Immoral Certainty (12 page)

He had turned all that off, he thought, put it out of his mind by an act of will, crumpled it up like a sheet of legal bond and sunk it in the trash can. But when he thought of seeing Susan again, his gut knotted. Did he still care, or was it shame? It was shame. He knew in his heart that he would never have thought of seeing his wife again had it not been for Marlene’s ultimatum.

Karp closed the window and opened his briefcase. He took out a picture postcard that had arrived at his New York office the previous week. On one side it had a picture of the midway at Santa Monica Pier, full of tourists, and on the other a phone number. He sat down on the bed and dialed it. Two rings and then the phone was picked up at the other end. Nobody said hello.

Karp said, “This is Roger Karp, Mr. Impellatti.”

After a pause, a voice said, “You in town?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Alone?”

“Right. Where are you?”

“You got the card there?”

“Yes.”

“Look at it. You see the guy with the red shirt with the kid? He’s got a balloon.”

“Yeah, I see it.”

“I’ll meet you tomorrow at twelve noon where that guy is standing. Be alone.” With that the phone went dead.

Karp was impressed. As a connoisseur of paranoia himself, he thought that Little Noodles had come up with a neat method of arranging a meeting so that somebody listening in on the conversation wouldn’t know where it was.

This conversation was cordial compared with the next one Karp had, which was with his mother-in-law. She slammed the phone down when he identified himself. When he called again, she informed him that this whole
mishegas
was his fault, as was her husband’s recent heart attack, that if he had stayed in California, and had a nice home, and joined a temple like a decent Jewish husband, instead of living in a crummy apartment in that crazy place with God knew what kind of people for neighbors, so he could chase
momsers,
he should be ashamed of himself, and so on and so on.

Karp waited for a pause in the guilt-bath and asked for Susan’s address. After some hesitation, and some artful lying on his part, he extracted a rural address in Ladero, California, a small town in the mountains above San Jose.

Karp’s third phone call was to an old law-school friend with a practice in L.A., to get the no-fault papers drawn up. He spent the rest of the day by the pool, went to bed early, tossed around for a couple of hours, and then watched movies on TV until four in the morning. He got up at ten, breakfasted in the motel coffee shop and then called V.T. Newbury in New York, the man he had left in charge of the Bureau.

“V.T.? It’s me.”

“The Incredible Hulk? How’s California? Are you snorting cocaine amid the perfect oiled bodies of blonde starlets?”

“Yeah, right. What’s happening at the store?”

“Karp, you’ve been gone a day, what could be happening?”

“So I’m nervous. What’s Bloom doing?”

“Not much. He came to work this morning in a silk peignoir and white satin mules. Besides that, nothing new. Did you connect with your guy yet?”

“Yeah, I’m meeting him in a couple of hours. How do you like the agony of command?”

“My respect for you grows hourly. I signed a bunch of leave slips and a purchase order for a new copier. I feel like Erwin Rommel. Speaking of which, you might have a word with Roland when you get back. He seemed a little miffed he didn’t get the deputy slot.”

“Yeah, I figured he would. It’s kind of hard to explain the situation. Roland thinks hard work and kicking ass is the way to get ahead. But you’re the only guy I got Bloom won’t touch.”

“Hey, I work hard.”

“When you feel like it. Your family and their friends also control about a trillion dollars in political money, which is why you’re golden with the D.A. Meanwhile, I got to go. Is Marlene around?”

“No, I saw her leave with those two cops she’s got working for her. Oh, I almost forgot, Guma wanted to talk to you. Let me switch you over. Bye … hey, and get some sun, take it easy.”

Buzzing and clicking and then Guma’s heavy voice was on the line.

“Butch, how ya doin’? Getting any sun?”

“Why does everybody ask me that? Yeah, sun up the ass. What d’you got, Goom?”

“I talked to Tony Bones. He’s in town.”

“Goom, you ever think that hanging around with wise guys is not a particularly smart move, assuming you’re interested in staying in the D.A. business?”

“Butch, I could give a shit it’s a smart move or not. What am I, bucking for bureau chief? I’m trying to impress fucking
Bloom
? I was putting goombas in jail when he was in finishing school. You too, come to that, so don’t
you
give me any horseshit about Tony Buonofacci. I know him from when we’re both snot-nose little guineas in Bath Beach. We used to hustle chicks together down Cropsey Avenue, for chrissake.”

“Goom, stop with this old neighborhood crap! Half the guys he’s whacked out got the same story. You think he shoots East Side Presbyterians?”

