“So, you goin’ a work today, Felix, or what?”
“Yeah, maybe, if I feel like it. You goin’?”
“I guess. But it don’t start ’til four.”
“You still working that security job?”
“Yeah. Fuck, I get paid for rackin’ out, which I would do anyway, so….”
“Yeah, hey, so what do they keep there, that, what is it, a warehouse or somethin’?”
“Yeah, a warehouse. It’s all white goods, like fridges, and stoves, washers, like that.”
“Any TV or stereos?
“Yeah, sometimes. Hey, Felix, you thinkin’ maybe you wanna take the place off?”
“No, Stevie, I’m thinking of goin’ into the fuckin’ warehouse business, I wanna check out the competition. They know you been in the joint? At the job?”
“Fuck I know. They didn’t ask. Shit, fuckin’ half the dudes work there been in. If not, they’re some kinda gook or some kind of weird nigger, from Pakistan or some damn place. Who the fuck else is gonna work that kinda job?” The two men were silent for a moment, as if contemplating the economic reality behind that question.
Felix Tighe was lying on a narrow sofa bed in the living room of his friend’s apartment. His friend, Steve Lutz, was leaning in the doorframe that led to the apartment’s bedroom, dressed in maroon gym shorts and a cut-off Rolling Stones T-shirt, the first Schlitz of the bright morning in hand.
He was a lean, muscular man in his early twenties, with a narrow, lantern-jawed face and lank, dark, neck-length hair. His arms were tattooed with the usual assortment of hearts, knives, names and snakes. He kept his mouth open, even when not talking, showing uneven yellow teeth.
Lutz took a long swallow and asked, “You wanna work out?”
“Yeah, in a minute.”
Lutz disappeared into the bedroom, and shortly afterward Felix heard his grunts and the clank of weights. He rolled over and reached for his first cigarette. He tried to remember if he had exceeded his self-imposed ration of five daily cigarettes the previous evening, and decided he probably had. He had been with Anna, who smoked like a chimney. He’d have to get her to cut down.
He sat up and looked around the living room, wrinkling his nose in disgust. There were dirty clothes strewn in piles on the floor and the remains of a large pizza on the square bridge table in the center of the room. Beer cans, some crushed, some still holding stale dregs, littered the floor and overflowed the large rubber garbage pail in the corner. He could see into the tiny alcove kitchen through a torn curtain made of an Indian bedspread. Filthy dishes were piled in the sink and three squat brown bags of dripping garbage were lined up on its drainboard. The close air stank of old beer and orange peel.
Felix got out of bed, naked except for a pair of bikini underpants printed with a zebra-skin pattern, and picked his way carefully through the litter to the bathroom. He wondered how Lutz could stand to live this way. That junkie bitch he hung out with never lifted a finger around the house, at least she hadn’t in the four months Felix had been crashing here. He would have to get Anna to come over and clean the joint up, or better still, get her to let him move in with her. He would ask her tonight.
The shower was tepid and weak, the tub ringed with black grime. Felix thought of his mother’s spotless house. He could move back there in a minute. His skin crawled. No, he could hit her up for meals and cash, and stay an occasional night, but no way was he going to move back with Mom. It meant no women for one thing, and for another … he could not quite put his finger on it but there was a big reason why not. No, it would have to be Anna, even if he had to marry her, because he sure as hell was not going to spend any more time in this garbage dump, and the only other alternative, even more unattractive, was moving back in with his wife.
“Hey, little girl! Want some candy?”
Marlene Ciampi looked up from the papers on her lap as Karp sidled into the seat next to hers.
He dangled a Milky Way in front of her face. “What do I have to do, show you my undies?”
“For starters.” He dropped the candy bar into her hand. She stripped off the wrapper and a full third of it vanished into her mouth. They were sitting in the back of a courtroom, Part Thirty, a calendar Part of the Supreme Court of the State of New York, watching the Honorable Albert A. Albinoli dispense justice.
“Ummpph, God, don’t even joke about that stuff!” mumbled Marlene around the Milky Way. “I’m waiting on the Segura case here; we’re arraigning on the indictment.” She finished the candy bar and sighed contentedly as the chocolate was transformed into incandescent plasma by her remarkable metabolism. Marlene lost weight on six thousand calories a day. She radiated heat. Karp could feel it warming him on the next chair. He wanted more.
“The little girl homicide,” said Karp. “Yeah, I remember.”
“Look,” said Marlene, “Albert’s going to do a far-be-it-from-me.”
