Depraved Indifference

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  Dressed, Karp called Lieutenant Fred Spicer’s office. Spicer headed the squad of NYPD detectives assigned to help the DA’s office with investigations. Spicer had a regular day off, but the duty sergeant agreed to send around a car and driver. After calling Marlene to say he’d be over in fifteen minutes, he called Chief Inspector Peter Hanlon and set up an eight-thirty appointment at police headquarters. Karp thought it unremarkable that the man who ran the Arson and Explosion Division was in his office at seven-thirty on a Saturday. Not this Saturday.

  Finally, Karp called Vinson Talcott Newbury, another assistant district attorney, at home.

  “Hey, Butch! Make it snappy, kid. I’m out the door.”

  “Going to Annabelle’s?”

  “Where else? What’s happening?”

  “I need one of your well-placed cousins, V.T.”

  “Butch, your belief that my family controls the Western world is flattering, but I have to be in Great Barrington by eleven. Can’t it wait?”

  “Not really.” Karp gave Newbury a brief outline of the bomb and hijack case. “What I need,” he continued, “is a line into Paris, the embassy, or whatever—whoever’s handling the U.S. interest in getting these guys back.”

  “Why don’t you work through the Feds here?”

  “I will, but I want an edge. Denton has a feeling that the Feds are not being their usual forthcoming selves. What do you say?”

  “I say it’s going to put a dent in my emotional life, such as it is. Annabelle believes there’s a time for work and a time for play. However, between my fabled charm and my monstrously overdeveloped sexual apparatus—surprising in one of such diminutive stature—I believe I can repair any resultant damage. Besides, no favor is too great for the man who bought me my first knish. Let me make some calls.”

  “You have somebody?”

  “Well, we have a first cousin at State: Andrew. He’s in economic affairs, probably not directly connected, but he’s pretty senior. I’m sure we have somebody in Paris, a second by marriage or a once removed. I’ll find out. I tell you what—give me a buzz at Annabelle’s around noon, I should have something.”

  The black Ford pulled up two minutes later. Doug Brenner, a large, jowly detective, was at the wheel. Karp got in the front seat and Brenner pulled away.

  “We’re going to the ranges, right?” asked Brenner.

  “Yeah, but first we got to pick somebody up. Stop by 49 Crosby and honk.”

  Marlene was wearing a yellow shirtwaist dress set off by a white sweater knotted around her shoulders and white canvas shoulder bag. As she skipped lightly down the iron stairway from her door, she looked to Karp like a college girl meeting her date for the big game. Her black hair had grown out since the explosion, and she wore it shoulder-length, parted on the right so that it fell like a pall across the bad part of her face and her left eye. She had her glassie in place this morning, Karp noticed; this was her habit during official business. Among friends she wore a pirate patch and her hair pulled back.

  Marlene climbed into the back seat, greeted both men, and lit a cigarette. Brenner lit the stump of a cigar he fished out of the ashtray. Karp opened his window. He caught Marlene’s glance in the rearview mirror and winked. She smiled and stuck out the tip of her tongue for an instant. Thus their relationship proceeded in public, at Marlene’s insistence, although the DA’s office was wasting its money on any detective who did not know about it at this point. The same for their friends among the attorneys. Karp thought it childish and had said so many times, but lately he had left off arguing, resigned to playing things Marlene’s way.

  Karp had never met Peter Hanlon before, but he had known many people with something to hide, and Hanlon looked like one of them. He sat behind his glass-topped oak desk and regarded the two ADAs with a carefully neutral expression. He was a medium-sized man with a black pompadour and a small, sharp nose on which perched heavy, dark-rimmed glasses. The dark rings under his eyes indicated that he hadn’t slept well.

  “Mr. Karp,” he began, “you seem to have friends in all the right places. Bill Denton speaks very highly of you. What can we do to help?”

  “Well, Inspector, we’re obviously going for a murder one on this for the terrorist group. Bill’s notion is that we would put together a team of detectives from across the Department to gather all the relevant evidence—one investigation, one case.”

  “I see. And you would be in charge of all of it?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What about the Department’s own internal investigation?”

