Butch Karp: Act Of Revenge Part 30

"See you later, crocodile," said Tran in English, and left.

Lucy crouched over the Vietmanese and took his hand. He opened his eyes. "I'm sorry," he said. "I am ashamed, but they made . . . I'm so sorry."

"Don't be sorry," she said. "All this is my fault."

Then, as if magically, as if in a dream, the alcove was full of people. Her mother, her father (her father?), Detective Bryan, Mary Ma, two paramedics, several policemen.

"Lucy, come away, honey," her father said. "Let these guys get to him." He knelt down and placed his arm around her.

Cowboy said, "No!" with such vehemence that he coughed up a froth of blood. He gripped Lucy's wrist so hard her tanned skin turned white around his b.l.o.o.d.y fingers. He began to speak rapidly in Vietnamese, interrupted by spells of coughing. Lucy answered softly in the same fluting language. Tears were pouring from her eyes. Karp held his daughter tightly, and in his other hand a Sony soundlessly rotated, recording the best possible exception to the hearsay rule, a dying declaration.

Chapter 19.

"YOU DON'T HAVE TO DO THIS NOW," Karp said. "You don't have to do it at all. I can get a Vietnamese translator tomorrow-"

"No," said Lucy firmly. "You said the faster we can get this done, the faster the cops can start looking for Leung. And I want to do it. He was my friend. It's my fault he's dead."

"Lucy, now stop it! It's not your fault." She shriveled and started to weep again, a slow snuffling drip, almost soundless, that had been going on almost without break from the time the dying boy had grasped her hand. They were in the Karps' bedroom at Aunt Sophie's house, where they had returned late, after endless exhausting interviews with the local cops and then the homicide cops from county and state police, and a couple of well-dressed gents from the FBI. In fairness, it was a complex story and the telling took some time, how a Chinatown double murder and a Mafia a.s.sa.s.sination had led to a machine-gun shoot-out in a beachside shopping center, and how Lucy Karp fit into all of it. Karp had been by his daughter's side throughout, and thought she had handled herself well. Leung was the man she and Mary and Janet had seen at the murder-there was no point in hiding that any longer, and Mary confirmed it. But the locals and the staties were interested in the four corpses on their patch. Miraculously, no one else had been killed, although there were numerous injuries among the bystanders, some grave. Of the dead, two were simply explained: Leung had killed Nguyen Van Minh, aka Cowboy, and an NYPD police officer had killed Vo Van Hai, aka Kenny Vo. There were two other Asian corpses outside the Beach Bazaar, Cai Wens.h.i.+ and Yang Wo-ming from their ID, and no one knew who had shot them, or whom Kenny Vo had been shooting at, or why.

Lucy professed ignorance of these details. Karp was not so sure. The list of people who could both mount a disciplined a.s.sault with automatic weapons and who were pals with his daughter was a very short one; perhaps it had only one member. Despite this, he did not press her on it. The other great mystery of the day was what had become of Mr. Leung. By four that afternoon several hundred officers from a half dozen police agencies had searched the area of the shopping strip and beyond, stopping cars, peering into crannies under the boardwalk, and questioning people, but with no success. Leung had vanished, and Karp believed that Cowboy's last words might hold a clue to his plans. He prepared pad and pencil and pushed the recorder switch. The sound of coughing and then the boy's voice.

Lucy said, "He says, 'I am sorry. He is a bad person, my cousin, he . . . does not know how to live as a human being. I am bad, too, although I did not want it to . . . listen, it was Leung's plan, all of it. First, we captured the Italian man, Catalano . . .' "

Karp heard his own voice saying, "Did you kill Catalano?" and then Lucy's translation and Cowboy, again. Lucy translated: "No, I drove one of the cars. Kenny killed Catalano. Leung was there. He looked at the clock and said when to fire. They fired through the man's head. I was sick. Kenny laughed and he said, 'Next time, you will do it yourself, it's about time,' and other things. They all laughed at me. I wanted them to stop laughing, so I did it. I came in through the back door and I shot them both, as Leung had ordered, in the body and in the head. I went on home invasions, too. In one place we raped a woman, and I pretended to also, but I was too ashamed. I did not want this kind of life in America. He knew you were the one, that day, you saw everything. He found out from the Chen. You called, they got the address where you were. She asked you. I should have shouted out or warned, but I was afraid. We came out here. I didn't want to, but . . . Lucy, do you think . . . Lucy, do you think . . . Lucy . . ." And the sound of crying. Karp flicked off the machine.

