Hoax

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  Dr. Calvin Hobbes introduced himself as an entomologist, “someone who studies bugs.” He looked somewhat like an insect himself with thick glasses and a high-domed forehead accentuated by a receding hairline; he even had a curiously pinched mouth that reminded Karp of a grasshopper’s mandibles, but the man knew his critters. The lack of all but three fly larvae on the bodies, Hobbes said, suggested that the victims were buried immediately after their murders and before more of the insects could lay eggs. “During the summer and on warm fall days, even a few hours aboveground and I would have expected to see many more larvae, perhaps even maggots,” he said while Karp fought a queasy feeling in his stomach.

  Karp recognized the fourth scientist, Jack Ludlow, as a weather-man on one of the local television news programs. Tanned and movie-star pretty, Ludlow explained that he helped with forensic cases “as a sort of hobby…goes back to my boyhood days as a Sherlock Holmes buff.” His contribution at first seemed superfluous when he noted that the murders “probably occurred at night to avoid detection.” Well, duh, Karp thought but his interest picked up when the meteorologist, also added that the killing probably occurred “during a full or nearly full moon; otherwise the killer would have had to have used a flashlight and risked detection in order to find his way through that particular part of the park with his victims. Given that my colleagues believe that the murders occurred a month or so apart, I would venture to guess that you have what we call a werewolf killer—he feels compelled to murder by the light of the full moon for either practical or ritual purposes.”

  While Karp was still digesting Ludlow’s dramatic conclusion, Perriwinkle finished up by saying the children had been identified through dental records as two boys missing from Chinatown’s Vietnamese-American community. “One disappeared in August of last year,” he said. “The other in September. Which, of course, fits with what we’ve told you.”

  Karp pondered the ramifications. If this “werewolf” killed every full moon, had he only begun in August? And if so, had he stopped in September? Or were there other bodies out there, one for every full moon? He thought it likely. The guy was too practiced, too purposeful to have murdered twice and then gone back to his day job. Heck, he left the rosary bead calling cards, as if taunting the authorities.

  Karp also knew something that the scientists had not been told. The coroner had found foreign DNA in the boys, the result of sexual assaults. Someday, he hoped, the genetic markers would help identify the killer. The scientists were thanked and reminded that they were sworn to secrecy, “especially in regard to the rosary beads.”

  Leaving any mention of the rosary beads out of her story was another chit he owed Stupenagel. She had at first balked, but he explained: “That’s something only the killer would know about. We’ll get a thousand crank calls on something like this once your story hits the streets. All the loonies who want to confess to murder for the publicity and attention, plus the assorted nuts, whackos who may or may not have any real information, will be all over it. We have to have some detail to help us weed them out. The rosary beads are it.”

  Stupenagel complained bitterly that he was “taking half of the most dramatic stuff” out of her story, but again she’d agreed. “So long as when you do get ready to reveal that little fact, you wait until I can get it in first. In the meantime, you owe me twice as much as before, which was a lot. In fact, I’m going to have to think long and hard—get it?—about what I might want in return. But I’ll let you know.”

  Karp was trying not to think about what pound of flesh, or worse, Stupenagel would want when he and Guma arrived at his office on the eighth floor. As they exited the elevator, he stole an appraising look at his old friend and colleague. Guma only worked part-time as a special prosecutor when Karp needed someone with experience and Guma needed something to keep his mind off his deteriorating body. “How are ya these days, Goom?”

  “Well, other than having to listen to unfair and untrue remarks about my physical prowess,” he said, “I am well, thank you very much.”

  You don’t look well, my friend, Karp thought. In the old days, Guma had been built like a bulldog—low, squat, hairy, and heavily muscled. He could shave at eight in the morning and by five his beard would have sanded the paint off a ship. His goal in life had been to bed as many women as possible—and it never seemed to matter to him if they were beautiful or ugly, thin or fat, balloon-breasted or two peas on a plank. However, the cancer had turned him into an old man almost overnight. He was bent and frail, often using a cane or umbrella to support a decidedly wavering walk. The Mediterranean hair that once would have put a young Dean Martin to shame was now a thinning hedgerow of salt and pepper; likewise the beard, which seemed in a constant state of one-day’s growth. The swarthy complexion had faded into a sallow one, and the muscles had abandoned him, leaving behind nothing but skin and bones. But the mind was still sharp, the smirking smile still Guma, and the legal advice better with age.

