Reversible Error

by Robert Tanenbaum

  Reedy rose and shook the man’s hand, and Karp pushed his chair back and stood to be introduced. Reedy said, “Frank Sergo, Butch Karp.” Karp took the proffered hand, which was damp and cold, like a pack of hot dogs just out of the refrigerator. Sergo was nearly a full foot shorter than Karp, and fat, and the necessity of acknowledging this disparity, which no success in the marketplace could ever repair, seemed to annoy him. Karp had seen this before in short men, and he hoped it did not turn, as it often did, into active belligerence.

  Reedy had briefed him on Sergo when he had set up the meeting—the newest of the boy wonders of Wall Street, nearly a billionaire at thirty, ruthless and proud of it. Karp had no trouble believing it. Immediately upon sitting down, Sergo literally snapped his fingers for the waiter, ordered a drink—a martini that had to be made with some exotic vodka and prepared according to directions so precise that they might have sufficed to assemble a nuclear warhead—and, ignoring Karp, began to talk to Reedy in a rasping monotone about money and about himself.

  Karp had rarely met a man he liked less. It was not that Sergo was vulgar, or sloppy, or that every other word was an obscenity (all women in his conversation were cunts; all his business rivals were cocksuckers). Some of Karp’s closest friends shared many of these traits, after all. Rather it was the hollowness that Karp detected within the shell of tough and brutal talk. Sergo’s life was about nothing but the making and spending of large sums of money, together with complaints that the world failed to pay him the respect due his great wealth.

  Sergo had launched a long and pointless story about how badly he had been abused at that season’s most elegant restaurant. To his satisfaction, Karp (to whom Sergo had still not addressed a word) observed that Reedy was as bored as he himself was.

  “So they brought out the fucking caviar,” Sergo said, his mouth working around a bolus of nuts and vodka, “and it was fucking gray caviar. So I called the schmuck headwaiter over and I told him I ordered black Molossal caviar, and if he thought I was gonna pay a hundred twenty bucks for gray caviar, he was out of his fucking mind, and if he didn’t get the right caviar on the table in ten seconds I was gonna buy the fucking restaurant and fire every incompetent son-of-a-bitch in the place.” He laughed, as if he had made a joke. “Fucking cheap caviar! I get sick from cheap caviar. You know?” He looked at Karp for the first time, as if to stimulate agreement. Without expression, Karp said, “It makes me puke.”

  Sergo accepted the remark at face value. “Yeah!” he said. “You might as well be getting fucking tuna fish.”

  Reedy took this as a convenient point of entry into the business of the evening. Sergo was, as Reedy said, looking for someone to back. He wanted to get into politics, and a D.A.’s race was one on which he could immediately achieve preeminence. As he put it, “I got everything else, I ought to have a politician, ha ha!”

  Numbers were mentioned, shockingly high numbers, to Karp, and as soon as what appeared to be an agreement was reached, Sergo rose heavily, without ceremony, shaking the little table and spilling his drink, waved to both men, and stalked out, waiters and bus-boys scurrying to remove themselves from his path.

  Karp looked over at Reedy, his brows bunching dangerously and his jaw tight. Reedy grinned and shook his head. “Yeah, I know. It’s disgusting, but there it is. The only beauty part is, the schmuck is a virgin. Besides the market, he knows from nothing and he won’t know enough to meddle. He’ll pay for practically the whole thing; you won’t have to deal with a mob of people who think they’ve got some lock on you.”

  “Why the hell do we need that kind of money anyway?” asked Karp irritably. “I ran a campaign for Garrahy, his last campaign, with next to nothing and a bunch of volunteers.”

  Reedy gave him a pitying look. “Oh, yeah, Garrahy! All the hell Phil Garrahy needed at the end was his name printed on the ballot. Look, there are a million and a half voters in the county. How many of them know your name? Ten? That’s what the money’s for. To get your beautiful face on the tube, for Chrissake.”

  Karp fumed silently for a moment, knowing this was perfectly true and hating it. Then he said, “OK, we need money. What about the asshole? What’s he going to want?” asked Karp sourly.

