Depraved Indifference

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  “You understand? It’s a cloud on the case; maybe a little cloud, but little clouds get together and make thunder. You’re in open court, you conduct your business in the open, on the record, where possible.”

  Harris said, “OK, sorry,” and turned away to shove papers into his briefcase. Karp felt a pang of remorse. He said, “Hey, Tony, it’s OK, you did good. I didn’t mean to lecture you, I just got a hair up my ass today.”

  Harris smiled his crooked smile. “Nah, it’s good training. See you.” He took his bulging briefcase and walked off up the center aisle to his next case. He had to swerve to the side to avoid the small figure of Rhoda Klepp, who was homing in on Karp like a reentry vehicle on the first day of World War III.

  “There you are,” she said without preamble. “You’re never in your office and nobody ever knows what you’re doing. I’ve been looking all over the building for you.” She walked into the jury box and cocked a plump hip on the railing.

  Karp stood up and stretched. “This is a courtroom, Rhoda. I spend a lot of time in courtrooms because I am a lawyer. Law-yer. See the guy up there in the black robe? He is a judge. Juhudge.”

  “Cut the bullshit, Karp.”

  “You better watch it, Rhoda. You start hanging around in courtrooms, you might meet a criminal, maybe catch a disease of some kind.”

  Klepp rolled her eyes and curled her upper lip, an expression she used when she heard something she thought was stupid. Among the bureaucratic levels she frequented, this was an effective signal, since it meant she was liable to carry poisoned tales about the wit of her interlocutor to her masters, Wharton and Bloom. Karp ignored it. In fact, Karp avoided looking at Klepp entirely, since he did not want his gaze to wander anywhere near those mighty cones. As he examined the ceiling moldings, Klepp tightened her jaw and went on. “The boss wanted to find out what’s happening with Weaver. It’s today, isn’t it?”

  “Was. He’s remanded for trial. The clerk can give you the exact date.”

  “Trial, my ass. I’ll get it back on the calendar for another hearing. The boss wants us to accept a plea on this one.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. I wish you could take a hint sometimes, Karp. It’d make life easier for everybody. You heard about the dope they found in this asshole’s car?”

  “Whose car, Weaver’s?”

  “No, Karp, Weems’s. A gram of toot in the glove compartment. It looks like Mr. Weems wasn’t quite the pillar of the community the press has him cracked up to be. Liked the high life. So did his secretary, it turns out. I hear she—”

  “What is this, Klepp? We’re investigating the victim? The guy was shot dead in the street, for chrissakes! We got the killer. Who cares about the victim’s bad habits?”

  Klepp favored him with a small, superior smile. He was looking at her now. “Karp, don’t be a schmuck. There’s a political aura about this case that you don’t seem to understand. The black community is not going to stand up for this guy—he’s an embarrassment now. It’s a good case for building points with the rednecks. We let him cop to man one, put him away in Attica for a couple. With any luck some dude’ll knife him and—”

  “Rhoda, shut the fuck up!” he said with such vehemence that she actually did. He bent over and put his face close enough to hers that he could see the little lumps of mascara on her eyelashes. She leaned away from him, but she couldn’t move far because of the rail of the well. He lifted his enormous hand in front of her face and counted on his fingers. “One. Focus on this, Rhoda. I don’t care about politics. It’s just boring assholes playing stupid games. Two. It doesn’t matter if anybody will stand up for the victim. That’s what we get paid for. It doesn’t matter what the victim did or was. He’s the fucking victim! Am I making contact? We care about what the defendant did. Three. Over my dead body will you cop a plea on Weaver.” Karp backed away and strode out of the well. Rhoda came after him. “You maniac! You’re dead already,” she shouted.

  Sleepy Sam woke up and tapped his gavel. “Miss, please! This is a courtroom.”

  Back in his office, Karp found out what she meant. There was a sealed envelope in his in-basket, marked “CONFIDENTIAL” and “URGENT.” In it was a letter from Bloom, thanking him for his work as Assistant Bureau Chief of the Criminal Courts Bureau and informing him that his services in that capacity would no longer be required, effective close of business the following day.

  Ray Guma squashed his cigar into the tin ashtray and looked in silence at the small woman seated across the dirty, Formica-topped table. They were alone in an interrogation room on the fourth floor of 100 Centre Street. Elvira Melendez’s gray prison uniform hung slack on a body that, except for high, pointed breasts, was like a twelve-year-old’s. She had beautiful, black, heavily lashed eyes. Those eyes were filled with terror.