  Guma caught the look as they walked into Karp’s outer office. “Yeah, I know, I look like shit,” he growled. “But I can still bang with the best of ’em…ain’t that right, Mrs. Boccino,” he added as he walked past Karp’s new secretary, who gave the stallion a dirty look.

  “Bug off, Guma,” the buxom fortyish woman said in the colloquial of her native Long Island. “You only wish.”

  Karp hurriedly ushered Guma into his office before there was a chance for a reply that might have ignited a federal sexual harassment lawsuit. “We never change, do we,” Karp said, then whirled at the sound of someone clearing her throat.

  “He is genetically incapable of it,” said Stupenagel, who was sitting in one of the overstuffed leather seats left over from the previous administration. “Comes from having his brain located in his penis.”

  “There was a time when you liked the way my penis thought,” Guma shot back.

  Stupenagel snorted. “If I remember correctly, and believe me I’ve tried to forget, most of the time your penis was thinking about sleeping.”

  Karp let the two former lovers go at it. He had other things on his mind. For the moment, he even had to put the two bodies in Central Park on a back burner. The Alejandro Garcia murder case was more pressing,

  There was scheduled to be a preliminary hearing after lunch in front of Judge Alan Friedman. The purpose of such probable-cause hearings was to officially ascertain that a crime had been committed and that there was reasonable grounds to believe that the defendant was to blame.

  If the judge agreed that probable cause existed, then the case would be officially marked HGJ, which stood for Held for the Grand Jury. New York state law required that in order to try a defendant for a felony charge in the Supreme Court—the felony trial court—the prosecution must proceed by way of grand jury indictment, unless the defendant waived that procedure.

  When he was the homicide bureau chief, Karp had almost always skipped preliminary hearings and gone straight to the grand jury with murder cases. There was an economy to that practice. Why duplicate the presentation at prelim and then again in the GJ? Move the case expeditiously directly to the GJ, get the indictment, and then on to trial in the Supreme Court.

  However, this time Karp had told the new homicide chief, Lilli Sakamoto—a tough, Japanese-American Yale Law grad who fought and scrapped her way to the top—to direct assistant district attorney Terrell Collins (the lead ADA assigned to the Garcia case) to ask the judge to schedule a preliminary hearing. The hearing was scheduled for Monday and he still wasn’t sure what to do. He didn’t usually micromanage the bureaus, but he had a reason this time—one he hadn’t passed on to Sakamoto or Collins—and that was he wanted to stall for time.

  A week ago, the case against Alejandro Garcia had seemed like a slam dunk. The defendant had been overheard making death threats to the victim, and an eyewitness had identified him as one of the shooters. He had an alibi—his meeting with Father Dugan—but it wasn’t bulletproof.

  Yes, there had been pro
blems with the case, chiefly that he thought that Vincent Paglia was a lying piece of shit, which put his people in the odd position of trying to prove that against their own witness. But then Detective Flanagan called on Thursday afternoon to say that the crime lab report on the .45 found underneath the limo was in. “According to the ballistics, it was definitely the gun used to kill Johnson and one of the hookers,” he said. “And they got one real good print that’s a match for Garcia and a couple other probables.”

  Playing devil’s advocate, Fulton pointed out that Paglia’s lies didn’t mean that Garcia wasn’t one of the shooters. “Maybe there was a falling out among killers,” he said. “Or maybe it was a setup to have Garcia do the hit and then take the fall all alone, especially when Paglia learns about the reward.”