“Hey, did I say he wasn’t a cold-blooded killer? But one, he’s based in Miami now, which puts him off our turf. Let him shoot all the sun tans he wants! And two, he knows if I ever get the chance, I’ll hang his ass, and no hard feelings on either side. He’s a pro—he’ll get the best lawyer in town, he’ll try to fix the jury, and if he loses he’ll go down without a peep. Meanwhile, he’s a
paisan,
and it’s getting so there’s not many of us left.”

“Wait, Guma, I got to wring out my hankie,” said Karp, laughing. “So tell me, what does Tony Bones have to say that I would find interesting?”

“Just that the word is that Harry Pick went apeshit when Little Noodles disappeared. He started stirring things up, as only Harry can, and among the things he stirs up is a little hood named Carmine Scalliose, who it looks like is the last guy to see Noodles in the City. This is in a spaghetti joint on Grand, two days after Ferro got his. Apparently, Noodles walks up to him, gives him a big smile, and starts schmoozing like crazy, which is weird, because him and Carmine have never been such great friends.

“So after a while he leaks out that Harry Pick’s after him. He don’t know why, but he saw Harry give him the shot, he says, up at Nyack.”

“What’s that about, ‘the shot?’”

“I don’t know, some kind of gesture—you know, like kids going ‘bang-bang.’ But Noodles thinks it’s for real—he’s a dead man. So he panics, he splits, he hides—”

“He hides from Harry in
Little Italy?”

“Yeah, I know, it’s like hiding in Harry’s Jockey shorts, but here’s the thing: He tells Carmine he’s going to Puerto Rico—even shows him the ticket. So he gets Carmine to drive him to Kennedy: bon voyage, Noodles.”

“Knowing, of course, that Carmine will go straight to Harry.”

“Like shit down a chute. So Harry tears up PR, looking for him, for a couple of days. Then he starts thinking it’s a scam. Tony thought it was pretty amusing, Harry in PR, and all the time Noodles is in L.A.”

“Wait a minute, Guma—Tony knows Noodles is in L.A.?”

“Shit, Butch,
everybody
knows he’s in L.A. After he got back to the City, it took Harry twenty-four hours to get wise to the switch. You think he don’t have people in the airports? Tony says he’s got Jimmy Tona’s outfit looking for him out there. Harry’s pissed, Butch. Maybe in Nyack he was just dicking around, but now it’s serious, you know? I mean, Noodles knows where all the bodies are buried.”

“That’s probably not a figure of speech, is it?”

Guma chuckled, a sound like marbles running down a bathtub drain. “I doubt it. You’re in a bind, son.”

“So it seems. It’s a shame I’m going through all this to bring Noodles back, and he doesn’t even make a case to nail the shooter and Harry.”

“What d’you mean, he was driving the … Oh, right, no corroboration.”

“Right, it’s too bad Noodles was an accomplice. Of course, Harry doesn’t know we don’t have a corroborating witness. We might try to play with that, assuming I can bring Noodles in in one piece. You have any Sicilian wisdom to convey on that?”

“Yeah, stay away from the cops. Noodles goes anywhere near a jail, he won’t get much older. Which he knows.”

“Uh-huh. He does seem a hair paranoid about me being alone.”

“I don’t blame him. Look, you got a meet set up yet?”

“Yeah, in about an hour and a half.”

“OK, make the contact, then get in a car and drive like a sonofabitch someplace where they won’t look for you. Lay low for a couple of days and I’ll get something together, bring you both in.”

“What are you talking about, Guma? Lay low, my ass! I’m going to pick up Impellatti, drive to LAX, get on a plane, and come home.”

“Butch, you’re not listening. Listen to me! You think Harry Pick would lose sleep over wasting a planeload of people to get this guy? You remember why they call him Harry Pick? No planes, and stay out of big towns. Hotels ain’t such a good idea either. Can you think of any place you can hide out? Like in the country?”

“Yeah,” said Karp, after a moment’s pause. “I just thought of a place they’ll never look.”

“What do you mean, the doll’s a dead end?” snapped Marlene. Peter Balducci sighed. “Marlene, for
now,
a dead end. I’m not saying something couldn’t turn up.” He and Raney were in Marlene’s office at the end of a long and frustrating day. He looked at his partner for support, but Raney had his chair tipped back against the wall, staring up at the high ceiling, watching the smoke from his cigarette and Marlene’s curl and twine up to the high ceiling.