She was sobbing now, and she brought forth from the pocket of her cutoffs a wad of tissues the size of a softball, bits flying everywhere, and dabbed her eyes with it and blew her nose. Karp tossed his pad away and hugged Lucy to him, making comforting sounds without meaning, until the whooping sobs stopped and she relaxed against him, snuffling and exhausted.

"You should get some rest," he said.

"Everybody thinks it's my fault, don't they?"

"n.o.body thinks that, Lucy."

She pulled away and faced him. "No, don't be a daddy, tell me the truth! None of this would've happened if I just came to you and told what I saw in the Asia Mall."

"You want the truth? Okay, yeah, it would've been better if you came forward with it-for you. For you, Lucy, not necessarily for the other people."

"I thought I was doing the right thing. For Mary, I mean, and Janice. Dad, how could she have? I don't understand. I thought she was, they are-were, like my family. I loved her. Wen jing zhi jiao."

"What's that?"

"Friends who would die for each other. I thought . . . oh, G.o.d, what a mess." She stood and gave her face another wipe. "I want to go see Mary now, all right?"

"Sure, baby, go ahead. I'll see you later."

He checked over his transcription and put it away, and bent to pick up the sc.r.a.ps Lucy had scattered on the floor, placing them in a large tin ashtray on the bedside table. He did a good job, glad, actually, of one mess that was easy to clean up.

Marlene made a big batch of Spanish omelettes and b.u.t.tered toast for the house, but the table was far from the merry a.s.sembly it had been on previous nights. Two people were missing: Posie had been kept by the hospital for a day of observation, and Detective Bryan, placed on routine administrative leave after the shooting, had gone back to the city. The rest ate with poor appet.i.te, in relative silence. Even the twins were subdued. The girls left for their attic as soon as they could, and Sophie left early, too, complaining of pains in her hip. Karp took the boys for a walk on the beach before bedtime, accompanied by Ed Morris, while Marlene washed up. As she stood at the sink, Jake Gurvitz came in, picked up a dish towel and started to dry.

"Don't bother, thanks," she said. "They'll drip on the rack."

Jake smiled. "That's what Sophie says." He took a seat at the kitchen table. Outside, it was drifting into deep blue, and moths were beginning their totentanz against the back-door lightbulb.

"How is she?"

"Not bad for an old lady who just had a G.o.dd.a.m.n thing the size of a pipe wrench stuck in her body. Amazing what they can do nowadays."

"Yeah, amazing." She turned off the hot water, racked the egg pan, and faced him, leaning against the sink. "Was she upset about this afternoon?"

"Upset? Sophie's hard to upset. Something don't go right, she puts it out of her mind. You think of what she's been through, it's probably the best thing."

Marlene pulled out her pack and stuck a sandy, crumpled filter tip in her mouth. Jake lit it and lit a panatela for himself. "Yeah, no point in carrying all that stuff around with you, except if you plan on doing something with it. And, speaking of the past, does she know about you?"

"She knows I wasn't teaching in a girls' school," he said after a brief pause. He was watching her closely.

"But not that you were Jake the Baker."

"Huh. You're some detective. Where'd you hear that?"

"Around. Does she?"

"That? No. Why, you going to tell her?"

"No, of course not. You did a good thing for me and my kids today. I owe you. But as a matter of curiosity, and because I got a stake in it, what kind of paper would it be that Salvatore Bollano wouldn't like to see on the TV?"

Jake released a long stream of cigar smoke and studied a large gray moth battering against the kitchen window. He took a deep breath and let it out. "You know I worked for Sally back then?"

"Uh-huh. What as, exactly?"

"I kept the union in line, made sure Sally got his cut of the dues, took care of the pension funds for him. Moved money from here to there and back. Like that."

"And put guys in ovens?"

