“Okay, Marlene, you’re right,” said Karp crankily. “It’s a great story. So what are you gonna do with it? Where does it take you? Nowhere. Roland’ll laugh in your face if you bring him that connection.” Then, observing the growing tightness of her jaw, he temporized.
“Look, let’s review the plot here. What do we know as facts?” He ticked them off on his long fingers. “One, Ersoy is killed. Two, he has a big pile of money in a box. Three, Tomasian’s alibi disappears after the crime. Four, a woman who may be Gabrielle Avanian is badly beaten. Five, another unidentified woman is thrown off a roof, the only association with Avanian being they both were bitten. What else? Okay, not quite a fact, but I’m almost positive that Kerbussyan was lying to me when he said he didn’t know anything about Ersoy’s cash.”
“I still don’t see why it couldn’t be a sex thing.”
“You have sex things on the brain, Marlene,” said Karp, snappish, “and don’t tell me all about how you were right about sex rings that once. You want to know what I’d do? I’d find out where that money came from. And I’d find out who killed those women.”
Marlene did not like being lectured to by Karp in this way, which was one reason why she had maneuvered in the past to get out from under his direct supervision. On the other hand, she had laden him with enough lectures of her own, and regarded that aspect of their marriage as an inevitable result of two lawyers literally, rather than figuratively, screwing one another on a regular basis. Also, to her credit, she was able to see, through the fog of conjugality, the reason in what he was saying. Her preferred view was still little more than a fairy tale.
“Okay, how would you approach the money angle?” she challenged. “Kerbussyan?”
“No, he’s extremely slick and hard to get at. I’d go through Ersoy’s connections. The Turks at the U.N. His hang-outs.”
“Wasn’t there a girlfriend?” Marlene asked.
“Uh-uh, the girlfriend’s a semi-pro. She knows from nothing, according to the report Wayne and Frangi filed-he was just one of her regular dates. But come to think of it, I don’t recall that anybody checked out the U.N. yet. I mean, why should they, since they had the guy already?”
“Look,” she said after a moment of thought, “don’t get mad, but this is starting to look like a big complicated thing. On the assumption that my cases are connected somehow to Tomasian-no, don’t look like that, I said assumption-why don’t me and Harry do some poking around on the Tomasian case while you’re loafing in the hospital? Maybe drop by the U.N., see what we can shake out.”
“No, but you’ll do it anyway. But do you really think a diplomat hung out in the East Village and threw a girl off a roof and beat another one to a pulp?”
“Well, as to that,” said Marlene blithely, “I was thinking more of a diplomat paying to have it done. Harry already knows who did the jobs on the women.”
“What? Who was it?”
“Harry won’t say yet,” she replied.
“He won’t say? What the hell does that mean? Why did we just go through this whole song and dance if he’s already found the killer?”
Marlene shrugged. “What Harry knows and what you can bring to court are two different things.”
“What kind of statement is that, Marlene? If he has evidence sufficient to identify the killer, he should bring it to us to see if there’s a case. He’s not supposed to make those judgments. Or are we talking about his mystic intuition?”
“Come on, Butch. It’s Harry. You know he has his little ways.”
“Okay, fine,” Karp said grumpily. “Do your thing. Just keep Roland informed, okay?”
“You’re upset,” she said inanely.
“No, I’m not. Yeah, I am. I think that’s why I’m hot to do this Russell case. It’s clean. The guy did it. We caught him. We have a case. We’ll convict. It’s like a cold shower after all this horseshit Armenian business.”
After Marlene left, Karp took two little white pills. Since he had scheduled the operation, he had become more generous to himself with respect to codeine. He figured he wasn’t going to become a junkie because of a few days’ excess, and he was willing to trade a slight fuzziness for increased mobility-that and surcease from continual pain and the irritability it caused.
Over the next half hour a pleasant numbness crept through his body. He signed some routine papers and then, growing restless, he walked down to Ray Guma’s office to talk about some things he wanted done while he was in the hospital.
“Well, you look happy,” observed Guma as Karp came into the steel and glass cage that served him for an office. Raney, the cop, was there too. They had been listening to a tape recording. Guma flicked the machine off, and Karp sat down clumsily in a spare chair.
“Raney, I think you oughta make him pee in a bottle. I think he’s been tapping the evidence lockers.”
“I have a prescription,” said Karp with dignity.
“That’s how it starts,” said Raney. “Then it’s boosting car stereos and gold chains. Do you have a street name yet?”
“Yeah, Butch the Crip. What was that tape?”
“The thoughts of Chairman Joey; it’s from the tap we got on Castelmaggiore’s phone-on the Viacchenza shootings. Wanna hear? It’s pretty interesting if you like stupid dirty talk.”
Karp made a go-ahead gesture. Guma pushed the rewind. As the tape whined backward, he said, “Okay, on this part you’re going to hear, he’s talking to Little Sally Bollano, who’s sort of the smoother-over for the family at this point. They got another guy who handles it when they don’t need to smooth it over. The problem is Lou Viacchenza, the older brother, was a made guy. He’d done a lot of good business for the Bollanos over the years, and Joey had him whacked without clearing it with the family. So Joey’s got to show it’s for business, not, like, he just got pissed and had them taken out.”
“I understand,” said Karp. “It’s the principle of the thing.”
“You got it,” said Guma, “not to mention he has to discuss this problem without actually coming out and saying anything indictable. He hopes.”
“You figure they know there’s a tap in?”
“They’d be assholes if they didn’t,” replied Guma, and pushed the play button.
The first voice on the tape was Little Sally Bollano’s, a nasal snarl.
“What the fuck, Joey, you don’t know how we do business? How the fuck long you been doing fuckin’ business, Joey? Answer me that!”
“A long time, Sally.” This voice was low and grumbling: Joey Castles.
“So you shoulda fuckin’ known better, right?” the voice of Sally Bollano continued. “Lemme tell you something, Joey: the Don don’t know shit about this, I been making sure of that; he finds out, old as he is, he’d fuckin’ have your culliones on a plate. So, what I’m saying, this thing, it gotta be put right. Okay, the women, the kids, they gotta be taken care of. You understand what I’m saying, Joey? Out of your fuckin’ pocket. Not my fuckin’ pocket. Not the Don’s fuckin’ pocket. Capisc’?”
A significant pause on the line. Then Joey said, “It was business, Sally. It wasn’t, like, they parked in my fuckin’ parking place, like personal. They were taking us off, Sally. They had their own fuckin’ little like warehouse over by Ozone Park-”
“Hey! I din’ say they shouldn’ta been. Did I fuckin’ say that? Been up to me, hey, go do it! It was the way it went down, Joey. No talk, no … no fuckin’ courtesy. Guys are fuckin’ pissed.”
“Okay, they’re pissed, the cocksuckers-what, I gotta open my fuckin’ veins? I’ll do the right thing with the family-what the fuck’s it to me? But, you fuckin’ believe it, man, next time some cocksucker rips all a you off, I din’ see nothin’, I din’ hear nothin’, I ain’t gonna do nothin’. The fuck I care, right?”
“Hey, that kinda talk, Joey-”
“Hey, cut the shit, Sally, I’m fuckin’ shakin’ already. So, is that it? Everybody’s fuckin’ happy now?”
“No, that ain’t all. They’re fuckin’ unhappy about the Turk, they wanna know he’s gonna hang in there.”