Immoral Certainty (32 page)

“Yeah, I always thought Judge Montana was a stand-up, no bullshit guy.”

“I’m counting on it. Anyway, today I had the engineer in, Shannon, to establish the shape of the apartments and the whole crime scene. That’s critical, because we’re going to be talking about two incidents in the same hallway—the murder itself and the business with Tighe beating his girlfriend—also the thumbprint that ties our guy to the scene is out in the hall, on the doorway. And Tighe threatens the victim in the hearing of two cops out in the hall. So I want the jury to be as comfortable in that hallway as they are in their own hallway.

“Then the first cop on the scene, Dienst. Big guy, good witness. Describes the horror scene, the little boy in the bloody apartment.”

“You gonna call the kid?”

“I could, but he’s out of town with the dad. I got some scruples about dragging him through it again, you’ll probably be surprised to know.
I
was surprised. No, I’ll deliver a statement, which the defense will stipulate to. If not, I will call the kid and after he testifies they’ll lynch the fucker right there in the courtroom. Which Klopper knows, of course.”

“And the girlfriend … ?”

“The girlfriend, yeah—great witness,” Karp said enthusiastically. Guma noticed with satisfaction that the worn look he had seen on Karp’s face earlier was fading in the enthusiasm of retelling the events and strategy concerning the trial of Felix Tighe.

“Rivas, her name is. We established he beat her and she screamed and the deceased called the cops. He broke her place up too, the girlfriend’s, with karate blows, suggesting he was not averse to busting things up, like breaking down the door to the victim’s place. We established that the chain lock was ripped out of the wall by great force.

“She also testified that the day of the murder, this scumbag meets her after work and tells her that he’s going to quote take care of the victim, that she’ll read about it in the papers—that’s a quote too—and that he’s got an alibi, so she quote shouldn’t worry about him.

“Also, he forces her, by threat of violence, to accompany him down to the building where the murder took place. He tells her he has quote unfinished business in the building. In the cab, they’re jostled toward one another by a pothole, and she reaches out and touches something hard stuck in his belt.”

“What, this is the day of the murder?”

“Yeah.”

“And he shows her the knife?”

“Not that good, but almost. He tells her quote he’s got something, he’s carrying something. She didn’t see the blade but we can show he’s a knife artist.”

“What, from priors?”

“Yeah, a good one. A year ago in Queens he got stopped on a burglary and he ripped the cop up pretty bad with a big knife.”

“Last year? You mean he walked on the attempted murder?”

“Skipped. Convicted
in absentia
and they lost the damn wanted card.”

Guma whistled and shook his head. “Sonofabitch! So how’re you gonna bring it out?”

“Cross on the accused.”

“Klopper’s gonna
call
this sweetheart?” asked Guma in amazement.

“He’s got to, to try and impeach the girl’s testimony and explain the thumbprint. Also, this fucker is not a shaved head with five o’clock shadow and a mean scar—the guy looks like a prince, a movie star. He’ll be a good witness—articulate, clever. Confusing. I used all my challenges to get an all male jury.”

“So you think you got it locked?”

“I never think that until the guy stands up and says ‘guilty, Your Honor.’ But yeah, it looks good unless they fuck with my evidence. The girl and the print you could explain away: woman scorned, she’s a slut anyway, the accused hung around the place, his prints are here and there.

“But we go to his room and find a knife that could be the murder weapon
and
a diary that says ‘fix big mouth,’
and
a pair of pants soaked in blood, the same type as the victims’,
and
newspaper clippings of the crime … and now it looks a helluva lot better. And I got to say, little Freddie Kirsch did a good job on the Q and A and the Grand Jury testimony. Everything we need was brought out there.”

“How could they fuck with it, Butch?”

“A million ways,” said Karp grimly. “And Klopper knows them all. I don’t like this guy Lutz, Tighe’s roomie, for one thing. He testified on the evidence before the Grand Jury, but who knows? He’s sort of a skell himself.”

Guma smiled as Karp continued his comment on the case: What he would do if they did
that,
what if they did
this,
how he would sum it up, together with commentary on law and precedents. Nothing juiced Karp up like a trial, and winning it would put him in as good a mood as he could achieve while his loved one was in the evil clutches of whomever. And Guma needed Karp in a good mood, since he was about to do something that, had Karp known of it, would have put Karp in a very bad mood indeed.

An hour later Guma was in his car, a black ’57 Mercury junker, its paint iridescent with age, tooling along the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn. He drove to Cropsey Avenue and Bay 14th Street in Bath Beach and parked behind an immaculate white stretch Cadillac with dark glass windows.

A young man with sunglasses and a good tan, dressed in clothes a little too tropical for the season in New York, stood at the rear door. He nodded at Guma and threw open the door of the white limo for him. Guma climbed in and sank back into cream leather soft as thighs.

“Guma!
Cosa dic’
?” said the man in the back seat, a broad and gold-glittering smile splitting his deeply tanned face.

“Lo squal’ incula il pe’c’,”
replied Guma. “You’re looking well, Anthony.” The two men shook hands with warmth and enthusiasm.

“Drive,” said the tan man softly. The engine purred into life, the young man in the tropical clothes leaped into the front seat and Guma and his friend Anthony Buonofacci cruised out into the littered streets of their shared boyhood.

“You should get some more sun, Goom,” said Buonofacci. “You look like a mozzarella. When you gonna come down to Miami, anyway, huh? I told you, I’ll set you up good—plenty for a legal eagle to do down there. What d’you say?”

This was a ritual. For almost twenty years Tony Bones had been trying to get Ray Guma to work for him, and Guma had always refused. Guma was comfortable with Tony as a friend; he would not have lasted five minutes as his lawyer.

