s the real possibility that Pigetti didn’t do it,” said Karp, and took another drink of wine, toyed with a plastic soldier one of the boys had left at the table, and returned in his thoughts to the idea that had been niggling at him for weeks, the real reason he had not done the expedient thing and gone ahead and cleared Lie for the grand jury.

  “Earth to Butch, hello?” said his wife.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’ve been talking for five minutes, and you haven’t heard anything I said. Where were you?”

  “I’m sorry, Champ, what were you saying?”

  “Never mind that, what were you thinking? Except, if it was an elaborate sexual fantasy not featuring me, I don’t want to hear about it.”

  He said, “How can you drink a pint of espresso this late at night?”

  “Don’t change the subject. What’s going on?”

  “Nothing. It’s just a feeling, a. . an aura. I have the sense of some presence, some controlling force behind all this, the Catalano thing, the business Lucy’s involved in, the Sing killings. Shit! And I can’t figure out how the pieces fit. We have one low-ranking wetback Chinese gangster, who walks into the D.A.’s office, asking for me personally, with a half-wit lawyer, and says he’s willing to act as a witness against Joe Pigetti, and this gangster seems to have a remarkably clear understanding of the immunity procedures available in New York state. Why? Because he’s scared that the Mob is going to get him, he says. Marlene, I looked this guy in the face, and I have never seen anyone less scared in my life. His lawyer was scared shitless, but he wasn’t. You ask me, the little bastard could eat the whole Bollano mob a la mari
nara. And this guy has no traces, none, no car, no bank account, no drugs, but when we check him out with Hong Kong, we find out he’s really a guy named Nia who’s got big-time triad contacts over in the Far East. That’s one thing we do know for sure, from fingerprints: Lie is definitely the man the Hong Kong cops know as Nia. That’s only mystery number one. Mystery number two: the whole leadership of the Bollano organization is knocked out, except for the don himself: Catalano killed, Pigetti accused, Little Sally in jail, charged with attempted murder, et cetera. Does somebody have a big hard-on for the Bollanos? And are they using us to get them?”

  “But there’s no connect between Little Sally and the other two,” Marlene objected. “He got in trouble because his wife cut out on him.”

  “Yeah, right, it’s a coincidence. Just like it’s a coincidence that two big triad guys got whacked the same week as Eddie Cat, at which murder our little girl might well have been a witness, and then a Chinese gangster with triad connections comes in and asks to see me personally, and shortly thereafter, another no-name Chinese gangster, Leung, starts hiring people to threaten Lucy and find out what she knows, among other things, to demonstrate to dear old dad how easily his daughter could be snatched. That’s mystery number three. Too many mysteries in a limited area, Champ. I have this sense that somebody is sitting out there pulling the strings, some. . some intelligence, moving around little plastic soldiers.” Angrily he flicked the actual soldier with his index finger. It flew across the room, ricocheted off the refrigerator, and landed, clanging, in a steel mixing bowl awaiting rinsing on the drainboard of the sink.

  “Two points,” muttered Karp.

  “Yes, and an example of the role of the random in our lives.”

  “What, you think all of that is just coincidence?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “The killings could be connected. Lie and Leung could be working for the same outfit. But I do know that the joker in your deck is Vivian. Why did she split just then after years of marriage to the scumbag? And in a way guaranteed to send Little Sal off the rails and get him into deep trouble?”

  “I like that she was boffing Eddie Cat, and when he got it, she figured she was next and ran.”

  “No way,” said Marlene. “Scarpi was right; it had been that, they would’ve used the knife, and made her watch. No, it was something from the deep past reached up and bit her on the ass. That’s why this Jumping Jerry investigation is happening.” And she told him what she had learned that day from Doherty and Abe Lapidus.

  “That’s interesting about Judge Paine being such a bad boy back in the old days,” said Karp. “He’s really cleaned up his act, if true. I’ve never heard a whisper about him being bent. The opposite, in fact. He’s hell on the defendant, especially Mob defendants.”

  “People change,” said Marlene. “Maybe. By the way, I went by Sophie’s after I finished with Abe. I think I caught her and her enamorata in a compromising position. She was wearing a lavender wrapper with an actual feathered collar and silk mules.”

  “This is Jake?”

  “Yeah. He stayed in the bedroom, probably in black silk pj’s and a scarlet quilted monogrammed robe with tassels. Me and Sophie chatted briefly. I didn’t want to take her away from a hot time, especially, God forbid, you can never tell if it might be her last one. And Abe was right, she didn’t know any of the legal details, but she filled me in pretty good on the family and friends. A very fifties story. The king and the queen in paradise, with the perfect little girl, and of course they had the usual Jewish princess and rich daddy relationship, and also we got the best friend-”

  “Kusher, the gonif.”

  “Yeah, but before he achieved gonif-hood. A swell guy, sort of the third wheel around Jerry and the lovely Ceil, his bride. Ceil’s a little soft in the upper stories, according to Sophie, but very decorative, played a lot of guts canasta. Bernie’s the jokester, the boys play practical jokes on each other, gag gifts, costumes, while they make a nice living defending the Mob.”

  “Was Bernie schtupping the wife, do you think?”

  “God, I didn’t think to ask! And I thought I was the one with the dirty mind.”

  “A possibility, anyway,” said Karp. “It’s always the best friend. A guy dies, suicide or foul play, you look at that the first day. And the man did vanish.”

