Lucy Karp grows two tiny fangs. She is not amused. Sleep is banished. In desperation, and secretly, Marlene dips a rag in marsala wine and sugar and sticks it in Lucy’s little gob. It works like a charm. Marlene decides not to think about her daughter’s brain cells perishing in squadrons, or what Karp will have to say if he finds out.
Emilio Morales returns to his neighborhood, to no great enthusiasm among the home boys. The People’s Republic of East 112th Street having not, like the state of New York, suspended the death penalty, Morales is found one sunny morning among the trash cans with two through the ear. Another listless murder investigation begins.
Frangi and Wayne do as little as possible on the Tomasian case. It is the height of the murder season, and they have much to occupy them. They visit the mistress of Mehmet Ersoy, from whom they learn that the late Turk was a big spender, unsurprising information. They also learn that Sarkis Kerbussyan is precisely what he appears to be, a wealthy Armenian art collector with no obvious criminal ties. Aram Tomasian languishes in jail. Gabrielle Avanian is still among the missing. She had never returned from California after the credit card ran out. The police have ceased to look for her with any ardor.
Geri Stone, the sister, collapses the day after Susan Weiner’s murder. She is briefly hospitalized and then released, laden with tranquilizing drugs she forgets to take. Her grooming slips, her work deteriorates. She revokes the paroles of an unacceptably high proportion of her case load, and her supervisor asks her to take extended sick leave. She haunts the Criminal Courts building, mumbling, occasionally shouting at nothing. She fits right in.
On 5th Street, in August, around midnight, a woman was being tortured. Her screams and the heavy, meaty sounds of blows shot out into the blackness and melded with the other sounds of the moist summer night—the Spanish music playing on the big radios propped up on the stoops, the punk and heavy metal and salsa from stolen stereos, the roar of cars, the shrieks of children out too late, loud conversation from small knots of men dealing drugs, the buzz of a thousand televisions. It was not an unusual addition to the summer symphony in Alphabet City. Nobody called the cops.
Later that night, two men emerged from 525 East 5th Street, carrying a long bundle wrapped in a dirty green blanket. They walked a half block west to a housing project on Avenue A, cursing the unwieldy weight, and tossed their burden unceremoniously next to a blue Dumpster. They walked away. The bundle moved slightly and a mewling sound arose from it, but no one noticed.
“This is a bad one,” said Mimi Kellerman, passing Marlene an eight-by-ten photograph. “They took this at Beekman when they brought her in.” Kellerman was one of Marlene’s four attorneys in Sex Crimes, a birdlike woman with a crisp head of curls and a hard eye. If she said it was bad …
Marlene looked. It was a photo of a woman naked from the waist up. It was bad, and Marlene thought for an instant of her Jane Doe. The woman’s face was one huge bruise, but worse that that, it had been crumpled like a beer can: the optical orbits and the cheekbones crushed, the nose flattened, the teeth bashed in, the jaw broken. Bruises also covered her upper body, and there was a gaping hole full of clotted blood on the surface of one breast. Above the hole, obscenely grinning, was a small tattoo of a skull with a red rose in its teeth.
Marlene tossed the photo down. “Sexual activity too, no doubt?”
Kellerman read from a page in a folder. “Raped repeatedly and sodomized, substantial tearing of the vaginal and anal mucosa, internal bleeding, foreign objects forced into both anus and vagina—”
“What objects?”
“Let’s see … in the anus, a rubber grip from a motorcycle. In the vagina, a folded-over plastic card, some sort of credit card. Nice, huh?”
“I’m enthralled. I assume an autopsy has been scheduled. Who’s handling it for Homicide?”
Kellerman gave her an odd look. “What homicide? She’s alive.”
A bubble of nausea rose in Marlene’s belly, and she felt the dampness of sweat on her forehead. That the tortured flesh in the photograph was still vulnerable to pain seemed a grosser violation than mere murder.
“How is she? Can she talk?”
“No, she’s still unconscious. Not that she would be able to actually say anything—he did a good job on her mouth.”