  Guma was trying to be gentle with her, which was difficult, because gentleness was not his strong suit. For forty-five minutes he had been trying to get her to come across with some information about the Sorriendas murder, with no result except shrugs, monosyllables, and frightened glances from those huge eyes whenever he mentioned Ruiz.

  From a pack Guma had brought, she was slowly smoking Kents, one after the other, blowing the smoke in strong twin plumes from her nostrils, tapping the ashes into the tin ashtray. Suddenly Guma sprang from his chair. “This is bullshit,” he said. “I feel like the Gestapo. You’re scared shitless, and I’m trying to help you, and it’s not working. Look, I got an idea. I’m starving, you’re probably hungry, eating baloney sandwiches in the jail, right? Let’s get out of here, grab a bite to eat, maybe have some laughs. What d’ya say?”

  She looked at him blankly. He put on his suit jacket and came around to her side of the table. He took her hand. “Come on,” he said, pulling her to her feet. “Hey, we’ll get some Cuban food. Arroz con pollo. Biftek with lime and a big pile of those weird French fries. Flan. You like flan? Shit, honey, I haven’t had any flan in years. There’s a great place in the Village, on Eleventh Street—Yglesias or Ysidro, begins with a Y, anyway.”

  She was still staring at him. She fingered the label of her prison dress. “But how …”

  “Oh, I got an old raincoat in my office you can wear. Don’t worry, I’ll bring you back, you won’t get in trouble with the jail. Hey, I’m an officer of the court, right?”

  “You can do this?”

  Guma beamed. “Is Fidel a commie?”

  They ate, or rather, Guma ate. She picked at her rice and beans and drank three cups of café con leche. And smoked. Guma raved about the food, cracked jokes in bad Spanish with the waiter, and watched her. Once she almost smiled.

  When the plates were taken away and the place was nearly empty, she said, “I’m not what you think I am.”

  “What do you think that is?”

  “A slut. Someone who lives with gangsters. You’re treating me like a person, even though I know you’re just trying to get me to talk about what happened to Alejandro. Even the pretense that you care about me means something. For a long time no one has even pretended.”

  “What are you, then?”

  “At one time I was a schoolteacher. Now I am a slave,” she said, “to him. El Serpiente.”

  “I thought you were Sorriendas’s girlfriend.”

  She snorted. “Him! Ruiz gave me to him as a present. Perhaps he was drunk, or he bet me in a card game and lost. It wouldn’t be the first time, you know. Not nearly. Alejandro was not the worst of them, either.”

  “He busted you up pretty bad.”

  “Yes, he did. Ruiz came one night with Hermo, one of his men, to have a party. Ruiz made me do things with him, with Hermo, in front of Alejandro, you understand? He couldn’t do nothing, anything. He just drank. Then, when they went away, that’s when he beat me up. I could understand that. But Ruiz is beyond understanding. You know about machismo. Domination of women, yes, but honor and courtesy are also there. Ruiz and women, it’s not machismo, nothing to do with honor or courte
sy.

  “In the old days, in Santiago de Cuba, he was with the Batista police. There were stories. Girls from the barrios would disappear, then later they would find the bodies on the dump. We were neighbors, you know, in Santiago. I would see him on the street, and he was always polite, like an ordinary man. My family was in politics, so we were protected. After the revolution, in Miami, he began to come around. We were no longer protected, and he was no longer polite. When my father died, three years ago last May, all this began.”

  “Didn’t you ever try to get away? Or go to somebody for help?”

  She lit another cigarette and pumped smoke for a silent minute. Guma could hear the rattle of dishes in the kitchen and the murmur of Spanish voices. She said, “I have a family. They live in Hialeah. My mother and my baby sister. She is eleven. Ruiz has told me in great detail what will happen to them if I don’t do what he wants. So there is no escape for me. But as long as I am with him, I think he will stay away from them, I think.

  “But maybe not. Now that I’m in jail … who knows? That’s why they call him what they do. Who can understand a snake? So you see why I can’t help you. But thank you anyway for all of this.”

  “What if I could arrange protection for you and your family?”