  “I can deal with him,” said Reedy confidently.

  Karp looked at him. “Oh?”

  “Yeah, you know what we were talking about? About inside information? You think Sergo cares about what’s legal and what isn’t? I could put him in jail in a minute.”

  “Then why don’t you?” snapped Karp, suddenly tired and irritated beyond all endurance.

  Reedy reached over and patted his hand. “Because you will, after you’re D.A. You’re going to go after your biggest political contributor and put him away for fraud. It’ll be a gigantic public trial and after it you’ll be so golden in this corrupt town that you can run unopposed for the next thirty years.”

  Karp felt a grin moving uncontrollably across his face. “You’re quite a piece of work, Mr. Reedy,” he said. “Quite a fucking piece of work. I’m glad you’re on the side of truth and justice. By the way, I hope you’re not thinking of defending Mr. Sergo when the time comes.”

  Reedy looked startled for an almost invisible instant; then his loud, frank laughter pealed out, and after a moment Karp joined it. As he laughed, the name of Marcus Fane popped unbidden into his mind, and he lost much of his good humor. Fane and Reedy were business and political associates. It was on the tip of his tongue to broach the subject of what he had learned from Fulton, to warn Reedy off the congressman, to protect his friend and sponsor. But, in fact, Karp was by nature a close-mouthed man; and a decade of keeping criminal investigations confidential had not made him any more liberal with his words. The moment passed, yet Karp was surprised to feel a pang of regret.

  SIXTEEN

  A ringing phone dragged Sid Amalfi up out of a drugged sleep. He checked the bedside clock—three-fifteen in the morning, the pit of the night. He fumbled for the phone, knocking over the bottle of sleeping pills on the nightstand. His heart was pounding even before he answered.

  “Sid? Dick. We got troubles, man. You gotta meet me now.”

  Amalfi struggled into a sitting position. “Now? For Chrissake, Dick, it’s the middle of the night. What the fuck is going on?”

  “I can’t talk on the phone,” said Manning, his voice tense. “You got to get over here right now.”

  Amalfi rubbed his face vigorously, trying to push away the urgent need for sleep, trying to straighten out the web of stories that he had told in the past few days, trying to stay alive.

  “Ah … Dick, you want to give me a clue about what this is all about?”

  “Fulton,” said Manning. That was it, then. Amalfi had told Manning that Fulton had simply skipped at the hospital; there had been no opportunity to commit the murder they had planned. Now Manning had either found out that Fulton was not crooked or had discovered another way to get at him. In either case, it was essential for Amalfi to cover himself. Fulton knew all about him; Hrcany and IAD had the tape, so they knew everything too. His only out was to lay everything off on Manning. Then maybe … A plan started to jell in his sleep-addled mind. He said, “OK. Where?”

  Manning gave him an address in an industrial area near Kennedy Airport. When Amalfi pulled up in his car thirty minutes later, Manning stepped out of the doorway to a welding shop and got into the passenger side.

  “Jesus, I’m glad to see you!” Manning said.

  Amalfi yawned hugely. “I’m falling out here. Wanna go get coffee? I can’t keep my eyes open.”

  “No, we don’t have time,” said Manning. He looked down the street and checked the rear mirror.

  “You gonna tell me what this is all about?” Amalfi asked. He yawned again. The sleeping pills were still dragging him down and he fought against their pull.

  “Yeah,” said Manning. “It’s Fulton. He’s working undercover.”

  Amalfi feigned vast surprise. “Jesus! That cocks
ucker! What’re we gonna do?”

  “He doesn’t know that I know. I got him to come here. He should be here in half an hour. Look, when he gets here, you got to take him out.”

  “1 got to take him out? Why me?”

  “Because I found out where he’s got that rucking tape stashed. The one Tecumseh made.”

  “How the fuck did you find that out?” asked Amalfi suspiciously.

  Manning grinned. “I got friends in high places, man. Anyway, I got to pick it up before anybody finds he’s dead. That’s why you got to do the job and I got to travel fast. Are you cool?”

