An ambulance showed up a few minutes later, the paramedics taking over from where Charlie Vitteli had been pushing on his dead rival’s chest. One of the rescuers looked up at where Charlie stood, his hands dripping with blood, and shook his head. “He’s gone,” the paramedic said.
Charlie slumped against the wall and took out his silk monogrammed handkerchief to try to clean the blood off his hands as Joey and Jackie gathered around as if to comfort him. A flash went off and then another. The press had arrived. “It will look good for the papers, but goddamn it, the shit doesn’t want to come off,” he complained, just as he glanced over Barros’s shoulder in the direction of the alley and stepped back as if he’d seen a ghost. Standing just inside the shadows were the homeless women who’d been around the oil drum several nights before.
Anne Devulder was staring right at him, damnation in her eyes. The second woman cackled and pointed at him as the third, the large black woman, mouthed the words, “ ’Tis time! ’Tis time!”
Wild-eyed, Charlie turned to Barros. “Those bitches are back!” He ducked to hide behind his man.
Corcione and Barros both turned to look in the direction indicated, but then turned back around with confused looks on their faces.
“What bitches?” Barros asked.
“There’s nobody there, Charlie,” Corcione added.
Charlie straightened and peered around Barros. It was true, there was no one standing in the shadows of the alley. “They vanished!” he swore. “They were there but now they’re gone . . . like a breath in the wind.”
Barros’s mouth twisted. “Jesus, boss, you’re giving me the willies,” he said. “There’s no one there, and Vince Carlotta’s not going to give us any more problems. Here, give me that.” He reached down and took the bloody handkerchief from Charlie, then walked over and threw it in the oil drum. “It will be gone the next time some bum lights a fire,” he said. “Now, let’s get you home.”
Charlie nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Must have just been my imagination. The mind can play funny tricks on you. But let’s go back to Marlon’s first. I need another drink.”
4
“HEY, BUTCH, WHO . . . CRAP SON of a bitch . . . am I?” the little news vendor with the pointed and perpetually dripping nose and thick, smudged glasses said to the tall man in the navy blue suit standing in front of his newsstand. He puffed out his chest, and threw back his head pugnaciously.
“Here goes, here goes, take a guess,” he said, pulling his old down coat patched with duct tape around him as he hopped from foot to foot. “You ready? ‘You don’t understand. I coulda had class. I coulda been a . . . balls tits oh boy whoop . . . contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let’s face it.’ ”
“Um, let’s see . . . a very poor Marlon Brando as Terry in On the Waterfront,” Roger “Butch” Karp replied with a laugh. “And please, don’t ever do that again; you’ll ruin one of my all-time favorite movies for me. That was even below your standards, such as they are, as a trivia question. However, I take it your ‘impersonation’ was motivated by last night’s events and meant to make a point.”
As they spoke, the morning crowd swept past on the sidewalk in front of the Criminal Courts Building on 100 Centre Street in downtown Manhattan where Karp worked as the district attorney of New York County. The newsstand was owned by “Dirty Warren” Bennett, who now smiled mischievously and hooked a thumb over his shoulder at the front pages of the New York Times and the New York Post tacked to sides of his newsstand.
“Read ’em and . . . fuck piss . . . weep,” stuttered the little man, who suffered from Tourette’s syndrome, which, besides giving him facial tics and sudden muscle twitches, caused him to spout profanity.
Karp scanned the headlines: UNION BOSS CARLOTTA KILLED ON WATERFRONT; SUSPECTS FLEE, read the Times. MASKED BANDIT BLASTS CARLOTTA, the Post boldly advertised.
Karp nodded. He’d known what the headlines would be—or at least had a good idea—after he got a telephone call at one in the morning from Clay Fulton, the head of the NYPD detective squad who worked for his office.
• • •
“Thought you’d want to know,” his old friend had said. “Somebody shot and killed Vince Carlotta outside of Marlon’s. Looks like a robbery. I’m on my way over to the crime scene now. The press is going to be all over this, and I want to get there before the rumors start flying.”
