Act of Revenge bkamc-11

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  “I am not accusing Mr. Colombo directly,” Karp interrupted. “It is entirely within the realm of possibility that an intrepid reporter penetrated the interior of the Southern District offices, got past dozens of armed federal law enforcement officers, located the tape in question from among hundreds and hundreds of evidence tapes, and purloined it. In that case Mr. Colombo would be merely incompetent and not culpable.”

  Bryson’s face now arranged itself into an expression of pained forebearance, suitable to guests who claimed alien abduction. “Mr. Karp, as I said, the issue here is the content of the tape itself, and whether an assistant district attorney was in collusion with organized crime.”

  The camera focused in on Karp here, so as to watch him sweat out an answer to this one, but Karp was not looking at the camera. He was staring at Bryson. The show’s director instinctively switched to a two-shot and got a good one of Karp’s center punch of a finger pointing at the host. “I know you!” he cried. “I’ve seen you around my daughter’s school. You were trying to trade heroin for sexual favors from little girls. Yeah! You’re the guy!”

  Bryson’s face took on a rictus of surprise and horror, which the unforgiving camera recorded forever. The show stopped for two beats, and then Karp said, “Oh, gosh, I’m sorry. You’re not the guy after all. It was someone else. Do you get it now, Mr. Bryson?”

  “You’re avoiding this issue, sir. .”

  “I beg to differ-this is the issue. Say I don’t like you, Mr. Bryson. Say I hauled you into court on that preposterous charge, and brought up a cloud of witnesses who claimed to have seen you do awful things. I bet you have plenty of malicious enemies. Oh, you’d probably get off, and you might afterward sue for false arrest, but think of the cost! And then I might do it again. Why not? If we had a system where someone like me could make a baseless accusation against someone like you, even if the case proved false, your reputation would never survive. I don’t even mention your bank account. That’s why there are grand juries, and that’s why they’re secret. Before I can make you a defendant in a felony, before I can indict you, I have to convince a majority of twenty-three of your fellow citizens that there is enough evidence to hold you to answer for the crime at a public trial, and if there isn’t, if the charge does not hold up, no one knows about it, ever. Absent that constraint, the authority of prosecutors to do damage is very nearly absolute. Absent that, I could tear you apart, Mr. Bryson. I could tear anyone apart.”

  “Yes, that’s all very well, but you haven’t answered-”

  “Listen to me! We are your dogs, Mr. Bryson. Me and Mr. Colombo and all the others who are supposed to represent the people. You want us to keep you safe from the wolves in our society. But we have very, very sharp teeth and powerful jaws, and we need strong chains. The grand jury is one of those chains, and secrecy is its most important link. Weaken it, and even though greedy journalists think it’s swell to get leaks from a grand jury, I guarantee you, you won’t like what happens. Mr. Colombo’s office has slipped that chain, and as a result a distinguished public servant, a man who has in thirty years of dedicated work done more to fight organized crime in this city than anyone I know, has had his reputation besmirched. You mentioned the Pentagon Papers? How can you compare the breaching of executive secrecy in a matter of transcendent national importance with a cheap political stunt by an out-of-control federal prosecutor?”

  Bryson made a series of inarticulate noises as he tried to regain momentum. The director, who was one of the many who did not like Dudley Bryson, held the camera steady on this gabbling: “But, but, but, um, but, if that’s the, I mean, if. . then you. . are not going to pursue any, disciplinary measures against Mr. Guma?”

  The camera moved to Karp’s face, on which there was a bemused expression that all New Yorkers could recognize as the one that appeared on their very own faces when trying to explain to a group of Korean tourists how to get to the Cloisters.

  Cue commercial.

  In the Karp home, all were glued to the little screen in the kitchen, watching the man of the house on Morning Report.

  “Why is Daddy so shiny, Mom?” asked Lucy. “He looks weird.”

  “I believe that’s the light of truth and justice issuing forth,” said Marlene. “They usually don’t let it on TV. It’s like full-frontal nudity.”

