“Uh-huh. Not well. He was playing his last year for UCLA when I started with Cal. I played against him a couple times.”
“No kidding! Any good?”
“He was all right. An OK college point guard. Not that athletic.”
“No you, you mean,” said Hrcany.
Karp smiled tightly and shrugged. He never talked about his life in basketball. He never wanted to hear coming out of his mouth the pathetic reminiscences of a has-been. This was unusual, he knew. Everybody in the Criminal Courts Building had heard about Guma’s afternoon with the Yankees and how he had talked with Phil Rizzuto and Mantle.
But Karp had cut basketball out of his life with a thoroughness that amazed his friends. Karp knew it was mere petulance, a childish attempt at revenge on the sport: if he couldn’t play in the big time, he wasn’t going to participate at all, not as a fan, not as an amateur player or coach, not even—beyond the dictates of cordiality—as a water-cooler guru. When he saw basketball on TV by accident, or passed a playground with a lively game, the pain was undeniable; that it was also ridiculous did not make it less so.
Several other men had joined the conversation about the Hustlers and basketball, and Karp was able to slip away. He went over to Marlene.
“I got to go,” he said. “Bloom called a meeting at a quarter to five.”
“On a Friday?” said Marlene in tones of outrage.
“He’s a busy man,” said Karp, who, though he deferred to no man in his contempt for the exiguous Bloom, had lately come to believe that a perfect and chill correctness was the only appropriate response. This he did not in any hope that Bloom would reciprocate, but because he had always felt a vague uneasiness at participating in the casual and profane deprecation of the D.A. that took place in his bureau. The man was, after all, the district attorney, and Karp was in his chain of command.
He kissed Marlene good-bye and assured her that he would see to her cartons of personal gear. Then he left and took the elevator to the twelfth floor.
As he ascended, he prepared himself by assiduously thinking good of Bloom. The man was undoubtedly a fine politician. He knew every source of power in the state and was well in with nearly all of them, from the unions to the governor’s staff. He was a shrewd conniver for budgets, and in this he compared favorably with the late Francis Garrahy. Garrahy had believed that working for the New York D.A.’s office was in itself so great an honor as to render any other reward superfluous. Thus his minions had labored (and happily, for the most part) in cramped, dirty quarters at derisory rates of pay.
This situation Bloom had improved, as he had the office’s record keeping and other details of administration, for he was at heart an administrator, as Garrahy had at heart been a prosecuting attorney. He was also skilled in public relations, so that the office had kept much of the reputation (if not the abilities) it had built up in the Garrahy years. That was all Karp could think of by the time the elevator stopped.
Karp emerged in the D.A.’s reception area, which was decorated in corporate modern: teak furniture, upholstered in shades of leather, a patterned gray carpet, abstract paintings, and a young and lovely receptionist who took his name and told him to sit. Although it was the stroke of the appointed time, Karp knew he was in for a wait at least of fifteen minutes. He read the new Sports Illustrated. Another plus: Bloom kept all his office magazines up to date.
Called in at last to Bloom’s office, Karp was surprised to see another man seated in one of Bloom’s maroon leather side chairs. Karp recognized him as Kevin McHugh, the director of Bloom’s public affairs office.
Karp was gestured into another chair, and Bloom gave him one of his patent toothy false smiles and took up some minutes with jocose small talk. Bloom had the perfect teeth and the perfect, slightly tanned skin of the extremely wealthy. He had large, moist muddy eyes, a full mouth and a thin, prominent nose. His hair was light brown and carefully razor-cut. He was near fifty but looked younger, like the anchorman on a suburban TV station.
“So this is Mrs. Karp’s last day on the job,” said Bloom. “I trust her unit won’t suffer from it.”
After taking a brief moment to figure out who “Mrs. Karp” was, Karp said, “Luisa Beckett’s in charge while Ms. Ciampi’s out.”
“That little colored girl?”
“She’s a fine attorney,” Karp said flatly, amusing himself by imagining what the feminist typhoon that was Luisa Beckett would have done at hearing herself so described.
