“So what do you think my chances are of getting Svetlov to talk to me?”
“None and none,” Jendry replied. “He’s a stone-cold killer. The Russian mob’s main muscle, and absolutely loyal to his bosses. He doesn’t say anything they don’t tell him to say.”
Marlene hung up. Well, won’t hurt to ask, she thought. Several hours later, she wasn’t so sure when, with a buzz and a metallic snap, hidden bolts slid into place and the steel bars of the gate in front of her slid open. “Please step forward,” said a monotone male voice whose owner she assumed was behind the dark window of the control booth. She did as told, stepping into what amounted to a cage large enough for one and fought a momentary urge to retreat before the gate slid home behind her.
Silly, she thought as the gate closed, they have to let you out. She thought of the “release from liability” form she’d had to sign just to get this far, especially the part that said if she was taken hostage by the inmates, the Department of Corrections would not negotiate for her release. She’d be on her own.
There was more buzzing and metallic clicks, and the next gate in front of her slid open. “Step forward, please,” the voice said again. Ever since she’d been escorted beyond the waiting room, which at least made an attempt at softening the scenery with a few magazines, a television set to CNN, and a motley collection of children’s toys in a corner, every sound seemed magnified, as if unable to find anything to absorb its energy in all that steel and cement. God, I’d go insane if I was locked up, she thought. A good reminder to stay on the straight and narrow, Ciampi.
As soon as she stepped into the hall beyond the cage, she was met by a hard-eyed, square-jawed corrections officer. He handed her a Visitor badge. “Place this somewhere visible and keep it on you at all times,” he instructed. “Follow me.” Without waiting for a reply, he turned and led the way down a long, brightly lit hallway of gray-painted cinder blocks.
Reaching a row of doors, each marked with a letter of the alphabet, he opened the one marked B. She looked inside and saw that it was a tiny interview room with a single mushroom-shaped metal stool bolted to the floor in front of a window she was sure was probably capable of stopping an automobile. This was max at Auburn State Prison—not the most hard-line in New York’s prison system but no joke, either.
“Have a seat, he’ll be here in a minute,” the guard said and closed the door behind her.
Marlene sat down on the stool and picked up the telephone receiver from its place on the wall to listen. Nothing but a slight buzzing noise. The walls were white and glossy; there were no nooks and crannies, no place to hide anything, even if they hadn’t confiscated her purse and searched her before letting her proceed. A horrible place. Then again, she thought, it’s designed to secure and punish pretty horrible people. She looked up and saw the eyes of a camera gazing down at her. Nothing would go unnoticed, not that she had any intention of trying.
A door in the room opposite her opened and the largest human being Marlene had ever seen shuffled in. His massive wrists were cuffed to a chain that ran around his belly and between his legs. She assumed the shuffling was because he was shackled. He stood blinking in the bright light, looking at her as a guard unlocked the fastener holding the handcuffs to the belly chain while two more guards looked on. He waited for them to back out of the room before he took a seat on the stool.
Marlene picked up the telephone. When he made no move to do the same, she indicated he should do so with her head. He gave her a bored look but reached up and plucked the telephone off the wall with his manacled hands.
“Da?”the big man said.
“Sergei Svetlov?” Marlene asked.
“Depends. Who vants to know this?” His baritone voice seemed to rumble up out of some deep dark well.
“Marlene Ciampi…I’m a private investigator working for Corporation Counsel in New York.”
Svetlov shrugged. “Means na-think to me.”
“It does to me,” Marlene replied. Jendry was right—Svetlov wasn’t likely to be very helpful. But it couldn’t hurt to ask. “I was wondering if you could help me find Igor Kaminsky?”
Svetlov pursed his lips and said, “I don’t know this man.”
Marlene tried a different tack. “He’s not in any trouble with the law. In fact, his life might be in danger, and I might be able to help.”
“I tell you, I don’t know this man,” Svetlov said again.
“But you killed the man who tried to kill him,” Marlene said. “Those people might try to kill him again.”
