Justice Denied

by Robert Tanenbaum

  He mopped up the soup with the last of his bread and leaned back in his chair, regarding his wife with an appraising eye. Matter-of-factly he asked, “So, Marlene, what’s in the crate?”

  “The crate?”

  “Yeah, that big wooden crate in the corner with all the old cartons near your speed bag. With the drop cloth on it.”

  “Oh, that crate. Well, you know, to be perfectly honest, I don’t know what’s in it because I haven’t opened it yet.”

  “Uh-huh. You don’t think it has caviar in it? I’m just guessing that that’s what it says on the top of the crate.”

  “Nope. I doubt the caviar.”

  “And how did this object come to be in our domicile, if I may ask?”

  “Harry brought it up last night. Don’t give me a lot of shit on this, Butchie. I only did—”

  He held up a hand to stop her. “No, I don’t want to know about it. And the reason for that is, when you’re indicted for, let’s see, misfeasance, grand larceny, burglary, and tampering with physical evidence, and maybe you have to go upstate for a while, I’ll be able to say that I was not an accomplice after the fact. I’m thinking of the kid, here.”

  “Yes, good point,” said Marlene. “Although I think I could make a good showing that I acted to save a priceless cultural relic from certain destruction. Harry said the furnace was all unloaded and set to go, in the locker.”

  “Mmm, there’s that, although I think you’re supposed to make said showing to a judge before you conduct a raid. You’re supposed to have one of those pieces of paper—what’s the word I’m looking for—begins with a W . . .?”

  “I hate it when you get sarcastic like this.”

  “Not to mention that, having done this bag job, you’ve destroyed the evidentiary value of whatever’s in that crate. Which may mean never being able to prove that Djelal and Nassif did the murder.”

  Karp was groggy with the aftereffects of the trial. At such times he needed to sleep, to purge his mind of the accumulated memorized facts, the precedents, the points of law that had stuffed every available brain cell for weeks. He was not capable of a closely reasoned argument with his wife, nor was he capable of making the next logical connection: that there was an object worth thirty million dollars in his home, an object of interest to at least one Turkish murderer. And the mob.

  He sighed and looked at her, his eyes bleary. Marlene did not respond to his last comment, so he said, “Well, whatever. You’re a nut. I love you. I married you. I can’t think about it right now. I’m going tocrash. You coming?”

  “Yeah, I’ll just clean up here. Look, don’t worry, okay? It’ll be all right. About the crate.”

  “What crate? I din see no stinkin’ crate,” said Karp, and clumped his way slowly to bed.

  Ahmet Djelal parked the black Cadillac Sedan de Ville on Crosby Street and looked up at the loft building he had come to burgle. He didn’t much like using an embassy car, but his little sports car was too small to carry what he had to carry away. He also didn’t like the idea of hauling the crate down five flights of stairs, but there didn’t seem to be a choice. He had cased the building earlier that day, found out that his target was on the fifth floor, and learned that there wasn’t an elevator.

  He got out of the car, stretched, and checked the pistol in his shoulder holster. He was a large man, well over six feet tall and burly. He had a close-cropped head, a thick neck, and a dark flowing mustache. He looked like a Turkish policeman, which he was.

  Djelal had no doubt that he could manage the crate by himself. Rolled up in his pocket was a furniture mover’s strap. He would carry it down the stairs on his back.

  Djelal also had no doubt that he could deal with whoever had stolen his property. After the first moment of panic when he had arrived at the storage place and found the thing missing, he had made a careful search of the area and found a crumpled MasterCharge slip with a name and a telephone number, obviously dropped by the thief. It was not hard to find the address from this information. He was, after all, a policeman.

  The thief had an Italian name, which suggested that the people to whom he had planned to sell the gold and jewels might have arranged the theft. He knew who Marlene Ciampi was from her visit to the embassy. Obviously she was corrupt and had somehow learned where the mask was from that idiot Nassif and told her relatives. Djelal was not particularly worried that Nassif had been arrested. It had perhaps been a mistake to involve Nassif, a mere merchant, not a warrior, as he himself was, but one had to depend on family. And at least Nassif was a real Turk. He would not betray his cousin.

