Immoral Certainty (24 page)

Balducci looked at his note pad. “Three A North isn’t home. Three A South didn’t know the deceased, didn’t hear nothing, don’t know nothing. The B’s and C’s are out too. Three D North is an old lady, Mrs. Banda. She said the deceased had visits from men, and that they stayed the night.”

“She a pross?”

“No, a singer. Wrote some songs too. According to the guy in Three E North. Dolan, a plasterer on disability. Had a beer or two with the deceased. Said Mullen was married to a rock musician named Willie Mullen, also the father of the two kids. They were not on good terms, he says. Also, there’s a boyfriend, another musician named Staley or something close, he wasn’t sure. He’s a brother. He also said the victim was close to a woman named Anna Rivas, lived in 3F South. But the super said Rivas moved out about a week ago, in a big hurry. Everybody else was out. What’d you get?”

Raney looked around the living room in disgust. “Not much the forensic guys missed. There’s a big thumb print on the outside doorway. You don’t even need dust to see it. You think this scumbag is maybe not a mental giant?

“Anyhow, I checked out the stuff in her desk. The hubby’s behind on payments. There’s some letters and shit from a lawyer. Also, I talked to the mother, Mullen’s mother. She said she’d been expecting something like this—she seemed more busted up about the little kid than about her own daughter. I gather Stephanie was a disappointment to Mom. Anyway, she likes the ex for it. Apparently, he was a hitter—beat her up for years. And I found this.”

He held up a framed glossy standard publicity photograph of a good-looking black man with long corkscrew curls. He was shown singing and pounding on a bass guitar. The message “Love you babe—always, Dodo” was written across the front of it.

“The name is Dodo Styles,” said Raney. “Quite the stud. He’s first on my list to talk to.”

“Him rather than the ex?” asked Balducci. “Why?”

“It’s a knife job, ain’t it? That always makes me think a jig. Or a PR.”

“Good thinking, Jimmy, I like the way your mind works. Of course, it could be one of us wops. We’re pretty good with knives.”

“Nah, wops have graduated to guns. It’s the jig, you’ll see, Petey.”

“Yeah, well let’s close up here and see if we can get to see these guys. My thinking is, though, it ain’t either one of them.”

“Yeah? How’s that? Who, then?”

“I don’t know, but I figure it went down this way. The perp comes in. He kills the mother right in the doorway. The kid comes down the hallway from the kids’ bedroom, or he’s already standing where the hall meets the living room. He sees his mother get it, the perp sees him, and he stabs the kid right there. The question is now, why didn’t he kill the other kid?”

“But the other kid didn’t see nothing. He was sleeping.”

“Yeah, but the killer didn’t know that. One kid was up, the other kid coulda been up, too, he coulda seen the whole act from down the hall. It’s a straight shot. What I’m saying is, anybody who knew there were two kids in the house woulda taken out the other kid. So …”

“It was a stranger. I get your point. The chain is ripped off the wall there, too, which also says stranger. He had to break in.”

“Definitely a stranger,” Balducci agreed and grimaced. “That means it’s gonna be a pain in the ass.

“Maybe, but if we find Dodo carrying out a bag of bloody clothes, and his prints match, I’m gonna laugh in your face.”

CHAPTER
11

“I
s this guy shining us on, or what?” said Roland Hrcany.

“No, he’s telling the truth,” said Ray Guma. “Why should he lie, for chrissake?”

“Yeah, why should I?” added the object of their discussion, Little Noodles Impellatti.

Butch Karp regarded without enthusiasm the five men sitting around the conference table in his office. Besides Hrcany, Guma, and Noodles, there were young Tony Harris and Art Devlin, the cop. Devlin and the two senior A.D.A.s had been bickering without significant advancement of the cause of justice for the better part of an hour. Karp, whose interest in the Ferro killings had started out slight, had recently become enthusiastic about the prospect of making a major anti-Mafia coup. Now it was all coming apart, and he found to his disgust that he resented losing what he had begun by not wanting at all.

“Guys, guys, settle down!” Karp said, rapping with his heavy knuckles on the table. They all stopped talking and looked at him.

“OK, let me review the bidding. Noodles, you have supplied us with details of three assassinations in which you were involved between nineteen sixty-six, when you got out of prison, and the present. All these murders were ordered by Umberto Piaccere in your presence. You identified the final resting place of the victims, which were all parking garages owned by the Bollano family. We had people go out to these places, we pried up two steel plates you told us about, and what did we find?”

