Act of Revenge bkamc-11

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  “What kind of fixer?”

  “Oh, you know-traffic tickets, drunk driving, getting a contractor’s license. He knew all the pols, all Tammany back then. The machine. Heshy moved a lot of fat brown envelopes around town, and a lot of the money wasn’t so clean, if you catch my drift.”

  “Panofsky supplied Mob cash to politicians?”

  Abe smiled. “You didn’t hear it from me, darling. Which is why it was so ironic and so fishy that when somebody finally got caught moving one of those fat envelopes, it was Jerry and not Panofsky. Makes you think, don’t it?”

  “Panofsky framed Jerry?”

  “Go and prove it.”

  “Jesus! How did he ever get to be a judge?”

  Another smile, this one more patronizing. “Darling, listen to what you’re saying. I told you he had the politicians by the you-know-whats. What, you think you get to be a judge because of your legal brilliance?”

  “I stand corrected. Okay, forget Panofsky for now, who else besides this Nobile would know something?”

  “Well, that’s like I say, the problem. Mulhausen the cop, but he’s dead. The judge in the tampering case, Mohr, and the prosecutor, Currie, also both dead. Bernie Kusher, who knows? Probably dead already-”

  “Tell me about Bernie. He was the third partner, right?”

  “Right, Bernie Kusher, the third partner. He defended Jerry in the tampering case, or he would’ve if Jerry hadn’t copped out. Another character. Bright, tough, a damn good lawyer. Very close to Jerry, very close: they went to Columbia Law together, started their practice together. I didn’t know him well, but the pair of them were devastating in a courtroom. They won a lot of big cases back in the fifties. Sophie socialized with them more, the Feins and Bernie. He was divorced, I seem to recall. You could ask her. I don’t have to tell you Panofsky hated him; they were poison together.”

  After that they talked desultorily about the tampering case, for Abe Lapidus recalled only the broad outlines of the plot, which centered upon the famous zippered bank envelope full of cash (the envelope itself amply stamped with Fein’s prints) and a note typed on Fein’s office typewriter, indicating that a vote for acquittal in the Gravellotti case would earn double what was inside.

  Abe began to maunder again, supplying unwanted details about some peripheral courtroom figures.

  “Oh, hell, Abe,” Marlene broke in with heat. “You’re telling me everything but what I want to know. Why didn’t Jerry fight the thing? Why did he cop on it?”

  Abe poured out some water, rattled the ice cubes, took a long drink. He gave her an odd look, compounded of assessment, affection, cynically exhausted humor.

  “You’re a smart cookie, Marlene. That’s the big one. We all wondered about that too. Why did one of the sharpest courtroom jockeys around go into the tank when his own tuchas was on the line?” Another long pause.

  “And? And?”

  Lapidus chuckled dryly. “You remember the old Lamplighter? It was a saloon on Baxter. A courtroom hangout. It shut down.”

  “Yeah, in the early seventies. What about it?”

  “This was the evening after Jerry pleaded. Bernie was there in the Lamplighter. He was falling down drunk, which we never saw before, believe me. All of us were what you would call hard drinkers in those days.” He tapped his glass with a fingernail. “They didn’t move much Italian seltzer in the Lamplighter. You drank scotch. Or martinis. But controlled. You got out of hand, they’d call a cab and stick you in it. Anyway, Bernie was there, buying rounds for anyone who’d yell, ‘Fuck you, Panofsky!’ And pouring Chivas down as fast as they could set it up, all the time raving about Heshy. How he wasn’t going to let Heshy get away with it, he’d confess, he wasn’t going to let his pal take the fall, cursing out Heshy and also Frank Currie. .”

  “He was the D.A. in the case?”

