By the time he was dressed in slacks, a light sweater, and a raincoat he felt calm again. He pulled his attaché case from under the bed and flipped it open. He took out all the cash and stuffed it in his wallet, then threw a change of clothes on top of the shotgun and the pistol. The pistol! HOLY SHIT! Louis ground his teeth and trembled in a paroxysm of self-contempt. He’d forgotten to ditch the pistol that tied him to the liquor store killings. Damn! He should have given it to Elvis and then wasted the asshole. But who could have figured that Elvis would fuck it all up like this? Weirdly, one of his mother’s sayings passed through his mind: “Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.”
He shook his head. I’m going batshit, he thought. He closed the attaché case and made for the front door. He decided to go down the fire stairs and ditch the gun in the trash can out back. He went out the door and slammed it behind him.
He turned right toward the fire stairs. A white man in a plaid jacket was leaning against the fire door. Before Louis could register what this meant, a voice behind him said, “Don’t move.” He snapped his head around and looked into the barrel of Sonny Dunbar’s revolver, pointed at his head, three feet away. Then, as he stood frozen, the white man was by his side, he was pushed against the wall, his attaché case was taken, and he was thoroughly frisked. His hands were cuffed behind his back. Dunbar told him he had a warrant for his arrest for murder and read him his rights. He took his right to remain silent seriously. The two detectives got not a single word out of him during the long ride downtown.
Nor did Karp do any better. He was still jazzed up from the excitement of the last hour: the ride to the precinct and the operation of his plan to catch Louis without violence, the positioning of the two detectives by radio, Walker’s phone call, and the successful capture of the desperado. His first sight of Mandeville Louis had been a letdown. It was difficult to believe that this calm, slight, almost scholarly looking man could be a cold-blooded murderer. The thought flashed through Karp’s mind that a mistake was being made-but then he recalled the guns in the attaché case. The pistol was already on its way to police ballistics to be test-fired.
After Louis had been booked and fingerprinted at Midtown South, and after Walker had identified him as Stack, Karp had him brought to an interrogation room. Karp found the man disturbing, his preternatural calm, something almost reptilian about the way he sat erect in his chair, hands folded on the table, as if waiting for a rabbit to emerge from a hole.
Karp introduced himself, Dunbar, and the stenographer for the record and said, “Mister Louis, I want to ask you some questions concerning the shooting deaths of Angelo Marchione and Randolph Marchione at A amp;A Liquors, located at Madison Avenue and Forty-ninth Street, which took place on the night of March Twenty-sixth, Nineteen-seventy, between 10:30 and 11:00 P.M. Before I ask you any questions, I want to advise you of your rights. You have the right to remain silent and to refuse to answer any of my questions. Do you understand that?”
“Yes.”
“And anything you do or say can and will be used against you in court. Do you understand that?”
“Yes.”
“And you have a right to consult a lawyer now, before any questioning, and to have a lawyer present during any subsequent questioning. If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be provided free of charge. Do you understand that?”
“Yes.”
“Fine. Now, do you wish to make a voluntary statement concerning the shooting deaths I have described?”
“No, I do not. I wish to remain silent and I wish to consult a lawyer at this time.”
And that was that. Any information obtained through questioning after such a statement would be tainted. Karp knew it, and obviously Louis knew that Karp knew it. He gave Karp a little smile. Karp tightened his jaw and called the prisoner duty officer to take Louis back to one of the precinct cells.
But after some reflection, Karp felt he had done pretty well. With Walker as a prosecution witness, and if the gun checked out, he felt he had a tight enough case. There was also the chance that Mrs. Kolka had gotten a good enough look at Louis to pick him out of a lineup. As Karp gathered his papers and prepared to return to Centre Street to write up the case, he began to feel happy-champagne-silly happy. He thought, I caught a killer!
But Karp was not the happiest person concerned with this particular case. The happiest person was a prostitute named Violet Buttons. She had checked into Room 10 of the Olympia Hotel with a trick about ten minutes after Preston Elvis had left. As she entered the room her quick eyes spotted the blue plastic bank envelope on the shelf above the sink. In an instant it was buried in her oversized handbag. Twenty minutes later, in a booth in the ladies’ room of a cafeteria on Tenth Avenue, she inspected her prize. Cash! Jesus! And what was this? Smack? It couldn’t be! But it was. She looked at the bank envelope. Uh-oh, better get shut of this. She took a straight razor out of her bag, reduced the envelope to confetti in seconds, and flushed the pieces away.
She got out her works and shot the stuff into a vein on the top of her foot. Goddamn, she thought, this is fine shit. And free, too. I have died and gone to heaven, she thought. And she was half right.
Chapter 9
Twenty of the best prosecuting attorneys in the Western world sat in Jack Conlin’s office for the Homicide Bureau’s weekly meeting. It was the next Monday. Karp had been working nonstop on the Marchione case in preparation for this weekly event.
The meetings usually took place on Thursday, but somebody in the mayor’s office had scheduled a Bullets softball game with the Bronx DA’s office on the previous Thursday, in Yankee Stadium no less, which of course took precedence. The point of these meetings was to allow the assistant DAs to present their cases, and for the other assistant DAs, especially the half dozen or so senior ones, to tear them to shreds. This was done with acid wit and without pity.
Karp sat in the rearmost of two rows of straight chairs that had been set up behind the leather banker’s chairs around Conlin’s big table. The senior guys sat around the table, with Conlin himself, looking now like a large pink shark, at the head. The man presenting the case would stand or sit by the door at the foot end of the table. This was where Karp would be in a few minutes and present the liquor store murder case, after the bureau got through with chewing up poor Terry Courtney.
Karp was fibrillating with nervous energy. The room was overheated and he was sweating like a pig and hoping it wouldn’t show. Every few minutes, he casually wiped the heel of his hand across his face like a squeegee and wiped the collected sweat on his trousers. He thought, I can do this, the case is in my head, I did everything right, it’s OK to be nervous, this is just like before a game. Like a game, he thought, grimly, but I never played against Bill Russell.
Courtney was a good lawyer who had come to the bureau six weeks ago from Felony Trial; this was only his second homicide case. He’d won his first and had gotten cocky. Now he was meat.
Courtney felt as he imagined Angel Ramirez, the deceased in this particular case, must have felt, when the 4.3-inch blade wielded by his rival in love, Hector (Kid Benny) Benvenista sliced through his anterior abdominal musculature, inflicting a 2.1-inch perforating wound in the inferior vena cava, causing death by exsanguination and shock at approximately 11:30 P.M. on March 4, 1970 at 78 East 129th Street in New York County in the State of New York.
Angel was dead. Kid Benny had killed him. Courtney knew it. The crowd of witnesses who had observed the deed knew it. God knew it. But Courtney could not prove it, in the eyes of the law-and what was vastly more important-to the satisfaction of his colleagues in the Homicide Bureau.