“We found zilch,” said Devlin.

“Yes,” said Karp. “The concrete in which the bodies were supposed to be encased had been dug up. So we got three holes. Three holes is not good enough, Noodles.”

Noodles shrugged, “Whaddya want, Karp? They must of took them.”

“They must have,” Karp agreed.

“This is crap, Butch,” snarled Hrcany, wrinkling his golden brow. “We oughta throw his ass out on the street.”

“Roland, be real for once,” Guma said in a tired voice. “The guy’s a corpse already. He’s got no angle for not spilling what he knows. Not that he knows much.”

Hrcany opened his mouth to respond, since to him everybody was lying all the time about everything, and to bother to explain why a mutt like Noodles might not be lying seemed an exercise in frivolity. But Karp cut him off with a gesture and turned his full attention to Impellatti.

The man seemed to have shrunk during the days of interrogation, as if the rich juice of Mafia status had kept him pumped up beyond his normal dimensions. That juice had nearly drained away and he had begun to seem slight and weasely. Karp looked him carefully in the eye and said, “Noodles, we want to help you, but we can’t unless you give us something to make a case, you understand? Right now, we got nothing.

“Sure, you’re a witness, but we need someone to corroborate your story, which we haven’t got yet. Right now, Harry’s going around cleaning up the loose ends that he knows you know about. But he can’t clean up everything, can he? So what I want you to do is to try to think of something that you know about that Harry
doesn’t
know you know about. Can you do that now?”

Impellatti made an eloquent gesture of helplessness with his hands. “Hey, man, I’m just a driver, you know? What the fuck you expect, I’m gonna know something he don’t know? You think I’m hanging around in the castle with the big shots? They tell me, I drive—that’s the whole ball of wax.”

But then he sat and thought through the length of three chain-smoked cigarettes, while the others waited silently. At last he spoke.

“Carmine DiBello.”

“Who’s he?” asked Karp.

“Just a guy. He used to hang around Bleeker Street, waited tables sometimes at Formaggio’s and other joints and ran a little numbers back when. Not too bright of a guy, you know? I ain’t seen him around much lately, but I heard he was working for the Ferros in Brooklyn.”

“He means what about him, Noodles,” snapped Hrcany, “his connection—what the fuck we care about his biography?”

Impellatti looked offended, but continued. “I’m getting to it. So when we hit Jimmy Scorsi, like I told you, Joey Bottles was the trigger. We got him when he was goin’ into his car. He was keeping some bitch in this fancy place on First, and Joey nailed him with two in the head and then we put him in the trunk and drove him to the garage on Tenth just like I told you.”

“Yeah,” said Karp, “one of the famous missing bodies. So what’s the connection with this DiBello?”

“He saw the whole thing. He was across the street in his car.”

“Uh-huh. What was he doing there?”

Impellatti smiled vaguely. “That’s the funny part. Jimmy’d hired him to watch his girl’s place. He thought she was givin’ him the horns. What a laugh, huh?”

“Hilarious. So you spotted him there.”

“Yeah. I recognized his car.”

“And you didn’t tell Joey about it? Or Harry?”

“Shit, no, man! I’d a done that, Joey woulda whacked him out right there. I mean there was a big trunk in Jimmy’s car. It was a ’71 Caddie Coupe de Ville.”

“Why didn’t you tell them?”

“I dunno. Carmine done me a couple a favors. And it was, you know, none of my business. I’m the fuckin’ driver, you understan’? I figured there was no percentage in it for me. I had a couple of words with him after, and I figured there wasn’t gonna be no trouble or nothin’. If you wanna know, I never thought about why until you ast me just now.”

Karp turned to Guma. “Goom, you ever hear about this DiBello?”

“No, but that don’t mean much. I could ask around.”

“Do that. And Art? If you could follow up on this too—see if you can get a line on him.”

“Well, it’s a start,” agreed Devlin and left to begin making his calls. That seemed to be the end of the meeting. Hrcany spoke with Karp briefly about a monster sting he was setting up on an uptown fencing operation, and then left for another appointment. Karp stood up and stretched his long frame. A couple of detectives came in and removed Impellatti.

“So what do you think, Goom?” asked Karp. “About what he just gave us? It could be what we need.”