Judge Albinoli was berating a young public defender who had had the temerity to argue a motion to suppress evidence, thus taking up time that could be spent in getting through the calendar. Albinoli resembled the late Thomas E. Dewey, but run to fat and with an excruciatingly silly toupee. The calendar was his god.
He sprayed when he spoke. “Young man, far be it from me to make a commentary on the jurisprudence which you have averted to, far be it from me, but I too have passed the bar examination, and I have to tell you that I wouldn’t throw out this evidence if you paid me.” A mild titter drifted through the courtroom. Albinoli smiled, as if he had delivered a witticism. Although there were many in the purlieus of Centre Street to whom the term might apply, when people around the courts said “The Asshole” the reference was almost always to this particular one.
Marlene rolled her eyes and looked over at Karp, but he seemed lost in thought. After a minute he said, “Speaking of that case, Marlene, do you recall that little spat we had, couple of months ago, about you and the other female person attorneys picking up more than your share of these juvenile rape and murder? You still feel you got a problem?”
“As a matter of fact, now that you mention it, I do sense a slacking off in that department. I also see by the smug expression on your face that you think you had something to do with the fix.”
“You could say that. I had a few words with the clerical staff in the complaint room.”
“So it wasn’t a random thing at all. Somebody was putting it to the ladies.”
“Somebody was, and they ain’t any more, so far as I can tell. Anyhow, the boys are pulling their load in the child abuse area, and not too happy about it either.”
“My heart bleeds, the scumbags!”
“Yeah, for some reason it’s hard to get them to take those cases seriously, except when they’re actual homicides. They call them ‘spankers’.”
“Spankers?” Marlene shook her head. “Oh shit, that’s nauseating.”
“Yeah, well, they’re a hard bunch …” His voice trailed off. Marlene’s attention had turned to the business of the court. Karp stood up to go. “Gosh, thanks, Butch,” said Karp. “You’re welcome, Marlene.”
She looked up at him sternly. “Thanks. For the candy. I’m not going to thank you for doing your job. Which you should have started doing a year ago.” A look of pain and guilt spread like a stain across Karp’s face. She saw it and felt an instant and stunning remorse, but kept her face hard. Somebody had to pay for all her misery, and Karp was her favorite target, both handy and vulnerable.
“Fine, Marlene,” answered Karp tightly, “as long as we’re being so professional, what about this Segura case? She going to plead?”
“As a matter of fact, no. She insists that she’s innocent. I offered her a good deal, but she turned me down. Wouldn’t even consider it.”
“Shit, Marlene, you mean we’re going to try this thing?”
“Yeah, we’re going to try it. Unless you want to say, ‘Hey, Mrs. Segura, sorry about the inconvenience, but try to watch it with the other kids, OK?’ What the fuck, Butch! I thought you were Mr. Trial.”
Karp felt his face grow warm. It was true. He needed trial slots to threaten the professional badmen and their lawyers. Otherwise, why would anybody, even the most patently guilty, take a stiff prison sentence on a plea bargain? After all, didn’t they have the right to a speedy trial? So spending a trial slot on what in his true heart he saw as a crummy domestic slaying irked him, and worse, filled him with shame that his situation had led him to regard the brutal murder of a little girl as a professional annoyance. Marlene was still staring at him. The court was hearing a plea of not guilty on a vehicular homicide. Something nagged at his mind.
“Umm, OK, Marlene, you offered manslaughter one?”
“Of course! And negligent homicide. Nothing doing. She says she never touched the kid.”
“Are you sure she did?” asked Karp.
Marlene opened her mouth to say something, but at that moment the clerk called out “Segura!” and Marlene had to walk down the aisle to the well of the court to help Albert the Asshole arraign Maria Segura for the intentional murder of her daughter Lucy.
Two burly female guards brought in the accused, who proved to be a small, biscuit-colored woman, barely out of her teens, with a sharp nose, a downcast mouth and dark, soft-looking pads under her eyes. Karp watched as she pleaded not guilty in an accented and almost inaudible voice. Karp thought she looked about as dangerous as a dust mop.
The judge remanded her for trial. The public defender made a perfunctory argument for a reduction in bail. The woman had two small children to look after. The judge said that this woman asking for a bail reduction so she could look after her children was like the man who killed both his parents asking for mercy on the grounds that he was an orphan. The judge got his titter from the onlookers. He beamed horribly. The guards shuffled Maria Segura out the narrow door. Next case.
