Act of Revenge (32 page)

“And? And?”

Lapidus chuckled dryly. “You remember the old Lamplighter? It was a saloon on Baxter. A courtroom hangout. It shut down.”

“Yeah, in the early seventies. What about it?”

“This was the evening after Jerry pleaded. Bernie was there in the Lamplighter. He was falling down drunk, which we never saw before, believe me. All of us were what you would call hard drinkers in those days.” He tapped his glass with a fingernail. “They didn't move much Italian seltzer in the Lamplighter. You drank scotch. Or martinis. But controlled. You got out of hand, they'd call a cab and stick you in it. Anyway, Bernie was there, buying rounds for anyone who'd yell, ‘Fuck you, Panofsky!' And pouring Chivas down as fast as they could set it up, all the time raving about Heshy. How he wasn't going to let Heshy get away with it, he'd confess, he wasn't going to let his pal take the fall, cursing out Heshy and also Frank Currie . . .”

“He was the D.A. in the case?”

“Yeah. Not an ornament to the profession, if you want to know. Bernie was saying things like, ‘I'll confess, and Frank Currie can kiss my ass!' People were looking at each other, you know, like when there's an embarrassing drunk. But trying to ignore it. The man was bellowing. And then Jerry walks in and goes right over to him. I figure Pete Demaris, who was behind the bar at the time, must've called him. They did stuff like that in the Lamplighter all the time. It was a club, like. So Jerry goes up to him and puts an arm around him and tries to lead him out, but Bernie won't go, he's holding onto the edge of the bar. He's saying things like, no, no, Jerry, you're not taking the fall for me, I'll confess, and Jerry, angry, telling him to shut the fuck up, excuse my French. Everybody pretending it wasn't happening, but ears flapping like Dumbo. And then Pete came around the bar, this was a real
bulvan
, if you know what that is, and he just tucked Bernie under his arm and they all walked out and stuffed Bernie into a cab and Jerry got in, too.” He took another drink.

“So . . . what are you saying? That it was Bernie bribed the juror?”

“Oh, no. That was definitely Panofsky. I told you, he was the fixer. No, just when they were dragging him out the door, Bernie yelled something like, ‘I did it!' and then some names—Mintzer, De Salerno, Maddux, and some others. Well, he was raving, so no one paid any attention. Later, they remembered.”

“You've lost me, Abe.”

“Yeah, it's complicated. I'm amazed
I
can remember it myself. They were names of trusts. The firm didn't have much of a trust business, mostly local guys who made a pile in the forties, wanted to protect their families. Maybe thirty million total. Bernie was in charge of the trust operation.”

“And he was looting them.”

“Looting is strong. He was doing floats, kiting checks, stripping a little interest. He never touched the principle. But definitely stuff that would not stand up to an audit. Heshy found out about it, needless to say. Not much got past Heshy. So, Heshy sets up the frame on Jerry, who practically laughs in their face when they indict him. He's gonna cram it up Currie's you-know-what. Now, Currie, like I mentioned, is a piece of work. He's desperate to get Bollano, he's got political ambitions, wants to be Tom Dewey number two fighting the mobsters. No ethics to speak of. He figures he squeezes Fein with this bribing a juror charge, it'll be like . . . what're those things the kids break and all the toys fall out? Mexican . . . ?”

“A piñata. But what about client privilege? Jerry was their lawyer.”

“Hey, I said the guy was a nogoodnik. Fein knows all about the Bollanos, and Currie figures he's facing ruin, disbarment, he'll open up and spill goodies all around. He don't have to do it in the open. Crack the Bollano mob like that piñata. But Fein wouldn't play that game, no, he's ready to go to trial. Then Currie finds out about Bernie and the trusts, you can guess how. Now, from here it's speculation. I don't
know
any of this. You want to hear it?”

“Desperately.”

He laughed. “Okay, cookie. Let's say Currie calls up Fein. We got the goods on your partner, he's going down unless you play ball. Jerry thinks fast. He says, here's the deal—I cop to misdemeanor tampering, you lay off Bernie, and don't
schtup
me with the bar. Currie says, what about the Bollanos? Nothing doing, says Fein, you don't like it, I'll see you in court, and Bernie can take his chances. So Currie, who's no dummy, he thinks, one way I got a good collar on a Mob jury tampering, the other way I got to go up against Jerry Fein and Bernie Kusher with a weak case, I could lose my ass. And what do I care about technical violations of the trust regs? No juice there. So they deal. But afterward Currie
does
put it to him with the bar, and Jerry gets the shaft. Besides the rest of it, Currie was a mean, vindictive son of a bitch.”

