Guma finished his drink, reached for the bottle, hesitated, put it down, thus demonstrating that he could still leave it alone. “Armand Figuroa, the stepdad. A real prince. He was fucking the other daughter, too, as it turned out. Seven years old. By the way, Shelly didn’t vouchsafe us any of this stepfather business when he presented the case to the bureau. Just the Manuel stuff, and it looked solid.”
“When did you find out?”
“Felkes called Jack. He actually hired a PI out of his own pocket, and the guy came up with the missing police records. Jack and me talked about getting Shelly disbarred, but we decided not to. A high-profile case, the scandal . . . Jack reamed him out and gave him the boot. He hated you, by the way, Shelly. I mean back then. Maybe he still does.”
“What? Why the hell did he hate me? I never did anything to him. He invited me to lunch, for crying out loud.”
“And was he a pleasant companion?”
Karp did not need to think. “No, it was pretty clear the whole thing was set up to make me feel like an asshole and a loser. I didn’t cop to it then because . . . Christ, who the fuck knows? I guess I couldn’t really imagine why anybody would go through that much trouble.”
“Shelly is strange. He used to ask me about you, obsess practically. You were the fair-haired boy, you were winning all those cases, looking good. How did you do it? You must’ve been cutting corners.” Guma took a last puff on the Macanudo and placed it neatly in the ashtray. He splashed another quarter inch of whiskey into his glass. “Some guys never get it, the line. The biggest case he was ever on, and he cut some corners to win it because he assumed you and me and everyone else was doing it, too. Especially you. And now? Let’s face it, the guy’s a high-priced pimp living on a rich wife, draping himself in a lot of liberal causes, bitching about the corruption of the district attorney’s office . . .”
“That he got canned from. The scales fall from my eyes. Guma, I’m a college graduate, I’m not a dope. Why didn’t I see that about him? Back then or recently?”
Shrug, smile, hands out, palms up. “What can I say? You got a blind spot. You’re a fucking superstar in a very hard business, and you got no idea that people could look at you and be jealous, and hate you, and smile at you while they hate you.”
“He’s Sybil Marshak’s attorney.”
“I know. And he’s going to walk her and spit right in your face. I’d give odds that’s why he took the case in the first place.”
“But he wouldn’t have faced me. I had nothing to do with homicide until after Roland pulled his boner in the elevator.”
Guma grinned, extended an index finger, and slowly tugged down on his lower left eyelid.
“Oh, please,” cried Karp. “You’re not suggesting he set that up to get Roland out of the way so he’d have a shot at me! How could he? How’d he know that Roland would shoot his mouth off?”
“Hey, he worked in the bureau. He knew Roland had a tendency to unload all kinds of unpopular shit when he thought no one from the outside was listening. The press conference was common knowledge. He took a chance, and he lucked out. And who else is Jack going to turn to, a case like this Marshak thing? Butch, the Fireman, Karp is who. Matter of fact, it’s a wonder Roland’s lasted so long. If that hadn’t’ve worked, Shelly would’ve tried something else. An underage girl would’ve been my personal choice, I wanted to shaft Roland Hrcany. You find that guy in the elevator, a hundred bucks says he’s linked up some way with old Shel.”
“I can’t believe it.”
“Then don’t. Meanwhile, he’s going to cream you in Marshak. If it ever comes to it.”
“Unless I find out about the watch.”
“Come again?”
Karp explained all about the watch. Guma’s face seemed to take on more life as Karp talked, his body becoming more erect, fuller, as if someone were inflating it with a pump.
“What do you think?” Karp asked when he was finished. “Am I crazy or what?”
“No, you’re not crazy. Jesus, Augie Al Firmo! He’s connected up to his ears, you know. With the Gambinos.”
“I didn’t know. We ever catch him?”
“Never, and he’s been in business now for a long time. Shit, he might even be older than me. I don’t know how many times they’ve tried to sting him, but he always slips away, or someone else takes the fall for him. I remember back in ’84, Ray Cooley tried to take him down. They had a sting set up over two years. A bunch of detectives were running one of the biggest fake burglary rings on the East Coast. I mean they were pretend ripping off shipping containers and pretend fencing stuff all over the place. They were paying off the Mob. Half a dozen of them liked it so much they were doing it for real. You remember that . . . the Mollen people were real cranky behind it.”
