Trap (9781476793177)

by Tanenbaum, Robert K.

  Deep in his gut, Gallo felt a sudden warming of the old anger and temper that had been a part of him back when he and Garcia were both leaders of their respective Latino gangs. Garcia in Spanish Harlem; Gallo in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Back then, they’d been a lot alike in many ways. Both had grown up on the hard streets where they’d had to learn to be a man when most boys their ages were still playing kid games and were curious about girls. They’d both also exhibited the kind of leadership and decision-making skills that had earned them the respect and leadership among older teens.

  Although separated by the East River and with little opportunity for contact, Gallo and Garcia had been aware of each other but not rivals. For one thing, they weren’t with the big, drug-dealing inner city gangs; theirs were more the old-fashioned neighborhood gangs, as much a collection of friends as anything else. They could be violent if pushed or defending their “turf,” but mostly they avoided trouble and just wanted to be left alone.

  Back in the day, a challenge like Garcia’s would have been fighting words. But not anymore, so he just shook his head. “I don’t want any trouble, Alejandro. I just saw that she was having a book signing, and I wanted to wish her luck.”

  Garcia had glanced at the front of the room. Rose Lubinsky was looking over the crowd, smiling and nodding at friends. Then she’d looked up and spotted the two of them and her smile faltered.

  Gallo blinked to clear his eyes of the tears that had suddenly sprung into them. But Lubinsky had turned to say something to the small man who had escorted her to the stage.

  “I think you better leave,” Garcia said. “She doesn’t need your kind of luck. You’re free to go back and report that you followed her here and did your job. Otherwise, we’ll see all of you union pendejos in Albany next week.”

  Again the old anger flared for a moment but it faded just as quickly. He might have once been a hard-nosed street gangster who had clawed his way out of the ’hood and put himself through college. He may have overcome enormous odds to go on and get his teaching license by working two jobs and avoiding the people and circumstances of his past life. He may have once been so fired up about the charter school movement—so committed to helping kids like himself—that he’d taken out enormous loans, put his house up for collateral, and sunk every cent he had in the Bedford-Stuyvesant Charter School. That brave, altruistic young man was gone; he’d first lost everything, and then been replaced by a spineless “yes man” addicted to fast cars, loose women, nice clothes, a luxurious condo, and . . . la vida fácil, the easy life.

  So Gallo turned and left without responding to Garcia or looking back to see if Rose Lubinsky was watching anymore. Outside, he shivered both from the cold and his warring emotions. The lighting was weak and everyone was bundled against the cold but for a moment one face some twenty-five feet away from him looked familiar. But the young man disappeared back into the crowd and he wasn’t sure.

  “Yo, Micah, you going to order something?”

  Monroe’s gruff voice brought him out of the memory. His boss and the waitress, a bottle blonde wearing too much makeup, were both looking at him, waiting for him to order. “You’ll have to forgive him,” Monroe said with a wink, “he spent the afternoon getting busy, if you know what I mean.”

  Gallo blushed as the waitress laughed. “Yeah, I’ll have a beer.”

  “What kind, honey?” the waitress replied sweetly, obviously taken with his dark good looks.

  “Uh, Schaefer.”

  Monroe made a face. “You still drinking that swill? At least order a microbrew or something decent.”

  Gallo shrugged. “It’s what I grew up with, and I like it. Just a Schaefer, please.”

  When the waitress left, Gallo turned back to Monroe. “So what’s so important?”

  “Stopping this fucking bill is what’s important,” Monroe replied. For the next half hour, he went over the strategy for the next week: who needed to have his or her arm twisted; places and hands where some cash might do some good; favors that needed to be called in.

  “To be honest, it wasn’t going to be enough.”

  “Wasn’t?”

  “Isn’t,” Monroe corrected himself. “It isn’t going to be enough. You know what I meant.”

  The way he said it—all worried and angry—made Gallo wonder if the man was cracking. “Maybe we’re pushing back too hard,” he suggested. “Maybe we can still reach a compromise. It would take some adjustments, but maybe we can figure out a way to work with the charter schools, and still keep the union strong.”

