Immoral Certainty Page 5

  “Something wrong?” asked the secretary, Connie Trask. Karp’s face was contorted into a rictus of disgust and outrage. He looked at her blankly and then massaged it slowly with a big hand.

  “No, just what I expected. Ever since Tom Dewey, every damn prosecutor in the country’s been playing gangbusters, figuring they put enough Mafia skells in jail they could get to be president or some damn thing. Especially including our own leader. Which means I’m going to have to pull people off stuff that means real paydirt and chase down shooters who are in Palermo by now and witnesses who didn’t see nothing, don’t know nothing—aah, shit I wish they’d all kill each other and get it over with.”

  Trask made sympathetic noises; Karp took a deep breath and collected his thoughts. Even at this late date, any interference in his bureau by Sanford Bloom, the district attorney of New York, got his back up, and made him want to shout obscenities.

  “OK, Connie, set up a meeting. Get whoever caught the squeal from Midtown South, the detectives, me, ah, Tony Harris, Roland Hrcany, and let’s get Guma in on it too. As soon as they all can. Not that it’ll matter.”

  “So where is this guy anyway, the guy that fingered Ferro?” asked Butch Karp. He was holding, unenthusiastically, but true to his word, the meeting on the shooting of Vinnie Red. Four men were sitting around the battered oak table in the bureau chief’s office: Roland Hrcany, Ray Guma, and Tony Harris, all Assistant D.A.’s, and Art Devlin, a police officer. None of them were quick to answer the question. Karp looked at the heavy, sad-faced man sitting at the far end. “Art? Any ideas?”

  Art Devlin, the detective lieutenant who had caught the Ferro case out of Midtown South, said, “Could be anywhere, Butch. Out of town, probably.” He shrugged. “I mean, wise guys—who knows?” His tone implied that he didn’t much care either. This annoyed Karp. If he had to participate in this bullshit, everybody else was going to pull their weight. He frowned and replied, “Um, that’s not all that helpful, Art. I mean, has anybody seen this guy the last couple of days? You got any people working on it, or what?”

  Devlin shrugged again and ran his big hand across the bristling blond stubble on his skull. “Yeah, we got people on it, like we got people on the other six hundred and twenty one unsolved homicides on the books. There’s just so much we can do. And also, a Mob hit….” A final shrug.

  Karp sighed. “Sure, Art, I understand. What about the shooter? Any line on that?”

  “Yeah, not that you’d ever get anybody to stand up in public and repeat it, but it looks like it was Botteglia—Joey Bottles, from the Bollanos. He has a distinctive appearance.”

  “And he’s gone too, I bet.”

  “I don’t know about ‘gone,’ but he’s sure as hell not at home.”

  “So we have no leads?”

  “I didn’t say that, Butch,” Devlin protested, “it just takes time for information to flow in on one of these Mob things.”

  By which he meant, Karp knew, that the cops intended to put the minimum force into the effort until such time as mob rivalries or happenstance threw up a reliable snitch. This was fine with Karp; he would have done the same, in fact, intended to do the same.

  He looked around the table. “Anybody got any ideas?” he asked. “Roland?”

  Karp looked at the man sitting to his right. He was ever an interesting and unusual sight. A backswept mane of white-blond hair almost obscured Hrcany’s eighteen-inch neck. His massive shoulders and arms stretched his shirt to drumhead tightness. He had a heavy-browed, hawk-nosed, belligerent face. Karp and Roland Hrcany went back a long way, having begun working for the D.A.’s office the same week, eight years ago.

  Hrcany snorted. “Yeah, I got an idea. Watch the river. That’s where you’re gonna find Little Noodles.”

  “You think somebody killed him?” asked Karp. “What makes you say that?”

  “It figures. He disappears the day after he fingers a hit on Vinnie Ferro—in public, by the way. We checked the planes, the trains, buses, car rental—he didn’t leave town any of those ways. His wife knows from nothing and he didn’t pull any money out of the bank. Also we got word from the state cops: Umberto Piaccere’s got this condo up in Nyack he uses for meetings and to stash people. The state cops and the Feds keep an eye on it, maybe there’ll be another Appalachin or something. There was what they call ‘unusual activity’ up there the morning after Vinnie got it. They spotted Piaccere and a couple of his heavy hitters and also Joey Bottles.”

