Which was why he was now standing alone in front of the door to an apartment in Washington Heights, on his own time, preparing to brace the woman, Concepción Erbes, and find out whether she was the source of the threatening notes or knew who was. Netski knew from looking over the jail’s phone records that Jesus Obregon had made numerous calls to this apartment. He had interviewed Connie Erbes several times way back when the case was fresh, and had found her in possession of only limited gun-moll knowledge of the criminal doings of her pals (although she had confirmed their phony story in every particular, sad to say), but he had to start someplace, and there were all those calls.
He knocked on the door. Some seconds later it was flung wide, not by Connie but by a thin young man who was snarling, “Where the fuck you been …” as he opened the door and stopped, scowling, when he saw that the person at the door was not the one he had anticipated.
Netski flashed his shield. “I want to talk to Connie Erbes,” he said, looking this character over. He was dressed in white jeans and socks, and had a wide bandage wrapped low around his bare abdomen. There was a spot of brownish red about the size of a nickel soaking through just over the hipbone.
“She ain’t here,” said the young man, starting to close the door.
“Know where I could find her?” asked Netski, moving his foot and his body forward.
“No,” said the young man, and Netski said, “Mind if I come in and wait?” clearly a rhetorical question, since he had already pushed his wide shoulders and solid hips through the door. Netski was a big guy, well over two hundred pounds. He had a meat-slab face, graying blond hair, and pale eyes. These took in the immediate scene in the apartment’s living room. Some smashed furniture. Stacks of take-out containers on the coffee table. Wads of bloody dressings strewn around. An assemblage of first-aid supplies—antiseptic, bandages, gauze pads, tape, scissors.
“Looks like you got hurt, fella,” said Netski. “How’d it happen?”
“At work. Is construction job. I fell on a nail.”
“Oh, yeah? Where was that? I mean, what job?”
“Some job. Downtown.”
“Uh-huh. What’s your name, fella?”
“Fernando Zedillo.”
“And what’re you doing here, Paco? I mean, excuse me, but you don’t look like you work much construction. You keeping the old bed warm for Obregon? A little snuggle with Connie while the big man’s in the calaboza? I tell you what, Paco, let’s you and me take a tour of this crib, see what we can find, all right?”
Netski gestured to the hallway that led from the living room. The young man hesitated a moment and then walked off docilely enough. The first door led to the kitchen—dirty but otherwise innocent. The next door led to a bedroom.
Netski had no sense of danger. He was there to interview a woman; the real bad guys were in jail; there was this pretty boy who looked like maybe somebody stuck him, which in Netski’s experience was an occupational hazard of pretty boys.
So he didn’t have his gun out, he didn’t have his hands on the kid, he didn’t kick the doors open, holding the kid in front of him like a shield, which is what he would have done had he had any sense of danger.
The kid walked into the bedroom and over to the bed, which was unmade, and picked up a pillow. Netski just had time to take in what else was in the room, in the corners, stacked, the machine guns, the rocket launchers, the magazines, the little egg pile of hand grenades, and time to feel the first thrill of fear and reach for his pistol, but not enough time to do anything useful before El Chivato shot him three times in the chest through the pillow.
Marlene came back to the loft shortly before eleven on Saturday morning, having shepherded Joan Savitch through criminal justice system hell, and then visited Mattie Duran in the hospital. Of the two women, Marlene thought that Mattie would recover sooner, despite having taken 9mm rounds through thigh and collarbone.
The Savitch business had, fortunately, been a perfectly straightforward case. Gerald Savitch, ex-husband of Ms. Savitch, having been released from prison the day before, had used a wrecking bar to break into Ms. Savitch’s apartment, thus gaining entry illegally during the hours of the night, upon the discovery of which Ms. Savitch had confronted him and ordered him to leave, whereupon, he refusing and advancing toward her in a menacing fashion with the wrecking bar, and she in fear of her life or grievous bodily harm, she had fired five .38-caliber hollow-points into his chest, killing him instantly. Marlene had managed to get the woman released on her own recognizance even given the charge of homicide, the authorities being fairly sympathetic to householders who shoot guys who break in at night. Savitch would have to appear before a grand jury at some future time and explain the death, but Marlene had little doubt that the jury would find the shooting justifiable homicide and no crime.