  “The Department can do what it likes, naturally. But we would expect you to give us any physical evidence you turned up, and access to any reports. The usual. I know it’s early, but have you come up with anything yet?”

  Hanlon shook his head and flapped his hand. “Oh, no, it’s far too early for that. It hasn’t been twenty-four hours since—since the accident.”

  Karp perked up at this. “Accident? Is that what you’re calling it?”

  Hanlon cleared his throat. “No, not at all. I mean the explosion, the event.”

  “But you said ‘accident.’ That implies that there was some kind of error that led to the explosion. Was there?”

  Hanlon’s face darkened and his jaw got tight. Karp thought, he’s going to say he doesn’t like being cross-examined. I just got started and I’m screwing this up.

  “I don’t like being cross-examined, Mr. Karp.”

  “Sorry,” said Karp, forcing a grin. “Habit, I guess. Look, Inspector, I think maybe we’re getting off on the wrong foot—”

  “I knew Terry Doyle. He was a friend of mine,” Marlene said.

  Both men stared at her. She went on. “I met him back in ’74 when I was on the Brownstone Bomb Factory case. He was new and I was new, so I guess we just gravitated toward each other. He was a funny guy. Cocky. He had this thing about booby traps. He loved to rig these little devices and leave them around. You’d go to sit down at the typewriter or pick up a phone and kablooie! White smoke, red smoke, whistles.

  “But I’ll tell you one thing, he loved the Job. Loved it. And the bomb squad, too. So I want you to know that I want to nail the motherfuckers who did this as much as anyone on the Job. But I want to do it the way Terry would have wanted it. If there’s any shit flying around I’ll do my best to see it doesn’t stick to the Department.”

  For a moment the only sound was the hum of the ventilation system. Then Hanlon said, “I see. Naturally, I feel the same way, Miss, ah, Ciampi, is it? A real tragedy, a great loss. The inspector’s funeral is Monday.”

  In the elevator going down, Marlene leaned against Karp’s flank and sighed. He put his arm around her and squeezed gently.

  “Thanks for jumping in with Hanlon,” he said.

  “I had to. Jesus, Butch, you can’t get into pissing contests with police brass. In another minute you’d of had your shlongs out on his desk looking to see who’s got the biggest.”

  “Mine is.”

  “Of course, but the point is we can’t roll into these guys just because Denton is fronting for us. I don’t care how corrupt some cop is, if they think the Department’s going to get slimed, it’s stonewall, period. Even Denton won’t do you any good then. He’s a cop too.”

  The elevator stopped and, demurely separated, they walked out onto Police Plaza.

  “You’re going too fast, Marlene. Why would anybody think the Department screwed up on this one? A cop tried to defuse a bomb and it blew up. We know who did it. What’s the problem?”

  “I don’t know, but Hanlon was weirded out. You saw that too, right? So what else could it be except something that might reflect on the job? He’s a secret Croatian? He doesn’t want to catch a bunch of cop killers?”

  “No, but I’ll tell you something else wacky. He asked about whether we were going to get the hijackers back for trial. I told him we were sure that we would and that we had something working already?”

  “Which was bull
shit, of course.”

  “Of course. But he believed it. And he didn’t look happy about it. Not at all.”

  They got to Rodman Neck at mid-morning. Captain Frank Marino, the bomb squad detective in charge of the investigation, was expecting them. Marlene knew him from her previous work and liked him. This guy didn’t pull any punches.

  Like his boss, Marino wasn’t happy either, but for more obvious reasons. And he was willing to talk about them.

  “I still can’t believe it,” he said as he walked with Karp and Ciampi toward the fatal bunker. “Jack Doheny has been taking bombs apart for twenty years. He was like my best guy. Now this. You know we haven’t lost a cop since 1933?”

  “I know,” Marlene said. “You got a line on what happened?”

  Marino didn’t seem to hear. “The goddamnedest thing! A brick, he said, it’s just a brick. I listened to the tapes about fifty times. They pulled it perfect at Grand Central, set it up, clipped it, all by the book. Then they go and pull a damn bonehead … OK, here we are.”

