Depraved Indifference (7 page)

Marino swung his hand to encompass the crowd and said, “Marlene, you know what we're doing here, right?”

“Yeah, you're trying to reconstruct the bomb from the debris.”

“Uh-huh. And we'll probably do OK on it. It wasn't much of a bomb, power-wise. We didn't get much scatter, you know? I figure from what this looks like, plus what we got on the tape, that we're talking no more than five, six ounces of high explosives, probably military.”

Marlene said, “What do you mean, ‘what we got on the tape'?”

“Oh, just Terry's description of what he saw when he opened the pot. It was empty, he said, except for a brick. They all thought it was a dud, a hoax. Brick was probably hollowed-out, the dumb bastards.”

“I thought you X-rayed the bombs you get in here. Wouldn't they have seen the hollowed-out part in the films?”

Marino shook his head. “Some bricks don't X-ray worth a damn. Bricks have a lot of lead in them, and radioactives. You know that just living in a brick house could give you cancer? It's a fact.”

Karp pointed to a group of men pouring sand through wire-mesh screens. “What are those guys doing?”

“Oh, they're looking to see if anything's embedded in the sandbags. We take apart and sift through the ones that got punctured by the debris.”

“Pretty thorough,” said Karp.

“Yeah,” Marino said bitterly. “I wish they'd been that thorough yesterday.”

Marlene put her hand on Marino's arm. “Frank, we got to talk.”

Marino looked at the hand sideways. “So talk.”

“No, privately. It's important.”

Marino smiled. “Come on, Marlene, I'm married, four kids.”

“Damn, Marlene, I can't take you anywhere,” Karp said.

Marlene stuck out her tongue at both of them and flounced away to the ladder. As if by a signal, every man in the pit stopped work for several seconds to look up her dress, then returned to their grim dredging.

In Marino's small office, Butch and Marlene sat in hard chairs while Marino poured three black coffees from a thermos into china mugs.

“Mmm, this is Medaglia D'Oro,” Marlene sighed.

Marino grinned at her. “Close,” he said. “I got an uncle runs a gourmet place, he sends me these beans. They cost about as much as cocaine. I got one of those little espresso pots, works pretty good.” The three of them sipped their coffee in silence. Karp thought the coffee tasted like medicine and wished he had a quart of milk and a bag of Oreos. His mug had fake Chinese characters printed on it, which when closely examined turned out to say, “Fuck you very much.” He pretended to sip from it and waited for Marlene to make her play.

At length Marino spoke. “So? What'd you want to talk about?”

Marlene leaned forward. “OK, Frank, this is strictly off the record, so no bullshit, all right? We just got started on this thing, and already we're getting weird vibes. We don't know if the brass is covering their ass or what. So we have to know:
is
there something to cover up? Or are we imagining things?”

The detective drank some more coffee and fumbled in the pockets of his coverall. He extracted a crumpled pack of Winstons and lit one with a steel Zippo. “Off the record for real?” he asked through blue smoke.

Marlene gave him her flashlight grin. “C'mon, Frank, would I lie to you except to advance my career? Is something going on?”

“OK, here it is. Yesterday was a zoo around here after the blast. Around ten last night I noticed that Hanlon showed up, along with some of his people from downtown. OK, not unusual, a cop gets aced, the chief inspector shows up to view the ashes, et cetera. But I see his people asking questions of the guys around here. They got Jim Hammer in the office there, and they're doing a regular grill job.”

“Who's Hammer?' Karp asked.

“Doheny's driver. He was at Grand Central. Anyway, I start getting a little pissed at this and I go to Hanlon. I get him alone and I ask him, you know, what the fuck is going on? He says the investigation has attracted interest at the highest level, and he will be personally involved and all that bullshit. Which is fine with me. Then he asks, was Doheny drunk?

“OK, I say, Jack Doheny has been known to take a drink, and he was at this big retirement racket the night before, so maybe there was a little hair of the dog that morning, but nobody who knew him for five minutes would believe that he was ever drunk on the job.

