Depraved Indifference (17 page)

“Wait a second, Connie, calm down. A riot?”

“It's the Croatians, from Brooklyn. There's, God, I don't know, two hundred of them up in our office, yelling and screaming and tearing things up. They're yelling for you, too. That's why I thought I better come down.”

“Yeah, thanks, Connie. How about building security, you call them?”

“Yeah, first thing. They sent two guys, a big help.”

“OK, I'll take care of it. Go to the snack bar and get yourself some coffee or something. OK?”

“All right. Great way to start the day, huh. Hey, I saw you last night on the news. You looked good.”

As Karp dashed into a nearby office and picked up a phone, he began to realize why he and not Bloom had been cast as the featured player in this case on TV. Cursing himself for his own stupidity, he dialed Bill Denton's number.

It took two hours for the tactical cops to drag the Croatians out of the Criminal Courts Bureau offices and down to the waiting paddy wagons. Used to dealing with radical kids or unruly members of minorities, the cops were disconcerted by having to manhandle respectable middle-aged people led by a priest.

Karp stood in the fourth floor hallway, guarded by an immense black TPF sergeant, and watched the last of them being muscled out. A fiftyish woman with a neat blond perm and a sky-blue pants suit squirmed in the grip of two six-footers. She caught sight of Karp as she was dragged by and let out a stream of spittle-laden vituperation in two languages.

The TPF sergeant said, “Karp, you better watch yourself, these nice folks don't like y‘all one bit.”

“Free the Five! Free the Five! Long live free Croatia!” the woman shouted as the stairway door closed. The stairwell was echoing and booming with similar shouts. The sergeant snorted.

“That's it. You'll be OK, now. The chief's got building security beefed up for the next week at least.”

“Thanks, Sarge. Any bloodshed?”

“Naw. These folks're all talk. And we got orders to be real gentle. This demonstration'd been a bunch a brothers, there'd a been hair on the walls. Croatians, my ass!”

Karp thanked the sergeant again and went into the office. A dozen or so attorneys and clerical workers stumbled around in the wreckage, setting up desks that had been overturned and clearing up drifts of scattered paper. He acknowledged their greetings and a scattering of compliments about how well he had looked on television. Hrcany came up to him and handed him a large hand-lettered picket sign. “Here,” he said, “you might want it as a souvenir.” The sign said:

KOMMIE-LOVER KARP

FREE THE FIVE!!

“The price of fame,” Karp said ruefully. “Roland, if I ever go on television again, would you be a friend and kick me in the ass?” He gestured broadly to the wrecked office. “Christ, look at all this crap.”

Roland started to leave and then snapped his fingers. “Shit, I almost forgot. I found you another witness. Guy name of Emil Koltan. He's a waiter down at the Buda Restaurant.”

“Oh yeah? What's his story?”

“The story is, I'm having dinner with my dad last night at the Buda, which is the place to go for serious pirogi and paprikash, and we get to talking to Emil. Him and my dad go way back, before '56 even. So they're bullshitting about money, how hard it is nowadays, et cetera, and Emil's talking about how he takes these odd waiting jobs, like banquets, weddings, and so on. I'm not really listening until I realize his tone has changed, to like confidential. He's asking my dad for advice, and he's talking about a private dinner he did for a Croat fraternal organization.”

“When was this? The dinner.”

“Just last week, the ninth. It seems these four guys at Emil's table were a little high and talking freely because they figured nobody could understand them, which was a good bet because they were speaking Serbo-Croat. Little did they know that our boy Emil, though a Hungarian, understands Serbo-Croatian. He was raised in one of the border areas that kept switching around during the last century or so. Anyway, he got the gist of the conversation, which was that they were giving one of them the needle about screwing up something important. Emil says ‘the little one, with thick glasses' was the goat. Turns out, it was putting a bomb in a locker in Grand Central.”

“Holy shit, Roland!”

“Yeah, wait, there's more. They're also talking about stealing a plane. One of them, Emil says, ‘the big one, old, but like a bull,' is like running a quiz show, snapping out questions about what everybody is supposed to do, making sure they know their parts—”

“Karavitch.”

“Sounds like it.”