Marlene picked up the photograph again. “Christ! It’s hard to believe anyone survived this. She’s got a hole in her chest the size of my fist.”
Kellerman looked at her folder again. “Oh, that—that’s the least of her problems. It looks like hell, but it’s superficial compared to the head and facial damage. Apparently he took an actual bite out of her.”
“A bite? And this was where, Alphabet City?”
“Yeah, as a matter of fact. Why?”
“Because he did it before. A Jane Doe, except then he tossed her off a roof after he chewed on her. Not ‘he,’ I should say ‘they.’ Harry found the guy who called in the Jane Doe, and he saw two people throw the Jane Doe off the roof. Speaking of which, do we have an ID on this woman?”
“Not exactly,” said Kellerman. “She was nude under the blanket they found her in. But, um, that credit card? It had a name on it.” She read it off. “Gabrielle P. Avanian.” Then she said, “Marlene, why is your mouth hanging open?”
“Yes, Marlene,” said Karp, “I do think it’s crazy, but luckily it doesn’t matter what I think. I’m going into the hospital tomorrow. I’ll be lying on my bed of pain, clinging tenuously to life. Somebody else can think about the Armenians.”
“I hate it when you play for sympathy,” said Marlene, getting up and walking to the window of his office, “especially for a minor operation. What about me? You think it’s going to be fun being a single parent for however long? I don’t see why you can’t just stay at home until your cast is off.”
“I explained this already, babe,” he said, controlling his irritation. “I’m starting the Russell trial. I can stay in my office while it’s on. After, I can get somebody to carry me up the stairs and take some time off.”
Marlene stiffened her jaw and turned to look at him, ready to spew invective, but something in his eyes made her check. Was it fear? Karp wasn’t afraid of anything. He was the solid, steady, unchanging one. She was the nut prone to weird fantasies. A tide of empathy burst through the elaborate structure she had built, as a quasi-modern woman, to keep the “relationship” on track and prevent herself from being trodden on. She walked over to him and touched his hand. He gripped her fingers, tight enough to sting. They remained that way silent, for minutes, while the sounds of the working day flowed in through the glass of the door.
Karp cleared his throat, and spoke again about what she had discovered, as if nothing important had happened.
“I think it’s a good break, this woman, but tying it to the Tomasian case is speculation beyond the facts. It’s loopy to tie a sexual predator to a political assassination—”
“But we agree that it looks less and less like a real political assassination,” Marlene objected. “Tomasian’s being framed. Look, what’s the big anomaly in this case? The money. Where did the money come from? Blackmail? Maybe Ersoy knew somebody with money who was into snuff sex. The victim decides a hit is cheaper than paying off forever. The killer decides to frame Tomasian. He knows Tomasian has an alibi, so he has to wax the girlfriend too. But she runs. When she has to come back, maybe because she’s broke, they grab her and do her like they did the Jane Doe.”
Karp held up an admonishing hand. “Marlene, stop! You don’t know any of this. Even if the same guy did Avanian and the other girl, it could still be a nutcase selecting at random, like you thought before. There’s nothing else solid to tie these Alphabet City cases to Ersoy.”
“Then why did she split?” Marlene asked with some heat. “Why did she leave town the day after the murder? With her boyfriend accused of the crime? It wasn’t like she just decided to take a vacation and didn’t know about it. This case made the network news, for chrissake.
She went on the lam for a reason, Butch.”
“Okay, Marlene, you’re right,” said Karp crankily. “It’s a great story. So what are you gonna do with it? Where does it take you? Nowhere. Roland’ll laugh in your face if you bring him that connection.” Then, observing the growing tightness of her jaw, he temporized.
“Look, let’s review the plot here. What do we know as facts?” He ticked them off on his long fingers. “One, Ersoy is killed. Two, he has a big pile of money in a box. Three, Tomasian’s alibi disappears after the crime. Four, a woman who may be Gabrielle Avanian is badly beaten. Five, another unidentified woman is thrown off a roof, the only association with Avanian being they both were bitten. What else? Okay, not quite a fact, but I’m almost positive that Kerbussyan was lying to me when he said he didn’t know anything about Ersoy’s cash.”
