Material Witness

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  Wordlessly, Harry led them through a dark hallway to the sunporch at the back of the house, and the three of them sat down in dusty rattan armchairs upholstered in green and purple flowered cotton.

  The room might have been cheerful once, the brightest room in the house, looking out at a little garden full of flowers. Now, with the steely light of a late November afternoon coming in over a plot of wet and ragged weeds, it was funereal, a tone augmented by the dozens of dead and shriveled potted plants on shelves and in hanging baskets. There was a clock in the shape of a comical cat on the wall. Still stupidly grinning, it had stopped, its pendulum tail covered in dust. Marlene caught Bello staring at her in an odd way. It’s her chair I’m sitting in, she thought.

  Nervous small talk. How ya doin’. Fine. How ya doin’. Lies. Balducci was embarrassed and regretted that he had agreed to bring Marlene here. Bello wasn’t a close friend; they had never even worked in the same borough. But he was a cop and Balducci could not help feeling the reflected shame.

  Marlene described her interest in the Simmons case, and Karp’s connection with the Hustlers. She started asking basic questions about his progress. She was amazed that Bello didn’t object to this amateur meddling by a Manhattan A.D.A., as he should have, as any normal cop would have. Information was gold; you didn’t give unless you got some back or unless you had to, and often not even then. More than the dead plants, it confirmed that his spirit was broken.

  And there wasn’t much information. Bello had examined the crime scene. He had not attended the autopsy, but he had looked at the M.E.’s report, he thought. He had talked to Nadleman, the coach, and to Marva Simmons, the dead man’s mother. He had attended the funeral.

  He hadn’t talked to any member of the team, or any other of Simmons’s relatives, or checked out the drug lead with Narcotics, or ordered a canvass of the neighborhood around the parking lot where Simmons’s car had been found, to see if anyone had seen anything that night. Worst of all, it turned out he had made no effort to find how Marion Simmons had spent the last twenty-four hours of his life.

  This was too much for Marlene’s patience. “Harry,” she said. “What’s going on? You want to find this guy or not? For chrissakes, they teach little kids in school to check out the vic’s movements the previous day. It’s like page three in the crime-stopper’s handbook—”

  “Marlene …” Balducci warned.

  She ignored him. “So what is it? You think that it’s a professional hit and it’s not worth the trouble? Because you sure as shit haven’t taken any.”

  Harry just looked at her, as if she were talking about the weather on Mars, something unconnected to him and far away. Marlene stood up abruptly, or as abruptly as she could manage in her condition. Harry Bello started at the movement, like a sparrow beneath a moving shadow.

  She said, “Let’s get out of here, Pete. This is horse-shit.” And then to Bello, “Look here, boss—you had some rough hits, fine! You want to drown your sorrows—great! But do it off the job, OK? Maybe you have to be drunk, but you don’t have to be a clown too.”

  That was stupid, Marlene, she thought as she waited for Balducci to emerge from the little house. It was a post-war brick cottage with peeling white trim, not unlike the one she had grown up in, not five miles from here. Vet housing. No blue madonna in the tiny front yard, though; a clogged bird bath instead, with a tarnished mirror ball in it.

  Stupid to get angry like that. She should have worked him, coaxed. Even blind drunk he should have absorbed more than he had apparently picked up. She knew how to work a lush. The truth was, she had been oppressed by his passivity and silence. It frightened her too. On the ride over, Balducci had described some of Bello’s exploits, feats of detection and courage that had become famous throughout the Department. If a guy like that could go down the tube, then nobody was safe. Not even Marlene her own self.

  The raw wind chased her into Balducci’s car. She wished she still carried cigarettes. She rummaged in Balducci’s glove compartment and found an open six-pack of Roi-Tans. She lit one on the car lighter and puffed, filling the car with ashy smoke, like the color of the sky above Queens.

  Balducci got into the car after a while, frowned at her, and when she knotted her brows and frowned back, he laughed out loud.

  “I can’t take you anywhere,” he said. “Enjoying my cigar?”