  “Well, they were discreet as hell if so, because I haven’t heard a whisper. Anyhow, into this paradise comes the serpent Panofsky. Jerry’s being his usual amenable self, and Panofsky brought some family money into the firm, which never hurts, and the kid washes out as a trial guy and he becomes the fixer, et cetera, which we knew already, and also, get this, he conceives a passion for, guess who?”

  “The lovely and talented Vivian?”

  “Right, and naturally it’s a joke,” said Marlene. “She’s a dewy sixteen, and a stunner, he’s pushing thirty, and he looks like an armpit, as we know, a young armpit maybe, but still, and according to Sophie, he’s hanging around her, weekends at the beach, it’s embarrassing, he won’t let up. Finally she tells him to take a hike in no uncertain terms. He still doesn’t get the picture, so Jerry has a talk with him, nice but firm. Then he lets up. This is in August, say, and that fall, that’s when the jury-tampering scandal breaks.”

  “You’re saying Panofsky framed Jerry because. . what, he was spurned by the beauteous Vivian?”

  “Hey, far be it from me to cast aspersions at a distinguished jurist, but it does have a certain poetic resonance, a Jacobean flavor, The White Devil or The Spanish Tragedy. I can just see the ugly little fuck licking his lips and rubbing his hands together as he takes his revenge.” Marlene rolled her eye horribly, licked her lips, and wrung her hands to demonstrate.

  Karp shook his head and gave his wife a cockeyed look. “And. . after twenty-odd years, what? What happened to make her break out? And come to that, how do we go from spurning Panofsky to accepting a nasty psychopath, the young Bollano?”

  “Oh, well, that was after Jerry’s jump,” said Marlene. “The girl is desperate, miserable, vulnerable, the mom is a dim bulb, and, you have to say, the mope at least is a handsome devil. Maybe he said, yeah, honey, some mobster aced your old man and by God we’re going to find him and whack him out, and maybe he did, or he said he did. And then she finds out just recently he really didn’t, he was blowing smoke to get her in the sack.”

  Karp laughed. “Makes a great movie, Champ, but. .” He rubbed his thumb and index finger together. “Where’s the beef?”

  “Yeah, right,” she agreed with a sigh. “But I still got people to talk to, Nobile the gofer and maybe I can dig up this bag lady, get her story. I called Paine’s office for an appointment and got one for tomorrow.”

  “Oh, I’d love to be a fly on the wall for that,” said Karp.

  “Yeah, especially the part where I trade sexual favors for the straight poop. Euuugh!” She shuddered elaborately. “Meanwhile”-she consulted her watch-“want to watch some TV? That’s all I have energy for right now.”

  “In a bit. Let me just go spend some time with Lucy.”

  He walked down the hall, feeling a bit of a sneak, because when she kissed him at the table, his daughter had whispered a request for him to do just that, later, in her room.

  He knocked, got a “come in,” and found his daughter in bed, reading The Loom of Language. She put the book down, and his heart sagged at how peaked she looked, like an abandoned nestling.

  “What’s up, kid?” he asked as he turned her desk chair around and sat.

  “If I tell you stuff, like crime stuff, can I, like, stop telling you when I want, or do I have to tell the whole thing?”

  “I assume this is not just hypothetical.”

  “No, it’s real.”

  Karp waited a beat or two, nodded, and said, “Okay. Here’s the deal. If you give me information about a crime or criminal activity, then I’m obliged to take official cognizance of it. I mean if you say, ‘Dad, I saw Joe shoot Jim,’ then I have
to go after Joe and I have to name you as a witness. I got no choice here. The cops get called, they interrogate you, they interrogate Joe. .”

  He stopped because Lucy was shaking her head. “No, I mean, I just want to give you some information about a suspect. Like I saw a guy on a wanted poster and then I spotted him on the street. Do I have to say how I got it or if other stuff happened? I mean, I want to tell you, it’s, like, the right thing, because it could stop a bad crime and people I know could get into trouble, but do you have to, like, bug me to tell you every little thingee about it, I mean, how I know and stuff?”

  She was suffering, he could see it, and he wanted to enfold her in protective arms and make all this go away, and he thought about what Marlene had said in the hospital room that day, about who Lucy really was. A hug from daddy would not, in fact, make it all better.

  “Lucy,” he said, “let’s keep it real simple. You just tell me what you want to tell me, and I won’t bug you for any more. But I will take the actions I think are necessary, both as a member of the D.A.’s office and as a father, for your safety. Sorry, but that’s the best I can do.”

  “We found the Vo brothers,” said Lucy in a rush, as if the phrase were a bolus of poison she had to heave out or die.

  “Where?”

  “Two-oh-three Hester Street, off Lafayette, second floor in the front.”

  “Okay, good girl! You wait here, I’ll be right back.” Karp went to the hall phone and dialed a familiar number. Experienced in such instant mobilizations of force, Clay Fulton asked few questions as Karp filled him in.

  “You want me to bring the Five in on this?” was one of them.

  Karp thought of Phil Wu. He had been hard on Wu, and he figured it would be a decent gesture to let the guy in on a good collar. Clay Fulton was way past needing credit for big arrests. He said, “Yeah, Phil Wu’s the man there. And make sure they have a Vietnamese interpreter along. I don’t want these guys getting shot because of a mistake. Call me when you get it done, whenever. I’ll be here.”