Material Witness

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  It also tended to support what Karp had learned from Thelmann. If Doone was a serious cocaine merchant, and a killer, then there was every reason to believe that a citywide operation might have him as a target.

  Marlene’s mind raced. What to do now? What did she tell Bello? That he was a distraction for the real investigation?

  To delay this embarrassment, she said, “Um, Harry, so what do you think? You want to talk to this guy?”

  It was a stupid question, and she knew it. There was a long pause on the line. When he spoke his voice was flat. “Yeah, I’ll ask him did he shoot Simmons. Maybe he’ll confess out of remorse.”

  More silence. What was he waiting for? She thought, Oh, what the fuck? and said, “There’s another investigation, Harry. Out of the Queens D.A. It’s a big sweep, and I think Doone is involved in it. They were just letting you be a … distraction.”

  He said, “Yeah, I figured. What’ve they got?”

  “This I don’t know. I just heard about it. What do you mean, you figured?”

  “Come on, Miss Ciampi! I may be a lush, but I’m not an asshole.” He paused and she heard a clink that could have been a bottle hitting a glass. “So what do we do now?” he asked. “Whoever told you about it must have told you to lay off, right?”

  “Right.”

  “You gonna?”

  “I guess. I said I wanted to talk to you first.”

  “That must have gone over good,” he said.

  For some reason she couldn’t define, she did not want this final conversation to end, and so she ignored his last comment and said, “So, anyway, you think it’s this Doone character did it?”

  “Well. Since you ask. No.”

  “Why not?” The line crackled silently. “Harry? Are you there?”

  “Yeah. So. Why not, right? Why not?” A pause, and then, “You home now?”

  “Yeah, Harry, that’s how I picked up the phone when you called me.”

  “Oh, right. What’re you doing? Making dinner?”

  “No, my husband’s out of town. I was just going to grab something from the fridge.”

  He said, “Doris used to make this big kind of lasagna with sweet sausage in it. It would last for days. I used to heat it up if I came home in the middle of the night. Last all week. We never had any kids. You’re pregnant, aren’t you?”

  “That’s right, Harry.”

  “Jim Sturdevant had three kids, Francie, Jim Junior, and … Mack. He got shot. Jim, not Mack.”

  “Yeah, I heard,” she said. His pain radiated through the tinny sound of the earpiece, through the drunk talk. Her eyes smarted as she listened to him ramble, disconnected things about his wife and his partner and his partner’s kids, about buying them presents, about parties they had been to together, Jim and Doris, and Jim’s wife, Maggie, and the kids. It all came oozing out, helped by the ersatz intimacy of the telephone. He called her “Doris” twice and she didn’t correct him.

  At last and without an obvious break, he started talking about the murder. “Why not? I’ll tell you: because it’s not a Jamaican hit. Leaving fifty large worth of prime rock in a glove compartment is not Jamaican. Two in the head in a Caddy in a parking lot is not Jamaican. Shooting him someplace else and bringing him to Queens is not Jamaican. It’s Mob, or some asshole who wants it to look like Mob, or …”

  “Or what, Harry?”

  “Nothing, forget it. I forgot what I was gonna say. I gotta go sleep. You gonna brush your hair?”

  “Yeah, Harry, I might. Why do you ask?”

  “Nothing, just … check the pictures. It’s the woman with the head scarf.”

  “What woman, Harry? Harry … hello?” But the phone was dead.

  Marlene took a deep breath, hung up her phone and poured herself a tiny glass of red. The baby kicked her, as it was doing with increasing frequency.

  “Come on, kid,” she said aloud, “give Momma a break.”

  Sighing, she sat down on the red couch and, taking up a yellow pad, began to make notes on the conversation she had just had, including what seemed to be extraneous details and ravings. With Bello, you could never tell what was extraneous, what was message and what was static. Listening to him was watching a play illuminated by a very slow strobe light, or listening to one side of a conversation between two people in an intimate relationship: twins, or a married couple, or two detectives who had been partners for a long time. The unspoken context, the net of associations, was absent, and with it, clear meaning. Marlene sensed that Harry Bello, or some part of him, his analytic genius perhaps, was attempting, in a hesitant and boozy way, to establish another context, with herself as the other partner.