  “I prefer Macanudos.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m on a pension. You know, kid, you were way out of line back there.”

  She nodded and blew a plume of smoke. “Agreed. I embarrassed you and I’m sorry. Blame it on my delicate condition.”

  “On the other hand, a little good-cop, bad-cop never hurts if you’re trying to promote cooperation. Give me one of those cigars.”

  While Balducci lit up Marlene said, “He talked to you after I left?”

  “Yeah. It’ll take a lot more booze to turn Harry Bello into a complete fuck-up.”

  “So give already!”

  “First of all, Harry’s pretty sure Simmons didn’t drive the car to Queens. He thinks the guy was shot someplace else, driven to the lot, placed behind the wheel and finished off with two in the head.”

  “Why does he think that?”

  “Because Simmons was shot once through the lung before he was put in the car, and then twice through the head. He only found two casings in the car; that’s what got him suspicious in the first place. Also, there’s an exit wound in his back and no marks on the seat and no slug from that wound. That confirms it. Another thing: no prints on the steering wheel. It was wiped. As was the driver’s door handle. Simmons was put in the car. Oh, yeah, and no coke in the kid at all.”

  “Interesting. So how come he didn’t bust a gut trying to find out where the vic took the first shot?”

  Balducci shrugged and blew a long stream of smoke, like a visible sigh. “Ran out of steam, I guess. Harry is not hitting on all eight lately, as you saw.”

  “Yeah. Is that it?”

  “No, something else. A little vague here. Harry says he was checking out the photographs they always take of the funeral. He says he was wondering why there wasn’t a girlfriend or two among the chief mourners. An attractive, famous, rich, unmarried guy should have a girl, right? Anyway, in the back of the crowd there’s a white woman nobody seems to recognize.”

  “Whoopee!” yelled Marlene. “A missing bullet. A mysterious woman! Am I in heaven or what?”

  “I’m taking you home,” said Balducci. “You should start making dinner for your husband.”

  Marlene ignored the avuncular advice. “You come too, Peter. We need to get our heads together and figure out how we’re going to approach this case.”

  “Again with the ‘we,’ “ he said. “I don’t like that, Marlene.”

  “Of course you do. You’re bored shitless sitting around the house, getting in Marie’s way. This’ll make a new man out of you.”

  “It’ll kill me, is what it’ll do,” said Balducci, trying to be glum and failing.

  “Nonsense, you’ll love it,” she said.

  Francine Del Fazio, a homemaker on the census forms, had been a semi-pro prostitute for nearly five years, working out of several bars in Bayside, although she would have been appalled and insulted had anyone actually called her a whore. She had a nice little bungalow on a quiet street in Little Neck, a car of her own, and a husband who left her more or less alone, didn’t drink and made a nice living. Queens paradise, but …

  Of course, she didn’t have any kids, which was the main problem. Frankie wanted to adopt, but she thought, The hell with it, I’m gonna bust my hump wiping up somebody else’s kid’s shit, and that idea had been quietly dropped.

  So, time on her hands. She was thirty-two and bored out of her mind. He made enough so she didn’t have to take a dumb factory or clerk job, but not enough so she could buy anything really nice. She was thirty-two, and the lines were starting to bite around the eyes and the corners of her mouth. Of course, she still had
those nice tits, and she had kept her weight down, and she took good care of herself. Still, it made her cry sometimes, early in the morning, looking in the mirror.

  On the other hand, she was not one to brood, nor was she interested in making a break from Frankie. Although the cool hood with the lilac Bel-Air and the duck’s-ass haircut that she had loved and married out of high school had metamorphosed into a jowly, pear-shaped machinist who fell asleep in a lounger in front of the TV every night, being married gave her a certain status. Her family, her friends, would not comprehend leaving a good provider because of … what? It wasn’t rough, she couldn’t complain, it was just zero, and it was hard to get up and go from one zero to what figured to be another zero, where she would also have to bust her ass paying the bills.

