Material Witness

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  Marlene grunted, moved the plastic bowl of duck sauce, which now held but a few brown smears, and rolled over on her side, facing away from Karp. “Meanwhile,” she said, “would you rub my lower back?”

  Carmine slammed down the phone in a rage. His boss was in a panic, and he had to fight to keep it from affecting his own equanimity. Carmine had warned him about this dumb deal a million times, and now that it had turned to shit, he, Carmine, was getting the blame. The worst thing was that there was nothing he could do to clean it up. He had hired a guy to watch the loft where the Ciampi woman lived, but she hadn’t been out alone for days. He would have to go in after her, and pretty soon too.

  “Hey, Marlene, is Butch there?” said Guma over the phone, without preamble.

  “No, he just went out to practice. What’s up?”

  “Well, he asked me to find out something and I did. You know those guys? In the picture—the torches from Philly?”

  “Yeah, what about them?”

  “OK, funny thing—Butch said, look out West, Phoenix, L.A. So I did, but the people I talked to, when I described these guys, I was saying, these guys burn stuff down. And I was getting nowhere. Finally, I remember this old boozer, Jack Santini, he used to be a jockey, hangs out at the White Rose near the Williamsburg Bridge. You know where it is?”

  “Yeah, I know,” said Marlene patiently.

  “Yeah, Jack used to be out there, L.A., Phoenix, Vegas. He always has a tan. Even in the winter in the City, he’s got a tan. Who knows how, maybe one of these sun-lamp places. He sure isn’t flying to the Bahamas. That’s actually how I remembered Jack, because of Butch saying these guys who’re after you, they both have tans, and in the picture too.

  “And I remember he was connected, sort of. That’s actually why he stopped riding. Racing commissions don’t like jockeys that’re connected. I figure he might know a West Coast wise guy. So I go in there this afternoon and there he is, Jack Santini. I buy him a bump, a couple, we bullshit awhile, and then I pull out the picture. Jesus, the guy gets pale, even with the tan.

  “He says, ‘Freshie the Fish.’ He got his finger on the driver, the big guy with the cigar.”

  “Freshie the Fish? Goom, who the fuck …”

  “Hold on, I’m coming to that. OK, Jack clams up. I never saw anybody clam up so fast. He doesn’t want anything to do with talking about this guy in the picture. The other guy he doesn’t know. OK, no dice there. So I go back to the office and I call a guy I know in rackets at the Bureau, and he knows a guy in L.A. and he makes a call, and to make a long story short, I’m on the line with a guy in the L.A. office.

  “So, yeah, he knows who Freshie the Fish is. It turns out he’s Carmine Fraschetti. He works for Jimmy Tona in L.A. You know who Jimmy Tona is, don’t you?”

  “Personally, I’ve never dated him, but I’ve heard the name. Some big L.A. capo, no? So this Fraschetti burns down buildings for Tona?”

  “No, no, Marlene, that’s the point! I was looking for pro torches, or for the kind of guy they would send to torch a building, which is why I didn’t turn up the Fish. Not that I would swear Fraschetti never torched a building, but that’s not what he does. He’s Tona’s main guy. He’s what they call a mechanic.”

  “A shooter?”

  “Among other things. He makes sure things go the way they’re supposed to. He fixes things—a mechanic, get it? The Bureau guy was very interested to hear they were in town.”

  “The other guy is the torch?”

  “Marlene, forget torches. These guys didn’t fly across the country to burn down buildings. Tona can get that done with a phone call. Oh, yeah, the Bureau guy says the other one sounds like Joey Castello, a rising dirtbag, just got out of Folsom, copped to manslaughter. Another shooter. The Bureau guy wanted to know what was going on. I honestly didn’t know what to tell him. What the fuck is going on, Champ?”

  “Hey, Goom, cross my heart, all we got are theories. Butch was just saying this morning, we need these guys. Maybe they came to do Simmons, and they did the buildings as a favor. Or the other way around.”

  “Yeah, well, in the meantime,” said Guma, “I drew up a couple of warrants for these scumbags on the Simmons thing and put their faces out. Maybe we’ll get lucky.” He paused, then added, “One thing, Marlene, don’t fuck anymore with these two, understand? They’re the worst.”

