Act of Revenge (33 page)

“That's interesting about Judge Paine being such a bad boy back in the old days,” said Karp. “He's really cleaned up his act, if true. I've never heard a whisper about him being bent. The opposite, in fact. He's hell on the defendant, especially Mob defendants.”

“People change,” said Marlene. “Maybe. By the way, I went by Sophie's after I finished with Abe. I think I caught her and her enamorata in a compromising position. She was wearing a lavender wrapper with an actual feathered collar and silk mules.”

“This is Jake?”

“Yeah. He stayed in the bedroom, probably in black silk pj's and a scarlet quilted monogrammed robe with tassels. Me and Sophie chatted briefly. I didn't want to take her away from a hot time, especially, God forbid, you can never tell if it might be her last one. And Abe was right, she didn't know any of the legal details, but she filled me in pretty good on the family and friends. A very fifties story. The king and the queen in paradise, with the perfect little girl, and of course they had the usual Jewish princess and rich daddy relationship, and also we got the best friend—”

“Kusher, the
gonif.
”

“Yeah, but before he achieved
gonif
-hood. A swell guy, sort of the third wheel around Jerry and the lovely Ceil, his bride. Ceil's a little soft in the upper stories, according to Sophie, but very decorative, played a lot of guts canasta. Bernie's the jokester, the boys play practical jokes on each other, gag gifts, costumes, while they make a nice living defending the Mob.”

“Was Bernie schtupping the wife, do you think?”

“God, I didn't think to ask! And I thought
I
was the one with the dirty mind.”

“A possibility, anyway,” said Karp. “It's always the best friend. A guy dies, suicide or foul play, you look at that the first day. And the man did vanish.”

“Well, they were discreet as hell if so, because I haven't heard a whisper. Anyhow, into this paradise comes the serpent Panofsky. Jerry's being his usual amenable self, and Panofsky brought some family money into the firm, which never hurts, and the kid washes out as a trial guy and he becomes the fixer, et cetera, which we knew already, and also, get this, he conceives a passion for, guess who?”

“The lovely and talented Vivian?”

“Right, and naturally it's a joke,” said Marlene. “She's a dewy sixteen, and a stunner, he's pushing thirty, and he looks like an armpit, as we know, a young armpit maybe, but still, and according to Sophie, he's hanging around her, weekends at the beach, it's embarrassing, he won't let up. Finally she tells him to take a hike in no uncertain terms. He still doesn't get the picture, so Jerry has a talk with him, nice but firm. Then he lets up. This is in August, say, and that fall, that's when the jury-tampering scandal breaks.”

“You're saying Panofsky framed Jerry because . . . what, he was
spurned
by the beauteous Vivian?”

“Hey, far be it from me to cast aspersions at a distinguished jurist, but it does have a certain poetic resonance, a Jacobean flavor,
The White Devil
or
The Spanish Tragedy
. I can just see the ugly little fuck licking his lips and rubbing his hands together as he takes his revenge.” Marlene rolled her eye horribly, licked her lips, and wrung her hands to demonstrate.

Karp shook his head and gave his wife a cockeyed look. “And . . . after twenty-odd years, what? What happened to make her break out? And come to that, how do we go from spurning Panofsky to accepting a nasty psychopath, the young Bollano?”

“Oh, well, that was
after
Jerry's jump,” said Marlene. “The girl is desperate, miserable, vulnerable, the mom is a dim bulb, and, you have to say, the mope at least is a handsome devil. Maybe he said, yeah, honey, some mobster aced your old man and by God we're going to find him and whack him out, and maybe he did, or he said he did. And then she finds out just recently he really didn't, he was blowing smoke to get her in the sack.”

Karp laughed. “Makes a great movie, Champ, but . . .” He rubbed his thumb and index finger together. “Where's the beef?”

“Yeah, right,” she agreed with a sigh. “But I still got people to talk to, Nobile the gofer and maybe I can dig up this bag lady, get her story. I called Paine's office for an appointment and got one for tomorrow.”

“Oh, I'd love to be a fly on the wall for that,” said Karp.

