Act of Revenge (35 page)

“Yeah?” he snapped. “What is it now? And how did you get into the building? If this is another goddamn charity collection, you can forget it.”

“Mr. James Nobile?” Marlene inquired.

“Yeah?”

“Did you work at the law firm of Fein, Kusher and Panofsky in the fifties and sixties?”

“What if I did? Who are you, lady?”

Straight is not going to work with this guy, Marlene thought. Doherty might have been a bent cop, but as a human being he was relatively decent; this little fellow was warped to the core. She smiled and said, “My name is Ariadne Stupenagel, I'm a freelance writer, and I'm doing a story on famous suicides in the New York area. Can I come in?” So saying, she used her hip and entered the apartment, closing the door behind her.

“Hey,” said Nobile, “I didn't say you could come in here.”

“I won't take up much of your time, Mr. Nobile,” said Marlene, looking around. Musty, the smell of whiskey in the close air. Expensive, flashy furniture from twenty-five years ago, the low point in American design, crowded the living room, lots of crushed velvet, a Barcalounger, a twenty-one-inch television in an immense mahogany console, a nude on velvet on the wall; no sad clowns, but he might have saved that for the bedroom.

She chivvied him into letting her sit on his sofa; he sat in a fading brocade armchair facing her from halfway across the room, as if she were carrying a communicable disease.

“Now, what I wanted to ask you about was the suicide of Gerald Fein, one of the partners in the law firm you worked at. Do you recall that tragedy, Mr. Nobile?”

“Sure, yeah, but I don't know anything about it. I mean, all I know is from the papers and whatnot.”

A lie, thought Marlene. A whopper. She was always surprised at how badly ordinary people lied. Being careful to stare into the interrogator's eye more than was common, that was one sign. Nobile's eyes were like some curdled dessert, a dab of grainy chocolate in stale, yellowing crème.

“But you worked for the firm at the time. You must have seen Mr. Fein every day, just about. Did you get the impression that he was troubled?”

“Hey, I just did my job. I didn't poke into anybody's business.”

“Mr. Panofsky thought that Fein was troubled, though, didn't he?” Shrug.

“Did he ever mention it to you?”

“Hell, lady, it was twenty-five years ago,” Nobile said irritably. “You think I keep crap like that in my head? He must've been crazy or he wouldn't have jumped off of the Empire State.”

“Uh-huh. Well, you're right, it was a long time ago. I guess you're retired now yourself.” She looked around admiringly. “You must have a nice pension to afford this place. Upper East Side, wow! I'm jealous.”

“Not a pension. Those days only the big guys gave pensions. Nah, I got Social Security and I got investments.”

“Lucky you! So, tell me, how did you come to work for Fein's law firm?”

“I answered an ad in the
Journal-American
. I was with them seventeen years.”

“Uh-huh. And before that?”

“I was in building management.” His look grew narrower. “What do you want to know this stuff for?”

“Just background, Mr. Nobile. So, was carrying important packages part of your work? Confidential information and so on?”

“Yeah, I did that, I did a little of everything. What does that have to do with the suicide?”

“I'm getting to that. The packages were mostly from Mr. Panofsky, weren't they? Thick envelopes. You took them to politicians all over town, didn't you?”

“You're not a reporter,” said Nobile, and shot to his feet.

“But you took them from Panofsky, not Fein, didn't you? Fein wasn't in the thick-envelope business. Except once.”

“Get out of here!” Nobile's clay-colored face was going red around the edges.

Marlene got up and stalked slowly toward him. “Except once, and that envelope was the one that got him disbarred. I bet you could tell me a lot about that deal, couldn't you? Is that how you got your
investments
?”

Sometimes they talked when they were scared, and sometimes they fought, and if they were decent folks, they called the police. Nobile was terrified, she could see that, but not necessarily of her. He turned and ran into the kitchen. Marlene heard a drawer violently open and metallic rummaging sounds. Gun, or knife, or hammer? She recalled that she was unarmed and dogless, and beat a retreat.

Tran and Lucy were about to leave the loft when the phone rang. Lucy picked it up. “Lucy Karp, please,” said an unfamiliar voice.

“Speaking.”

