Tragic

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  “What do you mean, Frankie? You talking about the photograph of Mom?”

  “Yeah, that. These guys are mixed up with the Russian mob and those fuckers don’t mess around.”

  Marlene decided to interrupt. “I know someone in the Russian community who is willing to guarantee your family’s safety,” she said.

  “Bullshit,” DiMarzo spat. “Who’s got that kind of muscle?”

  “I’m not naming names here,” Marlene said, then lowered her voice as she looked in his eyes. “You remember who stopped Bebnev from killing you in the landfill? That’s who’s got that kind of muscle.”

  A look of comprehension came over DiMarzo as he carefully regarded Marlene, but then he smiled. “So I got to make some sort of deal or my family could pay for it.”

  Marlene shook her head. “No. The people who hired you to kill Vince Carlotta are like that, but I’m not holding your family hostage. My friend will look out after your family whether you decide to do the right thing or not. This is about your conscience and your soul, not playing with innocent people’s lives.”

  Frank’s brown eyes filled with tears and his head dropped. “Please, Frankie,” his sister pleaded as she reached across the table and grabbed his hand. “These people don’t deserve your protection. You made a bad choice, but they’re the ones who put it in front of you. They flushed your life down the toilet, and they’re threatening your family. We want you to do the right thing, all of us, no matter what.”

  “You can protect my family?” Frank asked Marlene.

  “We’ll move them into a safe house,” she replied. “Around-the-clock security and medical care for your mom, just to be sure. Then, when this is all over, my friend will make sure that they can go home in peace.”

  Reaching out for his sister’s other hand, Frank said to Marlene, “Tell your husband I’ll talk to him. And sis, next time you visit, bring the Bible from my room.”

  Liza smiled. “I’m glad you’re doing this,” she said. “And reading your Bible will help.”

  Frank smiled slightly. “Yeah, I think it will take a load off. But be careful; there’s some loose pages in it that I don’t want to fall out.”

  Suddenly there was a knock on the door and Dave Whitney walked in. “Sorry, Marlene. We’re going on lockdown. I need to get the prisoner back to his cell immediately!”

  “What happened?” Marlene asked.

  “Goddamned Russians killed somebody out in the yard,” Whitney replied.

  A warning bell went off in Marlene’s head. A bell she’d heard many times before and knew better than to ignore. “Do you know who was killed?”

  “Marlene, I don’t have time—”

  “Please, Dave, ask.”

  Whitney frowned but spoke into a handheld radio he was carrying. “This is Assistant Warden Whitney. Do we have an ID on the victim yet?”

  There was a long pause before the radio crackled and a voice said, “Inmate Alexei Bebnev. Prisoner Number 80346-A.”

  “Oh, my God,” Liza Zito cried out, her hand going to her mouth.

  Marlene grabbed her friend Whitney’s arm. “You can’t take DiMarzo to his cell,” she implored him. “They’ll kill him.”

  Whitney thought about it and nodded. “I’ll put him in AdSeg until we get this sorted out.”

  “Even trying to get there could be risky if all the inmates aren’t accounted for,” Marlene said.

  “Got ya,” Whitney replied and picked up the radio again. “I want a SWAT team to Interview Room B, ASAP, full gear, and there better not be a Russian within a cell block of here when I move out.”

  “Roger that,” the voice on the radio said. “SWAT on the way.”

  “Thanks, Dave,” Marlene said. She turned to Frank. “You still ready to go through with this?”

  The young man looked at his sister, who nodded. “Yeah. It’s time.”

  Marlene took out her cell phone and punched in a number. “Hi, Butch,” she said. “Yes, me too . . . Hey, I think you and Guma might want to take a drive with Clay to Sing Sing. What? Yeah, right now.” She looked over to where Frank was hugging his tearful trembling sister in the corner of the room and turned away. “I thought I’d be the first to tell you that Alexei Bebnev just completed his life sentence. But more important, Frank DiMarzo is ready to sing.”