“I still don’t see why it couldn’t be a sex thing.”
“You have sex things on the brain, Marlene,” said Karp, snappish, “and don’t tell me all about how you were right about sex rings that once. You want to know what I’d do? I’d find out where that money came from. And I’d find out who killed those women.”
Marlene did not like being lectured to by Karp in this way, which was one reason why she had maneuvered in the past to get out from under his direct supervision. On the other hand, she had laden him with enough lectures of her own, and regarded that aspect of their marriage as an inevitable result of two lawyers literally, rather than figuratively, screwing one another on a regular basis. Also, to her credit, she was able to see, through the fog of conjugality, the reason in what he was saying. Her preferred view was still little more than a fairy tale.
“Okay, how would you approach the money angle?” she challenged. “Kerbussyan?”
“No, he’s extremely slick and hard to get at. I’d go through Ersoy’s connections. The Turks at the U.N. His hang-outs.”
“Wasn’t there a girlfriend?” Marlene asked.
“Uh-uh, the girlfriend’s a semi-pro. She knows from nothing, according to the report Wayne and Frangi filed—he was just one of her regular dates. But come to think of it, I don’t recall that anybody checked out the U.N. yet. I mean, why should they, since they had the guy already?”
“Look,” she said after a moment of thought, “don’t get mad, but this is starting to look like a big complicated thing. On the assumption that my cases are connected somehow to Tomasian—no, don’t look like that, I said assumption—why don’t me and Harry do some poking around on the Tomasian case while you’re loafing in the hospital? Maybe drop by the U.N., see what we can shake out.”
“No, but you’ll do it anyway. But do you really think a diplomat hung out in the East Village and threw a girl off a roof and beat another one to a pulp?”
“Well, as to that,” said Marlene blithely, “I was thinking more of a diplomat paying to have it done. Harry already knows who did the jobs on the women.”
“What? Who was it?”
“Harry won’t say yet,” she replied.
“He won’t say? What the hell does that mean? Why did we just go through this whole song and dance if he’s already found the killer?”
Marlene shrugged. “What Harry knows and what you can bring to court are two different things.”
“What kind of statement is that, Marlene? If he has evidence sufficient to identify the killer, he should bring it to us to see if there’s a case. He’s not supposed to make those judgments. Or are we talking about his mystic intuition?”
“Come on, Butch. It’s Harry. You know he has his little ways.”
“Okay, fine,” Karp said grumpily. “Do your thing. Just keep Roland informed, okay?”
“You’re upset,” she said inanely.
“No, I’m not. Yeah, I am. I think that’s why I’m hot to do this Russell case. It’s clean. The guy did it. We caught him. We have a case. We’ll convict. It’s like a cold shower after all this horseshit Armenian business.”
After Marlene left, Karp took two little white pills. Since he had scheduled the operation, he had become more generous to himself with respect to codeine. He figured he wasn’t going to become a junkie because of a few days’ excess, and he was willing to trade a slight fuzziness for increased mobility—that and surcease from continual pain and the irritability it caused.
Over the next half hour a pleasant numbness crept through his body. He signed some routine papers and then, growing restless, he walked down to Ray Guma’s office to talk about some things he wanted done while he was in the hospital.
“Well, you look happy,” observed Guma as Karp came into the steel and glass cage that served him for an office. Raney, the cop, was there too. They had been listening to a tape recording. Guma flicked the machine off, and Karp sat down clumsily in a spare chair.
“Raney, I think you oughta make him pee in a bottle. I think he’s been tapping the evidence lockers.”
“I have a prescription,” said Karp with dignity.
“That’s how it starts,” said Raney. “Then it’s boosting car stereos and gold chains. Do you have a street name yet?”
“Yeah, Butch the Crip. What was that tape?”
“The thoughts of Chairman Joey; it’s from the tap we got on Castelmaggiore’s phone—on the Viacchenza shootings. Wanna hear? It’s pretty interesting if you like stupid dirty talk.”
