They looked him over. A compact, short, olive-skinned man in his late twenties, Aram Tomasian stood in the doorway of his apartment and returned their look out of deep-set brown eyes. He didn’t seem surprised to see two cops at his door at eight of a Sunday evening, which was itself surprising. What was more surprising, he didn’t say, “What’s this all about?” or “What’s wrong?” or give them the phony smile that most people kept in stock for a visit from the police, but gravely ushered them into his home and said, “I’ve been expecting you.”
Frangi and Wayne walked into the place and absorbed it in a glance, as cops do. Upscale but not ostentatious: white carpeting, beige Haitian cotton sofa and armchairs, an expensive stereo system and a large television mounted in a long teak wall unit, a glass and chrome coffee table. There was a large framed color poster of what looked like some old ruins on the wall and a dozen or so family pictures in silver or leather frames placed on various shelves of the wall unit, together with a substantial library.
Wayne looked at Tomasian and once again tried to make his mind blank, hoping for a telling illumination. A regular guy, was all he got, a little cocky, in control. Wayne didn’t care for that. “Why were you expecting the police, Mr. Tomasian?” he asked, making his voice a little flatter and louder than necessary.
Tomasian gestured at the TV. “The Turk who got shot today. I figured you’d be around.” He sat down on his sofa and crossed his legs.
Frangi sat down opposite. Wayne paced around the room, looking at the books, photographs, and jacketed LPs stored neatly in the wall unit. One shelf, behind clear glass, was devoted to a collection of some kind: four pieces of old-looking jewelry with bright enamel insets, some dull gems deeply engraved with designs, and several small panels of gray or whitish stone incised with carvings of saints.
Frangi said, “Why did you figure that, Mr. Tomasian?”
The man shrugged. “That call to the papers. It was on TV. They blamed it on Armenian nationalists. I’m an Armenian nationalist …” He made a flowing gesture with his hand indicating the obviousness of it all.
“And you know something about this Armenian Secret Army that claimed credit for the killing?”
Tomasian allowed himself a faint smile. “If I told you that, it wouldn’t be much of a secret, would it?”
From behind the couch Wayne said, “Withholding information about a murder investigation is a serious crime, Mr. Tomasian.” Wayne liked to get physically behind the subject during interrogations. He found it got them off balance. Then he and Frangi could shoot questions at the subject alternately, and have the pleasure of seeing the guy’s head whip back and forth as he tried to face his questioners.
This pleasure Tomasian denied them, however. Keeping still, he said to Frangi, as if he had made the statement, “In that case, let me say that I have absolutely no knowledge of this murder, either the planning of it or the execution, and don’t know anyone who did. I am not aware that the Armenian Secret Army or any other Armenian organization had any part in it. I am not going to discuss the Armenian Secret Army with you in any way, or reveal its plans, its organization, its activities, or its membership.”
Frangi said, “Okay, Mr. Tomasian, if that’s the way you want to play it, fine. Let’s talk about you personally, then. This morning between eight and eleven—you were where?”
“Right here. I had a late night last night and I slept in, until about noon.”
“Alone, right?” asked Wayne, still behind the sofa.
Tomasian smiled again. “No, I was with my girlfriend. In bed. She left about one-thirty.”
“We’ll need her name, then,” said Frangi.
Tomasian paused and then said, “I guess there’s no way around it. This is all going to come out in the papers, right? The thing is, her family will have a shit fit. There’s no way to, um, keep this private.”
Frangi stared at him blankly, his pencil poised above his pad.
“Her name’s Gaby Avanian, Gabrielle.” He added an address on St. Marks Place in the East Village.
“You own a car, Mr. Tomasian?” asked Frangi.
“Yes, why?”
Frangi ignored the question. “Make and model?”
“It’s a 1977 Ford Polara.”
“Is that a blue car, sir?” asked Wayne, and when told that it was in fact that color he and Frangi exchanged a significant look. “Where do you keep it?” Wayne asked.
“In the garage in the building.”
“Did you use it today at all?” asked Frangi.
“No. I don’t ever use it much, as a matter of fact. I can walk to work. Sometimes I drive out of town on weekends or visit relatives in the boroughs, Westchester, like that. And sometimes I pick up supplies for my business.”
“What business is that?” asked Wayne.