  26

  CHARLIE VITTELI PUFFED FURIOUSLY ON a cigar as he paced in front of the window of his office in the dock warehouse, waiting for Joey Barros to arrive. He could have told Barros to call with the news he wanted to hear, but he didn’t trust the telephone lines, and cell phone calls were too easy to intercept. As it was, he regularly had his office, home, and cars swept by a high-priced security company, and still he didn’t feel safe.

  Everybody seemed to be looking at him. Talking behind his back. People on the streets and in restaurants—the waiters at Marlon’s acted as if they were reluctant to serve him. Or is it all in your mind, like Joey says? Screw that! I seen their eyes, the way they whisper to each other. His wife and kids had left to visit her mother in Illinois without saying when, or if, she was coming back, and even his mistress’s ardor had cooled.

  More significantly, the union was split between the old guard, whose loyalty he’d bought or coerced, and T. J. Martindale and his crew, who grumbled openly and were demanding a new election. So far he had enough support to hold off the calls, but every day the demands for his resignation grew. Or so it seemed.

  And it all started when Karp publicly humiliated him in the courtroom. The media had wasted no time jumping all over it, running up and shouting at him as he emerged from the Criminal Courts Building that afternoon.

  “Vitteli, is it true you paid to have Vince Carlotta killed!”

  “How does it feel to be accused of murder by the district attorney?”

  “Did you do it?”

  Vitteli had snarled and pushed his way through the jostling throng as Barros waited for him in a car at the curb. “Get the fuck out of my way! Move, damn you, or I’ll shove that camera up your . . .”

  The pack of journalists just laughed like hyenas as they tore into him. Then his scowling face and curses, bleeped for the profanity, appeared on the evening newscasts, and again on the front page of the morning newspapers. Nor had they let up much after Bebnev and DiMarzo were convicted and sentenced to life; in fact, the story had gone national and he’d been besieged with calls from everywhere from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco. His contact with the U.S. Department of Labor had called to say that Mahlon Gorman was demanding an audience with the higher-ups and might get it. He’d told the man that if he went down, he was taking him down, too. “So you better stay on board, or your ass will fry with mine!”

  It didn’t matter to him that Karp was right, that he was guilty. He was outraged that the district attorney had convicted him in the court of public opinion, and life had been hell ever since. Just about every night in the weeks since, he’d woken up in a cold sweat from a dream of Karp shouting up at him on the witness stand. “There are three men in this courtroom who should be standing trial for the murder of Vince Carlotta! The two defendants sitting right there, and you, right, Mr. Vitteli?!”

  Later, over a beer at Marlon’s, Syd Kowalski had tried to brush off the nightmare on the witness stand. “Karp did that because he ain’t got a real case,” the attorney said. “He was baiting you.”

  “Can’t we sue the bastard?” Vitteli complained. “How can he get away with that crap?”

  “You really don’t want to go there, Charlie,” Kowalski replied. “And look at it this way, Karp making you look bad put the nail in the coffins, so to speak, of Bebnev and DiMarzo. They’re going to Sing Sing, which is right where we want them. Those two rats would have run for whatever hole they could find if they got off. Now I suggest you forget about it and let the Malchek gang take care of those two little problems.”

  Looking down at the road that ran past the docks, Vitteli saw Barros’s car turn the corner. “About
fucking time,” he swore and wondered why it had taken so long. Even Joey wasn’t the loyal dog he’d always been. He’d caught him watching him with an apprising look on his face and he’d begun questioning his decisions. Well, the dog can either come to heel, or I’ll get a new mutt.

  Vitteli pasted a smile on his face when Barros knocked and walked in. “So, is our little problem taken care of? I . . .” The words died in his mouth when he saw his man’s face.

  “One isn’t an issue anymore,” Barros said quietly, aware of Vitteli’s concerns about the office being bugged. “But the second . . .”

  “Let’s take a walk,” Vitteli interrupted.

  When they were outside, Vitteli headed for one of the docks. “Okay, what gives?”

  “Bebnev is dead,” Barros said. “But DiMarzo got a visitor and wasn’t in his cell.”

  “Visitor? What visitor?”

  “Not sure. Family maybe, but Kowalski said there were two and it wasn’t in the visiting room.”

  Vitteli furrowed his brow. “I don’t like it. This was supposed to be taken care of,” he complained angrily.