  Vinnie was the only one Karp knew who could answer those questions, but the police had been unable to find him. Flanagan and Leary had reported that he wasn’t at the fish market on Wednesday afternoon when they went to pick him up at Fulton’s request. Nor did he go home that night, and he wasn’t at the fish market again on Thursday. His wife said he’d called to say he was spending the night with a cousin, but a check at the cousin’s house didn’t turn up the fat man.

  When Flanagan had asked why they wanted to talk to Paglia, Karp had given him a lame excuse about wanting the witness to walk Terrell Collins through the shooting at the crime scene. “Where were the shooters when he first saw them, and then when he took off running? What street was he on when he heard the shooting? You know, all the stuff to make it clear for the jury.”

  Flanagan seemed to accept the answer. But Karp didn’t know why he felt the subterfuge was necessary. Maybe I don’t like sloppy police work, he thought. The cops should have checked Paglia’s story better—found out about the thousand dollar payoff to get the job, seen if anybody could connect him to Garcia or Pentagram Records. It was purely an accident that Helen’s cousin just happened to be the guy who was supposed to be driving that night, or we’d be trotting Paglia out in front of a grand jury to lie through his teeth.

  Still, there was something troubling him beyond Paglia’s lies and subsequent disappearance, or the conviction of Dugan and the twins that Garcia wasn’t good for the murders. His gut was telling him there was something wrong, and it got even wronger when Fulton called him at home Sunday evening.

  “You’re starting to make a habit of these Sunday surprises,” Karp said, “and I’m not sure I like them.”

  “What?” Fulton asked in mock surprise. “You mean you don’t want to hang with the brother 24/7? Well, that’s okay, the kids are over at my mom’s for the night and me and the wife have more important things to do, too, if you catch my drift. But I thought this was pretty important—almost as important as your little gangsters becoming witnesses in a murder investigation.”

  “Okay, okay.” Karp laughed. “You made your point. Now what could have possibly pried you away from the warm attentions of the lovely Mrs. Helen Fulton? Perhaps, you’ve gone out of your mind, leaving a woman like that waiting. She might call the pizza delivery boy over to keep your place warm.”

  Fulton chuckled. “She might at that if the look on her face was any indication when I got a phone call from Flanagan.” But then his voice grew serious. “They fished Vincent Paglia’s body off the rocks at Hell’s Gate this afternoon.”

  “Any evidence of foul play?”

  “Not so far,” Fulton replied. “No obvious gunshot or knife wounds or signs of blunt trauma. But that’s just the preliminary from the paramedics who fished him out of the water, according to Flanagan. They figured he drowned, but it’s still uncertain as to the surrounding circumstances. The ME’s going to do the autopsy in a couple of hours and maybe we’ll know more then. What I know now is that our boy was fully clothed, had his wallet, a watch, and his wedding band on him.”

  Karp thought about it for a moment, then said, “I know this is asking a lot, and I’ll owe you big, but do me a favor, Clay, and sit in on the autopsy. Ask the ME, nicely, to be extra meticulous. Something bothers me about a witness who decides to go swimming with all his clothes on right after we hear he may be yanking our chain.”

  “Knew the jig was up and committed suicide?” Fulton tossed out as a question.

  “I don’t think so. This guy was a gambler,” Karp said, “not a good one, but willing to lay down big numbers with some pretty rough people. He couldn’t have known for sure that we thought he was lying. I mean, we told him we’d be talking to him from time to time about the case. What he does know is that if he sticks to his story, maybe he walks away with the fifty grand that Pentagram offered. You think a gambler walks away from that without knowing for sure that he’s been made?”

  “So maybe someone was worried that he might say something,” Fulton ventured.

  “Yeah, maybe,” Karp said. “But that’s been a possibility since the whole scheme was dreamed up. Why change their mind all of a sudden and knock off the witness who makes it all click, unless they thought we knew something for sure? And how would they know that?”

  “Maybe somebody tipped them off. It’s a little suspicious that he didn’t show up for work on Wednesday or Thursday. And he didn’t go home Wednesday night. But only a few of us were privy to that, and I know it wasn’t me, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t you.”