  “Yeah. Not an ornament to the profession, if you want to know. Bernie was saying things like, ‘I’ll confess, and Frank Currie can kiss my ass!’ People were looking at each other, you know, like when there’s an embarrassing drunk. But trying to ignore it. The man was bellowing. And then Jerry walks in and goes right over to him. I figure Pete Demaris, who was behind the bar at the time, must’ve called him. They did stuff like that in the Lamplighter all the time. It was a club, like. So Jerry goes up to him and puts an arm around him and tries to lead him out, but Bernie won’t go, he’s holding onto the edge of the bar. He’s saying things like, no, no, Jerry, you’re not taking the fall for me, I’ll confess, and Jerry, angry, telling him to shut the fuck up, excuse my French. Everybody pretending it wasn’t happening, but ears flapping like Dumbo. And then Pete came around the bar, this was a real bulvan, if you know what that is, and he just tucked Bernie under his arm and they all walked out and stuffed Bernie into a cab and Jerry got in, too.” He took another drink.

  “So. . what are you saying? That it was Bernie bribed the juror?”

  “Oh, no. That was definitely Panofsky. I told you, he was the fixer. No, just when they were dragging him out the door, Bernie yelled something like, ‘I did it!’ and then some names-Mintzer, De Salerno, Maddux, and some others. Well, he was raving, so no one paid any attention. Later, they remembered.”

  “You’ve lost me, Abe.”

  “Yeah, it’s complicated. I’m amazed I can remember it myself. They were names of trusts. The firm didn’t have much of a trust business, mostly local guys who made a pile in the forties, wanted to protect their families. Maybe thirty million total. Bernie was in charge of the trust operation.”

  “And he was looting them.”

  “Looting is strong. He was doing floats, kiting checks, stripping a little interest. He never touched the principle. But definitely stuff that would not stand up to an audit. Heshy found out about it, needless to say. Not much got past Heshy. So, Heshy sets up the frame on Jerry, who practically laughs in their face when they indict him. He’s gonna cram it up Currie’s you-know-what. Now, Currie, like I mentioned, is a piece of work. He’s desperate to get Bollano, he’s got political ambitions, wants to be Tom Dewey number two fighting the mobsters. No ethics to speak of. He figures he squeezes Fein with this bribing a juror charge, it’ll be like. . what’re those things the kids break and all the toys fall out? Mexican. .?”

  “A pinata. But what about client privilege? Jerry was their lawyer.”

  “Hey, I said the guy was a nogoodnik. Fein knows all about the Bollanos, and Currie figures he’s facing ruin, disbarment, he’ll open up and spill goodies all around. He don’t have to do it in the open. Crack the Bollano mob like that pinata. But Fein wouldn’t play that game, no, he’s ready to go to trial. Then Currie finds out about Bernie and the trusts, you can guess how. Now, from here it’s speculation. I don’t know any of this. You want to hear it?”

  “Desperately.”

  He laughed. “Okay, cookie. Let’s say Currie calls up Fein. We got the goods on your partner, he’s going down unless you play ball. Jerry thinks fast. He says, here’s the deal-I cop to misdemeanor tampering, you lay off Bernie, and don’t schtup me with the bar. Currie says, what about the Bollanos? Nothing doing, says Fein, you don’t like it, I’ll see you in court, and Bernie can take his chances. So Currie, who’s no dummy, he thinks, one way I got a good collar on a Mob jury tampering, the other way I got to go up against Jerry Fein and Bernie Kusher with a weak case, I could lose my ass. And what do I care about technical violations of the trust regs? No juice there. So they deal. But afterward Currie does put it to him with the bar, and Jerry gets the shaft. Besides the rest of it, Currie was a mean, vindictive son of a bitch.”

  “That’s some story,” said Marlene, “but it makes sense. Currie’s dead, you said?”

  “Yeah, Garrahy, the D.A., canned him when Bernie took off.”

  “Bernie took off where?”

  “Oh, after Jerry died, he really did loot the trusts. Lifted over a million and disappeared. That’s why I say that the people who were in the Lamplighter that night rec
alled the names. It was a big scandal, especially when it came out that Currie knew about the trust irregularities and did nothing as part of the deal with Fein. Bernie put that in a postcard he wrote from Papua or some South Pacific place-wrote it right to Garrahy. You know what Garrahy was like, what he’d do if he found out one of his people was blackmailing a lawyer by suppressing evidence of a crime. Fried Currie’s shorts for him and gave him the boot. The man keeled over a couple of years after that. Heart. Bernie disappeared completely, lost in the Pacific.”