Jake chuckled. "You don't want to believe everything you hear, Marlene. Anyway, a lot of cash moved around, and there were markers, little pieces of paper that said who got paid what-like receipts, you know? The guy's initials, the amount, and who cleared the payoff. That was usually Sally himself, but me, too. We called them tags. Like a guy would say, 'Tag so-and-so for fifty G.' "

"A guy like Heshy Panofsky?"

Jake raised his eyebrow and smiled. "Oh-ho! Now I see why Sally sent that kid around to see you. No, as a matter of fact, Panofsky was at the other end. He was a cutout, if you know what that means. The politicians didn't want to know from where the dough really came. But they get it from Panofsky, they could tell themselves it was clean."

"So Panofsky collected money from the Mob and paid it out. I figured that out already."

"Uh-huh. He would keep track of it in a book he kept locked up in his office. The tag book, they called it, like a ledger. Initials, dates, amounts, the whole megillah."

"That'd be an interesting book to read."

"Interesting, yeah, but not healthy," said Jake, and Marlene asked the inevitable next question: "This has something to do with why Jerry Fein got killed, doesn't it?"

Jake's face darkened, and he looked again at the window. The moth was stationary now, exhausted, longing for the light. "That's a whole different story. You don't need to know about that."

"Oh, Christ! Jake, tell me you didn't do him!"

Jake looked at her, meeting her eyes. She thought, What is it about me that attracts the bad boys of the world? What do they want from me? Why do I like them? Thinking thus, it seemed like a long while before he answered.

"No, I didn't do him. Little Sal and Charlie Tuna did him. I knew about it, though. I found that sc.u.mbag n.o.bile for them."

"For the key."

"Yeah. The key."

"Was Panofsky involved?"

"Nah. They wouldn't involve Heshy, a thing like that. He was their gate into legit stuff. They wouldn't want him to get his hands dirty. Did he know about it? h.e.l.l, yeah, he knew about it. Had to."

"So, why, Jake? Why did they kill their own lawyer?"

"Why? Because he found out who framed him on the jury tamper. Thing about Jerry, see, he played it straight up. He gave you his best shot, and he was good. But Sally, on that Gravalotti thing, his own a.s.s on the line, he wasn't gonna take no chances. So he tells Heshy, put the fix in, Heshy, get to a juror, a couple of jurors. So Heshy does it. But he works it so that when it comes out, Jerry looks like the one done it. And he, I mean Heshy, makes sure it comes out."

"Why would he do that?" asked Marlene.

"Hey, what do I know? But Panofsky had this hard-on for Jerry Fein. It was a known thing. Everybody but Jerry knew it, but Jerry, he couldn't take it in. He brought the guy into the firm, covered his a.s.s, he's making a good living . . . what's that thing about punishment, something about a good deed?"

"No good deed goes unpunished."

"Yeah! That was them."

Marlene thought for a moment about what she'd learned from Abe Lapidus. Heshy'd done the frame, Fein had taken the fall to protect Bernie Kusher, but then found out that Heshy had screwed him. He'd be mad as h.e.l.l, but . . . She turned a puzzled face to Jake. "But . . . okay, say Jerry found out about the frame. He threatens to expose Panofsky. What's that got to do with the killing? Bollano killed Jerry as a favor to Panofsky?"

"Nah. No way. No, that's something I could never figure out. Sally was really mad at Jerry, really mad, and Sally, you know he was usually a bucket of ice about business. No, this was something else, something personal. Because it looks bad, guys in that business don't usually knock off their lawyers. Lawyer's no danger to them, because of that rule-they can't rat them out."

"Right, client privilege. So, tell me, what was the paper you're going to scare Big Sally with?"

Jake shrugged, raised his eyebrows. "Oh, that. h.e.l.l, that was mostly bluff. I handled a lot of paper for Sally, he don't know what stuck to my fingers. Tags and stuff. I got some stuff with my lawyers, anything happens to me . . . you know. But the tags ain't worth much without the tag book."

"And I presume that's gone by now."

"h.e.l.l, yeah! I mean, they're not stupid. After Jerry went, Panofsky cleaned out the office, dumped Jerry's secretary, got rid of Bernie Kusher-"

"I thought Kusher embezzled some money and took off."