“Like I told you on the phone, I saw this guy, what’s-his-name, the doll guy …” He checked his notebook. “Schlechter, he’s got a place on Madison, a doll expert. He recognized the maker. The doll’s Belgian, made about nineteen-ten. He said there’s only about fifty of them around.”

“Eleven grand a copy,” said Raney.

Balducci snorted. “Yeah, can you believe it?”

“Did he know how many of them were in the city?” Marlene asked.

“No, and he didn’t sell that particular one, either. But he gave me a list of the kind of collectors who could touch an item like that.” He passed a sheet of paper to her across the disordered desk. “Fourteen names. Three were out of the country. I checked out all the others. Nothing.”

“What, ‘nothing’?”

“Nothing, nothing. None of them got a doll like that missing. None of them got a record with anything more than a parking ticket.”

Marlene looked at the list. The addresses were all Silk Stocking East Side or upper West Side. “How do you know none of the dolls was missing?”

Balducci rolled his eyes. “Christ, Marlene! We don’t know these folks
had
a doll like that. Just they
could’ve
had. We had to check them out because we could’ve got lucky. Like, ‘Oh, yeah, officer, that’s the one that cousin Reginald the sex fiend ripped off last June.’ Besides that, what am I supposed to do? People who can pay eleven grand for a doll, you don’t just walk in and toss their place.”

“What are you telling me, Pete? Above a certain tax bracket we don’t have sex killers?”

Balducci glowered at her and got to his feet. “Marlene, you know damn well I don’t think that. Now come on! We’re two people, we got a full load besides this crap, we’re not gonna follow every citizen that could’ve had access to an expensive doll. Not until we know something else about who we’re looking for.”

“He’s big, he’s white, he wears black clothes, and he’s got short, blond hair,” said Raney.

The others looked at him, dumbstruck for a moment. “How the hell you know that, Jimmy?” Balducci demanded.

Raney let his chair drop down with a crack like a gunshot. “Because while you were talking to the doll collectors, I went back to Lucy Segura’s neighborhood and hung out. There’s a playground, a couple of schoolyards. I figured if the little sister saw him, he had to be in some public place where he was hustling her. I mean, he didn’t pick her up at her door, right? So I found a couple of kids playing basketball in a schoolyard on One-sixteenth. They remembered seeing a guy with that description talking to a little kid three days before Lucy disappeared. They thought he was a priest.”

“Kids!” snorted Balducci. “They’ll tell you any damn thing …”

“Right, so I cruised the fast-food joints on One-sixteenth and up Lex. The day manager at the MacDonald’s also remembered a guy in black and a little girl. They came three, four times. Guy bought a meal for the kid and himself. He wouldn’t have recalled it, but the guy was so big. Maybe six-four, three hundred pounds. Black raincoat, black suit, and fedora. He doesn’t remember if he had a dog collar on or a regular shirt.”

Balducci frowned. “Maybe it
was
a priest, Jimmy. Maybe it was a priest with another little girl.”

“It’s the guy, Petey.”

Balducci looked at Marlene for support, but she was gazing at Raney with admiration, who was gazing back with a similar expression.

Balducci shook his head. “Right. It’s the guy. An arrest is imminent. You two figure it out. I’m going home.”

After Balducci left, Marlene said, “Your partner seems grumpy.”

“Yeah, he can get that way. He’s just P.O.’d because he wants to can this case, and I don’t. We’re gonna get that guy.” He smiled at her.

He’s got a nice smile, thought Marlene, returning it. “Well, I’m glad you’re with me on this,” she said. “How are you going to handle it?”

“We’ll nose around the buildings where the doll people were, see if anybody’s seen a big blond dude.”

“What if they haven’t?”

“Then Pete’s right—it’s square one again. Hey, we got lucky. There’s no guarantee our luck’s gonna hold.”

Marlene nodded and sighed. “Yeah, you’re right, I guess.” She looked at her watch. It was six-ten. “Anyway, time to go home.” She stood and started stuffing her briefcase.

“Can I drop you off?”

“Don’t you want to get home yourself?”

“Haven’t got one. I share a place with a couple of other cops in Jamaica.”

“OK. I just have to drop some things off at the Bureau office. I’ll meet you on the Leonard Street side in ten minutes.”

Marlene expected the Bureau office to be deserted this late in the day, but the lights were on and she heard the sound of typing. She threw some files in an in-basket for filing. At the sound, the typing stopped and Dana Woodley stuck her head up over a partition. She looked startled.