Absolute Rage (13 page)

“Probably to shoot something,” answered Giancarlo equably. “That's what he does instead.”

*  *  *

Karp listened to Marlene's news in silence, made the conventional noises, asked, “You think it was a hit?”

“The whole family? I doubt it, unless the Colombians are diversifying into coal. That poor child!”

He waited.

“I know what you're thinking. But I'm in the dog business now.”

“That's good, Marlene,” he observed neutrally. “You going back to the place?”

“No, I thought I'd come into town and stay over. I'm on the Van Wyck. I thought we could spend the evening together, go out, see a movie. I need distracting.”

Karp hung up the phone and let the camera of his mind pan over the innumerable murder-scene photographs he had looked at during the twenty years he had been prosecuting murders. He had not, of course, viewed the ones of the Heeney murders, but he could slot in the faces well enough. They all looked like life-size dolls, the fresh ones did, instantly distinguishable, even without the visible blood and damage, from a sleeping person. You always passed them around to the jury, the defense always objected to this, and the judge always let them pass. A cheap trick; the jury wanted vengeance for the horror on the glossy eight-by-tens and the poor schmuck in the box was the closest they could get to it. But Karp always did it anyway. He had never known a murder victim personally. One “knew” lowlifes who got whacked, but that was not the same thing. He had come close from time to time, Marlene being what she was, or had been (he hoped), but it had never actually come to him.

The phone buzzed its intercom tone. The DA wanted to see him right away. Karp grabbed a pad and walked across the hall to his boss's office. Keegan was behind his desk, a burly, fleshy, florid Irishman with a still intact white mane, although there was a rumor that he weaved. He was taking a Bering corona from its metal tube as Karp walked in. This was a bad sign. It meant that something had happened to the prop cigar he always had at hand or in mouth, which never got wet or smoked, but which sometimes, in moments of anger or stress, got chomped on or flung across the room. As now, obviously.

Karp took a seat without being asked and sat erect, pad on lap, miming the loyal retainer.

“I had a call from the congressman just now,” Keegan began. New York boasts a number of congressmen, being so very populous, but Karp knew which one had called.

“Oh? I hope you conveyed to him my very best regards.”

“Don't be cute. What are you doing with this mutt, Bailey?”

“Prosecuting him for first-degree assault.”

One of Keegan's bushy eyebrows elevated itself. “Personally?”

“No, of course not. But I'm taking a personal interest in the case.”

“So I gather. My man was telling me all about it. He said you threatened to shove Bailey under the jail forever and a day unless Bailey told you a pack of lies about how the congressman paid for his last campaign.”

“That's true,” agreed Karp, “except for the lies part. Bailey is a smurf for Beemer Pennant, and Pennant, we know, is laundering pimp money through political action committees run by your pal. I thought it was worth a shot.”

“I see. Even though I told you that there isn't remotely enough evidence of alleged laundering to justify pissing off my one political ally north of the park.”

“I thought he was all for the other guy last year.”

“He had to be for the other guy, but he wasn't for the other guy hard enough for him to win. And there are other elections.”

Karp knotted his brow dramatically. “Okay, let's see if I got this. You don't want to annoy your guy uptown, since we don't have enough evidence to move forward, but you don't want me to put the squeeze on this mutt, which might result in us getting the evidence. So . . . um . . . how will we ever get your guy uptown?” Karp snapped his fingers. “Oh,
now
I understand. You think it's
okay
for the congressman to launder money for a pimp and a murderer, so we'll kind of give him a walk on it.”

“Oh, for Christ's sake. Forget I said anything. I'll take care of it myself.”

“Fine. What about Mr. Bailey?”

“I
said,
I'll take care of it.” The DA's face was closing in on the color of fresh hamburger, and the prop cigar was directed at Karp like a weapon. Karp wondered if the DA was going to sacrifice this one so soon after breaking it out. Again he reflected upon how stupid it was, this silly duel between him and Keegan. Keegan would never change, would never quite get it. While in many respects his instincts as a DA were perfectly fine—he knew the law, knew procedure, was essentially honest—he remained capable of identifying his own political survival with the Good and the True.
Casuistry
was the technical term; maybe it had something to do with the twenty years Keegan had spent in Jesuit institutions. Lucy would know.