Karp made a go-ahead gesture. Guma pushed the rewind. As the tape whined backward, he said, “Okay, on this part you’re going to hear, he’s talking to Little Sally Bollano, who’s sort of the smoother-over for the family at this point. They got another guy who handles it when they don’t need to smooth it over. The problem is Lou Viacchenza, the older brother, was a made guy. He’d done a lot of good business for the Bollanos over the years, and Joey had him whacked without clearing it with the family. So Joey’s got to show it’s for business, not, like, he just got pissed and had them taken out.”
“I understand,” said Karp. “It’s the principle of the thing.”
“You got it,” said Guma, “not to mention he has to discuss this problem without actually coming out and saying anything indictable. He hopes.”
“You figure they know there’s a tap in?”
“They’d be assholes if they didn’t,” replied Guma, and pushed the play button.
The first voice on the tape was Little Sally Bollano’s, a nasal snarl.
“What the fuck, Joey, you don’t know how we do business? How the fuck long you been doing fuckin’ business, Joey? Answer me that!”
“A long time, Sally.” This voice was low and grumbling: Joey Castles.
“So you shoulda fuckin’ known better, right?” the voice of Sally Bollano continued. “Lemme tell you something, Joey: the Don don’t know shit about this, I been making sure of that; he finds out, old as he is, he’d fuckin’ have your culliones on a plate. So, what I’m saying, this thing, it gotta be put right. Okay, the women, the kids, they gotta be taken care of. You understand what I’m saying, Joey? Out of your fuckin’ pocket. Not my fuckin’ pocket. Not the Don’s fuckin’ pocket. Capisc’?”
A significant pause on the line. Then Joey said, “It was business, Sally. It wasn’t, like, they parked in my fuckin’ parking place, like personal. They were taking us off, Sally. They had their own fuckin’ little like warehouse over by Ozone Park—”
“Hey! I din’ say they shouldn’ta been. Did I fuckin’ say that? Been up to me, hey, go do it! It was the way it went down, Joey. No talk, no … no fuckin’ courtesy. Guys are fuckin’ pissed.”
“Okay, they’re pissed, the cocksuckers—what, I gotta open my fuckin’ veins? I’ll do the right thing with the family—what the fuck’s it to me? But, you fuckin’ believe it, man, next time some cocksucker rips all a you off, I din’ see nothin’, I din’ hear nothin’, I ain’t gonna do nothin’. The fuck I care, right?”
“Hey, that kinda talk, Joey—”
“Hey, cut the shit, Sally, I’m fuckin’ shakin’ already. So, is that it? Eve
rybody’s fuckin’ happy now?”
“No, that ain’t all. They’re fuckin’ unhappy about the Turk, they wanna know he’s gonna hang in there.”
“Hey, let me worry about the fuckin’ Turk. The Turk ain’t gonna do nothin’.”
“And what you said, before, this thing goin’ down, it’s still on with them all?”
“Yeah, yeah, it’s okay—hey, here’s a fuckin’ tip, Sally, you worry about your business and let me fuckin’ worry about mine—”
Karp cleared his throat and said, “Hold it there, Goom. Roll it back about a minute.” Guma did so; the machine squawked and played the last few sentences of dialogue again.
“What is this Turk business?” asked Karp.
“Street name. We think it could be Turk Minzone.”
“Who is … ?”
“A Bollano soldier—Red Hook boy, nobody special.”
“You like him for the shotgun on the Viacchenzas?”
Guma waggled a hand, palm down. “It’s not his usual line of work. He does sports action and a little sharking. Joey could’ve called in a favor, though, had him do the hit. I mean, it’s not like he got scruples about it.”
Raney asked, “Why do they call him Turk?”
Guma said, “Turk? It’s an expression. They say, ‘Il fuma’ com’ un turco.’ The guy chain-smokes De Nobilis; he’s always got one in his face. The story is he ground one out in Jilly Manfredo’s eye when Jilly wouldn’t come up with his vig.”
Karp said, “Yeah, but he said ‘the Turk,’ not just ‘Turk.’ Why would he do that?”
“No big thing, Butch. It’s like saying ‘the Babe’ instead of Babe Ruth, no? Or, what, you got another idea?”
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