Justice Denied bkamc-6

by Robert Tanenbaum

  But most of all there was the body. Roland Hrcany was a committed bodybuilder and weight lifter. He had twenty-five-inch biceps and a forty-four-inch chest and a nineteen-inch neck. Cops are physical people. They believe they have to dominate physically to survive. Roland was physically dominating. That he was also a very smart, aggressive lawyer, capable of grinding mutts and their candy-ass lawyers to powder in court, was just the cherry on top.

  They laid out the case, respectfully, knowing that Roland would understand the fix they were in with the slicks and sympathize, and he did. Roland interviewed the witnesses and dismissed them. Frangi went to the bathroom. The patrolmen stopped guarding the entrance, and the Villa D’Este opened for business.

  Frangi came back. The proprietor walked over and, smiling, offered lunch, which they accepted. His place was going to be on television, and he was happy with the world. When they had been given a huge bread basket and a round of drinks, Wayne said, “So, Roland, what do you think? A ball breaker, right?”

  “Not really, Barney. I got a good feeling about this one. I think it’s gonna play right for us.” The two detectives made skeptical noises, but Roland advanced his case with undiminished confidence. “No, look: they were waiting for the guy, this Ersoy. They were parked where they knew he was going to pass at that particular time. So they knew him-”

  “Not necessarily,” Frangi interrupted. “They could’ve been pros, casing him for weeks.”

  “Okay, or they knew his habits, but no way they were pros. A pro who knew as much about the vic as these guys did would’ve waited by his apartment and given him three in the head from a small-caliber gun.”

  “How can you say that, Roland? It’s on TV all the time: the terrorists in Europe and the Middle East hit these politicians like a fucking army: machine guns, rockets-”

  “Yeah, but those people are covered by heavy security. You can’t get to them unless you blast your way through. Our guy was naked. He didn’t feel threatened at all. So, of all the times to hit someone, why pick broad daylight on a Sunday, with your car pointed down a one-way street whose only outlet is through U.N. Plaza, which practically every other weekend is loaded with cops and demonstrators. It doesn’t make sense unless it’s amateur hour.”

  “He’s got a point, Joe,” said Wayne.

  Frangi replied, “Okay, fine, say I buy that, what does that give us?”

  “It means,” said Roland, “that either the killing comes out of his life, as usual, and the Armenian Army thing is horseshit, a dodge, or that you’re looking for a bunch of Armenian assholes sitting around a kitchen table in Brooklyn. I mean, it’s not gonna be Carlos the Jackal.”

  Wayne sighed. “Yeah, well, nothing against the Armenians, but that would suit me fine. We have to start tracing through this dude’s life, we’re talking weeks, swimming upstream against this diplomat shit all the way. So I guess we have to start with the blue car and the printouts and the Armenian names. And if you’re right, they might have used their own car.”

  “They might have,” Roland agreed. “But we still have to check out the vic. Did I see a safety-deposit key on that case you took off him? Yeah? People with boxes usually have more interesting lives than most. You’re going to toss his place today?”

  The detectives looked nervously at each other. “Well, that’s what I meant about swimming upstream. We got a lecture about being diplomatic,” said Wayne. “The brass wants us to go through the embassy on everything.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s fine for the embassy personnel and the office, but his personal place is our meat. It’s a felony investigation, not a parking ticket. If you get any heat there, call me. I’ll take it all the way up the line if I have to, and-”

  He looked up, aware of a presence looming over him. It was a very tall, very black man wearing a Burberry over a gray suit and a brightly colored pillbox hat on his head. He had gold-rimmed spectacles. They all stared. The man smiled and reached into his coat. They all tensed, but he brought out only a leather card case.

  “Excuse me,” the man said. “I understand you are of the police?”

  “Yeah,” said Frangi. “Who’re you?”

  The man passed each a large, stiff engraved card declaring him to be M. Etienne Mbor Sekoué of the Senegalese mission to the U.N. He said, “I extremely regret not coming before this, but I felt it proper to escort my sister home. She was entirely devastated by the lamentable events of this morning. It is her first visit to New York and-”

  “Wait a minute, you’re a witness?” Frangi exclaimed.