  Hrcany paused for effect. “They also saw Impellatti. That also happens to be the last time anybody saw Impellatti. The cops didn’t see him leave, and he sure as shit ain’t there now. So it’s got to be they gave him a ride down the river in a Sicilian speedboat.”

  “I don’t understand, Roland,” said Karp. “Why would they do that? I thought he just did them a favor by helping them nail Ferro.”

  “Favor, schmavor—come on, Butch. These are wise guys. Who else can tie Joey and Harry Pick to the Ferro hit? Hey, your nose is dripping, you’re grateful you got a piece of Kleenex, but do you keep it around after it’s full of snot?”

  Karp grinned. That was one of the reasons he liked Roland. Karp’s view of the human race had become fairly bleak by this time, but Roland made Karp look like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. “That’s a nice image, Roland,” he said. “But if you’re right, we might as well pack it in.”

  “He’s not right, Butch. In fact, it’s total bullshit,” said a gravelly voice from the other end of the table. Its source was a chunky, dark-jowled, greasy-locked, pop-eyed figure slouched back in his chair and looking like a heap of dirty laundry. He wore a lavender brocade tie with a knot the size of a jelly donut yanked down to the second button of his shirt. The shirt, a white-on-white silk job, was open at the collar, revealing a mat of dark hair like old Brillo.

  “Why is it bullshit, Guma?” asked Hrcany testily.

  “Because,” said Guma, “there is no fuckin’ way Harry Pick would be worried that Noodles would rat him out on this thing. Noodles is a stand-up guy.”

  Hrcany rolled his eyes. “Christ, Guma! You really believe that omerta shit? You really think that if we dragged that little mutt in and hit him with a felony murder rap he wouldn’t roll?”

  Guma placed his finger beside his nose and screwed his face into a reasonable likeness of a crafty Sicilian peasant’s, which did not, after all, require much screwing. “Cu’e orbu, bordu e taci campa cent’anni ’n paci,” he replied.

  “What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means, ‘He who is deaf, dumb, and blind will live a hundred years in peace.’ It’s like a motto, like ‘Better Living Through Chemistry.’ You better believe these guys take it seriously, especially Noodles.”

  Hrcany looked away in disgust, but Karp signalled Guma to go on. Guma said, “You know why they call him Little Noodles? He got the name in the joint—this was Sing Sing, so it was maybe twenty years ago, before they closed it down. Impellatti was the wheelman on the Baggia hit. You remember that, Art?” Devlin nodded and Guma continued, warming to his tale. He had been with the D.A. longer than anyone else in the room and had an encyclopedic memory.

  “What a mess! It was in the old Park Terrace Hotel at Thirty-fifth and Lex. There was a barbershop in the hotel with a window on the street. Al Baggia used to get shaved there every morning, get a little hot towel. Needless to say, given his line of work, he always had a couple of buttons sitting in the hallway leading to the shop. Anyway, Impellatti, he couldn’t of been more than about eighteen, whips this big Caddy up onto the sidewalk right up against the window of the barbershop and the shooter—who was Charlie Tonnatti, by the way—smokes Baggia with a shotgun. And they’re gone, boom!

  “So the cops pick up Frank and they take him over to the Fourteenth Precinct and they give him the business, and this was before Miranda was fuckin’ born, so they had no problems with really tearing into him. But no way could they get the name of the shooter out of him. The D.A.,
same shit—nothing! Then—boom! All of a sudden he confesses to being the gun. So he gets the max, nineteen years they sentence him and he don’t even blink. He’s in the can eleven years, not a word about the hit to anyone, and believe me they sent ringers in there to listen, too.

  “Oh yeah, about the name. There was a guy in the joint at the time, a huge hulk, looked like Primo Camera, but beefier and not as smart, name of Angie Lasagna. Frank hung out with him a lot, they kind of looked out for each other. So, naturally, because of his name they called Lasagna ‘Big Noodles’ and Frank was Little Noodles. Angie died a couple a years back, walked in front of a bus—”

  Karp broke in, “And the point is, Goom … ?”

  “The fuckin’ point is that no way is Harry Pick gonna waste Frank ’cause he’s worried he’s gonna rat. Not if Frank had to go over for fifty years.”

