Act of Revenge (30 page)

A worried look crossed Scarpi's face as he said, “Yeah, but, Guma? Seriously, you think you can do me some good? I mean, I can take a jolt upstate but not cripped up like this.”

Guma leaned over and patted Scarpi on the knee. “Hey,
paisan
, you know I'll do what I can do.” He winked. “The fix is in.”

“That's quite a story, Goom,” said Karp later that afternoon when Guma had concluded the tale of his hospital visit. “What's your take?”

They were in Karp's office, Guma on the couch, Roland Hrcany on a side chair tilted precariously back against the wall, Karp in the big swivel chair behind the desk.

“What's my take? You're gonna laugh, but I think the mutt was leveling with me.”

Hrcany did laugh, forced, hooting, unpleasant and overlong. “You're losing it, Goom. Too much time with the little birdies and fishies on the TV. You really expected the little fuckhead to tell you the
truth
?”

“Well, yeah, Roland, as a matter of fact. I realize he's just Mafia scum, but I made a living for years out of knowing when these guys are straight and when they're not, and he wasn't lying. Why should he? You honestly think he thought I was being cute? That I would double-cross him to make a case?”

Roland sniffed and picked up Karp's precious Mickey Mantle baseball. He tossed it up and caught it one-handed. “Okay, say you're right. Where does that put us? If Willie boy
is
lying, then why? What's in it for him?”

They thought. After some moments, Karp ventured, “He's moving smack, and it must be major weight if he's dealing directly with Joe P. He lied about being a dealer for the Bollanos. In fact, he's a supplier and a money launderer. And, let's say he rips them off on some delivery and the boys come after him and he panics and decides to go for protection. He figures that ratting out Joe P. for the Catalano hit . . . ah, shit, that doesn't work.”

“Yeah, 'cause Gino would've mentioned that,” said Roland, “and also, your point earlier, he's a chink. He doesn't really need protection. A ticket out of town and he's history as far as the Mob is concerned.”

“Especially since he may not even be Willie Lie,” said Karp. Then he told them what V.T. had told him about the ID from Hong Kong and the triad connection, to the accompaniment of muttered cursing and startled exclamations from the two other men.

“A fucking egg roll,” was Guma's summation. “Looks simple on the outside, but who the fuck knows what's in it.”

Gloomy silence for minutes thereafter, into which Karp put, “Okay, we could speculate all day and all night. What have we actually got?” He ticked the points off on his long fingers. “One, Lie's uncorroborated story about Pigetti. Two, the fact that someone or something is knocking off the big guns of the Bollano family. Three, Eddie Cat was killed in such a manner as to give Joe P. and his whole crew an alibi. Four, Little Sally's wife left him for a woman's shelter shortly after Eddie got killed. Five, the uncorroborated testimony comes from a Chinese gangster with possible triad connections who comes in voluntarily, asks for me personally, volunteers to be a grand jury witness, knows all about transactional immunity, and bolts when he doesn't get it. Okay, six: Willie Lie is for all intents and purposes nobody. He seems to have no money and no drugs we've been able to find. Have I left anything out?”

Roland said, “Yeah, Tommy Colombo.”

“What do you mean? What's he got to do with anything?”

“He's got Lie. He's offered him what he wants on the federal side, but he'd love for us to play along, and nail both Joey and the Sals on murder charges. He'll keep the pressure up on Jack: why isn't the D.A. letting this little schmo skate in order to get these vicious kingpin killers? And if we put him in front of a grand jury without cutting him the deal he wants, he'll either clam or perjure himself—and that means that the only way we can hang on to him is on a pissant contempt or perjury charge, which will make Jack look like a prize ass, he's gumming up the crusade against the big bad Mob. Believe me, Butch, Jack's ready to roll on this, give the Chinaman his blind deal, anything to make the murder case against Pigetti. If Lie gets that, he'll give us the shooter, maybe the gun, the details, corroboration up the ass, the whole nine yards. So if that happens, all your points become moot. Joe P. goes down for the hit, case closed.”

“That can't happen,” said Karp. “Roland, I can feel it: there's an intelligence behind this, behind Willie, and it's playing all of us, you, me, the Bollanos, Colombo. Something's going on here that's bigger than putting one wise guy in jail for shooting another wise guy. Goom, if Pigetti and Lie were together on the hit like Lie says, would Scarpi necessarily know about it? I mean, could Pigetti keep it secret from the Bollano guys?”

“Hell, yeah, in principle. Joey'd be taking a big chance, and Lie would have to be a major player to set up Catalano on the basis of an eye wink from Joe. But then why does he turn around and screw Joey with this testimony bullshit? What's his game?”

