Justice Denied (40 page)

“Yeah, he ack like this motherfucker was his own cousin. Name Wharton.”

Karp got the night-duty driver to take him home to Crosby Street. He mounted the absurd contraption and rode upward in the warm, dark shaft. Mercifully the winch did not slip, and he arrived safely in the bosom of his family.

“So, tell me!” said Marlene.

“It went the way I thought.”

“My hero! You don't seem very hyped by it. When I saw your face, I thought maybe they walked him. What's wrong?”

“I don't know. I'm pissed off generally. I got into a stupid cat fight with fucking Freeland after the trial. And Roland came by and told me he didn't get anything out of Nassif. And I got this thing on my leg. The usual.”

He clumped across the loft and collapsed on the red couch.

“And the whip cream on the charlotte russe was I got a call from my old buddy Hosie Russell. He told me who worked the scam on Tomasian. The jailhouse witness.”

“You made a deal with Russell?”

“No, that's the weird part. He just called me up after the trial and spat the whole thing out. For free.”

“Why'd he do something like that?”

“I don't know. I gave him a stupid lecture once about trying to just do something because it was right. I guess it sank in. Miracles happen, or maybe it was just an extra clever scam because I will do something for him after all. I'll make sure he gets old in some nice medium-security joint. There's no point in putting him in Attica. He's not violent unless he's loaded, and he's not a runner. I think he likes prison, as a matter of fact.”

“Don't we all, each in our own way. So who was it?”

“Wharton, who else?” said Karp dully.

“Shit! What're you going to do?”

He rubbed his face. “I don't know. But he's gone—out of the office, that's for sure. I'll go to Bloom. He'll do the right thing once he knows the story. I mean, he likes Conrad, but not nearly as much as he likes himself. It'll be quiet and quick.”

“What'll happen to him, not that I give a shit?”

Karp laughed bitterly. “They'll probably make him a judge.” He fell back against the cushions and closed his eyes. Marlene looked at him with some alarm. She had never seen him so wan and diminished.

She said, “Poor baby! Did you eat?”

“No. You know I never eat when the jury's out. Why? Are you going to cook me something?”

“I might open you a can,” said Marlene.

Which she did, a can of Progresso black bean soup with cheese ground thickly on top and a plate of olives and salami and provolone and egg tomatoes with olive oil on it and a chunk of warm, fresh bread rubbed with olive oil and garlic. He ate it like a wolf. Marlene drank black coffee and watched him eat.

He mopped up the soup with the last of his bread and leaned back in his chair, regarding his wife with an appraising eye. Matter-of-factly he asked, “So, Marlene, what's in the crate?”

“The crate?”

“Yeah, that big wooden crate in the corner with all the old cartons near your speed bag. With the drop cloth on it.”

“Oh, that crate. Well, you know, to be perfectly honest, I don't know what's in it because I haven't opened it yet.”

“Uh-huh. You don't think it has caviar in it? I'm just guessing that that's what it says on the top of the crate.”

“Nope. I doubt the caviar.”

“And how did this object come to be in our domicile, if I may ask?”

“Harry brought it up last night. Don't give me a lot of shit on this, Butchie. I only did—”

He held up a hand to stop her. “No, I don't want to know about it. And the reason for that is, when you're indicted for, let's see, misfeasance, grand larceny, burglary, and tampering with physical evidence, and maybe you have to go upstate for a while, I'll be able to say that I was not an accomplice after the fact. I'm thinking of the kid, here.”

“Yes, good point,” said Marlene. “Although I think I could make a good showing that I acted to save a priceless cultural relic from certain destruction. Harry said the furnace was all unloaded and set to go, in the locker.”

“Mmm, there's that, although I think you're supposed to make said showing to a judge
before
you conduct a raid. You're supposed to have one of those pieces of paper—what's the word I'm looking for—begins with a
W
. . .?”

“I hate it when you get sarcastic like this.”

“Not to mention that, having done this bag job, you've destroyed the evidentiary value of whatever's in that crate. Which may mean never being able to prove that Djelal and Nassif did the murder.”

