Butch Karp: Act Of Revenge Part 4

The woman who opened the door of 37 to Marlene's knock was still lovely in the frozen way that some wealthy women adopt, a look that peaked in the Kennedy years. Not a mark was visible on the face, which didn't mean much. A lot of guys were careful about the face, wanting to preserve the trophy value of the arm piece. Her eyes, a nice china blue, and big ones, showed more mileage around the edges than one might gather from a first look at the face and body. A well-preserved forty, was Marlene's thought, three days a week at the gym, a few surgical tucks maybe, strict diet, winters in the Islands. She was dressed in a ratty purple sweats.h.i.+rt and jeans several sizes too large for her, and a pair of cheap tennis shoes, all clearly out of the shelter slop box.

"You wanted to see me," said Marlene, and introduced herself, extending a hand. The woman's grip was soft and hesitant, and her eyes, which Marlene now observed were fuzzy and unfocused, slid away from contact. Oh, pharmaceuticals! thought Marlene. She loved these types.

The woman did not give her own name, but turned away and sat on the narrow bed. Marlene shut the door and sat beside her, there being nowhere else to sit. The room was tiny, a cell eight feet on a side, holding only a steel cot, a varnished deal bureau, a rag rug, and a rickety night table.

"So, what do I call you?"

The woman paused, as if trying to remember. "Vivian," she said.

"Last name?"

The woman shook her head and looked down at the rag rug.

"Look, I can't begin to help you unless you talk to me." Nothing. "I have to have your name at least." Marlene waited. She observed that the woman had fragments of nail polish still clinging to her nails, which bore the signs of having had the frequent attention of a manicurist. Her hair, too, though lank from a recent was.h.i.+ng, showed the ma.s.s and shaping of a first-cla.s.s cut. Marlene felt a pulse of irritation, which she knew she would not have felt had the woman been poor. She stood up and announced, "Okay, sorry, but I'm leaving."

"Fein," said the woman.

"Fine? You don't want help? You want me to leave?"

"No, Fein is the name. My name is Vivian Fein." The crying started.

Marlene always said that she was one of the few women in New York for whom both Kleenex and bullets were a deductible business expense. She gave over a wad of the former to stem the drench and waited, making soothing sounds.

"I'm sorry," said Vivian Fein, after some minutes. "It's hard to explain. I was thinking about my father." She paused, glanced at Marlene in a way that seemed to demand some recognition, as if this father were so well-known as to require no further explanation, and then she blushed and said, "Ah, s.h.i.+t, you must think I'm crazy"-here she uttered a shrill laughlike sound. "Oh, yeah, why would you think that, just because I ran out of my house dressed in a blanket and a pair of panties? Of course, I a.s.sume you know all about my father, just because that's what's rattling around in my head all the time. Isn't there a disease where people think they're transparent? That everyone can see their thoughts?" A spate of silent shaking laughter, dissolving into liquid weeping.

Marlene adopted a neutral expression and waited. The father thing was interesting. Maybe it wasn't the S.O. this time, for a change. Or maybe Dad was both-not at all unknown in the business. The Fein woman stopped being semi-hysterical and drew away, and leaned against the wall. She wiped her eyes and blew her nose on Marlene's wad of tissues. To her surprise, Marlene now found herself subject to an appraising look, with a hint of hardness. A quick recovery. Or the waterworks was an act. Or the woman was deep in tranquilizer psychosis.

"You don't look like what I thought you would," she said.

"I never do," said Marlene coolly. "Let's cut the horses.h.i.+t, Ms. Fein. I presume you wanted to see me about whoever beat you up. I'll need his name and details of the incident, plus any information about past abuses, with doc.u.mentation."

"Doc.u.mentation?" The woman was staring at her as if she were speaking in a foreign tongue.

"Yes. Visits to the emergency room or private doctors. Calls to the police. Any witnesses to the violence . . . I'm sorry, you find this amusing?"

