Hoax

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  Karp wasn’t dead, but it wasn’t the end of the world. He might have been frightened enough to back off, decide that prudence was the better part of valor when going up against the NYPD and the Catholic Church in New York. If not, well there would be other chances.

  What Karp didn’t know yet was during all the evening’s excitement, several well-trained men had broken into the office of V.T. Newbury by posing as a cleaning crew, whose original members were now dead in the parking garage of 100 Centre Street. They’d removed the police No Prosecution files, which he was now burning in the fireplace of his library.

  As he tossed another file on the fire, Kane reflected on how he met Flanagan. The archbishop had come to him after the shooting of Jumain Little and asked him to take on the case of Michael Flanagan personally.

  “I knew his father, Liam,” the archbishop said. “A good man, faithful…worked endlessly with us through the Sons of St. Patrick that helped us minister to our flock. Too bad about the allegations after his death. Never believed them, of course. His son’s a good boy and an excellent officer, from what I understand. It would be a shame if his career and life was ruined because of an error made with the best intentions.”

  The archbishop cleared his throat, evidently ill at ease making such a request but determined to go on. “I’d consider it a personal favor to me if you’d do whatever you can to help Michael. And if there’s any way the church can help with his defense—financially or otherwise—please call me.”

  So he’d rescued Flanagan and Fey had certainly been helpful. It had been only a minor irritation when the detective demanded to meet with the archbishop. O’Callahan had called in a panic. “What if he talks to Fey?”

  Kane, however, calmed him. He thought about it for a moment and came up with the idea for what he considered one of the great con jobs of his life. He told O’Callahan to arrange a private audience with Fey for Flanagan. “We’ll keep it brief—no time for questions and answers—and here’s how to explain it to the old man,” he said.

  The archbishop had been told by his secretary that the police detective was being honored by the Catholic Benevolence League for his work with troubled youngsters. “It would really mean a lot to him if you’d say something in appreciation. Just a few words, as we have a meeting to attend immediately afterward with the architects for the new cathedral.”

  So Fey had thanked Flanagan for his work on behalf of the church and the community. Then O’Callahan hustled the archbishop back out the door. The detective had been a willing minion ever since.

  29

  IT WAS NEARLY 1:00 AM WHEN KARP AND COMPANY WERE finally ready to leave the scene. As Karp talked to one of the detectives outside the club, Guma had been on the cell phone to the hospital to check in on Fulton. He now walked over and gave his report. “Just talked to Helen, who just spoke to the surgeon. Apparently the bullet just missed the major artery in his thigh, though it hit a couple of other smaller veins and such. Without the tourniquet, he would have probably bled to death. But the doc says he thinks they’ve saved the leg. Clay’s going to be laid up for a while and probably faces more surgery, but otherwise a full recovery is expected. Helen sends her love.”

  Karp grimaced as much for the medical personnel on the floor of the hospital, who were going to have to put up with a man who never stopped moving and was now immobilized, as for the wounded detective himself. “I guess only the good die young,” he said and started to smile until he looked at the puddle of drying blood at the foot of the stairs and remembered Francisco Apodaca. Unfortunately, the saying probably has more than a bit of truth to it. He sighed, wishing he could just go home and Marlene would be there. He’d take out all the frustrations and tensions of the past two months on her body, but she’d understand and throw herself into the project until he was exhausted and drained of all the bad things. But she was a thousand miles away in New Mexico and in God only knew what kind of trouble herself. He did not want to go home and lie in bed thinking about her, so he uncharacteristically suggested that they all go have a drink to unwind.

  He’d called the twins to let them know that everything was okay, but he wouldn’t be home until really late. “I have some catching up to do down at the office. Bolt the door and I’m sure Gog will be happy to sleep in your room tonight if you want her to,” he said, referring to Marlene’s huge Neapolitan mastiff guard dog. The boys had all sorts of questions they wanted to ask about the story in the Voice, starting with whether Paglia’s death would have any bearing on their friend Alejandro Garcia.