“Yeah, now I do. That was Ray Cooley?”
“Yeah. He really wanted Augie Al, but no soap. They picked up a bunch of his associates and a couple of the cugini, but they couldn’t make anything stick to the man. Nobody ratted him out either, which is unusual. But Augie Al’s always been a big carrot-and-stick guy. Nowadays he’s semiretired, only handles high-end ice, watches, opticals, like that. Guns, too. Fancy stuff they truck in from those Second Amendment–type states.” Guma stopped, scratched his head. “You know, now that I’m thinking about it, there was a thing back then where he was using street people to move stuff around. Smart, really.”
“Why smart?”
“Hiding the shit in plain sight. You got a guy in an army jacket with fifty fake Rolexes, who’s gonna think three of them are real? There’s five cutouts between Firmo and the skell.”
“And he doesn’t get ripped off?”
“Hey, probably all the time, same like the dope guys. It happens once, the skell gets toasted, and move on. A cost of doing business. He buys wholesale, he sells retail. What can I say, it’s a living. So to bring it back, probably the guy Marshak shot was a mule for Firmo. I don’t see what that buys you on your case against her.”
“I don’t either. It was just a loose end.” But Karp’s mind was vibrating with notions. The watch. Ramsey shot. Firmo. The Cooleys, father and son. The father failing to catch Firmo. The son chasing a skell named Canman. Bent cops. Skells muling hot items. An unusual number of skells found with their throats cut. Toasted. Canman a suspect. Cooley chasing Canman. Cooley killing Lomax, whom he knew. How? Lomax, a sheet for fencing, theft. Connection between Lomax and Firmo? Don’t know. Cooley on a gun-running stakeout the night of the Lomax shooting. Connection? Don’t know. Firmo linked up with Cooley? Don’t know. Cooley linked to the bum slashings? Don’t know. How to find out?
“Ah, shit!” Karp snarled.
“What?”
Karp shook his head. “Nothing. Just that I need an investigative apparatus to figure out something, and the one supplied by the taxpayers for just such purposes seems to be out of order.” He explained the tantalizing connections.
“Do like Felkes—hire a PI,” said Guma.
“Be serious.”
“Hey, why not? Your wife’s rich. Come to think of it, your wife’s a PI. Hell, you want to, I’ll ask around. I take it you think Cooley’s dirty.”
“Filthy. Got to be. Why else would he take a chance like that, a big public shooting, to get Lomax? What, you don’t think so?”
Guma waggled a hand, palm down. “Hey, anything’s possible. The pope could be hocking the Vatican silver. But Cooley being dirty I would tend to doubt.”
“Why, because he’s a hero?”
“No. But I knew Ray. I knew all of them, matter of fact. Did you know they were from south Brooklyn?”
“No. But you know everybody.”
“I don’t know Donald Trump. I don’t know Jennifer Lopez . . .”
Karp ignored this. “How well do you?”
“Ray Cooley was a year ahead of me in Cardinal Hughes. We were on the same teams. He was a pitcher. The ‘Two Rays of Sunshine,’ as the Brooklyn Eagle had it. Neither of us had the stuff for
the bigs, but we fucking burnt up the parochial-school league. I hit .387, he had like fifty strikeouts his senior year.”
“And that’s why Brendan Cooley isn’t dirty?”
“The Cooleys,” said Guma portentously, waving an admonitory finger, “are not as you and I. If you’re interested, I could probably find out whether anyone on the cops got a bad smell off the kid. And I could talk to Connie Sassone.”
“Who is . . . ?”
“Brendan’s ex. She’s a niece of my ex’s. My first ex. Nice kid. I was there when they got married.”
“Would you?”
“Sure, why not? Dying don’t take that much of my time.”
Karp let that pass. To fill the silence he asked, “Remind me what happened in the Falla case. I recall you got a conviction.”