Karp was groggy with the aftereffects of the trial. At such times he needed to sleep, to purge his mind of the accumulated memorized facts, the precedents, the points of law that had stuffed every available brain cell for weeks. He was not capable of a closely reasoned argument with his wife, nor was he capable of making the next logical connection: that there was an object worth thirty million dollars in his home, an object of interest to at least one Turkish murderer. And the mob.

He sighed and looked at her, his eyes bleary. Marlene did not respond to his last comment, so he said, “Well, whatever. You're a nut. I love you. I married you. I can't think about it right now. I'm going tocrash. You coming?”

“Yeah, I'll just clean up here. Look, don't worry, okay? It'll be all right. About the crate.”

“What crate? I din see no stinkin' crate,” said Karp, and clumped his way slowly to bed.

Ahmet Djelal parked the black Cadillac Sedan de Ville on Crosby Street and looked up at the loft building he had come to burgle. He didn't much like using an embassy car, but his little sports car was too small to carry what he had to carry away. He also didn't like the idea of hauling the crate down five flights of stairs, but there didn't seem to be a choice. He had cased the building earlier that day, found out that his target was on the fifth floor, and learned that there wasn't an elevator.

He got out of the car, stretched, and checked the pistol in his shoulder holster. He was a large man, well over six feet tall and burly. He had a close-cropped head, a thick neck, and a dark flowing mustache. He looked like a Turkish policeman, which he was.

Djelal had no doubt that he could manage the crate by himself. Rolled up in his pocket was a furniture mover's strap. He would carry it down the stairs on his back.

Djelal also had no doubt that he could deal with whoever had stolen his property. After the first moment of panic when he had arrived at the storage place and found the thing missing, he had made a careful search of the area and found a crumpled MasterCharge slip with a name and a telephone number, obviously dropped by the thief. It was not hard to find the address from this information. He was, after all, a policeman.

The thief had an Italian name, which suggested that the people to whom he had planned to sell the gold and jewels might have arranged the theft. He knew who Marlene Ciampi was from her visit to the embassy. Obviously she was corrupt and had somehow learned where the mask was from that idiot Nassif and told her relatives. Djelal was not particularly worried that Nassif had been arrested. It had perhaps been a mistake to involve Nassif, a mere merchant, not a warrior, as he himself was, but one had to depend on family. And at least Nassif was a real Turk. He would not betray his cousin.

Djelal picked the lock of the downstairs door with ease. He put away his lock picks and turned on a pencil-beam flashlight. Slowly he mounted the steep, dark stairs.

At the fifth-floor landing he paused and listened. There was no sound from the other side of the door. He dropped to his knees and directed his light at the lock. He had just inserted his pick when Harry Bello came up silently behind him from the shadows of the landing and hit him across the back of the head with a braided leather sap.

“He's coming around,” said Marlene.

A skylight and a colored glass lamp swam into Djelal's view and then a woman's face in the center of a cloud of black hair. He was lying on his back, his hands uncomfortably constrained behind him. His head hurt and he felt the bite of handcuffs on his wrists.

The dark, fuzzy edges of his vision cleared, and Djelal could see that he was in a large room with three people, the woman, a stocky man with a gray face, and a very tall man with a cast on his leg. The stocky man held a revolver in his hand.

The woman said, “Mr. Djelal, I'm Marlene Ciampi, an assistant district attorney, and this man here is Harry Bello, a police officer. You're under arrest for the murder of Mehmet Ersoy.” Then she told him that he had the right to remain silent and the right to a lawyer, and that if he couldn't afford a lawyer, one would be provided for him. She asked him if he understood those rights.

He said,
“Bir kelime bile anlamiyorum. Bir tercüman bulabilir minisiz?”

Marlene turned to Harry. “He's useless. Take him out and shoot him and throw the body in the river.”

Involuntarily, sweat started out of Djelal's brow, and he gasped. Marlene looked at him sharply. “Yes, I think you understand English well enough. Now, do you understand your rights?”

Djelal said, “Yes.”

“Good. Are you willing to make a voluntary statement at this time?”