  They had arrived at the lip of the bunker. Several vans were parked in the area, and men were carrying equipment and bundles of plastic evidence bags to and fro, vanishing down the ladder and reappearing, like delving dwarves. A stiff wind was blowing off the bay, flipping Marlene’s dress around. Somebody whistled appreciatively.

  “Can we go down?” she asked.

  “Yeah, sure,” Marino answered distractedly. “Follow me.”

  The bunker was as active as a stirred-up anthill; the ants were PD technicians in blue jumpsuits with a couple of white coats thrown in. Most of them appeared to be involved in an impossible task—placing every scrap of wood, metal, wire, every crumb of interestingly foreign substance into a plastic evidence bag and neatly labeling it. By the light of powerful lamps set up on poles, two men were taking photographs like they owned stock in Kodak.

  Marino swung his hand to encompass the crowd and said, “Marlene, you know what we’re doing here, right?”

  “Yeah, you’re trying to reconstruct the bomb from the debris.”

  “Uh-huh. And we’ll probably do OK on it. It wasn’t much of a bomb, power-wise. We didn’t get much scatter, you know? I figure from what this looks like, plus what we got on the tape, that we’re talking no more than five, six ounces of high explosives, probably military.”

  Marlene said, “What do you mean, ‘what we got on the tape’?”

  “Oh, just Terry’s description of what he saw when he opened the pot. It was empty, he said, except for a brick. They all thought it was a dud, a hoax. Brick was probably hollowed-out, the dumb bastards.”

  “I thought you X-rayed the bombs you get in here. Wouldn’t they have seen the hollowed-out part in the films?”

  Marino shook his head. “Some bricks don’t X-ray worth a damn. Bricks have a lot of lead in them, and radioactives. You know that just living in a brick house could give you cancer? It’s a fact.”

  Karp pointed to a group of men pouring sand through wire-mesh screens. “What are those guys doing?”

  “Oh, they’re looking to see if anything’s embedded in the sandbags. We take apart and sift through the ones that got punctured by the debris.”

  “Pretty thorough,” said Karp.

  “Yeah,” Marino said bitterly. “I wish they’d been that thorough yesterday.”

  Marlene put her hand on Marino’s arm. “Frank, we got to talk.”

  Marino looked at the hand sideways. “So talk.”

  “No, privately. It’s important.”

  Marino smiled. “Come on, Marlene, I’m married, four kids.”

  “Damn, Marlene, I can’t take you anywhere,” Karp said.

  Marlene stuck out her tongue at both of them and flounced away to the ladder. As if by a signal, every man in the pit stopped work for several seconds to look up her dress, then returned to their grim dredging.

  In Marino’s small office, Butch and Marlene sat in hard chairs while Marino poured three black coffees from a thermos into china mugs.

  “Mmm, this is Medaglia D’Oro,” Marlene sighed.

  Marino grinned at her. “Close,” he said. “I got an uncle runs a gourmet place, he sends me these beans. They cost about as much as cocaine. I got one of those little espresso pots, works pretty good.” The three of them sipped their coffee in silence. Karp thought the coffee tasted like medicine and wished he had a quart of milk and a bag of Oreos. His mug had fake Chinese characters printed on it, which when closely examined turned out to say, “Fuck you very much.” He pretended to sip from it and waited for Marlene to make her play.

  At length Marino spoke. “So? What’d you want to talk about?”

  Marlene leaned forward. “OK, Frank, this is strictly off the record, so no bullshit, all right? We just got started on this thing, and already we’re getting weird vibes. We don’t know if the brass is covering their ass or what. So we have to know: is there something to cover up? Or are we imagining things?”

  The detective drank some more coffee and fumbled in the pockets of his coverall. He extracted a crumpled pack of Winstons and lit one with a steel Zippo. “Off the record for real?” he asked through blue smoke.

  Marlene gave him her flashlight grin. “C’mon, Frank, would I lie to you except to advance my career? Is something going on?”

  “OK, here it is. Yesterday was a zoo around here after the blast. Around ten last night I noticed that Hanlon showed up, along with some of his people from downtown. OK, not unusual, a cop gets aced, the chief inspector shows up to view the ashes, et cetera. But I see his people asking questions of the guys around here. They got Jim Hammer in the office there, and they’re doing a regular grill job.”