  “Yes, I approached one of the officers on the street, and they directed me here.”

  “Please sit down, Mr. Sekoué,” said Roland. “Tell us what you saw.” Wayne brought out his notebook and said, “Where were you when the shooting took place?”

  The African settled himself at the table’s fourth seat. “I … we, that is, my sister and myself, were on point of crossing Second Avenue. We were perhaps in the center of the street when we heard the shots commence-a fusillade.”

  Wayne frowned. The man had been farther away from the action than some of the other witnesses. He asked a few more questions about the movements of the killers and their victim, but this merely confirmed what they already had. “Anything else, Mr. Sekoué? Did you notice anything unusual about the killers? Or their car?”

  “Of the assassins? No, no one could see anything of them. Their masks, their gloves. As to the car,” he smiled self-deprecatingly, “it was a large American car, new, of the color dark blue. I am not familiar with the American marques.” He paused. “Surely, however, you will be able to search it, having the license number, no?”

  Frangi said, “Sure, if we had the number, but we don’t.”

  M. Sekoué’s spectacles glittered when he smiled. “Ah, but I have written it down, you see.”

  And he had. Before their amazed faces he produced a tiny leather address book with a gold pencil attached. A license number had been neatly written inside the back cover. Wayne wrote it down in his notebook. The three men thanked the diplomat profusely, and he departed.

  “That’s the kind of brother we need more of in this town,” said Frangi with feeling. “Now, five bucks says it’s ripped off and we’re back to zero. You want to make the call, Barney?”

  Wayne nodded and walked over to the pay phone in the bar. He dialed and had a brief conversation. Roland and Frangi sat waiting, not speaking. Wayne came back to the table and sat down. “It’s not on the latest hot sheet. The next one’s not due for a couple of hours, so it could have been boosted this morning and the guy hasn’t missed it yet …”

  “Barney, for chrissake, who owns the fucking vehicle?” cried Frangi.

  Wayne smiled broadly. “How do you like Aram Tomasian? A local boy. Lives in Murray Hill.”

  Roland Hrcany laughed out loud. Frangi raised his eyes to the ceiling and said, “Thank you, Jesus!”

  2

  They looked him over. A compact, short, olive-skinned man in his late twenties, Aram Tomasian stood in the doorway of his apartment and returned their look out of deep-set brown eyes. He didn’t seem surprised to see two cops at his door at eight of a Sunday evening, which was itself surprising. What was more surprising, he didn’t say, “What’s this all about?” or “What’s wrong?” or give them the phony smile that most people kept in stock for a visit from the police, but gravely ushered them into his home and said, “I’ve been expecting you.”

  Frangi and Wayne walked into the place and absorbed it in a glance, as cops do. Upscale but not ostentatious: white carpeting, beige Haitian cotton sofa and armchairs, an expensive stereo system and a large television mounted in a long teak wall unit, a glass and chrome coffee table. There was a large framed color poster of what looked like some old ruins on the wall and a dozen or so family pictures in silver or leather frames placed on various shelves of the wall unit, together with a substantial library.

  Wayne looked at Tomasian and once again tried to make
his mind blank, hoping for a telling illumination. A regular guy, was all he got, a little cocky, in control. Wayne didn’t care for that. “Why were you expecting the police, Mr. Tomasian?” he asked, making his voice a little flatter and louder than necessary.

  Tomasian gestured at the TV. “The Turk who got shot today. I figured you’d be around.” He sat down on his sofa and crossed his legs.

  Frangi sat down opposite. Wayne paced around the room, looking at the books, photographs, and jacketed LPs stored neatly in the wall unit. One shelf, behind clear glass, was devoted to a collection of some kind: four pieces of old-looking jewelry with bright enamel insets, some dull gems deeply engraved with designs, and several small panels of gray or whitish stone incised with carvings of saints.

  Frangi said, “Why did you figure that, Mr. Tomasian?”

  The man shrugged. “That call to the papers. It was on TV. They blamed it on Armenian nationalists. I’m an Armenian nationalist …” He made a flowing gesture with his hand indicating the obviousness of it all.

