Justice Denied (19 page)

An hour later, Karp watched as the two officers signed statements to the effect that Hosie Russell had positively identified the shirt as his, amid much rolling of eyes all around.

“You know, guys,” Karp said, “this is what makes this job such a challenge—matching wits with Professor Moriarty.”

9

H
arry Bello walked the night streets of Alphabet City, that part of the upper lower East Side of Manhattan where the avenues are named not for great men or events but for letters of the alphabet, as if it might have been inappropriate to name them after anything admirable. There are many slums in New York that have fallen from better times—Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant were once proud middle-class districts—but Alphabet City was built as a slum and had not risen in the world. It contains block after block of New Law tenements, five-story walk-ups with fire escapes and air shafts. Down the bleak avenues parade the storefronts of bodegas, liquor stores, cheap furniture and clothing marts, record and hairdressing rooms, pentecostal churches, and the rest of the economy of poverty, all heavily grilled and shuttered at night.

In the sixties, tens of thousands of young people seeking bohemia flooded into New York, and naturally gravitated to the famous art enclave of Greenwich Village. They were thirty years too late; the rents there were designed for art patrons rather than actual artists and their friends. So they moved east, displacing elderly Ukranians, and the East Village was born. There, middle-class kids on the bum could live in agreeable squalor, take drugs, catch sexual diseases, and (a few of them) make music and art.

Where the East Village ends and Alphabet City begins is a question only real estate brokers care much about. To a homicide cop like Bello the presence of a borderland like this one, between the faux poor and the hard cases, meant mainly that it was a place where taxpayers' children in search of excitement were particularly likely to get themselves killed.

Every night for the past week Bello had walked the streets around midnight. This was after a full day's work acting as Marlene Ciampi's private detective on a variety of other cases. Bello didn't need much sleep, and he had no hobbies except Lucy Karp, who was not available in the wee hours.

He was looking for a middle-aged black man, the man who had called 911 at 1:58 one evening a month or so ago and said, “There's a dead woman on Fifth Street off Avenue A.” When the operator had asked for his name and number, he had shouted, “You heard me. Fifth and A,” and hung up. Bello had listened to the tape many times. The pronunciation was diagnostic: “there's” was “deh's”; “Fifth” was “Fi't”; “dead” was “daid”; and, most interesting, “heard” was “hoid.” You didn't get that much among the recent generations. The guy would be over fifty.

Bello had canvassed all the houses on both sides of 5th between avenues A and B and come up blank. A lot of
“no comprende”
on 5th Street. Bello understood enough Spanish to understand that something was being hidden, but not enough to squeeze for it. So he continued to walk the night streets. He bought cigarettes and coffee in the bodegas. He stared down the
guapos
swaggering on the streets. He was polite, almost courtly, to the women.

After a while the people got used to him, and when they found he was not interested in their minor grifts, they almost forgot about him, except that, to the majority of the people, it was nice having their own private
lajara
on the street at night. He became invisible. He was good at it; he felt invisible.

On this night Harry Bello crosses Avenue A to a little
comidas y criollas,
where he buys a cup of excellent coffee and a greasy sugar bun. He reads the
News,
the other three men in the place, Puerto Ricans and a Dominican, chat, smoke, read
El Diario.
Two whores come in for beer, indulge in light raillery, leave with a scream of tires. An elderly black man in dark green work clothes comes in, buys a pack of Camels and a newspaper. When the man gives his order, Bello puts down his paper. There is a brief, inexplicable hiatus in the Spanish conversation.

The black man leaves. Bello, without a word, rises and drifts out behind him. The black man is mid-sixties; he walks stiffly, but his shoulders are square and his back is erect. He enters a building on A off 7th Street. Bello follows him into the building. The man hears a step sounding behind him, whirls in fear. Bello holds up his gold shield. He says, “Tell me about the girl. How she died.”

Marlene said, “He said they were laughing?”

“Yeah,” said Bello. “Laughing their heads off. Shouting stuff. Have a nice trip. Like that. Two of them, that he saw over the parapet.”

They were in her office, and Bello was telling her what he had learned from William Braintree, sixty-four, a Con Ed maintenance worker who, walking home from his swing-shift job at a local substation, had nearly been struck by the falling body of a young woman.

