Fury (The Butch Karp and Marlene Ciampi Series Book 17)

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  “Revelations 6:2,” Kipman said, “from the Bible…the riders of the Apocalypse prophecy that begins, ‘And I looked, and behold, a white horse, and he who sat on it had a bow; and a crown was given to him, and he went out conquering and to conquer…’”

  As Kipman recited the verse, Karp felt his stomach knot. One of the witnesses to the murder of a rap star that past summer was a former professor of English, Edward Treacher, who wandered the streets as a homeless bum quoting from the Bible. He’d also been connected to David Grale, which is what caused the pain in his gut. Grale’s dead, he told himself, but he could not stop an involuntary shiver at the thought.

  “Anyway, why I bring it up now is that the Muslim community is all over the cops to catch the killer,” the head of homicide said. “And I got a call from them yesterday—the Muslims, not the cops—wanting to know why we were dragging our feet. I had to explain that we needed a suspect before we could press charges. What did they want us to do, prosecute a ghost?”

  Again, Karp felt chilled. Get ahold of yourself, Butch old boy, he thought, you’re starting to think like Lucy…ghosts and talking saints.

  When the meeting was adjourned, Rachman slammed her briefcase shut and stormed out of the room before anyone else had even risen from the table. The other attorneys glanced quickly at Karp to see his reaction, but he kept his face neutral.

  Out in the hall, Rachman swore, “Goddamn men.” She felt like crying as she marched off toward her office. But that would give the bastards what they want, she thought. At heart they’re all just a bunch of animals. Sticking together in their Brotherhood of the Penis.

  11

  Friday, December 17

  “DID YOU GET A LOAD OF SOME OF THE LOOKS WE GOT WHEN we came in?” Murrow said, peering back anxiously over his shoulder as if he expected an assassin to come running up from behind them. “You’d have thought we were attending a convention for the guys you’ve sent to Attica instead of a meet-and-greet at the Police Benevolent Association.”

  “Yeah, boss, you’re not very popular with these guys right now,” Clay Fulton said, only he was smiling. His boss had never been the sort who worried about his popularity; in fact, there were times when those closest to him wondered if he went out of his way to be unpopular. Fulton was handpicked by Karp to be chief of the NYPD detectives who were assigned to the DAO as investigators.

  “Gots ’em right where I wants ’em,” Karp said, returning the smile while clapping Murrow on the shoulder. The event had been set up months before as a “meet the candidate.” The night before, however, Dick Torrisi had called and warned him to expect a cool, even hostile, reception.

  “The word making the rounds is that you’re letting the actions of a few bad apples slant the way you view the NYPD as a whole,” Torrisi said. “It seems pretty orchestrated, but I’m not sure who’s throwing the wood on the fire and it’s pervasive from the union leadership on down.”

  Butch had thanked him for the heads-up but assured him that he was still planning on attending. The “few bad apples” was a reference to two fairly recent, but separate, cases against cops that he’d been directly involved in. The first had been the successful prosecution of two cops who’d gunned down a Jamaican immigrant they’d believed to be selling drugs. They’d tried to justify the shooting by claiming that the deceased grappled with them and seized one of their guns. But with the help of a forensic gunshot-wound expert, Karp proved that the killing couldn’t have happened the way the cops had described it, and they’d been convicted of murder.

  The second wasn’t about one or two bad apples but a whole bushel—Andrew Kane’s so-called Irish Gang. They were a half-dozen or so Irish-Catholic cops who’d been recruited by Kane to do some of his dirty work—such as killing a drug dealer—under the pretext that the orders came from the archbishop, who was using them to do “God’s work.” However, in reality, they were helping Kane expand and control his criminal empire through the coercion and murder of rivals.

  Some of them were now dead, killed in a Central Park gunfight that still played out in Karp’s head like a scene from one of the favorite movies of his Brooklyn childhood, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, with Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas. In some ways, it didn’t seem real, as if he’d been acting out a part in a play, except for the dead bodies and the fear that still haunted his sleep that Marlene had been killed.