  Harry Bello sat in the driver’s seat of a derelict Dodge van parked on 33rd Street in Long Island City, sipping black coffee and looking out at the frosty night. It had not taken him long to set up the stake-out, since he was its only participant. This was against regulations and good procedure, but Bello could not have cared less. If he caught the arsonists that was all right, and if they killed him, that was all right too. In any event, he did not trust his command in the NYPD. Anyone who had assigned the drunk Bello to catch a criminal did not want the criminal caught.

  Bello thought he had a fair chance of bringing it off. He had checked out the two threatened buildings earlier, to familiarize himself with the layout of the basement, which is where he guessed they would start their fires. The other fires had been set in basements, using lots of gasoline and simple timing devices, and Bello had boundless faith in the unimaginativeness of professional criminals. All he had to do was wait for their arrival, follow them into the building they chose and collar them in the act. Or get shot.

  He had already spent one full day and night watching. His presence had excited no attention. In that neighborhood, whole families might live for weeks in abandoned vehicles. He had prepared expertly for the stake-out: a dozen hero sandwiches, a gallon of coffee in a picnic jug, a can to pee in. He was dressed in two sets of long underwear, a sweater, ski hat and ski socks of heavy wool, and over all, a black snowmobile suit and fleece-lined boots.

  He rarely slept much anymore, not since giving up the booze, so this duty was, in a sense, ideal. They had explained to him at the hospital that detox took awhile, that he would be irritable and confused for some time. They told him to go to meetings and take it one day at a time. He was willing to do that, as long as there weren’t that many days in all. For some reason he had fixed on Marlene Ciampi as a reason not to drink himself to death, and had decided to risk some mutt’s gun as a way out. It appealed to his sense of order. After all, it should have been him that got it instead of Jim Sturdevant.

  Bello drifted in and out of a light sleep, waking whenever a car approached. At about three A.M. he came fully awake to the noise of a car door slamming. He looked out and saw two men standing by a dark, new Chevy. They took some equipment out of the car’s trunk and marched into one of the buildings on the left, blithely, like Fuller brush men.

  He stuck a portable cop radio and two sets of handcuffs in the convenient pockets of his snowmobile suit and picked up a six-cell flashlight and an Ithaca Model 37 12-gauge pump shotgun. He jacked a 00 buckshot shell into the breech. Then he followed the two into the building. He waited a few minutes in the dark trash-filled lobby, listening, and was rewarded by a faint scraping clank coming from below his feet. Men at work.

  He walked down the stairs to the basement. The fire door had been wedged open, revealing a long hallway that ran the length of the building. He could see the moving beams of flashlights coming from a storeroom whose open door gave on the hallway. The air stank of gasoline.

  The faint spilled light from the arsonists’ flashlights was sufficient to lead him swiftly down the hall to where they were hard at work, pouring gas and arranging their fusing. Standing in the doorway, he flicked his own flashlight on and said, “Police,” in a conversational tone.

  They stared up at him in stunned surprise, but their surprise was nothing to Bello’s. In the cold glare of the flashlight it was perfectly obvious that the two men were not the ones who had been following Marlene Ciampi.

  The next morning Bello called Marlene a little past dawn, said he had caught the arsonists during the night and was coming over. Marlene had mumbled something and f
allen back into dreamland. Fortunately, ten minutes later the lift engine started up. Even without the alarm bell it was enough to banish sleep, for Marlene. Karp grunted and piled more pillows on his head.

  She threw on his stained blue robe over her nightgown and stepped into pink fuzzy slippers shaped like kittens, a present from the secretaries. After six months in the loft they were encrusted with filth, like two little road kills clinging to her ankles. Fuck cleaning up, she thought; Bello was like family—I know he’s a drunk, he knows I’m a slob.

  Bello came in, sat at the round table, and accepted a cup of Medaglia D’Oro. “Congratulations, Harry,” said Marlene. “How did it go down?”

  “No problem. I braced them in the act and they gave it up. Nonviolent types.”

