“Whom,” Guma corrected him
“Huh?”
“Never mind, I take it they didn’t require English grammar as part of the GED you received in prison, according to your records,” Guma said, looking at the file he’d asked Murrow to pull while they stalled Anderson and Coletta.
“If this is going to turn into an insult contest, we’re out of here,” Anderson said, making a move as if to stand.
Karp put his hand up and motioned for him to remain seated. “I think Mr. Guma, who is lead counsel for the prosecution in this case, would love to hear Mr. Coletta’s ‘version of the events.’ Mr. Guma?”
“Yeah, let’s hear it,” Guma confirmed.
“Yeah, well, if this is the way a citizen gets treated for trying to do the right thing, no wonder there’s so much crime in Manhattan,” Coletta said. “But anyway, yeah, I was there when he did it.”
“When who did what?” Karp said.
“What?” asked Coletta with a smirk. “Am I being tag teamed here?…Look, I ain’t comfortable talking to The Man, con’s code of honor and all, but I don’t want to see Mr. Stavros go down for something he didn’t do. He’s a legit guy, gave me a chance after I did my time, and I’ve worked for him ever since.”
“So you’re saying, you owe Mr. Stavros,” Guma asked, looking at his fingernails as if they might need clipping.
“Nah, it ain’t like that,” Coletta countered. “I just wanted to explain why I would turn on a guy who I was pretty tight with at one time.”
“So who are we talking about?” Guma asked. “Who are you saying you saw kill Mrs. Stavros?”
“His name is, or rather was, Jeff Kaplan,” Coletta said. “He was Mrs. Stavros’s gardener. But I understand he died in a boating accident or something.”
“Start from the beginning. Where did you meet him?” Karp asked, recalling the report he’d read from Detective Fairbrother regarding his conversation with former detective Brian Bassaline.
“I met him at Auburn Prison. He was in for killing some guy—not that he meant to do it; it was a fight in a bar, Jeff one-punched him and turned out the guy’s lights forever. Guess it was sort of a freak thing. Anyway, next thing Jeff knows, he’s doing time for manslaughter.”
“And Mr. Kaplan was a gardener?” Guma asked, although he had also talked to Fairbrother and read the report.
“Yeah, he got into it in prison, said it calmed him down,” Coletta said. “Anyway, we were cellies for a half year or so before I got out. When he was released, I talked to Mrs. Stavros, who was struggling with her roses, and got him a job.”
“You’ll excuse me, but this is the first we’ve heard of the gardener,” Karp said. “But there’s nothing in the file about him.”
Coletta shrugged. “That’s not my problem. I know he was questioned. Guess it’s just sloppy work on your part.”
Guma asked if Coletta had much time to observe the relationship between Emil and Teresa Stavros.
“Yeah, whoo boy, she was an A number-one bitch,” Coletta said, before crossing himself superstitiously. “Excuse me for speaking unkindly of the dead. But I watched Mr. Stavros take a lot of shit from her, and it wasn’t right.”
Karp noticed Guma stiffen at Coletta’s description of Teresa and quickly interjected. “But Mr. Stavros was, by his own account, carrying on an affair with Amarie Bliss.”
Coletta nodded. “Yeah, I knew all about that. Hell, I drove him to her apartment all the time—that’s how I know he wasn’t around when his bitch wife got what was coming to her.”
“This is a bunch of crap—” Guma snarled.
“Ray!” Karp cautioned.
Coletta’s brow was furrowed. “What? You callin’ me a liar?”
“Yeah, a liar and a—” Guma started in.
“Ray…let’s hear what the man has to say,” Karp said.
Guma looked like he was going to say something else. But instead he leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling.
Karp looked at Coletta. “Go on, and please, forgive Mr. Guma…this is the first we’ve heard that sort of description of the victim. Anyway, you were commenting on Mr. Stavros’s affair?”
“Yeah, well, I don’t know how much I want to say if I’m just going to be called a liar,” Coletta said, but went on anyway. “Yeah, Mr. Stavros was bangin’ Amarie. Can’t say I blame him considering his wife was one cold fish.” He looked at Guma as if expecting to be challenged. “Although she was plenty warm around Jeff.”