  Arriving at the PBA building, they’d walked into the main meeting room and all conversations had stopped. Eyes followed them to the corner where several minor union officials were conferring with the union president, Edward Ewen. They returned his handshake as perfunctorily as possible.

  Personally, Karp had the utmost respect for the NYPD, especially after 9/11. They worked a hard, dangerous job, and he believed that it was the best big-city police force in the world. By and large, its members were fine, upstanding men who carried the torch of justice like latter-day knights. But it never ceased to amaze him the way they circled the wagons if one of their number was threatened, even if they personally thought the cop was a scumbag. It was always the NYPD on one side, everybody else on the other.

  “Now remember,” Murrow said a few minutes later as they stood in the wings offstage waiting for Karp to be introduced. “We’re here to win their hearts and minds. You have your speech?”

  Karp held up the set of notecards prepared for him by his assistant. It was what Murrow called his “law and order” speech, meant to appeal to any cop’s heart. More support for the police. More officers. Better technology.

  Ewen finally walked to the podium and with little in the way of an introduction asked Karp to take the stage. There was a smattering of applause but the boos and hisses were louder. He handed the notecards to a startled Murrow. “Here,” he said, “I’ve changed my mind.”

  “Butch?” Murrow pleaded as Karp walked out onto the stage. “Butch, let’s talk. What are you going to say, Butch?”

  “I don’t think he’s listening,” Fulton said, positioning himself where he could reach Karp if something went wrong. He had his own handpicked guys in the audience, even though it was unlikely that someone would go so far as to try to hurt his boss—at least in a public place. But he wasn’t the sort to take chances, and heck, the PBA was probably the most heavily armed group Butch would talk to before the election.

  “No,” Murrow shook his head sadly. “He never does.”

  Out at the podium, Karp looked over the crowd—a lot of guys sitting with their arms crossed and slouched in their seats.

  “Okay, let me propose a compromise,” he began. “I left my notecards for the planned dog-and-pony show over there with my colleague, so you’re not going to have to listen to political bullshit.”

  “We already are,” came a voice with a thick Bronx accent from the back of the auditorium.

  “Yeah, maybe,” Karp agreed, “but in exchange for not throwing a bunch of campaign rhetoric at you—though I think some of the issues I was going to talk about are pretty important to you guys—I’m asking you to hear me out and make up your minds as men and women of integrity. The New York Police Department and the New York District Attorney’s Office are like a married couple—”

  “I want a divorce,” a woman officer shouted, to general laughter.

  Karp chuckled, too. “How about after the children are grown?” he replied. “Anyway, we need each other to achieve a common goal, which is to serve and protect the people of New York City. But it’s obvious this relationship is not going to get better until we clear the air.”

  “The air will clear when you leave,” the guy with the Bronx accent shouted. Some laughed, but a few also demanded that their fellow officers “pipe down, let him speak.”

  Karp used the break to launch into what Murrow called—and not always very happily—his “one bad apple only spoils the bunch if they let it” speech. Essentially, it boiled down to: It’s not enough to be an honest cop if you know that the guy next to you is corrupt, not unless you do
something about it.

  “I believe that the New York City Police Department is the best in the world and that the press concentrates on the few bad apples.”

  “So do you, Karp.” The Bronx guy again.

  “But at the same time, those of you who hate that kind of press, if you tolerate the bad apples just because they wear the same badge, you’re no better.”

  The last comment brought a fresh chorus of boos but he noticed there was also some applause. Karp looked over to the wings and saw Murrow with his hand clamped over his mouth as if he was about to throw up. “I KNOW most of you have never taken a bribe in your lives, not so much as a free coffee on a cold morning. I KNOW most of you have done your job day in and day out without stepping over the line. But that’s not enough….”

  “Take a hike, Karp,” the guy from the Bronx yelled again.

  “Shaddup, Archie, I think he’s talking about you,” someone else shouted, which stirred more laughter.