“He wants to squash the Bollano family?” Karp suggested.

Roland let his chair rock down, and he tossed the baseball to Karp. “That may be, Butch, but that's not what they're buying today. Today the choices are ‘D.A. convicts mobster' or ‘D.A. fucks up big-time, U.S. attorney convicts mobster.' Unless you can come up with something with enough juice to give Jack a third choice, I'm guessing he's sooner or later going to roll over for Mr. Lie.”

Mr. Leung was at that moment well content. Mobilizing Willie Lie had worked as he had expected. Lie would keep the Italians confused, weakened, and occupied, at little risk to the plan. The Chens and their tong were neutralized for the time being. Karp had proved a disappointment; he should have leaped at the opportunity to bring a murder charge against Pigetti, but he had not. Was it possible that his daughter had been talking to him? But would a man like that heed a child, a girl child, no matter how skillful? It was hard to credit. He sensed from what he understood of the interaction between Lie and the federal prosecutor that there was an intense rivalry between Colombo and Karp. Clearly they were working for different political factions, just as in China. Perhaps money should be offered. Meanwhile, the snipe and the clam were still focused on one another, and Leung himself was perfectly safe, moving silently and steadily up the beach. It was just as the drunken American in Macao had predicted.

Chapter 14

IT TOOK MARLENE AN HOUR ON THE Long Island Expressway to get to the Nassau County line and nearly another hour on feeder roads roaming the cloned streets of Great Neck Estates to find the colonial split-level house occupied by retired detective John (Black Jack) Doherty. As usual when making a cold call like this, she'd had Sym make a telephone contact to make sure the mark was still alive and not senile. (No, Mr. Doherty did not want to buy any aluminum siding from the young woman.)

The house was large and white and clean-looking, an American-dream kind of dwelling, set back on a broad, closely clipped lawn shaded by well-grown red maples. There was a gray Chrysler Le Baron, three years old and spotless, in the driveway. Over the doorway, fixed in the center of the triangular pediment, screamed a black iron eagle, below which was a small flagpole carrying the stars and stripes.

Marlene stood under the sluggishly moving banner and pushed the bell button, which was set into a brass plaque with another eagle on it. A brass eagle also served as a knocker on the shiny black door. As she waited, she could not help reflecting how much grander this house was than the one her parents lived in, although as far as earnings were concerned, a cop and a plumbing contractor had been about on a par back in the fifties. Maybe his wife worked, or his kids struck it rich and bought it for him, she thought, not really believing it.

The man who answered the door was in his mid sixties, stocky, with a dark, angular face, black hair going speckled gray on the sides, thick black eyebrows over dark eyes, a good example of the physiognomic style called Black Irish, supposedly representing gene lines dumped on the shamrock shore by the wreckage of the Armada. He was dressed for suburban comfort in a green cardigan, tan Lacoste shirt, pale blue Sansabelt trousers, and woven leather slip-ons. The fishing magazine he was holding completed the picture of a prosperous retiree, but his eyes were still cop eyes when he looked Marlene up and down. She was still something to see, with the face covered in yellowy-mauve blotches, but she had made the effort, having donned a blue linen suit, a crisp primrose blouse, heels, and a snappy panama hat to hide the Frankenstein stitches on her bristly skull. The cops still had her gun, and she was in no great hurry to get another one.

“Yes? Can I help you?”

“You can if you're John Doherty. Harry Bello suggested I look you up.”

She could see him thinking. The NYPD has something over two thousand detectives, of whom only two hundred or so are detectives first grade. Bello had been one and Doherty had not, and even if their careers had not been exactly contemporary, Doherty would have heard of Bello as a rising hotshot.

“Harry Bello. In Brooklyn, yeah. I was in the city my whole career. He still with the force?”

“No, he retired and went private. I'm his partner, Marlene Ciampi.” She held out a business card, one of the old Bello & Ciampi versions.

He read it, and when he looked up his gaze remained suspicious. They were still standing on the doorstep, and he had not yet made a gesture to invite her over his threshold. “What's this about, Miss Ciampi?”

“One of your old cases bears on an investigation we're running for a client. Harry thought you could be helpful, maybe supply some background that never got written into a DD–5.”

“What case would that be?”

“Gerald Fein. You remember it?”

The big eyebrows rose a quarter inch. “Hard to forget that one.” He looked at his watch. “I got an eleven o'clock tee-off at Fresh Meadows, but I could talk for a couple of minutes. Come on in.”