“I’m a jeweler. My dad owns Metropolitan Jewelry. It’s a chain. I run the store at Lex and Forty-first, and I also do a lot of our original designs.”
The detectives exchanged another look and Frangi rose. “Thanks for your time, Mr. Tomasian,” he said, and offered a business card. “If you think of anything that might be helpful, give us a call.”
Tomasian glanced at the card and placed it on the coffee table. Again he smiled faintly. “But meantime, don’t try to leave town?”
Frangi said, “That would be considerate, Mr. Tomasian, but in any case, if we decide we want you, we’ll find you.”
Tomasian didn’t offer to see them to the door, and they let themselves out. In the elevator, Wayne said, “So. You like him. I could tell.”
“Like him? I love him. I want to marry him and have his babies. It’s the guy, Barney. This is a twenty-four-hour clearance. The fucking fans will go wild.”
“Yeah? I hope.”
“Why? You don’t like him?”
Wayne did not want to dispel his partner’s enthusiasm, but he had seen better suspects than this one go glimmering. He said, “Well, I’ll like him better after we talk to the girl, and after we get a couple of pieces of physical evidence.”
Frangi gave him a look. “Partner, if by some chance our boy was not the trigger, he knows who it was. Count on it! Fucking cute asshole! ‘It wouldn’t be a secret.’ Hey, I got an idea. Let’s take a look at the car.” He pressed the G button.
“Look at that,” said Frangi with satisfaction when, after ten minutes of searching, they stood behind the blue Polara. Wayne looked and then after a moment knelt down and examined the bolts that held the license plate into its frame. He rose, rubbing his fingers together under his nose.
“That settles it,” said Frangi.
“Hmmm,” said Wayne.
“What, what do you want, a signed confession? It’s the right plate on his car. He’s our guy, for cryin’ out loud.”
“Well, we can get a warrant with this, but I don’t know … he could have an alibi. Somebody could’ve boosted this car, and besides, the car they used was a Fairlane. This is a Polara.”
“Hey, let the D.A. worry about that shit.”
“I will. But I’ll tell you, even Roland’ll be happier if those ski masks and parkas show up in his closet, or the guns. And another thing. How do you figure a guy sloppy enough to use his own car for a hit in broad daylight is careful enough to clean the rust off his license-plate bolts and keep them oiled up?”
“We’re doing good,” said Roland Hrcany, concluding his tale of what the detectives had learned. “I’m almost amazed.” He was sitting across the desk from his boss, the bureau chief of the Homicide Bureau of the New York County D.A., on the Monday following the murder of Mehmet Ersoy.
The bureau chief said, “It is amazing. The stupidity of criminals has no known limit. And speaking of stupidity, the district attorney will be pleased. I know that’s important to you, Roland.”
Hrcany laughed obligingly. It had been a private joke between them for years that Roland was trying to curry favor with the exiguous Sanford Bloom, the D.A. In fact, Hrcany had as little respect for the D.A. as his chief, but his ferocious ambition showed itself as a desire to impress. The bureau chief was, in contrast, long past caring what anyone thought of him.
The bureau chief’s name was Roger Karp. Now he stood up and stretched and paced back and forth behind his desk. He was a very tall, lanky man, with close-cut light brown hair and a bony face. He moved stiffly, with a slight limp. At the age of four he had decided that he would be called Roger no longer, but Butch instead, a decision he had enforced by ceasing to answer to any other name. It was a stubbornness he had retained in adulthood.
Karp said, “They talk to this alibi yet, this girlfriend?”
“No, they haven’t turned her up yet. There’s nobody home at her place, and her parents don’t know where she is.”
“That could be a problem, if she comes out of nowhere later and confirms his story. However …”
“However, we’ve got way enough for a warrant,” said Hrcany.
“No question,” Karp agreed. “Let’s do it, and let me know as soon as you get anything. Bloom’s already been on my ass about it.”
Hrcany scooped up his papers and left. Karp walked over to his window and looked out. Six floors below he could see Leonard Street, a patch of blacktop that, at that point, was largely devoted to the parking of judges’ cars, while directly across Leonard was the New York State Office building, where he could actually observe an army of slow-moving clerks making it difficult for the citizens of New York to get license plates.