  “And you know something about this Armenian Secret Army that claimed credit for the killing?”

  Tomasian allowed himself a faint smile. “If I told you that, it wouldn’t be much of a secret, would it?”

  From behind the couch Wayne said, “Withholding information about a murder investigation is a serious crime, Mr. Tomasian.” Wayne liked to get physically behind the subject during interrogations. He found it got them off balance. Then he and Frangi could shoot questions at the subject alternately, and have the pleasure of seeing the guy’s head whip back and forth as he tried to face his questioners.

  This pleasure Tomasian denied them, however. Keeping still, he said to Frangi, as if he had made the statement, “In that case, let me say that I have absolutely no knowledge of this murder, either the planning of it or the execution, and don’t know anyone who did. I am not aware that the Armenian Secret Army or any other Armenian organization had any part in it. I am not going to discuss the Armenian Secret Army with you in any way, or reveal its plans, its organization, its activities, or its membership.”

  Frangi said, “Okay, Mr. Tomasian, if that’s the way you want to play it, fine. Let’s talk about you personally, then. This morning between eight and eleven-you were where?”

  “Right here. I had a late night last night and I slept in, until about noon.”

  “Alone, right?” asked Wayne, still behind the sofa.

  Tomasian smiled again. “No, I was with my girlfriend. In bed. She left about one-thirty.”

  “We’ll need her name, then,” said Frangi.

  Tomasian paused and then said, “I guess there’s no way around it. This is all going to come out in the papers, right? The thing is, her family will have a shit fit. There’s no way to, um, keep this private.”

  Frangi stared at him blankly, his pencil poised above his pad.

  “Her name’s Gaby Avanian, Gabrielle.” He added an address on St. Marks Place in the East Village.

  “You own a car, Mr. Tomasian?” asked Frangi.

  “Yes, why?”

  Frangi ignored the question. “Make and model?”

  “It’s a 1977 Ford Polara.”

  “Is that a blue car, sir?” asked Wayne, and when told that it was in fact that color he and Frangi exchanged a significant look. “Where do you keep it?” Wayne asked.

  “In the garage in the building.”

  “Did you use it today at all?” asked Frangi.

  “No. I don’t ever use it much, as a matter of fact. I can walk to work. Sometimes I drive out of town on weekends or visit relatives in the boroughs, Westchester, like that. And sometimes I pick up supplies for my business.”

  “What business is that?” asked Wayne.

  “I’m a jeweler. My dad owns Metropolitan Jewelry. It’s a chain. I run the store at Lex and Forty-first, and I also do a lot of our original designs.”

  The detectives exchanged another look and Frangi rose. “Thanks for your time, Mr. Tomasian,” he said, and offered a business card. “If you think of anything that might be helpful, give us a call.”

  Tomasian glanced at the card and placed it on the coffee table. Again he smiled faintly. “But meantime, don’t try to leave town?”

  Frangi said, “That would be considerate, Mr. Tomasian, but in any case, if we decide we want you, we’ll find you.”

  Tomasian didn’t offer to see them to the door, and they let themselves out. In the elevator, Wayne said, “So. You like him. I could tell.”

  “Like him? I love him. I want to marry him and have his babies. It’s the guy, Barney. This is a twenty-four-hour clearance. The fucking fans will go wild.”

  “Yeah? I hope.”

  “Why? You don’t like him?”

  Wayne did not want to dispel his partner’s enthusiasm, but he had seen better suspects than this one go glimmering. He said, “Well, I’ll like him better after we talk to the girl, and after we get a couple of pieces of physical evidence.”

  Frangi gave him a look. “Partner, if by some chance our boy was not the trigger, he knows who it was. Count on it! Fucking cute asshole! ‘It wouldn’t be a secret.’ Hey, I got an idea. Let’s take a look at the car.” He pressed the G button.

  “Look at that,” said Frangi with satisfaction when, after ten minutes of searching, they stood behind the blue Polara. Wayne looked and then after a moment knelt down and examined the bolts that held the license plate into its frame. He rose, rubbing his fingers together under his nose.

  “That settles it,” said Frangi.

  “Hmmm,” said Wayne.