  “Yes, but I don’t know what,” he said. “We’ll talk later, okay?” He got off the telephone quickly, not just because he didn’t want to answer any more questions, but he was suddenly aware that maybe he couldn’t trust the telephone line. If Fulton was right and the shooters were after him, did that mean someone had tipped them off to his presence at the club? And if so, who? Someone at the club? That would have been pretty quick; we weren’t inside more than twenty minutes. Or was it someone at the DA’s office? Did that mean his telephone was tapped? Was his home being watched?

  Not so fast, now you’re getting paranoid. It might have been a crime of opportunity. He’d made a lot of enemies in his career, any one of whom wouldn’t have minded driving by and taking a potshot. Heck, it might not have had anything to do with the Garcia case, he thought, but didn’t believe it. He called Chip McIntyre, the detective who was Fulton’s second in command, and filled him in on what had happened.

  “Hold on, I’ll be down there in ten minutes,” said McIntyre, who came from five generations of Irish Catholic cops, the first one having hardly stepped off the boat from County Cork before he joined the force.

  “That’s okay, Chip, stay home. I don’t think anybody would try to shoot me twice in one night, except my wife and she’s not in the state,” he said. “But send a car over to park in front of my place, okay? My twins are sleeping up in the loft, but I’m not going home for a while.”

  “My guys will be there in five,” McIntyre promised. “Clay going to be okay?”

  “Yeah, sounds like he’ll be fine,” Karp assured him, glad to hear the loyalty in the man’s voice. “Oh, by the way, tell your guys not to go to the door of my place. If the boys open it and don’t recognize them, there’s a dog in there that eats entire cows for supper…preferably live cows it has to chase down and kill.”

  McIntyre laughed. “Okay, avoid the Hound of the Baskervilles. See you in about six hours down at the office. I’ll be picking up the slack for that candy ass Fulton…one little bullet and he calls in sick.”

  Guma had to outfight Stupenagel to drive the Lincoln, but they finally all piled in and headed to the White Horse Tavern in the West Village. The White Horse was famous as the bar where, Stupenagel reverently announced, the writer Dylan Thomas “drank himself into a fatal coma, may we all be lucky enough to share a similar fate.” The bar featured drafts of local beers, and there were soon pitchers of amber liquid crowding their table.

  They’d consumed several of the pitchers when Guma, who had been off checking with “some friends from the old neighborhood,” returned. “You’ll never guess who the plainclothes guys were across the street from the Hip-Hop,” he said.

  Karp scowled at him over the rim of his upturned beer mug. He wiped the foam off his mouth and said, “I’m tired of games, Guma, just tell me.

  “Okay, spoilsport, it was Detective Flanagan and his sidekick, Bob Leary,” he said, letting it sink in before adding, “Them and a patrol car were the ones who pinned the shooters down in a warehouse off Christopher and West.”

  “We have an ID on the shooters?”

  “Yeah, three members of the Crenshaw Mafia Gangster Bloods out of LA—ML Rex’s old running buddies—each of them with a rap sheet as long as my leg. So maybe they were after Garcia and you just looked like the biggest target to start with.”

  “I take it they’re now under arrest?” Karp asked.

  Guma cleared his thr
oat and shook his head. “Not exactly,” he said. “They apparently decided to resist arrest and didn’t live to talk about it.”

  “All dead?”

  “Yeah. All of ’em. The guys at the crime scene say it was quite the battle—dozens of rounds fired by the bad guys. But I guess our guys are just better shots; one of the uniformed guys was nicked in the arm, but that’s about it.”

  • • •

  When the White Horse bartender kicked them out at 3:00 AM, the troupe trooped back into the Lincoln. This time there was no argument from Stupenagel about Guma, who couldn’t drink anymore because of his cancer, driving. She apparently had other things on her mind as she slid in next to—or more accurately, on top of—Murrow, who was closing one eye and then the other in a vain attempt to focus.

  “Watch out, Murrow, Stupe thinks she’s poured enough beer in you and her to contemplate robbing the cradle,” Karp warned as he got in the front passenger seat.

  “He’s of legal age. God, you’ve got to love a man with battle scars,” she purred and brushed the hair from the bandage on his forehead.