  The baby kicked again. That’s all I need, she thought, another parasite. No, a symbiont. But what’s my end? Fascination? A case to work? Not being Mom-at-Home?

  Marlene looked at her notes. The woman with the scarf. Bello was referring to the funeral photographs. She vaguely recalled that off to the side in one of them was a group consisting of a man in a hat, a man with sunglasses, and a woman with a scarf, none of whom had been identified as yet. Balducci was supposed to be working on this problem.

  It was nine, not too late to call Peter. When he got on the line, Marlene summarized the conversation she had just had with Harry Bello, leaving out the loonier segments. Balducci listened in silence. “So what do you think, Peter?” she asked.

  “I don’t know, kid. It’s just speculation. I mean, he doesn’t have any real reason for thinking it wasn’t this Doone mutt. The girl is in with a heavy dealer, the victim’s got a ton of drugs … it’s starting to look more like a coke war, not less, if you want my opinion.”

  “The thing is to see the girl again, alone. And we should talk to Doone.”

  “We should definitely not do that, Marlene,” said Balducci with some asperity. “We agreed, you and I and Butch agreed, that we weren’t going to take this thing any further. You had your talk with Harry, like we said, and that’s it. Case closed.”

  Marlene took a deep breath to stifle a harsh reply. She heard voices and the clinking sound of people eating and drinking.

  “Having a party, Peter?”

  “Yeah, just a couple of people over. So how you doing? A basketball widow, huh?”

  “I’m doing fine, Peter. I’ve been living by myself for ten years and I’ve been married six months. Look, about this woman with the scarf and the two guys—did you get anything on them?”

  “Zilch.”

  “Nothing? Where’ve you looked?”

  Balducci sounded embarrassed. “Well, the truth is, Marlene, I haven’t been feeling a hundred percent this last week. I got these chest pains, got no energy—”

  “Oh, no! Did you see a doctor?”

  “Yeah, sure, what’re they gonna tell me? My pump’s shot? I already know that. Meanwhile, Marie goes apeshit every time I get up from the lounger. I think my days of working the street are over, doll.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m sorry, Peter. Look, could you just get all the stuff you have back to me—the photos, any notes you took—”

  “Why? It’s over.”

  “Just humor me, Peter. You never can tell. Maybe when this big investigation breaks, we can make a contribution, however small. You know how it is, some little connection … it could help.”

  Balducci agreed to humor her, and after a mutual pledge of concern for each other’s health they hung up, after which Marlene cursed imaginatively and did a foot-pounding dance of rage for about thirty seconds, until the baby kicked her yet again and she stopped, suddenly sad and exhausted.

  A nice bath was what was needed. She stripped, tottered up the little step and folded the insulated cover back from her huge tank bath. A column of dense steam arose. She switched on a small black-and-white TV resting on a bookshelf within easy viewing distance of the bath, and entered the steam like a Wagnerian heroine making an exit.

  She floated in the semidarkness, her attention drifting between an old Betty Grable movie
and literally contemplating her navel, now swollen and bobbing above the ripples like a pink Malomar. The film ended and the news began. Politics and crime. A tittering feature about teenagers with green hair. She was distracted from her reverie by her husband’s name. The sports announcer was saying something about the game between the Hustlers and the Celtics that night.

  She saw a tiny Karp, looking strange in his uniform (like an old clipping brought magically to life), take the ball from a teammate, drive past an opposing player, his face intense, his hair dripping sweat. Then the camera cut to a full-court view, and she saw Karp heave the ball all the way to the opposing basket. It hit the rim, bounced high, and went in. A buzzer sounded. Cheers. And then the blow-dried blonde was back saying that the Hustlers had broken their five-game losing streak, the first game they had won since Marion Simmons’s “tragic death.”

  Karp had apparently done something remarkable. She wished for the first time that she knew something more about basketball. Karp would call later, as he always did, and he would explain it in profuse detail.