Marlene came up the aisle tight jawed and frowning. Karp said, “I like the way your eyebrows almost touch when you have that expression on your face. What’s wrong? I thought you did OK. The dread Mrs. Segura is not out menacing our citizens.”
“Fuck you, Karp! What did you mean, ‘Are you sure she did it?’”
“Well, it just struck me that one explanation of Segura’s intransigence on the plea is that she is in fact innocent. Also, if you’re going to try a homicide against a defendant with no priors who doesn’t look up to wasting a cockroach, you better have the case really nailed down. Do you?”
“Yeah! Of course I do. Shit, Butch I got an indictment from the grand jury on this thing—”
“Marlene, don’t bullshit me!” said Karp, his voice rising. “The grand jury would indict Mother Theresa if a D.A. told it to, as we both well know. I want to know what we got.”
Marlene looked over her shoulder at the judge, who was glowering at them. “Miss Ciampi, far be it from me to interrupt what appears to be a fascinating conversation….”
“Yes, Your Honor,” said Marlene. “Sorry, we were just going.”
With that she gathered her brown envelopes under her arm and made for the door, Karp following.
A few minutes later they were in Marlene’s office. She lit up and watched the smoke rise up the high, narrow shaft of her office. “All right,” she said after a while, “I fucked this up. We got garbage for a serious trial. I was figuring the percentages: a parent kills a kid, what they want is punishment. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred they’ll cop to anything you offer, just to avoid standing up in public while somebody tells all about how they used the knitting needles on little Mary.”
“So what do we have?” said Karp unsympathetically. He was angry with Marlene, and angry with himself for not keeping closer tabs on her and the other attorneys. That doing so was plainly impossible, given the caseload of the Criminal Courts Bureau, did not diminish his anger one whit. A case like this would have been laughed out of the old homicide bureau in a New York minute.
“The history of child abuse. Butch, honestly, that’s what threw me. This kid has been through Bellevue emergency over forty times—broken wrists, ribs, bruises, cuts, burns, the whole nine yards. It just seemed too obvious that the mom had gone a hair too far.
“Then the clothes. The kid was naked when they found her in the dumpster, in the trash bag. The cops found her bloody clothes in another trash bag—the same kind of bag—in the air shaft right under Segura’s window. There was a package of the same kind of trash bags in her kitchen.
“The sexual abuse part—the child was raped, repeatedly, but what else is new? The mother had men in, nobody steady, different ones, all the time. Maybe one of them wanted seconds after the mom passed out. Or maybe ten of them. Did the cops interview every one of her known companions? Hah-Hah. So that’s fucked up too.
“But … the woman doesn’t have an alibi for the time of the killing. Says she was sleeping one off, alone. That’s it. Pretty thin, huh?”
“Yeah. So where’s the finger?”
“The what?”
“The finger, Marlene, the little girl’s finger. I seem to remember you telling me it was cut off. Did you find it?”
“No. I figure she got rid of it, down the can or something. I was thinking a crazy punishment that got out of hand, you know? ‘Be a good girl or Mama will cut off your finger.’ Then afterward, the kid wouldn’t stop crying, the mother got scared, tried to shut the kid up, and bingo! Lights out. It’s happened before.”
That was just the problem, Karp thought. It’s all happened before: repetition, the boring banality of crime, of seeing what people did to one another. It deadened not only the intellect, as in this case, because Marlene Ciampi was arguably one of the most intelligent lawyers in the bureau, but also extinguished the moral imagination, so that the people of the Courthouse could no longer look at the accused and say, “Could this person have done thus and so? Could I have done thus and so, if I were that person?” There were so many, and so alike, that after a while the association between the particular crime and the particular defendant—the essence of justice—didn’t matter. And if that didn’t matter, nothing mattered: the creeping death of Centre Street.
He wanted to shout at her, to shake her, but instead he sat and looked down at his hands, and said in a low voice, “That’s an interesting idea. What does the M.E.’s report say? Does it confirm?” He saw in her face that she didn’t know, that if she had read the Medical Examiner’s report (among a thousand such reports) its message had failed to penetrate the part of her consciousness that was frozen into horrified routine.
Wordlessly Marlene shuffled through the case file and began to turn pages. Karp looked at the distant ceiling. In a few minutes he heard a gasp, a muffled “Oh, shit!”
“What?”
