Act of Revenge (44 page)

There was a commotion at the door, and Karp came in with the two boys. They came rushing up to their mother, and each dumped a large, stinking marine rock on the clean table.

“We collected rocks, Mommy,” cried Zik. “Look, mine has seaweeds and a little crab. But he's hiding now, and a clam stuck on it.”

“A barnacle. It's beautiful, darling!”

“My rock is bigger,” said Zak. “Mine has red worms on it.”

The rocks were admired, placed in plastic bags, were banned from the bathwater, despite strenuous objections, and the Karps soon afterward put their boys to bed. The two girls had meanwhile taken over the front bedroom vacated by the departure of Bryan and Posie. In their own bedroom, the Karps flung themselves full-length on their high bed, hooting and giggling with exhaustion.

“Good thing this is a vacation, or I'd be tired,” said Karp.

“Yeah, any more relaxation and we'd start to get stale.”

“Right. Say, Zak kept going on about going on a boat ride, and Zik said something about the kidnap man coming in a boat. What was that all about, or were they making stuff up?”

“No, just some asshole in a rubber boat trying to mess with my head. They see a woman alone on the beach, it goes right to their gonads. It was nothing.”

“Really?”

Marlene ignored this, for she did not have the energy to deal with Karp's worry. They had, she thought, enough to worry about. She moved closer to him and nestled her head into the hollow of his shoulder. “You're so good,” she said. “You uphold the law. You don't kill people. You don't even
want
to kill people.”

“Well, George Steinbrenner . . . if I could get close enough . . .”

“No,
seriously
, Butch. I keep feeling it's all my fault, the violence, that there's some, I don't know,
lust
, I have for it. I was just thinking, just now, who are my friends, who do I attract, who am I attracted to: Mattie Duran, a killer; Tran, a stone killer; my best friend on the cops? Jim Raney, who's killed more people in line of duty than any other serving officer. Jake Gurvitz—”

“Our Jake?”

She told him who Jake was. He said, “Jesus!”

“Jesus, indeed. So I'm in this life, I chose it, for whatever reason, and I have to say, Lucy's in it, too. Bad genes. I don't worry about Lucy; I mean, I worry about her hating me, and not being happy, but I don't worry about her safety the way you do. Irrational? Maybe, but that's how I feel. But, Butch, when that guy went after Zik, I fell apart. Complete paralyzed jelly. They're not like Lucy, they're just little tiny boys. And I can't protect them, not twenty-four hours a day, not and do anything else. Does this make sense?”

“Honestly? No, but I know that's the way you feel. The question is, what are you going to do about it?”

“Well, first I'm going to have a ciggie.” She got her pack out, opened the window wide to the sea breeze, went over to the nightstand, and picked up the ashtray. She looked at it in distaste.

“What is all this crap?”

“Lucy's crying debris. Kleenex from her pocket.”

“Butch, this is
blood
.”

“Where?” Together, they examined the crumpled, brown-stained piece of paper together.

Karp said, “This must have come from the murder scene. It's got Chinese writing on it. It looks like a betting slip. See, the number 4,500 and the characters around it.”

“Could it be evidence?”

“Sure, but I don't know of what or what it's worth. In any case, we have more than enough to nail Leung.”

“If you can catch him,” Marlene observed. She placed the slip in the drawer of the nightstand. “There's no point in bothering her any more today. Show it to her in the morning, and we'll see if it's worth keeping.”

“It's a deposit slip from a Chinese named Kuen,” said Lucy the next morning as they all gathered for breakfast. “He's kind of a banker. You give him money and he gives you these slips, with your name and his name and the amount, or you give him a slip and he gives you money. It could be his own slip or a slip from someone he knows, in China or Hong Kong or wherever.”

Karp recalled his brief conversation with V.T. Clearly this was how Leung had moved money in and out of the country. He experienced another brief moment of irritation as he thought of the man-hours wasted searching for Leung's financial trail, when all the time his darling daughter . . . but there was no point in getting into that now. He said, “Interesting. And this slip—Leung dropped it?”

“No. When Nguyen fell he grabbed and ripped Leung's pocket out. He had a bunch of them.”

