Justice Denied (28 page)

Marlene said, “Yes, it's perfectly clear.” Wharton gave her a final dirty look and turned to pick up his phone. Marlene rose and walked out, much relieved. She had thought that she was going to be warned off Sarkis Kerbussyan too.

13

S
o I think we should go see Kerbussyan again,” Marlene said. “As soon as possible. Now, maybe.”

Karp considered this. His wife had burst into his office and spilled out the whole exotic and confusing tale of her interview with Sokoloff.

“You like him for Ersoy, right?” Karp asked. “Kerbussyan.”

“I think he's connected, sure. Whether I like him? I don't know.”

“Umm …” Karp rolled his eyes.

“Yeah, I thought of that too, God forbid,” she said quickly. “But Sokoloff said Tomasian was the last person Sarkis would've used, and that's supported by what Mr. K told you when you went to see him. Tomasian's a courier, not a shooter.”

“So he must've used somebody else. What makes you think he'll be more forthcoming now than he was with me?”

“We know he lied. He said he didn't know anything about Ersoy's money, and I guarantee you it came right out of his own bank account. He dealt with the vic, for chrissake! So we got him anyway for obstructing. It's a lever.”

Karp nodded. “Okay, I'll call.” He called. And it turned out Mr. Kerbussyan would find some time around five.

Marlene went back to her office. Harry had left no messages, which worried her. She had sent him out again after Djelal,
before
she had been warned off the U.N., but she didn't think that detail would matter to Wharton if Djelal or the ambassador made a stink. It could be very bad indeed. She could lose the bureau.

In this mood she scrambled through paperwork and made herself generally unpleasant to her minions. Being the kind of minions they were, they were unpleasant back. Thus, she was in no mood for playtime when Jim Raney stuck his head in her door and flashed his patented charming Irish grin.

“Go away, Raney, I'm busy.”

He slipped past the door and closed it behind him. “Go ahead, I'll just watch.” He pulled a visitors' chair around so that it was touching Marlene's chair, and sat down in it, still grinning.

“Raney! Go away!”

He placed an arm across the back of her chair. “You seem tense,” he said. “I hear the marriage is breaking up. You're probably not getting much lately. You ready for an indecent proposal from a deserving Irish lad?”

“The marriage is not breaking up,” she said snippily, suppressing a giggle. Raney had that effect on her, the same effect as the strutting neighborhood swains of her teen years—infuriating but crudely seductive at the same time.

“Oh, yeah? How come I hear he moved out?”

“He had an operation on his knee; he can't climb our stairs.”

“A good story. Stick to it. On the other hand, I'd figure out how to climb those stairs with two busted legs, if you were at the top of them.” This last was whispered a half inch from her ear. His hand slipped down off the back of the chair to her neck.

Harry Bello walked in the door without knocking, as was his habit. There was a moment of frozen embarrassment. Marlene shot to her feet, knocking back her chair with a clatter.

Bello said, “You're busy.”

“No, Harry, come in,” she answered in a voice that cracked. “Um, Harry, you know Jim Raney. Raney, Harry Bello.”

Raney stood up too. He seemed amused. “Yeah, Harry Bello. I heard you brought in Vinnie the Guinea by yourself. Very impressive.”

Harry said in a flat voice, “Jim Raney. I hear you shot four guys in the head in four seconds. Very impressive.”

Raney flushed, and his jaws stiffened. Another moment of strained silence, which Marlene broke by saying breezily, “Jim was just leaving.”

“Yeah,” said Raney, his grin returning. “I just came by to invite you to the big touch football game this weekend. Bring the family. Two at the Sheep Meadow, rain or shine. Be there or be square. I could pick you up.”

“Do that. I wouldn't miss it,” said Marlene. Raney left.

“Don't you dare look at me like that,” said Marlene. “It's just the way he is. He saved my life once.”

Harry shrugged and sat down like a cat. He said, “He's got a Mercedes 300SL.”

“Who, Raney? No, he doesn't … oh, you mean Djelal. Did you talk to him?”

“No, just checked him out. Nice condo in the fifties too. They must pay pretty good, the U.N.”

“I love it! This is looking a lot better. I also love it you didn't roust him.” She explained Wharton's orders about bothering the U.N., and told him what she had learned at Sokoloff's.