  “OK, I see what you mean,” Karp admitted. “So where is he, and why’d he skip?”

  “Hey, the fuck I know! Am I his brother? But the Pick didn’t kill him.”

  Devlin cleared his throat and said, “Ah, Butch, I got to agree with Guma. Now that we’re talking about it, I remember one of my guys telling me that some Bollano people were asking around after Impellatti the weekend after Ferro got hit. They don’t seem to know where he is either.”

  There was silence in the room for a few moments after that, which was broken by Tony Harris. “What about his car?”

  Everyone looked at Harris. He was a wiry young man in his fourth year with the Bureau, a good lawyer and the regular third-baseman on the D.A.’s softball team. “What car, Tony?” asked Karp.

  “Impellatti’s car. He’s got a car, hasn’t he? I mean, he doesn’t go to work on the subway. Also, he’s a driver. He wanted to get away for some reason, he’d probably take the car.”

  Karp looked at Devlin, whose expression was admissible evidence that no, the cops hadn’t thought of looking for Little Noodles’s car.

  CHAPTER

  4

  “So, you goin’ a work today, Felix, or what?”

  “Yeah, maybe, if I feel like it. You goin’?”

  “I guess. But it don’t start ’til four.”

  “You still working that security job?”

  “Yeah. Fuck, I get paid for rackin’ out, which I would do anyway, so….”

  “Yeah, hey, so what do they keep there, that, what is it, a warehouse or somethin’?”

  “Yeah, a warehouse. It’s all white goods, like fridges, and stoves, washers, like that.”

  “Any TV or stereos?

  “Yeah, sometimes. Hey, Felix, you thinkin’ maybe you wanna take the place off?”

  “No, Stevie, I’m thinking of goin’ into the fuckin’ warehouse business, I wanna check out the competition. They know you been in the joint? At the job?”

  “Fuck I know. They didn’t ask. Shit, fuckin’ half the dudes work there been in. If not, they’re some kinda gook or some kind of weird nigger, from Pakistan or some damn place. Who the fuck else is gonna work that kinda job?” The two men were silent for a moment, as if contemplating the economic reality behind that question.

  Felix Tighe was lying on a narrow sofa bed in the living room of his friend’s apartment. His friend, Steve Lutz, was leaning in the doorframe that led to the apartment’s bedroom, dressed in maroon gym shorts and a cut-off Rolling Stones T-shirt, the first Schlitz of the bright morning in hand.

  He was a lean, muscular man in his early twenties, with a narrow, lantern-jawed face and lank, dark, neck-length hair. His arms were tattooed with the usual assortment of hearts, knives, names and snakes. He kept his mouth open, even when not talking, showing uneven yellow teeth.

  Lutz took a long swallow and asked, “You wanna work out?”

  “Yeah, in a minute.”

  Lutz disappeared into the bedroom, and shortly afterward Felix heard his grunts and the clank of weights. He rolled over and reached for his first cigarette. He tried to remember if he had exceeded his self-imposed ration of five daily cigarettes the previous evening, and decided he probably had. He had been with Anna, who smoked like a chimney. He’d have to get her to cut down.

  He sat up and looked around the living room, wrinkling his nose in disgust. There were dirty clothes strewn in piles on the floor and the remains of a large pizza on the square bridge table in the center of the room. Beer cans, some crushed, some still holding stale dregs, littered the floor and overflowed the large rubber garbage pail in the corner. He could see into the tiny alcove kitchen through a torn curtain made of an Indian bedspread. Filthy dishes were piled in the sink and three squat brown bags of dripping garbage were lined up on its drainboard. The close air stank of old beer and orange peel.

  Felix got out of bed, naked except for a pair of bikini underpants printed with a zebra-skin pattern, and picked his way carefully through the litter to the bathroom. He wondered how Lutz could stand to live this way. That junkie bitch he hung out with never lifted a finger around the house, at least she hadn’t in the four months Felix had been crashing here. He would have to get Anna to come over and clean the joint up, or better still, get her to let him move in with her. He would ask her tonight.

