“You’re welcome,” he said. “Now, we say good-bye. But do me this favor.”
“What?” the twins asked.
“Grow up to be good men like your father.”
19
Tuesday, December 21
MARLENE WAS LOOKING FORWARD TO AN AFTERNOON ALONE. The twins had run out of the house, headed for the basketball court; they’d be going on from there to bar mitzvah class with Butch so she’d probably have the evening, too.
Lucy and John Jojola were still staying at the loft, but they’d been spending a lot of time out at night on some mysterious mission they wouldn’t talk about. She figured that it had something to do with Jojola’s notion that David Grale was still alive, although the evidence indicated that it wasn’t very likely. John, who’d offered to stay in a hotel but Marlene wouldn’t hear of it, said he wasn’t sure either. He seemed almost embarrassed to admit that the only thing he was going on was a recurring dream.
“My old friend Charlie Many Horses came to me and said I needed to find David Grale,” he told her. “When I told him Grale was dead, he turned his back and walked away. I could be misinterpreting—sometimes the spirits are not very clear about what they’re trying to say—but I thought I should come and at least try to do what Charlie asked. It can be a mistake to ignore the spirits, too.”
Marlene had not dismissed Jojola’s dream as metaphysical nonsense. She knew that he was a deeply spiritual man—a member of the Gray Coyote, a spiritual clan—and that he believed that the spirits talked to those who listened.
Then again, when you’re the mother of Lucy Karp, who regularly claimed to converse with a martyred saint, you get used to the people around you having strange invisible companions. And Lucy said she’d been having a dream similar to Jojola’s. Neither would go into any detail about what the dream entailed, but Marlene could sense that it greatly disturbed them both, and if she hadn’t known Jojola’s courageous spirit, she would have thought he was afraid.
Whatever their reasons were, ever since their arrival Lucy and Jojola left in the morning and often did not return until late at night, long after the “old folks” had gone to bed. So Marlene had found a good book and was looking forward to her first concentrated and quiet hours of pure reading in months, when the telephone rang.
“Marlene!” said the nearly hysterical voice of her father. “Your mother is missing again!” He started sobbing.
“Calm down, Dad, I’m sure everything’s all right,” she said, seeing her dream of an evening alone with a book pop like a soap bubble. “Have you looked everywhere? Remember, she was in the basement the last time.”
“Everywhere, everywhere,” he cried. “She even left a note on the refrigerator. ‘Gone to walk Barney.’ She’s crazy, Marlene.”
Marlene sighed. Barney was the family beagle, dead for more than forty years. Her mother had been his favorite person in the family, and she’d returned the love, letting him sit on her lap while she watched television and sleep on the bed. “She’s not crazy, Pops, she has Alzheimer’s…it’s a disease,” she said, trying to sound convincing.
“Marlene…she left her clothes at the front door.”
“I’ll be right over.”
Marlene drove as quickly as she could to her parents’ home. So quickly that she nearly missed seeing the elderly naked woman strolling along the sidewalk four blocks from her house, dragging an old dog leash. Her mother appeared to be looking for something but apparently couldn’t see or didn’t care about the two young boys who danced around her, pointing and laughing.
Screeching to a stop at the curb, Marlene jumped out of her car. “Get the hell out of here, you little bastards,” she yelled. The boys took one look at her face and ran off, yelling “crazy old bag lady” over their shoulder.
Marlene flipped the boys off, then turned to her mother. “Mom, Mom, what are you doing?” she said, whipping off her coat to cover her mother.
The old woman was shivering from the cold but brightened when she looked up and recognized her daughter. “Marlene,” she said. “How nice of you to come help me look for Barney. That rascal got out, and I’m afraid he’s going to dig up Mrs. Johansen’s rose garden again.”
Mrs. Johansen, like Barney, had departed the earth decades earlier, but Marlene took it as a hopeful sign that her mother had called her by name.
“But what are you doing home, dear?” her mother said, a look of concern crossing her face. “Is something wrong? Why are you out of school already?”
Marlene put her arm around her mother’s shoulders and guided her to the car. “Come on, Mom, let’s go home,” she said. “Pops is worried.”