  Djelal picked the lock of the downstairs door with ease. He put away his lock picks and turned on a pencil-beam flashlight. Slowly he mounted the steep, dark stairs.

  At the fifth-floor landing he paused and listened. There was no sound from the other side of the door. He dropped to his knees and directed his light at the lock. He had just inserted his pick when Harry Bello came up silently behind him from the shadows of the landing and hit him across the back of the head with a braided leather sap.

  “He’s coming around,” said Marlene.

  A skylight and a colored glass lamp swam into Djelal’s view and then a woman’s face in the center of a cloud of black hair. He was lying on his back, his hands uncomfortably constrained behind him. His head hurt and he felt the bite of handcuffs on his wrists.

  The dark, fuzzy edges of his vision cleared, and Djelal could see that he was in a large room with three people, the woman, a stocky man with a gray face, and a very tall man with a cast on his leg. The stocky man held a revolver in his hand.

  The woman said, “Mr. Djelal, I’m Marlene Ciampi, an assistant district attorney, and this man here is Harry Bello, a police officer. You’re under arrest for the murder of Mehmet Ersoy.” Then she told him that he had the right to remain silent and the right to a lawyer, and that if he couldn’t afford a lawyer, one would be provided for him. She asked him if he understood those rights.

  He said, “Bir kelime bile anlamiyorum. Bir tercüman bulabilir minisiz?”

  Marlene turned to Harry. “He’s useless. Take him out and shoot him and throw the body in the river.”

  Involuntarily, sweat started out of Djelal’s brow, and he gasped. Marlene looked at him sharply. “Yes, I think you understand English well enough. Now, do you understand your rights?”

  Djelal said, “Yes.”

  “Good. Are you willing to make a voluntary statement at this time?”

  “This is an outrage. I am an official of the Turkish government. I have diplomatic status.”

  “Yeah, but we’re not talking about a parking ticket, are we?”

  She pulled up a straight chair and sat down just a few inches from the couch on which he lay. Her knees almost touched his shoulder. She was wearing a blue bathrobe, and he thought she might be nearly naked underneath it. He could smell her body. He thought he was going insane; women did not do this to men, question them while they lay bound and helpless. The other way around was correct, as he himself had done many times when he was an intelligence officer with the military. It was like a nightmare in which you found yourself with a saddle on your back and a horse riding you.

  “You’re a very stupid man,” she said. “I think maybe Ersoy was the brains of this operation. After you killed him, the two of you have been stumbling around like a pair of idiots. Once we knew about the art theft and forgery ring, it was no problem finding you. And nailing you. You understand that expression, ‘nailing’? You’re nailed.

  “You had a nice little operation going, but the Mask of Gregory was too big for you. Too much cash involved. You figured, why split three ways when you could have half each? So you killed Ersoy, probably with that pistol you brought along tonight….”

  She gestured toward a low table, where his gun sat in a clear plastic bag. His mouth sagged.

  “Yeah, I figured. It’s the same gun. Dumb. Bone stupid. You thought you were smart pinning it on the Armenians, but
it turns out that was really stupid. That’s what got us started on the trail that led to the art scam. If you’d’ve just shot him on a dark street and lifted his watch and wallet, nobody would have asked any questions.

  “But that’s not the stupidest thing you did. No, the stupidest thing was to think that half of what you were going to get from Joey Castles for the gold and jewels from the mask was more than a third of what Kerbussyan would’ve paid for the mask itself. The two of you outsmarted yourselves out of about ten million dollars.” She laughed in his face.

  He broke. Djelal jerked himself upright and roared and lunged at Marlene with his teeth, his mouth throwing ropes of spit. She kicked her chair backward to avoid him, and instantly Harry Bello was between them with his pistol pressed hard against Djelal’s skull and his arm locked around his neck.

  “It was not the money, whore!” the Turk shrieked. “Piç! It was the Armeniy! Ersoy was going to sell the filthy saint to the Armenians! We were going to cheat them, like they cheated us. But he said, no, Kerbussyan would not be fooled. We can get more if we sell it. But we are real Turks. How could we give this filthy thing to our enemies, for them to glory in it and defame us more? Melt it, I said. But no, he wouldn’t. He was corrupt, a politician! So we had men to steal it and we …”

  “You killed him.”

