Justice Denied (36 page)

Harry didn't move. Marlene stood frozen against the door. She couldn't breathe.

“Drop it! I'll cut its fuckin' head off!” screamed Vinnie.

The baby became frightened. Her face grew red and crinkled up, and she began to wail. Tears sprang from her eyes, and then from Marlene's eyes.

Slowly, carefully, Harry Bello bent his knees and placed the pistol on the cobblestones.

“Back away from it!” shouted Vinnie. Slowly Harry did so, never taking his eyes off Vinnie, part of his mind cool under the terror, considering options, looking for an opening. Vinnie would have to put the baby down or take the knife away from her in order to pick up the gun. That's when he'd make his move.

Harry was a lot faster than he looked. He figured he'd have to take at the most two bullets before he got to the guy.

Vinnie shuffled forward into the street, toward the pistol. Marlene followed behind him.

Then the roar of an engine gearing down filled the canyon of Crosby Street, and a green Karmann-Ghia whipped around the Howard Street corner and screeched to a halt twenty feet from where Vinnie stood. Jim Raney stared at the scene through his windshield. It was not hard to figure out what was going on.

Raney got out of his car and walked a few steps toward Vinnie. He took his Browning Hi-Power out of its holster, jacked a round into its chamber, and took up his stance, pointing the weapon at Vinnie's head. “It's over, Vinnie,” he said. “Put the kid down.”

Vinnie had no intention of putting the kid down, not until he had a gun. With the baby under his knife, he was in control of the situation. He had seen all the movies. The cops always dropped their guns when you had the kid. He shouted, “Fuck you, cocksucker!
You
drop it! I'll rip its throat out, I swear … !”

Raney looked at Marlene. She stood white-faced behind and to Vinnie's right. Their eyes met. In a conversational voice he said, “Marlene. Red dog. On three.”

Vinnie heard this. He didn't understand it, but he didn't have to. He was in control. Again he shouted.

“Drop the fuckin' gun!”

Raney took two deep breaths and let the second one out very slowly. Holding the pistol in both hands, he brought the little Day-Glo dot on the front sight in line with Vinnie's sloping forehead. He said, “Hut, hut, hut.”

On the third “hut” he pulled the trigger.

On the third “hut” Marlene started to move.

Vinnie saw the flash of the gun. He formulated a thought: he would stab the baby and grab the woman.

This thought was still turning itself into neural impulses when Raney's 115-grain 9mm parabellum silver-tip hollow-point punched through the bone of Vinnie's forehead as if it were wet cardboard, expanding to the diameter of a champagne cork as it did so. The resulting shock set up a cone of destruction in Vinnie's brain tissue, turning that thought and all the other thoughts he had ever had, and all his memories, and his unpleasant personality, into a reddish slurry that was, within the next hundredth of a second, ejected out the back of his skull in a graceful arc.

The decorticated mammal exhibits limb extension. The body of Vincent Boguluso did so; the legs stiffened, the arms shot wide, a fleshy crucifix. Squalling, Lucy Karp dropped like a brick.

Marlene was airborne in a low dive. She twisted in the air, her back crashed along the stones, her cupped hands reaching under her falling baby to cushion its skull. She felt the warm weight in her hands and whipped the little body around, pressing it to her breast.

She looked up at the standing corpse. Desperately she started to roll away from it, but there was no need.

The knees buckled, they hit the street, and it fell over slowly onto its side.

“Are you all right?” Harry Bello was kneeling by her side, his face the color of cheap toilet paper.

“Yeah,” said Marlene. She checked the baby. She was still whimpering, and her sundress was torn, but the only marks on her were a thin red bruise on her neck and finger impressions on her arm. Marlene shuddered and tried to force deep breaths into her lungs.

There was a loud, disgusting noise. It went on for some time. Harry looked up.

Marlene said, “It's okay. He always does that.”

“What, puke his guts?”

Marlene nodded. “When he kills people.”

Harry said nothing. He was pretty sure that if Raney had missed, if he had hit Lucy, Harry would have taken his own gun and killed Vinnie, Raney, and himself, in that order. He put the thought out of his mind and helped Marlene to her feet. Then he went to his car and called the incident in on the police radio.