Yes, the legal part was dandy. What Marlene was dragging behind her like a sack of dead mackerel as she entered her home was the other stuff that always surrounded death by violence, especially death by violence by loved ones, especially messy death by violence by loved ones, with big hollow-point wounds, not as seen on the TV, blowing great gouts of estranged-Dad flesh over the tweed couch and the framed picture of the kids and the nice blue shag rug, and the blood actually gurgling and hissing out of the blown aorta, another thing (besides, of course, the smell) that the media are reluctant to depict, blood mist filling the air and spraying a fine carmine airbrush-like pattern over the table and the chairs and the ceiling, and over Mom with the smoking gun and the two little boys, seven and ten, standing there, watching.
And, inevitably, the various horrified feelings, the real, the ancient gut-ripping feelings, which turn out to be not at all ameliorated by all the hundreds or thousands of dramatized killings we have all seen, but are just as vivid as they were the day Clytemnestra whacked Agamemnon, king of men, those feelings, after taking some twisting caroms around the psyche of the formerly abused lady, popped out at—who else?—the author of the event, the supplier of the deadly weapon, the enabler, Marlene herself. And Marlene had to take it, the blame, the rage, the shame, the horror, the dumping, because what could she say? Congratulations? Ding-dong, the witch is dead?
Baby giggles and a peculiar shuffling sound greeted her as she entered the loft. Her husband had brought out a four-foot-high plastic basket and backboard into the wide, smooth hallway, and he was on his knees playing b-ball of a sort with his twin sons, using a six-inch green Nerf sphere. Much of this game consisted of wild heaves by the boys and scrambling after the loose ball, but occasionally one of them caught a pass or hit close enough to the backboard so that Karp could flick it in and crow, “Swish! Two points!”
Ordinarily, this scene lifted Marlene’s heart, but not today, with the faces of Savitch’s two boys occupying her interior TV. And there was the unfinished business with the shelter and the Arab girl that would have to be thrashed through with Butch and, God knew, she didn’t have the energy just now. She waved at Karp and got a wave in return, a formal one, like a salute, and then she went into the bedroom and stripped. She hooked up the thick, old-fashioned Koss headphones to the cassette deck of the bedroom’s stereo and slapped in Glenn Gould doing The Well-Tempered Clavier. Wrapped in her sleazy kimono and trailing the twenty-foot cord that was pumping heavenly order into her ears, she marched to the huge rubber hot tub, dropped the robe, and submerged up to her neck. Hot tears leaked from her eyes and dimpled the black surface of the water.
As for Karp, contrary to appearances, he had not spent the morning entirely in fatherly Saturday a.m. pursuits. Posie had left him with cleaned and fed twins before departing for her regular day off. Lucy was sleeping in. Plopping the boys in front of the most lurid and violent cartoons on offer, he had worked the phones. As the district attorney’s sole deputy, and as a former homicide bureau chief of some luster, Karp still drew a good deal of water in the murky channels of Manhattan’s criminal justice system. Cops from working-stiff detectives to precinct captains t
ook his calls, and fed him more or less the straight line. He managed to grab the Fifth Precinct night-shift detective lieutenant, a man named Eric Schenck, before that tired fellow had gone off duty, and extracted from him the full story of the women’s shelter raid.
“Funny business,” Schenck said, his voice husky with smoke and coffee and the end of a Friday night East Village shift. “They came in through the roof door. Looked like a pro job, but nothing taken—hell, nothing there to take. The director there, that Duran woman, blasted away at the perps with that big Colt she keeps, and they returned fire from some kind of nine-milli auto weapon, the proverbial hail of fucking lead. She got hit twice, but lucky. She’s stable at Saint Vs. What’s your interest here?”