  She smiled sadly. “What, the police? You think the cops in Hialeah are going to guard an old woman and a kid forever, every place they go, to school, to the store, all night?”

  Guma looked her in the eyes and put his hand on top of hers.

  “Not the cops,” he said. “And believe me, it won’t be forever.”

  Karp stayed in his office the rest of the afternoon. He read the letter from Bloom a couple of times, but the message didn’t change. The phone didn’t ring once. Word gets around. At three-thirty V.T. Newbury walked in, holding a fat accordion file and looking cheerful. He sat down and said, “Roger, my boy, I’m going to make your day.”

  “If it’s not the Nobel Prize, forget it,” Karp replied glumly. He passed Bloom’s letter across the desk.

  V.T. read it and raised his elegant eyebrows. “Hmm, this could be serious. We’ll have to do something about it.”

  “Like what? I only wish I had decked that little motherfucker.”

  “There, there, it’s not worth getting excited about. We’ll think of something. Meanwhile, there’s this.” V.T. pulled a sheaf of papers out of his file.

  “What is it?” Karp asked without enthusiasm.

  “The synopsis of my brilliant exploration into the origin and ownership of Tel-Air Shipping, Incorporated. We owe a debt of thanks to my brother-in-law Deny, who has long been a name to conjure with in offshore funds. Also, that kid, Harris, is some kind of computer ace—very helpful. So here’s the story: Tel-Air began in 1973 as a Cayman Islands corporation … what’s wrong, Butch?”

  “V.T., you’re not computing. I just got fired. The candy store is closed. You understand what that means? It means politics as usual in the Criminal Courts Bureau. No more team. No more Tel-Air. We got a dead dealer. We got a greaser chick who looks good for it. Case closed, one more clearance. She’s got a history of getting beat up by the victim—JoJo the Dog Boy could walk in off the street and cop her to man one. She didn’t actually do it? There’s a killer loose on the streets? Who gives a shit? We’re all Wharton’s robots now, cranking out pleas. Not me, baby. I am gone from here.”

  “Butch, snap out of it. Of course you got fired. I’m just surprised it didn’t come down sooner. Christ on a crutch. You’ve been on borrowed time since Garrahy died.”

  “So?”

  “So they’ve shot off their nukes. What else can they do? They think they’ve won, which is the best time for a counterattack.”

  Karp shook his head, which was starting to ache. “Bullshit, ‘counterattack.’ With what, paper clips? No, that’s it, V.T. I gave it my best shot and I crapped out. I should’ve played along more, schmoozed up to Wharton and all of them on the eighth floor. I didn’t, I blew my cool, I lost. And fuck it all.”

  “What about Doyle, you going to blow that off too?”

  “Shit, no! Doyle’s different. I’m at least holding some cards on that one, as long as Bill Denton doesn’t get hit by a truck. But that’s it, ace. No Tel-Airs. I’m going home.”

  “Suppose they’re connected?” V.T. said in a neutral voice.

  Karp, who was shrugging on his suit coat and walking toward the door, whipped around with his arms still half in the sleeves. He looked like a falcon with its wings folded, swooping out of the sky.

  He stared at his friend. “What’s connected, V.T.?”

  “Gotcha!” said V.T., breaking into a broad grin. “It’s tenuous but interesting. You have to have a devious mind—”

  “V.T., don’t screw around with me now.”

  “Fine, I’ll just skim the high points.”

  “Yeah, leave out the parts about which relatives gave you what stuff.”

  V.T. sniffed. “To me, those are the high points. However. To resume, Tel-Air is a privately held Caymans corporation, which means it’s just a brass plate on a lawyer’s office down there in the sun. I won’t go into how I got hold of this information, but Ruiz owns forty-nine percent of the company. The directors are all stooges of his, except one, who represents the majority shareholder, someone named George Paine. He’s not important; in fact, he may not even exist. But the shareholding firm is very important.

  “Now here’s where it gets tricky. Control of Tel-Air is lodged with another offshore called Delmaris Investments. Ruiz is on the board of that one, together with two other men, Luis Cabrone and Bernardo Gelles. OK, think back a couple of years—Watergate, Vietnam protest, Daniel Ellsberg’s shrink, the Carl Hoffman break-in. Got it?”

  Karp scrunched up his brows, then shrugged. “Sorry, V.T., I’m drawing a blank.”