“Good. Listen, this is Detective Wu from the Fifth Precinct. You're supposed to come down here and look at a lineup.”

“We were just leaving,” she said.

“Your mom's there?”

“No, I'm coming with a friend.”

“Well, your dad said I was to go pick you up. I'll be by in ten minutes. Why don't you be outside your building, okay?”

“Wait a second, how come I can't—”

“Just be outside, okay?” He hung up.

When she told Tran about the change in plans, he frowned. Tran did not like changes in plans at the last minute.

He said, in French, their best mutual language, “Let us go look at this policeman before he drives away with you. Anyone can say he is of the police.”

They went down in the elevator, and Tran led her a few buildings away and across Crosby Street, where they waited in a deeply shadowed doorway. A brown sedan approached from Howard and stopped in front of the Karps' building. After a few minutes, a neatly dressed Asian man emerged and pressed the Karps' buzzer.

“That must be him,” said Lucy. “The detective.” She began to wave and walk forward, but Tran swept her up, pulled her deeper into the doorway, and clapped a hand over her mouth.

“Be still,” he whispered. She could feel the warmth of his breath and smell his scent:
nuoc mam
and lilacs. “I have seen that man before, accepting something from our Mr. Leung. You mustn't go with him.” He took his hand away from her mouth.

She stared at the man, who was now gazing up at the windows of the family loft.

“Are you sure? I thought he was a cop.”

“Whether he is or not, which I will determine later, I do not care to have you go off alone with anyone who takes thick envelopes from a triad agent. Ah, good! He is going into your building. Now we will make our
getaway
.”

“Where will we go?” asked Lucy, trotting along beside him.

“Well, as to that, here is the problem. We believe Leung has corrupted one policeman, but perhaps there are others who are
on the take
. A policeman comes up to you on the street, shows his badge, orders you into his car, and you go, and poof! No more Lucy. He
takes you for a ride
, yes? So properly, we should
blow town
.”

They reached the alley where Tran kept his elderly Jawa. Lucy said, “Uncle Tran, I don't think people say
blow town
anymore.”

“Do they not? You astound me. In any case, I believe we will not do that thing at all, but instead travel to the Queens, where we will be quite safe. Climb on! I want you out of sight before he realizes you are not going to place yourself in his hands.”

If it was a tail, Marlene thought, it was a stupid one, or maybe they figured she would think that. Nobody sane would use a dirty red Dodge pickup with a pale green front fender to tail a car in the city. The vehicle had impinged mildly on her consciousness when parking near Nobile's apartment building, and then moved up on the awareness scale when it appeared in her side mirror as she drove south on Second Avenue. She cocked her head to center the rearview in her good eye. There it was, two cars back. A man driving, wearing sunglasses and a dark ball cap—could be anyone. When paranoia strikes, Marlene believed, respond as if the danger were real, because all in all a little social embarrassment, even including a brief stay in a nice clinic enriched with soothing medication, is better than being dead. Consequently she signaled, hung a right at 54th Street, and was not really that surprised to see the Dodge make the same turn, nor to see it again after her left onto Third. Marlene now demonstrated why you need at least three cars in radio communication to set and keep a proper tail in a city. By 48th Street she had maneuvered herself so that when the light at that corner turned red, she was right at the crosswalk, and then, just before the cross-street traffic entered the intersection, she leaned on her horn and shot through, scattering pedestrians and summoning forth the usual cacophony of honking horns and screamed curses in several languages. The tail was pinned, and Marlene cut west at 45th, parked in a loading zone for fifteen minutes, and then continued south.

She left the car in a garage of a hotel on Madison off 34th and set out on foot. At a bank she changed a hundred dollars into a stack of crisp ones and fives and went looking for the homeless. After a couple of hours she was thirty-five dollars lighter and not much wiser. The homeless are not your best informants, especially when trying to locate one of their number, most especially when you don't have a good recent description of your quarry. Shirley Waldorf could have been the Tinfoil Lady, or the Dog Lady, or the Leopardskin Lady, or Crazy Annie. She could have been the Demon Queen that haunted one particular person who, dressed in a toga and a paper hat bearing mystic signs designed to fend off just such evils, assured Marlene that the woman she sought was just across the street, but currently invisible.