  Monroe looked at him for a moment like he was nuts, then laughed, or more accurately, snorted. “Adjustments? What adjustments? Adjusting to being out of a job? Adjusting to a prison cell? Or have you forgotten that part of the bill means someone will be poking around in the books? We tried to compromise with that bitch, she wasn’t budging. We’ll all hang if she gets her way.”

  “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  Monroe gave him a funny look. “No? Where do you think all the money for your playboy lifestyle comes from?”

  “My salary,” Gallo replied. “And bonuses.”

  “Yeah, and where do you think those bonuses come from,” Monroe shot back. “We’re not I-fucking-BM and you’re not a shareholder. Bonuses, Christ, don’t make me laugh.” He leaned across the table and pointed his finger in Gallo’s face. “Listen to me, buddy boy, I’ve been taking care of your ass, but you better remember who buttered the bread. You’re in this up to your eyeballs. I go down, you go down; we all go down together, which means, we do whatever it takes to make sure this bill doesn’t pass.”

  Gallo hung his head. It doesn’t get any more clear than that, he thought. The asshole not only bought you, he made sure that if you ever did grow a set of balls, and tried to do anything about it, he’d cut them right off.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Monroe said suddenly.

  Looking up to see what the Irishman was talking about, Gallo followed his eyes to the television. It took him a moment to realize what he was looking at beyond the words “News Alert!” flashing on the bottom of the screen. A car was burning and people were rushing about.

  “Hey Julie,” Monroe bellowed. “Turn up the tube, would ya?”

  Standing next to the bar, Julie the waitress pointed and pressed the TV remote and a newscaster’s voice broke through the background noise of the pub: “. . . where an apparent car bomb has exploded outside this Midtown bakery where charter schools association president and author, Rose Lubinsky, talked about her new book . . .”

  Slowly Gallo rose to his feet, his eyes wide with horror, his jaw slack. The newscaster continued: “. . . gang of neo-Nazi skinheads earlier clashed with neighborhood residents and supporters of Mrs. Lubinsky . . . early reports are one dead, two in critical condition, numerous injuries . . . District Attorney Butch Karp is at the scene . . . reports of one arrest . . .”

  Gallo turned toward Monroe. “Did you do this?” he asked, his throat suddenly bone dry and his voice coming out as a croak.

  Monroe sat back in his seat and laced his fingers together behind his head as he studied Gallo. Then he shook his head. “Fuck no,” he said. “It was probably those Nazi assholes. They didn’t like her ’cause she was a Jew. Hope they all fry in hell.”

  “I got to go,” Gallo said, grabbing his coat off the back of the chair.

  “Yeah, sure,” Monroe said. “This is upsetting news. But Micah . . .”

  “What?”

  “Who butters your bread?”

  “You do, Tommy.”

  “Attaboy, you just remember that and you’ll be fine.”

  9

  KARP LOOKED THROUGH THE ONE-WAY glass into the interview room at The Tombs as the muscular young man in the gray jail jumpsuit slouched in a chair on the other side as if he didn’t have a care in the world. In fact, he was humming, a slight smirk on his tattooed face.

  “What’s that song?” asked Fulton, who was standing next to him looking at
Lars Forsling with disdain etched into his big dark face. “I’ve heard it before.”

  “The ‘Horst-Wessel-Lied,’ sort of a national anthem for the Nazis in World War II,” Karp replied. “Just in case we couldn’t figure out his political leanings.”

  There was a knock on the door and in walked Assistant District Attorney Ray Guma, a longtime friend and colleague of Karp. Once an athletic, ruggedly handsome man with curly dark hair, Guma had been reduced by cancer to a shell of his former self. His face was much thinner, his cheekbones pronounced and the dark brown eyes deep in their sockets. The hair was still curly, though thinner and nearly snow white, and he was so thin, his body seemed barely able to support the suit he wore.

  However, the old fire that had defined him as a college baseball player and tenacious prosecutor still burned, and even though he only worked part-time, he was still one of the best at the DAO. Driving back to 100 Centre after the bombing, and deciding how to proceed, Karp had thought immediately of the former “Italian Stallion” to assist him with the case.