  “Ah, the tragedy of Alzheimer’s and so young! Carl Hoffman? Worked for the Pentagon, realized that senior people in Vietnam and Washington were covering up the real numbers of Viet Cong and N.V.A. troops, inventing body counts. Spilled his guts to the Washington Post? Later somebody broke into his apartment, looking for incriminating stuff.”

  “Oh, yeah, now it comes back. They found out the guys who did it were on the FBI payroll as ‘informants.’ A big scandal.”

  “Right, a big scandal. And the names of the guys they nailed for the break-in? The envelope, please: Luis Cabrone and Bernardo Gelles. You like it? Wait, there’s more. OK, we got black-bag guys on the FBI payroll connected to Tel-Air and Ruiz. Let’s go back to the companies. Delmaris Investments has only two investments. One is Tel-Air. The other is—are you ready for this? Southeastern Air Ferry Service, Limited.”

  “Who?”

  “Butch, children in rompers know that Southeastern is a CIA front. They ran the whole Guatemalan operation through it. So Ruiz is linked to CIA too. And not only that. It looks like Ruiz and his merry band were used as police and counterinsurgency trainers, plus some other fairly nasty odd jobs, when the CIA helped to whack out the Arbenz regime in Guatemala.

  “So that’s the corporate connection. Look at Tel-Air more closely and what do we find? Nothing much. The firm has almost no assets. They rent a warehouse out in Jamaica, Queens, and a couple of vans. For a shipping company they do remarkably little shipping. They don’t have any bank loans, they’re not in commercial paper either. But do they have a cash flow! For the last six months it’s averaged around two hundred K monthly. They maintain a small wash account in Mercer Trust, dozens of small deposits, all cash, very cagey.

  “Every month or so Ruiz cleans it out, and he or one of his men gets on the direct Swissair flight from Kennedy to Geneva. They’re not pricing cuckoo clocks. Every dime goes into a numbered account at the Credit Vosges.

  “Only two commodities can generate that kind of loot with no visible honest economic activity. One is dope, which we know he’s into from Guma. The other is arms. That would explain one peculiarity: we can’t find any supplier for his opera
tion. Plus if he’s using Tel-Air to launder his cash, and if almost all his capital goes into the bank, and if all the cash from the bank goes to Switzerland, what does he use for dope buys? He’s not growing poppies in Queens, and DEA is positive he’s not buying overseas. His volume would make waves for sure and attract the attention of the wise guys in Marseilles and Palermo. That’s a tightly held franchise.

  “Another fact: in March 1976, during a period when our government was trying to put the screws on El Salvador by cutting down on military aid, a ‘private’ group based in Salvador purchased five hundred and thirty thousand dollars’ worth of weapons from a French consortium. The same month, Ruiz’s account at Credit Vosges showed withdrawals of approximately five hundred and fifty thousand dollars in Swiss francs. Don’t ask. DEA corrupted a Swiss bank clerk. Conclusion: Ruiz is getting dope, both heroin and coke, from somebody, for free, selling it here in bulk, and using at least part of the proceeds to buy guns. Any ideas about who could be the middleman?”

  “CIA?”

  “Two points. But to be fair, I doubt that it’s official CIA, not like it was in the Sixties, fucking out of control. There must be dozens of former or even current CIA guys now who are running, or could run, entirely renegade operations funded by self-generated sources. Ruiz’s operation looks like one of those.”

  Karp tapped his fingers on his desk. The headache was building into a rare skull-buster. He massaged his face and neck and wondered idly where Marlene was right now. He’d have to call her before he left.

  “So? What do you think?” V.T. asked. “Pretty neat, huh? It sure as hell gives you something to work Elmer Pillman over with.”

  “True. But a connection? Bunch of Croats, bunch of Cubans, neither likes the reds very much, maybe both have a CIA handle, but … or am I missing something?”

  “Just one detail. The agent who was the chief executive officer of Southeastern, who is reportedly close to Ruiz, just happened to be on the plane with the Croats on the way back from Paris and has gone into deep bye-byes since. Our mysterious friend Dettrick. Coincidence? Maybe, but there’s also those swarthy guys dashing around and burning down luggage stores in Grand Central Station and otherwise threatening witnesses in the Doyle case. They’re sure as hell not middle-aged Croatian refugees. Maybe they’re Ruiz’s people doing a favor for Daddy.”