“Unbelievable! But Roland, why didn't this waiter tell anybody about this?”

“Come on, Butch, what's to tell? They were laughing and joking—it could have been a play, or a practical joke.”

“About bombs and boosting airliners?”

“Butch, they're Croats. Emil's a Hungarian. How does he know what a bunch of Croats would find funny? But when he saw them on TV after the hijack and recognized them—”

“He can ID them?”

“Sure. Except for the chick. She wasn't at the dinner. So he gets concerned and decides to talk to my dad next time he's in the Buda. My dad is sort of a pillar-of-the-community type, big lawyer, owns property, so a lot of the old country people like to grab him and spill their guts in Hungarian, maybe cop some free legal advice. Anyway, he did, and there I was, and the rest is history. Here's his name and address.” Hrcany handed Karp a piece of paper. Karp took it, kissed it loudly, and flung his arm over Hrcany's shoulders in an athletic hug.

“Roland, I'm peeing in my pants. Between Emil and Max Dorcas, Rukovina is going to crack like an egg, that little scumbag. That's it, that's the case in—ah, shit!”

Karp grimaced and slammed his right fist violently into the palm of his left hand. “What's wrong, Butch?” Hrcany asked.

“Dorcas, dammit! There was supposed to be a lineup for him here this morning. Look, Roland, thanks a million for this. I got to call Spicer now to get the lineup going and I'll tell him to send a man for Emil too. See you later.”

Karp got Fred Spicer on the second ring. “Fred? Karp. Look, things are rolling. I want to do that Max Dorcas lineup right away, and I got another witness in the same case that I'd like you to send somebody for, also right away. OK, here's his name—”

“Hold on there, Butch, just a second. The Dorcas lineup? Christ, I canceled that, must of been a little past nine.”

“You canceled it? Without asking me? Why in hell'd you do that?”

“There was a riot going on, Butch, hey?”

“What the fuck does that have to do with it, Fred? We weren't going to do the lineup in the goddamn Criminal Courts Bureau office. Shit!”

“Well, I just thought it was wiser not to, that's all,” said Spicer, beginning to huff. He was a reasonably good administrative cop, if inclined to be lazy.

Karp gritted his teeth and sat on his rising temper. Spicer could screw up his life more than just about any member of the police department, and Karp could not afford any more problems at present. “OK, OK, Fred. Sorry I snapped. Schedule the Dorcas lineup for tomorrow first thing. I'd like Slocum to bring them in from Riker's himself.”

“Yeah, he said you wanted him to. Hell, Butch, I got better things for my guys to do than haul scumbags from the jail and back. I'm short as hell now, as it is, and—”

“Fred, bear with me. Believe me, it's important. But more important right now is picking up this witness. Name's Emil Koltan. Here's the address.” Karp read off an address in the 80's off East End Avenue. Spicer said he would get right on it, which Karp doubted but couldn't do much about.

After hanging up, Karp went into his office, undamaged except that somebody had scrawled “
FREE THE FIVE
” across his frosted glass door in pink lipstick. He calmed himself by sheer force of will, put in a couple of hours of paperwork and made a dozen or so phone calls, including one to Denton about the waiter Hrcany had found. Around eleven Marlene Ciampi walked in, as usual without knocking.

“Where have you been this fine morning?” Karp asked sourly. As always, his first sight of Marlene in the morning made his heart bump with love, but today he resented it. Roland's news had elated him and the conversation with Spicer had cast him down again. Those events, coming on top of the TV appearance and its sequel, made him feel jerked around, a feeling 'e particularly hated.

“I didn't know you were a Cosmo girl,” said Marlene, pointing to his desk. “This gives us something else in common.” Karp realized he had been carrying the magazine he had bought from Dirty Warren around with him all morning. He cursed and threw it in the trashbasket.

“Silly you,” said Marlene, perching her bottom on the edge of his desk and shaking out a Marlboro. “Now you'll never know the seven ways to tell if your boss is romantically interested. Hey, I saw you on TV last night.”

“Yeah, right. How was I, great?”

“I thought you were the sexiest thing since Marshal Dillon. I was wet to the knees.”