Bloom grunted noncommittally and said, “I’ve asked Kevin to sit in here because I’m concerned with this damned Chelsea Ripper case.”
Karp glanced over at McHugh, a slight, genial man with a fringe of reddish hair decorating either side of a bald head. He wore thick tortoiseshell glasses and an owlish expression.
“The Phelps case,” said Karp. “But public affairs … ?”
“Yes,” said Bloom. “It’s a big case. There’s national press involved. The whole thing has to be very carefully managed. And on top of that … Kevin, you tell him.”
McHugh said, “The New York Times Magazine is doing a cover story on the office. We’ve been trying for this for months, and they finally rolled.”
Karp slipped into the usual pose of polite incomprehension he affected when publicity was the issue. “I don’t understand. What does that have to do with the Phelps case?”
Bloom looked at him in disbelieving pity. “What does it have to do … ? Christ, Butch, I said national press. We have to put this bastard away. What I want to know is, are we going to?”
Karp said, “Well, I could get my files up here if you want to discuss the legal situation in detail.”
“No, no, we don’t need the details,” said Bloom impatiently. “Just the payoff. We got to try this case and win it. Now, what I’m concerned with is this insanity business, the what-d’y-call-it—”
“The competency hearing,” Karp said helpfully.
“Yeah, the competency hearing. Are we going to have trouble with that?”
“Well, that’s up to the docs in Bellevue. If they declare him fit to stand trial, he will. If not, there’s not much we can do about it. It’s not like we think he’s malingering.”
“What do you mean?” asked Bloom.
“I mean he may well be a genuine nut. Look, the guy broke into three apartments that we know about and murdered and mutilated four women. He kept souvenirs too, which was how they caught him. The smell, I mean. So there’s no question about guilt right now, but only whether he’s capable of assisting at his own trial. Then, at trial, he could also plead insanity, and then the docs can argue about whether he knew what he did when he did it and that it was wrong.”
Bloom looked at him peculiarly and smiled. “There’s no way we could, say, sway their opinion? Or overturn it?”
Karp looked at him blankly. Bloom knew that Karp had, in fact, once overturned an insanity determination by a Bellevue panel, although in that case the doctor had fudged procedure and lied about it under oath, and in that case the defendant had been a cold-blooded killer who knew exactly what he was doing and didn’t care that it was wrong.
“Maybe we should wait for the competency decision before we think about that,” said Karp in as equable a fashion as he could manage.
Bloom stared at him, as if expecting some further reaction, and then said, “Yes. Well. I’m sure it will work out. I’m counting on you, Butch.” This with another flash of teeth.
“Thank you,” said Karp. “Is that it?”
Bloom signaled that it was indeed it by turning away and talking to McHugh about another subject. Karp got up and left, his leaving unremarked.
“What a pain in the ass!” exclaimed the younger of Marion Simmons’s two murderers as the two men watched the second day of television coverage of their handiwork. They were sitting in one bedroom of a small two-bedroom furnished apartment in Manhattan, Joey lying in bed and Carmine occupying a vinyl armchair. “Shit, that blow must’ve been worth fifty large, maybe seve
nty-five. And it was right there. Fuck!”
Carmine looked at his companion bleakly. It had been too much to hope that Joey would see what a blessing the discovery of the drug cache had been for the two of them. “Joey, it’s the best thing that could’ve happened.”
“What’re you talkin’ about?” said Joey, his exiguous forehead knotted in puzzlement.
“They found dope, which means they’re gonna be looking at that angle—the cops, I mean. That means they’ll stay out of our business, which is good because, like this situation here is unusual because, when you whack somebody, the smart thing is to clear out of town, which we can’t do, because of that little problem we got.”
“What, the truck driver? So we whack him too; so what?”
“No, listen to me, Joey. Try to think it through. Whacking a guy is not just you go up and stick a piece in his face and bang-bang. Not if you want to keep healthy.” He saw the boredom creeping into the other man’s face, but persevered. He had been told to show the kid the ropes, and he had never done less than his best at anything. “It’s like craftsmanship, Joey. There’s a right way and a wrong way. OK, we seen the wrong way, the last couple things we did. Now we’re gonna try the right way, which is we think it all through before we do the guy. Now, we checked the guy out—what do we know about him?”