The woman brought her giggling under control. Definitely pills, thought Marlene. "No, I'm sorry, really. I realize I must seem crazy to you. But . . . no, there's no witnesses. No doc.u.mentation. And that's not why . . . whew!" Fein took several deep breaths. "We got off on the wrong foot, Ms. Ciampi. I don't want you to pursue my husband in any way. I want to hire you for something else altogether."

Marlene c.o.c.ked her head, the att.i.tude of disbelief, and also, in her particular case, the way in which she focused attention with her one good eye. "Excuse me. It's a reasonable a.s.sumption. This is a battered women's shelter you're in."

"Yes, and I do need protection, and I'm incredibly grateful for it, but this is something I have to do, and I can't do it from home. My husband would not approve, and he's an extremely watchful and suspicious man."

"Uh-huh. And what is it you want to hire me to do?"

"I want you to investigate the death of my father, Gerald Fein. He was a lawyer. He supposedly committed suicide in 1960."

"And you think there's something suspicious about his death, that it wasn't a suicide? How did he die?"

A bleak smile. "I see you're not a New Yorker."

"But I am, born and raised. You mean you think I should recall a suicide twenty-odd years ago, of a-" Marlene clapped her hand to her mouth. "Oh, s.h.i.+t! You don't mean Jumping Jerry was . . . Oh, Christ, I'm sorry, that was crude of me."

"Oh, please, we're used to it. Well, I don't think you ever get used to it, but you learn to live with it. You must have jumped rope to the, whatever, the rhyme, if you were a city kid."

"I was a little old. My younger sister did, though. It must have been unbelievably bad for you."

"Yes. We loved him very much. And we thought he loved us."

Marlene did not know what to say to this, and she did not particularly want to learn. The story now percolated back up from deep storage from where it had lain alongside Brooklyn Dodgers team rosters and the Ozone Park rules for ring-a-levio. And jump-rope rhymes, of course. Gerald Fein had gone to his office building one day and instead of getting off at the 57th floor, where his firm had its suite, he had traveled up to the observation deck, where he had somehow gotten past the barrier and, achieving the actual parapet, had walked into s.p.a.ce, thus becoming the last man to jump successfully from the Empire State Building. After some moments of uncomfortable silence Marlene said, "Ah, Ms. Fein, regarding this investigation-I don't, that is, in my connection with the shelter, I don't do investigations, except for things like locating a spouse for child-support payment. But my firm, the Osborne Group, has an investigations division. I could put you in touch with them."

The woman was shaking her head. "No, I want you to do it."

"I'm sorry, Ms. Fein, but I don't have the time or the resources to handle a serious investigation into something that happened twenty-three years ago. Osborne does, and I ought to tell you now that if they take the case it's going to cost you. And, not to be harsh, but you don't look like you have a whole lot of bucks at your disposal."

"I can pay!" the woman cried. Moving like a frightened bird, she darted her hand under the pillow of the narrow bed and s.n.a.t.c.hed out a crumpled paper bag, which rattled as she brought it to her lap, and reached in. Light flashed in her hand.

"That's real, I presume," said Marlene, who could not help a thick swallow at what she saw.

"Oh, yeah, it's real. One thing about Sa-my husband, he only buys the best stones. This is a six-and-a-half carat D color VVS2 quality stone in platinum. It's worth at least a hundred forty grand."

There was something about the way this statement popped out of Vivian Fein's lush little mouth that raised for Marlene the notion that perhaps the deserted hubby was not one of society's ornaments, though filthy rich, that perhaps Ms. Fein (and what was her married name, after all?) had spent some time around the hard boys. Come to that, Marlene thought further, wasn't old Jumping Jerry mobbed up in some way? Another reason to avoid additional involvement. She stood up again and pulled her eye away from the fabulous glitter of the ring.

"You want to put that in a safe, Ms. Fein. Some of the ladies here are fairly hard types. I'll have someone from our investigations division give you a ring. A call, I mean."