The license plate was the odd thing about Roland’s case. Simple carelessness and stupidity or a sophisticated bluff? Karp could imagine a defense lawyer saying to a jury, “Ladies and gentlemen: can you really believe that this intelligent, successful businessman would use his own car, bearing his own license, to commit an assassination in broad daylight?”
Well, yes, Karp could believe it. In his twelve years with the D.A. he had seen acts of egregious stupidity on the part of defendants that made this license-plate business look like the special theory of relativity. Still, the defense always used the “can you believe?” argument. And sometimes it worked.
Karp was not as sanguine as Roland about the lock they supposedly had on Mehmet Ersoy’s purported killer. On the other hand, Roland knew what he was doing. He was the best of Karp’s twenty-nine prosecutors, a man with a record in homicide prosecutions nearly as good as Karp’s own, which was the best ever. But had he been the worst, Karp still would not have interfered, except to correct some obvious legal or procedural boner. Karp could cajole, criticize, even humiliate his minions, but the A.D.A. in charge of a case was in charge of the case. To behave otherwise, to second guess, to countermand decisions, was to court chaos. Karp could not supervise the prosecution of all the thousand-odd murder cases that Manhattan produced each year. A thousand and climbing.
This rule, of course, did not apply to the D.A. himself, who felt free to intrude in any case that took his fancy. What took his fancy were the cases with high political profiles. Rich people or famous people getting killed. The bizarre ones that stuck to the front pages and appeared on the nightly news. Cases involving the interests of his friends, or acquaintances, or anyone with a nice suit who could grab him for fifteen minutes.
Karp was often able to ignore these intrusions or confound them. The D.A. was not a trial lawyer and never had been. If it was up to him, there wouldn’t be any trials at all, just gentlemanly discussions between defense and prosecution leading to a plea bargain and another cleared case.
Unfortunately for the D.A., without the capacity to go to trial and win an overwhelming proportion of the time, the plea-bargaining system would not work. The defendants would laugh in your face. Karp won trials, murder trials especially, which was why he was able to get away with what he got away with.
Karp moved closer to the window, resting his forehead against the cool glass. From this angle he could see the green street sign that dedicated the foot of Leonard Street to the former D.A., the legendary Francis P. Garrahy. Garrahy had died six years ago, an act for which Karp had just begun to forgive him. Karp’s heart still lived in the D.A.’s office that Garrahy had created and run for three decades: an organization of uncompromising legal probity, dominated by men whose natural home was the courtroom. In that organization the cream had risen to the old homicide bureau, of which Karp had briefly been a part.
When Bloom had got in, the first thing he had done was to dissolve the homicide bureau and assign homicide cases at random to a series of identical Criminal Courts bureaus. It made more sense administratively, went the argument, which meant it made sense to a man who had never tried a murder case and saw no difference between murder and any other crime.
But murder was different. The emotional currents and the legal intricacies that surrounded murder cases were unique, even in a state, like New York at the time, which had no death penalty. A homicide bureau had to be a special sort of place.
Karp had recently been given a recreated homicide bureau, not because Bloom had seen the light but because Karp had caught him at so much chicanery, malfeasance, and blundering so often that, although Karp had never even hinted at a quid pro quo, Bloom’s politician’s soul had cried out that Karp must be given something big and substantial, that by such a gift his fate might be more closely tied to Bloom’s own. Besides which there was the chance that, in the dangerous world of murder trials, Karp might one day screw up so badly that Bloom could dump him publicly, and with the approbation of the vulgar herd.
Past the foot of Leonard Street, and barely in Karp’s field of view, was a small park called Columbus Park. At this moment a dozen or so elderly Chinese had gathered on the new grass to do their morning t’ai chi. Karp admired their movements for a few minutes and then, as he turned away from the window to get back to work, imitated one of the positions, holding his hands high, balancing on his left foot, and sweeping his right foot across to the left.
Karp was a naturally graceful man, and the movement might have even pleased the Chinese had not Karp’s left knee collapsed, sending him crashing into a couple of conference table chairs and to the floor.
He lay there cursing and gritting his teeth against the fierce pain jabbing up from his bad knee. A dark, worried face appeared upside down over the edge of the conference table.
“Are you all right?” asked Connie Trask, his secretary.
Karp flushed and managed to get his good leg under him. Trask rushed around the table to give him a hand, but he waved her off and, groaning, struggled to his feet.
