“That’s an interesting story, Mr. Lie. Would you be able to provide corroboration?”
Fogel said, “Mr. Lie, what he means is he needs something to back up your story, some other witness, some-”
A look of what seemed like impatience seemed to flash from Lie to the lawyer, and he said, “I know what is corroboration. Yes, I have this. I have boys who did job, names, places you find them, and, have gun they used. They use, they give it to me to get rid of, but I don’t do it. So, yes. But I must have immunity. Transactional immunity.”
Karp shot an inquiring glance at Fogel, but the man seemed bemused by his client’s statement.
“Well, Mr. Lie,” said Karp, “as your lawyer may have informed you, all witnesses before New York state grand juries receive automatic transactional immunity. That is, a witness is immune from prosecution connected to any transaction arising from anything covered in his testimony, a very broad immunity.”
“Yes, is what I want,” said Lie.
“Right, I understand that, Mr. Lie. But here’s my problem. I don’t know you, I don’t know who you are or what you’ve done. Until you’ve made a formal statement and provided us with the means to corroborate it, I can’t actually guarantee you anything.”
Lie shook his head. “Is not good, not for me. Look, I admit I am gangster, I admit I sell drugs, I set up murder. When you have this all signed, you can say, Mr. Lie, you talk, you testify or you go to jail.”
Karp pushed his chair back and said, “Bill, I’m going to step outside for a few minutes, and in that time I’d like you to explain to your client how a proffer works and how we’re really not interested in pulling any fast ones on him.” He stood up. “While I’m out, would anyone like a soft drink? We have Coke and Diet Coke and Sprite, I think.” Fogel declined; Lie asked for a Coke.
Karp went into the outer office and used the phone to call the desk man at the D.A. squad, the small group of police officers assigned permanently to the district attorney’s office for various cop-type chores, and said, “Mel, get on to CATCH and find out if there’s a record on a mutt named Willie Lie, el-eye, or el-eye-ee, Asian male, age about thirty, five-five, around one-forty. Also, get a couple of the guys posted outside the courthouse. The mutt’s in my office now, and when he leaves I want him followed. He’s wearing a white shirt, dark pants, loafers. And tell Captain Fulton to call me as soon as he can. I may need full surveillance on this character. Got that?”
The officer said he had. “Is that it?”
“No, send a CSU tech up here in about fifteen. I’ll have something for him.”
Karp hung up and went to the coffee room behind the secretary’s office and, after killing five minutes with a newspaper he found in the trash can, he took a couple of Cokes from the refrigerator, wrapped them both in paper napkins, and went back into his office.
“Any progress?” Karp asked, handing a can to Lie, who picked it up, popped it, and took a swig. It was clear to Karp that lawyer and client were at odds. Lie had a cast to his face that made him look a lot less like a Chinese waiter and a lot more like what he said he was. Fogel looked confused and out of his depth, no surprise there.
“Butch, I’m afraid we’re at something of an impasse. Mr. Lie is not willing to proffer more than a version of what he has already related unless he is guaranteed protection and full transactional immunity.”
“Well, then, Bill, I’m afraid I can’t deal. No offense intended to your client, but somebody could walk in off the street, say he just shot the mayor and say that your grandmother set up the hit, and ask me to let him skate on it in return for his testimony against granny.”
“That’s not a relevant analogy, Butch,” Fogel objected. “Mr. Lie had a very minor role in the Catalano killing. He’s giving you a major organized-crime figure.”
“He’s giving me nothing but smoke, Bill. I need the shooters, the weapon, and a detailed account of how it was ordered, paid for, and carried out. With that, and after due investigation to see if the story checks out, I would be glad to place your client before the grand jury with the routine transactional immunity. Alternatively, I can offer him use immunity on his testimony, and offer him protection as a material witness. But other than that. .” He opened his hands palm up, the gesture of helplessness.
Lie placed his Coke back on the table and rose. “Now this over. Now we go to see United States attorney.” He waited to see what effect this would have on Karp, and Karp was surprised that a Chinese gangster, a relative newcomer, had grasped the fact of rivalry between two prosecutorial organizations enough to expect that there might be such an effect. He did not think a malpractice lawyer like Fogel had the balls to play that high-stakes game. There was more to Mr. Lie than was first apparent, it seemed, and it seemed to Karp that he, rather than Fogel, was calling the shots.
Karp smiled and gestured in the direction of the federal building, and they left. Shortly thereafter, the crime-scene-unit tech, a small, dark man in civilian clothes, came in and took away Mr. Lie’s Coke can, carefully ensconced in a plastic bag. Then it was time for Karp’s four-thirty meeting with the administrative judge’s staff, and when that was done he fielded some phone calls, and did not break free until nearly six.
There was a message waiting from the D.A. squad desk man. Karp called him back and received the news that Willie Lie had no criminal record, no driver’s license, no Social Security number.
“This guy an illegal?” the man asked.
“He says. I got the lab guys working on pulling some prints he left here.”
“That could help if he has a sheet in another state and the locals bothered forwarding them to the NCIS. Meanwhile, you got a nobody.”
Not a nobody, Karp thought. A somebody, and a dangerous one at that. For in the last moment of the meeting, when Bill Fogel had gone out the door, Karp had used his splendid peripheral vision to observe Mr. Lie pause on the threshold and shoot back at him a look full of assessing intelligence, guile, and impersonal hatred.
Chapter 9
After Chinese school Lucy usually went to get something to eat with Janice and a group of friends, but today she had promised to go up to the lab and have lunch with Ronnie Chau before going to the lab. Chau had invited her several times in the past weeks, when Lucy had been too depressed to go, but the new Lucy had made a cheery call from a pagoda-tipped phone booth after class and set it up.
She boarded an uptown Broadway train at Canal, found a corner seat in the first car, and reached into her bag for a copy of Sing Tao Jih Pao, the Chinese newspaper. It amused her to observe the reactions of the passengers to a white girl reading it. But as she reached into the bag, her hand touched an unfamiliar object, and she drew out, wonderingly, Tran’s copy of The Tale of Kieu.
Her eyes stung and she had to take several deep breaths of ozone-rich subway air before her emotions were back under control. She inspected the book closely. It was stained on the edges and endpapers with water and earth, and on the leather of the back cover there was a large dark brown blot of what was surely blood. She stared at it, jogging on her lap in the train’s motion, a holy thing, she thought, a relic of romance, of war, of horror, of courage, of desperate flight, and she felt honored beyond endurance that Tran had slipped it (she could not imagine how) in with her possessions.
She turned past the title page, her fingers caressing the blurred memento of the dead wife, and began to read. It was slow going, for the orthography of Vietnamese is complex and the language was poetic and refined and, in the fashion of classical Asian poetry, the poet made use of compressed references that would be familiar to any Vietnamese, whose meaning she had to guess at. The train was rushing out of 72nd Street before she had the first verse clear.