“Okay, arrest me, then! Go ahead! I don’t care.”
Karp sighed. “Oh, sh. . I’m not going to arrest you, okay? I’m in the same fix you’re in, kid. I’m your father, you come first, no question. But as of now, I’m breaking the law. So we’re both in a pickle.”
“Could you, like, lose your job?” she asked. This aspect of the situation had not occurred to her before. Indeed, she was over her head.
“I could, if anyone found out about this conversation,” answered Karp, feeling horribly guilty at putting this kind of pressure on the girl, but what else could he do?
Lucy wrapped her arms around her head to shut out the tormented choices and buried her face in the cool, smelly leather of the couch. Karp waited. She said something he didn’t catch.
“What was that, honey?”
“Kenny Vo,” she whimpered.
“Who’s Kenny Vo?”
“The guy who beat me up. He’s a Vietnamese gangster.” She described what had happened to her, and he took notes. His throat and nose ached with stalled weeping. When she ran down, and had another cry, he asked, “Did he do the murders, too?”
She blinked away the silvery tears, and her pale brown eyes stared levelly into his. “I don’t know anything about any murders,” she said.
“Okay,” said Karp, knowing when he was beaten. “Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to get Ed Morris to take you back home, and I’m going to arrange for a policeman to watch the loft. I don’t want you going out by yourself until we get this thing cleared up. Do you understand that? Not even down to the store, or to Mott Street, or Janice’s. If you can’t promise me that, then you really will have to go into protective custody.”
“Okay, Daddy,” she said meekly, carefully not promising, and to her immense relief, he turned to the phone and did not press her on it.
When Morris, Karp’s driver and also a D.A. squad detective specially trained not to ask questions, had taken Lucy away, Karp went to the men’s room, splashed cold water on his face, dried it with a towel, and looked deep into the mirror to see if the monster he had become showed much yet. No, not much, which said something for clean living and an absence of cynicism. Karp had been perfectly sincere in his lecture. He was not cynical about the law, was in truth as deeply in love with it as he had been when as a young, dewy bride he had first stepped across the threshold of 10 °Centre Street long ago, and was continually amazed at how a system so inherently stupid and run, by and large, by moral imbeciles, kept cranking along, doing as well as it in fact did. What had not come up in the lecture was what to do when dedication to the law ran up against love of family. Marlene’s shenanigans were bad enough, but Marlene was at least an adult, and Karp truly believed that if he caught his wife in a conscious felony, he would turn her in. It was different, he discovered, when his child was involved, a child who was turning out more like her mother than Daddy felt comfortable about.
Yes, the mother. Karp went back to his office and placed a furious call to the mother, and, fortunately for his marriage, did not get through. He was too old-fashioned a man to allow himself to express anger to an anwering machine, so he left a mere urgent message. He did the same at her office, and then tried the car phone (nothing) and then left another message at her paging service. He then put his notes into shape for a warrant and called Mimi Vasquez, who was in, and available at that very moment.
Nor was that the only favorable contrast with his wife. Mimi Vasquez was in her fifth year with the D.A. and her second in Homicide, and clearly a rising star, quite apart from her status as a Hispanic woman and thus an affirmative action two-fer. Karp had spotted her as a comer early on, and nudged her career helpfully when needed. Vasquez had the broad shoulders, solid build, and narrow hips of a distance swimmer, which she was, a neat round head, and short thick straight hair, cut close. With her round face, huge dark eyes, flat nose, and tawny skin, she presented the appearance of a not entirely terrestrial creature, a seal perhaps, recruited into the legal profession in exchange for those shiploads of lawyers the jokes are always drowning. She and Karp agreed perfectly on what was important; she was one of those who had instinctively understood his corny lecture and gone on to put principle to the test of action. Not in the least frightened of trials, she’d won a couple of nice ones recently, without becoming obnoxious about it as so many of her male peers did after similar victories. She reminded Karp strongly (and sadly) of his wife, when his wife had been a respectable colleague rather than a loose cannon with a short fuse.
For her part, Vasquez was always delighted when Karp took an interest in her work. Not only did he know a lot, but he was not, like Roland Hrcany, her immediate boss, trying tediously to get into her pants. As to that aspect, should anything unfortunate and permanent befall Mrs. Karp, Mimi Vasquez was perfectly willing to dispense entirely with pants in re: Butch Karp, a willingness she shared with any number of women at 10 °Centre Street, and of which the object was entirely oblivious.
Upon receiving Karp’s call, Vasquez had spent three minutes in front of the glass in the sixth-floor ladies’ getting herself into perfect court-appearance order and two minutes after that was sitting in Karp’s side chair, legs neatly crossed, ears perked, pad on lap.
“How’s the Sing double going?” asked Karp.
“Nothing new since the last time you asked,” replied Vasquez, and seeing his frown added, “I realize that’s not the right answer, but it’s always like that down there, especially in this case, where it looks like an out-of-town job. You know the story: a couple Ghost Shadows hit a Flying Dragon one night on Canal Street, at least there’s talk on the block, some history behind the crime, and we can bring in the snitches, not that Chinatown is full of snitches, but the cops hear stuff. Here. . it’s like it never happened. A couple out-of-towners with heavy triad connections in Hong Kong walk into a stockroom, followed by person or persons unknown, and wind up dead. Nobody the cops talked to will admit to seeing anything unusual.”
“Who caught it in the Five?”
“Phil Wu.”
He waited, but she did not elaborate. “And. .?”
“I never worked with him before, but Roland says he’s okay. Smart, speaks Cantonese and Mandarin. He had the collar on that pool hall shooting in ’81, Bayard Street. He seems to be doing the right things, but. .”
“Uh-huh. He talk to the Chen family, do you know?”
“They own the place? Yeah, in the original canvass at the crime scene.”
“But not afterward?”
“Not that I know of.” She gave him an interested look, scenting something. “Why? You think they’re connected?”
“The vics got in through the back door and so did the killer. That back door is always locked. Somebody opened it from the inside. Also, there are always people in and out of that stockroom. If nobody saw anything, then either they’re lying or they were pulled away from there.”
She was frankly staring at him now, as if he had just produced a live chicken out of thin air. “Jesus, Butch! How the hell do you know all that?”
Karp glanced away, as if embarrassed. “We’ve known the Chens for a long time. That door is on Howard Street right down from where we live. I’ve seen delivery guys ringing the bell back there or pounding on the door a million times. It’s never unlocked except when they’re taking in merchandise.”