"The way I heard it, Heshy was about to rat him out, but Bernie beat him to the punch. He cleaned out the safe, all of Sally's payoffs for the month, had to be seven, eight hundred large. Heshy had to loot the trusts to pay it back, which he stuck on Bernie. Neat trick, when you think about it. Always a joker, Bernie."

Not a million, though, thought Marlene. Some of the trust money had stuck to Heshy's fingers. She said, "Yeah. Speaking of funny, aren't you worried about Vinnie Fresh? He doesn't strike me as the kind of guy who you blow his ear off he's going to laugh and forget about it."

Jake ground out his cigar and laced his hands behind his head. "Well, I tell you, Marlene: one, I'm seventy-two. If not this, it'll be the prostate or some other d.a.m.n thing. I never figured to last this long in the first place. Practically everybody I came up with is dead. All this with Sophie-it's a bonus I never expected. And two-these guys they got today, they ain't the same as guys like me. They ain't tough the same way. I'd've pulled a stunt like that on the beach, in the old days, I wouldn't be here talking to you now. I'd be feeding the crabs. We used to get any s.h.i.+t, boom! Come right back at you, none of this f.u.c.king around. So, I ain't worried. I can take care of myself. Believe me, Salvatore knows that better'n anybody alive."

There was a commotion at the door, and Karp came in with the two boys. They came rus.h.i.+ng up to their mother, and each dumped a large, stinking marine rock on the clean table.

"We collected rocks, Mommy," cried Zik. "Look, mine has seaweeds and a little crab. But he's hiding now, and a clam stuck on it."

"A barnacle. It's beautiful, darling!"

"My rock is bigger," said Zak. "Mine has red worms on it."

The rocks were admired, placed in plastic bags, were banned from the bathwater, despite strenuous objections, and the Karps soon afterward put their boys to bed. The two girls had meanwhile taken over the front bedroom vacated by the departure of Bryan and Posie. In their own bedroom, the Karps flung themselves full-length on their high bed, hooting and giggling with exhaustion.

"Good thing this is a vacation, or I'd be tired," said Karp.

"Yeah, any more relaxation and we'd start to get stale."

"Right. Say, Zak kept going on about going on a boat ride, and Zik said something about the kidnap man coming in a boat. What was that all about, or were they making stuff up?"

"No, just some a.s.shole in a rubber boat trying to mess with my head. They see a woman alone on the beach, it goes right to their gonads. It was nothing."

"Really?"

Marlene ignored this, for she did not have the energy to deal with Karp's worry. They had, she thought, enough to worry about. She moved closer to him and nestled her head into the hollow of his shoulder. "You're so good," she said. "You uphold the law. You don't kill people. You don't even want to kill people."

"Well, George Steinbrenner . . . if I could get close enough . . ."

"No, seriously, Butch. I keep feeling it's all my fault, the violence, that there's some, I don't know, l.u.s.t, I have for it. I was just thinking, just now, who are my friends, who do I attract, who am I attracted to: Mattie Duran, a killer; Tran, a stone killer; my best friend on the cops? Jim Raney, who's killed more people in line of duty than any other serving officer. Jake Gurvitz-"

"Our Jake?"

She told him who Jake was. He said, "Jesus!"

"Jesus, indeed. So I'm in this life, I chose it, for whatever reason, and I have to say, Lucy's in it, too. Bad genes. I don't worry about Lucy; I mean, I worry about her hating me, and not being happy, but I don't worry about her safety the way you do. Irrational? Maybe, but that's how I feel. But, Butch, when that guy went after Zik, I fell apart. Complete paralyzed jelly. They're not like Lucy, they're just little tiny boys. And I can't protect them, not twenty-four hours a day, not and do anything else. Does this make sense?"

"Honestly? No, but I know that's the way you feel. The question is, what are you going to do about it?"

"Well, first I'm going to have a ciggie." She got her pack out, opened the window wide to the sea breeze, went over to the nightstand, and picked up the ashtray. She looked at it in distaste.

"What is all this c.r.a.p?"

"Lucy's crying debris. Kleenex from her pocket."

"Butch, this is blood."

"Where?" Together, they examined the crumpled, brown-stained piece of paper together.

Karp said, "This must have come from the murder scene. It's got Chinese writing on it. It looks like a betting slip. See, the number 4,500 and the characters around it."