  Zak was dancing around snapping a red plastic pistol and crying, “My daddy’s on television!” repeatedly. Zik was not watching at all, which offended his brother, who urged him to lift up his eyes and gaze. “Watch Daddy, Zik! Daddy’s on TV.”

  “Daddy’s not on TV,” replied Zik disdainfully. “Daddy’s in real life!”

  And back in real life, Karp got a round of applause and humorous cheers from those he passed as he went to his office, and within five minutes of arriving at his desk, he got a call from Jack Keegan.

  “I haven’t had so much fun since the pigs ate grandma,” said Keegan without preamble.

  “I’m glad you liked it,” said Karp.

  “Like is not the word. You added ten years to my life, boyo, and you set public relations back twenty-five. McHenry’s been bending my ear for the last ten minutes. He’s going to require sedation. He reminds me, and I now remind you, that the press never forgets. You made one of them look like a jackass, boyo. I hope you’re prepared to live a life of absolute perfection from now on. You’re a marked man.”

  Karp thought briefly not of himself but of Marlene and the extraordinary vulnerability and imperfection of her life and of what a couple of skilled investigative reporters could do to her with it, and then suppressed that unhappy line of thought. “Perfection? No problem,” he replied lightly, and asked, “How are your peers responding?”

  “Mixed. I like to imagine all the honest ones are on our side. The guys I watched the show with were cheering, at any rate. How’s Ray holding up?”

  “I sent him home with one of the guys from the squad for company.”

  “You don’t think he’s in any serious danger?”

  “I got the word out he didn’t know about the bug, but whether that will satisfy Scarpi and his brothers is another question. But fuck them, they’re the bad guys. I’m more worried about the good guys.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Well, Jack, not to put too fine a point on it, Ray Guma, in addition to being, as I said to millions, a helluva crime fighter, is also, as you well know, excessively fond of dipping his wick, and he has dipped it on occasion in places where maybe he shouldn’t have, being an officer of the court. Lovely witnesses, for example. Lovely former defendants, for example. High-class ladies of the evening with strong ties to some prominent Italian-American gentlemen, for example. Colombo puts the full-court press on this, he’s going to come up with a lot of dirt, and the media will eat it up. D.A.’s man in Mafia sex ring. Keegan’s Italian stallion in bed with Mob. .”

  Keegan cursed briefly, and then there was an ominous silence on the line, leaving Karp to imagine that Keegan was thinking nasty thoughts about how to cut Guma loose, and about what he, the district attorney, could plausibly have known and when about the fellow’s deplorable lusts. Karp decided to save Keegan embarrassment by changing tack.

  “Which means we have only a limited time to derail this entire operation and make Tommy look like a horse’s ass not only on the Guma thing but on the Catalano thing as well, so much so that the jackals will forget Ray. So I need some scope, and I need some cover.”

  “What do you have in mind?” growled the D.A.

  “Not a goddamn thing right now,” said Karp. “But I’ll think of something.”

  Tran came to convey Lucy to the cops for her lineup, and Marlene and Posie, the kids and the mastiff, piled into the Volvo. All but Marlene exited at Central Park South for a healthy romp, and Marlene headed north and east. James Nobile was in the phone book, which meant that Marlene needed no detection skill greater than the ability to find a large tan apartment building at 70th and Third.

  There was no d
oorman, and Marlene entered with the standard ruse: being well dressed, with nice legs, and fumbling with keys while a legit male tenant was entering.

  As usual, Sym had called to determine if the man was home, and he opened the door at Marlene’s ring. She looked down, trying to hide her surprise. Abe had not mentioned anything about Nobile’s physical appearance, so she was unprepared for a man less than five feet high. Paint him red and screw a big hex nut into his skull, and he would have passed for a fire hydrant on a dim night. He must have been near seventy, and he had retained, or returned to, the face of an irascible infant.

  “Yeah?” he snapped. “What is it now? And how did you get into the building? If this is another goddamn charity collection, you can forget it.”

  “Mr. James Nobile?” Marlene inquired.

  “Yeah?”

  “Did you work at the law firm of Fein, Kusher and Panofsky in the fifties and sixties?”

  “What if I did? Who are you, lady?”