  “I don’t care if you’re pissed at me for convicting scumbags who happen to also wear that uniform,” Karp said. “But who you should really be pissed at are the guys who sully their badges and yours with their greed or their laziness or their corruption. If you have a stain on your house, you’re the ones who need to clean it up.”

  “Yeah, what about your house?” the female heckler said.

  Karp knew what she was driving at. Everybody in the law enforcement business in New York knew that Marlene had a reputation for working in some pretty gray areas of the law. In general, the cops liked her even better than him; they understood her vigilante sense of justice. But it certainly made it difficult to point fingers.

  “What about the DA’s office?” one of the union officials yelled from his seat in the front. “It seems to me that for all this talk about the so-called Irish Gang, which as an Irish-American I find personally offensive, there was some complicity in the DA’s office. But I don’t see anybody there in jail.”

  The audience liked that one and cheered. It took a minute before they quieted down enough for Karp to speak. The question was a good one, but not one he knew the answer to yet. He suspected that the No Prosecution files forwarded by Kane and others to the DA’s office had been ignored because Bloom, and certainly Keegan, had trusted their opinion and because it was easier. So far there was no indication, as in evidence of bribes or kickbacks, that would establish that a crime of malfeasance had been committed.

  “All I can say in that regard,” Karp replied, “is that the investigation begun this past summer is continuing. We are following all leads, up to and including any that would point to wrongdoing by anyone in my office past or present.”

  “Yeah, whaddya bet only cops will take the heat on this,” the union official grumbled.

  “If a cop commits a crime that we can prove, he or she will be prosecuted,” Karp said. “And if someone in my office commits a crime that we can prove, he or she will be prosecuted. You’ll just have to take it—or not—on faith.”

  “Not,” shouted several. Another added, “We have faith in our own.”

  Karp nodded. “Which is how it should be. I have always admired your loyalty to one another. But I think you have to ask yourself, what if a thief or rapist or murderer is one of your own, does he deserve to wear that uniform? I don’t hire or fire anyone at the New York Police Department. My job is to prosecute criminals who commit crimes in New York County and that’s what I do whether they’re doctors or truck drivers or lawyers or police officers. Justice is blind, and justice can be slow. But anybody who tells you I’m anticop is not serving you, they’re serving their own interests…you’ll have to decide why that is.”

  The crowd was silent after that last comment. “Thank you for your time,” Karp said. “I hope there’s a next time when you and I can talk about the stuff that matters, like working together toward a common goal.”

  Karp turned to go and found himself almost face-to-face with Clay Fulton, who had walked out and stood with his hand extended. Fulton was well respected in the PBA, one of the guys who’d worked his way up through the ranks. Karp knew that his appearance onstage was his way of making a statement to the members.

  “More of them heard you than you think,” Fulton said as they shook hands. “It’s just tough for them to break ranks.”

  Karp patted him on the shoulder. “Thanks. I understand.”

  At that moment, one of the union flunkies walked up to Karp. “Mr. Ewen would like to speak to you, if you have a minute.”

  Karp and his entourage followed the young man off the stage and through a door leading to a hallway. At the end of the hallway, Karp paused in front of a car-size photograph of the burning World Trade Center buildings in a frame, and around its edges were the names of the police officers who’d died that morning trying to save others.

  “Quite a list, eh, Mr. Karp,” said a voice from the office to the left.

  Karp turned, and in the near dark of the room he saw the union president, Edward Ewen, a large, florid man, sitting behind a desk. With his bulging cheeks and bulging eyes, Ewen reminded him of a bullfrog. It would not have surprised him to see a long, pink tongue dart out from between the thin purple lips to snatch an insect, which was how he was looking at Karp.

  Karp glanced again at the photograph and names. “Yes, quite a list,” he said. “I can’t imagine the courage it took to go back into those buildings.”

  “Ya know, Karp,” Ewen said. “Sometimes ya sound like you was on our side. Then others, it’s like ya got a hard-on for cops and think that the boys are a bunch of crooks.”

