“Why not, Guma? I thought you were always up for a new challenge.”
“Hey, Karp, give me a break. I got a nice thing going with what’s her name there, Sunni. I want to work on it, let it blossom, you know? I don’t need any challenges right now, OK?”
“Guma, you just met the woman last night.”
“Hey, what can I say? It was magic.”
“Guma, you’re missing one of the great experiences. Imagine those incredible mazumas unleashed. They’d stalk you across the room like a beast of prey. Also, I hear she’s into every depravity.”
“Depravity, hey? Talk to a German shepherd, then. Talk to a fuckin’ pony. Not me.”
“You’re chicken.”
“I stopped listening, Karp. I’d like to help out, but let me put it to you this way: I wouldn’t fuck her with your dick.”
“Guma won’t do it,” Karp said to Marlene later that evening. “Any ideas? I guess I could try.”
“Yeah, but you wouldn’t get far without genitalia, and I’ll cut off your first move in that direction. No, I’ll work something out. I’ll catch her in the little girl’s room one time and lay a trip on her. I owe her one anyway.”
Shortly after lunch on Sunday the blessed isolation Karp and Marlene were enjoying was cut short by a telephone call from Bill Denton.
“I’m going to ruin your weekend,” he said.
“You already did. What’s up?”
“They found the waiter, Koltan. In a dumpster in Canarsie.”
“Ah, shit. The poor bastard. How’d he get it?”
“They tied his hands behind him with wire and cut his throat. Butch, these guys are going crazy. Their scam is coming unglued and I think they figure they got nothing to lose. I got extra guys with the hijackers and all the people I can steal looking for the Cubans, but who knows? Lot of places to hide in the city, and they could have left already. By the way, did you get that stack of shots I sent over?”
“Yeah, Ruiz and company, real beauties.”
“You recall seeing any of them yourself? I mean recently.”
“No, not that I recall. It’d be hard to miss Ruiz, the little fucker really looks like some kind of reptile. Why do you ask?”
“Well, there’s one figure in this case who’s wandering around with nobody watching him, and I’m getting a little concerned.”
“What figure is that, Bill?”
“You.”
Karp laughed. “Come on, Bill. Mutts don’t waste ADAs.”
“Yeah, but these aren’t your usual mutts. And as I recall, somebody tried real hard to punch your ticket a couple of years back. With that letter bomb.”
“Yeah, there’s that. Well, what do you suggest?”
“Get back to the city as soon as you can and stay put. I’ll get Brenner to babysit you for a couple days, until we nail these assholes. Oh, yeah, speaking of assholes, your friend Flanagan has turned up missing too.”
“Flanagan? Oh, crap!”
“What is it?”
“Nothing. I just thought of something I had to do.” It had occurred to him that the Q and A he had taken off Flanagan was sitting in its sealed envelope on the floor of his bedroom. If anything happened to the detective, he would have no proof of a conspiracy to introduce tainted evidence into Karavitch et al.
“OK, Bill,” he said, “we’re leaving in a little while. I’ll talk to you Monday.”
It took them nearly an hour to dig the car out, and they left about four. The roads were icy and Karp sweated bullets on the mountain turns. It was nearly six when they hit the clear pavement of the Taconic, a black canal between the mounds of snow pushed up on its shoulders by the plows. The sky had gone dark purple when he decided he needed some coffee and pulled into one of the Taconic’s rustic rest stops.
He was waiting at the take-out counter for his order, thinking about nothing in particular, when he happened to look out the window. At that moment, with an intensity that prickled his scalp, he was overcome by a feeling of déjà vu. A good-looking, swarthy man was using his reflection in the restaurant window to comb his long black hair. As he finished, he cocked his head at an angle and tossed it back so that a lock of hair fell just so over one eye.
Karp felt the ice form in his belly. He had seen that man before, doing just that in the window of a Chinese restaurant. He had seen that gesture reproduced in the crazy mimicry of Dirty Warren, which meant that this guy had been hanging around Centre Street for weeks. Now that he had seen Denton’s pictures, he realized that he was looking at Esteban Otero, the man who had helped to kill Alejandro Sorriendas. Hermo.