“It’s right here.” Marlene wailed, her cheekbones red with embarrassment. She read, “‘Fifth digit of right hand missing. Signs of recent amputation at point one centimeter proximal to the first carpal joint. Crushing of tissues on both lateral and medial surfaces of stump suggest removal instrument was a heavy shears. Lack of circumferential bruising and normal clotting suggest amputation occurred post-mortem.’ I’m dying!”
She slapped the base of her hand hard against her forehead. “God! What an idiot! I can’t believe I missed that. OK, Marlene, superstar, do you believe that this ratty little woman, who wants a trial, strangled her daughter in a fit of rage, and then calmly cut off her finger with a scissors? Why? And then took her body down to the dumpster, forgetting the finger? And … oh, shit, why go on? It’s all garbage. We got to check the men … no that doesn’t make sense either. I can’t believe a casual … oh, shit!”
She sprang to her feet and started gathering up her bag and raincoat. “What are you going to do now?” asked Karp, surprised by this instant action.
“Do? I’m going to reopen this investigation. Jesus, Butch! If Segura didn’t do it, and I don’t think she did any more, we got some stranger running around who likes to kill little girls. And takes souvenirs.”
After his shower, Felix Tighe put on a black exercise suit and went into Steve Lutz’s bedroom to work out. They helped each other with bench presses, whooshing air out of their lungs and groaning at the peak of the effort. Then Lutz did sit-ups with a twenty-pound weight held behind his head while Felix did bicep curls with thirty-pound dumbbells in front of a full-length mirror. He was feeling good, lifting smoothly, in control, just getting into watching his definition ripple, when the phone rang. He dropped the dumbbells with a clang. “I’ll get it, man, it’s probably for me anyway. Anna’s supposed to call me.”
He took the phone on its hook on the kitchen wall. It was for him, but it wasn’t Anna. The voice on the phone was rich and dark. Whenever he heard it he felt the same odd feeling, a mixture of desire mixed with something close to dread.
“Hello, Denise,” he said, his mouth dry.
“How’s my big boy today?”
“Fine, Denise. What you up to?”
“Oooh, just lounging. Lounging in my tub, in perfumed water with lots of suds. I’m making my skin silky and clean. And you know why, don’t you. Yes you do. I’d like to have your hairy body in this tub right now. I’d like to bathe you and lick you dry, like a momma cat. Lick you everyplace. Would you like that? Yes, you would, you dirty child. But not today. It’s not our day yet, is it?”
“No, Denise.”
“No, it’s next week. Next Friday. I’ll just have to wait. I’ll just have to wait, and keep myself stimulated until then. Would you like to listen to that, to me stimulating myself?” She giggled. He heard faint splashing, and then other sounds.
He listened. His skin burned and felt thick, as if he were on some drug. He had to listen to the sounds. She called out his name, her voice rising, cracking. There was silence on the line, except for her breathing and the movement of the water.
Felix said, “Good-bye, Denise,” and hung up the phone. He slid down the wall and sat on the floor and put his head between his knees, and waited for the strange pleasure sickness to go away.
He tried once again to figure out how he had gotten in with Denise, when it had started. He couldn’t remember, which was odd in itself, because Felix kept a meticulous record of all his appointments and accomplishments in a series of small, black notebooks, going back to high school. She had just appeared one week and after that, she was always there once or twice a month, forever.
He stood up, shakily, and at once the telephone rang again. It was his lawyer from Queens, a morose little man named Dudnick.
“Mr. Tighe,” said the lawyer in his precise, dry voice, “I’ve been trying to reach you all week.”
“Yeah? Well, I been busy. What do you want?”
“I wanted to remind you that your trial begins in four days. There are a number of things we need to discuss beforehand.”
“What things? I’m getting off, right?”
Dudnick cleared his throat. Criminal law at this level was not really his specialty. The white-shoe law firm that Mrs. Tighe used for her business and trust dealings retained him as a convenience for its distinguished clientele. The bulk of his practice consisted of arguing for leniency in cases where wealthy people had gotten drunk behind the wheel or bought marijuana from the wrong person. He had racked up thousands of hours of community service sentences. This was different.
“Well, in fact, Mr. Tighe, I have been in contact with the Queens District Attorney and he appears willing to accept a plea of guilty to breaking and entering and felony assault, which is quite an advance for us. The indictment is for attempted first-degree murder and burglary.”
“Does that get me off?”
“Not exactly, Mr. Tighe. We would expect a sentence of from three to five years in—”
“Three to five! You’re outta your mind, three to five!”