Karp had swung his legs out of bed and turned on the nightstand light. It was no secret that Vince Carlotta’s supporters had been raising a stink about the last union election. The popular union boss had also been in the papers recently threatening to reopen the union investigation into a fatal accident involving dock cranes. The conspiracy theorists were bound to be out in droves. “I’ll get dressed and join you,” Karp said.
“Stay put. I think we’re okay,” Fulton replied. “Ray Guma heard about it from his Italian mob connections on the docks almost before we did. He called off the ADA who was catching cases on the homicide bureau night chart and is taking it himself. I want to talk to the detectives on the scene, maybe sniff around a little bit. But the initial report I got was pretty cut-and-dried. Carlotta got jumped and tried to pull a gun. Bingo, bango, he took one to the chest and one to the head. Gunman ran away. I’ll let you know if it looks like more than that; Ray and I will see you in the morning and get you up to speed.”
Karp thought about it for a moment. Special Assistant District Attorney Ray Guma was one of his oldest friends. They’d both come onto the DAO at the same time, fresh out of law school and as different as the law schools they’d attended. Karp at Cal-Berkeley and Guma at NYU. Karp was tall, long-limbed, with gold-flecked gray eyes; a highly recruited college basketball player who still worked at staying fit. Guma was built like an ape with a gargoyle’s face; he’d gone to Fordham on a baseball scholarship and played for a year in the minor leagues for the Yankee organization.
Karp was a straight arrow, the son of a Brooklyn businessman and an English teacher. A dedicated family man, he’d always preferred an evening in with his wife and kids to going out on the town with the boys.
Guma grew up in the rough section of Bath Beach in Brooklyn, one of six children of an Italian plumber and his stay-at-home wife. Through his extended family, Guma had connections to the Mafia, though he’d put plenty of mobsters away. Also, there was an understanding that “those” members of the family kept their business affairs out of Manhattan. Most of the time Karp had known Guma, his friend had used a hard-drinking, cigar-chomping, womanizing front to hide a heart of gold. He would lay his life on the line, and had, for his friends.
What they had in common—besides their Brooklyn roots and an obsession with Yankee baseball—was their love for the law and the work they did with the New York DAO. Under the guidance of the legendary District Attorney Francis Garrahy, they’d both discovered early in their friendship a mutual admiration for the beauty of the justice system when applied fairly and objectively.
However, even in the courtroom their differences in demeanors stood out. Karp was the methodical, persuasive tactician who wielded dramatic moments—such as when a touch of righteous indignation was called for—like a fencer with a rapier. Guma, with his hot Mediterranean blood, was more emotional in his delivery, also skillful and smart but more likely to use emotion as a cudgel. They were both formidable in court, striking terror in the hearts of the defense bar because they knew they’d be in for a dogfight and there’d be no plea bargain and after conviction the maximum sentence would be imposed.
• • •
Sitting on the edge of his bed, Karp knew that Guma could handle anything at the scene and didn’t need “the boss” hovering over his shoulder. So he hung up with Fulton and started to turn off the light when the woman beneath the sheets next to him turned over.
“Who’s dead?” his wife, Marlene Ciampi, asked.
Turning to look at her, Karp smiled. He was amazed at how she could look
so good awakened from a dead sleep. Even though she had one glass eye—a casualty of a letter bomb intended for him many years before—she was still a beautiful woman with short dark curly hair that framed her olive-hued face. The petite body beneath the sheets was still lithe and desirable, though he noted the pink puckered wound where she’d been shot that past summer, a new reminder that the woman he’d married when they were both young assistant district attorneys was pretty as a rose, but also tough as thorns.
“What makes you think that anyone’s dead?”
“Well, even if I hadn’t been able to hear Fulton clearly, which I could—I swear the man’s getting deaf he talks so loud—I could tell by your demeanor and the fact that you were ready to hop out of bed with me and rush off to play with your cop friends. That usually means some sort of murder and mayhem is afoot.”
Karp laughed. “Excellent detective work, Ms. Ciampi.”
“Thank you. Now give. Who bought the farm?”
“Vince Carlotta,” Karp said.