  “I’m not that drunk, and I’ll thank you to unhand me, you cad,” Murrow slurred, proving that he was that drunk but, Karp noticed, making no attempt to put any space between himself and the avaricious journalist.

  They dropped Stupenagel off at her apartment in the East Village. “I’ve just got to get some sleep before I start writing up our latest little adventure,” she said. “Murrow you want to play wartime censor? You could tie me up and…” But Murrow was asleep with his face pressed firmly against the window, his mouth wide open and making a sort of quacking noise as he breathed. She patted him on the cheek. “Good night, sweet prince,” she said, and got out.

  “I think I’m going to throw up,” Karp said.

  “It’s people like you who kill romance,” Stupenagel pouted.

  “No, I mean it, I think I’m going to throw up,” Karp repeated before opening the door and letting go in the gutter.

  “Oh, great,” Stupenagel said, rolling her eyes. “We’ll be smelling the inner workings of the New York DA around here until the next rain.”

  “Sorry,” Karp replied, wiping his chin. “Not used to drinking beer.” Along with all the excitement, fear, and anger that had curdled the contents of his stomach like cottage cheese.

  A half hour later, Karp was asleep in his chair, his size-sixteen oxfords propped up on the desk, as Murrow curled up on the couch. They were still in that position when V.T. Newbury knocked and entered five hours later.

  “Oh my God, it smells like a brewery in here,” he said, leaving the door open to ventilate the fumes that boiled up from the stomachs of the sleeping men. “Mrs. Boccino, I suggest you remain outside while I check for vital signs.”

  “Whaaaa?” Karp managed, although his tongue had swollen to the size and consistency of a roll of toilet paper.

  “Don’t mind me, Sleeping Beauty, I just came to find the files,” Newbury said. “You should have left me a note. I about had a heart attack when I walked into the office this morning and discovered I’d been cleaned out.”

  Karp was instantly awake. “I don’t have the files.”

  Newbury’s pale complexion turned pasty white. “Tell me you tied one on and are now experiencing a blackout. Tell me they are here somewhere, or you took them home. Because they are not in my office.”

  An hour later, after a frantic search of all the possibilities, it was clear to one and all that the No Prosecution files were gone. Karp was describing the previous night’s debacle to Newbury when Guma walked in. The district attorney knew right away that something was wrong when the Italian Stallion didn’t bother to proposition Mrs. Boccino.

  “What’s up Goom, but be forewarned I don’t want to hear any more bad news,” Karp said.

  “Then you better turn off the hearing aids,” Guma replied. “They just found the bodies of two members of the cleaning crew stuffed in the trunk of their car in the parking garage. One shot to the back of the head each, close-range, small caliber, probably a .22. Very professional.”

  Karp didn’t hear the rest because of the roaring in his ears that he recognized as the sound of rage. With an effort he fought the urge to hurl his desk across the room where it might well have struck the still-sleeping Gilbert Murrow. “What now?”

  “We can start from scratch by using the police department files,” Newbury said. “Between me and the gang, we’ll probably recall many of the names, certainly the most egregious cases. Let’s ask Internal Affairs for the files on those cases first.”

  “That’s okay for going after the bad cops,” Karp said. “But it doesn’t give us any evidence of who signed off on this crap. I don’t want to just round up the soldiers who were only following orders; I want the generals who gave the orders.”

  “It’s a start,” Guma pointed out. “You don’t wave a wand over this kind of shit and it’s all taken care of…POOF! It’s like when I was a kid cleaning stalls out at the Meadowlands. The first day I got in there and started shoveling to beat the band, but I didn’t seem to be getting anywhere; I’d just dug myself into the middle of a bunch of horseshit. But the old black guy who was in charge of us stable boys took me over to a corner of the stall and said, ‘Start here. A shovelful at a time, scoop by scoop, don’t move on until that spot is clean. That way you’ll be able to see your progress, instead of just tossing shit all over the place. Then, maybe, that big pile of shit at the back of the stall won’t look so bad.’ So it’s the same thing here; we start shoveling with the little guys and work our way back to the big shit at the back.”