“Of course, in all probability you would only have to serve eighteen months.”
“Fuck me, eighteen months! Listen, asshole—I’m not serving eighteen minutes. I want off, understand! I’m not going to goddamn prison on the say-so of some dumb nigger cop. They got nothing on me.”
“Well, actually, Mr. Tighe, as I’ve tried to explain to your mother, they have quite a bit on you. You actually were caught red-handed, so to speak, in that they were able to remove samples of that policeman’s blood from your hands and clothing.”
“That don’t mean shit. They could of made it all up just to frame me.”
“Yes, but that’s something we can discuss at our meeting. Now when would you like to come by? Mr. Tighe? Hello, Mr. Tighe?”
Felix slammed down the receiver, shaking the phone and making it ring faintly. He went back into the bedroom, fuming. Felix had never been a clever burglar, just a lucky one. And considering the priority given in recent years to low-grade burglaries by the police in New York, he did not even have to be that lucky. He’d been picked up a couple of times as a kid, but his Ma had got him off. Since he’d turned eighteen he’d been pulling a couple of jobs a month and never a breath of trouble. Felix was not into self-criticism, but he had to admit to himself that he’d gotten cocky, coming down the ladder like that, with a cop car right under. He’d have to lie low on the burglary business for a while, maybe figure out another scam.
“So, who was it? You look pissed off,” observed Lutz, who was setting up the weights to do his jerk and press sequence.
“My fuckin’ lawyer, the dickhead. He says I’m going to have to go up for this piece of shit thing in Queens.”
“Hey, man, that’s a son-of-a-bitch, ain’t it. So what’re you gonna do? I mean split or what?”
Felix didn’t bother to answer. He had all he could do to ride out the waves of fury that were rolling through him, blackening his vision and churning his guts. He was furious at the lawyer, of course, and at his mother for hiring the asshole, and at Anna for not having been on the phone instead of Dudnick. He slammed his knotty fist into his thigh. None of those people was immediately to hand. There was only one person in the apartment besides himself.
“Hey, Stevie,” he said, “get out the mats. We’ll do a little karate.”
Lutz dropped his barbell and looked up, an expression of nervous concern wrinkling his low brow. “What, you mean gohon?”
“Nah, fuck that shit. I feel like some freestyle.”
Lutz whined, “Ah, crap, Felix, you’re gonna whip my ass again.”
Felix grinned unpleasantly. “I don’t know, Stevie. You might get lucky. Meanwhile it’s good training. You don’t spar, you’ll never make black belt, hey? So stop being a pussy and get the mats out.”
Marlene was in the bullpen of the Criminal Courts Bureau, perched on the corner of a clerk’s battered desk, making the calls necessary to get the Segura case started up again. It was a place of business she often preferred to her own isolated office. She was trying to get a homicide lieutenant in Manhattan South to assign people to a case he thought he had wrapped up weeks ago. Since he had about sixty working homicides that were nowhere near wrapped up, he was less than excited at the prospect.
“Let me get this straight, Ms. Ciampi,” said Lieutenant Shaughnessy, his voice on the phone suspiciously calm. “You’re throwing out this case because you just found out the kid’s finger got cut off after she was dead and not before.”
“Yeah. You understand what that means, don’t you?”
“Um …”
“Lieutenant, the mother beats up the kid. We know that. She’s an abuser. So the theory was that she went too far, killed the kid in a rage, and then tried to get rid of the body. But the fact that the finger was amputated after death doesn’t jibe with a typical domestic child murder.”
“It don’t, huh? What does it jibe with, then?”
“A maniac.”
“What are you talking about, lady?”
“A maniac, Lieutenant. Who else kills kids and cuts off their fingers? Jaywalkers? And he did it once, he could do it again.”
“Maybe the mother did it and cut off the finger to make us think it was a maniac,” said the lieutenant, grasping.
“Right. Good idea. You want to take the chance that there won’t ever be a repeat?”
There was silence on the line for a long moment. Of all the things that could derail Lieutenant Shaughnessy’s stately progress toward thirty-and-out with a captain’s pension, a serial child murderer was close to the top of the list. There would be reporters. There would be outraged editorials. There would be parents with placards.
The brass would be watching his every move and they would set up a special task force that would take half his men, and naturally, he wouldn’t get any relief from his normal clearance quota in the meantime. Of course, if he told this crazy bitch to get stuffed, which was his first impulse, and it turned out there really was a loony cutting up kids, he would spend the rest of his career running a motor pool in the South Bronx. An idea flickered across his mind.