  Amalfi yawned again and nodded. This was moving a shade too quickly, but he thought he was still ahead. It might even work out better. When Fulton arrived, he’d tell him about Manning and they could pick him up with the tape in hand. Good.

  Manning nudged him. Amalfi looked over and saw that he was holding out to him a .38 revolver wrapped in a handkerchief. “It’s clean,” Manning said. “One in the ear and it’s all over. After I have the tape, with him gone they got horseshit on us.”

  Amalfi took the gun and put it in his jacket pocket.

  “OK, give me your gun,” said Manning.

  Amalfi stifled a yawn and looked at Manning in surprise.

  “Why the hell do you want my gun?”

  “Because I don’t have one. Shit, Sid, I’m so fucked up behind all this, I slipped the clean one into my holster and I was halfway here before I remembered. What’s the difference? You got the clean one and I’ll have yours. You can dump it on your way home. But I’m damned if I’m gonna do what I have to do bone-naked.”

  Amalfi shrugged and handed him his own .38 Chief’s Special.

  “When did you say Fulton was gonna get here?”

  Manning looked at his watch. “Around twenty minutes. I’ll be going now, OK?”

  “Sure, Dick,” said Amalfi. He settled himself into his seat and leaned back against the headrest. He felt a yawn coming on again, and this time he didn’t stifle it.

  Manning waited until Amalfi’s mouth was all the way open and his eyes were squeezed tightly shut. Then he reached over and stuck the muzzle of Amalfi’s gun into its owner’s mouth and pulled the trigger.

  Manning waited until the corpse of his former partner had stopped twitching, a surprisingly long time. Then he carefully searched the body and the car for recording devices. Finding none, he removed the clean .38 he had given Amalfi, pressed it into the corpse’s right hand, and fired a shot out the open window into the blackness of a large junkyard across the street. Having ensured that Amalfi’s hand would bear the microscopic chemical evidence produced by firing a revolver, he removed the clean gun, put it in his pocket, thoroughly wiped Amalfi’s own .38, and placed it in the body’s limp hand.

  Manning left the car and stood in the darkened doorway of the welding shop. Ten minutes passed, then a car Manning recognized came slowly down the street. It parked behind Amalfi’s car and Clay Fulton got out. Manning stepped out of the doorway and waved to him.

  Clay Fulton saw Manning wave and pulled over to the curb. Fulton was tense and excited, but confident that this meeting was going to break the case open. During the call from Manning that had brought him here, Manning had cast broad hints about introducing him to his main man. He had also complained about Amalfi, that he was acting funny—nervous and distracted.

  As well he should be, with a wire on him and hanging around with a cold-blooded shit-head like Dick Manning. Fulton reflected that this would probably be his last night under cover. Whatever happened, he was going to go to Denton in the morning, pull in the IAD team, and see where they stood. Now that IAD was involved, his own role was less necessary, but he felt that the possibility of uncovering Manning’s backer was worth hanging on a little longer.

  He stepped out of his car and looked around. A good neighborhood for something bad to happen. For the first time he felt a twinge of regret at having come alone. But, of course, that had been the whole point from the start. It was the most plausible thing about him undercover: he really was on his own.

  And there was no way Manning could know he was undercover, at least not with enough certainty to act. The only people who could betray him were Denton and Karp. No problem there. And Amalfi. But Amalfi was hooked by IAD. And IAD guys didn’t even talk to priests about what they did. So while there could be some additional risk from out of left field, it was a calculated risk that Fulton felt that he had to take.

  “What’s up?” said Fulton as Manning came toward him.

  “What’s up is, Sid ate his gun,” said Manning, pointing to Amalfi’s car. Fulton walked over to the driver’s side and bent over to look in the window. It was obvious what had happened, but Fulton instinctively reached out to assure himself that there was no pulse in the man’s neck. As he did so, Manning came up silently behind him and hit him as hard as he could on the back of the head with the clean pistol.

  Karp put the phone down hard, a mixture of annoyance and vague fear roiling his early-morning stomach. He drank some lukewarm coffee and chewed off a chunk of cold toasted bagel, which helped not a whit. Fulton was not to be found: not at the precinct, not at home, not at the various bars and restaurants that Karp knew about. OK, he was undercover, he had dropped from sight before this, but Karp knew that this time he was dangerously exposed.