  Karp shook his head. “God love you, Guma. I knew you’d shoveled a lot of horseshit in your time, but didn’t know you got your start with the real thing.” He was quiet for a moment as he thought about the next step. “Okay, let’s go over to One Police Plaza to talk to my old pal Bill Denton and see if I can get him to release those files. They’ll be talking to Flanagan, Leary, and the rest, and I’d sure like to know what they have to say about last night’s events.

  “So you figure Flanagan set you up?”

  “Well, do you believe in coincidences?”

  “Depends.”

  “How about him just happening to be the first detective on the scene of the ML Rex homicides? Then when he’s told to find Vincent Paglia, the fat man goes for a long swim. After which, his name just happens to be at the top of the heap of the No Prosecution files sent to us by someone trying to save Garcia’s neck. Next, we find him loitering in front of the Hip-Hop Nightclub, just in time to chase down some gangster killers, none of whom survive to say who put them up to it…or how three guys from LA knew where to find me.”

  “Oh, well, put it like that and I guess, no, I don’t believe in coincidences.”

  “Neither do I. We know the guy’s a bad actor from the Jumain Little case. What we don’t have is proof that he’s involved in this up to his eyeballs or enough to go after the guy who’s pulling his strings.”

  “Who?” Murrow said, sitting up and both looking and sounding like an injured owl.

  “Somebody with the wherewithal to pull off a burglary at the New York fuckin’ criminal courthouse and willing to kill two innocent people to do it. Somebody we would have never suspected in a million years if we hadn’t seen his signature, or the signature of one of his cronies, on every one of those No Prosecution files.”

  “Andrew Kane,” Newbury said, “the next mayor of Gotham.”

  “Correct,” Karp said. “But with those files gone, we got diddly-squat on him.”

  “But we will, and soon I think,” Guma said.

  “What?” Karp said, racking his brain, which was suffering a hangover relapse and was sloshing around in his head like sponge in a bucket.

  “The third test.”

  Karp sighed, “I can hardly wait.”

  • • •

  A half hour later, Karp was sitting in the office of Bill Denton, the chief of
the NYPD. They’d known each other for most of their professional careers; they’d even been in charge of the homicide bureaus of their respective agencies during the same period of time. While they weren’t exactly bosom buddies, they shared a healthy dose of mutual respect for one another. However, Denton wasn’t particularly pleased to see him.

  Karp quickly realized that it was because of the story in the Voice. Put the words police misconduct in a newspaper and even a cop as honest as Denton would close ranks with the rest of the thin blue line. He had a right to be pissed, too, as he pointed out to Karp. “You could have at least given me a call to let me know the story was coming. Instead, I don’t even see it before I get to the office, and there’s already two-dozen calls from the bastards in the press wanting me to comment.”

  Karp apologized and meant it. “I didn’t know exactly what she was going to write, but I knew something was going to come out,” he said. “Let me fill you in on the details now, and then I hope you’ll understand what I’ve been dealing with…to be honest, all I’ve been doing for the past few weeks is reacting to stimuli like a rat in a science experiment.”

  He then spent the next forty-five minutes going through his life since the murder of ML Rex—to the discrediting of Vincent Paglia, the man’s disappearance and death, up to the drive-by shooting the night before. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this,” he said, “but I think Michael Flanagan, and probably his partner, Robert Leary, are dirty.”

  Sitting at his desk, Denton rubbed his big ruddy face with thick fingers while his breath escaped like a teapot boiling over. “Goddammit,” he swore.

  Karp commiserated, “I know he’s a hero in the department—”

  “He’s a hero to this whole damn city,” Denton interjected.

  “Yes, the whole damn city, and I know this city needs its heroes, and wish this wasn’t so,” he said. “But something’s going on here and it’s bad, really bad…much worse and much bigger than dirty cops, even dirty cops who commit murder. At least eight people are dead, and I don’t even know why yet. Only that someone is willing to throw lives away like sacks of garbage to get something he wants. And it’s been going on a long time. But it’s not just the NYPD; two previous administrations over in my building have had a hand in it. And what really bothers me is that I was there while this cancer was growing all around me, but I was too blind to see it, or too wrapped up in my own little world, fixated on my own assigned caseload.”