“Okay, I'll call it in. Maybe he'll show up at this Kuen's place, providing we can find it.”

“It's on Doyers Street,” said Lucy. “It's where I bank.”

“Where
you
bank?” asked Marlene, who was cracking eggs at the kitchen counter. Karp was beyond being stunned.

Lucy calmly sliced another bagel, holding the circle against her chest and plunging the knife in the direction of her heart as she cut. “The lab pays me. I went to Kuen because I'm underage to get an account at a regular bank and I didn't want you guys to know about the money.”

“Lucy!” Marlene exclaimed. “But why not?”

The girl shrugged. “I don't know. It seemed important at the time. Everything's changed now.” She sniffled, seemed close to tears, swallowed hard and gained control of herself. “I hope you get him,” she said.

“We'll get him, if we have to put a cop on every corner in Chinatown,” said Karp grimly. “One thing in our favor—the guy has to stay in the community. An illegal from Hong Kong, on his own. He wouldn't know where to start on the outside.”

“You know, Dad, that might not be true. He can talk English with a New York accent when he wants to. He might be a lot slicker than we think. And he's from Macao, not Hong Kong. He knew an American there who taught him all kinds of stuff. He said.” She resumed her slicing. Karp and Marlene exchanged an eye-rolling look, and then Karp went to the phone to call in these revelations to Clay Fulton in the city.

After breakfast Marlene set the girls to washing up and dialed her number at Osborne. She punched in her voice-mail code and listened to the messages from Tran, then pushed the numbers to erase it. Tran's involvement in the Beach Bazaar affair vanished into electronic chaos. The next three message were from Mattie Duran. She ignored these. Maybe she was out of the business, maybe not, but the ladies would have to get along without her for a while. The next message was from Tran.

“Marie-Hélène, I am in Bridgeport, in Connecticut state. I thought it wise to continue east, rather than heading west to the city, in case there should be inquisitive policemen along the way back. We took the ferry from Port Jefferson. Do you know, there is a considerable Vietnamese community in Bridgeport? Perhaps I shall stay here awhile. I am
splitting the town,
as you say. Perhaps I shall once again enter the noodle business. Accept my tender regards, dear friend, and offer them as well to your daughter. Tell her she can keep the book for the time being. Until next time.”

Marlene punched the buttons and erased this message, too.

Leung spent nearly ten hours at the bottom of a Dumpster outside the Grand Union less than a hundred yards from the Beach Bazaar, covered by layers of rotting vegetables, meat, and fish, surrounded by dozens of searching cops. The dumpster was opened several times, and sticks were pushed down into it, but he was not discovered. Leung thought that American policemen would not wish to burrow through rotting garbage on a scorching day, or even imagine that anyone would be able to stand being buried in such a place, and he was correct. It was far from pleasant, but he had been in worse places. He kept a carton wrapped around his head, and enough air filtered down through the stinking mass to keep him alive. In the early morning hours of the next day, when the search had moved far away, he dug himself out, walked down to the empty beach, and bathed in the sea. He threw his clothes in a trash basket, except for his undershirt and trousers, which he cut down into shorts with a pocketknife. Barefoot, he walked west on the beach under the shadow of the boardwalk. When he judged he had gone far enough, he crossed the boardwalk and entered the town. This would be the most difficult part. There was always a chance that a police car would blunder down the street he was on, but he counted on a beach town patrol not looking twice at what looked like a man in swim shorts and T-shirt without shoes—a citizen walking back from a party, perhaps. It was unlikely that they would come close enough to find that he was an Asian. He crossed the narrow sand spit on which Long Beach lay, following the signs he had noted earlier to the New York Avenue marina. Up to the age of twelve, Leung had lived on the estuary of the Pearl River, outside Guangdong, and later, in Macao he had worked as a smuggler. There was little about boats he did not understand, and so found it easy to steal a twenty-four-foot Bayliner from the marina. The boat was well supplied with charts. He moved at low speed out of the marina into Reynolds Channel and East Rockaway Inlet.