  “I don’t think of it as taking sides,” Karp said. “I get paid by the people to prosecute criminals; it doesn’t matter if they’re wearing blue jeans or blue uniforms. If the NYPD doesn’t like the black eyes from these cases, maybe the membership and the union ought to work harder to ferret the bad ones out.”

  “None of the boys want to work with bad cops,” Ewen said. “But it seems that every time one of you guys runs for office, you feel like you need to make a big splash in the newspapers by bustin’ cops for ticky-tacky stuff.”

  “Murder, criminal conspiracy, extortion…a little more than ticky-tacky,” Karp noted.

  “No doubt. No doubt,” Ewen agreed. “It’s just that the boys don’t see no one in the DA’s office going down on this one, and you can’t tell me…them…that Keegan and that other idiot, what was his name, Bloom, were squeaky clean and didn’t know what was going on.”

  “As I told ‘the boys,’ this investigation isn’t over,” Karp said. “If crimes were committed by anyone in the district attorney’s office, we will pursue those charges as vigorously as we do the others. Now, was there something in particular that you wanted to talk to me about?”

  “I just wanted a little face time, Karp,” Ewen said. “Personally, I think you’re a good guy…heart in the right place and all that. I just thought that as one old campaigner to another I’d let you know that there’s a perception out there that you’re anticop. You need to do something about it, or even a supporter like me won’t be able to persuade the membership to back you in the election.”

  Karp rankled at the implied threat: play ball with the union or jump to the back of the unemployment line. “I guess I’ll just have to trust that most of the membership can think for themselves and don’t need to be persuaded by someone else,” he replied.

  “Careful, Karp,” the union boss said, narrowing his frog eyes into slits, “I’m not someone you want as an enemy.”

  “Neither am I, Ewen,” Karp shot back.

  Murrow, who’d started to feel nauseated as the situation deteriorated, jumped in. “Hey, hey, in the immortal words of Rodney King, ‘Can’t we all just get along?’”

  Ewen looked at Murrow as if he were a fly he was about to snap up, but then he laughed. “Yeah, yeah, young man…sometimes a coupla bull-headed guys like your boss here and me, we gotta butt heads. But we all want the same thing, a safe city. Them guys o
ut there, they pay me to look after ’em. I’m just trying to give your boss a friendly reminder that sometimes you get more with honey than a stick.”

  “And we certainly appreciate that, Mr. Ewen,” Murrow said before Karp could reply. He looked at his watch. “Oops, we got to go, Butch. You’re supposed to pick up your sons in less than an hour.”

  Karp had locked eyes with Ewen, but neither of them flinched. A tough old bastard, he thought, been around since Garrahy’s days. “Yes, I believe Mr. Ewen and I have said what needs to be said.”

  Most of the members had left by the time they were escorted back out to the auditorium. A few stragglers gave them dark looks, but there was one reasonably friendly face, that of Richard Torrisi.

  “Hi, Butch, good speech,” Torrisi said, holding out his hand.

  “Yeah, I really wowed them,” Karp replied, shaking it.

  Torrisi laughed. “Yeah, well, tough crowd but they’re not as sheeplike as some people might want you to believe. I think most of them are waiting and watching. They won’t be afraid to break from the leadership if there’s a good reason.”

  “Aren’t you talking ill of your bosses?”

  Torrisi grimaced. “I suppose I am, technically. But to be honest, I think of the rank and file as my real bosses. I was hired by the leadership but to represent the members’ interests.”

  “I think a lot of us have been in the same boat,” Karp said.

  “Yeah…hey, if you have a minute, there’s someone else I’d like you to meet,” Torrisi said.

  Murrow answered. “Sorry, but not really. He has to be somewhere in…,” he looked at his watch, “forty-seven-and-a-half minutes.”

  “That’s okay,” Karp said, “we’ve got time.” He’d caught some sense of urgency in the union lawyer’s voice and was curious as to what it might be about.