He picked up the paper bag with his order in it, paid, and walked out, trying not to shake, trying to think, trying not to look at the man four feet away. He walked toward where he had parked the Chevy, but a large green station wagon was parked in his slot.
His stomach dropped and he tasted acid on his tongue. He turned slowly in a circle, searching for the pink car. A string of curses directed at Marlene appeared on the screen of his mind. Where the hell was she? He looked back toward the restaurant. Hermo was gone. He started back to the restaurant. There was a phone there, maybe he could call Denton—
An enormous blast erupted behind him. He stumbled and almost dropped the bag of coffee as he spun around.
Marlene was sitting in the Chevy’s driver’s seat, grinning. He walked to the driver’s side and she rolled down the window. “Hell of a horn,” she said. “It’s a diesel air jobbie.”
“Marlene, what the fuck are you doing?” he choked out between clenched teeth.
Her grin faded. “I was just getting some gas. I didn’t want to bring the car back empty. Butch, what’s the matter?”
“I just spotted one of Ruiz’s men. He’s been following me. We got to get out of here. Move over.”
“Get in!” She leaned over and jerked the passenger door open.
“Marlene, move over! Stop playing around!” he shouted.
“Butch, listen. You want to get away from these guys? Get in. You can’t drive worth a shit. Hey, is that them?”
In her rearview mirror she had spotted a white Econoline van pulling out of a slot. There were two men in the front seat.
Karp looked. “Yeah, that’s them.” He felt drained. “OK, you drive.” He got in and Marlene stomped on the gas. The big engine screamed. She slammed into gear, popped the clutch, and the big Eagles on the rear wheels squealed, spinning wildly and sending up clouds of stinking rubber smoke. Then the treads caught and the car took off, hitting sixty by the time it reached the end of the exit ramp.
“So far, so good,” she said after a few minutes. “Are they following us?”
He peered through the rear window. “I can’t see them. But it’s getting dark. That was quite a takeoff, Marlene.”
“It was comme il faut at the Tastee-Freeze on Linden Boulevard. Some things you never forget. It’s a good thing we got this car. I can blow the doors off anything but a Ferrari. Assuming it holds together. Oh, crap, look at this!”
They had crested a hill and before them stretched the taillights of a monumental traffic jam. She hit the brakes, skidded sideways, corrected, and slowed to a crawl behind a Volvo with a loaded ski rack.
“Shit, if there wasn’t this goddamn snow I could cut across the median or go down the shoulder. Can you see them yet?”
“I don’t know. Yeah, I think that’s them. About four cars back.”
“OK, let me try something.”
They inched along in the center lane for about five minutes.
“Um, Marlene, what’s the plan? You going to try to get us to a phone?”
“Yeah, after we lose these guys. Pretty soon now. We should be real close to the Tuckahoe Road exit.” When the exit sign appeared, she hit the brakes and the car rolled to a stop. In seconds, horns were blaring behind them and drivers were rolling down their windows and poking their heads out. “Marlene, what’s going on?” he said anxiously.
“Wait a minute
. I’m getting some maneuvering room.” The left and right lanes continued to move forward, and then they too were blocked by cars far back in the center lane attempting to get past the obstacle. A clear space of about five car lengths opened up. Marlene gave it the gas and the car screamed forward. Then she leaned on the horn.
It had a spectacular effect. Half a dozen cars in the right lane leaped into the snowy shoulders of the road as their drivers instinctively wrenched their wheels away from the terrifying sound. Marlene barreled past them and tore up the exit lane at fifty. There was a scream of brakes and a metallic crash behind them.
“What happened?” she shouted.
“Our guys tried to pull right out and cut off somebody. Shit, they’re still coming.”
She drove east on Tuckahoe Road. In the rearview she could see the headlights of the van glaring against the snow as it left the exit ramp in pursuit. A quarter mile later, she whipped the Chevy into a high-speed turn down a suburban lane.
“What are you doing now?” he asked. The van had also made the turn, and the headlights behind them were getting closer. There wasn’t another car in sight.