  Francine, in any case, was too shrewd for that. There were no flies on little Francine, her mother had declared from her early childhood.

  It had started with a guy in a bar; he ran a carpet-cleaning operation, nice car, dressed sharp. A hot affair, Tuesdays and Fridays, for a year. Then the guy kissed her off—his wife was getting suspicious, he had kids. She understood, and to tell the truth, she had been getting a little dragged behind the whole thing too—it had started to feel like being married to two guys.

  But, to her astonishment and delight, he had made her a parting guilt offering, a twenty-four-karat gold bracelet with a little diamond in it. She had pawned it for four hundred and fifty dollars the next day, and it had struck her forcibly that there was no need to go through the whole year-long song and dance, the bitching and the boredom, before getting the little giftie at the end. You could shorten the whole process considerably.

  There were rules, she told herself, that marked a distinction between what she was doing and the girls did out on the stroll. One guy, no, make that two guys, or at any rate never more than three or four guys on the string at any one time. No cash money, just little gifts, either real jewelry or unopened and, hence, exchangeable, brand-name luxury goods.

  She learned not actually to ask for these things, but how to make them appear without asking. Men were schmucks after all. She was clearing eight hundred, twelve hundred a month at the end of her third year.

  Stan Malinski was a recent conquest; she’d known him for around three weeks. He had a free hand with large bottles of imported perfume, which he got from a friend who drove for Bergdorf’s. She’d been a little uneasy about doing it in the sleeper of the truck, but after a while she got into the kinkiness of it. Thrills were, after all, part of the secret life.

  That night when they had heard the cars coming into the alley, Stan had frozen in mid-screw and put his face to the truck window. He was paranoid about the possibility that his wife might hire a private detective to follow him around. When he saw the guy walking over, he had jumped back into the sleeper and put his hand over her mouth; that had pissed her off, like she was going to yell and attract attention. When the guy climbed down from the step and walked away, they had relaxed and had a giggle.

  Her heart almost stopped when they heard the two booming reports. OK, somebody had whacked a guy out. It didn’t concern them, and they sure as hell were not going to call the cops. In fact, she hadn’t seen anything, having spent the whole episode flat on her back. But Stan was practically gibbering with fear. She calmed him down a little, but not nearly enough to get him back in the saddle. They waited until the killers had driven off and then separated, she driving away in her Toyota and figuring that she’d never hear from old Stan again.

  And she hadn’t, and hadn’t thought about him at all for the next two days, although she had followed avidly the press coverage on the Simmons murder, and then she had seen the little two-inch piece in Newsday about the cops finding his body. She hadn’t known Stan Malinski very well, but she was a good judge of human nature and she didn’t figure him as somebody who would blow his own brains out.

  She surprised herself that she was not in terror, that she was thinking calmly and rationally about the murder of an acquaintance by professional hit men (for what else could they be?) and about the possibility that they might be interested in her.

  The good news was that they hadn’t seen her. They might not even know she had been there, unless Stan had volunteered the information, and why should he have? Even if he had, he hadn’t known her last name, or her address, and there were a lot of Francines in New York. There was the car—they might have noticed that. It might be wise to get rid of it, on the off chance, and she had enough stashed away to get another car, a better one, maybe a late-model T-bird.

  As she thought it through, there seemed no need to get all that excited—yet. They were just men, after all, and she hadn’t met one so far that she couldn’t outsmart.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “So, are you mad at me?” asked Marlene, the first words out of her mouth after Balducci had gone.

  “Why?” asked Karp as he began clearing the table. “Am I showing anger or resentment? Being surly?”

  “No, but I thought you might be hiding deep reservoirs of rage that might burst forth when a girl least expects.”

  He smiled benignly at her and stacked dishes. “Well, now that you mention it, when you walked in with Balducci and it became clear that not only were you messing with this case in a way I thought we had agreed you weren’t going to, but also that you had roped Peter into it, without discussing it with me, yes, I did feel a flash of red-hot fury.”