  “Shit happens,” Barros replied. “Kowalski’s on his way and . . . Speak of the devil.”

  Vitteli turned to look in the direction that Barros indicated and saw a sedan headed for them. It stopped and the stocky attorney pried himself out of the backseat and waddled toward them.

  “Joey give you the news?” he asked Vitteli.

  “So far only that Bebnev is dead but DiMarzo’s still alive?”

  “Yeah, it was all set up,” Kowalski said. “The right people were paid to look the other way, but last minute, DiMarzo got a visitor and wasn’t in his cell. According to my sources, he didn’t go to the visiting room; they took him to an interview room.”

  “Who’d he see?”

  “One of his sisters and some attorney named Jodi Vannoy. Then when it went down with Bebnev, the SWAT team whisked him off to administrative segregation and our friends can’t get to him.”

  “Fuck!” Vitteli exclaimed. “Now what?”

  “Don’t work yourself up,” Kowalski cautioned him. “DiMarzo’s family is probably just working with this lawyer to appeal his conviction.”

  “Which means he may talk to get a deal.”

  “I really don’t think that’s going to happen,” Kowalski said. “For one thing, Karp doesn’t make deals. And even if he did, how much of a threat is DiMarzo anyway? He didn’t meet Joey or Jackie. Anything he says he heard from Bebnev is hearsay and now it can’t be corroborated. I talked to Clooney after the trial—that transfer into his account is a done deal, by the way—and he said that DiMarzo knows shit.”

  Just then, Kowalski’s cell phone rang. He pulled it out of his pocket and frowned as he looked at the caller ID. “Excuse me, I need to take this,” he said and then spoke into the phone. “Yeah?”

  As he listened, the attorney’s frown grew deeper. He stepped away from Vitteli and Barros and when he turned back to them a minute later, he didn’t look any happier as he hung up.

  “What is it?” Vitteli demanded.

  “Let’s not panic,” Kowalski began ominously, “but that was our friends the Malcheks. Apparently, Karp, some guy from his office, and that black detective who’s always around him showed up at Sing Sing a few minutes ago to talk to DiMarzo. I still don’t think it’s a problem.”

  “What in the hell do you mean it’s not a problem?” Vitteli cursed. “It means Karp’s asking questions and DiMarzo’s ratting!”

  “So what?” Kowalski shot back. “What could DiMarzo say that changes the situation?”

  “How the fuck do I know? I want him gone!” Vitteli complained. “Maybe our friend or Joey needs to pay a visit to the punk’s family?”

  Kowalski shook his head. “That was another part of the conversation,” he said. “This DiMarzo apparently has friends in low places. The family is off-limits; the Malcheks say they won’t go near them and to think real seriously before we do. Essentially, until this gets cleared up, you’re on your own.”

  “On my own . . .” Vitteli’s voice was right on the edge of hysteria. “What about Karp? He’s got it in for me, if he’s gone . . .”

  “Are you insane?” Kowalski asked. “Hit the District Attorney of New York and you’ll bring down a firestorm of shit that will destroy you and anybody else who has anything to do with it. If the Malcheks knew you were even thinking of such a thing—with all the heat it would bring to their business interests, including the project at the docks—they’d kill you themselves.”

  Vitteli swallowed hard. His chest felt suddenly tight and he wondered if he was having a heart attack. The whole thing was driving him crazy. Just the night before, his mistress had found him in the bathroom sleepwalking. She said he was washing his hands, complaining that the spots wouldn’t come off. Then he’d woken up. He wondered if he was losing his mind.

  Kowalski patted him on the shoulder. “Look, this is all part of Karp’s plan to rattle you and make you do something stupid,” he said. “Bebnev was the only connection to Barros and Jackie. Karp still doesn’t have a case, so stay cool and ride this one out—”

  “Bebnev wasn’t the only connection,” Barros interjected. “Jackie Corcione can fuck us all. He needs to have an accident and it needs to be soon.”

  Sweat dripping from his brow, Vitteli looked from Barros to Kowalski. “I don’t know. . . .” he said.

  “Damn it! We got no choice, Charlie,” Barros snarled. “If Karp gets to the little faggot, we’re all going down!”