Svetlov, whose big, round, scarred head reminded her of a jack-o’-lantern, shrugged and said, “I killed the shitty man who tried to stab me…is self-defense.”
Marlene looked at the man, who looked impassively back at her. “Well, thank you, Mr. Svetlov, for agreeing to meet with me,” she said. “If you remember anything that might help me, you can contact Dr. Jendry and he’ll be able to reach me.”
Svetlov smiled, and she was surprised how pleasant it made his face. “Is not often I have visit from a beautiful woman. This pleasure is mine.”
Hmm, a ladies’ man; maybe a little of the old Ciampi sex kitten will turn the trick, Marlene thought. She smiled shyly and brushed a strand of her hair from in front of her eyes. “If you remember something important about Igor Kaminsky, I could come back up and talk to you again.”
“Perhaps,” Svetlov said in a way that let her know that he was on to her game and had, in fact, expected it. “But unfortunately, I do not know this man.”
Ten minutes later, Marlene stepped outside the prison, relieved just to be beyond the clanging doors and metallic voices. It was only sixty miles down the road to the next stop in her Department of Corrections tour but a world of difference in attitude. The Roxbury Prison Farm was considered a model of humane and progressive incarceration for model prisoners. There were a few lifers at the farm, who for one reason or another had managed to get transferred there, but most were inmates who were expected to return to society as changed men.
The looming walls of Auburn were topped with razor wire and watched over by men with rifles in guard towers. But there was only a fifteen-foot-high chain-link fence between the inmates at Roxbury and freedom. There were no guard towers or men with guns in plain sight of the inmates. The guards patrolled in cars around the perimeter, but most of the security work was done by cameras.
The grounds of the prison farm were immaculately kept and appeared to have been professionally landscaped with bushes and trees. Beyond the campus, there were rows and rows of crop fields—barren now, but plowed and furrowed for the spring planting.
Hell, if they had a pool and a bar, I could almost live here, Marlene thought after a cursory check of her identification at the front gate. She pulled up to the building with the pretty painted sign that read Administration.
Again she had to invoke her husband’s name to get the superintendent, an officious little mouse of a man named Andrew Vundershitz—an unfortunate but appropriate name—to cooperate. Vundershitz had a guard escort her to a waiting room with overstuffed chairs and a well-stocked magazine rack. The guard disappeared and a couple of minutes later reappeared with Enrique Villalobos, who was even uglier in person than the mugshot she’d seen.
The prisoner was wearing jeans and a clean blue prison shirt, but it was the only thing clean about him. His yellow, jaundiced eyes held hers for only a moment before drifting down to her breasts. The purple scars of a childhood bout with measles looked hideous against his ocher-colored skin. There was something about the way he combed his greasy black hair back from his pointed face and his rodentlike teeth that made her think of a large rat she’d seen once in the alley next to the loft building on Crosby.
The creature had seen her too—it was broad daylight—and rather than scurry away, stood on its hind legs and hissed at her. Marlene was no coward but there was something about the hissing rat that unnerved her and she’d turned and ran.
“You want m
e to stay in the room, ma’am?” the guard asked. He looked like a big, strong farm kid, probably from one of the neighboring farms, who was supplementing his income with a job at the local prison. He evidently thought it was a good idea if he remained.
“No, that’s okay, officer,” Marlene said. “I’ll be fine.”
“Yes, Officer Richardson,” Villalobos sneered. “She’ll be just fine. I’ll treat her real good.”
Officer Richardson pointed a thick finger at Villalobos. “You behave or if this lady complains, you and I will have a little discussion out by the toolshed.”
Villalobos feigned a hurt look. “I wouldn’t hurt a fly, Officer Richardson. You got no call to talk to me like that.” Then he turned and leered at Marlene. “Obviously, this fine-looking bitch has heard that Enrique Villalobos is a stud and wants to find out for herself.”
Marlene felt grateful that she was no longer carrying a gun. Otherwise, she thought, I might be tempted to wait for Officer Richardson to disappear, then put a hot one in this piece of shit’s brain.