“So Hanlon says we have evidence that suggests that he might have been drunk and screwed up the deactivation, and that's why Terry got killed. I couldn't fucking believe it! Jack's in the hospital with a fractured skull and busted ribs, and this guy is trying to get him to carry the can for it. What could I say? He's a chief and I'm a captain, right? I always thought he was a pretty good guy—”

Karp broke in. “But Doheny did screw up, in a way. I mean, you said it was a dumb move, buying that the bomb was a hoax.”

Marino glowered at him. “Fuck yeah, I said it! But I'm saying it
after
. I
know
it was a real bomb. All right, maybe they didn't exactly follow procedures. They should have waited longer. But I could have made the same mistake, anybody could. That's no reason for Hanlon talking like he was going to bring charges.

“Look, I'll be honest with you. Terry's dead, and Jack and Luke are probably off the job permanent on three-quarters. The important thing is getting the guys that did this. I mean, they did it once, they could do it again. So what I can't figure is where Hanlon gets off being a hardass about Jack.”

“Yeah, that's the question,” Marlene said.

“It doesn't make sense,” Karp added. “You would think the brass would be doing the opposite. If the explosion was due to incompetence by cops, they would be covering it up, not selling it.”

“Unless they're covering up something worse,” Marlene said quietly.

Karp shook himself and stood up. “Or unless this is our imagination. Look, Frank, when you start getting a picture of what happened here, I'd appreciate it if you let Marlene or me know first. And be extra careful with any physical evidence. Just call one of us and we'll send somebody over to get it.”

Marino gave a short, sharp laugh. “Great. That's just what Hanlon said.”

“Oh, yeah? You might tell Chief Inspector Hanlon to call his boss about that. Or maybe I will.”

Marlene stood up, too, and she and Karp made to leave. At the door she turned and said, “Thanks for the help. And Frank, for sure now, it wasn't a fuck-up, was it?”

Marino regarded her bleakly. “Marlene, whatever Jack Doheny did or didn't do, some bastard wired that pot for one reason and one reason only—to kill whoever tried to take it apart. And it worked, the son of a bitch.”

Twenty minutes later, Brenner, Marlene, and Karp were eating lunch in a clam bar on City Island, an unlikely community more reminiscent of Nantucket than of the Bronx, of which it is a peninsula. Only a few minutes from Rodman Neck, City Island's bars and seafood joints are usually populated with odd mixes of off-duty cops, Saturday boaters from the nearby marina, and local moms and kids in for a weekend treat. This clam bar showed the bill of fare in black stick-in letters on a white board supplied by Coca-Cola, and most of the customers were eating fried clams served in red plastic mesh baskets.

They talked for a while about the developing case, and when the waitress came over they each ordered a dozen cherrystones. Marlene and Brenner had bottles of Schaefer; Karp ordered a black-and-white malted.

“What're you, nutso? Nobody has a malted with clams,” Marlene said indignantly.

“Yeah,” Brenner said, “it's like pickles and milk. You get a bellyache.”

“Beer gives me a bellyache,” Karp said placidly. “You should have a malted, Champ. Or two, you're still a rail.” It was true. Marlene had never regained the weight she had lost after her injury. Everything she ate—and she ate enormously—was turned to hot vapor by her torchlike metabolism, a biological freak for which ninety per cent of the women in New York would have committed any number of class-A felonies. Perversely, Karp had liked her better when she was curvy, and said so often, producing pouts or snarls, depending on her mood.

This time she ignored the remark and said, “Brenner, what do you think? Why is Hanlon acting like he wants to pin something on his own guys?”

Brenner looked sideways at Marlene. With his heavy-lidded eyes he appeared to be half asleep most of the time, but Marlene knew he didn't miss much. “Somebody's leaning on him. From the top.”

“Come on, Doug, Denton's running this,” Karp said. “You saying somebody's bucking Denton?”

“Don't have to buck Denton. There's channels and channels, my lad. There's other superchiefs. There's the politicals. The hell I know. But if something's moving funny, there's got to be a mover, no?”

“But Hanlon would have to be crazy to screw with Denton on this.”

“Why? What are you going to do? Go to Denton and say that Pete Hanlon isn't cooperating? He is. Tell him you didn't like the expression on his face? Give me a break. Besides, you do everything Bloom tells you?”