He turned and led the way back into the house, through a small entrance hall past a living room demonstrating that the Dohertys must be among the very best customers of the Ethan Allen Company, down a hallway lined with family photographs (wife, four good-looking kids, an assortment of probable grandchildren), and into a pine-paneled room that was clearly the master's den. Doherty seated himself in a big maroon leather recliner and indicated a needlepoint-cushioned maple rocker for her to sit in. Marlene took in the unsurprising decor: framed photographs of Doherty in uniform and plainclothes with other smiling men, all Irish-looking, similarly dressed, awards, plaques, two stuffed fish of good size, a bass and a tarpon, an antique wooden eagle, hooked rugs on the floor, and the furniture, desk, chairs (except the man's recliner) impeccably early American maple and pine. Esthetic consistency was clearly a major value
chez
Doherty.

Settled, Doherty did not beat about the bush. “You want to know was the suicide legit?”

“Yeah, that'd be a good place to start.”

He made a steeple of his fingers and looked out the window past beige drapes printed with flags and drums to a small stone patio and the yard beyond. “Officially, we found no evidence of foul play. The man went up to the observation deck, bought a ticket, opened a locked maintenance door, went out onto the overhang below the deck windows, and climbed over the parapet.”

“And unofficially?”

“Unofficially . . . ? Well, I was the junior guy on the case. Arnie Mulhausen was running it, and he couldn't get rid of it fast enough. But I had some problems, yes.”

“Like?”

“Okay, no note. Not unusual, but you have to figure, a lawyer, a man uses words every day . . . it made me itch a little. Arnie's take was, hey, the guy was nuts, right? Who else takes a header off of the Empire State? So I'm doing interviews, family, friends, associates—”

“Excuse me a second, Mr. Doherty, this kind of investigation for a jumper—it's not that usual either, is it?”

“Well, it's sad to say, it depends on the person. A cop eats the gun, hey, it's pretty cut and dried. Some guy gets out of Creedmore and jumps in front of a bus, same thing. Guy, a Mob lawyer, no history of depression, goes off a building, we look a little harder. So, my other problem, like I was saying, I couldn't get anyone to tell me Fein was depressed, despondent, whatever. The wife, the daughter, colleagues. He was laughing, he had plans to recover, he wasn't hurting that bad for money.”

“Except for Herschel Panofsky,” said Marlene.

“Yeah, except for him,” said Doherty, giving her an interested cop look.

“That didn't make you suspicious?”

“Oh, suspicious, yeah. But, like Arnie said, who's to say the guy didn't have a great front, the only guy he leveled with was his partner? I checked up on Panofsky, just on my own, and he was alibied pretty tight on the day of. The guy became a judge later on. Changed his name. Anyway, I let it go.”

“Anything else fishy?”

He frowned. “Fishy isn't the word I would use here. But, yeah, there was the key business. The door to the maintenance area was always locked. The management was real careful about that, for obvious reasons. Fein had a key. We found it in his pocket after he hit. Where'd he get it? We figured he bought it off one of the maintenance guys, and we sweated every one of them, every person who had access to a copy, and came up with zip.” He paused and stared out the window again. From the yard came the liquid trilling of a robin, and they both listened to it for a while.

Doherty looked at his watch and leaned forward in his recliner. “I got to start moving,” he said.

Marlene put away her notebook and stood. “You've been very helpful.”

“I wish I had something else for you. You know, you have, detectives have, hundreds of cases, and most of the time you figure you gave it your best shot. Here, though . . .” He waggled a hand. “Nothing to go on, not really. And the family bought it, and that was it, case closed. Everybody bought it, as a matter of fact, except the secretary. She wasn't in any doubt.”

“Secretary?”

“Uh-huh. Fein's personal secretary. She took it harder than the family, practically. She got to be something of a pain in the you-know-where after. She couldn't understand why we were treating it as a suicide when she knew for a fact that it wasn't.”

“What was her evidence of that . . . oh, first, do you recall her name?”

“Yeah, as a matter of fact I do. A hard one to forget. Waldorf, like the hotel; first name . . . ?” He closed his eyes for a moment, opened them. “Jesus, it's gone! Sheila? Sharon? One of those. What she had was a bunch of letters, carbons, of stuff he'd sent out, all about relocating in California, applying for the bar there. Plans, you know? Therefore, not going to kill himself. Arnie looked at her stuff, didn't find anything definite. She kept coming by, here's more papers, Detective. After a while we didn't bother looking. I mean, the case was closed. Panofsky had to get rid of her. I guess she was an embarrassment.”