"Take it!" said the woman. "You have to, you have to . . ." She leaped up and grabbed Marlene's sleeve, and tried to press the diamond into the pockets of Marlene's s.h.i.+rt. They shuffled around the floor for a while like a pair of folk dancers from a particularly ungraceful folk, and Marlene thought, absurdly, of her tiny grandmother trying to press packets of leftovers on recalcitrant relatives, both of them doing the same sort of dance. Vivian was again weeping, Marlene saying, "Please . . . excuse me . . . please," and wondering whether she would have to get rough to make her escape, when a long, full-throated scream sounded in the hallway outside.

Vivian froze. All the pink drained from her face, and her eyes showed white all around their blue centers. From outside another yell and the sound of cursing and shrill cries. Vivian jumped back from Marlene and, with crazed stupidity, looked around for somewhere to hide in the tiny cell. In a hoa.r.s.e, high-pitched whisper she said, "Oh, s.h.i.+t, oh G.o.d, oh s.h.i.+t . . . it's him, oh, s.h.i.+t, oh, G.o.d . . ."

"Stay here," Marlene commanded inanely, pulled her pistol from its holster, and stepped out of the room. At the end of the narrow hallway a small crowd of women and kids had formed a yelling circle around what was obviously a fight. Marlene crouched down and looked between the legs of the spectators. As she had expected, one of the combatants, the one on the bottom, getting creamed by a hefty brown woman, was Brenda Nero. Marlene replaced her pistol. Heavy treads on the stairway and here came Mattie Duran at the trot, darkness on her brow. The spectators scattered before her as she pierced the circle and grabbed a handful of each combatant, heaving them to their feet and holding them apart like a pair of squabbling puppies.

"What the h.e.l.l is going on here?" she yelled.

Marlene heard a familiar voice wail, "I didn't do anything!" Brenda's old refrain. Brenda never did anything, yet where she dwelt chaos reigned. On her last unlamented visit to the shelter she had, among other stunts, spilled a bottle of nail polish (borrowed without asking, of course) and wiped it up with "an old rag" that proved to be her roommate's baby's baptismal dress, the last pathetic remnant of the poor woman's lost respectability. Marlene imagined it was something like that this time, too, or a remark at just the wrong moment, or a secret casually revealed. What her life with Chester Durrell was like, Marlene could barely imagine, yet she was prepared to talk to Chester about keeping his temper and not going with the fists. In fact, she had to admit, she would rather deal with Chester than with Brenda. Let Mattie deal with Brenda.

As for Vivian Fein, Marlene suspected that her case made Brenda and Chester look like Ozzie and Harriet. Not interested, was Marlene's thought, not even in why Vivian Fein So-and-So had decided to split from an abusive man at just that time and look into her father's long-ago death, and she took the opportunity to slip-slide away, down the stairs and out of the shelter, into a nice, warm, smelly New York purple evening. But of course, now she couldn't get the d.a.m.n skipping rhyme out of her head.

Jumping Jerry jump so high Really thought that he could fly Jumping Jerry couldn't wait He jumped off the Empire State Down and down and down he flew Landed on Fifth Avenue Hundred-ninety-eighty-seventy-sixty-

fifty-forty-thirty-twenty

SPLAT!.

Or alternatively, you could end with the most disgusting possible raspberry noise. She entered her car. The dog made a companionable whine and panted.