“He rests his case,” Marlene said after slurping her last clam. “And now gents, since this line of inquiry must await further developments, as we say in police work, I am off to the ladies' for a whiz, after which I'd like to go to Jacobi to see if Doheny or D'Amato can talk yet. Then I think it would be a good idea for me to go back to Rodman and watch the boys poke through the ruins. How about you, Butch?”

“I guess I'll hit the FBI after we drop you off. I got to make a phone call first.”

There was a pay phone under a canopy outside the restaurant. Karp bought a roll of quarters from the cashier and called V.T. Newbury in Great Barrington.

“V.T.? Butch. Have you got anything?”

“I made some calls, yeah. An interesting situation. Do you know anything about France?”

“Umm … they eat frogs and stinky cheese and the people talk funny.”

“You got it. I meant the way they handle things like this hijacking. Authority in France is incredibly centralized. Nobody makes a decision about something like this without an OK from the Minister of the Interior. But underneath there's all kinds of rivalries. For a crime at an airport, you have the local prefectural cops, who everybody shits on; the gendarmerie, who are sort of a national police force; plus the
police judiciaire
, who investigate crimes and develop cases. Also, within the regular gendarmerie there's a specialized anti-terrorist unit. Nobody gets along with anybody, so in the typically French way they also have this committee, CNSAC, in which all the various police groups are represented, plus the airport managers and the political types.”

“Great lecture, V.T. So what's the bottom line? What's happening now?”

“OK, I'm getting to the good part. According to Leland Wilkes, a second cousin at the Paris embassy, this group has been meeting continuously since they first learned the plane was heading for Paris. The hijackers are demanding the release of two Croats the French arrested in June. Apparently they aced the Yugoslav consul-general in Marseilles. Then they want the plane fueled and reprovisioned for a flight over Yugoslavia so they can drop leaflets. Then they want to land in Bulgaria. The Yugoslavs are going batshit. They're demanding that the French arrest the Croats and return them to Yugoslavia.

“The committee seems to be deadlocked. The gendarmerie wants to storm the plane. The local cops and pols want the plane out of France, period. The thought of an airliner loaded with explosives winging around over Paris freaks them out. The Interior people, and we can assume the senior government people, don't want to piss off the Yugos too badly. After all, they owe them one for letting the consul get wasted. Mostly they don't want a bloodbath involving Americans. The bomb that blew up in New York seems to have impressed them that these assholes mean business.”

“What's doing down at the airport?”

“Waiting is all, according to Leland. He's been there, and tells me they've got the plane parked on a side runway. There's a tanker and a flight crew van out there, and a friend of his in civil aviation says the crew in the van is suspiciously tough-looking and muscular for French airport workers.”

“Sounds like their SWAT team's in place. Will they try something?”

“Hard to tell. The French have never stormed an aircraft, and they've got a shitty record in dealing with terrorists.”

“So what are our guys doing?”

“Ah, that's
really
interesting. The Paris chargé, a guy by the name of Oscar Raiford, is getting very mixed signals from Washington. The FBI also has a guy on the spot, Jim Toomey, flew over this morning. Out of the New York office. You know him?”

“Never heard of him, but he must work for Pillman. What's with the mixed signals?”

“Well, SOP in cases like this—hijack originating on U.S. soil, American flag carrier—is to pressure the holding nation for return of the hijackers to U.S. jurisdiction and also to resist concessions to hijackers. The drill is to talk, talk, talk, figuring time is on the side of the negotiators.

“OK, that's the direction Raiford is getting from State, or was, through this morning. But Toomey was pushing in the opposite direction—give in, let them go, let the Bulgarians have them. Leland says Raiford seems confused, keeps cabling Washington for written orders. Also this guy Dettrick seems to be a big player, which is odd too.”

“Who's Dettrick?”

“According to the cuz, a Deputy Public Information Officer at the embassy, but really the CIA station chief. Dettrick wants the plane stormed with no damn nonsense about saving lives.”

Karp whistled. “What does Leland think of all this?”

“Leland isn't actually paid to think. He's paid to speak good French and act snotty. But between cousins he vouchsafed to me that it's a remarkable departure from normal policy-making. His view is that somebody would like these Croats either in Bulgaria or in the next world, but in any case not on trial in New York. And that's about it, Butch.”