“Uh, well, you sound like you could have a real problem there, Miss Ciampo. Tell you what I’ll do. How would it be if I transferred a couple of good detectives over to the D.A. squad?”
“That would be great,” replied Marlene cautiously. “But what’s the catch, Lieutenant? They stop killing people in your end of the city?”
“Yeah, we stopped crime around here. The thing of it is, Miss Ciampo …”
“Ciampi, Lieutenant. Ms.”
“Yeah, right, the thing of it is, we’d naturally expect them to carry over their cases for the duration of the detail.”
“Naturally,” Marlene agreed. She vaguely suspected she was being shafted in some subtle bureaucratic way, but didn’t have time to figure it out. And the offer was too good to turn down.
“So, if that’s OK with you … ah, Ms.?”
“Yeah, deal. What do I have to do?”
“Not a thing. I’ll call Fred Spicer and put together the detail papers,” said Shaughnessy smoothly, and broke the connection before she could change her mind.
An hour later, having made several dozen telephone calls from the same perch, setting up witnesses, talking to public defenders, and making appointments, Marlene became aware that she was sitting in the workspace of another person, who had for some time been carrying out her tasks minus the advantages of either a phone or a Marlene-bottom-sized section of her desk.
“Uh, sorry, Dana, I’m in your way.”
The woman fluttered her hands and grinned, revealing a row of crooked poor-people teeth.
“Garsh, Marlene, that’s awright,” said Dana Woodley, in an accent infrequently heard in the halls of 100 Centre Street. Woodley was an anomaly on the D.A.’s support staff, which ran more typically to gum-cracking tough kids from Queens with stiletto heels and whore make-up or struggling black single mothers. She hailed from an Appalachian hollow called Daggersville, and had been transplanted to New York by way of a crashed love affair that left her with a kid, a suitcase, and no prospects. She dressed in frilly white blouses tied with little velvet bows, and narrow dark skirts. Her best feature was a mass of glowing auburn hair, which she kept in a long cheerleader’s pony tail. Besides that, her face was long and sallow, and devoid of make-up, and her eyes were the color of damp stone, thin and wary.
As she smiled back at this woman, Marlene could not help but be aware of the admiration, nearly the adoration, in the other’s look. The notion that a woman could be a lawyer and deal with men on an equal footing had hit Dana Woodley like a shot of benzedrine. For her part, Marlene had not been a role model before this, and was not averse to a little admiration.
Marlene got off the desk, lit a cigarette, and said, “What a day! Did you ever feel, when you bought something you thought you wanted, that whoever sold it to you knew you were coming?”
“Oh, sure, all the time. ’Course, I am an ol’ hillbilly, no reason they shouldn’t try to treat me like a sucker. If’n they can get away with it, which they-all’d have to get up purty early in the day t’do.”
Marlene laughed. “Whut’s s’funny,” asked Woodley.
“Sorry, I get a kick out of your rap, is all. No, it’s no lie. I could listen to that corn pone talk all day. It’s like a cheap tour out of here. Meanwhile, speaking of sucker, I just arranged to get two cops in here on a detail to reopen the Segura case, and I think I got taken, and I can’t figure out how.”
“Shoot, Marlene, long as they gave you the overhead along with the two bodies I don’t see how they—”
“Wait … overhead?”
“Uh-huh. That’s support staff, paperclips, phones, and like that. See, if’n they come ’n work outa this office, we got to supply all o’ that? So they got to agree on a fund transfer cause it’s a different budget—the po-lice, ’n all?”
“Oh, shit! You’re probably right. That jerk-off! I better go see Karp before Spicer gets to him.”
“Yeah. Say, how come y’all reopenin’ Segura?”
Marlene quickly explained the reasoning behind the decision, which Dana grasped rather more quickly than had Lieutenant Shaughnessy. Her mouth tightened and her eyes got flat and hard.
“I swear, Marlene, thing like that…. ‘Vengeance is mine saith the Lord’ according to gospel, an’ I mostly believe it, but a man’d do a thang like that to a little girl, it’s just so purely mean, some’n like that just wants killin’. An’ I always think of Carol Anne. Shoot, they make it sorrowful hard on motherin’ in this city!”
“They do, all right. How’s the kid, by the way. Day care working out?”