  She leaned back and immersed her head in preparation for a slow and luxurious shampoo. When she broke the surface, a loud bell was ringing. She swore and climbed out of the bath. Head wrapped in towel and robed in a tattered black and red silk kimono, she marched over to the street-side windows, heaved one up, and stuck her head out to see who was ringing the street-level bell.

  A man was standing in the light of the street lamp grinning up at her.

  “Raney!” she cried. “What the hell’re you doing there?”

  “Can I come up?” He waved a manila envelope. “Pete gave me some stuff for you.”

  “Sure. Here’s the key.” She picked a split tennis ball with a key inside it from a table and tossed it down.

  A few moments later, Marlene opened the door to James Raney, a NYPD detective out of Zone 6 homicide in Manhattan and the former partner of Peter Balducci.

  “Well, well,” said Marlene, offering a cheek for a kiss, “to what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “Delivery boy. I was over Pete’s for dinner and he said you wanted this stuff.” He placed the manila envelope on a side table. “I got the midnight tonight and I wasn’t going to go the hell back to Malverne anyway, so I said I’d drop it off.”

  He reached out casually and rubbed her belly. “This is coming along pretty good.”

  “Yes, it is,” said Marlene curtly, “and I’d like to know why every Tom, Dick and Harry feels entitled to palp my womb. Christ! People on the goddamn bus do it.”

  Raney laughed and sidled a hand around where her waist used to be. “Hey, I’m a friend. Mmm, you’re not wearing anything under this kimono, are you?”

  She slapped his hand away in annoyance, partly feigned, and looked up at his grinning face. Raney was about thirty, with red-gold hair, skim-milk skin, turquoise-chip eyes—her type, for sure, so why, given her taste for (and track record with) guys who looked like they entered stage left on a wire, did she end up with a hulking Jew, inclined to the morose? A mystery of life, or maybe because Karp was earthy, of the earth, and a necessary anchor. A month with Raney, or the other Raneys of her past, was a guaranteed case of the screaming fidgets, and she’d done that already. Still, the old tug was there.

  Slightly flushed, she moved away from him, playing respectable matron. “Have a seat, Raney. Want a drink?”

  He sat on the couch and patted his lap, which she ignored. She poured him out a Miller. He asked, “What’s in the envelope?”

  “Let’s see.” She sat down next to him and dumped the contents of the envelope on the black door coffee table. A thick stack of eight by ten glossies of the funeral party, both the original shots and blow-ups showing individual faces. Blow-ups too of the license plates of the vehicles used. A printout matching plate numbers with registered owners’ names. Balducci’s sketchy notes.

  The individuals in the close-ups were all identified with big red numbers, and a hand-written list linked these numbers to names, except for the two men and the woman Marlene had mentioned to Peter. She glanced through the notes, then shook out the envelope to see if something was stuck within it.

  “Shit!”

  “What’s the matter?” asked Raney.

  “Oh, Peter didn’t chase down the plate numbers on the rental cars. This trio I’m interested in must have rented a limo. Somebody has to go to the livery companies, find out who was driving that day, and show them funeral pictures. That’s the only way we can find out who these folks are.”

  “Can’t you do it by elimination? It looks like Pete ID’d most of them.”

  “No, because half the people there came in hired limos, and a lot of them were hired by firms.” She shuffled out a sheet of paper. “Here, look! LP Products. The Menton Agency. Marpol, Inc. Which people came with who? It’s impossible to tell.”

  “You want to tell me what this is all about? I thought you were taking a break.”

  Marlene offered a wan smile. “OK, you asked for it …” She told him the whole story, up through her conversation with Bello.

  “So there it is,” she concluded, “a dead end. But not a dead end if I could get some help.” She gave Raney an appraising look. He laughed and stood up. “No fucking way, honeybunch. I love you and I still got dibs on your first extramarital affair, but this is a loser. In the first place, they’re screwing up the ongoing investigation. Hubby and Pete are dead right on that, and I wouldn’t touch it with a pole. Second, you don’t want to go anywhere near John Doone.”

  “You know him?”

  “I heard the name a couple times. A buddy of mine, Tony Draper in the three-oh, was interested in him for a pile of soup bones somebody made out of a smalltime dealer up in Inwood. Got nowhere. Man is a stone killer.”