“Butch and I are going to see Kerbussyan this afternoon—oh, crap! Look, Harry, could you do me a terrific favor and pick up Lucy at day-care and take her home? I'll give you my key.”

“No problem,” said Harry, a little pale light starting up in the dead of his eyes.

After Harry left, Marlene called Ray Guma, who, as it turned out, had caught the homicide prosecution of Vinnie Boguluso.

“What do you think, Goom? Of the case, I mean.”

“Hey, it's locked. Any time you want to do all the work up front, let me know. I could use a break.”

“He'll go for the top count?”

“Rest assured. The little scumbag's testimony and the toothmarks, and the Perez woman—it's a lock. Grand jury this week, no problems. We go to pretrial probably the week after, but I can't see the defense coming up with anything. The warrants're good. So's the evidence.”

“Have you talked to him?”

Guma chuckled. “Yeah. He's a fuckin' piece of work, Vinnie. You know, he's really got a thing for you, Champ. I think you pissed him off. I think you insulted his manhood.”

“I'll try to live with it. Any word on the third guy, Duane?”

“No, we got the usual APB out on him, but I'm not holding my breath. He got any sense, he's in fuckin' Texas, or someplace where there's more Duanes to blend in with.”

“Yeah, really. Okay, let me know how it goes …”

“Hey, one other thing, you gonna see Butch the next coupla hours?”

“Yeah, I'm going out with him right now on something. Why?”

“Just tell him to get with me. I got some more stuff about Turks on my wire into Joey Castles. He was interested the other day.”

“Turks?” she asked. “What's a mob guy doing with Turks?”

“Hey, the fuck I know. Joey called Ready Eddie Scoli, you know, the fence? Handles heavy theft? He says the Turk got the product and they're getting ready to process it. I thought, fuck, it sounds like scag—you know? Process? But Eddie doesn't do scag—he's into gems, metals, furs. So tell Butch it looks more like my theory that the Turk is this Brooklyn guy, Minzone. Minzone I could see getting hold of a shipment of dope. Maybe he's cutting it or something and Eddie's supposed to cover the financing, or maybe—”

“Hold it, Goom,” she interrupted. “This is getting too complicated, and I got to meet a car like five minutes ago. I'll tell him to call you.”

One of the D.A. squad cops drove Karp and Marlene up to the house in Riverdale, and they told him to wait. The door was opened not by the housemaid but by a burly, bushy-mustached man in an olive drab T-shirt and chinos who looked as if he had just put down his assault rifle. He gave them a severe look and led them through the paneled and carpeted hallways, stopping impatiently from time to time to let Karp, clumping along on his crutches, catch up.

He took them not to the study where Karp had originally interviewed Kerbussyan, but through a solarium full of huge houseplants and then through French doors to a small brick terrace overlooking the garden. There he left them. Karp collapsed gratefully into a white wicker armchair. Marlene walked out into the garden.

It was a lovely place, smelling of wet earth, crushed foliage, roses, and lavender. It sloped to the west, and from the terrace end one could see the river and the cliffs of the Palisades. She strolled down an aisle of roses, turned around the heavy green arch of a grape arbor, and came upon Sarkis Kerbussyan clipping grapes.

The old man was dressed in a white silk shirt and pale linen trousers, slightly stained with green but crisply pressed, and a black-banded straw hat.

He nodded formally. “Miss Ciampi, I believe,” he said.

“Yes. How did you know?”

“One is informed. The Ashakians speak highly of you. And, of course, you made an impression on Stephan Sokoloff: a formidable woman, he said. Formidable and beautiful.”

He finished his pruning, and placed his clippers and the cuttings in a small basket. “These are raisin grapes. Or sultanas, as they should be called. Raisins to me are still dried currants. These, you know, don't dry well in this climate, but I grow them anyway. My uncle had a whole vineyard full of them in Smyrna. Shall we return to the terrace?”

Civilized, thought Marlene. Not like interrogating Vinnie the Guinea, although she suspected that Sarkis Kerbussyan could eat any number of Vinnies like raisins. They sat in the wicker armchairs around a wicker and glass table. Coffee and little cakes appeared, brought by the silent housemaid. Kerbussyan talked to Marlene about the garden, and they watched the lush late-summer twilight gather over the dark trees.

