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  Material Witness

  A Butch Carp and Marlene Ciampi Thriller

  Robert K. Tanenbaum

  For

  Mom, Dad, and Bill

  Acknowledgments

  To my partner and collaborator, Michael Gruber, whose genius flows throughout this book and who is primarily responsible for this manuscript;

  To my basketball coaches in high school and college, Paul Ryan and Rene Herrarias, who painstakingly taught me the fundamentals of the game and gave me the chance to play;

  To Detroit Pistons coach Ron Rothstein, who kept me apprised of the realities of the N.B.A.;

  To Donald Sterling, who permitted me to practice with the Los Angeles Clippers.

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Preview: Justice Denied

  A BIOGRAPHY OF ROBERT K. TANENBAUM

  CHAPTER ONE

  The dying man in the white Cadillac moaned and said a name that the driver didn’t catch. He was not in any case interested, although he was mildly surprised that the man was still alive. The driver peered through the swishing wipers, looking for a good place, trying to control his irritability. He thought he was too old to be driving around with corpses; it was something he had done a good deal of in his youth, and he believed that he had more or less put away childish things.

  The driver had planned at first to dump the car and the body in a parking lot at Kennedy, or alternatively, to drive down some mean street in south Jamaica and leave it. The problem was that the guy wouldn’t die, and the driver had a long-standing objection to shooting people where there was even the slightest chance of a witness. In this way he had survived nearly all of his contemporaries. He was fifty-four, in good shape, and at the top of his profession.

  When he saw the small, darkened shopping center looming through the light rain, he made a quick decision, pulling off Jamaica Avenue into the parking lot, signaling carefully as he did so. A second car, an anonymous blue Chevrolet sedan, entered the lot behind him. The Cadillac led the Chevrolet around to the back of the long commercial building. Both cars shut off their engines and their lights.

  The driver of the Cadillac switched off the dome light and left the vehicle. He was a medium-sized, stocky man of vaguely Mediterranean appearance, a look accentuated by his deep tan. His most remarkable feature was his mouth, which was large, floppy and bent down, like that of a flounder. In this mouth was clenched the stump of a thick cigar. He wore hornrimmed glasses and his pepper-and-salt hair was conventionally cut. Against the chill rain he had put on an unfashionable little waterproof tan cap, and as he stood waiting for the other driver to emerge, he hugged a tan raincoat around his body. It was not really adequate for the weather, but he owned no winter clothes anymore. Although he had been raised in New York, all his business interests were now in warm climates, and he intended to keep it that way. He wore old, thin pigskin gloves, as he always did when working, even in a warm climate.

  The other man was younger—in his mid-twenties—and shorter, despite the lifts in his small, pointed tan loafers. He wore black gloves and was dressed more suitably than his partner in a thigh-length leather coat. Despite the November cold, however, he had the top two buttons of his coat open, revealing a sprout of dense hair at the V of his patterned silk shirt, amid which nestled a set of heavy gold links. Visible among these were a cross, a St. Christopher medal and a charm in the shape of a hand making a rude gesture with the middle finger, all in gold.

  Above this mass of metal was a jowly dark face that bore a thin, down-hooking nose and a sensual, petulant mouth. The eyebrows were heavy and touching each other, and the eyes were small and too close together. It was a face made to sneer.

  The younger man approached the Cadillac. “So, Carmine—what’re we doin’? Where the fuck is this place?”

  The older man said, “He gets off here.” He pointed over at the end of the lot, where a big semi-tractor, a red Toyota and an old panel truck were parked, and added, “Go over and make sure nobody’s in those.”

  “What the fuck, Carmine! They’re empty. It’s fuckin’ one in the morning. You think they’re making deliveries?”

  The older man suppressed a sigh. “Just do it, Joey, huh? Just once, do something I ask you to do, without a song and dance, OK?”

  Joey muttered something and stalked off across the gleaming asphalt. He glanced cursorily through the front windows of all three vehicles—he had to climb the step on the semi to do so—and then trudged back to the cars.

  “Like I said, nothin’.”

  Carmine nodded. “You thought, but now you know.” He gave a last look around the full circle of his vision. It was a good spot for a spot picked at random. The back of the shopping center gave onto a straggling high hedge shielding a cyclone fence, beyond which was the blank rear concrete wall of a tire store. There was no view of the streets on either side.

  “OK, let’s move him to the driver’s side,” said Carmine.

  Joey was about to complain about this too, but stifled his remark. Guy wanted to be an old lady, let him. The two of them dragged the dying man out of the passenger seat and wrestled him behind the wheel.

  Joey was panting from the exertion. “Now can I do him, Carmine?” he asked irritably.

  “Yeah, go ahead—no, from the passenger side, not through the window.”

  Joey grunted, pulled a large automatic pistol out of his waistband and stomped around the front of the Cadillac. He leaned in through the open door and fired two shots into the temple of the man in the driver’s seat. The sound echoed off the concrete walls, and the interior of the car lit up like a little stage. Joey put the gun away and slammed the car door.

  “I do that right, Carmine? You got any comments on that?”