  Straight is not going to work with this guy, Marlene thought. Doherty might have been a bent cop, but as a human being he was relatively decent; this little fellow was warped to the core. She smiled and said, “My name is Ariadne Stupenagel, I’m a freelance writer, and I’m doing a story on famous suicides in the New York area. Can I come in?” So saying, she used her hip and entered the apartment, closing the door behind her.

  “Hey,” said Nobile, “I didn’t say you could come in here.”

  “I won’t take up much of your time, Mr. Nobile,” said Marlene, looking around. Musty, the smell of whiskey in the close air. Expensive, flashy furniture from twenty-five years ago, the low point in American design, crowded the living room, lots of crushed velvet, a Barcalounger, a twenty-one-inch television in an immense mahogany console, a nude on velvet on the wall; no sad clowns, but he might have saved that for the bedroom.

  She chivvied him into letting her sit on his sofa; he sat in a fading brocade armchair facing her from halfway across the room, as if she were carrying a communicable disease.

  “Now, what I wanted to ask you about was the suicide of Gerald Fein, one of the partners in the law firm you worked at. Do you recall that tragedy, Mr. Nobile?”

  “Sure, yeah, but I don’t know anything about it. I mean, all I know is from the papers and whatnot.”

  A lie, thought Marlene. A whopper. She was always surprised at how badly ordinary people lied. Being careful to stare into the interrogator’s eye more than was common, that was one sign. Nobile’s eyes were like some curdled dessert, a dab of grainy chocolate in stale, yellowing creme.

  “But you worked for the firm at the time. You must have seen Mr. Fein every day, just about. Did you get the impression that he was troubled?”

  “Hey, I just did my job. I didn’t poke into anybody’s business.”

  “Mr. Panofsky thought that Fein was troubled, though, didn’t he?” Shrug.

  “Did he ever mention it to you?”

  “Hell, lady, it was twenty-five years ago,” Nobile said irritably. “You think I keep crap like that in my head? He must’ve been crazy or he wouldn’t have jumped off of the Empire State.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, you’re right, it was a long time ago. I guess you’re retired now yourself.” She looked around admiringly. “You must have a nice pension to afford this place. Upper East Side, wow! I’m jealous.”

  “Not a pension. Those days only the big guys gave pensions. Nah, I got Social Security and I got investments.”

  “Lucky you! So, tell me, how did you come to work for Fein’s law firm?”

  “I answered an ad in the Journal-American. I was with them seventeen years.”

  “Uh-huh. And before that?”

  “I was in building management.” His look grew narrower. “What do you want to know this stuff for?”

  “Just background, Mr. Nobile. So, was carrying important packages part of your work? Confidential information and so on?”

  “Yeah, I did that, I did a little of everything. What does that have to do with the suicide?”

  “I’m getting to that. The packages were mostly from Mr. Panofsky, weren’t they? Thick envelopes. You took them to politicians all over town, didn’t you?”

  “You’re not a reporter,” said Nobile, and shot to his feet.

  “But you took them from Panofsky, not Fein, didn’t you? Fein wasn’t in the thick-envelope business. Except once.”

  “Get out of here!” Nobile’s clay-colored face was going red around the edges.

  Marlene got up and stalked slowly toward him. “Except once, and that envelope was the one that got him disbarred. I bet you could tell me a lot about that deal, couldn’t you? Is that how you got your investments?”

  Sometimes they talked when they were scared, and sometimes they fought, and if they were decent folks, they called the police. Nobile was terrified, she could see that, but not necessarily of her. He turned and ran into the kitchen. Marlene heard a drawer violently open and metallic rummaging sounds. Gun, or knife, or hammer? She recalled that she was unarmed and dogless, and beat a retreat.

  Tran and Lucy were about to leave the loft when the phone rang. Lucy picked it up. “Lucy Karp, please,” said an unfamiliar voice.

  “Speaking.”

  “Good. Listen, this is Detective Wu from the Fifth Precinct. You’re supposed to come down here and look at a lineup.”

  “We were just leaving,” she said.

  “Your mom’s there?”