“Yeah, I did. Felkes did great, brought the bastard stepfather up there, but he couldn’t break him, hammered the cops, but they did their usual ‘Hey, it’s routine, we talk to the relatives in a child case,’ blah blah. Felkes got the confession tossed, but it didn’t do him a lot of good. The thing was Manuel didn’t help himself, the way he looked. Fucking hulk, fat, greasy hair, pockmarked, falling asleep at the trial. Guy looked like Frankenstein in a suit. One time he was actually drooling. Every mother’s nightmare, right? They were only out forty minutes and convicted on the top counts, rape and murder two. Felkes didn’t give up though. He was running out his appeals when science marches on, they invent DNA, and it turns out Manuel doesn’t match the semen they found in the kid. He did eleven years anyway, they turned him loose, and he dropped dead within a week. We got the stepfather though. I did him, too, as a matter of fact. Twenty-five to life. It was when you were out private.” Guma laughed, raised his glass. “The fucking system, right? Gotta love it.”
Drag enough folding money through the lobby of a pricey hotel, Marlene found, and you can get your two-hundred-pound drooling mastiff into your suite. She ensconced herself, hung up her clothes, had the concierge take her crystal jacket and other drunked-over garments out for cleaning and repair, made an appointment at Danilo’s for hair and at Lamy’s for a complete overhaul, killed time until the appointments by playing with the dog and watching cable, and did not drink even one of the charming little bottles in the minibar. At three she kissed the dog good-bye and walked over to Lamy’s on Madison and Sixty-third, where she got boiled, seared, stripped of exfoliations, mud-packed, massaged, oiled, plucked, waxed, and manicured. She felt pretty good until her hostess told her she shouldn’t wait too long before beginning plastic surgery. Mildly depressed by this news, she went over by limo to Fiftyseventh, where Danilo gave her a $300 haircut so skillful that after it her hair looked just as it had when she went in. Then she shopped some, an evening bag and some perfume, and a few things for the office, to assure herself that she was going back to the office, someday, and then back to the hotel.
At around six-thirty she called home.
“It’s me,” she said when Karp answered.
“Where are you?”
“At the Plaza.”
“Uh-huh. What’re you doing?”
“Having a vacation from my life.”
“Drinking much?”
“I might. Are you going to send a spy to find out if I do?” she asked, and immediately regretted it.
After a silence, Karp said coolly, “Well, do what you need to do, Marlene. You’ll keep in touch, yes?”
“You’re pissed off at me.”
“Yeah, I guess I am. I kind of thought we were a family. One of us has a problem, we’re supposed to duke it out, not run away.”
“You’d be happy if I was in a twenty-eight-day program with Dr. Eichmann though, wouldn’t you?”
“Einkorn. Frankly? Yeah, I would. But you’re not going to do that, so why should I even mention it?” A long pause. “So . . . what are you doing?”
“Right now? I’m getting ready to go to a rich people’s party over at the Regency.”
“A party, huh? Wear some of those clothes you bought.”
“I guess. Look, Butch, this is not a permanent thing. I mean I love you. I just need to be away for a while. When I have to be around, you know, people I care about, I just want to die, I’m so ashamed. I know you’re not like that, but I am. I can’t bear the idea that I’m draining energy from everyone making everyone miserable. I want to crawl into a hole until I’m better.”
And more of this. Marlene was not entirely sure if it was true, the words were just coming out without much reflection. It was unbearable to see him and the kids, but it was also unbearable to be alone. She did not say that, however, and the conversation rattled to a close, as such conversations will, on square wheels.
Once off the phone, Marlene went to the minibar and drank down two Baileys, to line her stomach, and then, remembering Dottie, ate a banana from the fruit basket the hotel had provided. The valet service knocked, and there were her things, the crystal jacket shorn of a few inches but otherwise perfect. Then she dressed in her white Valentino outfit, strapped white Manolo spikes on her feet, spritzed herself with Chanel, snatched up her new bag, a confection of silver and bronze links over black silk, threw the jacket over her shoulders, and after a quick doggy kiss, left the room.