  “Possibly. But let’s not assume it was a spy. It could be just coincidence that someone panicked or maybe Vinnie started making threats, and they figure they can do without him.”

  “Still, it doesn’t clear Garcia on the murder, not with that gun and the fingerprints,” Fulton pointed out.

  “No, it doesn’t,” Karp agreed. “But what I still don’t get is why kill Johnson and then set up this elaborate frame job to get Garcia. Why not just kill Garcia, too? It’s obvious that someone wants him to take the fall instead of just whacking him.” He thought for a moment about the anonymous caller. “It’s also obvious that someone else knows what’s going on and is trying just as hard to prevent Garcia from going down.”

  Karp didn’t say the next part of what he was thinking. Once again, everyone else seems to know their part in this little theatrical production but me. Instead, he said, “Whether he’s guilty or not, I want to keep the pressure on the kid; maybe he’ll come around and tell us what’s going on behind the scenes. But let’s keep all this between us. That caller said I couldn’t trust anyone outside of family and friends—I include you in that group, but that doesn’t mean the rest of the NYPD unless you can tell me which ones you’d trust to watch your back.”

  Fulton grunted his agreement. “Okay, I’m out of here,” he added. “I got to go upstairs and tell a beautiful, naked woman that I have to leave her all hot and bothered so that I can watch some medical school dropout cut up a fat guy. Man, Butch, if I didn’t love you like a brother…”

  “Love you, too,” Karp said, making a kissing sound into the receiver before hanging up.

  Afterward, Karp called Collins and gave him the bad news about his star witness. The ADA took it well. They chatted briefly about the next procedural step in the case, particularly in light of the absence of their star witness. Collins left Karp planning to file a motion to get Paglia’s videotaped ID of Garcia admitted into evidence, knowing it would be a long shot. He thought the defense had the better of the argument since the Sixth Amendment still required, even in New York, the right of the defendant to be confronted by witnesses against him who were alive and in court.

  • • •

  The bickering between his two friends brought Karp back to the immediate task.

  “It’s not the size of the ship,” Guma was saying, “it’s the motion of the ocean. So maybe if you hadn’t just laid there like the Dead Sea…”

  “Ship? Ship?” Stupenagel guffawed. “Since when does a rowboat qualify as a ship?”

  “Enough!” Karp barked. He was about to go on when the private line on his telephone rang. “Karp,” he said.

 
; “So maybe things aren’t as they at first seemed,” said the muffled voice of the anonymous caller. “And now someone else is dead.”

  25

  “YOU AGAIN,” KARP GROWLED. HE GESTURED TO GUMA, MAKING hand signals to get a trace going on the call. Guma quit his mid-sentence comeback aimed at Stupenagel and hurried from the room.

  “Yes, me again. But don’t sound so disappointed. I believe my last tidbit about the priest and Garcia was worth a few moments of your time.”

  “Didn’t prove anything,” Karp said, stalling.

  “You forget, Mr. Karp, the defendant doesn’t have to prove anything. Surely even the New York district attorney believes in the concept that the accused is considered innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.”

  “Okay, I know it by heart. Do you have anything important to say?”

  “Well, yes, I ought to get to it before your people wear themselves out trying to figure out where I’m calling from—but I could save them the effort, if you’d like. I’m at a pay phone in Union Square Station surrounded by a few thousand of my closest friends. All I really wanted to say was that you passed the first test and will shortly be receiving a second, much more difficult challenge.”

  “Test? What test?” Karp asked, writing the words “Union Station” on a notepad and handing it to Stupenagel to take to Guma. “I didn’t know I was taking a test.”

  “Well, you were, Mr. Karp,” said the voice. “And all you had to do to pass was show that you cared enough about justice to actually go check out what I had to say. But that was an easy one. It cost you nothing but a little time and energy. We’ll see how you do on the next one, when you realize the possible consequences. But I want you to understand, Mr. Karp, that as difficult as the second test may be, there is a third and final exam that will make the second look like remedial reading. What’s more, the third exam can’t be administered while Alejandro Garcia is in jail.”