“No, he couldn't ID them,” Bello continued, anticipating as usual. “Just saw silhouettes.” Pause. “The problem is proof.”

Marlene struggled to keep up with the detective. “Um, Harry, you know who did it?”

“Oh, yeah. There'll be somebody saw it. Let you know.” He got up and left.

Weeks now pass. The season moves into full summer, the City heats ups, and geographically literate New Yorkers recall that they live at the steamy latitudes of Madrid and Naples. Having no
corrida
to distract them, the poor cannot pass the unbearable summer like the dignified Madrileños and so take up the habits of the Neapolitans, shooting and stabbing one another in increasing numbers.

Lennie Bergman's case against the despicable Emilio Morales collapses amid scandal. Bergman receives a scathing lecture from the judge. Karp is subjected to a public tongue-lashing by the district attorney, who is able to use some tough-guy lines that he has been saving up for years. (“What kind of whorehouse are you running down there, Karp? You can't keep your people in line, maybe I better find someone who can!”) Karp takes it calmly, as he does most things these days. He is convinced that he will never recover from his impending operation. Nevertheless, he prepares the case against Hosie Russell for the grand jury and gets his indictment.

Lucy Karp grows two tiny fangs. She is not amused. Sleep is banished. In desperation, and secretly, Marlene dips a rag in marsala wine and sugar and sticks it in Lucy's little gob. It works like a charm. Marlene decides not to think about her daughter's brain cells perishing in squadrons, or what Karp will have to say if he finds out.

Emilio Morales returns to his neighborhood, to no great enthusiasm among the home boys. The People's Republic of East 112th Street having not, like the state of New York, suspended the death penalty, Morales is found one sunny morning among the trash cans with two through the ear. Another listless murder investigation begins.

Frangi and Wayne do as little as possible on the Tomasian case. It is the height of the murder season, and they have much to occupy them. They visit the mistress of Mehmet Ersoy, from whom they learn that the late Turk was a big spender, unsurprising information. They also learn that Sarkis Kerbussyan is precisely what he appears to be, a wealthy Armenian art collector with no obvious criminal ties. Aram Tomasian languishes in jail. Gabrielle Avanian is still among the missing. She had never returned from California after the credit card ran out. The police have ceased to look for her with any ardor.

Geri Stone, the sister, collapses the day after Susan Weiner's murder. She is briefly hospitalized and then released, laden with tranquilizing drugs she forgets to take. Her grooming slips, her work deteriorates. She revokes the paroles of an unacceptably high proportion of her case load, and her supervisor asks her to take extended sick leave. She haunts the Criminal Courts building, mumbling, occasionally shouting at nothing. She fits right in.

On 5th Street, in August, around midnight, a woman was being tortured. Her screams and the heavy, meaty sounds of blows shot out into the blackness and melded with the other sounds of the moist summer night—the Spanish music playing on the big radios propped up on the stoops, the punk and heavy metal and salsa from stolen stereos, the roar of cars, the shrieks of children out too late, loud conversation from small knots of men dealing drugs, the buzz of a thousand televisions. It was not an unusual addition to the summer symphony in Alphabet City. Nobody called the cops.

Later that night, two men emerged from 525 East 5th Street, carrying a long bundle wrapped in a dirty green blanket. They walked a half block west to a housing project on Avenue A, cursing the unwieldy weight, and tossed their burden unceremoniously next to a blue Dumpster. They walked away. The bundle moved slightly and a mewling sound arose from it, but no one noticed.

“This is a bad one,” said Mimi Kellerman, passing Marlene an eight-by-ten photograph. “They took this at Beekman when they brought her in.” Kellerman was one of Marlene's four attorneys in Sex Crimes, a birdlike woman with a crisp head of curls and a hard eye. If she said it was bad …

Marlene looked. It was a photo of a woman naked from the waist up. It was bad, and Marlene thought for an instant of her Jane Doe. The woman's face was one huge bruise, but worse that that, it had been crumpled like a beer can: the optical orbits and the cheekbones crushed, the nose flattened, the teeth bashed in, the jaw broken. Bruises also covered her upper body, and there was a gaping hole full of clotted blood on the surface of one breast. Above the hole, obscenely grinning, was a small tattoo of a skull with a red rose in its teeth.

