Immoral Certainty

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  Although the summer night was fine and warm, they took a cab back to Anna’s place. It was a two room third floor walk-up on Avenue A, in what realtors called the East Village. The neighborhood was druggy, but the building was fairly clean, and the rent only took two-thirds of her schoolteacher’s take-home. She clerked three nights a week at Macy’s to get by.

  The street was lively with kids and strollers as they got out of the cab. While Felix paid, Anna was hailed by a woman sitting on the wide stone ledge. It was her neighbor from down the hall. Anna went over to chat with her and when Felix approached she introduced her.

  “Felix Tighe, my friend, Stephanie Mullen.”

  Felix took the woman’s hand and shook it, holding it for slightly longer than the woman wanted, as he always did. He smiled to show it was just fun.

  “Any friend of Anna’s is a friend of mine,” he said. Stephanie’s smile in return was slight and forced. Anna said, “Stephanie is the building celebrity.”

  “Come on, Anna,” said Stephanie, grimacing.

  “No, really, Felix. She was married to Willie Mullen, the bass guitar for The Blue Disease, and she was one of the original Jersey Turnpikes.” Anna started swaying and singing a song that Felix recognized.

  Felix looked at the woman with renewed interest. A hit song they still played meant big money. Why was she living in a dump like this? She wasn’t bad looking for an old broad, he thought. Long blond hair, in hippie braids. Nice big tits and she wasn’t wearing any bra under that T-shirt. He turned up the voltage on his smile.

  Stephanie waved her hand as if shooing away flies.

  “Stop it, Anna! That was a million years ago. Christ Almighty, every time that thing comes on the radio I practically break my neck trying to turn it off. The kid keeps moving the dial to the oldie station, the little tramp!”

  “Your kid, huh?” asked Felix, his interest in Stephanie Mullen draining a little.

  “Yeah,” said Stephanie, looking down the street. “That’s him there.”

  She pointed to a sturdy yellow-haired boy of about seven years trotting down the street toward them, blasting the passing cars and lounging people with beams from a plastic ray gun. He wore dusty jeans and a Darth Vader T-shirt and his round face was flushed with play.

  Stephanie grabbed him as he passed by and plopped him on her lap. He laughed and struggled in her grip. She hugged him tighter and said, “Hey, you know what time it is? School day tomorrow. Time for a bath and bed.”

  “Nooo, Ma! It’s still light out. All the kids’re playing,” he complained.

  “Don’t make no never mind to me. Come on. Say hello good-night to Anna. And Felix.”

  “G’night Anna,” said the boy, squirming out of his mother’s grasp.

  “Good night, Jordy,” said Anna, beaming.

  The boy looked at Felix unsmilingly for a moment. Then he played the red beam of his gun slowly up and down Felix’s body, from knees to head. Felix’s smile grew tight. In the red beam of the gun it looked to Stephanie almost demonic, not a human expression at all.

  “Cute,” Felix said.

  “Yeah, he’s my doll, aren’t you, Jordy?” said Anna.

  “I’m a Jedi!” shouted the boy, and ran up the steps into the apartment house.

  “I got to go,” said Stephanie, rising. Her jeans were skin-tight, almost white with wear, ragged and covered with patches and embroidery.

  Felix followed the roll of her backside as she climbed the stairs. Definite possibilities there, he thought, if it weren’t for the kid.

  Later, Felix lay in bed, exhausted, watching the smoke from Anna’s cigarette curl toward the ceiling. She ran her fingers along his thigh, along the high ridges of muscle.

  “What a man!” she said. “I feel like a million bucks.”

  Felix grunted. He was dying for a cigarette. He said, “You know what? You smoke too much.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, baby. Does it bother you?”

  “Yeah. Put it out.”

  As she did so, he sat up abruptly in the bed. He felt antsy. He was thinking about Stephanie Mullen. When he moved in here, Anna would be at work all day and a couple of nights a week. Maybe he could work something out there.

  He felt Anna’s lips brush his shoulder. Christ, the woman never got enough! But he figured he’d already paid the rent. He climbed out of bed and started poking around for his underwear in the heaps of clothes scattered around the room.