  Carmine looked at his cigar, which had gone out in the light, misty rain, and without further comment entered the Chevrolet. Joey got in and they drove back to Jamaica Avenue and several streets east on it in silence. Then Carmine pulled the car over under a street lamp.

  “What now?” asked Joey.

  “Map. I want to see what’s the quickest way to La Guardia.”

  He studied the map for a moment, then folded it neatly and put it away in the glove. But as he made his instinctive glance at the rearview mirror, he checked and cursed.

  “What?” said Joey.

  “Look out the back, Joey. What do you see?”

  Joey looked, and saw a semi-tractor pulling out of the parking lot they had just left. “What the fuck! Carmine, I swear to God I looked in the fuckin’ truck—it was empty.”

  “It wasn’t empty enough. They got a place behind the cab where the guy sleeps. Did you check that? No, what am I, crazy? Why am I asking?” He gunned the car into a wide U-turn and shot off west in pursuit of the tractor.

  “Maybe … shit, maybe he didn’t see nothin’,” said Joey.

  Carmine did not consider this comment worthy of reply.

  Patrolman William Winofski, of the 105th precinct, cruising his radio motor patrol car down Braddock Road in Queens Vil
lage in the calm center of the graveyard shift, was entirely justified in expecting that nothing would trouble his working life. Cops love Queens. The City’s largest borough sprawls toward the rising sun from the broken and troubled lands of Brooklyn, a boundless inhabited steppe, until it merges with the uttermost and mysterious East, Long Island. Cops love Queens because it is calm: in its vastness occur each month fewer crimes of violence than take place in a single Harlem or Bedford-Stuyvesant precinct. Cops love Queens so much that they park their families there; more NYPD officers live in Queens than in any other borough. Easy living and easy policing—on the leafy streets of Queens the only gunshot to be heard from one year to the next is from a cop committing discreet suicide in his finished basement. It was, additionally, a Tuesday night, just after Thanksgiving, chilly and raining: good cop weather. Even down south in the 103rd, in Jamaica, Queens’s own excuse for a high-crime area, things would be quiet.

  That was fine with Winofski. He realized how good he had it compared to others on the Job. The 105th was one of the City’s quietest, a long, narrow strip making up most of the border with Nassau County, so far east that nomadic Mongols could often be glimpsed on the horizon. His major worry in life came not from the guns of malefactors but from the current plight of the City itself. It was 197, and the town was broke. Winofski had only three years in; he would be one of the first to go if the promised cutbacks actually hit the NYPD. He had already glanced at a post office recruiting bulletin. The benefits were better, and carrying mail would be exciting compared to patrolling the 105th in the wee hours.

  Winofski looked at his watch: nearly 4:00 and halfway through his shift. He would cruise through the little shopping mall at Jamaica Avenue near Springfield Boulevard, check the back to insure that nobody was doing any unauthorized Christmas shopping, and then run west on Jamaica to one of the few all-night restaurants supported by the quiet, early-to-bed neighborhoods of the 105th precinct.

  The parking lot of the mall was black and shiny and empty of cars. He swung the RMP around the stores to the service area and drove slowly down the narrow alley. As expected, the corrugated iron delivery doors were shut and intact, and the back door to the buildings were at least closed. Everything was as it should be, except for the white Cadillac Coupe de Ville parked in the middle of the service alley. The car registered but dimly on Winofski’s mind. He was not anxious to get out in the rain to check it out.

  But when he came around the other side of the mall, instead of pulling out onto the avenue, he swung around for another pass, one that brought him closer to the white Caddy. The car was new and clean, glistening in the rain, its windows giving back the gleam of the alley’s fire lights. As he passed it, he slowed. Winofski was raw and lazy, but he was still enough of a cop to sense in the fact of a luxury car parked in the back of a deserted parking lot, glowing like a beached whale, that air of indefinable wrongness that the police learn to associate with crime.

  He backed up and studied the car for a minute. The interior was invisible because of the reflections. He took down the license and called it in for a stolen-car check. The car looked intact and undamaged—still, joy-riding teens were the likely cause, at least in this precinct.

  The check came back negative. The car was registered to a M. C. Simmons, at a Forest Hills address. Winofski figured some housewife had lost her keys just before the mall closed and hadn’t wanted to pay a locksmith overtime. Her car would keep until tomorrow, and if anything went wrong, she had zero deductible.

  The rain was heavier now and very cold. Winofski cursed softly and pulled the collar of his black slicker up as he scuttled over to the driver’s side of the Cadillac. He snapped on his six-cell flashlight.

  The left rear window was punctured and crazed and stained red. There was a human face pressed against the glass of the driver’s window. The face was dark, sucking up the beam of the flash, but the single eye that was showing bulged hideously and gleamed like a cue ball in a spotlight. Winofski’s heart jumped; he touched his gun and looked inanely about, although there was no one awake within a half mile of him. He then peered more closely at the window, moving the flash around to illuminate different planes of the man’s face. Winofski’s experience with violence was limited, but he knew what a bullet hole looked like and that a man who had two of them in his head was likely to be a victim of homicide.

