Reversible Error (31 page)

Amalfi shrugged and handed him his own.38 Chief's Special.

"When did you say Fulton was gonna get here?"

Manning looked at his watch. "Around twenty minutes. I'll be going now, OK?"

"Sure, Dick," said Amalfi. He settled himself into his seat and leaned back against the headrest. He felt a yawn coming on again, and this time he didn't stifle it.

Manning waited until Amalfi's mouth was all the way open and his eyes were squeezed tightly shut. Then he reached over and stuck the muzzle of Amalfi's gun into its owner's mouth and pulled the trigger.

Manning waited until the corpse of his former partner had stopped twitching, a surprisingly long time. Then he carefully searched the body and the car for recording devices. Finding none, he removed the clean.38 he had given Amalfi, pressed it into the corpse's right hand, and fired a shot out the open window into the blackness of a large junkyard across the street. Having ensured that Amalfi's hand would bear the microscopic chemical evidence produced by firing a revolver, he removed the clean gun, put it in his pocket, thoroughly wiped Amalfi's own.38, and placed it in the body's limp hand.

Manning left the car and stood in the darkened doorway of the welding shop. Ten minutes passed, then a car Manning recognized came slowly down the street. It parked behind Amalfi's car and Clay Fulton got out. Manning stepped out of the doorway and waved to him.

Clay Fulton saw Manning wave and pulled over to the curb. Fulton was tense and excited, but confident that this meeting was going to break the case open. During the call from Manning that had brought him here, Manning had cast broad hints about introducing him to his main man. He had also complained about Amalfi, that he was acting funny-nervous and distracted.

As well he should be, with a wire on him and hanging around with a cold-blooded shit-head like Dick Manning. Fulton reflected that this would probably be his last night under cover. Whatever happened, he was going to go to Denton in the morning, pull in the IAD team, and see where they stood. Now that IAD was involved, his own role was less necessary, but he felt that the possibility of uncovering Manning's backer was worth hanging on a little longer.

He stepped out of his car and looked around. A good neighborhood for something bad to happen. For the first time he felt a twinge of regret at having come alone. But, of course, that had been the whole point from the start. It was the most plausible thing about him undercover: he really was on his own.

And there was no way Manning could know he was undercover, at least not with enough certainty to act. The only people who could betray him were Denton and Karp. No problem there. And Amalfi. But Amalfi was hooked by IAD. And IAD guys didn't even talk to priests about what they did. So while there could be some additional risk from out of left field, it was a calculated risk that Fulton felt that he had to take.

"What's up?" said Fulton as Manning came toward him.

"What's up is, Sid ate his gun," said Manning, pointing to Amalfi's car. Fulton walked over to the driver's side and bent over to look in the window. It was obvious what had happened, but Fulton instinctively reached out to assure himself that there was no pulse in the man's neck. As he did so, Manning came up silently behind him and hit him as hard as he could on the back of the head with the clean pistol. Karp put the phone down hard, a mixture of annoyance and vague fear roiling his early-morning stomach. He drank some lukewarm coffee and chewed off a chunk of cold toasted bagel, which helped not a whit. Fulton was not to be found: not at the precinct, not at home, not at the various bars and restaurants that Karp knew about. OK, he was undercover, he had dropped from sight before this, but Karp knew that this time he was dangerously exposed.

Karp raised the phone again and dialed Bill Denton's private number, but put it down after the second ring. He was loath to call the chief of detectives, to tell him that the whole elaborate scheme to protect the police was blowing apart, until he had everything nailed down, and he could not do that without Fulton. On the other hand, Fulton might be in there with Denton right now, working on damage control, excluding Karp himself. Karp tried to turn those thoughts aside. Everybody was OK, nobody was screwing anybody, they'd get the bad guys in the end. Period. He decided to give it another day.

But he had to move; he was strangling at this desk, engulfed by the paper shadows of old crimes. He got up and stalked out of his office. Three people, including his secretary, tried to get his attention in the outer office, but he rushed past them, mumbling evasions.