  “What’s the word, Goom?” Karp asked, dreading the answer.

  A look of pain and anger crossed Guma’s face as he glanced at the skinhead in the next room. “As you know, one dead at the scene, a Miss Mary Calebras, an elementary school teacher at The New Hope Charter School in Yonkers,” Guma replied. “Unfortunately, I was just informed that a second young woman, Tawanna Mohammad, also a schoolteacher in Queens, died in the ER a few minutes ago.”

  “What about Rose Lubinsky and Alejandro Garcia?”

  “Alejandro will be okay. Second degree burns on his hands and arms, a little on his face, but he was wearing gloves and a leather coat. It could have been much worse. Brave kid though.”

  Karp nodded. “Yeah, he’s never lacked for courage. And Rose . . . ?”

  Guma sighed and shook his head. “Doesn’t look good,” he said. “Severe burns over eighty percent of her body, and that’s tough on anybody, but especially somebody her age. They got her in Intensive Care and are trying to make her comfortable—she’s in and out of consciousness—but the prognosis isn’t very hopeful.” He looked again at Forsling. “Son of a bitch.”

  Karp looked back at Forsling and nodded. “Yes, he is, now let’s go see if he’s also guilty.”

  The three men went out into the hallway, where a stenographer carrying a small black box waited. Karp nodded to her and turned to Guma. “If you don’t mind,” he said. “I know the cops were going to round up some of our boy’s Nazi pals, and I’d like you to handle the interrogations. Maybe one of them heard Forsling say something about this before it happened.”

  Guma turned and left. Then Karp, the steno, and Fulton entered the room where Forsling sat behind a table. He looked up and sneered but didn’t say anything.

  Karp paused for a moment and looked at his opponent, noted the “Sieg Heil” tattooed on his forehead. As if showing off, Forsling turned his head to the side so that the prosecutor could see the swastikas on the side of his face.

  “Good evening, Mr. Forsling,” Karp began.

  “I got nothing to say to you, Jew,” Forsling snarled.

  Again Karp waited before answering. He could still see the burning car and the bodies inside. He’d watched as the paramedics loaded Rose Lubinsky into an ambulance and heard her husband, Simon, crying out in anguish as he climbed in after her. The shocked, horrified faces of his own sons threatened to blind him, and then there was the image of the smirking face of Lars Forsling in the window of the police cruiser mouthing one word: Jew.

  And yet he felt neither rage nor a need to revenge his friends and family. Nearly all of his adult life he’d dealt with the worst of the city’s worst examples of human beings—the homicidal maniacs, the cold-blooded sociopaths, the child killers, and the violent rapists, the brutal and the vicious. But he’d learned to put his feelings aside so that he could do his job, and his job was to get at the truth; personal revulsion and rage aimed at a suspect could get in the way of that if he let it. Oh, at trial he might call forth righteous indignation or anger for the jury at the precise moment it was needed, but that was all part of his disciplined trial preparation.

  Sitting down across from Forsling, Karp indicated that the steno should take her place at the end of the table. The woman did so, placing the black box in front of her and opening the case to reveal a stenographer’s machine. Meanwhile Fulton stood against a wall where he could watch his boss and the suspect.

  “Mr. Lars Forsling, I’m District Attorney Roger Karp . . . ,” he began.

  “I know who you are, Jew . . .”

  The hatred in the young man’s voice was palpable but he didn’t let it deter him. “. . . and I’d like to ask you a few questions regarding the fatal car bombing this evening at Third Avenue and 29th Street in New York County. Also present are Carole Mason, a stenographer in my office, and Detective Clay Fulton, who is in charge of the district attorney’s detectives squad. You have a right to remain silent. Do you understand?”

  “The cops already read me my rights.”

  “Humor me,” Karp replied evenly. “Do you understand you have the right to remain silent?”

  “Jawohl.”

  “I believe you answered ‘yes’ in German,” Karp said. “However, I need you to answer in English, please.”

  “Yes, I understand.”