Marlene could see Karp getting more irritable. He liked interrogations to take place in smelly, green-painted rooms. Finally he said, “Mr. Kerbussyan, this is all very nice, but you know we're not here to talk about your roses. We're investigating a homicide, one in which you're more involved than you led me to believe at our previous meeting.”

“I? How involved, Mr. Karp?”

“You lied to me last time I was here. You said you didn't know anything about Mehmet Ersoy's box of cash. In fact, that was your cash he had, some of it, at least. You'd been buying art objects from him for months before he died.”

“Buying art is not a crime,” said Kerbussyan after a brief silence.

“No, but concealing evidence in a homicide investigation is. You remember last time I was here, we waltzed through some likely scenarios about why Ersoy was killed? Let me add one. A patriotic Armenian art collector starts buying Armenian art objects from a Turk whose brother is smuggling them out of Turkey. At first he buys them through an art dealer, but after a while the source is so good that he decides to do private deals. The Turk starts slipping him fakes. The Armenian gets pissed off and has the Turk shot. You like that one?”

“Mr. Karp, do you believe that I would employ Aram Tomasian, a child I have known all his life, as an assassin in an act of revenge?”

“It doesn't matter what I believe,” said Karp sharply. “It's what a jury will believe. It explains Ersoy's money. Tomasian is linked to you. When it's presented, it'll be devastating.”

Kerbussyan seemed not to hear this. He repeated, “But do
you
believe it?”

Marlene said, “I don't believe it.”

The two men stared at her in astonishment. Karp opened his mouth to say something, but she pressed on. “This is what happened. Ersoy offered you items. Some of them were fakes. You bought them anyway. You knew they were fakes, but you didn't care, because you knew that Ersoy had something that you had to have and you thought that if you kept him on the line he'd eventually offer it to you. This whole thing is about the St. Gregory mask, isn't it, Mr. Kerbussyan? And that's why you're going to help us, to work with us, to find the killers. Because whoever killed Ersoy has the mask. That's why they killed him.”

Karp could see from the stony look that passed briefly across the old man's face that Marlene's words had struck home. He recalled her mentioning something about a mask to him when she told him about her interview with Sokoloff, but he hadn't registered it as more than an oddity. Now it seemed to be central to the whole case. Karp had no idea how Marlene had just put all of it together, but he knew a fat opening when he saw one. He said, “Maybe you better tell us about this mask, Mr. Kerbussyan.”

“It's not a myth, is it?” asked Marlene.

Kerbussyan studied both their faces before answering. “No, it is not. It exists.”

“What is it?” asked Marlene. “Sokoloff mentioned that you had a line on it, but he didn't say much about it. Why is it so important?”

Kerbussyan took a deep breath and looked back at his garden, at the declining sun lighting the Palisades.

Then he faced them again and said, “It is a long story. Everything to do with Armenia is a long story, but this is longer than most. You may not credit that the hand of the past can reach forward to kill a man in the streets of a modern city.”

Marlene said, “A couple of years ago, a friend of mine, a cop, was blown to pieces because of something that happened in the fifteenth century in Serbia. So try me.”

“Well, then,” said Kerbussyan. “Ancient Armenia. A pagan kingdom caught between the declining power of Rome and the Persian Empire. In 224 A.D. a revolution in Persia overthrew the Artaxid dynasty and brought Artashir and the Sassanids to power. Khosrov, the king of Armenia, was related to the Artaxids, and he went to war against Persia. During this war a noble named Anak, who was loyal to the Sassanids, killed Khosrov, and the Persians took over the country. Anak himself was killed later.

“Two boys, the sons of Khosrov and Anak, were left fatherless by these events. They are close friends, nobles, raised at court. But they are separated. One, Trdat, son of King Khosrov, was taken to Roman territory as a ward of the imperial court. The emperor Diocletian was always interested in a royal pawn to use against the Persians. Anak's son, Krikor, was sent to Caesaria, in Palestine, where he came under the influence of the bishop and was raised as a Christian. He becomes a priest.

“Time passes. Trdat is now a famous warrior. He does great service for the emperor, saving his life, and as a reward Diocletian gives him military support. Trdat raises the Armenian barons, and the Persians are thrown out. The young man is crowned in Vagharshapat as Trdat III. Tiridates the Great, as he is known to the West.