  “Like Amelia Earhart,” said Marlene.

  “Yeah, but believe me, darling, there were more people looking for Bernie.” Abe smiled faintly, leaned back in his chair, and took his glasses off. He looked tired, as if this journey to the past had given him a kind of jet lag.

  Marlene leafed through her notes. “What about the secretary, this Shirley Waldorf? I guess she’s gone, too.”

  “Oh, no, she’s still around. I see her from time to time on 34th Street. She lives there.”

  “Oh, great! You have her address?”

  “No, I mean, she lives on the street. She’s a bag lady, Marlene. Completely meshuggeh. Has been for years.”

  “She can’t communicate at all?”

  “Oh, yeah, she communicates, all right. You want to go through her files, as she calls them, and pretend that she’s still a legal secretary, she’ll talk your ear off. She carries pathetic piles of trash around in a couple of supermarket carts. Her files. Another casualty of what Jerry did.”

  “If he did it,” said Marlene.

  “Yeah, right, if he did it.”

  In a conference room in the organized crime division they showed Karp the tape of Guma talking to Gino Scarpi at Bellevue. The camera had been concealed in the TV set, and the audio treated with sophisticated electronics to remove the sound of the TV programs so that the targets’ voices came through with clarity. After the viewing, after Eitenberg had turned up the lights, Karp asked Norton Peabody, “This is all you have?”

  “Isn’t it enough? It looks an awful lot like conspiracy to me. Your boy’s in bed with the wise guys, and apparently has been for years.”

  Karp rubbed his eyes. He pointed them at Peabody, charged heavily with contempt. “Peabody, how old are you?”

  The man hesitated, and then said, “Thirty-seven. Why?”

  “Yeah, same as me. Ray Guma is fifty-eight, which means he was putting killers away before either of us got out of high school. He started with the Kings County D.A. in 1949. That was just after that office took apart Murder Incorporated. You have any idea what organized crime was like in New York in 1949, how powerful?”

  Peabody affected a bored look. “Yes, I saw The Godfather, too. Where is this leading, Butch?”

  Karp stared at Peabody until the other man dropped his eyes. “That’s a movie, Norton. I’m talking about real life. Ray Guma started work in that environment, and three years later he got an offer from New York County and he went for it. He has over thirty years in the best homicide bureau in the country. He’s probably put more actual Mafia killers in jail than anyone else in the United States. And you have the gall to call him dirty?”

  Peabody shrugged. “So they threw him a fish once in a while, just like a trained seal. He still looks like a trained seal to me.”

  Karp got up, and reflected yet again how nice it was to be big and tall. Peabody was, by contrast, well named. Karp loomed over the smaller man for a long moment, fists clenched, until Peabody discovered that it was urgent to turn off the VCR and retrieve his tape. He stayed by the machine, a comfortable three yards from Karp, who said, with conviction, “This is going to be an embarrassment for you guys if you try to construe that horseshit as serious evidence. And I know that Mr. Colombo really hates to be embarrassed in public. His long, scaly tail lashes around in fury and does all kinds of damage to the people close to him.” He nodded politely to both men and left.

  He trotted across Foley Square to the courthouse, went directly to Guma’s office, knocked.

  “I’m on the phone,” said the occupant’s voice. Karp barged in anyway and made urgent circular motions with his index finger.

  Guma said into the phone, “Sol, I’ll have to call you back, I got a crisis here.”

  He replaced the receiver and looked up at Karp, who said, “I just came from the Southern District. Your subpoena is because they got the prison ward thing on tape. You and Scarpi.”

  “Fuck! Ah, shit, I should’ve figured they had the place bugged.”

  Karp threw himself into an old-fashioned wooden swivel chair, making it rattle. “Well, according to them, said tape demonstrates that you’re the Mob’s mole in the D.A. They were pretty convincing. Quote, I’m in the famiglia. Quote, you’ll be the first to know. Quote, the fix is in. Unquote. Easy to misconstrue, no?”

  “Misconstrue? Shit, Butch, you can misconstrue ‘good morning’ negative if you put your mind to it. What went on between Gino and me was just the usual horseshit I do with those guys. Nobody takes it seriously.”