Guma sat up with his dark eyes burrowing into Coletta. “But you just told us that Mr. Kaplan was the killer.”
“Yeah, that’s what I said,” Coletta replied. “Them two were going at it hot and heavy. He was boning her whenever Mr. Stavros went out, which was plenty. She was just using Jeff to get back at Stavros, but when Jeff wised up and decided to call it quits, she wasn’t going for it. ‘Nobody leaves me,’ she told him that night—”
“Which night?” Guma asked.
“The night of the murder,” Coletta answered. “Anyways, she told him that night that if he left her, she would go to the police and say he raped her when her husband was gone.”
Coletta said he was in the garage, putting the limo away when he heard Kaplan and Teresa arguing. “She was screaming at him and then she pulled a gun…this little .22 jobbie…and pointed it at him. But he took it out of her hands, so she turned and said she was going to go call the cops. Jeff freaked and shot her. That’s when I came out of the garage and saw him shoot and her fall.”
Kaplan turned and saw Coletta and was going to shoot. “But I put my hands up and said, ‘Hey, no worries, she was a bitch and deserved what she got.’ Then I helped him bury her in the rose garden. We even put the rosebushes right back on top of her grave.”
“Why didn’t you go to the police?” Karp asked.
Coletta rolled his eyes as if some rube had asked him a stupid question. “Come on, I just told you, I didn’t like the bitch, and Jeff was a friend. And besides, I got paid pretty good to keep my mouth shut.”
“By who?” Karp asked, wondering if they were about to hear the name Andrew Kane. When Detective Fairbrother returned from Maine and wrote up the conversation he’d had with Bassaline, the name Michael Flanagan had jumped at him like a rattlesnake in one of the old Westerns he’d loved.
Guma’s thinking had turned the same way. Do you think this is another Kane thing? he’d asked.
Hard to say, Karp replied. Sort of fits the “No Prosecution” MO. Pulls a few strings for a wealthy and well-connected socialite, gets his people on the force to quash the investigation. But Newbury had found nothing in the files.
Could be this was just Flanagan freelancing, too.
“Who paid me? Kaplan, of course,” Coletta said. “He came up with this scheme to say she disappeared, ran away from home, and kept her credit cards and bank shit. She’d shown him how to get into her private safe, so he had her PIN numbers and passwords, the whole schmear, including her jewelry. No woman was going to leave her jewelry. He had a girlfriend, sort of looked like Teresa, and he had her travel around a bunch, buying shit and then selling it, plus cashing big checks. They were living pretty high off the hog and sending me checks nice and regular, until the money ran out.”
“Mr. Coletta, did you remember seeing Zachary Stavros at the time of the shooting?” Guma asked.
Coletta shook his head. “Nah. That kid’s a basket case; I think he’s making it all up. Been on just about every kind of pill there is.”
“Do you remember what Teresa Stavros was wearing that night?”
Coletta scrunched his eyebrows and put a hand to his chin as if trying hard to recall an old memory. “Yeah, I think it was some white sort of see-through thing,” he said. “That was one thing she had going for her…she was quite a looker and didn’t mind showing the goods, if you know what I mean.”
After a few more questions, Anderson held up his hand. “I think that’s plenty. I hope you’ll give Mr. Coletta�
�s statement careful thought. It’s obvious this makes much more sense than Mr. Stavros somehow escaping his mistress’s apartment to sneak home, kill his wife, bury her in the backyard, and then sneak back into the apartment so that he could be seen leaving by the doorman in the morning.”
“We’ll let you know.” Karp smiled. “Until then, nothing has changed.”
Anderson and Coletta stood to leave. “Uh, sorry, just one more question,” Karp said. “I’m trying to picture how this happened. You say Kaplan grabbed the gun from Mrs. Stavros and she turned to go call the cops…”
“Yeah, that’s right,” Coletta said.
“Would you mind, using Mr. Anderson there as a stand-in for Mrs. Stavros, showing me about how far away, Kaplan was standing…how he pointed the gun…you know, sort of act it out—”
“I’m not sure I approve of this—” Anderson started to say, but Coletta turned him around.