“Couple of angles,” said Karp. “One, my wife works with them—a kind of volunteer, so I was concerned. The other thing is that Arab girl that got lifted—she’s connected to a couple of homicides I’m looking at. …”
“Wait a second! What Arab girl? Nobody said anything about an Arab girl.”
“Yeah, I guess. I imagine you know, the shelter being on your turf and all, that Ms. Duran sometimes pinches the criminal code of the state of New York when it suits her.”
A short, hollow chuckle sounded on the other end. “Oh, yeah. Mattie and I go way back. We’ve been known to look the other way, and she does what she thinks is right, which if you want to know, most cops would agree with. We cut her a lot of slack because she’s a fucking indispensable resource. Harboring a homicide suspect is a little rich even for her, though. Who was she?”
“Name’s Fatyma Daoud,” said Karp. “Age fourteen, around there. The story is she’s a runaway, the dad is an old-fashioned kind of guy, wanted to marry her off, kept her chained up. Yeah, literally. This is the kind of daddy who when the girl acts up figures death before dishonor. In any case, she runs, ends up on the Deuce, with the usual results. Oh, yeah, when she split she took the family dagger, and apparently when some pimp tried to get heavy with her, she stuck him with it. That’s how we traced it was her. Then she headed for the shelter.”
“Okay,” said Schenck ruminatively, “this stuff is coming back. There was a circular about this girl a little while ago. So she whacked a pimp on the Deuce—this is not the focus of your interest, I’m thinking. I mean, it’s not the kind of case you guys usually go after teeth and claws.”
“No, we usually handle those with a framed certificate of appreciation and a nice dinner,” said Karp. “The interesting part is the Daoud connection. The girl’s brother, Walid, was the guy who fingered the perps in the Shilkes case. You remember Shilkes?”
“Who could forget?” There was a brief silence on the line as Lieutenant Schenck engaged his experienced and highly paid, if exhausted, detective brains. “Um. So … brother Walid has, could I say, terrorist connections? The family wants the sister back, and suddenly we have the sister kidnapped by a well-drilled team carrying automatic weapons. You’re assuming that Arabs grabbed her? That there’s an operating Arab terrorist cell in New York City?”
“Oh, it’s more than an assumption. There’s no question she was lifted by Arabs.”
“What do you mean, no question?”
“My daughter happened to be staying in the same room as the girl. She was hiding when the snatch went down and heard the perps speaking Arabic. By the way, according to her, you’re looking for an Abdel and a Rifaat.”
“Your daughter speaks Arabic?”
“Among other things—it’s a long story. Meanwhile…”
“And—wait a minute—she was, like, pals with this fugitive …”
“Well, Lieutenant,” replied Karp, dropping his tone down half the Kelvin scale, “of course no one in my family knew she was a fugitive. What do you take me for?”
“Yeah, sure, but … okay, let’s see here. Tell you the truth, Mr. Karp, I got a lot of expertise chasing P.R.’s down stairways in Alphabet City. Black fucking September is a little out of my line. I’m open for suggestions. I mean, there must be other parts of the system plugged into this.”
“Yeah, there is, sort of. The key guy is Jim Raney up at Midtown South. You know him?”
“Oh, yeah, everybody knows Pistol Jim. He was through the Five a couple years back. He’s got the Shilkes thing, right?”
“Right. What you need to do is give Jim a heads-up on this raid, share your material with him, the ballistics and other forensic stuff. My sense is this is going to end up in a city-wide task force, operating out of the fourteenth floor, and you might as well start laying it off on Raney.”
Karp knew that neither Schenck nor his watch commander would have to be nudged very hard to get rid of a file like that, and his casual mention of the deck of One Police Plaza where the chiefs of the NYPD dwelt in their glory could not but accelerate such a movement. After Karp had finished with Schenck, he called Midtown South and, on being told Raney was at home, used Marlene’s Rolodex to get Raney’s home number. The detective listened without comment as Karp filled him in on the night’s events.
“That’s what we know so far,” Karp said, “and the obvious next step is to talk to the Daouds, dad and junior.”