“Out of curiosity,” said Karp, “what are you going to let him cop to? Community service?”

“If I want, gaddamn it.” the DA said, his voice rising.

“Okay, but just so you're aware: he sliced his girlfriend's nose off. She took a hundred and eight stitches. I thought we frowned on that kind of stuff. In any case, the poor woman is attracting some press interest. A big-time plastic surgeon from Downstate is volunteering to fix her up.”

A little lie there. In the old days, before he became corrupt, Karp would never have told it, nor would he ever have used the press as a shillelagh. On Keegan's face he observed the frustrated anger turn into a more calculating sort. That was one thing Jack Keegan would never do, place himself in the position of seeming soft on a heinous offense in the light of publicity; no, not for a wilderness of congressmen.

“Ah, you can do what the hell you like,” Keegan snapped. “One thing though—I want to see any deal you make on this whole issue, and I want to see it
before
it's made. Is that clear?”

Karp rose. “Perfectly clear, boss.”

Back in his office, Karp made a call to Bill Ricci, who was the ADA officially in charge of the People's case against Bailey, and instructed him to make no deals whatever with Bailey, to go for the highest penalty allowed by law, and to prepare for a trial. Then, after an uncomfortable interval of self-contempt, he dialed the number of the
Post
and spoke to a woman he knew who specialized in human-interest crime stories and gave her the details of the situation of Ms. Carolyn Watson, the former (he surmised) love interest of Mr. Bailey. After that, inured to perfidy, he had no trouble in calling a famous plastic surgeon for whom he had once done an enormous legal favor. This favor was called in. The man seemed relieved to be off the hook. Having thus arranged reality to com-port with his recent spontaneous fiction, Karp signed out of the office and had his driver take him to the Sloan-Kettering Center at Sixty-seventh and First.

The call to Downstate, which was just across the street, had reminded him of a neglected duty. Neglected because Karp hated hospitals. He was ashamed of this, but he could not help it. The smell got to him, the disinfectant, the sweetish floor wax, the sharp tang of alcohol, and the darker odors against which the cleaner ones fought; and lost to a large extent. His mother had died in a place like this when he was fourteen; Marlene had spent considerable time in hospitals, too, and each time he had to go was like a small death.

Raymond Guma was sitting up in bed talking to Eddie Bent. Guma was a very old friend of Karp's. He had been a veteran at the DA's when Karp arrived, and although not strictly speaking a mentor, since his reputation was not the best and everything he had to teach was barely legal, Karp treasured him as a reminder of the dear old days at the DA, when guys in fedoras and three-piece suits with watch chains had fought the Mob in its power, and neither Miranda nor Escobedo had yet been heard from. Guma knew more about the Mafia than anyone else in New York, not excluding the heads of the traditional Five Families.

“Butch Karp!” exclaimed Guma when Karp walked in. “For a minute there I thought you were the priest. Got a little worried.”

“You don't look like you need a priest, Guma,” said Karp. “A girl maybe.”

Guma brought up a hoarse laughlike noise. He actually did not look as bad as Karp had expected and feared. He looked like a shriveled, old monkey, true, but he had always looked a little like one. The cancer had made him into a 7/10 scale model of himself. He wore a blue stocking cap with a Mets emblem on it over his hairless head, which did not detract from the simian appearance at all.

“You know Eddie, Butch,” said Guma.

“Sure. Long time, Eddie.”

Eddie Bent nodded gravely to acknowledge it had been. Edigio Frascatti, a turtlish man of past seventy, was a retired
caporegime
of the Genovese. Guma had once put him away for a decent interval, but Eddie Bent had no hard feelings. It was never personal with those guys.

“We were just talking about great unsolved hits of the past,” said Guma as Karp pulled up a straight chair. “You'll recall Sam Riccardi.”

“Oh, yeah, Sam,” said Butch. “Fat Sam Riccardi. We never found the body, and I always entertained the hope that Fat Sam slipped away to South America. I kind of fancied him in a flowered shirt and a big straw hat drinking margaritas with some senoritas. You're telling me no?”