  She said, “Which, however, passed away because of the terrific dinner I whipped up. No, don’t scrub out the pot, let it soak; I’ll take care of it tomorrow.”

  “Yes,” Karp agreed, “the dinner was great, but the real reason was that it suddenly occurred to me that you were going to do what you were going to do and there wasn’t anything I could really do about it.” He put down his sponge and turned away from the sink, looking straight at her.

  “And then I thought about my dad. He liked things done his way too. Gave my mom hell when she didn’t toe the line. I’m starting to recall that he might have popped her a time or two. He sure had a heavy hand with the kids. In any case, what happened was that she became a sneak, and she got me to be a sneak’s helper. Little lies about where she was and what she had bought and how much it cost.

  “I’ve just started to remember a lot of stuff like that. And so I started thinking maybe I was a lot more like him than I wanted to be, as far as being king shit went, and that you were coming back at me in the same way—getting into sneakiness. And I didn’t like it.”

  She stared at him in happy amazement. “God, Butch! Insights flow out of you as from Montaigne. I’m astounded. And delighted. I thought we were in for a screaming match.”

  “If you thought that, why did you do it? Maybe you like screaming matches?”

  “There’s also such a thing as excessive insight, Dr. Freud,” she sniffed. “What ever happened to the simple jock I married?”

  “He has become a complicated jock,” said Karp. “I guess I never had time to think about all this stuff when I was working at the D.A. Workahol is a great drug. Since I quit, and since I started playing ball again, I’ve had more time to … it’s not just thinking. My head feels like an empty balloon. All that space that used to be full of schedules and hassles and preparing cases, it’s working on life. People v. Karp.”

  “I can live with that,” said his wife, and gave him a hug, which turned into a longish smooch among the steaming dishes.

  Later that evening, Nadleman called and told Karp that Chaney had agreed to let him play.

  “I sold it as a gimmick,” Nadleman said.

  “A gimmick?”

  “Yeah, I said the town is full of guys who played some college ball and who think they could have played in the NBA if they just had the chance. I said you’d be a draw for those guys, and he bought it. Also, I said I was going to keep James in the power slot and that we didn’t need a franchise player, which meant our replacement could be a twelfth man, and that you were th
e cheapest twelfth man we were likely to get. Howard loves cheap.”

  “Stop with the flattery, Bernie, I’m blushing all over. OK, I’m a gimmick. What about the investigation part?”

  “Uh-uh. That’s between you and me.”

  “Oh?”

  A pause on the line. “Yeah, well, in the first place, Howard is not what you would call tight with information. He’s got a mouth on him, so if he’s in on it, it’s all over town, which probably would not help our game all that much. Also … I get the feeling that he would like to put this Marion thing way behind him.”

  Again, that odd tone. Karp decided to push it a little.

  “Bernie, do you mean he’s just cutting his loss like a businessman, or something else? Like he knows something about the hit?”

  Nadleman laughed uneasily. “No, the businessman thing. Howard doesn’t like unpleasant stuff. Speaking of which, he said he wants you on ten-day contracts, the usual minimum. We’ll renew as needed. I assume that’s OK.”

  “Let me get this straight,” said Karp. “You’re gonna pay me to play basketball? What’s the usual minimum?”

  Nadleman laughed. “It’s 2,700 bucks for the ten weeks.”

  “You mean $270 a week?”

  “No, dummy, $2,700 a week, each week.”

  “Holy shit!” said Karp with fervor.

  “Welcome to the big time, sport,” said Nadleman. “There’s a press conference at eleven at the Hilton; he wants you there. Practice starts at three, at Memorial.”

  Karp had not been treated like a piece of meat since the age of nineteen, and he had never been treated as a clown. Chaney was master of ceremonies for the circus. He was wearing a double-breasted blue blazer with a yacht club crest on the pocket, over a white shirt and a yellow spotted tie. His face was ruddy under a five o’clock shadow of Nixonian density, and he had a fleshy nose and prominent, almost floppy ears. A memorable face, and no stranger to the press and cameras.