  Winfoski was not a particularly ambitious policeman, nor did he consider himself clever. As a result, he did not touch the car, or drag the body out, to see if it was really dead, or go through its pockets, or investigate the glove compartment or the trunk. He did, in fact, none of the things that patrolmen occasionally do when they find dead bodies in cars, but instead—now in a mild daze—fell back upon his excellent police academy training and did it by the book. He (1) secured the crime scene. No problem there. And (2) he called it in. And (3) he waited for the arrival of a sergeant and a homicide detective.

  The sergeant was there in eight minutes. The ambulance from the New York Medical Examiner and the man from Queens Homicide both arrived about five minutes later. The sergeant was grumpy and appeared to blame Winofski for getting him out on a night like this. The man from the M.E. was quick, casual, and exhibited the cheerful and vocal cynicism of his kind. The homicide detective was old, tired and quiet, dressed in a gray plastic raincoat buttoned up to the neck and a shabby tan canvas rain hat. His name was Harry Bello. Winofski thought he was the oldest serving officer he had ever seen; he looked like Winofski’s grandfather, who was seventy-five. In fact, Bello was fifty-six, but with a lot of hard miles.

  Unlike Winofski, Harry Bello had, of course, seen a lot of bodies, most of them killed violently. He looked at the dead face pressed against the window, then at Winofski, with eyes that seemed to the young patrolman to be only slightly more lively than those of the victim.

  “You touch anything?” he asked.

  Winofski said he hadn’t. The sergeant agreed. Then Bello asked what time he had found the car.

  “A little before four,” answered Winofski. Bello grunted and turned away. The van for the Crime Scene Unit arrived, and the crime-scene detectives rolled out and began taking photos, stringing yellow plastic tape and looking for clues. One of them was singing “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas.”

  After checking with the CSUs, the M.E. opened the door of the car, and the man’s head and upper body slumped out of the car. The two holes in the man’s right temple showed matte black against the shiny brown of the skin, and the exit wound showed the usual soufflé of hair, bone, blood and brain tissue bulging out of the skull like a mushroom. With the head down, this began to ooze and elongate in a manner that brought sour gases into Winofski’s young throat.

  The M.E. said, “I’m gonna take a chance and pronounce this guy dead at the scene.” Then he and his assistant rolled up a gurney with a body bag lying open on it, and began to heave the corpse out of the car. It took a while.

  When the body was lying flat on the gurney, Bello stepped forward slowly and looked at it. The man was dressed in a loose suede car coat over a turtleneck jersey that had once been bright yellow, but which was now thick with dark blood. He had dark slacks on and suede loafers. The belt of the car coat hung down almost to the ground. Bello picked it up and tossed it onto the body. It had a dark, oily stain at its end. Bello reached into the corpse’s back pocket and drew out a wallet.

  “Jesus, he’s a big motherfucker,” said the M.E.’s assistant. The man was so tall that the body bag would not zip up all the way.

  “You think he’s with the pros?” the M.E. asked. The others all looked thoughtful. The equation was simple: black man, height of a giant, expensive car.

  There was no money in the wallet. It contained, however, several credit cards and a driver’s license in the name of Marion Simmons.

  “It’s Marion Simmons,” said Bello in a flat voice.

  “No shit!” said the M.E.

  “Ay-ay-ay!” said the ambulance
assistant.

  “Marion Simmons?” said one crime-lab guy, a Lebanese who didn’t follow pro basketball.

  Winofski, who did, simply gaped at the enormity of it all, and mentally kicked himself for not having recognized the name when he made the stolen-car check.

  The other crime-lab guy didn’t respond at all, since he was buried in the well of the backseat, where he had just found another ejected case of a 9mm pistol cartridge. There was one on the front seat too. He placed it in a plastic bag and crawled backward out of the car.

  When he stood up, the M.E. called out, “Hey, Ernie! You know who this is? It’s Marion Simmons.”

  Ernie said, “Who, the stiff? Jesus!”

  All the men paused for a moment in silence, watching the rain bead up on the body bag. With the exception of the Lebanese immigrant crime-scene tech, each had seen Simmons alive, and not just alive, but radiating the fierce energy of the professional athlete in the first flush of youthful prowess. That he was now mere meat shocked even these professionally unshockable men.

  Then Bello coughed heavily and asked Ernie for a plastic bag to put the wallet in, and Ernie showed Bello the 9mm cases, and the Lebanese began to dust the interior of the car for prints, and Winofski remembered that he was supposed to call for a tow from the police pound for the Cadillac and walked back to his RMP, and the M.E. said, “Shit, I’m freezing out here. Let’s get this thing on ice, Julio.”

  Bello went back and sat in his car with the door open and lit another cigarette from the butt of one in his mouth. He was trying for cancer, but no luck yet. He thought about taking a hit from the flat pint of CC he kept in the plastic briefcase lying on the seat. But no, he hadn’t actually ever drunk at a crime scene yet: before, yes; after, God, yes, but not actually at. That was one rule. Another was, he was not going to bite his gun. He was not going to end up in a body bag with the M.E. cracking jokes by way of a send-off.

  Stupid, but there it was. The rules and habits formed over twenty-five years on the Job were rooted deeper than even his despair.