“My Aunt Agnes lives here,” she replied. Karp stared at her. Her lips were tight and she held the wheel in a white-knuckled, stiff-armed grip, hands in the ten of four position.
“Your Aunt Agnes? What are you talking about?” he shouted.
“Don’t yell at me, goddammit. I have to concentrate. OK, here comes the hill. Hang on to something.”
The street was a one-laner that wound through a neighborhood of large houses set back from the road. Suddenly she accelerated and spun the car across the road in a skidding left. When the car had straightened out on the new road, Karp looked ahead and gasped. The headlights shone out on nothing. Then the front of the car dipped and he was looking down a long, straight, steep hill coated with glistening black ice.
The rear wheels gently shifted to the left, farther and farther, until they were descending the hill sideways, gathering speed. Karp felt a scream well up in his throat. Marlene was shouting something, but everything was moving too fast for him to concentrate on what she was saying. The lights of houses and shadows of trees tore by in a monochromatic blur like an old movie in a broken projector.
Then it struck him that she was in control. By delicate twitches of the wheel and dabs at the gas she played the car as it continued its slow spin around the compass, at last reaching the right way around, pointing down.
The hill bottomed out and began a more gradual upgrade again. Marlene headed its nose into a snowdrift and set the brake. “Watch,” she said, turning and facing the rear window.
The white van came flying around the curve and started down the hill. It hit the ice and began to skid. Karp and Marlene saw its brake lights glow red on the snow as the driver jammed on the pedal. The van spun like a top, caromed off a pile of snow, smacked a buried car, toppled over onto the driver’s side, and skidded down the hill like a runaway carnival ride. Leaving the roadway entirely, it ripped through a high privet hedge and ended up smoking in the middle of a broad, snowy lawn.
Marlene backed out of the drift and drove slowly away. She was shaking with released tension. Karp felt a heavy pressure in his chest; it went away when he started breathing again. “That was incredible! How the hell did you learn how to do that?”
“Aunt Agnes’s hill? We used to do it every winter when we were teenagers. It was a trip. The one who spun the car the most times won.”
“Yeah, but what if the guy in the van knew how to take ice?”
“Well, I thought about that, and then I figured, Cubans? From Miami? On black ice? I figured it was worth a shot.”
“I guess. I’m glad I went to the bathroom before, though. OK, where to?”
“Well, why don’t we drop in on Aunt Agnes? I’m starving and she’s always good for a feed. And we can call Denton from there. Besides, you said you wanted to meet my family.”
17
“THEY’RE TEARING UP the street again,” Fred Brenner said disgustedly. “I’ll drop you at the corner here.” Karp shrugged and opened the door. The clanging explosions of air drills rattled down Centre Street from its junction with Canal and reverberated between the Courthouse and the Federal Building across Foley Square. “You sure you can make it by yourself?” the big detective asked solicitously. Karp shot him a sour grin. At Denton’s insistence, Brenner had been continuously with Karp since he and Marlene had returned to the city the previous night. He’d even set up a folding cot in Karp’s pristine living room.
“I think so,” Karp said. “By the way, I go to the can around two-thirty, and I like soft paper. Be there.” Brenner laughed and pulled away in a screeching U-turn down Canal.
Karp walked past the Courthouse to Pearl and stopped in at Sam’s. The little luncheonette was thick with the smell of bitter coffee, toast, and grease, the air almost like a food itself. He unbuttoned his coat and ordered a coffee with two bagels to go from Gus, the current Sam, a squat person with a striking resemblance to Yassir Arafat. Karp was about to leave with his order when V.T. and Guma came in, with a smiling Dirty Warren in tow. V.T. and Warren were their usual impeccable selves; Guma, unshaven and uncombed, looked like a man just arisen from bed.
Gus scowled when he spotted Warren and began to shake his head. “Hey, uh-uh—”
“It’s cool, Gus,” Guma said. “He’ll be good.”
“No shoutin’.”
“Right. Just a little quiet breakfast. We’ll sit back by the john. Hi, Butch, come on back. We’re just putting the finishing touches on you know what.”