  “He deserved death. He was a traitor.”

  Marlene said, “Wrap him up, Harry. We can get a statement from him in the morning. Did you get all that, Butch?”

  Karp was no shorthand expert, but he could write like blazes when necessary; few who can’t get through law school. He finished his scribbling and said, “Yeah, I think so. Except he said something like ‘peach’ at the start. Right after ‘whore.’

  “I bet it was something nasty, right, Ahmet?”

  But Djelal had sunk into morose silence. He did not resist when Bello led him out of the loft.

  “That was quite a performance,” said Karp. “Did you plan that whole thing? Like, how did he know to come here?”

  “Harry planted a charge slip at the storage locker. I got the idea from the Russell case. Funny, isn’t it? It was patriotism, not greed, that killed Ersoy. God protect us all from noble motives.”

  “Look who’s talking,” said Karp. He got up from the table and hopped over to the wall phone.

  “Who are you calling? It’s two A.M.”

  “Roland. I’m going to get him out of bed and get him down to Centre Street to spring Tomasian and write up Djelal.”

  “Oooh, nasty!”

  “No, it’s his case. He should handle it.”

  “You think he’ll ever forgive you?”

  “Roland isn’t into grudges. Tomorrow there’ll be a check in an envelope on my desk, and he’ll never mention it again and neither will I.”

  Karp made his call, which was terse. He hung up and went back to the couch. Marlene put a kettle on to boil. She made tea, and they sat down at the porcelain-topped table in the kitchen to drink it.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Karp said. “All’s well that ends well, but did you ever think that our guy might not have come alone? What if old Ahmet there’d brought three guys with machine guns along? Harry didn’t have any cops backing him up, did he?”

  “Not cops,” said Marlene carefully. “Not as such. But there’s backup, and more than three guys with machine guns.”

  “Kerbussyan! You tipped the Armenians this was going down. But that means …”

  She sipped from her mug and waited.

  “You’re going to give the thing to Kerbussyan?”

  “What thing is that, Butchie?” asked Marlene, giving him a hooded look, of just the kind that some ancestress of hers might have produced in the aftermath of an affair of poisoned daggers at the Palermo court of Robert the Devil.

  Kerbussyan arrived ten minutes later in the company of two silent, mustached men, the same ones Karp had seen at the house above the Hudson many months ago. They wore field jackets, though it was a warm night. They clanked with weapons.

  The old man embraced Marlene warmly and kissed her hand.

  “My dear, I have no words—”

  “No problem, Mr. K,” said Marlene, “but before we get all excited, let’s check what’s in the box.”

  Kebussyan’s two shadows followed her back through the loft and returned bearing the crate. She gave one of them a short wrecking bar, and he took the top off the crate. Inside, in a nest of straw, was a package wrapped in padded cotton, secured with rigger’s tape. One of the shadows drew it out and placed it on the dining room table. It was about the size and shape of a loveseat cushion, but obviously very heavy. The man grunted with the effort.

  Kerbussyan approached the thing and studied it, as if he could see through the wrappings, through the centuries. He was pale and white around the nostrils. Marlene handed him scissors. Carefully and slowly he cut the tape and unwrapped layer after layer of gray padding.

  Gold glinted as the last of the wrapping fell away.

  “It is. It is!” cried the old man.

  The cloth was swept aside and it stood there, a golden block the size of an atlas and as thick as an unabridged dictionary. On the closed doors of the reliquary triptych were embossed the figures of a man and a woman in Byzantine imperial regalia. They stood out, grave and holy, from a background studded with pearls and small diamonds.

  “The emperor Zeno and the empress Ariadne,” breathed Kerbussyan. “The donors.” His fingers fumbled at the central catch, and then he threw open the doors of the reliquary.