Karp had slept through the whole thing: the screaming, the shot, the sirens. Raney and Bello said they would handle the clean-up and the various official acts New York considers necessary when one of its citizens has his brains blown over one of its streets. Marlene returned to the loft alone. She got the baby interested in some toys in her playpen and poured herself a tumbler full of red wine. Which she drank and poured another.

There was still dinner to get, she thought, horrific event or no, and, naturally, she had not gone to the store. She was not going to go either. Maybe she would never leave her loft again.

No food in the house. Of course, there is always food in the house. She found half a Spanish onion, some faded escarole, and a chunk of salt pork. There was a bulb of garlic and olive oil.

She gets down an iron pot, splashes in some oil, cuts up the onion, chops in half the garlic and the salt pork, and puts the pieces in the oil, with the gas on low. She doesn't know what she is going to cook yet, but she knows that it is going to involve garlic and onions.

There was a can of tomatoes and one of tomato paste. Impossible there should not be, in Marlene's kitchen. She pulls out a handful of dry spaghetti, but sees it is not enough for two and puts it back. She had been going to shop for pasta today.

There is a bag of flour. She gets out her largest pottery bowl and pours a mound of flour into it. She adds water and an envelope of yeast and makes dough. The dough rises, and she scours the back of the refrigerator and comes up with a bag of dried mushrooms and the end of an ancient sausage. She cuts the moldy parts from the sausage. The knife shakes in her hand, and she works slowly.

She opens the can of tomatoes, drains it, and dumps the contents into a steel sieve. She pushes the tomatoes through the sieve into a bowl. The pulp is brighter in color and in texture not very much like Vinnie's brains blown out across Crosby Street. Nevertheless, vomit rises in her throat, and she has to stop for a moment and lean over the table on her knuckles, breathing, her eyes closed. Then she throws the tomatoes into the pot, adds oregano and bay, covers the pot, and turns the flame down to sharp blue dots.

Karp wakes up and rises, attracted by the sounds and the odors. He comes into the kitchen on one crutch.

“What'd you get?” he asks.

“I didn't get anything.”

He sees her face. “What happened?” he says in alarm.

She takes a deep breath and tells him. He's horrified, guilt-stricken. He looks at the child, who is in her playpen, banging two blocks together and crooning to herself.

“She's fine,” says Marlene. “She's forgotten it already.”

He senses Marlene doesn't want to discuss it now. “What's for dinner, then?” he asks.

“Pizza,” she says.

He is amazed. She amazes him further by pounding out the risen dough and flinging it up in the air. She has done this before, but never for him. A certain ethnic embarrassment: during the summer of her fourteenth year she did it fifty times a day at the restaurant owned by her father's brother in Belmar, New Jersey. It is obviously something you don't forget how to do, because Marlene can still do it.

She flings the dough high in the air again and again. Karp and the baby watch this, rapt. The dough enters the realm of pure ballistics, suns and galaxies tug at it. It becomes round and thin. Not a fast food this pizza.

Marlene puts it in a greasy pan and pours her sauce on it, and the mushrooms, escarole, and sausage. She bakes it. They eat, baby Lucy chewing on a crust.

By the time they have finished, Marlene is calm again, but changed, in the way this life has been changing her for some years. Ever less Smith, ever more Sicily.

17

D
ropping five stories on a wire was not Karp's idea of how to start a day when he was on a trial. It did not make him feel like Peter Pan, especially since the belt slipped during the descent and he had to dangle in mid-shaft for a half hour while two employees of the wire factory on the third floor labored, amid loud Spanish controversy, to repair the fault.

When he emerged from the shaft gate, his brow was dark, and his police driver decided not to express any of the several cute remarks he had thought of while observing these events.

Marlene remained in the loft. She had called in sick, although there was nothing physically wrong with her. But if she could not take a mental health day after a weekend during which her child had been assaulted by a gigantic felon, when could she? She spent the morning lounging comfortably in bed, drinking coffee and sharing TV cartoons and cookies with the baby.