“He's in Shea,” said Eddie Bent, pointing Queens-ward with the corkscrew index finger from which he derived his sobriquet.

“But not taking in a game?”

A barely audible chuckle from the mobster, and the finger pointed downward. Meaning, in the concrete.

“Any idea who did it?” asked Karp, feigning an innocent grin. They both grinned, too, but wolfishly, showing a good deal of gold.

“It was an open contract,” said Eddie Bent, a generous admission. “It's better to do it like that, you know? Sam was . . .” Here he looked pained and touched his chest.

“A friend?” Karp inquired.

“Yeah. Sam was good people. Not, you know,
una bagascia.”

“That's a cheap cunt to you, white man,” Guma interjected.

“But he was skimming,” said Karp.

Eddie Bent nodded sadly. “He was comfortable, you know? No fuckin' reason for it at all. He was warned. He was slapped around. Fuck, I slapped him around myself. What can you do, the guy won't listen to reason. What it was—I'll tell you what it was, and this is the sad part. Sam was a soft touch, you know? Guy walks in with a hard story, Sam liked to peel off from his roll. Which is fine, God bless him. But he was peeling off from our roll, too. He liked to be liked, Sam. Anyway, there's a guy you call in cases like this, been around for years. Everybody uses him. There's maybe a couple three guys in the business like that in the country, it's like a—what d'ya call it, like Con Ed?”

“A public utility?” suggested Karp.

“That's right,” said Eddie Bent, smiling. “A public utility. No fuss, no muss. The guy walked in here right now, I wouldn't fuckin' know him from Adam.”

Karp did not actually believe this, but did not object. Instead he said, “Funny you should be talking about this stuff. I just talked to Marlene. She said a guy she knew, actually I knew him, too, a union guy, just got whacked the other night. We had dinner with them a little while ago. They killed the whole family: him, his wife, and their little girl, ten or so.”

“Ah, shit, that's terrible!” said the mafioso. “That's fuckin' awful.”

“Not a professional hit, would you say?”

“Oh, no. No fuckin' way. A pro, the target just vanishes, he's gone. Unless you're talkin' animals, Colombians, or the Chinks. They do shit like that. A union guy, you say?”

“Yeah. In West Virginia.”

“Oh, well, West fuckin' Virginia, you're talkin' amateur hour there. That would definitely be a local thing. I would also say definitely it wasn't us. We're more or less out of that shit now, is what I hear.”

“And the perp probably not one of those guys you were just talking about, either?”

Eddie Bent gave a contemptuous snort. “Nah, them're class guys. And never with a kid, like you was telling us, not a chance. Hey, expensive?
Mamma mia!
But, like they say, you get what you pay for.”

Karp couldn't argue with this. Guma told a few stories about what was being done to him cost, and they all speculated about what he could've bought for the money, had Medicare been into fun stuff. A nurse came in and told them they had to leave in five minutes.

“Yeah,” said Guma, “for what these last two months cost, I could have had myself whacked out, what, twice?”

“About there,” Eddie Bent agreed. “Fifty grand, a hundred. It depends.”

Karp asked, “What did Hoffa go for? Back in the days when you still did unions.”

Eddie looked up at the ceiling and smiled. “I'll have to check my tax returns, see what I paid.”

“But a guy like you were telling us about, that would be the kind of thing you'd call them in for. An open contract.”

“That kind of thing. This one guy I'm thinking of, I mean, they don't give those, what the fuck, résumés, we did this one, we did that one. No advertising. But if you told me for sure he did Hoffa, I wouldn't fuckin' fall off my chair. You know what I'm saying?”

*  *  *

After her daily cry session, Lucy washed her face and spent the afternoon running dogs, first Malo and then Gringo, until her body was covered in sweat and dust. The sky was nacreous and seemed to press down heavily on land and sea. She took the twins swimming. Neither of them seemed affected now by what had befallen their late playmate. She tried to keep from resenting the easy amnesia of childhood. She could not shoo from her mind the image of Dan Heeney's face as he held the telephone tightly clenched in his hand.