“Come on, Bryce, this will be fun,” Coletta said. “He was about this far away.” Coletta raised his arm and pointed it at the back of Anderson’s head from a distance of a couple of feet. “Then boom! And she went down like a sack of rice.”
“Boom? One shot?” Karp said.
“Yeah, boom, just once was all it took,” Coletta said. “Ain’t that what the newspaper story said a little while back?”
Karp grimaced. Somebody in the ME’s office had leaked some of Dr. Gates’s findings to the press. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s what it said.”
After the attorney and chauffeur left, Karp turned to Guma, who was leaning back in his chair again with his eyes closed. “Guess I don’t need to ask what you think.”
“He’s totally full of it,” Guma said. “I haven’t met a single other person who says that Teresa Stavros was anything but a kind, loving woman and that her husband was a dirtbag with money problems. No mention of Kaplan and Teresa having an affair, which just doesn’t fit anyway.”
“There’s also Detective Bassaline’s comment that Kaplan told him that the rosebushes had been disturbed in the backyard. Why would Kaplan say something like that if he didn’t want to get caught?”
“And let’s not forget this whole thing with Teresa supposedly skipping the country and living the high life somewhere else was a pretty sophisticated operation. But Bassaline said Kaplan was no rocket scientist, took too many left hooks to the head.”
Karp agreed with the assessment. “Yeah, I guess it’s a good thing Fairbrother’s report is still on my desk, waiting to be sent to the defense.” But, he cautioned Guma, the defense had just drawn a pretty tough hand to beat. “Our star witness was five years old and says he remembers his mother and father fighting, a couple of pops that may or may not have been gunshots, and the sound of someone digging. They have an adult, granted one with a sheet, who says he saw the whole thing. Nice that the statute of limitations for conspiracy to obstruct and accessory after the fact is up. But he did get the caliber of the gun, which wasn’t mentioned in the newspapers, right.”
“Don’t tell me you buy this crap?” Guma said. “Isn’t it just a little too convenient that this guy is popping up now?”
Karp nodded. “Ray, I think this guy’s totally full of it, too, but we’re going to have to counter him. We can’t just ask the jury to believe our version based on our mutual good looks.”
Guma laughed. “Maybe you can’t, but I’ve won plenty of cases on that very notion.”
23
THE BURLY GUARD AT THE GATE LEADING UP TO VLADIMIR Karchovski’s house gave Marlene a suspicious look but let her in. He was the same gorilla who’d been there when she and Butch visited and his disposition wasn’t much better that afternoon. Then again, the Karchovskis don’t pay him the big bucks to be nice, she thought. She glanced quickly over her shoulder and saw that he was still watching her.
“Don’t let Boris put you off,” a male voice said as the door to the house opened. “He’s a dangerous man when necessary, but shy as a lamb around women. Not that he doesn’t appreciate the sight of a beautiful woman such as yourself.”
Marlene smiled as she looked up at Yvgeny Karchovski. Butch with an accent, she sighed inwardly, but not the integrity, nor could anyone ever understand me the way Butch does. Karp had been wonderful after she got back from Jojola’s memorial service—strong and supportive when she wanted to cry on his chest, fun and engaging when she needed a night out to get her mind off of her friend’s death and the threats against her family, as well as her vow to someday, somehow seek and exact her vengeance against Andrew Kane.
It had been some time since she’d seen the Karchovskis. Yvgeny, she understood, had been traveling—she figured in Russia, although his father, Vladimir, had waved his hand vaguely and said it was “to see old friends.” So that remained a mystery as did how Yvgeny, who was in the United States illegally, traveled so freely.
The old man had also been quiet for several weeks, since before Jojola’s death until that morning when he called on her cell phone. If you have a few moments, he’d said, I have some information that, perhaps, you can make sure gets in the hands of the proper authorities. The call had reminded her of the dream she’d had while at the pueblo in which Vladimir had tried to hand her a note, but the woman in black had snatched it.
Yvgeny asked her to come in. “Vladimir is out for his walk,” he said. “But he should return in a half hour or so.”
“Let’s go catch up to him,” Marlene suggested. “I could use the fresh air.”