  “Felix? What’re you doing, honey?”

  “Getting dressed.”

  “Dressed? Aren’t you coming back to bed?”

  “Can’t, babes. You remember, I told you I had a big meeting tomorrow, early. Power breakfast.”

  “You did? I don’t remember. I thought, you know, we could spend the night together.”

  “Hey, I told you. You saying I don’t know what I told you?”

  “No. No, of course not, but … it just seems weird, you running off in the middle of the night. Like you were going back to your wife.” She laughed, a sharp titter with little amusement in it.

  Felix grunted something about business being business and slipped into his Italian loafers. He kissed her briefly. “I’ll call you,” he said.

  Felix walked to the IND station at Houston Street and took the F train to Jackson Heights. He walked to an apartment house not more than a quarter of a mile from where he had been arrested and rode the elevator to the third floor. He opened the lock on apartment 302, eased the door open a few inches and slid his hand inside, lifting a loop of wire off a nail stuck in the inside of the door. He entered the apartment and switched on the light. The living room was furnished with a cheap new living room set in gold velvet. A couple of flower prints and a karate exhibition poster were tacked to the walls.

  The most unusual furnishing was a chrome kitchen chair standing in front of the entrance door, a chair that had a cut-down twelve-gauge two-barrel shotgun affixed to its back with duct tape. The wire that Felix had just removed from the door led through a small pulley taped to the leg of the chair and ended at the triggers of the gun. The weapon was set to blow the belly out of anyone who came through the door without first detaching the wire.

  Felix walked to the kitchen and took half a loaf of sliced white bread out of the refrigerator. Leaning next to the refrigerator was a piece of broomstick about ten inches long, with a straightened steel coathanger attached to it with duct tape. Felix picked this up too and went into the hallway outside the kitchen.

  There was a door in this hallway, shut with a padlock on a shiny new hasp. Felix opened the padlock and went through. On the other side of the door was a short hall, with doors leading to a bathroom and a bedroom. He heard a metallic sound as he approached the bedroom door, the clinking of a long chain moving.

  Felix smiled and swished the coathanger through the air a few times, making it whistle. A whining groan, weak and high-pitched came from the room. The bed creaked. Felix went through the door. “Hi, honey, I’m home,” he said.

  CHAPTER

  6

  Los Angeles was as Karp remembered it: compared to the City it was warmer, sported brighter colors, and the crazy people were in cars rather than stumbling down the street. The sun was impossibly high in the sky when he arrived at his hotel, a unit of one of the tackier lodging chains. It was on a gritty side-street off Sepulveda, convenient to the brake job and bodywork district, and was what he could afford on the miserable per diem paid by the New York D.A.’s office, which did not approve of foreign travel for its agents—except, of course, for the D.A. himself, who was out of town being famous half the year.

  Karp felt cranky and disoriented and knew he would sleep badly. He didn’t like to fly or drive. He liked to walk.

  He remembered jet lag from the days of his marriage, when he had made the coast-to-coast trip several times a year to visit his in-laws. They paid. He went to the window of his room and looked out past the tiny balcony to the heat-shimmering parking lot and the freeway beyond. He
opened the window and the thick air of L.A. summer flowed around him, a melange of smog, chile, eucalyptus and eroded mountains.

  It jogged his memory again, and he found himself thinking about Susan, and the uncomfortable occasions he had spent as a guest in her parents’ house in Bel Air. Four years ago, she had gone back to California. She hadn’t actually left him. She was going to get a Masters degree at UCLA. It was a very modern arrangement.

  He tried to remember her as she had been in their apartment in New York, and found that he could not, that the image that came to his mind was the nineteen-year-old cheerleader he had married. He remembered a round, open face, a dusting of pale freckles, the red-gold ponytail swaying, the long, tan California legs flashing as she leaped on the sidelines at basketball games. That was before he screwed up his knee.

  A perfect girl. A perfect marriage. Right now he should be living here, in Westwood or Beverly Hills, after a successful pro basketball career, probably a partner in her father’s law firm, probably a couple of kids. He felt his chest tighten. That had been one of their jokes: He wanted five boys, so he could coach. He’d be wearing white Guccis now, and doing deals for sitcom stars.