“Yeah, I’ll get on it,” Raney said. Then, after a thoughtful pause, “Well. It’s out of the closet now, anyway. That ought to make Fulton happy. Have you heard from him on the FBI angle yet?”
“Not yet,” said Karp. “I got to go now, Raney. I have to call the D.A.”
Which he did, and informed that gentleman about what was indeed out of the closet: that an armed, skilled body of Arab terrorists was in fact operational and at large in New York City.
Khalid owned nearly a dozen separate identifications, only some of which were known to his employer, and he selected one of the unknown ones, which conveniently had an Hispanic surname (Jorge Gomez) for his Saturday visit to Rikers Island. Jodón Obregon did not know any Jorge Gomez, but he assumed that this was a pseudonym of his agent, El Chivato. He was therefore astounded to discover the visitor’s chair on the other side of the glass occupied by the man he knew as Lucky.
They stared at one another for a moment, each of them maintaining the calm visage required in such meetings. Khalid spoke first, in English, their common tongue. “That’s quite a boy you sent after me.”
Obregon allowed himself a tiny smile. “Yes. He is really the best.”
Khalid shrugged. “Well, he has succeeded in disturbing my business, and I can’t afford to have my business disturbed. I underestimated you, I admit that. I thought you were a chicken; it turns out you are a tiger. So, I was mistaken, and I have to pay for the mistake. The main thing is for both of us to return to business with no hard feelings.”
“I’m listening,” said Obregon.
“Hard feelings are not businesslike. I figure, your interests are elsewhere, my interests are elsewhere too. We started out on the wrong foot, but we could make it right. On the other hand, you could say, hey, this guy Lucky, he fucked me, I have to get revenge, but in that case we have war. Maybe your guy gets me, maybe I get you, maybe we’re both dead. This don’t make sense, agree?”
Obregon nodded.
“Okay,” Khalid continued, “here’s what I see the fix is. The guy who killed the cop Morilla is named Ahmed Falani. As it happens, he’s dead too. Now, suppose the police find his body, and on this body they find the policeman Morilla’s identification—”
“And the fingerprints,” Obregon interrupted. “Tell me, did this Falani really do it, or is this another story?”
“No, really. Morilla was too close to our operation, and … what did you mean about fingerprints?”
“My lawyer tells me that besides my idiot brother’s fingerprints on the gun there are others, on the bullets in the magazine. This was to be a point in our favor at the trial, a weak one, but you know, if your man’s really match these …”
“Of course. Also, there is a little man I know, a smalltime distributor who informs for the police. Sometimes these people are useful, as
now, do you see? Let us say, he goes to the police, he says, ah, this Ahmed Falani, he was boasting to me how he killed this Narco cop and blamed the Obregons, and of course, he will have the whole story, with many details that only the police know, as if from the mouth of Ahmed. So that confirms the story, and you will be released. Now, as to the money … let us say our original agreement, the two million, plus, oh, ten percent for this … trouble, and to ensure good feelings. You are now—how should I say?—whole, with something extra, and free to go your way. This is satisfactory?”
Obregon did not answer immediately. He had imagined this scene many times. He had planned it, of course, and now it was bearing fruit. The problem was Lucky himself. He had expected to encounter a man terrorized, helpless, not the calm and confident figure who now faced him. There was not enough suffering here, and that made him suspicious. Ten percent, that was fine, but did it really pay for the indignity? No, of course not, but revenge could wait. In fact, it was better to wait, until this chingada would be off his guard, relaxed, enjoying himself, at which time Jesus Obregon would repay. He smiled at the man and nodded. “Yes, satisfactory, as you say. My lawyer is named Manuel Huerta. He will accept the money. When it is in his hands and your arrangements have made them release me and my brother, I will call off El Chivato.”
“Is that his name? Yes, but there is one other small thing. This man, he has taken something of mine, some information, which he must not have. It is not a matter of money, but political. You must arrange for him to be … delivered to me. Or else there is no deal—we go back to start and either your boy gets me or I get him, but either way you’re in jail and broke. So decide.”
Reckless Endangerment Page 24