  Karp raised the phone again and dialed Bill Denton’s private number, but put it down after the second ring. He was loath to call the chief of detectives, to tell him that the whole elaborate scheme to protect the police was blowing apart, until he had everything nailed down, and he could not do that without Fulton. On the other hand, Fulton might be in there with Denton right now, working on damage control, excluding Karp himself. Karp tried to turn those thoughts aside. Everybody was OK, nobody was screwing anybody, they’d get the bad guys in the end. Period. He decided to give it another day.

  But he had to move; he was strangling at this desk, engulfed by the paper shadows of old crimes. He got up and stalked out of his office. Three people, including his secretary, tried to get his attention in the outer office, but he rushed past them, mumbling evasions.

  His steps brought him, almost without thought, to the office of V.T. Newbury. This was a small boxlike affair, with a dusty window, tucked away in an obscure corridor of the sixth floor. Newbury was in, as he usually was. A specialist in fraud, and money laundering, and the sequestering of ill-gotten gains, he normally had little contact with the grungy realities of the Criminal Courts Bureau.

  When Karp walked in, Newbury was at his desk, half-glasses perched on his chiseled nose, running lengths of the green-and-white-striped computer printout known as elephant toilet paper through his hands, and muttering to himself.

  He looked up when he saw Karp, and flashed his perfect smile, then returned to making marks on the printout. Karp sank down in the rocking chair V.T. had provided for his visitors. Newbury had largely furnished his own office: battered wood-and-leather furniture, a worn Turkish rug on the floor, good small framed prints and watercolors on the walls, so that it looked more like the den of a not-very-successful country lawyer than the official seat of a New York assistant D.A. Karp often came here. V.T. was the only person in the building who neither wanted anything from him nor wanted to do anything to him.

  “How’s the war against crime going?” Newbury inquired, continuing his notations. “Not well, by the way you look.”

  “The usual shit,” said Karp. “What’re you doing?”

  Newbury wrote down some figures and looked up. “Actually, I’m finishing up that thing you asked me to look into.”

  “What thing?”

  “Oh, terrific! I’m ruining my eyes, not to mention having to entertain Horton for the weekend, and he’s forgotten all about it.”

  “What are you talking about, V.T.? Who’s Horton?”

  “My cousin Horton. In order to get a look at this material, I’ve had to let him inveigle himself into a weekend at our p
lace in Oyster Bay. A golf ball for a brain, which means I’m going to have to spend a weekend listening to how he birdied the bogey on the fourteenth hole. He married Amelia Preston, for whom at one time I myself had a moderate sneaker. I can’t see how she puts up with it, although perhaps we can polish our relationship while he’s out bogeying.”

  “You lost me, V.T. What does … ?”

  “Fane,” said V.T. “The congressman and the dope murders? Hello … ?”

  “Oh, shit! Yeah. So what, did you get anything?”

  “Yes, I did, although I don’t know how useful it’ll be to you. First of all, do you know what a leveraged buy-out is?”

  Karp did not, and V.T. said, “It’s simple in principle, complex in operation. Basically, a group of investors buy up enough of the public stock of a company to give them a controlling interest. They do that because they either think the company can be run better than current management is doing, or, more usually, they see a company that’s undervalued on the market. They buy it, and then they sell it for a profit, sometimes a huge one. With me so far?

  “The leverage part comes from the way they get the money to buy the stock. Essentially, they borrow it against the assets of the firm they’re buying, and pay back the loans from the sale of the firm itself. Or, what they’re starting to do, is go on the bond market with high-yield unclassified offerings, but—”

  “So Fane has been doing this?” Karp interrupted.

  “In a way, in a way. You understand that when a deal like this is going down, when the stock is in play, as they say, its price can go ballistic. And of course if the buyers tender for the stock above market value, you can make a fortune. Fane has been into some very good things. As has our friend Judge Nolan. In fact, in recent months three of the very same deals: Revere Semiconductor, Grant Foods, and Adams-Lycoming.”