  “What, what do you want, a signed confession? It’s the right plate on his car. He’s our guy, for cryin’ out loud.”

  “Well, we can get a warrant with this, but I don’t know … he could have an alibi. Somebody could’ve boosted this car, and besides, the car they used was a Fairlane. This is a Polara.”

  “Hey, let the D.A. worry about that shit.”

  “I will. But I’ll tell you, even Roland’ll be happier if those ski masks and parkas show up in his closet, or the guns. And another thing. How do you figure a guy sloppy enough to use his own car for a hit in broad daylight is careful enough to clean the rust off his license-plate bolts and keep them oiled up?”

  “We’re doing good,” said Roland Hrcany, concluding his tale of what the detectives had learned. “I’m almost amazed.” He was sitting across the desk from his boss, the bureau chief of the Homicide Bureau of the New York County D.A., on the Monday following the murder of Mehmet Ersoy.

  The bureau chief said, “It is amazing. The stupidity of criminals has no known limit. And speaking of stupidity, the district attorney will be pleased. I know that’s important to you, Roland.”

  Hrcany laughed obligingly. It had been a private joke between them for years that Roland was trying to curry favor with the exiguous Sanford Bloom, the D.A. In fact, Hrcany had as little respect for the D.A. as his chief, but his ferocious ambition showed itself as a desire to impress. The bureau chief was, in contrast, long past caring what anyone thought of him.

  The bureau chief’s name was Roger Karp. Now he stood up and stretched and paced back and forth behind his desk. He was a very tall, lanky man, with close-cut light brown hair and a bony face. He moved stiffly, with a slight limp. At the age of four he had decided that he would be called Roger no longer, but Butch instead, a decision he had enforced by ceasing to answer to any other name. It was a stubbornness he had retained in adulthood.

  Karp said, “They talk to this alibi yet, this girlfriend?”

  “No, they haven’t turned her up yet. There’s nobody home at her place, and her parents don’t know where she is.”

  “That could be a problem, if she comes out of nowhere later and confirms his story. However …”

  “However, we’ve got way enough for a warrant,” said Hrcany.

  “No question,” Karp agreed. “Let’s do it, and let me know as soon as you get anything. Bloom’s alrea
dy been on my ass about it.”

  Hrcany scooped up his papers and left. Karp walked over to his window and looked out. Six floors below he could see Leonard Street, a patch of blacktop that, at that point, was largely devoted to the parking of judges’ cars, while directly across Leonard was the New York State Office building, where he could actually observe an army of slow-moving clerks making it difficult for the citizens of New York to get license plates.

  The license plate was the odd thing about Roland’s case. Simple carelessness and stupidity or a sophisticated bluff? Karp could imagine a defense lawyer saying to a jury, “Ladies and gentlemen: can you really believe that this intelligent, successful businessman would use his own car, bearing his own license, to commit an assassination in broad daylight?”

  Well, yes, Karp could believe it. In his twelve years with the D.A. he had seen acts of egregious stupidity on the part of defendants that made this license-plate business look like the special theory of relativity. Still, the defense always used the “can you believe?” argument. And sometimes it worked.

  Karp was not as sanguine as Roland about the lock they supposedly had on Mehmet Ersoy’s purported killer. On the other hand, Roland knew what he was doing. He was the best of Karp’s twenty-nine prosecutors, a man with a record in homicide prosecutions nearly as good as Karp’s own, which was the best ever. But had he been the worst, Karp still would not have interfered, except to correct some obvious legal or procedural boner. Karp could cajole, criticize, even humiliate his minions, but the A.D.A. in charge of a case was in charge of the case. To behave otherwise, to second guess, to countermand decisions, was to court chaos. Karp could not supervise the prosecution of all the thousand-odd murder cases that Manhattan produced each year. A thousand and climbing.

  This rule, of course, did not apply to the D.A. himself, who felt free to intrude in any case that took his fancy. What took his fancy were the cases with high political profiles. Rich people or famous people getting killed. The bizarre ones that stuck to the front pages and appeared on the nightly news. Cases involving the interests of his friends, or acquaintances, or anyone with a nice suit who could grab him for fifteen minutes.