When she first agreed to take the case, Marlene had looked at Villalobos’s PSI, the presentence investigation report done on every prisoner to give the judge some guidance on the appropriate place and severity of incarceration. The psychiatrists who’d examined Villalobos had recommended maximum security because of the likelihood that he would reoffend if he escaped. The psychologist had noted that Villalobos both hated and worshipped his mother, with a strong possibility, though it had been denied by both, that the mother had had sexual relations with her son from an early age. “It is felt by this board,” the examining physicians wrote, “that the crime perpetrated on his victims was a way of acting out repressed anger at his mother. Yet, publicly at least, he professes a great love for her.”
When Richardson left, closing the door behind him, Marlene smiled at Villalobos. “Mr. Villalobos, I’d like to talk to you about a friend of yours.”
“Oh, yeah?” he said, placing his hand on his crotch. “I got lots of friends. Like the women I fucked. They always want more from their ‘friend,’ Enrique.”
“Yes, I’m sure,” she said sarcastically, but it didn’t affect his smile or what he was doing with his hand. “But I’m here to talk about another man…Igor Kaminsky.”
Villalobos’s smile disappeared and his hand returned to the arm of his chair. “I don’t know no fuckin’ Kaminsky.”
“No? The DOC’s records say he was your cellmate at Auburn in February. About the time you ‘confessed’ to the rape of Liz Tyler.”
“I remember sweet Liz, all right,” Villalobos said, regaining his composure. “I always remember them tight asses I fuck. Um, um, it’s so g-o-o-o-d.”
Marlene again wished she was packing heat, or at least a Taser, but forced herself to continue. “Well, I just thought you might be interested to know that Mr. Kaminsky has been in contact with the Brooklyn DA’s office.”
Villalobos scowled. “Oh, yeah, now I remember that lying sack of shit. I think I fucked him, too, in my cell. That’s what I do to liars and bitches.”
“That’s what you did until you had a ‘positive prison experience’ and found Jesus, right?”
The smile returned to the convict’s face. “Thas right, bitch. Me and God is tight like this,” he said, crossing his fingers.
“Yeah, Enrique, I’m sure God has something special planned for such a good friend…someplace cold and dark and alone except for the voice shrieking in your head,” she snarled.
The sudden turn in her demeanor shocked him at first. But he recovered and hissed, “Fuck you, bitch…when I get out of here—and you better believe I will—I’m going to come visit you and do what I did to sweet Lizzie.”
Marlene fought to keep that other side of her—the one she’d been trying to conquer—from jumping up and ripping Villalobos’s heart out through his throat. She only partly succeeded as she leaned forward. “Listen, you fuck. When I leave here, you ask some of your piece-of-shit friends, if you have any, if they know Marlene Ciampi. Ask them, ass wipe, if they think that there’s maybe something not quite right about her, in fact, maybe something’s quite wrong. I know a lot of really bad people in the world, and some of them owe me favors. And maybe before you can get out, I send a few of them to visit your mother—I believe she’s still living over off West Fourth in Brooklyn—and I have them do to her what you did to Liz Tyler.”
Marlene’s threat to have the man’s mother raped—one she would not have wished on any woman no matter what the provocation—had the desired effect on Villalobos. “You go near my momma, and I’ll kill you,” he hissed again only louder. “I will hunt you down and rape you, and slit you open like a chicken.”
“I’ll bet she screams like crazy when they do to her what you did to Liz,” Marlene said. “I bet she cries and begs for her son Enrique to save her…but he won’t be able to because he’s locked up here.”
“Fucking whore,” Villalobos screamed and lurched out of his chair at her.
Out in the hall, Officer Richardson heard the scream and rushed for the door. But before he could get it open to rescue the pretty woman inside, something had happened to the prisoner, whom he found lying on the ground gasping for air and clutching his sides.
“What happened to him?” Richardson said with an amused look.
“I think he hurt himself stumbling against the chair,” Marlene said. “But you might want to get him to the infirmary.” She tapped Villalobos in the side with the toe of her boot, which caused him to scream in pain. “I do believe he broke his ribs in the fall.”