The thin face brightened. “Oh, my, yes! We got us a scholarship through the church. It ain’t half a purty place, too. Carol Anne cain’t wait to go in the mornin’s.”
“Terrific! It almost restores my faith in anything working out. Speaking of which, I better get right in there.”
Karp’s day had continued to deteriorate. During the afternoon of the initial meeting on the Ferro killing, Tony Harris had come grinning into his office with what he imagined was good news.
“Hey, Butch, how about this!” Harris was waving a piece of yellow paper, his face creased by a snaggly smile.
“What you got, Tony?”
“I was right. His car’s gone. Impellatti’s. One of Devlin’s guys just called. They talked to the attendant at the garage where he kept it. The guy remembers Impellatti coming in and asking for it, maybe three in the afternoon the day after the Ferro hit. The guy said,” here he read from the paper, “‘Impellatti looked dishevelled and nervous, not normal, like he’d been running.’”
“That’s real interesting, Tony,” said Karp, finding it difficult to enjoy the other man’s enthusiasm. “So where did he run to?”
“This I don’t know. The other question is why was he running, if Guma’s right.”
“You mean about Harry Pick having no beef with him? It’s a plausible theory, but it doesn’t get us anywhere. He could be in Timbuktu by now, and even if he walked in the door tomorrow we still wouldn’t have a case against the shooter or Harry Pick.”
“You mean because there’s no independent corroboration? Yeah, but if we had Impellatti, surely we could get somebody at the scene to come across.”
“At the scene?” exclaimed Karp, his eyes popping. “That crowd at Alberto’s? Witnesses? Dream on, child!”
Harris’s face fell. “So what do we do with this?” He flapped his paper.
“File it, Tony. File it deep. If Noodles walks in here or if Harry Pick has a crisis of conscience and wants to confess, then you can dig it out. Don’t look at me like that! You think I don’t sympathize? Everybody wants to fry a don. It beats the shit out of running fucked-up skinny black kids through the mill, hey? But right now, my boy, there’s no percentage in putting any more steam into this one.”
Then the phone rang and he had a long, unpleasant conversation with the head of the D.A. Investigations Squad. And then Marlene came in, looking belligerent.
“I just got my ass chewed by Fred P. Spicer, our noble D.A. squad chief,” said Karp sourly when he saw Marlene. “And as you know, he is one of the people I least like to get chewed by. What did you do?”
“I know, I know, I forgot to nail down the overhead.”
“The overhead! Shit, Marl, that’s only the half of it. You said they could keep their cases? On a detail? Which means Shaughnessy’s going to maintain his clearance quotas on my budget. Plus, you didn’t name-request the two officers, which means Shaughnessy could send over a couple of clapped-out boozers he’s been trying to get rid of for years.”
“He wouldn’t dare!”
“I don’t know about that, but as it turns out he didn’t. We’re getting Balducci and Raney, which from his point of view is almost as good.”
“Why? Are they duds?”
“No. Balducci’s a decent cop, a good detective. Trouble is, he’s retiring this year. So, what happens is, Shaughnessy fills the vacant slot with a fresh body. The quotas that go with that body are supposed to be assigned to the refill, but since Balducci’ll be checking out from Spicer’s shop, the quotas’ll hang around here for at least a couple months. Nobody’ll really expect us to follow up on them, but Shaughnessy’ll get a free ride for the duration of the switch. It’s a classic buddy-fuck: cop trick number four-oh-seven-two-b. Spicer’s gonna need a quart of Vaseline for his ass.”
“And Raney? Tell me he’s the famous brain-damage case.”
“No, but I could see where Shaughnessy might want to get rid of him. You remember that Clint Eastwood shoot-out in the Schmitkin Bakery last summer? Off-duty cop, four perps, heavily armed, all four ended up dead?”
“Yeah, in Jamaica. That was Raney?”
“That was Raney. Pistol Jim Raney, as I believe he’s called. A credit to the force, especially if the Viet Cong ever try to take Manhattan.”
“Oh, Christ, that’s all I need on Segura!”
“Segura! You’re doing this for Segura?”
“Yeah. What’s the matter? I told you I was reopening the investigation. We discussed it.”
The phone rang. Karp ignored it.
“We didn’t discuss anything, Marlene,” he said testily. “You made up your mind and ran off, and left me with the mess. As usual.”
“As usual! Fuck you, ‘as usual!’ That’s what I love about talking to you, these little zingers you put in there—like I’m nothing but a fuck-up around here.”
The phone rang again.