Navigation was easy, with the surf beating at Rockaway on his right and the lights of the great city behind it. He ate a box of Oreos and drank some warm beer he found in a cooler. He entertained the idea of sailing back to China, and it made him laugh. By dawn he was rounding Breezy Point, and then it was just a few more hours to cross Rockaway Inlet and reach Sheepshead Bay. He tied the boat up at a vacant slip where the charter boats docked, and walked east on Shore Boulevard. When he found an open store, he bought a pair of zoris, a pair of khaki pants, a white shirt, sunglasses, and a white terry-cloth hat. Shore Boulevard merged into Neptune Avenue. He was in Coney Island. He had heard a great deal about Coney Island; the American had painted it as a boy's paradise. It did not look like much in the light of day and without the scrim of happy memory. But there was a subway here, Leung recalled, and he found it without difficulty. He took the F train to Grand Street. By noon he was in Chinatown.

The Karps spent another day at the beach, but by Sunday they (or at least the adults) had had enough, and they decided to drive back to the city and deal with the unfinished pieces occasioned by the recent drama. Karp wanted badly to be in on the kill when they finally got Leung, and to ensure that the legalities were strictly observed. He also wanted to be the one to inform Tommy Colombo of what had been discovered. Karp was not much of a gloater, but he felt that a situation so flamboyantly gloatable should not be allowed to pass unobserved.

In the afternoon Posie returned, a walking advertisement for why you should not, if you have lard white Appalachian-person skin, spend eight hours in the sun of a New York scorcher wearing only a string bikini. They'd given her a lot of codeine at the hospital, and Marlene thought that Posie considered this access to legal downers a fair exchange for having most of her skin fried off. For her own part, things were starting to work again in her brain, slowly, like the first groaning movements of a locomotive setting out from the station, but in a direction she could now see clearly. She knew pretty much why everything that had happened since early June had happened. Two people had the remainder of the answer, of whom only one was available, but Marlene was determined to see her, brace her, and extract the truth.

The ride home was uneventful, punctuated only by an occasional scream from Posie as the dog licked her lobster-colored neck with his rough tongue. The twins slept, the girls talked earnestly in whispers, the radio stayed silent, as did Karp and Marlene. Traffic rather than ethnic gangs barred their way on the Belt Parkway. They dropped Mary off and pulled up in front of the loft just after six. Ed Morris got out of the follow car.

“You want me to stick around, Butch?”

“I don't think so. Just go up with Lucy and check out the loft. I think we can survive the night.”

Morris, Lucy, and Posie rode up on the elevator, with the dog and the first load of bags. Karp leaned deeply into the Volvo's backseat to unbuckle the sleeping boys from their car seats. Zik, he saw, had taken his beach rock out of its bag.

Marlene had the rear hatch of the Volvo up. She was gathering all the bits of travel debris into a sailcloth beach bag when she heard the sound of a car stopping suddenly and looked up. A black Trans-Am had parked in the middle of the street. The driver's-side door was flung open, and out stepped Brenda Nero, dressed in pink bermudas, a sleeveless top, and Mattie Duran's Colt Peacemaker .44. She walked around the front of her car, staggering slightly. Marlene saw that she was drunk, or high.

“I'm gonna kill you, bitch!” she shouted, and raised the pistol.

Marlene put down her beach bag. “Brenda, give me that damn gun before you hurt yourself!” she said.

Karp had been leaning into the car, fumbling with Zik's car seat strap, but when he heard the woman yell, he came out and stood up and stared at the scene on the street. The woman was pointing a huge shiny gun at his wife's head. At the same time he saw an old red pickup truck with a green fender draw up and stop behind the black Trans Am. Its driver, a burly man wearing a baseball hat, reached behind him and took a shotgun down from the gun rack and came out of the car. He jacked a shell into it and started walking toward Marlene.

Brenda Nero pointed the Colt at Marlene's head and pulled the trigger. A confused look came over her pretty, stupid face. She squeezed harder.

Marlene took two steps forward, grabbed the barrel of the pistol, yanked it out of Brenda's grasp, and socked her in the jaw. Brenda staggered back, tripped on the curb, and fell down. She started to cry.

“It wasn't loaded!” she wailed.

“It is loaded, Brenda,” Marlene said. “It's a single-action gun. You have to cock it first.” She demonstrated the cocking action.