“That's some story,” said Marlene, “but it makes sense. Currie's dead, you said?”

“Yeah, Garrahy, the D.A., canned him when Bernie took off.”

“Bernie took off where?”

“Oh, after Jerry died, he really did loot the trusts. Lifted over a million and disappeared. That's why I say that the people who were in the Lamplighter that night recalled the names. It was a big scandal, especially when it came out that Currie knew about the trust irregularities and did nothing as part of the deal with Fein. Bernie put that in a postcard he wrote from Papua or some South Pacific place—wrote it right to Garrahy. You know what Garrahy was like, what he'd do if he found out one of his people was blackmailing a lawyer by suppressing evidence of a crime. Fried Currie's shorts for him and gave him the boot. The man keeled over a couple of years after that. Heart. Bernie disappeared completely, lost in the Pacific.”

“Like Amelia Earhart,” said Marlene.

“Yeah, but believe me, darling, there were
more
people looking for Bernie.” Abe smiled faintly, leaned back in his chair, and took his glasses off. He looked tired, as if this journey to the past had given him a kind of jet lag.

Marlene leafed through her notes. “What about the secretary, this Shirley Waldorf? I guess she's gone, too.”

“Oh, no, she's still around. I see her from time to time on 34th Street. She lives there.”

“Oh, great! You have her address?”

“No, I mean, she lives
on
the street. She's a bag lady, Marlene. Completely
meshuggeh.
Has been for years.”

“She can't communicate at all?”

“Oh, yeah, she
communicates
, all right. You want to go through her
files
, as she calls them, and pretend that she's still a legal secretary, she'll talk your ear off. She carries pathetic piles of trash around in a couple of supermarket carts. Her
files
. Another casualty of what Jerry did.”

“If he did it,” said Marlene.

“Yeah, right, if he did it.”

In a conference room in the organized crime division they showed Karp the tape of Guma talking to Gino Scarpi at Bellevue. The camera had been concealed in the TV set, and the audio treated with sophisticated electronics to remove the sound of the TV programs so that the targets' voices came through with clarity. After the viewing, after Eitenberg had turned up the lights, Karp asked Norton Peabody, “This is all you have?”

“Isn't it enough? It looks an awful lot like conspiracy to me. Your boy's in bed with the wise guys, and apparently has been for years.”

Karp rubbed his eyes. He pointed them at Peabody, charged heavily with contempt. “Peabody, how old are you?”

The man hesitated, and then said, “Thirty-seven. Why?”

“Yeah, same as me. Ray Guma is fifty-eight, which means he was putting killers away before either of us got out of high school. He started with the Kings County D.A. in 1949. That was just after that office took apart Murder Incorporated. You have any idea what organized crime was like in New York in 1949, how powerful?”

Peabody affected a bored look. “Yes, I saw
The Godfather,
too. Where is this leading, Butch?”

Karp stared at Peabody until the other man dropped his eyes. “That's a movie, Norton. I'm talking about real life. Ray Guma started work in that environment, and three years later he got an offer from New York County and he went for it. He has over thirty years in the best homicide bureau in the country. He's probably put more actual Mafia killers in jail than anyone else in the United States. And you have the gall to call him dirty?”

Peabody shrugged. “So they threw him a fish once in a while, just like a trained seal. He still looks like a trained seal to me.”

Karp got up, and reflected yet again how nice it was to be big and tall. Peabody was, by contrast, well named. Karp loomed over the smaller man for a long moment, fists clenched, until Peabody discovered that it was urgent to turn off the VCR and retrieve his tape. He stayed by the machine, a comfortable three yards from Karp, who said, with conviction, “This is going to be an embarrassment for you guys if you try to construe that horseshit as serious evidence. And I know that Mr. Colombo really hates to be embarrassed in public. His long, scaly tail lashes around in fury and does all kinds of damage to the people close to him.” He nodded politely to both men and left.

He trotted across Foley Square to the courthouse, went directly to Guma's office, knocked.

“I'm on the phone,” said the occupant's voice. Karp barged in anyway and made urgent circular motions with his index finger.

Guma said into the phone, “Sol, I'll have to call you back, I got a crisis here.”

He replaced the receiver and looked up at Karp, who said, “I just came from the Southern District. Your subpoena is because they got the prison ward thing on tape. You and Scarpi.”

“Fuck! Ah,
shit
, I should've figured they had the place bugged.”

