Act of Revenge

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  When his wife got into violent-felony trouble in the County of New York, which she did more frequently than your regular Smith College, Yale Law grad, Karp naturally had to recuse himself from any involvement in the procedural aspects of the case. He interpreted this, however, as not forbidding the conveyance to him of information about her fate from various sources, for it is no fault to keep one’s ears open; God, after all, did not provide us with earlids, and the criminal justice system was chock full of people in the know who wanted to do the chief assistant D.A. a favor. Thus he learned in short order what had gone down at the EVWS, that his spouse had shot two Mafia soldiers and had been written up for assault in the first degree, that she had been punched out, that Little Sally’s wife, Vivian Fein Bollano, was a shelter resident, that Little Sally and his three fuglemen were in custody on a variety of serious charges, and that the bunch of them, including Mattie Duran, were in the cells at the Ninth Precinct waiting for transport to central booking.

  Replacing the phone after the last of several informative phone calls, Karp swiveled around in his big leather chair and stared out the window. He placed a pencil in his mouth and tapped out the rhythm of “Yellow Rose of Texas” between his upper and lower teeth with plenty of grace notes, as his mind drifted like a hang glider through the twisted canyons of the present situation. After four choruses he re-swiveled, stuck the pencil behind his ear, and picked up the phone.

  The words “urgent,” “emergency,” and “Marlene,” got Harry Bello out of the meeting he was in and onto the phone. Karp explained what had happened at the shelter, and Harry listened without asking a lot of dumb questions. Karp and Bello were not friends, but Karp thought the guy was a pro, as he himself was, and they both agreed that Marlene was definitely not a pro in her chosen field of endeavor and was bound to fuck up big-time, as now, so they had a basis.

  “I’ll go bail her out,” said Harry. “We’re covered for this kind of thing.”

  “Yeah, she’s got community ties and a job. It shouldn’t be through the roof. By the way, Harry—this Bollano woman she was seeing, could you fill me in a little on that?”

  “She’s a client’s about all I can tell you, Butch,” said Harry after a judicious pause.

  “You think she might know something about the Catalano hit, that’s why she took off from the happy home?”

  “I couldn’t say, although, considering the husband, she wouldn’t need that much of an excuse.”

  “You think Marlene has any information about that, the Catalano thing?”

  “I couldn’t say. Marlene knows all kinds of stuff. As you know.”

  Karp laughed. “Okay, Harry, go get her. Tell her there’ll be a lamp in the window.”

  Karp hung up, rose, grabbed a pad and the pencil, and walked over to the D.A.’s office, where he consulted the printed daily schedule O’Malley kept available to staff. Keegan was booked solid all through the afternoon. Karp regarded the three suits waiting for the next appointment, leaned down, and said sotto voce to O’Malley, “I need five minutes before these guys go in.”

  “It better be something,” said the secretary. “These are the boys from Albany on the budget bill.”

  “He’d want to know,” said Karp. “I guarantee it.”

  She nodded assent. Karp waited, and in ten minutes the door to the inner office opened and Keegan came out with a monsignor, a priest, and a nun. He shook their hands warmly, his eyes at the same time darting over the Albany group and then alighting on Karp, who discreetly extended five fingers. Keegan passed the religious party through, shook hands all around with Albany, made a graceful excuse, and motioned Karp to follow him in.

  “Christ on a crutch!” he exclaimed when Karp had given him a telegraphic version of the recent events in the East Village. “That woman doesn’t have the sense God gave a cat.”

  “She has her little ways,” Karp allowed.

  “At least she didn’t kill them, that’s something. All right, I’ll get Sullivan to handle it. That all?”

  “No. You notice who was conspicuously absent from the business at the shelter?”

  Keegan wrinkled his brow. “Joe Pigetti?”

  “Uh-huh. Who’s supposed to mind Little Sally so he doesn’t shoot up speed and pull shit like this? He’s not there because the federales picked him up today on the say-so of our Chinese friend. So it appears that in one, as they say, fell swoop, the Bollano main guys have been put out of action. One killed, one arrested for various federal crimes connected with the murder of same, and one led to commit a variety of violent acts—and who tipped him off to where his wife was hiding out, I wonder? If Marlene hadn’t stepped in, we could’ve had a couple killings, maybe more, all on Little Sally.”