“What’s to know? He’s an asshole, drives a truck.”
“Yeah, right, Joey. He works for Korvette’s out of a yard in Jamaica. He goes to a warehouse in Jersey City, picks up a trailer of appliances, TVs, and drops them off at different stores in the city and out on the island. Then he takes his tractor back to Jamaica, gets in his car and goes home to Hempstead. Anything pop up at you?”
“Yeah, you wanna write his life story before we hit him,” said Joey in a tone of affected weariness.
“No, Joey,” said Carmine patiently, “I mean what’s he doing in an alley in Queens in the middle of the night?”
“Sleeping? Jerking off? The fuck I know!”
Carmine ignored this and continued, “OK, there’s also a red Toyota and a panel truck in the lot. So I check, and the truck belongs to a plumbing supply in the shopping center, but nobody heard of the Toyota there. So the story is … hey, you following me, here?”
Joey had turned back to the TV, where a more interesting story was obviously being played out. Carmine walked over and snapped the TV off. Joey stared up at him in sullen irritation.
“The story, Joey, is that he had somebody in the back of the truck with him.”
“He did? Like a chick, you mean?”
Carmine forced an encouraging smile. “Yeah! Very good. He was meeting a girlfriend. She drove her little red car there and they went into the back. So that means the girlfriend saw it all too.”
Joey brightened. “So we gotta whack out the honey.”
“Yeah, but first we gotta find out who she is, which means we got to have a talk with what’s-his-name, Stanley Malinski. OK, let’s talk about the setup. The first thing is, you got to boost a car …”
Carmine kept talking for some time, the details of how they were going to lift and question and kill the truck driver, and more boring crap about protecting the deal and how they couldn’t use any local talent because nobody was supposed to learn that they were even in town before the deal was ready to go. Joey listened with half an ear. Whacking out a chick was what his mind was on, and the fringe benefits that would accrue to him personally when that went down.
CHAPTER THREE
The good thing about dying in Queens is that it’s a short drive to the cemetery. The borough boasts necropolises rivaling those of Thebes in population, if not sculptural grandeur, and has long been the ultimate destination for New Yorkers, many of whom, having sworn throughout life that they would not be caught dead there, eventually are.
The funeral of Marion Simmons, three days after the murder, was well attended, perhaps three hundred people in all, in a cortege of over a hundred vehicles, moving across Queens from a church in Jamaica to the cemetery in Woodside. The day obliged by coming on dark and chill, with a thin, intermittent rain,
There were any number of sporting celebrities at the graveside: the entire Hustlers team was there, gigantic and somber, like a grove of rain-washed poplars, and the other NBA teams had all sent representatives. There were families and friends beneath dripping umbrellas, a group of the merely curious, and an assortment of funeral buffs and sports fans and politicians. The press was out in force: on the access road overlooking the gravesite three TV vans were parked, and long-snouted cameras probed for the most affecting three-second spot.
Leading the mourners, flanked by Simmons’s mother and sister, was Bernie Nadleman, the Hustlers’ coach, a tall, thin, pleasantly horse-faced man, looking grim and drawn. Behind the coach walked a shorter, stouter man in his late fifties, in a fedora and black cashmere coat, whose lugubrious expression could not entirely hide his air of pugnacious self-importance. This was Howard Chaney, the owner of the Hustlers, whose major investment, boxed in mahogany, they were now preparing to lower beneath the earth.
The police were represented too, but more lightly than might have been expected for a murder of such magnitude. Besides the security detail, the photographers, and a few suits from Police Plaza, there was only one detective present, and he was drunk.
Harry Bello, in his tacky plastic raincoat and tan cap, swayed gently among the mourners. Just this once he had broken his resolve never to get loaded before going on the job. It was because of the cemetery. It reminded him of what had happened in the hallway on Lewis Avenue. And what had happened to his wife. Impossible to endure anywhere near straight up.
