Justice Denied (20 page)

“Then why did she split?” Marlene asked with some heat. “Why did she leave town the day after the murder? With her boyfriend accused of the crime? It wasn't like she just decided to take a vacation and didn't know about it. This case made the network news, for chrissake. She went on the lam for a reason, Butch.”

“Okay, Marlene, you're right,” said Karp crankily. “It's a great story. So what are you gonna do with it? Where does it take you? Nowhere. Roland'll laugh in your face if you bring him that connection.” Then, observing the growing tightness of her jaw, he temporized.

“Look, let's review the plot here. What do we know as facts?” He ticked them off on his long fingers. “One, Ersoy is killed. Two, he has a big pile of money in a box. Three, Tomasian's alibi disappears after the crime. Four, a woman who may be Gabrielle Avanian is badly beaten. Five, another unidentified woman is thrown off a roof, the only association with Avanian being they both were bitten. What else? Okay, not quite a fact, but I'm almost positive that Kerbussyan was lying to me when he said he didn't know anything about Ersoy's cash.”

“I still don't see why it couldn't be a sex thing.”

“You have sex things on the brain, Marlene,” said Karp, snappish, “and don't tell me all about how you were right about sex rings that once. You want to know what I'd do? I'd find out where that money came from. And I'd find out who killed those women.”

Marlene did not like being lectured to by Karp in this way, which was one reason why she had maneuvered in the past to get out from under his direct supervision. On the other hand, she had laden him with enough lectures of her own, and regarded that aspect of their marriage as an inevitable result of two lawyers literally, rather than figuratively, screwing one another on a regular basis. Also, to her credit, she was able to see, through the fog of conjugality, the reason in what he was saying. Her preferred view was still little more than a fairy tale.

“Okay, how would you approach the money angle?” she challenged. “Kerbussyan?”

“No, he's extremely slick and hard to get at. I'd go through Ersoy's connections. The Turks at the U.N. His hang-outs.”

“Wasn't there a girlfriend?” Marlene asked.

“Uh-uh, the girlfriend's a semi-pro. She knows from nothing, according to the report Wayne and Frangi filed—he was just one of her regular dates. But come to think of it, I don't recall that anybody checked out the U.N. yet. I mean, why should they, since they had the guy already?”

“Look,” she said after a moment of thought, “don't get mad, but this is starting to look like a big complicated thing. On the assumption that my cases are connected somehow to Tomasian—no, don't look like that, I said assumption—why don't me and Harry do some poking around on the Tomasian case while you're loafing in the hospital? Maybe drop by the U.N., see what we can shake out.”

“No, but you'll do it anyway. But do you really think a diplomat hung out in the East Village and threw a girl off a roof and beat another one to a pulp?”

“Well, as to that,” said Marlene blithely, “I was thinking more of a diplomat paying to have it done. Harry already knows who did the jobs on the women.”

“
What?
Who was it?”

“Harry won't say yet,” she replied.

“He won't say? What the hell does that mean? Why did we just go through this whole song and dance if he's already found the killer?”

Marlene shrugged. “What Harry knows and what you can bring to court are two different things.”

“What kind of statement is that, Marlene? If he has evidence sufficient to identify the killer, he should bring it to us to see if there's a case. He's not supposed to make those judgments. Or are we talking about his mystic intuition?”

“Come on, Butch. It's Harry. You know he has his little ways.”

“Okay, fine,” Karp said grumpily. “Do your thing. Just keep Roland informed, okay?”

“You're upset,” she said inanely.

“No, I'm not. Yeah, I am. I think that's why I'm hot to do this Russell case. It's clean. The guy did it. We caught him. We have a case. We'll convict. It's like a cold shower after all this horseshit Armenian business.”

After Marlene left, Karp took two little white pills. Since he had scheduled the operation, he had become more generous to himself with respect to codeine. He figured he wasn't going to become a junkie because of a few days' excess, and he was willing to trade a slight fuzziness for increased mobility—that and surcease from continual pain and the irritability it caused.

Over the next half hour a pleasant numbness crept through his body. He signed some routine papers and then, growing restless, he walked down to Ray Guma's office to talk about some things he wanted done while he was in the hospital.