Karp threw himself into an old-fashioned wooden swivel chair, making it rattle. “Well, according to them, said tape demonstrates that you're the Mob's mole in the D.A. They were pretty convincing. Quote, I'm in the
famiglia.
Quote, you'll be the first to know. Quote, the fix is in. Unquote. Easy to misconstrue, no?”

“Misconstrue? Shit, Butch, you can
misconstrue
‘good morning' negative if you put your mind to it. What went on between Gino and me was just the usual horseshit I do with those guys. Nobody takes it seriously.”

“Colombo does.”

“Right, and he's a fuckhead, we know that. Next question.”

Karp took a deep breath. “Okay, you're right. Jack will go a little ballistic, but who the fuck cares? Right is on our side, and that's what counts. It looks like shit, but I don't care about appearances, and you sure as shit don't either. I mean, Guma,
look
at you!”

Guma looked down at his chest and then at Karp. Then he laughed. Karp laughed, too, and said, “Meanwhile, I can't do anything about whatever passed between you and Gino, so you will respond to their fucking subpoena like a good citizen, and answer all questions asked, and explain what a jocular remark is, and fuck them if they can't take a joke.”

Guma laughed briefly, then sobered. “It's a damn good thing grand juries are secret.”

“Why?” asked Karp, and then it hit him. “Oh, you mean the boys might think you . . .”

“Guaranteed. This gets out, nobody in town with a vowel on the end of his name's gonna want to talk to me, and I'll be wearing Kevlar underwear for the rest of my life.”

Chapter 15

THEY WERE SITTING ON A WARM ROCK overlooking the 97th Street transverse in Central Park, eating pho out of styrofoam boxes and washing it down with black tea from cardboard cartons, when Tran gestured with his chopsticks at the humming traffic below and said, in Vietnamese, “Dear child, suppose you have two squads, say sixteen men. Where would you dispose them so as to block that road?”

Lucy sighed dramatically and rolled her eyes. “I would have them join hands and march down the middle of it, of course. Why do you ask?”

“She mocks her elders. I see you will have to be drowned after all, and here is a large body of water convenient to the task.” He seized the back of her vest with his free hand and mock-pulled her in the direction of the reservoir. She giggled and shrugged away. “But truly, Uncle Tran, why at every street corner do you ask me, how would you attack that building, or defend it? When I was younger it was our game, but now it is peculiar. Ought I to worry about your mental powers?”

“Your concern for my failing mind is worthy and I thank you. Nevertheless, the reason for my asking such questions is plain. ‘Sea becomes mulberry fields and returns to sea.' As you have read. Things change in unpredictable ways. When I was your age, I knew without the slightest doubt that I was going to teach literature at the Lycée Chasseloupe Laubat in Saigon. My future was planned, arranged, and secure, just as you imagine yours is. In the event, however, it proved necessary for me to acquire skills I did not dream of then, no more than poor Kieu in her father's garden imagined she would serve in a brothel and live as a bandit queen. The potter's wheel spins, disasters come flying on the wind, as they say.”

His eyes, as he said this, were both sad and fierce, and she felt a chill. “Very well, Uncle,” she said, and between slurps of noodle and pointing with her chopsticks she designated the positions of the riflemen, the machine guns, the fixed charges, the rocket launchers, and the planned concentrations of mortar fire in the dead ground. Tran responded with more questions, and soon they had so effective a kill zone designed that, had it been put into effect, New Yorkers would have found it far harder to get across the park than was presently the case.

They finished their meal, and Lucy trotted over the rise to find a basket for the trash. Tran had been her constant companion during her outings to the Columbia lab these last days, which was nearly the only time she got out, except for church. She was stifling but resolved not to show it, least of all to Tran.

She returned to the rock shelf and sat. Tran was still and silent, watching the road, as if he were preparing an actual ambush.

“Why are we waiting here, Uncle Tran?” she asked after some minutes. “My bottom is sore from this rock.”

“Have you any pressing engagements?”

“Only with the remainder of my life, if you can call it that,” she sighed, switching to her native tongue.

“In that case you can practice being still, a useful attainment, as you know. Squat also, as I do, rather than slouch like an empress on a divan. This will relieve your . . . ah, you are saved. Here is what we await.”

A dark Ford van had pulled up on the shoulder of the transverse, discharging an Asian man in a tan suit and large sunglasses. He walked up the little hill and stopped at the base of the rock ledge. Tran formally introduced girl and gangster. They both nodded politely, and then Freddie Phat said, “They are back.”

“Where were they, do you know?” asked Tran.

“Upstate, and in Connecticut, Hartford, pulling home invasions. Kenny's telling everyone that the first thing he's going to do is kill you.”