“You ought to see a doctor,” said the secretary.
“I don’t need a doctor, Connie. I’m fine. I just tripped.”
She looked at him doubtfully. “Hmmph. Tell it to the marines! You’ve been shuffling around here like the wreck of the Hesperus for weeks. You and that leg—”
“It’s the weather changing …”
“I thought that was when it got cold. It’s getting warm now.”
Karp moved around to his desk and sat down heavily in his chair, elevating the left leg on the edge of a desk drawer permanently pulled out for that purpose. He scowled and snapped, “Connie, we know you’re a grandmother, but you’re not my grandmother, okay?”
“Lucky for you,” she replied. “Meanwhile, you got an appointment waiting. Guy wants to work here, don’t ask me why. You want me to send him in?”
“Give me a couple of minutes.”
She nodded and left. Karp massaged his knee and flexed it gingerly. It felt like bits of pea gravel were trapped under the cartilage. It was nearly twenty years gone since a big USC guard had come crashing down on that joint, ending Karp’s basketball career at Berkeley and the possibility of a bid from the pros. The memory of that moment of pain could still nauseate him.
And as it had turned out, Karp had gotten to play for the pros, a brief debut the past winter on a New York team as part of a murder investigation. His knee had sufficed for six weeks of not very strenuous play, but had not been the same since. For now, however, Karp’s will was as strong as his knee was shaky. He willed the pain away and looked up brightly as his appointment walked in.
The branch of Metropolitan Jewelers run by Aram Tomasian was located on 42nd just west of Lexington. There, at ten on the Monday after, appeared the two detectives, Frangi and Wayne. They had with them the search warrant hastily but perfectly drafted by Roland Hrcany, ordering them to search for a list of specific items, including weapons and clothing and “any other articles and instruments used in the commission of the said crime.”
There was a clerk in attendance at the glassed counter, and when the two officers identified themselves, she brought Tomasian out from the back of the shop. Tomasian was wearing an old-fashioned tan work smock and a loupe attached to an elastic band. It stuck up from his forehead like a stumpy horn.
Tomasian seemed anxious, and again he surprised them. He asked, “Are you here about Gaby?”
They had to think a moment. Frangi said, “Gaby. You mean your girlfriend.”
“Yes,” said Tomasian. “I called her after I talked to you yesterday and I couldn’t reach her. I tried her half a dozen times and then I gave up and went over to her place. I have a key. She wasn’t there. I called her work and a couple of her friends, and nobody seems to know where she is.”
Tomasian seemed genuinely worried, but, on the other hand, Wayne, for one, thought that Tomasian might turn out to be a considerable actor. He had been too cool on the day of the murder, and too cute.
Wayne said, “Why were you so interested in reaching her?”
Tomasian uttered a sound of annoyance and exasperation. “Why? She’s my girlfriend. I wanted to talk to her. I knew you guys would be coming to see her and—”
“You wanted to get your story straight. Your alibi,” Frangi interrupted.
“It’s not a ‘story,’” snapped Tomasian. “I was concerned. She’s not the kind of person that police visit. I wanted to talk to her. Is that a crime?”
Wayne removed a paper from his coat pocket and smoothed it out on the glass counter. “This is a search warrant, Mr. Tomasian. It gives us authority to search your business premises and your home.”
Tomasian looked briefly at the document. A flush appeared along his cheekbones, and he licked his lips. The sight of this discomfort brought a surge of gladness to the heart of Detective Wayne. Tomasian said hesitantly, “Look, my apartment, fine, but this store—it’s not my property. It belongs to my father; I just manage it for him.”
“It’s your place of business, Mr. Tomasian,” said Wayne, “and it’s described in the warrant.”
Tomasian sighed and told his clerk to pull down the shades and lock the front door. The two detectives began to search.
There was nothing in the display cases out front except jewelry and the accoutrements of the jewelry trade. The back of the store looked more promising. It held a substantial jeweler’s workshop: a long, scarred wooden table covered with tools and bits of shining wire, a high stool before it, and the wall it faced was lined with cabinets and boxes full of tiny drawers. A small desk was placed at one end of the room, and this held a phone, a Rolodex, and assorted papers. It was flanked by a tan four-drawer filing cabinet. And then there was the safe.