Guma toyed with the cellophane on his next White Owl and looked doubtful. “Yeah, could be. If we can find him. There’s a lot of ginzos in Brooklyn. And even if we find him, there’s no guarantee he’s gonna roll, and go up against Umberto.” He made a short overhand stabbing motion with his hand. “They don’t call him Harry Pick for nothing.”

Tony Harris, who had remained silent during the questioning, spoke up now, and in the tone of one who has had secrets kept from him. “Guma, I’ve been hearing that for weeks, and I haven’t said anything, but I can’t stand it any more. OK, I’m the new kid on the block—tell me, why do they call him Harry Pick, if they don’t call him Harry Pick for nothing?”

“No big thing, kid,” said Guma with a magisterial air. “They call him Harry Pick, because in the old days he used to work over people he didn’t like with an ice pick. There’s a story that he got Philly Joe Lombroso down in a warehouse across from Pier 46 and stuck holes in him for three whole days. There was even a book on how many holes he could rack up before he croaked him. I forget the exact number, but it was a lot higher than you woulda thought. A skillful guy, Harry. Anyway, after that nobody fucked with him much. Except Vinnie Red.” He unpeeled his cigar and stuck it in his mouth unlit. Leaning back in his chair, he continued.

“I also heard he hung a guy up by his pecker once. Used the ice pick too. The way he did it, I heard—”

“Thanks, Guma,” said Harris quickly. “I get the picture. Great story. What about this castle, now?”

“What castle?” asked Guma.

“What Noodles said, when he said he didn’t know anything about what the big guys did. He said he never hung around the castle.”

“I honestly don’t know, Tony. It could be … hey, Butch, where’re you goin’?”

Karp had shoved a chair aside with a clatter and was out of the office at a run. Minutes later he was back with the detectives and Little Noodles in tow.

“It’s a place the Bollanos got,” Noodles explained after Harris’s question had been put to him. “It’s up in Nyack. What’s the big deal?”

“You mean the apartment in Nyack?” asked Karp.

“Nah, nah—this is a big place, a real castle, like in the movies. Sally B. lets a guy live there—a square guy, not a family guy. It’s free to him, but he’s got to clear out when the bosses want to meet.”

“You ever been there?”

“Nah, I told you—only the big fish go: Sally B., Little Sally, Harry, the
capo regimes.
Sometimes guys from other families or union guys. They drive themselves. But I heard about it—you know, around.”

Noodles was able to give the approximate location of the place he had described, and then he was led out for the second time.

“Guys,” said Karp with a grin, “I think we hit pay dirt.”

“You think so?” said Guma. “I dunno—what could they be talking about? The price of olive oil? Who does the best murals of Capri for pizzerias?”

“We’ll never know unless we get in there. Tony, get busy with setting up a connection with the cops upstate. Devlin knows what to do. Find the place. Then make out a petition for a wire tap and bugs.”

“You think you can get something on the Ferro hit out of this place?” asked Harris, as he scribbled notes.

“Ferro for starters, baby. But this could be the biggest score since Valachi. Since Appalachin. I think it’s just started to be worth the trip to California.”

Raney said, “I can’t believe this!
Neither
of these guys fit the thumb print?”

Peter Balducci sat on the edge of the desk in the tiny cubicle he shared with Raney in the offices of the D.A. and leafed through the report from forensic. “Neither Dodo Styles nor Willie Mullen gives a positive match on the bloody thumb print found at the scene. That’s that, unless we’re talking two guys and there’s no evidence for that.”

“Shit! Styles looked so good for it, too. What’s the D.A. say? Who is it, by the way?”

“Kid named Kirsch. He says no case on either of them—keep looking.”

“So where do we look?”

Balducci flipped pages in his notebook and grunted softly. “We could go back to the apartment building tonight and talk to the people we missed. We could try to find Anna Rivas.”

“Who’s she?”

“The woman who used to live in 3F South. The one who moved out …”

“Crap! I knew I heard that name. She called me!” He riffled through a pile of pink message slips until he found the one he wanted, and then dialed a number. There was a long wait and then he started to talk to someone on the other end. He motioned to Balducci, who picked up the other extension.

The two detectives spoke with Anna Rivas for twenty minutes. After they had hung up, Raney said, “What do you think? Sounds legit, no?”