Tran smiled unpleasantly. “Then I must flee for certain. Tell me, is Leung with them?”

“No, still gone. What they say on the street is he has traveled to Hong Kong, to report, and that he will return with his own people.”

Tran stood up, as did Lucy, who repressed the desire to massage her aching knees. Tran said, “That is interesting, and gives a certain urgency to our task. At this moment a freight container with ten assassins in it might be unloading at some airport. Where are the Vo now?”

“Their apartment on Hester, off Lafayette. They keep girls there. What do you want to do?”

“Oh, by all means let us visit, and join the party. Perhaps Lucy will read us passages from
The Tale of Kieu
, and we can all have a good cry.”

Tran and Lucy mounted the motorcycle, and they followed Phat in his van out of the park and downtown to Lafayette, parking both vehicles some distance from the junction of that broad avenue with Hester Street. Lucy sat in the back of the van and watched Phat talk to the man he had set to watch the house. There was some agitated conversation, and Phat showed considerable irritation. Lucy gathered that the two brothers had gone out a few minutes before. Tran and Phat and two of his boys went up into the house. The driver and the man Phat had used to watch the house sat in the front seats. The windows of the van were tinted to near opacity, and they kept the engine running and the A/C on, drowning out the sounds of the street. It was like being in a spaceship. The two men ignored her, nor did she wish very much to converse with them. (So, how do you like being a gangster . . . ?)

Instead she opened her
Kieu
and read about Kieu's romance with the bandit-rebel chieftain Tu Hai, fairly hot stuff, and this kept her occupied, reading and thinking that she was uncomfortably close to hanging out with bandit chieftains herself, until the van's door slid open and there was Tran, dragging by the arm a thin Vietnamese whom Lucy recognized from her kidnapping as Nguyen Van Minh, called Cowboy.

Tran threw the boy facedown into the space between the two rows of seats and kicked him flat, wrenched his arms around, and secured his wrists together with plastic cable tie.

“Do you recognize this garbage?” he asked Lucy.

“Yes, he's one of the kidnappers,” she said, and added quickly, “but he didn't hurt me.”

“Lucky for him.”

“What will you do with him?” she asked.

“I believe
Ong
Phat will offer him hospitality,” Tran replied, “and then perhaps his cousins, who seem to have stepped out for a while, will try to get him, and then we all sit down and have a talk about Mr. Leung and his various projects. You need not concern yourself.”

He turned away to speak to Phat and Phat's minions. Lucy leaned over the Vietnamese youth.

“Cowboy, don't be afraid,” she whispered in Vietnamese.

The youth twisted his head around. Lucy could see the side of his face and the livid bruise along his jaw, and a bit of swollen and bloody mouth, and one eye, white-rimmed and staring like a cow's.

“Don't worry, I won't let them hurt you.”

He replied, “What can you do? You are only a girl.”

“So was Kieu. Listen: Phat is the dog of Tran, and Tran loves me. Be calm and don't struggle or try to escape. I will see that you come out of this all right.”

She left the van and went to Tran. Motioning him aside, she said, “I want you to promise me something, Uncle Tran.”

“If I can,” he said.

“See that no harm comes to that boy.”

He frowned down at her, but she met his gaze. He said, “But, my dear girl, we require information from him. What if he does not wish to give it? These are dangerous people, and we must eliminate any danger that they pose to us. To you perhaps most of all.”

“I will interrogate him myself.”

Tran suppressed a smile. “Will you? I had not realized that was one of your talents. I look forward to learning much at your feet.”

“You mock me, but I tell you he will speak to me. Now promise!”

The Vietnamese gangsters were staring at this colloquy, which to them had much of the effect of Fay Wray dressing down King Kong.

After a long, tense moment Tran grinned, nodded sharply, and said, “I promise. And I must say that this is a remarkable and romantic gesture. I had not expected such gestures from you, at least not for some time.”

“Then you should not have given me that book,” said Lucy.

Dinner that night at the Karps' was a subdued affair. Desultory conversation, and the click of utensils, a monastery repast almost, with each member of the family locked in private thoughts. Lucy excused herself early, kissing both her father (with an especially close embrace) and her mother (a more formal yet still tender one), something she had not done for a while. Marlene set the espresso pot on the flame and sat down to finish her wine. Karp, she noted, had poured himself a glass too: rarer that, even than Lucy's kisses.

“You look a little tattered,” she said. “What's going on?”

“You look tattered yourself.”

“No,
I
look
destroyed
. Ruined.
You
look tattered. What is it, the agony of command? Trouble being Queen for a Day?”