“Yeah, especially the part where I trade sexual favors for the straight poop. Euuugh!” She shuddered elaborately. “Meanwhile”—she consulted her watch—“want to watch some TV? That's all I have energy for right now.”

“In a bit. Let me just go spend some time with Lucy.”

He walked down the hall, feeling a bit of a sneak, because when she kissed him at the table, his daughter had whispered a request for him to do just that, later, in her room.

He knocked, got a “come in,” and found his daughter in bed, reading
The Loom of Language
. She put the book down, and his heart sagged at how peaked she looked, like an abandoned nestling.

“What's up, kid?” he asked as he turned her desk chair around and sat.

“If I tell you stuff, like crime stuff, can I, like, stop telling you when I want, or do I have to tell the whole thing?”

“I assume this is not just hypothetical.”

“No, it's real.”

Karp waited a beat or two, nodded, and said, “Okay. Here's the deal. If you give me information about a crime or criminal activity, then I'm obliged to take official cognizance of it. I mean if you say, ‘Dad, I saw Joe shoot Jim,' then I have to go after Joe and I have to name you as a witness. I got no choice here. The cops get called, they interrogate you, they interrogate Joe . . .”

He stopped because Lucy was shaking her head. “No, I mean, I just want to give you some information about a suspect. Like I saw a guy on a wanted poster and then I spotted him on the street. Do I have to say how I got it or if other stuff happened? I mean, I
want
to tell you, it's, like, the
right
thing, because it could stop a bad crime and people I know could get into trouble, but do you have to, like,
bug
me to tell you every little thingee about it, I mean, how I know and stuff?”

She was suffering, he could see it, and he wanted to enfold her in protective arms and make all this go away, and he thought about what Marlene had said in the hospital room that day, about who Lucy really
was
. A hug from daddy would not, in fact, make it all better.

“Lucy,” he said, “let's keep it real simple. You just tell me what you want to tell me, and I won't bug you for any more. But I will take the actions I think are necessary, both as a member of the D.A.'s office and as a father, for your safety. Sorry, but that's the best I can do.”

“We found the Vo brothers,” said Lucy in a rush, as if the phrase were a bolus of poison she had to heave out or die.

“Where?”

“Two-oh-three Hester Street, off Lafayette, second floor in the front.”

“Okay, good girl! You wait here, I'll be right back.” Karp went to the hall phone and dialed a familiar number. Experienced in such instant mobilizations of force, Clay Fulton asked few questions as Karp filled him in.

“You want me to bring the Five in on this?” was one of them.

Karp thought of Phil Wu. He had been hard on Wu, and he figured it would be a decent gesture to let the guy in on a good collar. Clay Fulton was way past needing credit for big arrests. He said, “Yeah, Phil Wu's the man there. And make sure they have a Vietnamese interpreter along. I don't want these guys getting shot because of a mistake. Call me when you get it done, whenever. I'll be here.”

After discussing a few more details, they hung up, and Karp went back to Lucy's room. This time he sat next to her on the bed and pulled her close. He noticed that she had washed her hair, a good sign, and, putting his face close to the herbal-scented dark curls, he said, “All right, that was the D.A. part. This is the Daddy part. Is there anything else you want to talk about?” No answer; he felt her head shake against his chest.

“I'm worried about you, Luce,” he said. “We're a family. There shouldn't be any secrets in a family.”

“Hah!”

“What, you think there
are
secrets?”

She pulled away and looked up at him, meeting his eyes, which he thought was a good sign. She said, “Are you kidding? You're running the D.A. and my mother is a part-time felon, so what do you think? And I'm probably a felon, too.”

“You're not a felon, honey,” said Karp, startled as this sentence left his mouth, for it was not one that he had ever imagined saying to a child of his.