It was a green steel room the size of an apartment bathroom, its two thick doors hanging open invitingly. Wayne and Frangi moved toward it instinctively: if a suspect owns a safe, of course that’s the first place you look for the good stuff. The safe was lined floor to ceiling with metal shelves, upon which were stacked long, flat steel boxes and open bins. The bins, they found, contained gold and silver wires of different gauges and in sheets, as well as various semiprecious stones and jewelers’ findings. The boxes held gems and finished pieces. Under one of the lower shelves there was a steel-bound footlocker, painted olive drab and locked with a heavy hasp and padlock.
The detectives pulled the locker out into the center of the safe. Tomasian was sitting on his stool, watching them. Wordlessly he held out a key ring, holding it up by a small brass key. Wayne took the key and opened the footlocker.
Three hours later, the detectives were in Roland Hrcany’s office, sucking on illicit cans of beer and feeling pleased with what had gone down.
“He give you any grief?” asked their host.
“No, he went like a lamb,” answered Frangi. “Same thing at his apartment. We checked the closet, and there was the red and blue parka, just like the witness described. We also picked up a lot of paper—stuff about this Armenian Secret Army—leaflets, posters. We even got carbons of a couple letters he sent to the Turkish embassy at the U.N.”
“Threats?”
“You could say that, but it’s kind of vague what he was gonna do if they didn’t come across. But they weren’t love notes.”
“But you didn’t find the ski mask?”
“No,” said Frangi, “but that don’t mean much. It’s the kind of thing that’s easy to trash.”
“I presume he’s still denying the whole thing?”
Wayne said, “Yep. We read him his rights and he clammed up. He sticks to the line he was with his girlfriend, who’s still among the missing, and he didn’t know who the other guy at the shooting was because he wasn’t at any shooting.”
“So what do you think? He’ll keep sticking to it?” asked Roland.
Wayne said, “Yeah. This boy’s no scuzzball off the block; you’re gonna have to take it the distance, Roland, unless we turn up the partner.”
“Any leads on that?”
“Nothing so far, but we haven’t been through his papers completely yet. We’ll find him.”
Roland nodded and picked up a piece of paper on which Wayne had written an inventory of the items seized from Tomasian’s home and business.
“Okay, what about these guns?”
Wayne said, “He had a damn armory in that footlocker. The pistols are new, some of them still in boxes, but a couple could have been fired. Walther P5’s, 9mm. Then we got two H&K 54 submachine guns, also 9mm, also new, with the packing grease still on them, plus about three thousand rounds of 9mm. Parabellum.”
“That’s what the vic was shot with, right?”
“Right. And illegal as hell, the bunch of it.”
“What’s his story? You ask him?”
“A shooting club. Self-protection for Armenian businessmen. He picked the stuff up in Germany, he says. Goes over a couple times a year to buy gems. He doesn’t deny he smuggled the weapons in. Says he got a good deal, he didn’t think it was any big thing.”
“How wrong he was,” said Roland. “Meanwhile, we’ll do the ballistics on all the weapons, just to make sure he didn’t use them and then clean them up and rebox them. Now what about this assassination gun?”
Frangi smiled. “Uh-huh. You don’t see many like that. In fact, there weren’t that many to begin with. It’s an old World War II, what they call a grease gun, an M3 submachine gun chambered for the 9mm. Parabellum, but this one’s modified with a built-in silencer in the barrel. They made about a thousand of them for the OSS during the war. Shoot thirty rounds out of that thing, it’d make no more noise than a wet fart in an elevator.”
Hrcany seemed about to say something but didn’t. Instead he let out a hard laugh. “Also for protection and sport, no doubt?”
“I don’t know; that one he wouldn’t talk about,” said Frangi.
Hrcany picked a heavy spring-type hand exerciser from his desk and began to squeeze the handles without apparent effort. The muscles in his forearms flexed dramatically. He thought for a minute in silence as he pumped.
“Okay, like you said, do the papers. Find the other guy. Do the ballistics. Get the witnesses in to look at the car and Tomasian—I know he was masked, but let’s go through the drill.”
“They got a rubber print off the car at the scene,” offered Wayne.
“Yeah, that too,” said Roland. “Every little bit helps.” He looked at his watch. “Okay, let’s see this bozo now. I got a full day.”