“As you wish,” Yvgeny said, and they stepped back out of the house and walked down to the gate.
“You leaving?” the guard asked.
“Da, Boris,” Yvgeny said. “Open the gate.”
“You are not waiting for Mr. Karchovski to return?” Boris asked.
“No, we are going to meet him,” Yvgeny said. “Now if you don’t mind, we’d like to leave.”
“Yeah, sure,” Boris responded and opened the gate. “Um, Mr. Vladimir Karchovski has to me give orders, ‘Watch out for Yvgeny.’ So I must go with you.”
Yvgeny shook his head. “That’s all right, Boris, stay here,” he said. “I’ll be okay.”
“But Mr. Vladimir Karchovski, he give me this order—” The man looked like he might weep.
“Okay, Boris, okay,” Yvgeny said, rolling his eyes at Marlene to whom he muttered under his breath, “Doesn’t say three words in a week, but now he’s my shadow.”
With Boris lumbering along twenty feet behind and talking on his cell phone, Yvgeny and Marlene headed for the Brighton Beach boardwalk where Vladimir took his walks. Along the way, Yvgeny told her he’d been “snooping around” in Moscow and Chechnya to see if any of his associates with the black market had heard anything about what Samira Azzam was doing in the United States linking up with Andrew Kane.
“There’s nothing much more than rumor,” Yvgeny said. “However, one of those rumors is that an agent with the FSB—which used to be KGB—a woman named Nadya Malovo, is also rumored to be in this country. I actually met her once, many years ago after Afghanistan; she was with senior agents questioning officers about defections and anti-Soviet sentiments in the army. I thought she was a—how do you say—a cold one then, but I hear she may be much worse than that. Some claim she was with Azzam at the Nord-Ost theater and later Beslan. That is not for sure and even if she was, there could be a legitimate reason if, say, for instance, she is trying to work her way close to the Islamic extremist hierarchy.” Yvgeny hestitated a moment as if working things out in his head.
“But?” Marlene asked.
“Excuse me?” Yvgeny said.
“You didn’t say it, but there was a ‘but’ on the end of your last sentence,” she said. “You’re not sure you buy that theory.”
Yvgeny shook his head. “I am not sure. However, if the theory that I was talking to you and Butch about the night you were over for dinner—that the Russian government, or at least some rogue element in the government, and the Islamic hard-liners are working tog
ether for the moment to discredit the Chechen nationalists—”
“Then this Nadya Malovo might be working with Azzam and Kane,” Marlene finished. She whistled. “Which means the Russian government, or some rogue element, as you say, within the government or its secret police, is working with an Islamic terrorist and an American megalomaniac killer on some terrorist act on U.S. soil? That’s the stuff—”
“—wars are made of.” Yvgeny was the one to finish the sentence this time.
“So you think they’re still after Putin?” Marlene asked.
“It makes sense,” Yvgeny said. “Or at least, a staged attack directed at Putin with plenty of deaths among the UN ambassadors and staff to blame on the Chechen nationalists. The FSB isn’t the only spy agency in Russia. The army has its own network, some of whom are still my friends. Of interest while I was there was the apprehension of an Arab courier on the border between Kazakhstan and Chechnya. He killed himself before he could be questioned, but a CD data file was found sewn into his jacket. It was encoded, however, the army had recently broken that particular code. The only thing on the CD was a blueprint of a building.”
“Don’t tell me,” Marlene said. “The building was the United Nations.”
“ Da…yes,” Yvgeny said. “Of course, the army cannot come out and accuse anyone of plotting to kill the president, or against the Chechen nationalists, not without proof. After all, no one knows how high this conspiracy goes. But put it all together and the signs are pointing to something big happening in September.”
“So is this the information that Vladimir wanted to pass on?” Marlene asked.
Yvgeny shook his head again. “No…well, not entirely,” he said. “It is perhaps for you to judge who might make use of this information. Though you do not need me to tell you that not everyone involved in all of this can be trusted. But that I leave to you. Me and my people will continue our own ‘investigation.’ However, what my father wanted to pass on to you, while related, is of a more personal nature.”
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