“Well, you look happy,” observed Guma as Karp came into the steel and glass cage that served him for an office. Raney, the cop, was there too. They had been listening to a tape recording. Guma flicked the machine off, and Karp sat down clumsily in a spare chair.

“Raney, I think you oughta make him pee in a bottle. I think he's been tapping the evidence lockers.”

“I have a prescription,” said Karp with dignity.

“That's how it starts,” said Raney. “Then it's boosting car stereos and gold chains. Do you have a street name yet?”

“Yeah, Butch the Crip. What was that tape?”

“The thoughts of Chairman Joey; it's from the tap we got on Castelmaggiore's phone—on the Viacchenza shootings. Wanna hear? It's pretty interesting if you like stupid dirty talk.”

Karp made a go-ahead gesture. Guma pushed the rewind. As the tape whined backward, he said, “Okay, on this part you're going to hear, he's talking to Little Sally Bollano, who's sort of the smoother-over for the family at this point. They got another guy who handles it when they don't need to smooth it over. The problem is Lou Viacchenza, the older brother, was a made guy. He'd done a lot of good business for the Bollanos over the years, and Joey had him whacked without clearing it with the family. So Joey's got to show it's for business, not, like, he just got pissed and had them taken out.”

“I understand,” said Karp. “It's the principle of the thing.”

“You got it,” said Guma, “not to mention he has to discuss this problem without actually coming out and saying anything indictable. He hopes.”

“You figure they know there's a tap in?”

“They'd be assholes if they didn't,” replied Guma, and pushed the play button.

The first voice on the tape was Little Sally Bollano's, a nasal snarl.

“What the fuck, Joey, you don't know how we do business? How the fuck long you been doing fuckin' business, Joey? Answer me that!”

“A long time, Sally.” This voice was low and grumbling: Joey Castles.

“So you shoulda fuckin' known better, right?” the voice of Sally Bollano continued. “Lemme tell you something, Joey: the Don don't know shit about this, I been making sure of that; he finds out, old as he is, he'd fuckin' have your
culliones
on a plate. So, what I'm saying, this thing, it gotta be put right. Okay, the women, the kids, they gotta be taken care of. You understand what I'm saying, Joey? Out of your fuckin' pocket. Not my fuckin' pocket. Not the Don's fuckin' pocket.
Capisc'?
”

A significant pause on the line. Then Joey said, “It was business, Sally. It wasn't, like, they parked in my fuckin' parking place, like personal. They were taking us off, Sally. They had their own fuckin' little like warehouse over by Ozone Park—”

“Hey! I din' say they shouldn'ta been. Did I fuckin' say that? Been up to me, hey, go do it! It was the way it went down, Joey. No talk, no … no fuckin' courtesy. Guys are fuckin' pissed.”

“Okay, they're pissed, the cocksuckers—what, I gotta open my fuckin' veins? I'll do the right thing with the family—what the fuck's it to me? But, you fuckin' believe it, man, next time some cocksucker rips all a you off, I din' see nothin', I din' hear nothin', I ain't gonna do nothin'. The fuck I care, right?”

“Hey, that kinda talk, Joey—”

“Hey, cut the shit, Sally, I'm fuckin' shakin' already. So, is that it? Everybody's fuckin' happy now?”

“No, that ain't all. They're fuckin' unhappy about the Turk, they wanna know he's gonna hang in there.”

“Hey, let me worry about the fuckin' Turk. The Turk ain't gonna do nothin'.”

“And what you said, before, this thing goin' down, it's still on with them all?”

“Yeah, yeah, it's okay—hey, here's a fuckin' tip, Sally, you worry about your business and let me fuckin' worry about mine—”

Karp cleared his throat and said, “Hold it there, Goom. Roll it back about a minute.” Guma did so; the machine squawked and played the last few sentences of dialogue again.

“What is this Turk business?” asked Karp.

“Street name. We think it could be Turk Minzone.”

“Who is … ?”

“A Bollano soldier—Red Hook boy, nobody special.”

“You like him for the shotgun on the Viacchenzas?”

Guma waggled a hand, palm down. “It's not his usual line of work. He does sports action and a little sharking. Joey could've called in a favor, though, had him do the hit. I mean, it's not like he got scruples about it.”