“Oh, that man,” her mother said. “He’s impossible. ‘Do this. Do that.’ Who does he think he is, my husband?”
When Marlene arrived home with her mother, her father was standing at the door. He tromped out of the house, and before Marlene, who was coming around from the driver’s side, could intervene, grabbed her mother by the shoulders and shook her. “Where the hell have you been, Concetta?” he shouted. “Walking around the neighborhood without your clothes. I’m ashamed of you.”
“Help me,” her mother screamed.
“Pops!” Marlene shouted, jumping between her parents. “What are you doing?”
Her father backed off, panting, with a wild look in his eyes. He pointed at his wife. “She’s just doing this to torment me,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with her. She just wants to give me a heart attack.” He turned and fled into the house.
“I don’t know that man,” her mother said. “That’s not Mariano. I don’t know what they did with my poor husband but that’s not him.” She started to cry. “Oh, I just want to die.”
“Don’t talk like that, Mom,” Marlene said.
“I don’t care. I don’t care,” the old woman yelled and fled upstairs to her bedroom, where she closed and locked the door. Marlene followed and knocked but her mother responded, “Go away. Just go away.”
Marlene left and went downstairs, where she found her father kneeling in front of the small family shrine to the Virgin Mary. He’d lit a candle and was praying fervently but so low that she couldn’t hear him. When he finished, he looked up at his daughter.
“I’m sorry Marlene…I…I don’t know what came over me,” he said. “I’m just tired. And ashamed. Ashamed that I go to confession and have to tell the priest that I sometimes wish that the woman I love was dead. But I don’t, you know…I don’t want her to die, I just want her back.”
Marlene knelt beside her father. “I know, Dad,” she said. “But you heard the doctor when we took her in for her checkup the last time. She’s not going to get better. In fact, she’s going to get worse, until she doesn’t know anyone…not you…not even herself. It’s the disease, Dad, and no amount of praying is going to bring Mom back. If you can’t deal with that then you need to let me look into putting her into a nursing facility where they can take care of her.”
Her father had resisted all efforts to remove her mother from the home they’d shared for fifty years. Nor would he listen now. “It would kill her to be in such a horrible place. Like a prison they are,” he said. “At least here, she recognizes her things and seems happy most of the time, even if she’s on another planet. And those nursing homes…you hear stories about what they do to old people…sometimes alone at night…I can’t let that happen to her.”
“Dad, I know you want to keep looking after her,” Marlene said. “But there’s going to be a day when she’s going to be better off in the hands of professionals who know this disease and know how to minimize the impact on her. I have plenty of money, and you’ve never let me help with anything, so let me help with this. We can find the best there is where those bad things don’t happen. You can visit her anytime you want. But she’ll get the care she needs, and you won’t have to worry about her so much.”
But her father shook his head. “I’m not ready,” he said. “Sixty-six years we’ve been married.
Sixty-six years of sleeping in the bed next to the same person. What would I do without her? No, Marlene…we do okay most of the time. Maybe later. You go home now; sorry you had to come all the way out here to deal with your crazy old parents.”
Marlene looked at her father. He was a stubborn man; he’d ignored the prejudices and conquered the obstacles and built a good life for himself and his family. But that stubbornness could be hard to deal with at times, too.
“Okay, Pops, we leave it alone for now,” she said. “But you can’t let your frustrations get to you so that you end up hurting or yelling at Mom. She’s already afraid of a world that is closing in on her; she needs your love and support, even when she’s not all there. When the day comes when you can’t deal with it anymore, you have to promise me that you’ll tell me so that we can find a place. Promise me?”
The old man nodded and hugged her. “Yeah, yeah. Like I said, I don’t know what came over me. I’ve never hit your mother in sixty-six years of marriage. So now it looks like I’ll have to go have another talk with the priest.”
Marlene kissed her father’s cheek and patted him on the back. “You do that,” she said. “But don’t be too hard on yourself. You’ve been the best husband a woman could ever wish for…and the best dad.”