  “No, I’m coming with a friend.”

  “Well, your dad said I was to go pick you up. I’ll be by in ten minutes. Why don’t you be outside your building, okay?”

  “Wait a second, how come I can’t-”

  “Just be outside, okay?” He hung up.

  When she told Tran about the change in plans, he frowned. Tran did not like changes in plans at the last minute.

  He said, in French, their best mutual language, “Let us go look at this policeman before he drives away with you. Anyone can say he is of the police.”

  They went down in the elevator, and Tran led her a few buildings away and across Crosby Street, where they waited in a deeply shadowed doorway. A brown sedan approached from Howard and stopped in front of the Karps’ building. After a few minutes, a neatly dressed Asian man emerged and pressed the Karps’ buzzer.

  “That must be him,” said Lucy. “The detective.” She began to wave and walk forward, but Tran swept her up, pulled her deeper into the doorway, and clapped a hand over her mouth.

  “Be still,” he whispered. She could feel the warmth of his breath and smell his scent: nuoc mam and lilacs. “I have seen that man before, accepting something from our Mr. Leung. You mustn’t go with him.” He took his hand away from her mouth.

  She stared at the man, who was now gazing up at the windows of the family loft.

  “Are you sure? I thought he was a cop.”

  “Whether he is or not, which I will determine later, I do not care to have you go off alone with anyone who takes thick envelopes from a triad agent. Ah, good! He is going into your building. Now we will make our getaway.”

  “Where will we go?” asked Lucy, trotting along beside him.

  “Well, as to that, here is the problem. We believe Leung has corrupted one policeman, but perhaps there are others who are on the take. A policeman comes up to you on the street, shows his badge, orders you into his car, and you go, and poof! No more Lucy. He takes you for a ride, yes? So properly, we should blow town.”

  They reached the alley where Tran kept his elderly Jawa. Lucy said, “Uncle Tran, I don’t think people say blow town anymore.”

  “Do they not? You astound me. In any case, I believe we will not do that thing at all, but instead travel to the Queens, where we will be quite safe. Climb on! I want you out of sight before he realizes you are not going to place yourself in his hands.”

  If it was a tail, Marlene thought, it was a stupid one, or maybe they figured she would think that. Nobody sane would use a dirty
red Dodge pickup with a pale green front fender to tail a car in the city. The vehicle had impinged mildly on her consciousness when parking near Nobile’s apartment building, and then moved up on the awareness scale when it appeared in her side mirror as she drove south on Second Avenue. She cocked her head to center the rearview in her good eye. There it was, two cars back. A man driving, wearing sunglasses and a dark ball cap-could be anyone. When paranoia strikes, Marlene believed, respond as if the danger were real, because all in all a little social embarrassment, even including a brief stay in a nice clinic enriched with soothing medication, is better than being dead. Consequently she signaled, hung a right at 54th Street, and was not really that surprised to see the Dodge make the same turn, nor to see it again after her left onto Third. Marlene now demonstrated why you need at least three cars in radio communication to set and keep a proper tail in a city. By 48th Street she had maneuvered herself so that when the light at that corner turned red, she was right at the crosswalk, and then, just before the cross-street traffic entered the intersection, she leaned on her horn and shot through, scattering pedestrians and summoning forth the usual cacophony of honking horns and screamed curses in several languages. The tail was pinned, and Marlene cut west at 45th, parked in a loading zone for fifteen minutes, and then continued south.

  She left the car in a garage of a hotel on Madison off 34th and set out on foot. At a bank she changed a hundred dollars into a stack of crisp ones and fives and went looking for the homeless. After a couple of hours she was thirty-five dollars lighter and not much wiser. The homeless are not your best informants, especially when trying to locate one of their number, most especially when you don’t have a good recent description of your quarry. Shirley Waldorf could have been the Tinfoil Lady, or the Dog Lady, or the Leopardskin Lady, or Crazy Annie. She could have been the Demon Queen that haunted one particular person who, dressed in a toga and a paper hat bearing mystic signs designed to fend off just such evils, assured Marlene that the woman she sought was just across the street, but currently invisible.