  Would it have made any difference if he had stayed? Once again Karp experienced the feeling of hopeless confusion, and an embarrassment bordering on hysteria, that came over him when he recalled the breakup of his marriage. It was like a parody of the sixties, something out of a TV soap: husband preoccupied, wife runs away and joins lesbian commune.

  He had turned all that off, he thought, put it out of his mind by an act of will, crumpled it up like a sheet of legal bond and sunk it in the trash can. But when he thought of seeing Susan again, his gut knotted. Did he still care, or was it shame? It was shame. He knew in his heart that he would never have thought of seeing his wife again had it not been for Marlene’s ultimatum.

  Karp closed the window and opened his briefcase. He took out a picture postcard that had arrived at his New York office the previous week. On one side it had a picture of the midway at Santa Monica Pier, full of tourists, and on the other a phone number. He sat down on the bed and dialed it. Two rings and then the phone was picked up at the other end. Nobody said hello.

  Karp said, “This is Roger Karp, Mr. Impellatti.”

  After a pause, a voice said, “You in town?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Alone?”

  “Right. Where are you?”

  “You got the card there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Look at it. You see the guy with the red shirt with the kid? He’s got a balloon.”

  “Yeah, I see it.”

  “I’ll meet you tomorrow at twelve noon where that guy is standing. Be alone.” With that the phone went dead.

  Karp was impressed. As a connoisseur of paranoia himself, he thought that Little Noodles had come up with a neat method of arranging a meeting so that somebody listening in on the conversation wouldn’t know where it was.

  This conversation was cordial compared with the next one Karp had, which was with his mother-in-law. She slammed the phone down when he identified himself. When he called again, she informed him that this whole mishegas was his fault, as was her husband’s recent heart attack, that if he had stayed in California, and had a nice home, and joined a temple like a decent Jewish husband, instead of living in a crummy apartment in that crazy place with God knew what kind of people for neighbors, so he could chase momsers, he should be ashamed of himself, and so on and so on.

  Karp waited for a pause in the guilt-bath and asked for Susan’s address. After some hesitation, and some artful lying on his part, he extracted a rural address in Ladero, California, a small town in the mountains above San Jose.

  Karp’s third phone call was to an old law-school friend with a practice in L.A., to get the no-fault papers drawn up. He spent the rest of the day by the pool, went to bed early, tossed around for a couple of hours, and then watched movies on TV until four in the morning. He got up at ten, breakfasted in the motel coffee shop and then called V.T. Newbury in New York, the man he had left in charge of the Bureau.

  “V.T.? It’s me.”

  “The Incredible Hulk? How’s California? Are you snorting cocaine amid the perfect oiled bodies of blonde starlets?”

  “Yeah, right. What’s happening at the store?”

  “Karp, you’ve been gone a day, what could be happening?”

  “So I’m nervous. What’s Bloom doing?”

  “Not much. He came to work this morning in a silk peignoir and white satin mules. Besides that, nothing new. Did you connect with your guy yet?”

  “Yeah, I’m meeting him in a couple of hours. How do you like the agony of command?”

  “My respect for you grows hourly. I signed a bunch of leave slips and a purchase order for a new copier. I feel like Erwin Rommel. Speaking of which, you might have a word with Roland when you get back. He seemed a little miffed he didn’t get the deputy slot.”

  “Yeah, I figured he would. It’s kind of hard to explain the situation. Roland thinks hard work and kicking ass is the way to get ahead. But you’re the only guy I got Bloom won’t touch.”

  “Hey, I work hard.”

  “When you feel like it. Your family and their friends also control about a trillion dollars in political money, which is why you’re golden with the D.A. Meanwhile, I got to go. Is Marlene around?”

  “No, I saw her leave with those two cops she’s got working for her. Oh, I almost forgot, Guma wanted to talk to you. Let me switch you over. Bye … hey, and get some sun, take it easy.”

  Buzzing and clicking and then Guma’s heavy voice was on the line.

  “Butch, how ya doin’? Getting any sun?”