That evening, Marlene was grateful when Butch and the boys got back home, and he told her about the note Guma had found in the file. “Regards some letter from a guy named Kaminsky about Villalobos that Breman apparently received and passed on to Judge Klinger.” What made that even more interesting was that “an old friend” told him that he should pass on the name Igor Kaminsky to her as the former cellmate of Enrique Villalobos.
Marlene knew that more murderers had probably been caught because they opened their big mouths than because of all the detective work ever attempted. Prisoners were notorious for boasting about their crimes, if for no other reason than to make themselves seem tougher and meaner, so that maybe they wouldn’t have to prove it physically. But their “friends” and cellmates were equally notorious for ratting them out to the authorities, hoping to work out some sort of deal in exchange for information.
The next morning, Marlene called a friend with the Department of Corrections, who told her yes, Igor Kaminsky had served time at Auburn and yes, Igor Kaminsky had been kept in a cell with Enrique Villalobos for a short time that past spring. “But he’s not there now,” said the friend, a middle-aged black woman she’d once helped protect from her abusive husband. “In fact, there seems to have been a screwup. He was paroled and let go but was supposed to be handed over to the INS to deport back to Russia. Instead, they just gave him some bus money, a suit, and let him go—we have no idea where. But a start might be Brooklyn; that’s where he got arrested on the robbery charge that planted his ass in the pen. If they catch him, it’ll be good-bye New York, hello Moscow. Hey, that’s funny….”
“What’s funny?”
“Well, there’s a federal BOLO for him. ‘Consider armed and dangerous.’ Pretty heavy-duty for a one-armed—”
“He’s got one arm?”
“Yep, just like the bad dude in The Fugitive. Makes sense, don’t it. Anyway, someone got a federal judge to issue a bench warrant for his arrest. They must want him back pretty damn bad for a one-armed, small-time crook who, according to his dossier, was so bad at his job that he let a Korean shopkeeper take his gun and nearly blow his ass away.”
“Not exactly Public Enemy Number One, eh?”
“Not exactly.”
“Who was the judge?”
“Let’s see…Marci Klinger. Hey, ain’t she the one presiding over the Coney Island case?” There was silence from the other end of the line. “Marlene? You there?”
“Yeah, I’m here. Just…writing this down. Um…I don’t suppose there’s anything else in that file of interest—like maybe Igor was the second shooter on the grassy knoll in Dallas? Igor’s Russian, right? Maybe Oswald was working with the Soviets.”
“Too young,” her friend said with a laugh. “But as a matter of fact, I was just about to tell you…your Kennedy assassin was almost assassinated himself. Shortly before his parole, he got stabbed in the stomach by another inmate named Lonnie Lynd. And that’s even more interesting because—this part ain’t in Kaminsky’s file ’cause it happened after he left, just four days ago as a matter of fact—if I’m remembering this right, I saw a report that an inmate named Lonnie Lynd got his neck snapped by some Russian dude named Svetlov.”
“Snapped his neck?”
“That’s what it says, but there ain’t a lot of detail. Just that they were playing basketball.”
“Full-contact sport.”
“Yep. You might talk to Dr. Ron Jendry; he’s the gang counselor at Auburn. This gang ball project is his pet. He probably knew both guys.”
“Anything else?”
“Nope. That’s pretty much it. Oh, one last thing…it says here that he listed his brother, same DOB, as his next of kin in case anything happened to him in prison. The brother’s name is Ivan. Igor and Ivan, the Russian twins.”
“Any address for Ivan?”
“No. But it says to contact Ivan through a Father Stefan Sarandinaki with the Russian Orthodox Church in Brighton Beach, and I suppose that’s a start.”
“It is indeed,” Marlene said. “Thanks, I got to run, but I owe you big.”
“How about we go dutch for lunch next time I’m in the city?”
“Nope. Like I said, I owe you. I’m paying or don’t bother to call.”
“Okay, okay,” the woman said with a laugh. “You’re paying. See you soon, honey.”
Marlene hung up and whistled. When her friend named Marci Klinger as the judge who’d signed off on the bench warrant, Marlene’s hesitation to respond had a lot more to do with shock than because she was writing something down.