Marlene tossed the photo down. “Sexual activity too, no doubt?”

Kellerman read from a page in a folder. “Raped repeatedly and sodomized, substantial tearing of the vaginal and anal mucosa, internal bleeding, foreign objects forced into both anus and vagina—”

“What objects?”

“Let's see … in the anus, a rubber grip from a motorcycle. In the vagina, a folded-over plastic card, some sort of credit card. Nice, huh?”

“I'm enthralled. I assume an autopsy has been scheduled. Who's handling it for Homicide?”

Kellerman gave her an odd look. “What homicide? She's alive.”

A bubble of nausea rose in Marlene's belly, and she felt the dampness of sweat on her forehead. That the tortured flesh in the photograph was still vulnerable to pain seemed a grosser violation than mere murder.

“How is she? Can she talk?”

“No, she's still unconscious. Not that she would be able to actually say anything—he did a good job on her mouth.”

Marlene picked up the photograph again. “Christ! It's hard to believe anyone survived this. She's got a hole in her chest the size of my fist.”

Kellerman looked at her folder again. “Oh, that—that's the least of her problems. It looks like hell, but it's superficial compared to the head and facial damage. Apparently he took an actual bite out of her.”

“A bite? And this was where, Alphabet City?”

“Yeah, as a matter of fact. Why?”

“Because he did it before. A Jane Doe, except then he tossed her off a roof after he chewed on her. Not ‘he,' I should say ‘they.' Harry found the guy who called in the Jane Doe, and he saw two people throw the Jane Doe off the roof. Speaking of which, do we have an ID on this woman?”

“Not exactly,” said Kellerman. “She was nude under the blanket they found her in. But, um, that credit card? It had a name on it.” She read it off. “Gabrielle P. Avanian.” Then she said, “Marlene, why is your mouth hanging open?”

“Yes, Marlene,” said Karp, “I do think it's crazy, but luckily it doesn't matter what I think. I'm going into the hospital tomorrow. I'll be lying on my bed of pain, clinging tenuously to life. Somebody else can think about the Armenians.”

“I hate it when you play for sympathy,” said Marlene, getting up and walking to the window of his office, “especially for a minor operation. What about me? You think it's going to be fun being a single parent for however long? I don't see why you can't just stay at home until your cast is off.”

“I explained this already, babe,” he said, controlling his irritation. “I'm starting the Russell trial. I can stay in my office while it's on. After, I can get somebody to carry me up the stairs and take some time off.”

Marlene stiffened her jaw and turned to look at him, ready to spew invective, but something in his eyes made her check. Was it fear? Karp wasn't afraid of anything. He was the solid, steady, unchanging one. She was the nut prone to weird fantasies. A tide of empathy burst through the elaborate structure she had built, as a quasi-modern woman, to keep the “relationship” on track and prevent herself from being trodden on. She walked over to him and touched his hand. He gripped her fingers, tight enough to sting. They remained that way silent, for minutes, while the sounds of the working day flowed in through the glass of the door.

Karp cleared his throat, and spoke again about what she had discovered, as if nothing important had happened.

“I think it's a good break, this woman, but tying it to the Tomasian case is speculation beyond the facts. It's loopy to tie a sexual predator to a political assassination—”

“But we agree that it looks less and less like a real political assassination,” Marlene objected. “Tomasian's being framed. Look, what's the big anomaly in this case? The money. Where did the money come from? Blackmail? Maybe Ersoy knew somebody with money who was into snuff sex. The victim decides a hit is cheaper than paying off forever. The killer decides to frame Tomasian. He knows Tomasian has an alibi, so he has to wax the girlfriend too. But she runs. When she has to come back, maybe because she's broke, they grab her and do her like they did the Jane Doe.”

Karp held up an admonishing hand. “Marlene, stop! You don't know any of this. Even if the same guy did Avanian and the other girl, it could still be a nutcase selecting at random, like you thought before. There's nothing else solid to tie these Alphabet City cases to Ersoy.”