“I was set up. Fucking Bloom wants a patsy to hang if this case goes sour, and right now it looks like a good bet. I can't believe the shit that has gone wrong.” He briefly filled her in on what Hrcany had told him and about what had gone down with Spicer. She puffed smoke and listened, then said, “Take it easy, Butch. It's a complex case. It's going to take us awhile to settle down all the aspects. Now, you might be interested in another little wiggle I happened to turn up—”

“It's not
that
complex, Marlene, for crying out loud!

You wrote the goddamn indictments. That's what we should be concentrating on. The gang left a bomb. The bomb killed a cop. We got to convince twelve people it went down that way and that's all she wrote. Period.”

“If they let you.”

“If who lets me? What's that supposed to mean?”

“Butch, while you are pursuing the great simplicities, somebody is trying to screw up the case. You have to believe that, and you know as well as I do that there are about a thousand ways to taint a case like this. A couple have already been tried.”

“So? We stopped them.”

“So far. But they only have to score once, and they'll keep trying. Which is why we have to find out who they are. And soon.”

Karp leaned back in his chair and massaged his scalp. He felt exhausted and irritated. “They! Who's ‘they,' Marlene, tell me that! What are we going to do, go off on some paranoid wild goose chase after some fucking conspiracy we don't even know exists? We got six hundred homicides …”

“I know how many homicides we have, Butch,” said Marlene quietly. “And there's no need to start shouting at me.”

“Ah, Christ, I'm sorry, Marlene, but what do you expect me to do? I'm hanging on by my fingernails here. I just have to play it straight defense, that's all. And hope we can catch all the shit. OK, I'm calmed down. Now, what was the little wiggle?”

Marlene had decided on the spot not to tell him about what she had learned from Taylor, at least not yet. Or about what she planned to do with the old soldier. “The wiggle? Oh, nothing much. I found out where John Evans is from, is all.”

“Evans? Oh, the fancy suit at the arraignment.”

“Yeah. He works out of Washington, D.C. For Arthur Bingham Roberts.”

“Oh, that's just great. Marlene, where the hell do these
schmendriks
get the bread to hire the most expensive criminal lawyer in the United States?”

“Oh, I wondered about that, too. So I went down to the Fifth Precinct, where they booked those yo-yos who were here this morning. And I got sort of cozy with Father Peter Blic.”

“Who?”

“Father Blic is the priest at St. Gregory's in Greenpoint, where the Croat cheering section comes from. Our suspects are his parishioners.”

“And the parish raised the money?”

“Oh, sure, they had a bake sale and bingo and put together enough to hire Arthur Bingham Roberts for about twelve minutes. No, this weekend somebody delivered a check to Father Blic, with a note that said that Mr. Roberts had been contacted and was interested in the case. The check was for twenty K.”

“I can see his interest. Are you going to tell me who the check was from?”

“Well, you know, I asked Father Blic that very question, because, as I told the dear man, I was so impressed by the Christian generosity shown by the benefactors of those brave freedom fighters, that I had resolved to make a special novena for them. So he said that while he didn't know the actual donor, the check was drawn on the account of a law firm called McNamara, Shannon, Shannon and Devlin, and maybe that would help.”

“Hmm, sounds like a bunch of Croatians, all right. What's their story?”

“I don't know yet. That's for this afternoon. What do you think?”

“Not much. They're no criminal firm, though. Is that it?”

Marlene got off the desk and went to the door. “On the Doyle front it is. Oh, by the way, I sent my injury appeal up through channels. It's probably sitting in Corncob's in-basket. Any little thing you can do—”

“Sure, babe, I'll try, but you know how it is.”

“Alas, I do. See you.” She gave him a lopsided grin and slipped out.

Shortly thereafter, Marlene locked herself in a booth in the ladies' room and began weeping silently. Mouth wide open, tears gushing, she hugged herself and rocked back and forth, howling softly, her mind blank. After about ten minutes she mopped her face and blew her nose with toilet paper. These sessions had been occurring with increasing frequency during the past year. The overwhelming feelings would unpredictably burst like a summer squall, and then she would excuse herself from whatever she was doing and dash for the bathroom. Spiritual diarrhea, she called it privately, and told herself that it was a cheap substitute for therapy.