She knew from Butch that some sort of message or letter had apparently gone from Kaminsky, a potential material witness, to Breman to Klinger. Yet nothing had been said about the letter to Corporation Counsel.
So what is up with the judge? Marlene wondered. Did Breman receive the information and, not knowing what to make of it, went to the judge for guidance? The Kings County DA had just announced that her office would be settling with the defendants for an undisclosed amount—believed by the press, who’d probably been tipped off by Louis, to be in the neighborhood of twenty million dollars. But that wasn’t even a tenth of what Louis was suing the city of New York for, and he’d filed the papers intending to go after the ADAs and cops individually.
Breman must have made a sweetheart deal, she thought. Louis never even tried to squeeze that turnip for any more than he got.
After talking to her friend, Marlene had hung up and immediately called Auburn and asked to speak to Jendry. The man answered his telephone but was reluctant to say anything until she mentioned that she was the wife of the district attorney of New York.
“Butch Karp?” Jendry perked up. “He probably won’t remember me, but I was a freshman on the Brooklyn High basketball team when he was a senior…. Terrible what happened to his mother that year…. But man, could he post up and drain the bucket. I’d hoped to follow his career in the NBA, but at least I’ve been able to keep track of him at the DA’s office. He’s not exactly flying under the radar down there, is he?”
“No, Butch is pretty much flying where everybody can launch missiles at him,” Marlene said, amused at the man’s still-evident hero worship.
“It’s funny they still call him Butch,” the psychologist said. “Tell him hi from Birdlegs Jendry.”
“I certainly will, and if you’re ever in the city, you ought to look him up,” Marlene said. “He loves to talk about the good old days with old friends.” Actually, Butch rarely talked about the “good old days”; he wasn’t one to live in the past, but the thought of Birdlegs Jendry, whom he’d never mentioned, dropping in on him unexpectedly was too rich for her to miss the opportunity to set him up.
&nbs
p; “I will,” Jendry said, sounding extremely pleased. “Wow! Now, that’s what I call serendipity. So, what was it you needed, Marlene? I hope you don’t mind me calling you Marlene, but I feel as if I know you.”
“No, not at all,” Marlene said. “Any friend or former teammate of Butch Karp is a friend of mine. I insist…Ron. It’s nothing much. I’m just trying to find out what I can about a former inmate named Igor Kaminsky, who was apparently stabbed by another inmate named Lonnie Lynd.”
“Oh, yes,” Jendry sighed. “Terrible business, these gangs. So much violence, most of it traceable back to their dysfunctional families and growing up without male role models in the ghetto. Such a hard pattern to change.”
Gag me, Marlene thought. Rehashed sixties psycho-pablum. She doubted Butch would have had much to do with this former teammate. “I’m sure you’re making a real difference,” she said.
“Well, I’m trying, but to be honest, some days I just want to throw my hands up and go work for McDonald’s,” Jendry said with a great theatrical sigh. “The ones like Lynd and Svetlov…they’re incorrigible. Lynd’s dead, you know. Svetlov broke his neck like you’d snap a pencil, and Lynd was a big guy.”
“What started the fight?” Marlene asked.
“That’s just it, who knows? One minute they’re playing a game of basketball, the next there’s a riot with the Bloods and Russians going at it like a pack of wild dogs.”
“Bloods? The gang?”
“Yes, yes. The Bloods gang. Hard-core gangbangers, but the Russians are just as rough and better organized. Anyway, Lynd gets his hand on a knife of some sort, but Svetlov, a hulking brute if I’ve ever seen one, just sort of grabbed him and pop, Lynd’s dead.”
“Svetlov say what started it?” Marlene asked.
“Nope. The snitches we have in the general population are saying that it was planned retaliation for the attack on Kaminsky. He seemed to have some sort of pull with the Russian mob. But Sergei’s not talking, except to note, correctly, that Lynd pulled a knife on him. Self-defense, he says. But we got him in lockdown anyway.”
Fury (The Butch Karp and Marlene Ciampi Series Book 17) Page 33