“Yeah,” Richardson smiled. “Good thing I saw the whole thing or he might have tried to accuse you of beating the tar out of him.”
Marlene grinned back at him. “Oh, my, yes, good thing. I wouldn’t want something like that to hurt my reputation.”
20
NO SOONER DID MARLENE WALK IN THE LOFT DOOR FROM her tour of New York’s penal colonies than she began to tell Butch, who stood in the dimly lit kitchen, about her encounters with Svetlov and Villalobos. “That greasy piece of crap, Villalobos, is your prototypical prison braggart. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least that he said something to Kaminsky that he regretted later and told Sykes, who tried to have him killed by Lynd.”
She paused and pursed her lips in concentration as she looked out the window. “Svetlov may have just been retaliating—after all, in the jungle you can’t just let the other guys go running around sticking shivs in your guys. You have to answer. But I get a feeling that there’s more to it than that. We need to find Kaminsky.”
Only then did she look back and catch the look on her husband’s face. “What’s wrong?”
“Kaminsky’s dead,” he said.
Butch explained that he’d asked Guma to nose around and see what he could find out about Kaminsky. His old friend had connections in the criminal underworld that would have done any wiseguy proud. Butch occasionally wondered about the extent of those connections, but it had always been a sort of unspoken rule, like the army’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”
This time it wasn’t Guma’s mob sources that tipped him off, it was the Kings County Medical Examiner. Karp was just getting ready to leave his office that afternoon when Guma walked in and announced that he’d located “one I. Kaminsky. Or, what’s left of him. He’s down at the Brooklyn morgue. Apparently, some guy shoved him in front of a subway train. My friend at the ME’s says it ain’t pretty, but I’m headed over there to see if there’s anything interesting in his personal effects.”
“Well, that sucks—to use one of the twins’ favorite expressions,” Marlene said to her husband. “Whatever Kaminsky had to say about Villalobos—if anything—is now in the hands of Judge Marci Klinger. But for some reason, she’s chosen not to say anything about it, although judging by the note in the file, she’s had several months to consider it.”
“So what’s your next move?” Karp asked.
“Guess I need to visit Marci K
linger.”
“Just going to walk up and ask her for the letter, eh?”
“Yep.”
“Sounds like a plan,” he said. “Maybe it will shake her honor up a bit if nothing else.”
On Christmas Eve day, Marlene showed up at the federal courthouse on Centre Street intending to do just that. The building was only a block from the Streets of Calcutta where Butch worked, but a world apart in demeanor. The swirling, smelly mass of arguing, shouting, crying humanity was replaced by lawyers in thousand-dollar suits who quietly went about their business, sometimes conversing under their breath with equally well-dressed clients as if they were in a library.
When she reached the judge’s office on the fourth floor, Marlene tried to breeze past the pretty, young black woman sitting at the reception desk. Nothing doing.
“May I help you?” the young woman asked as she stood to block the door to the judge’s chambers.
“I hope so,” Marlene said. “I’m here to see Judge Klinger.”
“Your name?” The young woman glanced at the calendar on her desk.
“Marlene Ciampi, but you won’t find me on the calendar.”
The young woman frowned. “I’m sorry, but if you don’t have an appointment—”
“I think the judge ought to hear me out anyway,” Marlene said loudly, having decided on the bold frontal attack. Law clerks for U.S. District Court judges were used to the imperious nature of their bosses and tended to respond only when they believed that they were outranked. But this girl wasn’t budging.
“A lot of people would like to speak with Judge Klinger,” she said, her face still friendly but also indicating she was not going to take any grief. “Perhaps you’d like to make an appointment.”
Marlene continued speaking as if she thought the clerk might be nearly deaf. “My name’s Marlene Ciampi. I’m a private investigator working for Brooklyn assistant district attorneys Robin Repass and Pam Russell regarding the so-called Coney Island Four case. I believe the judge would like to hear what I have to say before I tell it to the press.”
Fury (The Butch Karp and Marlene Ciampi Series Book 17) Page 34