“How would you know?” she snapped, and then sagged against him again, cuddling into his arms. In a weary voice, too weary, Karp thought, for the voice of a child, she said, “I don't want to be a
freak
anymore. And
don't
say ‘you're not a freak,' because I am. It's a scientific fact. And I'm tired of all this . . . shooting and kidnapping and hospitals. I want things to be
regular
, like a regular family. And I love Tran, but he thinks he's still in the war, and we have to play soldiers all the time, and I used to like it, it was fun and exciting, but now . . . what's that called when soldiers go crazy from fighting too long?”

“You mean combat fatigue?”

“Yeah. I don't want this anymore. Sometimes, you know, like when you daydream? I dream that I have this room, with just my things in it, and attached to it is a big library with all the dictionaries and grammars in the world, and language tapes, and that's all, just a big white room, and it's on an island, with nobody else on it. And people could come by boat, or something, but they couldn't get on except if I wanted them to. And I could stay there and not be
bothered
by all this stuff. Crazy, huh?”

“Not really,” said Karp. “Could we have cable? And bagels?”

She giggled. “Oh, right, we need one of those machines they have on
Star Trek
, a replicator, that gets you anything you need.”

“Good idea, and we would need some hoops, full-court on parquet, like the Boston Garden . . .” He stopped because the girl's face had fallen. “What? No parquet? Okay, a half court, on planks. We're only going to play horse and one-on-one, anyway. Lucy, what is it?”

She shrugged. “I'm sleepy,” she said. “I need to say my prayers now.”

“Okay, Luce. But . . . I don't know how, but I'm going to fix this for you. This is wrong. You're a kid, you shouldn't be going through this now.” He kissed her forehead.

She gave him a bleak, heartbreaking little smile, and he went out the door. Before he shut it, he looked back and saw her cross herself and kneel by the bed, her head down on her clenched hands, resting on the bed, her body stiff with concentration. He could see the knobs of her spine through the thin cloth of her T-shirt, but he could not hear her murmurings, which, after the usual preliminaries, were, “Dear Lord, bless and keep my family and friends, and bless Tran, and take the violence and hate from his heart, he is really a good man, and help me to love my mother, and to be nice to her, and help her to love me, not just worry about me, which isn't the same, make her understand that, please, and don't let my father worry too much about me, it drives me crazy, and let Janice like me again the way she used to, and protect her and the Chens from the triad, and let them catch the guys who did it, and no more killing, please, and let them not hurt Cowboy, because I think he's really not a bad gangster, and give me spiritual strength, dear Jesus, and help me control my temper, and also, if it be Your will, please, please, could I have some breasts? Amen.”

Always an uncomfortable moment for Karp, watching his child worship a God he didn't believe existed and in so alien a fashion. He sent into the agnostic void a hopeless quasi-prayer of his own that whatever she was praying for might be delivered, after which he gently closed the door and walked down the hall to the living room, where he found his wife sprawled on the red velvet couch, sipping coffee and watching television. She lifted her legs, he sat down, and she dropped her calves across his lap, having converted Karp over the years into a pretty good foot massager. But only a desultory rub did she get tonight.

Marlene muted the volume of the show, a sitcom of no particular distinction except as an evening anodyne, and asked, “How is she?”

“Depressed. Exhausted. Marlene, we have to do something about this kid. I don't care what you say about her special qualities, she needs to be moved out from under this load she's carrying.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“Get her out of town, for starters, until this thing blows over. Hey, it's the summer. She could visit John or Anna or Patsy, hang out with the cousins. We could send her to camp, or . . . I don't know, a summer program, anything to get her out of here, and get her mind off what went down in that goddamn stockroom.”

Marlene considered this for some moments. “You're concerned she could be in danger?”

“Jesus, Marlene! Of
course
I'm concerned. Aren't you?”

“To an extent,” she replied with unnatural calm. “So, what is it, you have visions of Chinese hit squads bursting in and spraying bullets at her?”

“Yeah, that's a possibility,” he admitted, “and that's why—”

“And so you think the best place to put her is on my brother's or my sisters' suburban lawn with a gang of cousins? What, to absorb some of the bullets?”

“Don't be stupid, Marlene! I only meant that—”

“And you think that if someone wanted to get her, they wouldn't know how to find out where my relatives lived?”