“This is an outrage. I am an official of the Turkish government. I have diplomatic status.”

“Yeah, but we're not talking about a parking ticket, are we?”

She pulled up a straight chair and sat down just a few inches from the couch on which he lay. Her knees almost touched his shoulder. She was wearing a blue bathrobe, and he thought she might be nearly naked underneath it. He could smell her body. He thought he was going insane; women did not do this to men, question them while they lay bound and helpless. The other way around was correct, as he himself had done many times when he was an intelligence officer with the military. It was like a nightmare in which you found yourself with a saddle on your back and a horse riding you.

“You're a very stupid man,” she said. “I think maybe Ersoy was the brains of this operation. After you killed him, the two of you have been stumbling around like a pair of idiots. Once we knew about the art theft and forgery ring, it was no problem finding you. And nailing you. You understand that expression, ‘nailing'? You're nailed.

“You had a nice little operation going, but the Mask of Gregory was too big for you. Too much cash involved. You figured, why split three ways when you could have half each? So you killed Ersoy, probably with that pistol you brought along tonight….”

She gestured toward a low table, where his gun sat in a clear plastic bag. His mouth sagged.

“Yeah, I figured. It's the same gun. Dumb. Bone stupid. You thought you were smart pinning it on the Armenians, but it turns out that was really stupid. That's what got us started on the trail that led to the art scam. If you'd've just shot him on a dark street and lifted his watch and wallet, nobody would have asked any questions.

“But that's not the stupidest thing you did. No, the stupidest thing was to think that half of what you were going to get from Joey Castles for the gold and jewels from the mask was more than a third of what Kerbussyan would've paid for the mask itself. The two of you outsmarted yourselves out of about ten million dollars.” She laughed in his face.

He broke. Djelal jerked himself upright and roared and lunged at Marlene with his teeth, his mouth throwing ropes of spit. She kicked her chair backward to avoid him, and instantly Harry Bello was between them with his pistol pressed hard against Djelal's skull and his arm locked around his neck.

“It was not the money, whore!” the Turk shrieked. “
Piç!
It was the Armeniy! Ersoy was going to sell the filthy saint to the Armenians! We were going to cheat them, like they cheated us. But he said, no, Kerbussyan would not be fooled. We can get more if we sell it. But we are real Turks. How could we give this filthy thing to our enemies, for them to glory in it and defame us more? Melt it, I said. But no, he wouldn't. He was corrupt, a politician! So we had men to steal it and we …”

“You killed him.”

“He deserved death. He was a traitor.”

Marlene said, “Wrap him up, Harry. We can get a statement from him in the morning. Did you get all that, Butch?”

Karp was no shorthand expert, but he could write like blazes when necessary; few who can't get through law school. He finished his scribbling and said, “Yeah, I think so. Except he said something like ‘peach' at the start. Right after ‘whore.'

“I bet it was something nasty, right, Ahmet?”

But Djelal had sunk into morose silence. He did not resist when Bello led him out of the loft.

“That was quite a performance,” said Karp. “Did you plan that whole thing? Like, how did he know to come here?”

“Harry planted a charge slip at the storage locker. I got the idea from the Russell case. Funny, isn't it? It was patriotism, not greed, that killed Ersoy. God protect us all from noble motives.”

“Look who's talking,” said Karp. He got up from the table and hopped over to the wall phone.

“Who are you calling? It's two A.M.”

“Roland. I'm going to get him out of bed and get him down to Centre Street to spring Tomasian and write up Djelal.”

“Oooh, nasty!”

“No, it's his case. He should handle it.”

“You think he'll ever forgive you?”

“Roland isn't into grudges. Tomorrow there'll be a check in an envelope on my desk, and he'll never mention it again and neither will I.”

Karp made his call, which was terse. He hung up and went back to the couch. Marlene put a kettle on to boil. She made tea, and they sat down at the porcelain-topped table in the kitchen to drink it.

“I've been thinking,” Karp said. “All's well that ends well, but did you ever think that our guy might not have come alone? What if old Ahmet there'd brought three guys with machine guns along? Harry didn't have any cops backing him up, did he?”