  “Nonviolent! Harry, I talked to Guma the other day, and he told me these guys were heavy hitters out of L.A.” She told him essentially what Guma had told her.

  Bello shook his head and brought an envelope out of his jacket pocket. “We got a problem here, Marlene.” He placed her original Polaroid beside two standard I.D. shots of the men he had captured.

  “We got one beefy older guy and one younger round-faced guy with more hair in both sets, but it’s not the same two guys. My guys are Harry Ditmars and Jack DiBello. They’re from Philly like we suspected, pros; the cops down there know them pretty well.”

  Marlene studied the photos, trying to cope with this new information. She drank more bitter coffee, but her mind was still half asleep. Obviously, Guma’s discovery made a lot more sense now. But why in hell should two West Coast shooters come to … it suddenly clicked, and she stared at Harry, her eyes wide. “That bitch lied to me!”

  “The sister,” said Bello, instantly sorting out the various bitches in the case, half a step ahead as usual.

  “Give me ten minutes,” said Marlene, “we’re going to Brooklyn.”

  Splash, brush, pee, jeans, sweater, boots, maxi-coat, hat, scribble note for Karp on three pages of yellow bond, out the door. Ten minutes.

  The day was dark, the sky like an army of dust bunnies. She said, “We could have a white Christmas.” Bello grunted noncommittally and opened the car door for her.

  She was excited and angry at the same time. As they drove toward the bridge, she began to talk. “It’s my problem and I can’t do anything about it, because it’s also my big advantage. I mean, sympathy for women. I could get past it with Mackey but not with Leona. I kept thinking about her mother and that family, what it must have been like growing up with a superstar brother. I never found out about the father, but I didn’t see any pictures in the house. Maybe he died, maybe he split. The mother was focused on Marion. Or that’s what Leona thought. I forgot she was a junkie, and junkies lie even if they don’t have to.

  “And then I was so full of myself for doing that deal with Doone. Marlene gets in where angels fear to tread. And this whole thing has been so complicated. You know, we all hate routine and procedure. Butch and I were just talking about that, but it has a point. The good cop needs the bad cop. God, I feel so dumb!”

  She looked at Harry’s gray face. His eyes flicked and met hers and then went back to the road. The millions were pouring into the City, but there was little traffic going out. He said, “It happens. This case was fucked from the beginning. We were scuffling. I think you did real good.”

  “Yeah, well, we’ll see how it comes out,” said Marlene grimly. “Speaking of fucked, how did the booking go? You get any trouble from the suits on it?”

  A tiny smile appeared on Bello’s face. “No. Everybody was real happy. Or faking it pretty well. Surprised too. Even the A.D.A., Thelmann. He told me he was in complete charge of every aspect of the case, as he put it, the dumb fuck! I think it’s ass-covering time. From now on, everybody wants to be on record that they’re playing by the book.”

  “Did your guys talk yet?”

  “They don’t know nothing. The usual. A phone call. Envelopes full of cash from somebody in Philly they never seen before. They’ll cop and do ten or so. They never heard of Simmons either, and they say they have alibis for the night of.”

  “Because it was Guma’s guys that did Simmons. Guys from L.A., from Jimmy Tona’s operation. Butch found out that Chaney was running black money through a hair-goods outfit in L.A. When you caught the arsonists and we realized that we were dealing with two separate sets of hoods, I made the L.A. connection. Butch didn’t think that Simmons was killed because of the real estate thing. This tends to confirm it. Something else is going on.”

  “What?”

  “Butch thinks it’s sports betting. I’m not sure, but I’m sure Leona knows,” said Marlene.

  They were driving east on Fulton, through Bed-Stuy. Bello slowed the car and made a turn and brought it to a double-parked stop in front of a dingy brownstone. “What’s this?” Marlene asked.

  “This is where it happened. That building, 321 Lewis. Where Jim died. It’s funny, a month ago you could’ve broken my arms, I wouldn’t have come by here, and now here I am.”

  “Maybe you’re over it,” she said.

  He gave her a disbelieving look. “I’ll never get over it. It’s not the kind of thing you get over. What it is, is I still want to die, but I don’t want to kill myself. I’m not scared anymore, just empty.”