Karp passed his morning less pleasantly, finishing up the official witnesses in
People
v.
Russell:
Thornby, the arresting officer; Marrano, the cop who had taken the famous blue shirt, the victim's handbag, and the knife to the station house; Cimella, the detective who had received all this, plus the sales slip found on Russell; and two men from the medical examiner's office, who established that Susan Weiner had died of stab wounds and that the wounds were consistent with the knife found on the stairway of 58 Barrow, and that the stains on the knife blade were human blood.

The cross went as Karp expected. Freeland pounded away at the time issue. The implication he was trying to plant in the jury's collective mind was that the cops had found the handbag where the real killer (not Russell) had dumped it, found the sales slip within, and lied that they had found it on the defendant four hours or so before the bag had been located.

At least the trial was moving. Freeland had at last exceeded Judge Martino's level of tolerance, and Martino had responded in a way that did the defense no good. After a particularly fruitless and time-wasting series of questions about an alternate blood-testing system addressed to the medical examiner's blood pathologist, a man of magisterial expertise, Martino had called counsel to the bench.

“Mr. Freeland, what is the purpose of this line of questioning?” asked the judge.

“Your Honor, my purpose here is to draw out for the jury the failure of the medical examiner to test for blood type from the stains on the knife purportedly found.”

“The witness states that the amount of blood was too little for those tests.”

“Yes, but I've located articles in the
Journal of Forensic Medicine
—”

“Mr. Freeland, the witness has stated that those tests are not accepted by his profession.”

“Yes, Your Honor, but—”

“Mr. Freeland, do you know what an expert witness is?”

Freeland flushed, coughed, and said, “Of course, Judge.”

“I don't think you do. An expert witness is assumed credible when speaking within the confines of his expertise. You have spent half an hour questioning him about the validity of tests that he says are garbage, despite repeated objections by the People, which I have sustained. If you wish to challenge the expertise of the People's witness, the appropriate measure is to call an expert of your own. Do you plan to do so?”

“Uh, no, Your Honor, not at this time. But, Your Honor—”

“Be quiet, sir! Let me ask you, have you ever tried a homicide case before?”

Freeland's face was brick now. “Uh, no, sir, this is my first.”

“It'll be your last in my court if you don't stop wasting my time. Unreasonable delay and contentiousness for its own sake are not acceptable strategies in this court.” Martino paused for a beat. “And I want to say that if you can't cut it, I will have you replaced as counsel by reason of incompetence.”

Points for the judge, thought Karp, moving back to his seat. The threat of removal for incompetence would be particularly telling when counsel was the new head of the local Legal Aid Society office. He looked over at the defense table. Freeland was thumbing through notes and making marks. His color was back to normal, and he seemed relaxed for someone who had just had his shorts fried by a judge.

Marlene let the phone ring. It was lunchtime, and she was feeding the baby mashed bananas. But when the message machine clicked on and she heard the voice, she abandoned Lucy in her high chair and raced to the phone.

“Ms. Ciampi? I'm so sorry to disturb you at home, but I thought it was important.”

“No problem,” said Marlene. “What's up, Mr. Sokoloff?”

“A gentleman called on me today. He presented himself as an associate of Mr. Ersoy's, with similar contacts. He said his name was Nassif.”

“What did he want?”

“He had some things to sell. A very nice figured reliquary in silver—Armenian, fourteenth century. And some Byzantine coins ranging from the ninth to the fourteenth century. The reliquary is real, I believe, but the coins are not.”

“What did you do?”

“I, ah, said I had to consult with some potential customers. I invited him to call on me tomorrow.”

“Very good, Mr. Sokoloff, that's very helpful. Look, I need to talk to some people and then Ill get back to you.”

Clever man, thought Marlene after he had bid her good-bye. Just the right move to dispatch any lingering doubts about the complicity of Sokoloff Galleries in a set of art frauds that may or may not have led to a murder.

Marlene got on the phone then and spoke with V.T. and then with Rodriguez, the art fraud cop, setting up a sting. Then she called Sokoloff back and told him what he had to do.