  “So?”

  Here Karp paused, wrinkled his nose, and took a long, noisy breath, as if checking the age of a suspect mackerel.

  Keegan nodded a couple of times and said, “You’re saying that someone has a hard-on for the Bollanos and they’re, what? Using us to take them out?”

  “If so, it’s a subtle play. At the risk of political incorrectness, you might even say oriental subtlety.”

  “Our Chinaman.”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me,” said Karp. “I’ve already got Fulton on the case, and I’m going to V. T. Newbury from Fraud and put him on it. He’s the best paper guy in the business. This Lie has to be connected to something bigger than a Chinatown gang and a mob shooting.”

  “Okay, make it happen and keep me posted. Now, scram! I got to talk about money with these apple knockers.”

  “I’m gone. I’m taking off the rest of the day, by the way. Besides Marlene, my daughter got mugged this morning.”

  “Jesus! Is she okay?”

  “A little shaky, maybe,” said Karp, rising to go. “I’m going to complain to the D.A. about crime in the streets.”

  “You look like shit, Marlene,” said Harry Bello.

  “I feel like shit, Harry,” said Marlene glumly, which came out, “I seel ike sit, Ahee,” because of the swelling of her lips and tongue. They were in an interview room at the Ninth, an irregular meeting, but Harry still retained some clout from his years on the cops and, of course, everyone knew who the husband was. Harry wanted to hear the story before the Osborne Group lawyer got there.

  “Besides that, how was your day?”

  She had to laugh, a high sound that lasted a little too long. “Actually, until Butch called and said Lucy got beat up, I was having a pretty good one.”

  His eyes widened. “Lucy got beat up?”

  She placed a calming hand on his arm. “It’s okay, Harry, she’s okay. I’ll take care of it.”

  “Bullshit, you’ll take care of it. You can’t take care of yourself. Who did it?”

  She took her hand away and her look hardened. “Don’t get involved, Harry, all right? It’s got nothing to do with you.”

  “I’m her godfather, Marlene.”

  “Good, so protect her from the flesh and the devil, but don’t butt into this. You want to hear the story or should I go back to the cells? It hurts when I talk.”

  He relented, nodding. “Okay, go ahead. You had this great day.”

  “Yeah, this morning I was at the abortion clinic in Chelsea, to check on the security construction. It’s going good, Ms. Reiss-Kessler is very pleased. My views on abortion did not come up, I’m back in the club. Like you said, you never know. The cops got the guys who did it, some sect in Jersey. All but one of them. You heard about this? The actual shooter got away, name of Reginald P. Burford. Blasted his way through a roadblock and escaped to the wilds of New Jersey. I didn’t know Jersey had any wilds, but apparently they do, down there in the Pine Barrens, lots of little villages full of skinny blond people with their eyes too close together. Reginald is from there. It’s like looking for a Mafioso in Sicily. Anyway, me and Ms. Reiss-Kessler had a nice chat, she wanted to know if we could arrange firearms training for her staff, maybe she could branch out into making non
-flushable corpses. I managed to dissuade her from this. Then lunch. I fed the dog . . .” She stiffened. “Jesus, Harry, the dog’s still in the back of the car. He’ll be frantic!”

  “He’ll be sleeping. Don’t worry about the dog, I’ll take care of the car and the dog. What happened after lunch?”

  “Oh. Right, so then I came here—I mean, I went to the shelter to talk to Vivian, tell her what I’d found out already, and get her take on it. And I was holding the big questions in reserve, hey, Viv, how come a nice Jewish girl marries a psychotic mobster? Also what happened? How come out of nowhere you just have to investigate dad’s death after twenty years? You know, see if I could develop enough report to drop that kind of stuff on her.”

  “Rapport, you mean.”

  “Huh? Oh, right, rapport. So, anyway . . .” She seemed to go blank for a moment. Then she blinked and asked, “Sorry. Where was I?”