  “Who’s Hammer?’ Karp asked.

  “Doheny’s driver. He was at Grand Central. Anyway, I start getting a little pissed at this and I go to Hanlon. I get him alone and I ask him, you know, what the fuck is going on? He says the investigation has attracted interest at the highest level, and he will be personally involved and all that bullshit. Which is fine with me. Then he asks, was Doheny drunk?

  “OK, I say, Jack Doheny has been known to take a drink, and he was at this big retirement racket the night before, so maybe there was a little hair of the dog that morning, but nobody who knew him for five minutes would believe that he was ever drunk on the job.

  “So Hanlon says we have evidence that suggests that he might have been drunk and screwed up the deactivation, and that’s why Terry got killed. I couldn’t fucking believe it! Jack’s in the hospital with a fractured skull and busted ribs, and this guy is trying to get him to carry the can for it. What could I say? He’s a chief and I’m a captain, right? I always thought he was a pretty good guy—”

  Karp broke in. “But Doheny did screw up, in a way. I mean, you said it was a dumb move, buying that the bomb was a hoax.”

  Marino glowered at him. “Fuck yeah, I said it! But I’m saying it after. I know it was a real bomb. All right, maybe they didn’t exactly follow procedures. They should have waited longer. But I could have made the same mistake, anybody could. That’s no reason for Hanlon talking like he was going to bring charges.

  “Look, I’ll be honest with you. Terry’s dead, and Jack and Luke are probably off the job permanent on three-quarters. The important thing is getting the guys that did this. I mean, they did it once, they could do it again. So what I can’t figure is where Hanlon gets off being a hardass about Jack.”

  “Yeah, that’s the question,” Marlene said.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Karp added. “You would think the brass would be doing the opposite. If the explosion was due to incompetence by cops, they would be covering it up, not selling it.”

  “Unless they’re covering up something worse,” Marlene said quietly.

  Karp shook himself and stood up. “Or unless this is our imagination. Look, Frank, when you start getting a picture of what happened here, I’d appreciate it if you let Marlene or me know first. And be extra careful with any
physical evidence. Just call one of us and we’ll send somebody over to get it.”

  Marino gave a short, sharp laugh. “Great. That’s just what Hanlon said.”

  “Oh, yeah? You might tell Chief Inspector Hanlon to call his boss about that. Or maybe I will.”

  Marlene stood up, too, and she and Karp made to leave. At the door she turned and said, “Thanks for the help. And Frank, for sure now, it wasn’t a fuck-up, was it?”

  Marino regarded her bleakly. “Marlene, whatever Jack Doheny did or didn’t do, some bastard wired that pot for one reason and one reason only—to kill whoever tried to take it apart. And it worked, the son of a bitch.”

  Twenty minutes later, Brenner, Marlene, and Karp were eating lunch in a clam bar on City Island, an unlikely community more reminiscent of Nantucket than of the Bronx, of which it is a peninsula. Only a few minutes from Rodman Neck, City Island’s bars and seafood joints are usually populated with odd mixes of off-duty cops, Saturday boaters from the nearby marina, and local moms and kids in for a weekend treat. This clam bar showed the bill of fare in black stick-in letters on a white board supplied by Coca-Cola, and most of the customers were eating fried clams served in red plastic mesh baskets.

  They talked for a while about the developing case, and when the waitress came over they each ordered a dozen cherrystones. Marlene and Brenner had bottles of Schaefer; Karp ordered a black-and-white malted.

  “What’re you, nutso? Nobody has a malted with clams,” Marlene said indignantly.

  “Yeah,” Brenner said, “it’s like pickles and milk. You get a bellyache.”

  “Beer gives me a bellyache,” Karp said placidly. “You should have a malted, Champ. Or two, you’re still a rail.” It was true. Marlene had never regained the weight she had lost after her injury. Everything she ate—and she ate enormously—was turned to hot vapor by her torchlike metabolism, a biological freak for which ninety per cent of the women in New York would have committed any number of class-A felonies. Perversely, Karp had liked her better when she was curvy, and said so often, producing pouts or snarls, depending on her mood.