  “Why does everybody ask me that? Yeah, sun up the ass. What d’you got, Goom?”

  “I talked to Tony Bones. He’s in town.”

  “Goom, you ever think that hanging around with wise guys is not a particularly smart move, assuming you’re interested in staying in the D.A. business?”

  “Butch, I could give a shit it’s a smart move or not. What am I, bucking for bureau chief? I’m trying to impress fucking Bloom? I was putting goombas in jail when he was in finishing school. You too, come to that, so don’t you give me any horseshit about Tony Buonofacci. I know him from when we’re both snot-nose little guineas in Bath Beach. We used to hustle chicks together down Cropsey Avenue, for chrissake.”

  “Goom, stop with this old neighborhood crap! Half the guys he’s whacked out got the same story. You think he shoots East Side Presbyterians?”

  “Hey, did I say he wasn’t a cold-blooded killer? But one, he’s based in Miami now, which puts him off our turf. Let him shoot all the sun tans he wants! And two, he knows if I ever get the chance, I’ll hang his ass, and no hard feelings on either side. He’s a pro—he’ll get the best lawyer in town, he’ll try to fix the jury, and if he loses he’ll go down without a peep. Meanwhile, he’s a paisan, and it’s getting so there’s not many of us left.”

  “Wait, Guma, I got to wring out my hankie,” said Karp, laughing. “So tell me, what does Tony Bones have to say that I would find interesting?”

  “Just that the word is that Harry Pick went apeshit when Little Noodles disappeared. He started stirring things up, as only Harry can, and among the things he stirs up is a little hood named Carmine Scalliose, who it looks like is the last guy to see Noodles in the City. This is in a spaghetti joint on Grand, two days after Ferro got his. Apparently, Noodles walks up to him, gives him a big smile, and starts schmoozing like crazy, which is weird, because him and Carmine have never been such great friends.

  “So after a while he leaks out that Harry Pick’s after him. He don’t know why, but he saw Harry give him the shot, he says, up at Nyack.”

  “What’s that about, ‘the shot?’”

  “I don’t know, some kind of gesture—you know, like kids going ‘bang-bang.’ But Noodles thinks it’s for real—he’s a dead man. So he panics, he splits, h
e hides—”

  “He hides from Harry in Little Italy?”

  “Yeah, I know, it’s like hiding in Harry’s Jockey shorts, but here’s the thing: He tells Carmine he’s going to Puerto Rico—even shows him the ticket. So he gets Carmine to drive him to Kennedy: bon voyage, Noodles.”

  “Knowing, of course, that Carmine will go straight to Harry.”

  “Like shit down a chute. So Harry tears up PR, looking for him, for a couple of days. Then he starts thinking it’s a scam. Tony thought it was pretty amusing, Harry in PR, and all the time Noodles is in L.A.”

  “Wait a minute, Guma—Tony knows Noodles is in L.A.?”

  “Shit, Butch, everybody knows he’s in L.A. After he got back to the City, it took Harry twenty-four hours to get wise to the switch. You think he don’t have people in the airports? Tony says he’s got Jimmy Tona’s outfit looking for him out there. Harry’s pissed, Butch. Maybe in Nyack he was just dicking around, but now it’s serious, you know? I mean, Noodles knows where all the bodies are buried.”

  “That’s probably not a figure of speech, is it?”

  Guma chuckled, a sound like marbles running down a bathtub drain. “I doubt it. You’re in a bind, son.”

  “So it seems. It’s a shame I’m going through all this to bring Noodles back, and he doesn’t even make a case to nail the shooter and Harry.”

  “What d’you mean, he was driving the … Oh, right, no corroboration.”

  “Right, it’s too bad Noodles was an accomplice. Of course, Harry doesn’t know we don’t have a corroborating witness. We might try to play with that, assuming I can bring Noodles in in one piece. You have any Sicilian wisdom to convey on that?”

  “Yeah, stay away from the cops. Noodles goes anywhere near a jail, he won’t get much older. Which he knows.”

  “Uh-huh. He does seem a hair paranoid about me being alone.”

  “I don’t blame him. Look, you got a meet set up yet?”