  The shower was tepid and weak, the tub ringed with black grime. Felix thought of his mother’s spotless house. He could move back there in a minute. His skin crawled. No, he could hit her up for meals and cash, and stay an occasional night, but no way was he going to move back with Mom. It meant no women for one thing, and for another … he could not quite put his finger on it but there was a big reason why not. No, it would have to be Anna, even if he had to marry her, because he sure as hell was not going to spend any more time in this garbage dump, and the only other alternative, even more unattractive, was moving back in with his wife.

  “Hey, little girl! Want some candy?”

  Marlene Ciampi looked up from the papers on her lap as Karp sidled into the seat next to hers.

  He dangled a Milky Way in front of her face. “What do I have to do, show you my undies?”

  “For starters.” He dropped the candy bar into her hand. She stripped off the wrapper and a full third of it vanished into her mouth. They were sitting in the back of a courtroom, Part Thirty, a calendar Part of the Supreme Court of the State of New York, watching the Honorable Albert A. Albinoli dispense justice.

  “Ummpph, God, don’t even joke about that stuff!” mumbled Marlene around the Milky Way. “I’m waiting on the Segura case here; we’re arraigning on the indictment.” She finished the candy bar and sighed contentedly as the chocolate was transformed into incandescent plasma by her remarkable metabolism. Marlene lost weight on six thousand calories a day. She radiated heat. Karp could feel it warming him on the next chair. He wanted more.

  “The little girl homicide,” said Karp. “Yeah, I remember.”

  “Look,” said Marlene, “Albert’s going to do a far-be-it-from-me.”

  Judge Albinoli was berating a young public defender who had had the temerity to argue a motion to suppress evidence, thus taking up time that could be spent in getting through the calendar. Albinoli resembled the late Thomas E. Dewey, but run to fat and with an excruciatingly silly toupee. The calendar was his god.

  He sprayed when he spoke. “Young man, far be it from me to make a commentary on the jurisprudence which you have averted to, far be it from me, but I too have passed the bar examination, and I have to tell you that I wouldn’t throw out this evidence if you paid me.” A mild titter drifted through the courtroom. Albinoli smiled, as if he had delivered a witticism. Although there were many in the purlieus of Centre Street to whom the term might apply, when people around the courts said “The Asshole” the reference was almost always to this particular one.

  Marlene rolled her eyes and looked over at Karp, but he seemed lost in thought. After a minute he said, “Speaking of that case, Marlene, do you recall that little spat we had, couple of months ago, about you and the other female person attorneys picking up more than your share of these
juvenile rape and murder? You still feel you got a problem?”

  “As a matter of fact, now that you mention it, I do sense a slacking off in that department. I also see by the smug expression on your face that you think you had something to do with the fix.”

  “You could say that. I had a few words with the clerical staff in the complaint room.”

  “So it wasn’t a random thing at all. Somebody was putting it to the ladies.”

  “Somebody was, and they ain’t any more, so far as I can tell. Anyhow, the boys are pulling their load in the child abuse area, and not too happy about it either.”

  “My heart bleeds, the scumbags!”

  “Yeah, for some reason it’s hard to get them to take those cases seriously, except when they’re actual homicides. They call them ‘spankers’.”

  “Spankers?” Marlene shook her head. “Oh shit, that’s nauseating.”

  “Yeah, well, they’re a hard bunch …” His voice trailed off. Marlene’s attention had turned to the business of the court. Karp stood up to go. “Gosh, thanks, Butch,” said Karp. “You’re welcome, Marlene.”

  She looked up at him sternly. “Thanks. For the candy. I’m not going to thank you for doing your job. Which you should have started doing a year ago.” A look of pain and guilt spread like a stain across Karp’s face. She saw it and felt an instant and stunning remorse, but kept her face hard. Somebody had to pay for all her misery, and Karp was her favorite target, both handy and vulnerable.

  “Fine, Marlene,” answered Karp tightly, “as long as we’re being so professional, what about this Segura case? She going to plead?”

  “As a matter of fact, no. She insists that she’s innocent. I offered her a good deal, but she turned me down. Wouldn’t even consider it.”

  “Shit, Marlene, you mean we’re going to try this thing?”

  “Yeah, we’re going to try it. Unless you want to say, ‘Hey, Mrs. Segura, sorry about the inconvenience, but try to watch it with the other kids, OK?’ What the fuck, Butch! I thought you were Mr. Trial.”