"Don't ask, Sweets. Just don't ask," she said as she cranked up the car and pulled away from the curb. In fact, as she now recalled, she had skipped to it, when alone with her sister Pat and her younger cousins, and not standing on the dignity of twelve years. She had been a d.a.m.n good double-dutch skipper, too. All the Ciampis had skipped, including the boys. Her dad had been a welter-weight club fighter in the forties for a couple of years, and skipping was macho training rather than a girl thing at casa Ciampi, where everyone also learned to box. Marlene had kept up training, too. She had a speed bag and a heavy bag set up at home, and she worked out a couple, three times a week-not a Jazzercise girl, Marlene-still including skipping. And, naturally, Marlene had taught her daughter. Lucy still skipped, and was brilliant at it, but she did it in private, not with Mom anymore. It's just a phase, Marlene thought, trying to generate a little self-comfort. But really, who knew? Who knew, for example, what Jumping Jerry Fein's spectacular suicide had done to his daughter? Clearly, she was in a marriage made elsewhere than in heaven, but did that follow necessarily from the big jump? Flash forward twenty years-Lucy sitting all beat up in room 37: "Yeah, well, my mom was this hard-rock femin.a.z.i with a gun, so I guess I just became a doormat to get back at her."

"Is that why I don't want to do this silly woman's investigation, Sweety?" she asked. "Because I don't want to get into it? Some other miserable family. I am a simple person, basically. No, really, don't laugh! I love my husband, I love my children, even that rotten brat, I don't try to change the world, I'm not an ideologue, I don't tear cigarettes out of people's mouths in restaurants, I don't throw paint on furs. All I do is I try to keep a tiny fraction of the violent s.h.i.+theads of the world from hurting their loved ones. This is simple, no? Yell, scream, be depressed, but no hitting, no stabbing, don't shoot them with guns. It's kindergarten."

Marlene waited for the light at Houston and Lafayette and turned to face the mastiff, who turned his contemplative, sag-faced, red-eyed gaze on her, the better to concentrate his canine wisdom on her kvetching.

"But I always seem to get involved. I'm down in it all the time, slopping around with the toxic worms, who did what to who, back when, why-Brenda f.u.c.king Nero, this new one . . . I don't know, Sweets, this is not what I bargained for. If I wanted to do social work, I would have a little office with light oak and nubbly tweed furniture, and my MSW diploma and some soothing abstracts on the walls, and a black plastic thingie on my desk with my name engraved, or maybe a wooden one, with the swoopy carved letters. Do you see me doing that? Of course you don't. It's not me. I don't have good listening skills. I have good shooting skills, although G.o.d knows I never asked for that either. So? Any sage advice?" She waited. "What's that? Eat decayed corn dogs and sniff a.n.u.ses? Okay, it sounds extreme, but if it works for you, I'll try it. I tried everything else."

Chapter 4.

ONE OF THE HABITS THAT KARP HAD retained from his days as a worker bee was culinary, or rather anti-culinary. In the lunch hour, in fine weather when he had no unavoidable business luncheon, he repaired to one of the s.h.i.+ny cancer wagons lined up along the edges of Foley Square, and there consumed remarkable quant.i.ties of what his mother always called chazerei, or pig swill. Today he was eating macerated beef lips and pork by-products forced into a condom and served in a piquant mustard sauce on lozenges of absorbent cotton, with kraut, was.h.i.+ng this (the second of a matched pair) down with fizzy orange sugar water. Next to him, on the bench, there rested a yellowish square in waxed paper, the shape and very nearly the taste of paving material, which had been purveyed as a knish.

As he ate, he read through a stack of files, moving them, after reading, from one side of his seated position to the other, using the knish as a convenient paperweight. Although Karp could not possibly keep abreast of the thousands of live felony cases handled by the D.A.'s office, he made an effort to examine enough of a sample to give him a feeling for the tone of the office as a whole. From time to time he found some funny business and he pounced. As now. This, from Felony Bureau, was a major prosecution against a car-theft ring, an interstate operation involving numerous chop shops, crooked parts dealers, and gangs of thieves who functioned as suppliers. It was an elaborate case that had required many months to develop and involved cooperation with the FBI.