The do for the New York Foundation for the Arts was familiar ground for Marlene. People who provide security for the rich log a lot of hours at such affairs, and she had been to many, but as security rather than as a guest. There was a discreet table where one gave in one’s invitation and passed over one’s hefty check; Marlene stopped there, gave and passed, got a smile from a couple of old face-lifts, and moved on. She spotted a number of familiar people as she entered the ballroom, for it was the usual gang: old money, media moguls, a scattering of bored-looking art makers, New York movers and shakers, a sprinkle of Eurotrash, a few pretty-boy crashers who owned dinner suits and little else, half a dozen people who had achieved the nirvana of first-name identifiability, with their retinues, and a small group of nouveaux being allowed to buy entry into the good side of the red velvet rope. Of whom Marlene imagined she was now one.
She snagged a glass of champagne from a passing waiter, drank it down, and cast her eye across the crowd. Who cast back, for Marlene in full rig was a spectacular sight. Everyone was wearing crystals that season, but Marlene, being a parvenue from Queens, had more crystals than anyone else. Everyone in the place was to some degree well-known, but Marlene was notorious—not exactly the same thing. People came up to her, anorexic women with rigid golden hair helmets and couture gowns, men of moderate size spraying ego from their tanned or pig-pink faces, blank-eyed supermodels on the arms of debauched stockbrokers, they were all dying to meet her, a heroine, someone who had actually killed people. How did it feel? Were you scared? Are you carrying a gun now? To which she answered: It made me vomit. Yes. No. And every time the waiter came by, a glass of Krug. That made three, her limit this evening.
She wandered over to a table of little yummies, but was repelled by the creamed crustaceans, the tapenades, the caviar, and salmon mousse. But there was a large cornucopia made of pastry, from which spilled a mass of real fruit, and she selected a banana to go with her fifth champagne.
She felt a presence close at her side and turned. A young man, red-haired, thin, good-looking in the way she happened to like, with clever blue eyes.
“That’s quite a jacket,” he remarked.
“Yes, it is. I feel like I should be stationed in front of an auto dealership on Linden Boulevard, slowly rotating.”
He laughed. “You won’t get far with this crowd if you make fun of expensive clothes. Eating a banana is also not the done thing, although I love the way you do it.”
She chomped another section of the fruit, chewed, said, “Is that right? You’re an expert?”
“No, just another working stiff like you, but with less money. A private dick, too.” He held out his hand. “Peter Walsh.”
She took it, squeezed, warm and dry, good, an
d he didn’t try to hang on to it, which she always hated. “Marlene Ciampi. But you know that.”
“I did. In fact, I spotted you when you came in, and I’ve been working up my courage to come over and slip in and talk to you. In between the beautiful people in my rented tux.”
“Really. About what?”
“Oh, a job, I guess. I’d like to protect the famous and get stock options.”
Marlene looked him up and down while she drained her glass. Miraculously, a tray and waiter appeared, and she replaced the empty with a full. “You don’t look like a private dick, Walsh. You’re too pretty.”
“You’re pretty.”
“Yes, but I’m hard as nails. Are you hard as nails?”
“Hard enough, in the right circumstances.” He had moved closer. She wanted to sag against him, sag against something, but she held back. A good thing she had kept the champagne down to four hits.
“You’re not an ex-cop, though, are you?”
“No. I’m an actor. But I played a cop once.”
“Anything I would’ve seen?”
“Not unless you’re a connoisseur of New Jersey community theater. If you watch TV real late, you can sometimes catch me demonstrating the amazing multiwrench.”
“An unusual background for a PI. Most of them are ex-cops, ex-military. Sometimes ex-DA, like me. Where did you learn how to investigate?”
“Oh, off a matchbook. Good jobs at high pay. No, what they hire me for is hanging out, blending in with a crowd, seeing what you can pick up.”
“Impersonation.”
“Not necessarily. If you show up at a place in the right clothes, with the right look and speech, people assume you belong there. In a factory, they assume you’re a worker. In a DA’s office they assume you’re a DA. At a function like this, they assume you’re a rich art lover. People say things, do things, they wouldn’t ordinarily do in front of an outsider.”
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