Raney asked, “Why do they call him Turk?”

Guma said, “Turk? It's an expression. They say, ‘
Il fuma' com' un turco.'
The guy chain-smokes De Nobilis; he's always got one in his face. The story is he ground one out in Jilly Manfredo's eye when Jilly wouldn't come up with his vig.”

Karp said, “Yeah, but he said ‘the Turk,' not just ‘Turk.' Why would he do that?”

“No big thing, Butch. It's like saying ‘the Babe' instead of Babe Ruth, no? Or, what, you got another idea?”

“Um, I don't know. We got a murder involving an actual Turkish person.”

“What, the hit on that dip? Roland's thing? You think there's a connection? But that's the vic. Why would Sally be worried about a Turk being under control if the Turk's already dead.”

“Another Turk?” suggested Raney.

Guma wrinkled his nose and curled his lip back. “Guys, come on! This is your basic gangland slaying, like they say in the papers. Don't fuck me over with Turks, Assyrians, Armenians, or whatever.”

“Maybe I'll check out where Minzone spent the night of,” said Raney.

“Now,
that
makes sense,” said Guma.

Marlene and Harry Bello rode up the elevator in One U.N. Plaza, the undistinguished building across the street from the great glass Secretariat of the United Nations, where the missions had their offices. Like most people educated in the City, Marlene had made the ritual visit to the place in the fifth grade, and never again thereafter. Harry made no sign that he was impressed with the world body. They rode up with three men chatting in an incomprehensible guttural tongue. For all they knew, it might have been Turkish.

The second secretary of the mission, a Mr. Abdelaziz Kilic, welcomed them gravely into his small office, sat down behind his cluttered desk, and indicated chairs for them to sit in. He was a smallish man with slicked-back graying black hair and a nervous hatchet face. He was wearing a double-breasted suit that seemed to date from the first time that such suits had been popular. Marlene recalled having read that it was always 1937 in Istanbul, and she now understood what that meant. Kilic's desk was covered with brown folders tied carefully with literal red tape.

Mr. Kilic was in no hurry to get to the meat of the appointment. Coffee was ordered and delivered by a large, swarthy woman in a severely tailored black suit. They drank the heavy, sweet brew and talked about the heat of the day, whether it was hotter than in Turkey, which Mr. Kilic pronounced Turk
-iy-eh,
and about the many and varied differences between the two nations. That done, the talk switched to crime in general, to crime in the City, and at last, with many a parenthesis, to the crime in question.

“A truly dreadful happening,” observed Kilic. “We at the mission were most shocked.” He shook his head rapidly back and forth to indicate the severity of the shock. “But please, you must tell me what I can do for you. As I understand it, the investigation is concluded. You have hands on the criminal, isn't it so?”

Marlene was about to speak when Harry, to her surprise, answered the question. “Yes, we do have a suspect in custody, sir,” he said, “but in order to complete our case, it's necessary to find out all we can about the victim of the crime, especially to discover any reasons the victim might have been killed other than the reason we tell the jury he was killed. That way the defense won't be able to place a doubt in the jury's mind.”

This was the longest sentence Marlene had ever heard Harry utter, and she had to struggle to keep herself from gaping at him.

Kilic registered profound puzzlement. “What doubt can there be?” he asked. “Mr. Ersoy was assassinated by Armenian terrorists.”

“And why would they want to kill Mr. Ersoy?” asked Bello. “Was he a particular enemy of Armenians?”

Kilic smiled at this naïveté. “They are terrorists, Mr. Bello. Mehmet was a Turk; one is as good as another. This man you have arrested is well known to us. He has written abusive letters to us, full of the usual provocative lies.”

Somewhat to her surprise, Marlene found herself asking, “What lies are those, Mr. Kilic?”

An elegant dismissive gesture of the hand. “They accuse us of massacre during the first war.”

“And that's not true? The Turks didn't kill any Armenians?”

He gave her a sharp look, then smiled appeasingly at Bello. Who is this silly woman? “It was wartime. The Armenians were allied with the enemies of the Turkish people. Some were therefore removed to places where they could not practice their mischief. Of course, there were some deaths in the traveling, but massacre? There was none. We have rejected these lies authoritatively many times, and—”