  “You were going to tell her what you learned already. Marlene, are you feeling okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. Well, so I go in there, she’s looking rocky, antsy, not a stay-at-home, our girl, maybe she misses shopping, getting in the Jag and driving the roads. A little cabin fever. She does pills, too. I tell her I went over the press reports, the background, the trials, disbarment proceedings, transcripts, and all that, and the story is that he was despondent over the loss of his livelihood and that’s why he did it, and did she agree, was he depressed in the days before he did it or not? And she said, in effect, horseshit, my father wasn’t down, he was always up, full of life, he had money stashed, he had plans for moving to California, starting over. Very passionate. She thinks he got whacked.”

  “What do you think?”

  “No evidence for it. No other parties seen in the area. On the other hand, no suicide note either. The police instigation, from the press reports, looks serious, no editorial suggestion it was anything more than a regular whatchamacallit, a . . . I mean, that he killed himself. I need to talk to your pal Black Jack, though.”

  “Uh-huh, and what about your big questions? I mean, does she even know you know she’s Bollano’s wife?” Harry was watching Marlene very carefully, his stomach fluttering, his hands damp.

  “No, we didn’t get to that yet. I was trying to get her to list all the people involved in the cast then, who were still around and who might know something, and I mentioned her mother and she got upset, no, my mother doesn’t know anything I don’t, and we fenced around about that for a while, and then my paginator rang and I went down to call Butch, and while I was on the phone the bastards broke in. They must have jimmied the front door, and they used a . . . you know, a thing, a wrecking bar to break through the glass, and she, Vonda, shot at them but missed, and they started shooting at her and then . . . and then I . . .”

  She looked up at him, her brows knotted, her thick eyebrows nearly touching. “I can’t remember. First they broke the door down with the iron, and then I threw it at my mother.”

  Harry’s reflexes were not what they had been, not after the years of boozing, but he started moving when he saw her good eye roll up in her head, and so he was able to catch her before she fell off her chair.

  Karp had himself driven home in a police car, a privilege he rarely exercised, except in direct line of duty, which, he now observed sourly to himself, home had very nearly become, with his daughter a possible witness to murder and his wife behind bars.

  The little boys, at least, remained uninvolved in any crime more serious than Deliberate Spill of Apple Juice, two counts (Zik), and Assault With Plastic Brontosaurus (Zak). Karp held court on his lap in the living room, and let both of them off with a warning. Where’s Mommy? they wanted to know. Mommy’s still at work, he lied. He asked Posie to go ahead and feed the monsters, and asked, “How’s Lucy?”

  Posie rolled her eyes and pointed her chin in the direction of the girl’s bedroom.

  “She got home, went in there, locked the door, and hasn’t been out once. She’s grounded, huh?”

  “In a way,” said Karp. He went to the bedroom and got out of his suit and into chinos and a faded sleeveless sweatshirt and, sighing, went down the hall to knock at the prison door.

  “Lucy, it’s me, open up.”

  Steps, the click of the lock, more steps. He went in. A cassette recorder was playing some sort of odd music, a throbbing, low electronic droning, with a voice over it, husky, insistent, seductive, not singing but speaking in precise short sentences. Lucy had returned to her bed and picked up a small blue book. Karp sat on Lucy’s wooden swivel chair and took in his surroundings, as always, with some wonder at the mysteries of how kids turned out. Unlike most children her age, Lucy was neat, almost compulsively so. Her room resembled the habitation of a scholarly nun: a simple narrow bed, with a duvet in the form of the flag of Italy, above it a colorful, rough, gory Haitian crucifix, low bookcases along one wall, the books lined up and arranged by subject and author, on the other wall a desk, excruciatingly neat, sporting a little row of dictionaries between plaster gargoyle bookends, above which a large cork board displayed calligraphy samples, a chart of the 209 common radicals used in Chinese characters, a print of a portrait of an elderly gentleman in ecclesiastic garb (Cardinal Mezzofanti, 1774–1849, once the Vatican librarian and, Karp had been informed, a linguist quite in Lucy’s class), a school picture of her eighth-grade class, matted in cardboard, a poster of Bob Marley singing, a glossy photograph of a woman with short blond hair wearing sunglasses and a man’s suit and tie all in white, and a colored map of the world, showing in color-coded boxes the languages spoken thereupon, with a scatter of red map pins indicating those Lucy Karp had already mastered.