The initial Q. & A. with Aram Tomasian did not in any way diminish Hrcany’s belief that he had in custody the murderer of Mehmet Ersoy. Tomasian had a lawyer present, so Roland could not get away with his famous screaming wildman act, but he was able to confront the suspect with: his hatred of Turks; his possession of the requisite hardware and the right car; his inability to account for his whereabouts at the time of the crime and for hours on either side of it.
Tomasian’s response to all this was weak. The alibi was a joke. Even if the girlfriend showed up, her testimony was hardly gilt-edged. Tomasian admitted the letters but denied the license plate. His plate had been stolen ten days before the crime. He had reported it to the police. He had not used his car in the interim, while he waited for a replacement plate to be issued. Or so he said.
Not a bad Q. & A., Roland thought. He had enough to charge, enough to indict. When the lab stuff proved out, he’d have enough to convict. A nice package.
Delivering this package to Karp was a moment Roland had keenly anticipated, one that in his imaginings would be second only to the one when the jury returned a guilty verdict in People v. Tomasian. Roland and Karp went back a long way. They had entered Garrahy’s old operation on the same day. In a system that put a premium on toughness, on hard work for little reward, on success in the arena of the court, both had flourished. Karp had perhaps flourished a little more, but that was because, Roland had told himself in his secret heart, Karp had sucked up to old Garrahy in politics and gotten hold of a bureau chief’s job in the Criminal Courts Bureau.
Still, Roland considered himself Karp’s equal in the courtroom, and more than his equal in the battle of life. Roland had done well in the market; Karp lived on his ungenerous salary. He had a parade of young lovelies in his bed; Karp was married to a one-eyed woman who, by all Roland’s experience of her, was a massive pain in the ass. He lived in a five-room apartment in the Village; Karp lived in a converted SoHo factory. He had a perfect body: Karp was a semi-cripple.
On the other hand … what was it on the other hand? Roland had trouble pinning it down. Something about Karp irked him mightily. Perhaps it was his refusal to be patronized by Roland, his refusal to recognize that there was a contest going on. Karp was playing, and playing well, but he wasn’t watching the score.
When Hrcany entered the office, Karp had his leg up on his desk and was engaged in wrapping an Ace bandage tightly around his left knee. Roland grinned and said, “You got another call from the pros? They can’t live without your two-inch jumper?”
Karp returned a bleak look. “Screw the pros. I’m hoping I can make it to the can and back.” With a movement of his head he indicated the case file Roland was carrying. “That the U.N. thing?”
Roland slapped the folder on Karp’s desk and sat down. “Yeah, it’s wrapped up. How do you like that?”
Karp’s eyebrows rose a notch. “No kidding? The warrant paid off, huh?”
“Jackpot. The guy had an armory in his safe. We got threatening letters to the Turks. We got the parka he wore. It’s all over but the details.” He quickly filled Karp in on what the police had found.
Roland spoke confidently—in truth, with more confidence than he felt, for he was a careful and rigorous lawyer. Karp tended to bring out the boastful in him, and Karp understood this, if Roland himself did not.
Karp finished wrapping his knee and pulled his pants leg down. He smiled wanly across the desk. “Sounds great, Roland,” he said. “It could be a record for tying up a major case. What’s the guy like?”
“A little twerp. Got tired of making earrings, figured being a terrorist might be more fun. I mean, everybody else is doing it, right? Fucks it up, gets pinched the next day, now he wants out. He’s hamburger.”
“If you say so, Roland. It sure comes at a good time. Bloom’s been on the horn three, four times, what’s going down with the U.N. thing? You sure don’t want to kill anybody with political clout on his watch. I presume you’ll want to bring the good news personally to Mr. District Attorney.”
Roland did indeed want to bring the news to Bloom, and stand next to him at the press conference that Bloom would instantly arrange, but he would die before admitting it to Karp. If Roland shared Karp’s contempt for the D.A. as a legal mind, he was more attracted than Karp to power—not an unusual thing in bright and ambitious men, especially lawyers. Roland knew that, given a chance, he could manipulate the D.A.—in the interests of good, of course. The present case seemed an ideal opportunity to do so. Roland shrugged and said, “Hey, whatever.”
Karp smiled again. “Go do it, Roland. Give him a kiss for me.”
Roland laughed, a deep, loud rumble. “On the lips, Butch.”