  “They say that’s a phase you go through.”

  Bello sniffed. “Yeah, they say that. But they weren’t there. You want to hear how it went down? I never told anybody.”

  “Sure, if you want to tell me.”

  Bello inhaled a huge volume of air through his nose and let it out with a whoosh through his mouth, as if contemplating a dive through deep water. “I was in the bag. This was when Doris was real bad. She was down to ninety-five pounds and crying all the time. I had her at home with a nurse. I couldn’t stand it, so I was sucking it down pretty good. Jim was covering for me.

  “So we pulled up here, right where we are now. I was paralyzed. Jim cracks some line and goes in by himself. We weren’t expecting anything—just picking up this old lady who got herself mugged. The shots snapped me out of it. Two shots. A minute later, this black kid comes running out of the building, got a light blue sweatshirt on.

  “I run into the building and there’s Jim, shot in the head. My brain shuts down right there. All I can think of is, if they find out I let Jim go in there alone and let the killer run right past me while I’m drunk, I’m off the force. I was thinking of Doris, how the fuck am I gonna pay for the treatment if I’m off the force? The benefits and all. That’s what I’m thinking, and Jim’s brains are all over my hands. It shows you …

  “So I lie. I say I was there. I say I saw the guy. So, you know what happens when a cop gets it. We roust every black male between twelve and forty years old in a ten-block area. I go to lineups, I look in mug books. He’s not there, I say, like I would know him if he was sitting on my lap.

  “This is going on while Doris is dying, so you can imagine. I went a little crazy, working the street eighteen hours and then going home and sitting up all night with her. OK, the payoff. I’m on the street one day and I see a kid in a blue sweatshirt, light blue, the same color. I follow him, I find out who he is, where he lives. The kid’s got a sheet; he’s not a choirboy.

  “So I grab him, I drag him into an alley. I work him over pretty good, and the more I pound him, the more he’s yelling he didn’t do it. I must have lost my mind. The kid rolls over and puts his hand inside his pants. Before I know it, the kid’s dead there, I got my gun in my hand. He didn’t have anything on him. I faked it up with a drop gun. Self-defense.

  “There was a stink about it, but they covered it. The kid’s no choirboy, like I said. Of course, I got no way of knowing he shot Jim Sturdevant either. They moved me out of Brooklyn, though. Doris passed on two days after that. End of story.” He looked at her, but whether it was for approval or condemnation she could not tell. She said, “That’s a bad story, Harry. It happened to me, I’d get drunk too
.”

  “But you wouldn’t stay drunk,” he said.

  “Come on, Harry, what do I look like?” replied Marlene with some heat. “You want me to tell you you’re damned? Or saved? Am I wearing a black suit and a collar? All I can say is, I care about you, like you are now. You’re a good guy and a great cop. I hope you stay sober. When we get to Heaven we’ll find out what it all meant. Meanwhile, let’s see Mr. Doone.”

  Doone’s house was much as Marlene recalled it—the beat of reggae, the smells, the heavy reek of marijuana, cries of children—although in early morning it was less exotic, less threatening. The furniture and the costumes of Doone’s retainers seemed more garish, almost tatty, like the costumes and sets of a play when the overhead work lights are turned on. The big yellow man who answered the door led them silently to a brightly lit dining room.

  John Doone was having breakfast (grapefruit; a mash of scrambled eggs, dried fish, rice, and pepper sauce; fried bananas; coffee) dressed in a red brocade robe that sucked all the depth from the planes of his face, making him look like a black paper silhouette. He was not pleased to see Babylon at break of day. Marlene and Bello took chairs, uninvited.

  “Is what unu want from me now, gal?” Doone growled. “De deal all done between we.”

  “Not quite, John,” said Marlene. “Things have changed. We know who killed Leona’s brother now, and we know why—really why—not what we thought before. Leona knew too, all the time, and she lied about it.”

  Doone narrowed his eyes and scowled. “Is what all dis to me?”

  “If I’m right, Leona is an accessory to murder. She lied to me and she lied to you. She said she was through with Doobie Wallace, the ball player. That’s not true. She’s protecting him.