  “Who’s the singer?” Karp asked.

  “Laurie Anderson,” said Lucy shortly, not looking up.

  “She’s not exactly singing, is she? Not the kind of thing you can dance to.”

  “I like it. I like the words.” Silence afterward.

  “Put the book down, Lucy,” said Karp after a minute of waiting. “We need to talk.”

  She huffed and snapped it down on the bed, and sat up against the wall, looking at him with that angry, bored expression every parent of an adolescent dreads to see. She had scrubbed her face and pulled her hair back severely and had changed into baggy black shorts and a white T-shirt printed with the photograph of a professorial-looking man with bushy hair, underneath which was the text colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

  “Your mom’s in jail again,” he said, thinking once more that this was not a sentence he had ever imagined speaking in former years.

  “What did she do?”

  “Allegedly shot a couple of gangsters trying to bust into the shelter and grab some woman.”

  “She kill them?”

  “No, as a matter of fact, she did not. As I understand it, she waded into a hail of bullets, disabled the two bad guys with four shots, and got punched out in the scuffle when the cops got there. A pretty heroic deed, it seems. Uncle Harry’s down with her to help get her through and bail her out. She should be home later tonight.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Thank you for your concern,” said Karp, and was immediately ashamed of the sarcasm. Sarcasm had been a major tool in his own upbringing, and he had resolved never to use it with his own children. It was worry, and tension, and suppressed anger, he supposed. He went and sat down next to her on the bed and placed an arm over her thin shoulders. She was stiff as a tailor’s dummy. The Laurie Anderson tape came to an end. Off in the loft they could hear the sound of the TV and the ringing of the phone.

  “Lucy, are you okay?”

  “I’m fine, Dad.”

  “You’re not fine. You were kidnapped and beat up today. It’s okay to feel a little stunned. Maybe a couple of days at home will do you some good. It shouldn’t take longer than that to pick up those guys.” No response. He said, “Have you thought of anything else you’d like to tell me?”

  “No,” said Lucy, and then the door to her room burs
t open and there was Posie, looking distraught. “Butch! Harry Bello’s on the phone, he says it’s an emergency.”

  So it had been. Harry was calling from Beth Israel Hospital. Something was wrong with Marlene’s brain, which Karp already knew, but this was different, she was in surgery. This announced, shrieks and wails from Posie, sympathetic crying from the two boys, from Lucy, to Karp’s surprise and bemused relief, a cool efficiency. The girl got Posie on an even keel again, comforted the babes, organized cocoa and cookies, dialed the TV to an anodyne program involving space creatures. Karp grabbed his wallet and a jacket, made a call, and headed for the door. Lucy had her sneakers on and joined him.

  “I’m coming,” she announced.

  “You’re sure you’re up for this, Luce?”

  “She’s my mother.” Looking down at her, Karp saw this fact reflected in the set of her pale little face and the look in her yellow-brown eyes. He grasped her hand, and they walked out together.

  They went uptown in an unmarked, siren and lights. Harry met them at the neuro ward. Still in, no news.

  “How long has he been here?” asked Karp.

  Harry looked over at the corner of the waiting room, where Tran sat, motionless in a green plastic chair.

  “About ten minutes after we got in. How did he find out? You got me. He hasn’t moved, hasn’t gone out for a smoke, and I know the little fucker smokes like a chimney.” Harry shook his head and did a sort of shuddering shrug, expressing a desire that such things not be: Italian mommies shooting and getting kicked in the head by Mafiosi and being friends with weird Asian bad guys. As he did this, his goddaughter (and that was another incomprehensible thing!) sat down in a plastic chair as far as the room allowed from Tran. Harry and Karp exchanged a glance and afterward looked elsewhere.