  “Can you get me in to see him?”

  “Who, Tony?”

  “No, Doone.”

  Raney laughed again and rolled his eyes. “You’re a sketch, you know that, Ciampi? Doone, my sweet ass! Go to bed.” He walked out of the loft, still chuckling.

  Marlene jumped a little as the baby kicked again. “Who the fuck asked you?” she shouted at her central bulge.

  Riding back to the Sheraton, the Hustlers were raucous, yelling out the windows at the few women strolling on the chilly Boston streets and raising their index fingers in the familiar “number one” sign. The team had never beaten the Celtics in the Garden before, nor had they very much expected to this time, but they had, and it was Karp’s doing.

  Karp, however, was not joining in the fun. He had no great wish to scream obscene invitations to women or stick his index finger in the air, and besides, he knew what a fluke it had been.

  He hadn’t expected to play at all. But John Bryan had shown up that morning with food poisoning, and Stu Elmore had banged a knee badly in practice, and Ed Murphy had been hit in the face by a charging Celtic and retired with a broken nose. Nadleman had looked at his bench and, forced to choose between McDoul and Karp, had given Karp the nod, and so he made his pro debut on the sacred parquet of the Boston Garden, playing against the likes of Jo Jo White and John Havlicek.

  He went in with two and thirty-two left to play in the second quarter with the Hustlers down by seven. His man was understandably more interested in guarding Doobie Wallace than an unknown white guy, so Karp broke free easily and made himself so open that Barry Croyden couldn’t help hitting him with a pass just outside the three-point circle. Unbothered, unrushed, he swished it through.

  Then Croyden blocked a shot and Karp was there where the ball came down. He whipped it across to Wallace, who took it down court, faked a shot, and then (amazingly) passed it to James, who dunked it. Karp felt fine, more detached than nervous, surprising himself (I’m playing the Celtics in Boston Garden!); after all, it was just a game.

  The Celtics scored, then Wallace scored, then Croyden, with an assist from Karp, a fancy, blind behind-the-back pass. Croyden grinned at Karp after that one and held up his thumb. Lockw
ell stole a Celtic pass and the Hustlers took off on a fast break that ended with James dunking another. Tie score. The Garden was rumbling. The momentum of the game seemed to have passed to the visitors. The Celtics tightened their defense and picked up a foul off Lockwell, which they converted to a two-point lead with ten seconds left in the half.

  Karp by this time had his basketball nous cooking, and had entered that peculiar state where he seemed to be able to see a half second into the future. He knew, for example, that the Celtic forward was going to throw up a brick; before it had flown a yard from his fingers he knew where to pick up the rebound. As he rushed past Fred James, he said, “Fast break. Go!”

  James took off like a deer the instant Karp had the ball. Sixty-two feet from the basket Karp heaved a baseball pass. It was supposed to fall into James’s hands right at the foul line, and he should have had no trouble making the shot to tie.

  But as soon as Karp released the ball, he knew it was going to be too high. He watched, open-mouthed, as it flew over the forward’s straining fingers, hit the rim, bounced twenty feet in the air, and went in.

  Stunned silence from the crowd for an instant, then the buzzer, and the Hustlers were all over Karp, slaps and fives and hugs. The remainder of the game was anticlimax. The Hustlers’ game came together, the ducklings became swans all, and they beat the Celtics by eight. Karp played twenty-two minutes and got fourteen points, ten assists and five rebounds. His knee hurt like hell and he wanted to call Marlene and go to bed.

  This was hardly possible. The Hustlers were in the mood to celebrate. At the hotel, Karp headed straight for his room, which he shared with Chas McDoul. McDoul wasn’t there and Karp turned off the lights, threw himself down on his bed and closed his eyes: just a moment to relax and then he would call Marlene and get undressed.

  He woke with a start, in the dim glow from the bedside clock, his nose filled with unfamiliar perfumes. There were two women in bed with him, one chocolate with her hair in beaded cornrows, the other a strawberry blonde with purple lipstick. The blonde was nuzzling his ear; the other one was rubbing his groin. He sat up straight, knocking them both aside, to the sound of giggles and male laughter. The room lights went on.