Karp muttered and made notes on a legal pad, ripped off the pages, stuck them in the folder, and was about to move on to the next one when he looked up and was startled to see an elderly woman sitting on a bench across the path from him who was also muttering and making notes on a legal pad. Her pad was tattered and faded, and she was using a stumpy pencil instead of an office ballpoint, and she was wearing more than one dress and had next to her a shopping cart stacked with boxes and black plastic bags. Like most New Yorkers, Karp was careful to give the homeless their privacy and did not ordinarily stare, but this woman's face was interesting, plain, large-nosed, but with deep-set, large dark eyes, rimmed with brownish skin, like rust stains. Her drawn cheeks were decorated with spots of cherry rouge, and there were flakes of bright lipstick clinging to her lips and the skin surrounding them. Her hair was frizzy and dirty gray, and upon it she wore a black velvet hat with a tiny veil, such as his mother had worn back in the fifties. The woman stopped and looked up just then, and met his gaze, hers turning wary. He smiled and indicated his pad and hers.

"Nice day to work outside," he said.

"Are you a counselor, sir?" she asked after rather a long pause. Her voice was cracked from disuse, but she spoke with the exaggerated clarity of the New York native who has been at pains to disguise the accent.

"I'm with the D.A.," said Karp.

"Oh. I have such an interesting case here," she said, waving a thick and filthy manila folder. "Maybe you would be so kind as to give me your legal opinion. I believe a great injustice has been done, a very great, a very great, great injustice, and they're getting away with it." She lowered her voice and glanced theatrically over both shoulders. "With murder."

"Would you care for a knish?" Karp asked, hoping by this gesture to forestall what he knew could be an unpleasant encounter. The courthouse area was, naturally enough, well supplied with those of the mad whose nuttiness came out in legal colors, and this person was clearly one of them.

"Oh, no, I couldn't take your lunch," she fluttered.

"Please." He stood and extended the brick to her in its square of waxed paper, meanwhile slapping his (actually quite flat) stomach with his other hand. "I don't need it," he said heartily. "It'd only go to waste."

"Oh, well, in that case, thank you very much," she said, and accepted it and took a first small bite, closing her eyes as if she were tasting a spoonful of molossal at Le Pavillon.

Karp took this opportunity to make his escape, feeling somewhat ratty about it, but not too ratty, and not really regretting his lost knish.

Back in the office, he called the ADA in charge of the car-theft-ring prosecution, a luminary of the Felony Bureau named Weingarten, and asked him to stop by if he had no other commitments. Officially, Karp should have called Weingarten's bureau chief, Tim Sullivan, and taken it through channels, or, failing that, he should have had O'Malley call the Felony office secretary to set up an appointment, but he chose not to. Sullivan would b.i.t.c.h to Keegan, of course, and Keegan would answer that the chief a.s.sistant could call anyone in the office he d.a.m.n pleased, and then yell at Karp to for chrissake go through the chain of command, and Karp would forget to do so the next time, and thus each of the hundreds of attorneys in the office would learn that they could at any moment expect such a call and have to answer instantly for any of the cases under their control, which, of course, was the point of Karp doing it in so outrageously unbureaucratic a fas.h.i.+on.

Weingarten said the only thing he could say, which was that he had no other commitments and would be right up, and then he spent a frantic five minutes juggling his many commitments, and arrived at Karp's door breathless, a long-faced young man with pale eyes and thinning blondish hair. Karp pointed him to a seat and held up the case file.

"People v. Ragosi, nice job," Karp said.

A smile pulled tentatively at Weingarten's mouth and the ginger mustache that sat upon it. "Uh, thanks."

"Yeah, how long did it take you to build the case, a year?"

"Fourteen months, including the grand jury."

"Yeah, this Ragosi seems to be the kingpin, all right. And you got him the usual way, by turning each layer of his organization. The cops went undercover, posed as car thieves, got the evidence on the chop shops, the chop shops gave you the parts brokers, and one particular parts broker, what was his name? I got it right here . . ." He thumbed through the thick file.

"Ortiz, Luis Ortiz," said Weingarten.