His steps brought him, almost without thought, to the office of V.T. Newbury. This was a small boxlike affair, with a dusty window, tucked away in an obscure corridor of the sixth floor. Newbury was in, as he usually was. A specialist in fraud, and money laundering, and the sequestering of ill-gotten gains, he normally had little contact with the grungy realities of the Criminal Courts Bureau.

When Karp walked in, Newbury was at his desk, half-glasses perched on his chiseled nose, running lengths of the green-and-white-striped computer printout known as elephant toilet paper through his hands, and muttering to himself.

He looked up when he saw Karp, and flashed his perfect smile, then returned to making marks on the printout. Karp sank down in the rocking chair V.T. had provided for his visitors. Newbury had largely furnished his own office: battered wood-and-leather furniture, a worn Turkish rug on the floor, good small framed prints and watercolors on the walls, so that it looked more like the den of a not-very-successful country lawyer than the official seat of a New York assistant D.A. Karp often came here. V.T. was the only person in the building who neither wanted anything from him nor wanted to do anything to him.

"How's the war against crime going?" Newbury inquired, continuing his notations. "Not well, by the way you look."

"The usual shit," said Karp. "What're you doing?"

Newbury wrote down some figures and looked up. "Actually, I'm finishing up that thing you asked me to look into."

"What thing?"

"Oh, terrific! I'm ruining my eyes, not to mention having to entertain Horton for the weekend, and he's forgotten all about it."

"What are you talking about, V.T.? Who's Horton?"

"My cousin Horton. In order to get a look at this material, I've had to let him inveigle himself into a weekend at our place in Oyster Bay. A golf ball for a brain, which means I'm going to have to spend a weekend listening to how he birdied the bogey on the fourteenth hole. He married Amelia Preston, for whom at one time I myself had a moderate sneaker. I can't see how she puts up with it, although perhaps we can polish our relationship while he's out bogeying."

"You lost me, V.T. What does…?"

"Fane," said V.T. "The congressman and the dope murders? Hello…?"

"Oh, shit! Yeah. So what, did you get anything?"

"Yes, I did, although I don't know how useful it'll be to you. First of all, do you know what a leveraged buy-out is?"

Karp did not, and V.T. said, "It's simple in principle, complex in operation. Basically, a group of investors buy up enough of the public stock of a company to give them a controlling interest. They do that because they either think the company can be run better than current management is doing, or, more usually, they see a company that's undervalued on the market. They buy it, and then they sell it for a profit, sometimes a huge one. With me so far?

"The leverage part comes from the way they get the money to buy the stock. Essentially, they borrow it against the assets of the firm they're buying, and pay back the loans from the sale of the firm itself. Or, what they're starting to do, is go on the bond market with high-yield unclassified offerings, but-"

"So Fane has been doing this?" Karp interrupted.

"In a way, in a way. You understand that when a deal like this is going down, when the stock is in play, as they say, its price can go ballistic. And of course if the buyers tender for the stock above market value, you can make a fortune. Fane has been into some very good things. As has our friend Judge Nolan. In fact, in recent months three of the very same deals: Revere Semiconductor, Grant Foods, and Adams-Lycoming."

"That's not illegal, though, is it?"

"Who knows? It depends where they got their information, because they must have had it from somewhere. Insider trading: that's when someone who has advance-"

"I know what insider trading is," said Karp, thinking about Reedy and his lecture. But this thought brought another, and he said, "What about Agromont?"

Newbury cocked his head and regarded Karp narrowly. "Agromont. Well, well. You have been doing your homework." He tossed the printout onto the desk. "You don't need old V.T. anymore, if you're that well-connected."

"All I know is the name. I was at a party when Fane told Reedy that Agromont was a done deal."

"That's also very interesting. OK, the story is this. Agromont is a medium-size conglomerate. They're in food, machine tools, cosmetics, and at the time they also owned a good deal of New York real estate, mostly on the West Side. They had the old American Line pier. In any case, someone made a run on the stock last year-bid it up like crazy-but the company fought them off. Sold off some assets at fire-sale prices. A lot of people were left holding the bag."