  “Anything you say may be used against you in court, do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “You also have the right to have an attorney present during questioning. If you can’t afford an attorney, one will be provided for you? Do you understand this?”

  Forsling didn’t say anything but nodded.

  “You’ve indicated that you understand by nodding. However, Carole Mason needs to hear an answer.”

  “Yes, Karp, I understand English. Get on with it.”

  “Now, having been advised of your rights, are you willing to make a statement without your lawyer being present?”

  “White men don’t have rights in this country anymore.”

  Karp looked at Forsling for a moment, then continued. “Are you willing to answer any of my questions now?”

  “Am I under arrest for the bomb?” Forsling interrupted.

  “You were arrested for disobeying the lawful command of a police officer,” Karp answered. “And again, are you willing to answer my questions?”

  Forsling jabbed a thumb over at Fulton. “And if I’m not, you’ll have your house nigger beat me up.”

  Karp looked over at Fulton, who smiled and shrugged his shoulders. He’d heard it all, too, and it wasn’t the first time a suspect had used a racial slur on him.

  “That’s not the way we do things here. Whatever you think of me, or Detective Fulton, we’re after the truth, period. Will you answer my questions?”

  Forsling laughed bitterly. “Why should I, Karp? You and your nig . . . your cop . . . think I did it, and that’s all that matters. The white man can’t get a break, especially if he’s a white man who dares open his mouth in the defense of his race. For all I know, you planted that bomb so you’d have a reason to go after us for murder.”

  Karp drummed his fingers on the table. “I don’t care about your politics, Lars. And I haven’t decided any such thing, that’s why I want to ask you questions. What I do know is that you were present. That you had targeted the meeting where the victims were going to be for your demonstration. And that you were arrested near the car that exploded.”

  “So that makes me guilty, right?” Forsling scoffed. “A bunch of niggers riot, burn stores, and kill whites, and they’re just ‘venting.’ A few white men voice their opinion and they’re ‘racists and bombers,’ ain’t that right?”

  “It makes you a person of interest; it doesn’t make you guilty,” Karp replied calmly. “I also know that you were sitting in the police car when the bomb went off and had a view of Mrs. Lubinsky’s car. And that makes you a potential witness.”

  Forsling tilt
ed his head to the side. “If I answer your questions, can I leave?”

  “I’m afraid you’re going to have to wait and go before a judge in the morning on the failure to obey a lawful command.”

  “I can’t; I have to get out.” Forsling’s voice changed; instead of pugnacious, he sounded a little desperate.

  “Maybe you should have thought about that before you disobeyed the police officer. This won’t be the first time you’ve spent the night in The Tombs . . .”

  “My mom’s home alone,” Forsling interrupted. “She’s an invalid and needs help at night.”

  “I can’t do anything until the judge sets bail,” Karp said. “But I can ask that NYPD do a welfare check, make sure she’s okay. Or you can make a call and see if a friend or neighbor can watch out for her.”

  Forsling scowled and shook his head. “She’d freak if some nigger or spic cop showed up. And we don’t have any neighbors who’d help; they’re all a bunch of fucking illegal immigrants, spics and hebes.”

  “That’s the best I can do,” Karp said. “Now, are you willing to answer my questions?”

  Forsling sighed and shook his head. “Not that it will do any good, but yeah, okay, let’s talk. I know you won’t do anything with it, but what about the funny-looking nigger who was there?”

  “What about this individual?”

  “I saw him over by the car,” Forsling said. “He was out in the street and leaned over when he was walking past, like he was tying his shoe or something.”

  “When was this?”

  “After I got arrested. Of course, nobody cares if a nigger is wandering around. But I go for a stroll and it’s a fuckin’ federal offense.”

  Karp ignored the racial slurs. “So you said this individual was ‘funny-looking.’ What do you mean by that?”

  Forsling shrugged. “You know, like his face was like half-black, half-white . . . like he had that thing that Michael Jackson had.”

  “Vitiligo,” Fulton interjected. “It causes a decrease in skin pigmentation.”

  “Yeah, whatever,” Forsling said. “He looked like a fuckin’ mutant, or like he was trying to be white; like they all want to be white.”