“Aren’t you going to answer that?” Marlene asked.
“No! And, first of all, I didn’t say you were a fuck-up. I just meant there’s a way to do stuff right, procedure—”
“Procedure! Do my ears deceive me? When did you become such a bureaucrat all of a sudden? Look, Butch—you really going to tell me I can’t have two lousy cops to look in to what could be a goddamn maniac wandering around out—”
“I didn’t say you couldn’t have them! Did I say you couldn’t have the damn cops? Although, of course after Balducci hands in his potsy, you’ll only have Raney, the biggest loose cannon in the N.Y.P.D. And as I recall it, you were going to hang the mother for this one until I stepped in.”
“You’re never gonna let me forget that, are you? I can’t believe you’re being this way, just because fucking Spicer …”
The door opened, after a perfunctory knock, and Connie Trask’s face appeared in the doorway. “That call’s for you, Butch,” she said, smiling sweetly. “See, the way it works is, when it rings, you’re supposed to pick it up and talk in the little holes there.”
“Connie, come on, I’m busy. Can’t I call them back?”
“Um, guy sounded like he had to talk to you right now. It’s long distance. A Mr. Frank Impellatti.”
“Holy shit! Little Noodles?”
“He didn’t say nothing about noodles,” said Trask. “Pick up on three.”
Karp was on the phone for about two minutes, during which he said “uh-huh” half a dozen times. Then he said, “Wait a minute, Impellatti, I got a lot more questions. How do I … ah, shit!” Karp stared angrily at the receiver and then tossed it back in its cradle.
“What was that?” asked Marlene.
“That was Frank Impellatti, the guy who fingered Vinnie Red. I can’t believe this—I was just talking to Tony about this, that we needed this guy to walk in, and now he walks in. This is like the movies.”
“Where is he?”
“He’s hiding out in California. In Beverly fucking Hills, if you can believe it. He wants to come in and spill his guts on the Ferro hit, maybe some other stuff, too.”
“Butch, that’s great!”
“Yeah, maybe,” Karp said glumly. “He says he won’t move unless I go out there and get him. It has to be me, and alone.”
“No kidding? Why’d he pick you?”
“The fuck I know. He said, ‘I’m a no bullshit guy, and I hear you’re a no bullshit guy, so maybe we could do business.’ That was it.”
“You don’t get a tribute like that every day.”
“Yeah, my head’s still in a whirl. Look, kiddo, about the two cops, I’ll figure out some way to fix it. But only until Balducci retires. We don’t have a case by then….” He shrugged and made a gesture of helplessness, his hands spread and fluttering.
But Marlene seemed to be thinking about something else.
“So. You’re going to California.”
“Looks like it.”
“You’ll be down in L.A. Were you thinking about going up north, checking out your old stamping grounds?”
“I hadn’t thought about it, obviously, but it’s an idea.”
“Like where might you go? For instance.”
Karp looked at her. She was staring out the window. When he was silent, she turned to face him, holding her head slightly cocked so she could make full use of her good eye.
Karp said, “This is an interesting line of questioning, counselor, but I’m not sure where you’re leading.”
“Oh, well, I just thought that since you asked me to marry you lo, these many months, and since we might be considered to be engaged, but we can’t really, because you are, after all, still married to a woman who, I seem to recall, lives north of L.A. out there, I just thought that you might take this opportunity to locate this woman and obtain her signature on a petition for divorce. That was my thinking.”
“It was, huh?”
“Yes. And since the fact that we are neither married nor engaged has not prevented you from leaping on my body at every possible opportunity to do the dirty, and monopolizing my time in the bargain, thus preventing me from finding an alternative life’s companion, and since I have absolutely no desire to be a forty-year-old office girlfriend, which I have recently felt well on the way to becoming, it strikes me that this would be an ideal time to take care of that little business.”
“It strikes you that way, does it?”
She came toward him then, and leaned over him as he sat in his chair. She put her face very close to his, and placed her warm hand on the back of his neck, above the collar. It burned against his skin and he felt the sweat start from his forehead.
“Yes, it does,” she said. “And moreover, as we say in subpoenas, ‘therefore, fail not,’ because if you come back from California without said petition, as much as I love you, and as much as I dig to explore the ultimate frontiers of sexual pleasure with you, I will fucking cut off your water, and you will never get to experience the elaborate erotic treats I have been storing away for my wedding night since the first glimmers of puberty. What do you say to that, buster?”
“You got a deal,” said Karp.