“Sure. Hey, V.T., sorry we had to run. We had a great time.”
“Glad to hear it. You have any problems getting home?”
“You could say that,” Karp replied. When they were seated, he related the story of the encounter with the white van. “So you’re a hunted man,” said V.T. when he had finished. “That’s pretty exciting. Can I have your Yankee jacket if they get you?”
“You ought to get out of town, Butch. Until they catch those assholes,” Guma said.
“Yeah, but I can’t right now. The trial’s in a few weeks, and I got to watch the store or Bloom will let them cop to mopery. Of course, if I had something solid on Bloom, that’d be a different story. Like those tapes—”
“Oh, no, we went through that already.”
“Guma, I’m risking my life here, and you won’t risk … I don’t know what.”
“My balls? No thanks.”
“What are you guys talking about?” V.T. asked. Karp told him. “Goom, I can’t believe my ears. Passing up the match of the century? Klepp and Guma, my God! Alert the networks!”
“Fuck you and the horse you rode in on, Newbury,” said Guma, starting in on his prune danish and black coffee. The others were silent, except for Dirty Warren’s random muttering of curses under his breath. Finally Guma slammed his cup down in the saucer. “OK, goddammit! I’m not promising anything, but I will try. One try, that’s all. If I draw a blank, or I get any shit from that bitch, that’s all she wrote. You understand?”
“Perfectly,” Karp said. “Nobody could ask for more. Right, Warren?”
“Right, Mr. Karp. You jerk-off motherfucking dickhead.”
Outside the luncheonette, Karp paused to fix his collar and button his coat. The wind blowing up Pearl Street was making the crowd hunch over and the perpetual steam plumes from the manholes jitter in wispy rags. He spotted the big guy almost at once. He didn’t seem to be taking any trouble about hiding himself. He climbed down from a large van that was parked across the street, a blue Dodge this time, parked tight so that Karp couldn’t read the plates.
Another swarthy guy. He leaned against the front of his van, his dark eyes studying Karp calmly. He was about six-two and broad across the chest and shoulders, a weightlifter type, and wore a navy blue track suit with running shoes and a tan down vest.
Ruiz’s second string looked a lot more impressive than th
e first, Karp thought. Or maybe this was the first team. As he began to walk down Pearl toward Centre, the weightlifter followed. He was not interested in losing the big man. On the contrary, what he wanted was a conversation with this dude in the company of the Chief of Detectives.
Arriving at his office, Karp threw himself into his chair, still with his coat on, and called Denton. “They got another boy on me.”
“You said you were coming over here this morning.”
“I got work to do, Bill. I’ll be over afterward, maybe five-thirty. I’ll bring that Flanagan stuff over, too.”
“I’m worried about you, not the evidence. Why don’t I send Fred?”
“For what? To sit in my office and read comics? Chief, nobody is going to pop me in the goddamn courthouse. No, I’ll tell you what you can do. Let’s follow this guy and see who he works for. Maybe he’ll lead us to Ruiz.”
“I was going to suggest that, too. What’s he look like?”
As it turned out, the plainclothes detectives dispatched by Denton could find no trace of the weightlifter in the blue track suit. All they could do was to circulate his description to security and put out a bulletin for the guy.
Karp thus went through his hectic day with the back of his neck tickling. He found himself studying the faces in the crowded courtrooms, seeking the guilty look, the quick turning away of somebody who had been watching him. Of course, he found nothing—or rather, he found too much. Looking for suspicious people in the New York criminal courts was like looking for communists in the Supreme Soviet.
By three, he was irritable and nervous and wishing he drank liquor. Marlene had gone off somewhere; “out of the building” was all she’d told the secretary. Karp arranged and filed the ragged cardboard portfolio of case papers he had dragged around with him all day, the high point of which was the presentation of a homicide case to the grand jury. It was a simple case. A woman had left her abusive husband, and he had found her and shot her five times. Karp had no trouble getting an indictment. As far as he knew, the CIA was not interested in the affair, nor were the Vatican, the FBI, the KGB, or the Elders of Zion. It was his kind of case.
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