"How so?" asked Karp.

"Well, if you've tied up a lot of capital in a big block of stock and you fail to get control of the company, then you can't realize your profits. Some people made a bundle by riding the play and getting out before the showdown. But the main people were left holding a big chunk of overvalued stock. Which has sunk since.

"So they can either take their loss or try again. And Cousin Horton is very much convinced that they are going to try again. Someone has been nibbling at their stock. Little bites from a dozen different buyers: not enough to put it in play, but more than it usually moves. That could have been the origin of your cryptic comment from Fane. Telling a friend that the stock was shortly to go into play and that he should get in long on it."

"So is Fane buying?"

"He's starting to, it appears. But most of his purchases will probably be through someone else. Would you like me to look into it?"

"No, what do I care what stocks he buys? I'm not the SEC. But…" Karp rocked and looked out V.T.'s window at the little park behind the courts building and the low tenements of Chinatown beyond it.

"Yes?" asked V.T.

"But what I'd really like to know is, could someone use this kind of stock manipulation to launder money, maybe dirty money?"

V.T. thought for a moment, sounding the tuneless hum he favored when in deep contemplation of chicanery. He said, "Well, what I'd do is, I'd take the dirty money in cash to an offshore bank in the islands, a bank I controlled. Then I'd lend the money to people who were in a position to rig the market, and who needed liquidity to do it, and were willing to trade information on deals at a very early stage. Having got that information, I would use whatever honest dollars I had to make a killing."

"Very neat, V.T.," said Karp, who could barely balance his checkbook, with sincere admiration. "Would it really work?"

"I don't see why not. Our fictive man is insulated from the dirty money entirely. The offshore bank made the loan. It's not required to tell anyone where its capital came from, which is the true charm of the islands. There'd be a dummy holding the passbook for the actual account, which, of course, would never be tapped directly. And the profits on the market are honest gain, the result of sophisticated analysis of trends guided by vast experience-or so my cousin is always telling me. Our man pays taxes on it too-he's no mobster.

"So he's as safe as the Morgan Bank. And, of course, since he's not paying a premium for the money, he can buy a lot more stock than his competitors in a bidding contest. The people he was backing would be murderous traders.

"The only possible hitch is if someone traces a cash deposit back to him-unlikely-or if whoever gives him his info rats him out as an inside trader to the feds or the Stock Exchange-slightly more likely."

"Uh-huh," said Karp. "Does Fane control an offshore bank?"

"Doesn't everyone? But, if so, it's improbable that the connection is direct. Let me check it out, though." He made a note in his diary with a silver pencil. "Anything else?"

"No, thanks a lot, V.T., this is great," said Karp. He stood up and made to leave, then paused. "Oh, yeah-who was it that tried to buy Agromont?" he asked.

"The main player was a slightly greasy and very wealthy little arb named Sergo. He also bought their West Side property and the pier." He saw the change in Karp's expression and asked, "A friend of yours?"

Karp said glumly, "We've met," waved good-bye, and stalked out. The implications of what he had learned from V.T. were still whirling around his brain when he entered his office again, to find Roland Hrcany waiting with an odd smile on his face. He was sitting at Karp's conference table and he had a cassette recorder placed in front of him.

Karp gestured at the recorder and said, "Is it time for our dance lesson? What're you up to, Roland?"

"It's a little surprise," said Hrcany. "See if you can recognize the lyrics." He pressed the play button and the conversation between Amalfi and Fulton on the fire stairs at Roosevelt Hospital filled the room, their speech hollow and echoing, like the voices of ghosts on old radio shows.

When it was done, Karp asked, "That's definitely top-forty, Roland. You mind telling me where you got it?"

"I got with IAD and wired Amalfi," said Hrcany.

Karp looked out the window and rubbed his face. "Why did you do that, Roland?" he asked in a tired voice.

"I got a tip from an informant that Amalfi and Fulton were both involved in these drug-lord hits," said Hrcany.