Marlene made a note, shook hands, and they walked together to the front door, in her head asking the questions that couldn't be asked out loud, like how does an ex-cop on a pension afford a half-million-dollar house and a country club membership, tarpon fishing in Florida, and exactly how bent had Arnie Mulhausen been, and who else got paid off, and by whose money, for whisking Gerald Fein's murder under the rug back in 1960?

Ray Guma walked into Karp's office unannounced, slammed the door behind him, and flipped the thing onto Karp's desk. Karp looked at it, and then up at Guma, who was frowning so hard that his chin showed dimples and his thick eyebrows nearly met in the middle.

“That looks like a subpoena, Ray,” said Karp. He picked it up with two fingers, like a dead fish, and snapped the folded document open. “Yep. I was right. It's a federal subpoena. When did you get it?”

“Just now. What the fuck is going on, Butch?”

“You got me,” said Karp. He read through the document. “No indication of what they want you for, but there never is. The statute is 18 U.S.C.371, the good old criminal-conspiracy steamer trunk, could be anything. Got a guilty conscience, Goom?”

“Get out of here! Me?”

Karp laughed. He read the name of the issuing assistant U.S. attorney. “Douglas E. Eitenberg. You know him?”

“Never heard of the asshole. He must be new.”

“Call him yet?”

“No, I was so pissed I didn't trust myself not to blow up on the phone there. I figured Jack's out of town, you're the man, I'd talk to you first.”

“Wise. You want me to call him?”

“I want you to rip his lungs out.”

“Maybe later. Okay, Goom, calm down, go back downstairs, give Roland a heads-up on it so he knows what's happening, and since I'm king for a day, I will call our colleagues and find out what the story is.”

Keegan was at the Greenbriar in West Virginia at a big-time legal institute barbecue of the sort that he never offered to let Karp stand in at. Karp would be the district attorney for two whole days. As such, according to protocol, he should have called the U.S. attorney directly, or Eitenberg's boss in the organized crime and public corruption division, but he decided to let protocol go hang for once, and just penetrate through the bureaucracy in the hope that his temporary clout would blast some plain speaking loose from the lowly worker bee across the square.

He had O'Malley make the call (this is the office of the district attorney calling) and got the guy on hold and kept him there for a minute.

Eitenberg had a light voice, one that seemed only recently to have changed, and he spoke very carefully, with more than the usual number of ahs and ums.

After the briefest pleasantries, Karp said, “Yeah, Mr. Eitenberg, just checking out this subpoena you issued to one of our assistants, Mr. Raymond Guma. Do you recall that one?” Eitenberg did. “Well, here's the thing, Mr. Eitenberg, as a rule, we in the criminal justice business, being the good guys and all, we try to avoid this sort of thing, throwing subpoenas at one another. I mean, just as an example, if one of your fine federal law enforcement officers inadvertently violated the laws of New York state, we would not expect to find them in shackles walking the perp walk the next morning. No, a couple of phone calls, a friendly meeting or two, we'd straighten it all out. Unless there's some particular reason why Mr. Colombo doesn't want to go that way.” Silence on the line.

“Is there?” Karp asked. Ums and mumbles, and Mr. Eitenberg would like to consult with his management.

Fifteen minutes later, that management called, in the person of Norton Peabody, the head of the organized crime division, a man Karp knew to say hello to, and by reputation. Buttoned down and intense was the rep. More pleasantries, after which Peabody said, “Doug Eitenberg tells me you have some issues on this subpoena we sent out to Raymond Guma.”

“Issues, yeah. I didn't mean to get your boy all bent out of shape, but we were a little concerned. A subpoena? Why not a call? Or a visit? You look out your window, you could wave at my office.”

“Well, the problem with that approach, Butch, is your guy showed up on surveillance saying some pretty disturbing things to a pretty bad wise guy. We thought it was best to keep the whole thing formal for now. You understand, given the sensitivity—”

“What wise guy was that, Norton?”

“Gino Scarpi. We have them taped in the prison ward at Bellevue.”

“Oh, for crying out loud, Peabody! Ray was interviewing Scarpi at my direct request.”

“That's interesting. It was clear from our tape that he had no recording device on him. Was there one in the room?”

“No, because he wasn't there to gather evidence. He was there to gather intelligence. It's not the same thing.”

A pause. “Don't you think it's irregular to send an assistant district attorney to talk to a Mob gunman? Don't you have investigators for that?”

“Yes, of course, but so what? He wasn't sneaking off to conspire with a criminal, for God's sake. He was interviewing a prisoner at my direction. And for this he becomes subject to a subpoena? What is
wrong
with you guys?”