  “Colombo does.”

  “Right, and he’s a fuckhead, we know that. Next question.”

  Karp took a deep breath. “Okay, you’re right. Jack will go a little ballistic, but who the fuck cares? Right is on our side, and that’s what counts. It looks like shit, but I don’t care about appearances, and you sure as shit don’t either. I mean, Guma, look at you!”

  Guma looked down at his chest and then at Karp. Then he laughed. Karp laughed, too, and said, “Meanwhile, I can’t do anything about whatever passed between you and Gino, so you will respond to their fucking subpoena like a good citizen, and answer all questions asked, and explain what a jocular remark is, and fuck them if they can’t take a joke.”

  Guma laughed briefly, then sobered. “It’s a damn good thing grand juries are secret.”

  “Why?” asked Karp, and then it hit him. “Oh, you mean the boys might think you. .”

  “Guaranteed. This gets out, nobody in town with a vowel on the end of his name’s gonna want to talk to me, and I’ll be wearing Kevlar underwear for the rest of my life.”

  Chapter 15

  They were sitting on a warm rock overlooking the 97th Street transverse in Central Park, eating pho out of styrofoam boxes and washing it down with black tea from cardboard cartons, when Tran gestured with his chopsticks at the humming traffic below and said, in Vietnamese, “Dear child, suppose you have two squads, say sixteen men. Where would you dispose them so as to block that road?”

  Lucy sighed dramatically and rolled her eyes. “I would have them join hands and march down the middle of it, of course. Why do you ask?”

  “She mocks her elders. I see you will have to be drowned after all, and here is a large body of water convenient to the task.” He seized the back of her vest with his free hand and mock-pulled her in the direction of the reservoir. She giggled and shrugged away. “But truly, Uncle Tran, why at every street corner do you ask me, how would you attack that building, or defend it? When I was younger it was our game, but now it is peculiar. Ought I to worry about your mental powers?”

  “Your concern for my failing mind is worthy and I thank you. Nevertheless, the reason for my asking such questions is plain. ‘Sea becomes mulberry fields and returns to sea.’ As you have read. Things change in unpredictable ways. When I was your age, I knew without the slightest doubt that I was going to teach literature at the Lycee Chasseloupe Laubat in Saigon. My future was planned, arranged, and secure, just as you imagine yours is. In the event, however, it proved necessary for me to acquire skills I did not dream of then, no more than poor Kieu in her father’s garden imagined she would serve in a brothel and live as a bandit queen. The potter’s wheel spins, disasters come flying on the wind, as they say.”

  His eyes, as he said this, were both sad and fierce, and she felt a chill. “Very well, Uncle,” she said, and between slurps of noodle and pointing with her chopsticks she designated the positions of the riflemen, the machi
ne guns, the fixed charges, the rocket launchers, and the planned concentrations of mortar fire in the dead ground. Tran responded with more questions, and soon they had so effective a kill zone designed that, had it been put into effect, New Yorkers would have found it far harder to get across the park than was presently the case.

  They finished their meal, and Lucy trotted over the rise to find a basket for the trash. Tran had been her constant companion during her outings to the Columbia lab these last days, which was nearly the only time she got out, except for church. She was stifling but resolved not to show it, least of all to Tran.

  She returned to the rock shelf and sat. Tran was still and silent, watching the road, as if he were preparing an actual ambush.

  “Why are we waiting here, Uncle Tran?” she asked after some minutes. “My bottom is sore from this rock.”

  “Have you any pressing engagements?”

  “Only with the remainder of my life, if you can call it that,” she sighed, switching to her native tongue.

  “In that case you can practice being still, a useful attainment, as you know. Squat also, as I do, rather than slouch like an empress on a divan. This will relieve your. . ah, you are saved. Here is what we await.”

  A dark Ford van had pulled up on the shoulder of the transverse, discharging an Asian man in a tan suit and large sunglasses. He walked up the little hill and stopped at the base of the rock ledge. Tran formally introduced girl and gangster. They both nodded politely, and then Freddie Phat said, “They are back.”