  Numen flooded off it like water off a broaching whale, filling the room with emotional power, like light for the deeper feelings. The door on the left was inscribed with a gold and enamel-work martyrdom of St. Hrip’sime, and on the right was St. Gregory preaching to the Armenian nobles, assisted by angels. In the center, the golden face of the Illuminator stared out, terrible and marvelous, his eyes great sapphires, alive with blue flames.

  The three Armenians fell to their knees and crossed themselves, and there was a chorused prayer in the ancient tongue. Marlene felt her own knees dip involuntarily, and her hand twitched to make the cross. Karp, the Jewish pagan, just watched, fascinated in spite of himself.

  After some time, they shut the doors and wrapped up the soul of Armenia in its padding. Kerbussyan was nearly speechless with gratitude.

  “Please,” he said, “what can I do for you? You must let me give you some—anything … anything I have.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Kerbussyan, but I can’t accept anything. It’s just my job. We return stolen property, and the fact that it was stolen a long time ago doesn’t enter. I’m glad you got it back.”

  She walked them to the door. They were going to go to Centre Street to pick up Aram Tomasian. Marlene was thinking, naturally enough, about roots, about lost homelands, and a thought flashed into her mind.

  “Ah, there is one small favor, if you could,” she said hesitantly.

  “Ask.”

  “You’re in the real estate business. Do you know a guy named Morton Lepkowitz?”

  “The name is familiar. What about him?”

  Marlene explained their condo-conversion predicament.

  “I’ll take care of it,” he said.

  “How?”

  “My dear, don’t worry about it. What you have done is worth a bracelet of buildings like this one. As long as there are Armenians you will never want for a home. That is the same as forever.” He gave her a flash of his shark’s smile and left, flanked by his minions, bearing treasure.

  Marlene walked back to the mattress. She felt lightheaded, wired, and exhausted at the same time. Karp was waiting for her there, propped up on pillows, his hands behind his head. “Well,” he said, “did you get your bribe?”

  “It’s not a bribe. I just asked him to see if he could convince Lepkowitz to go easy on us, and he said he’d do it.”

  “I bet. Has it occurred to you what’s going to happen when all this comes out at t
he trial?”

  Marlene got into bed and looked at him. “Trial? Who, Djelal? He’ll never go to trial. He’ll plead to the top count.”

  “What makes you so sure, Counselor?”

  “Because if he doesn’t, we’ll deport his ass to Turkey, and they’ll try him for stealing national treasures.”

  “He won’t get much for that.”

  “It’s a death sentence. How long do you think an ex-cop will last in a Turkish jail? A week? Especially the kind of cop Djelal was. And especially a Turkish jail. No, he’ll do his twenty to life in Attica and be glad about it, and he’ll give us Nassif too. What’s the matter? You look like you swallowed a frog.”

  Karp blew air out, puffing his cheeks. “The bad guys are punished, the good guy is out—why don’t I feel right?”

  She put an arm around his shoulder and drew him close. “Because,” she said, “you’re basically honest, and you believe in the system, and I’m basically a crook, and I only believe in the system when it comes out the way I want. I believe in myself. How’d that Dylan line go? ‘To live outside the law you must be honest …’ Whatever that means, that’s Marlene.”

  Karp said, as Bogart, “Don’t be silly, you’re taking the fall.”

  Marlene laughed. “Yeah, I know. You notice that Bogie doesn’t marry Mary Astor and live happily ever after in that one. One of these days you’ll turn my ass in. Why did we get married anyway?”

  Karp reached for her. “Because you knew that someday you’re going to need a good lawyer.”

  A Biography of Robert K. Tanenbaum

  Robert K. Tanenbaum is the New York Times bestselling author of twenty-five legal thrillers and has an accomplished legal career of his own. Before his first book was published, Tanenbaum had already been the Bureau Chief of the Criminal Courts, had run the Homicide Bureau, and had been in charge of the training program for the legal staff for the New York County District Attorney’s Office. He also served as Deputy Chief Counsel to the Congressional Committee investigations into the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. In his professional career, Tanenbaum has never lost a felony case. His courtroom experiences bring his books to life, especially in his bestselling series featuring prosecutor Roger “Butch” Karp and his wife, Marlene Ciampi.