“Oh, not really. A little spat with the Southern District.” He told her about Guma's subpoena and its sequelae.

“Jack will shit,” she said with assurance.

“Uh-huh, but he'll be pissed at Tommy C., not Guma.”

“Mmm. I take your point about not hauling Mr. Lie before your grand jury without some better idea of who the hell he is and what he's done, but is Jack going to sit with that, with all the political pressure he's under?”

“Roland thinks he'll roll on it. I mean, the upside is pretty clear and straightforward. He gets a grand jury witness who'll implicate Pigetti and maybe the Bollanos, and provide corroboration, give us the people who lifted Eddie, maybe physical evidence—”

“But you're concerned Lie'll also say, oh, and by the way, I pulled the trigger on Eddie Cat and I also did some other little jobs for various people, and you won't be able to touch him on those.”

“You got it, and also there's the real possibility that Pigetti didn't do it,” said Karp, and took another drink of wine, toyed with a plastic soldier one of the boys had left at the table, and returned in his thoughts to the idea that had been niggling at him for weeks, the real reason he had not done the expedient thing and gone ahead and cleared Lie for the grand jury.

“Earth to Butch, hello?” said his wife.

“Excuse me?”

“I've been talking for five minutes, and you haven't heard anything I said. Where were you?”

“I'm sorry, Champ, what were you saying?”

“Never mind that, what were you thinking? Except, if it was an elaborate sexual fantasy not featuring me, I don't want to hear about it.”

He said, “How can you drink a pint of espresso this late at night?”

“Don't change the subject. What's going on?”

“Nothing. It's just a feeling, a . . . an aura. I have the sense of some presence, some controlling force behind all this, the Catalano thing, the business Lucy's involved in, the Sing killings. Shit! And I can't figure out how the pieces fit. We have one low-ranking wetback Chinese gangster, who walks into the D.A.'s office, asking for me personally, with a half-wit lawyer, and says he's willing to act as a witness against Joe Pigetti, and this gangster seems to have a remarkably clear understanding of the immunity procedures available in New York state. Why? Because he's scared that the Mob is going to get him, he says. Marlene, I looked this guy in the face, and I have never seen anyone less scared in my life. His
lawyer
was scared shitless, but
he
wasn't. You ask me, the little bastard could eat the whole Bollano mob à la marinara. And this guy has
no
traces, none, no car, no bank account, no drugs, but when we check him out with Hong Kong, we find out he's really a guy named Nia who's got big-time triad contacts over in the Far East. That's one thing we do know for sure, from fingerprints: Lie is definitely the man the Hong Kong cops know as Nia. That's only mystery number one. Mystery number two: the whole leadership of the Bollano organization is knocked out, except for the don himself: Catalano killed, Pigetti accused, Little Sally in jail, charged with attempted murder, et cetera. Does somebody have a big hard-on for the Bollanos? And are they using us to get them?”

“But there's no connect between Little Sally and the other two,” Marlene objected. “He got in trouble because his wife cut out on him.”

“Yeah, right, it's a coincidence. Just like it's a coincidence that two big triad guys got whacked the same week as Eddie Cat, at which murder our little girl might well have been a witness, and then a Chinese gangster with triad connections comes in and asks to see me personally, and shortly thereafter, another no-name Chinese gangster, Leung, starts hiring people to threaten Lucy and find out what she knows, among other things, to demonstrate to dear old dad how easily his daughter could be snatched. That's mystery number three. Too many mysteries in a limited area, Champ. I have this sense that somebody is sitting out there pulling the strings, some . . . some
intelligence
, moving around little plastic soldiers.” Angrily he flicked the actual soldier with his index finger. It flew across the room, ricocheted off the refrigerator, and landed, clanging, in a steel mixing bowl awaiting rinsing on the drainboard of the sink.

“Two points,” muttered Karp.

“Yes, and an example of the role of the random in our lives.”

“What, you think all of that
is
just coincidence?”

“I don't know,” she said. “The killings could be connected. Lie and Leung could be working for the same outfit. But I do know that the joker in your deck is Vivian. Why did she split just then after years of marriage to the scumbag? And in a way guaranteed to send Little Sal off the rails and get him into deep trouble?”

“I like that she was boffing Eddie Cat, and when he got it, she figured she was next and ran.”

“No way,” said Marlene. “Scarpi was right; it had been that, they would've used the knife, and made her watch. No, it was something from the deep past reached up and bit her on the ass. That's why this Jumping Jerry investigation is happening.” And she told him what she had learned that day from Doherty and Abe Lapidus.