"Yeah, here it is. I see Luis was a very bad boy. You started him out on fifty-seven separate B-felony counts, criminal possession of stolen property, first-degree-wow, this was a multimillion-dollar operation-plus forgery of a VIN, forty counts, plus odds and ends: falsifying business records, illegal possession of a VIN, and then you let him plead down to, let's see here, three counts of CPSP four, an E felony, plus some misdemeanor trash, and the payoff was he gave you Mr. Ragosi, who is the mastermind behind the ring. Is that right?"

Weingarten said, "Yeah, we thought that was a good deal for us. The cops and the feds have been after Ragosi for years, but he was always too sharp."

"Yeah, I see where Ortiz testifies to the grand jury the guy always used cutouts for cash transfers, would never meet face to face with his suppliers. And I don't see any evidence from the phone taps and mail covers, so I presume you got zip. A careful guy, Ragosi. So it was real fortunate that Mr. Ragosi decides one fine day to personally hand a manila envelope with forty grand in it to your pal Ortiz, and even more fortunate that Ortiz decides to keep that envelope, and sure enough, it's got Mr. Ragosi's prints on it. And on that evidence the cops get a warrant and raid Mr. Ragosi's place of business, and what do they find? All sorts of incriminating paperwork from our boy Ortiz. None from all the other limbs of his vast criminal enterprise, only from Ortiz. What do you make of that, Weingarten?"

"What can I say? The guy got sloppy for once, and we got lucky. It happens."

"Yeah, it does. It also happens that defendants under the hammer of a big jolt perjure themselves, and it also happens that cops anxious to close out a big one encourage that perjury and plant evidence. Ragosi may be a criminal mastermind, like you say, but I would be willing to bet my next paycheck that in this case he was framed."

Weingarten felt sweat bead up on his hairline and resisted the urge to wipe at it. "Wait a minute, you don't seriously think I-"

"Suborned perjury? No, I don't. I think the cops arranged it, and you bought it. Be more careful next time. Do you realize that you have no real independent corroboration of Ragosi's personal involvement in a criminal enterprise?"

"But we have half a dozen of his employees-"

"The same as Ortiz. They're ratting the boss out to save their a.s.ses. No, as far as I can see from this, you have a legitimate case against Ragosi for a number of counts of falsifying business records, period."

The young prosecutor gaped. "But that's . . . nothing!"

"It's not much," agreed Karp, "but it's all I'm going to let you go ahead with on Ragosi. The shame of it is that this is a really good operation. Ortiz and the other chop kings are bad guys and you got them. You broke up a major car-theft ring. If the big guy beat you, hey, you might get him the next time. There's no shame in getting whipped. The shame would be in this office bringing a case that stinks of perjury and manufactured evidence. If you're still set on Ragosi, my advice to you is go back to his operation and look harder."

"But we did!" cried Weingarten in a strangled tone. "We looked everywhere, his wife, his banks, his daughter, his f.u.c.king cousins, we bugged his house, his office . . . Jesus Christ, every s.k.a.n.k, drugged-out car thief on the East Coast knows Ragosi is the man, and we didn't find a f.u.c.king mark on him, and if it wasn't for Ortiz . . ." He stopped, flushed, and hissed, "Ah, s.h.i.+t!"

"I rest my case," said Karp.

When Weingarten had slunk off, Karp made a note to talk to Keegan and Sullivan about canning the Ragosi trial, and also to let the police chain of command know in the nicest possible way that he wasn't having any of that particular brand of horses.h.i.+t this month. Then he picked up the phone and called his wife.

"Where are you?" Karp asked when she answered. Marlene's car phone was still enough of a novelty that Karp always asked, even though he had been talking to cops in their cars for years without querying their 1020 unless necessary. It was different when it was your wife.

"I'm on Woodhaven in Queens," said Marlene.

"Oh, yeah? Seeing the folks?"

"No, an old boyfriend. Rocco Lopata."

"Uh-huh. Is this like something I should be worrying about?"

"Nah, it's just that every so often I have to get it on in a grease pit with a short, hairy, overweight body-shop manager. I'll be in and out of there in twenty minutes."