“I know who you mean,” said a voice behind her.

A Latino man in kitchen whites was puffing on a cigarette under a ventilator blowing grease and coffee smells out onto 33rd Street. Marlene slapped a buck into the filthy palm of Toga Man and turned to her new informant, who had clearly overheard her recent conversation with the nut.

“You know Shirley Waldorf?”

“Oh, yeah, I know Shirley. She come by in the mornings, and I give her a cup of coffee and a bagel. A old bagel, you know? She give me fifteen cents.” He laughed. “Old lady think a cup of coffee and a bagel still cost fifteen cents. Crazy but never give me no trouble. But I ain't seen her, three, four days now.” He raised his eyes to the vast gray cliff of the building across the street. “She was always going on about that Empire State. She used to work there or something, I don't know. Anyway, maybe something happen to her. You check with the cops or the hospitals, I think that would be the thing to do.”

Marlene asked a few questions, but the man knew little more than he had already offered. He accepted a five-dollar bill and a card with her number on it, and promised to call if Shirley Waldorf ever came by again for a bagel and coffee.

Back in the Volvo, Marlene drove downtown to her appointment at the courthouse. The red pickup did not show, which meant little. There could be other cars. How about that tan Mercury with the two guys in the front? Control the paranoia, Marlene. Of course, she did have more than the usual number of enemies; still she was having trouble assuring herself that she was operating at her best. It seemed to take more effort just to keep focused, and she wondered about neuron loss.

She was an hour early, on purpose. She wanted to see Judge Paine in action, and so she slipped into Part 52, where the current show was
People
v
. Macaluso
. Jilly Macaluso ran a crew for Salvatore Bollano, and his prosecution for extortion and other felonies was a part of Frank Anselmo's crusade against that crime family. Jilly had been nailed in the hope that he would turn and implicate higher-ups, but Jilly was a stand-up guy and here they all were.

Marlene sat on the hard and shiny seat and reflected upon how dull trials were, if you were not a principal player. It was always a wonder to her why the media had seized on this slow-motion institution as the symbol of dramatic tension—the wizardry of cutting, perhaps, otherwise “legal thriller” would be another oxymoron. Batting for the People was a guy named Motile, a senior rackets ADA, and on D. was, of course, Marvin P. Kronsky. Kronsky was having a bad day, but the smile on his broad, perfectly shaved face was intact, and his voice as he objected had the even resonance of an oboe in low register. The source of the bad day was up there on top of the presidium, a lumpy, chinless, Brillo-fringed head bobbing above the expanse of black serge like the noggin of a hand puppet. Paine was batting down Kronsky's objections to the line of questioning, which, as far as Marlene could see, were perfectly legit. The testimony was hearsay, and did not fall into any of the numerous exceptions to the hearsay rule. Of course, she had not been in a courtroom for several years. Maybe the law had changed, and the exception had broadened. In any case, the witness was more or less allowed to spin out his inculpatory tale. On cross, Kronsky brought out that the witness was as much a slimeball as his client, and then they broke for lunch.

Marlene walked down the hallway to Judge Paine's office, identified herself to the secretary there, and shortly Judge Paine himself appeared, still robed, to greet her. He gave her a big smile and, after a glance at her face, addressed his remarks to her nipples.

How nice to see you again, we don't get many attorneys as gorgeous as you (taking her arm, the backs of the fingers pressing against tit), sit down in that chair and I'll sit here (unspoken: so I can look up your skirt), did you hear the one about . . . (a mildly dirty joke), and the rest of the usual prelims with this kind of asshole. Marlene was used to it, knew the routine, smiled and giggled at the right times. Jesus, she thought, it was like working with a hot wire and a pithed frog, and after a good deal of this they got down to the reason she had come.

Gerald Fein? Oh, of course he remembered Gerald Fein. Marlene watched him closely as he spun what must have been a familiar tale. He really was an ugly little fuck, she thought, and this must have colored his life. People trust the handsome more than they do the ugly, she recalled, and it must have been . . . what? Excruciating? To be working with a couple of slick, good-looking men like Jerry and Bernie. He told the story well, and Marlene entertained the thought that he'd been tipped to expect her.