Marlene’s playful countenance turned instantly to a frown. “That’s horrible,” she said. “He seemed like a good guy, at least from what I’ve read. Remember we met him at that Hell’s Kitchen Boys’ Club fund-raiser? Him and his wife. A good-looking couple, sort of a spring–fall romance; she was lovely and he clearly adored her. I think they recently had a baby.”
“Yeah, I remember them,” Karp replied. “I’ve actually run into him a few times over the years. Dockworkers’ union guy, tough as nails, but he was also fair and reasonable. The word ‘integrity’ comes to mind when I think about him, unlike his counterpart, Charlie Vitteli, who’s a walking felony if I could just prove it.”
“Think Vitteli had something to do with it?” Marlene asked.
Karp considered her comment. His wife did not ask idle questions about murder. She’d once been the head of the DAO’s sex crime bureau, and had quit there to start a VIP Security Firm. Most recently, she’d hung up her shingle as a defense attorney/private investigator, working mostly cases in which she felt the justice system was messing up.
“I wouldn’t put it past him,” Karp replied. “But apparently Carlotta got caught up in an armed robbery outside of Marlon’s. I’ll know more after Clay fills me in when I get to the office. I’ll be heading in early.”
“Well then, you better turn off that light and come over here and hold your wife,” Marlene said. “This has given me a chill.”
“You don’t have to ask me twice,” he replied, and did as told.
• • •
“Hey, Karp! Did ya . . . whoop nuts tits oh boy . . . hear what I asked or not?” Dirty Warren demanded, squinting up at him.
“Uh, sorry, Warren, I got sidetracked,” Karp said, pulling himself away from the memory of how the night ended before Marlene let him go back to sleep.
“Uh-huh, you had kind of a funny look on . . . whoop oh boy . . . your face,” Dirty Warren replied. “I said that I . . . whoop . . . had a good trivia question for you.”
“Boy, you’re a glutton for punishment, but go ahead,” Karp said. The two friends had been playing a game of movie trivia for years; Warren had yet to win a single point, but it didn’t stop him from trying.
“Yeah, yeah, I’ll get you . . . bastard asswipe . . . one of these days,” Dirty Warren joked. “So . . . in the cab scene with Marlon Brando and Rod Steiger from which I just did an Oscar-worthy rendition of Marlon’s most famous . . . whoop oh boy . . . lines, why are the blinds pulled?”
Karp pursed his lips. “Good one,” he said. “Not many people even notice that you can’t see out of the windows of the cab. Even fewer know that it’s because producer Sam Spiegel forgot to pay for rear-projection equipment, hence nothing playing outside the cab’s windows.”
“Damn it, Karp, it’s not fair,” Dirty Warren exclaimed as he hopped up and down. “How can one man’s head be so . . . whoop whoop boobs . . . full of worthless trivia?”
“Uh, thanks for the compliment, I think,” Karp said. “But I’ve got to go. Duty awaits.”
“Sure, sure,” Dirty Warren said. “But just one more.” He pulled a piece of crumpled notepaper from the pocket of his dirty jeans. “Okay, okay . . . shit whoop oh boy . . . so there were two inspirations for On the Waterfront,” he said, reading from the note. “One was the series of articles written for the New York Sun about all the killings, corruption, and extortion on the waterfront in Hell’s Kitchen. Can you tell me who wrote those articles?”
“Malcolm Johnson. He won the Pulitzer Prize . . . back when it meant something to be a journalist,” Karp said.
“Now, now, your feelings for the Fourth Estate are . . . whoop crap oh boy whoop . . . showing and that’s my business.” Dirty Warren grinned. “But okay, you got that one. Now, what was the other inspiration for the story?”
Karp looked sideways at his friend. “Again, the question is below your usual degree of difficulty and comes with a hidden meaning. The other inspiration was the 1948 murder of a popular union boss. It reinforced what Johnson’s stories had said and sort of woke New York up to what was happening down at the docks. It was the beginning of the end for the worst of it, though no one doubts that there’s a lot that still goes on under the radar. But I get your point. This is about the murder, isn’t it? You know something?”