  Vitteli’s shoulders sagged. “You’re right. But how do we get the bank accounts and passwords? You can’t be slicing him up and have it look like an accident.”

  Smiling, Barros reached inside his coat and pulled out what appeared to be a flashlight. “My little toy here will get it out of him,” he said. “A few million volts will light him up and he’ll talk. After that, he goes over the balcony . . . just another queer who couldn’t handle the shame.”

  “When?”

  “Tonight, now,” Barros answered. “Before Karp gets to him. Give him a call, make sure he’s alone. Tell him I’m coming over to deliver some legal papers that he needs to sign and I don’t want to see none of his fag friends.”

  Vitteli swallowed hard and nodded. “Okay, do it.”

  “Stick him good and we’ll be okay,” Kowalski added.

  Barros grinned like a skeleton. “Don’t worry about that; I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time.”

  27

  JACKIE CORCIONE STOOD ALONE AT the rail of the balcony of his Hell’s Kitchen rooftop loft gazing west. The setting sun cast a warm orange glow on the Hudson River and South Jersey shore. Near and far, boat traffic of all sorts—barges, cargo vessels, sailboats, tourist cruises—moved in and out of his vision like actors going on- and offstage in a never-ending play.

  A warm breeze stirred the air and the pigeons on the eaves cooed and strutted in their mating rituals, a sure sign that spring had sprung in Manhattan. In the parks, the crabapple and cherry trees were blossoming and others were newly sheathed in lime-green leaves; daffodils, tulips, and forsythia competed for Best in Show. On the sidewalks below, the florists and rug merchants were bringing their merchandise in for the night, and the first of the Friday dinner crowd were carrying on without a care in the world as they waltzed along to their destinations.

  Corcione sighed. It seemed incongruous to him that the world went obliviously about its business while he suffered so much. Physically and emotionally exhausted, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a good night’s sleep, but it most certainly was sometime before the murder of Vince Carlotta, when he was still living the high life, the quintessential New Yorker and feeling the first harbingers of love. It all seemed surreal now, as if it had been an art movie he watched in another lifetime at some trendy Manhattan scene, like the cinema in the Tribeca Grand Hotel.

  A tear trickled down a cheek just as he heard the s
liding glass door open behind him. He didn’t turn around; he didn’t want Greg to see him crying. However, his resolve evaporated when his boyfriend walked up and put his arms around his waist.

  “God, it’s beautiful up here,” Corcione whispered just before the tears began to flow in earnest, and he shook as he struggled to maintain control.

  “Hey, hey, what’s the matter, handsome?” Greg asked.

  Corcione shook his head as he looked down at one of Greg’s muscular forearms and the green-black tattoo of a trident. After college and the end of his football aspirations, Greg had joined the Navy to become a SEAL commando. He’d passed the rigorous testing, then served in the first Gulf War and then reupped for Afghanistan after 9/11. He’d been wounded once and awarded the Silver Star for gallantry in combat.

  Yet he was the kindest, gentlest person Corcione had ever known, as well as the steadiest. “It’s nothing, just stress,” Jackie replied with a sniff.

  Greg released his hold around Jackie’s waist and placed his hands on his shoulders and gently turned him around. Jackie tried to keep his head down, but Greg put a finger under his chin and lifted, forcing him to look into his eyes.

  “Jackie, you’ve been stressed since December,” Greg said. “I know you were upset by the death of Mr. Carlotta, but you’re not getting past it. You don’t sleep; you’re losing weight; you’re distracted, an emotional wreck most of the time, and—sorry, I love you but—lazy as hell. Maybe you should see someone, a professional; better living through pharmaceuticals and all that. There’s nothing wrong with asking for help when you’re going through a rough patch.”

  Corcione tried to smile but only half managed. Rough patch, he thought. I have murdered sleep, as the Bard once wrote. “I’m okay,” he replied. “It’s really not something a shrink can do anything about.”

  “Then what is it? Let me help you,” Greg insisted. “If you can’t trust someone who loves you, then who can you trust?”

  Corcione’s lip began to quiver, and then his hands flew to his face as he let go and broke down. “I want to die,” he sobbed.