Still, he was there because the detectives in charge are supposed to attend the funerals of murder victims, and Bello was willing to at least go through the motions. There was always the chance that the murderer would come screaming through the crowd and throw himself or herself on the coffin in a paroxysm of remorse, or that the detective present would spot someone in the throng—someone, say, covered in dried blood, grinning and rubbing their hands in glee as the corpse was planted.
Bello’s dull eyes roved over the crowd, less from interest than from habit. They settled naturally on the intimate group around the actual grave: the mother, the sister, the coach, the team owner. Dimly he recalled seeing Chaney on television, angrily denying that Simmons had ever used dope. He had sounded as if he believed it. Bello wondered who had leaked the story. It could have been anybody from the police commissioner on down to the crime-lab technicians, for which reason every good detective kept a little bit of evidence private.
When Bello had been a good detective, when he had been with Jim Sturdevant, he had done the same. He shook himself to chase the memory away, but try as he might, he could not scrape from his mind the instincts and experience of over twenty years. There was something wrong with the group around the grave. Simmons had been unmarried, but there should have been a weeping young woman in the crowd. There was always a girlfriend. It was inconceivable that a man as attractive and wealthy as Marion Simmons had no romantic interest. That was one thing missing.
And there was something else. Bello had read the autopsy report. The two bullets to the brain were the immediate cause of death, but Simmons had been shot a third time. The pathologist had found another bullet wound in the chest—a mortal wound, although Simmons had remained alive until the shots to the head finally killed him. The third bullet had passed completely through Simmons’s body, and the evidence of clotting suggested that the shot to the chest had been fired more than an hour before the victim had died.
Bello stumbled back to his car. He had done his duty. There were no obvious murderers at the scene. He had no real hope of solving this one. The three days since the killing might as well have been three years. Nor did he really care.
He drove home to his tree-lined street in Corona, kicked irritably at the wet leaves clogging his unraked walk, and worked for the rest of the day on improvin
g his drunk. It took a good deal of drinking to make him forget, for a while, that although Simmons had been shot three times, only two shell cases had been found in the car.
Karp came awake all at once on the Saturday after the party, stiff and sweating, and with an oppressive feeling of having mislaid something important. It was a few minutes past five and still quite dark. He rolled over, closer to the heat of his wife, and sought sleep again, but failed.
He got out of bed, threw off the faded sweatshirt in which he slept and walked naked down the ladder that led to the sleeping platform. Karp and Marlene lived in a single room on Crosby Street in lower Manhattan, a room that was thirty-three feet wide and a hundred feet long. It was divided at odd intervals by partitions anchored on one wall and extending two-thirds of the way into the room, so that the loft was like a series of stage sets. Every surface was painted white, and the furnishings were a combination of junk-shop bohemia and the castoffs of a respectable Italian household, melded amusingly by Marlene’s lively imagination.
Karp stopped by the tiny closet that had served the employees of the former tenant (an electroplating concern) as a toilet, and then trudged down the length of the loft. He passed the kitchen and dining zone, the bathroom (containing the bathing pool that Marlene had converted from a huge rubber electroplating tank), the parlor zone, with its Tiffany lamp hanging under the skylight and its battered red velvet whorehouse sofa, and came at last to the gym.
This was a large, dusty area between the parlor and the small office that Marlene kept for herself beneath the windows at the far end of the loft. Lined with dusty cartons and crates containing the relics and memorabilia of both partners, it also housed their exercise equipment: Marlene’s speed bag and body bag, hanging from hooks, a set of rough shelves holding bats, gloves, balls, shoes, and similar impedimenta, and Karp’s rowing machine.
This was an elderly affair that Karp had picked up on Canal Street. It was made of dark, sweat-stained wood and blackened metal. He slipped on a pair of sweatpants, sat down in its seat and began to heave on the oars. He had been doing this nearly every morning for the past ten years, a simple, mindless, constant exercise that burned off energy without putting excessive pressure on his bad knee. After the first five minutes, this particular morning, he noticed something different, an uneasiness, a restlessness, a feeling of constraint. His body wanted something else.
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