Dirty Warren looked around as though he feared being overheard. “Word on the street is that this shooting ain’t all it’s cracked up to be in the press.”
Karp looked carefully at his friend. At first brush, Dirty Warren was just a simple news vendor with an odd affliction, but the man had a lot of contacts among the street people and more than once the information he’d given Karp had proven invaluable. “Anything specific?” he asked.
“Not yet . . . oh boy, ohhhhhh boy . . . just rumors that maybe it was a setup,” Dirty Warren answered as he handed Karp copies of the two newspapers. “I’ll let you know if I . . . piss shit . . . do.”
“Okay, thanks, you know I always appreciate it,” Karp said, giving his friend a five and then turning to walk around the corner of the building to the secure Leonard Street entrance reserved for judges and the district attorney. Inside, a private elevator deposited him in a small anteroom on the eighth floor outside his inner chambers, a way for him to bypass the reception area.
Fulton and Guma were already waiting for him. The detective was standing at the bookshelf that occupied an entire wall of the office, while Guma kicked back in a big overstuffed leather chair off to one side of Karp’s desk with an unlit cigar dangling from his mouth.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” Karp greeted them. “Clay, you’re looking good for someone I assume was up all night.” The big black detective still looked like the college football star he’d once been other than the slightly receding, and graying, hairline on his melon-sized head.
“Thanks, boss,” Fulton replied. “And you got that straight.”
Turning to his other friend, Karp said, “Guma, well, you don’t look much worse than normal.”
All three men laughed but it wasn’t that long ago that such a remark wasn’t such a joke. The once-muscular and spry Guma had been reduced by cancer to a white-haired shell of a man with an old man’s body and lines of pain permanently etched into his face. However, his mind and, at least according to his own accounts, libido were in fine shape.
“Very funny,” Guma said. “I didn’t see you up at two a.m. taking statements from Vitteli and Co. I had to go home and take a hot shower with Mrs. Milquetost just to get the smell off. Charlie was bad enough with the big fake alligator tears. But that Barros character is bad news; he didn’t even pretend to be upset.”
Trying not to let the image of Guma and his receptionist in a shower together disturb his train of thought too much, Karp settled in behind his desk and got out a yellow legal pad so he could take notes. “So what do we got?”
Fulton tilted his head to the side and twisted his mouth before answering. “First glance, looks lik
e a pretty straight-up robbery. Two bad guys on foot and another in a getaway car. Carlotta apparently went for his gun and one of the guys blasted him. They took off with wallets and watches.”
“Any witnesses?”
“Yeah,” Fulton said. “Vitteli, Barros, and Jackie Corcione, the union attorney and son of the founder, were all there. Apparently there’d been some sort of meeting to patch things up between them regarding the election. They were walking to their cars when it went down.”
“How convenient,” Karp said. “I guess we know what their alibis will be.”
“Yeah, pretty airtight,” Fulton replied, rolling his eyes. “Anyway, they were just getting ready to move the body when I got there. I talked to the officers and detectives on scene. Goom handled the witness statements and we’ve been all over the reports. I agree with my main man here, something stinks, but we got nothing right now to prove it.”
“Anybody else see anything?” Karp asked.
“Carlotta’s driver, a guy named Randy McMahon,” Fulton said. “He’d been sent to get the car and was just driving back when he saw it go down. But it was dark, and he didn’t know what he was looking at. Saw flashes from the gun and two guys running across the street to the getaway car.”
“He get a license plate number?”
“No. Just a description: older model, four-door American sedan. Gray primer on the trunk.”
Karp made a few notes on his pad, then looked at Guma. “What did you do after you left the scene?”
“I went to talk to some of my people who know what’s going on down at the docks,” he replied.
“And?”
“And it’s no secret there was no love lost between Carlotta and Vitteli, especially after Leo Corcione died,” Guma replied. “There was a power struggle, and the union had an election a year ago to decide it. Got pretty ugly. Lot of charges flying around, particularly from Carlotta’s side after Vitteli won.”
Tragic Page 5