They chatted about old times for half an hour, as the big limo went past the landmarks of their misspent youth—the parochial school, the canals, the warehouses, the bars, the grungy shoreline of Bath Beach. Tony poured a couple of scotches from the built-in bar.

“What a shithole, when you get right down to it,” he said gesturing toward the streets. “The old neighborhood! My mother won’t move, can you believe it? I got a condo for her, on the beach—she won’t move.” He struck himself on the head with the heel of his hand.
“Testard’
! Like a rock, huh?” He sipped his drink, put it down, slapped his knee and said, “So, tell me, you said you had to talk to me, so talk. What can I do for you?”

Guma pulled from his pocket a newspaper article roughly torn from the
Daily News
and gave it to his companion. It showed a small picture of Marlene Ciampi and the story of her disappearance.

“She’s a friend of mine, a D.A. Somebody grabbed her a couple of days ago and we got a call from somebody who said he was from the families. My
padrone,
Karp, this is his girlfriend. He’s got a squeeze going on Sallie Bollano, Harry, all of that outfit. He figures they snatched Marlene to get him to lay off.”

“That’s horseshit,” said Tony Bones.

“You think I didn’t tell him? He don’t listen, he gets an idea in his head, all he wants to do is run right up the middle. Like your Mama. But the main thing is to find the girl.”

“Yeah. A cute little thing, by the way. Who grabbed her, you think?”

“She was on to somebody she thinks was selling hairless pussy on a major scale out of a fancy day-care operation. She was on her way to talk to the boss of the place when she disappeared.”

“And the cops … ?”

“The cops think what Karp thinks—it was a family thing. Also, this bitch who runs this joint—she’s got some kind of heavy juice downtown. Nobody’s going to roust her unless we can get some edge on the whole business.”

Tony Bones chewed his lip for a moment and studied the traffic. Then he said, “So, what do you want me to do? I got no organization up here, but if it was a pro job, I could ask around …”

“No—I need you to set up a meet.”

“Yeah? With who, Big Sallie and them?”

“Right, with them, and another with the Ferros.”

“The Ferros? Well, well. You know, I used to be pretty tight with Charlie Chan.”

“I remember. That’s why I thought of you, and when I heard you were in town again….”

“This squeeze that your guy got on Sally—it have something to do with Vinnie Red?”

“Yeah, we got them, the whole family, the don, the kid, Charlie Tuna, Joey. We have the wheelman and a corroborating witness. We got a conspiracy charge, too—tapes, pictures. The Bollanos are finished.”

The other man whistled softly through his teeth. “Very interesting. So what’s the deal—if you got ’em, why meet?”

“I want them to help us find Ciampi.”

“Uh-huh. Also interesting. So tell me: one, what makes you think they can help; two, what you gonna give them if they do?”

Guma took a deep breath. “They can help because nobody sells ass in New York, of any kind, without some kind of cover from the families. So we need names, a feel for who’s buying, who’s selling—the whole setup. If I get some help from the Bollanos, I can probably swing it the don doesn’t have to go up. He’s over seventy, it must be—he doesn’t want to spend his golden years in Attica.”

“And where do the Ferros come in?”

“They’re interested in fucking the Bollanos because of Vinnie, but they don’t have the muscle for a serious war, not to mention that with Vinnie gone they lost half their brains and ninety per cent of their balls.”

“Yeah, yeah, but where do they come in … ?”

“The corroborating witness is one of their guys.”

Tony Bones thought about this for a few seconds, and then his face broke into a wide grin, and he began to laugh, an almost soundless aspiration that could, Guma thought, be terrifying under the right conditions. The spasm over, Tony wiped his eyes with a handkerchief and said, “What a pisser you are,
paisan
! Are you ever on the wrong side—what a waste!”

“So you gonna set it up?”

“Are you kidding? I wouldn’t miss it. You’re gonna get the Ferros to set up your case on the Bollanos, and then you’re gonna walk the don. How about Harry? He gonna walk, too?”

“Come on, Tony, you gotta leave me some room here.”

“OK, kid—I’ll set it up. But I tell you—like my Mama says, ‘
Non fa’ il passo lungo della gamb.
’”

“Thanks, Tony,” said Guma, surreptitiously wiping the accumulated sweat from his upper lip. Later, in his own car on his way back to Manhattan, he reviewed the bidding. He had told Tony he had a corroborative witness to the Ferro killing. That was a lie. They had DiBello, who could corroborate Noodles’s testimony and tie Joey Bottles to another killing, which they didn’t have a body for. But if the Bollanos and Harry believed they were nailed they would move heaven and earth to find Marlene. And they
would
believe it if they found the Ferros were allowing one of their people to rat. Which they would find out, if Guma had anything to do with it.

Getting the Bollanos off on the murder rap for doing this service was easy, since without a real corroborative witness there
was
no case. The problem was getting the don off on the perjury charge Karp had set up. He had told Tony Bones that the don would walk. As far as the fabrication about the witness was concerned, no big thing: Tony wouldn’t mind a little lie from an old friend, and Guma could always plead a misunderstanding.

And Tony would certainly make out handsomely from the information about the incipient fall of the Bollano family; he was probably making calls and selling the information at this moment. But if old Salvatore Bollano went to jail, his reputation as a dealer and a don in his own right would be hopelessly compromised, and this he would not forgive even an old friend.
Lo squal’ incula il pe’c’.
Guma knew who the shark was and who was the sardine and who would get fucked if this didn’t fly.

Guma got off the highway at Third Avenue and swung left through the streets of South Brooklyn and into Red Hook. He found a saloon rotting in the shadow of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, went in and ordered a scotch up and a beer. This was deep Ferro country. Vinnie Red had shot his first man, the first that Guma knew of anyway, within three blocks of this place, up on President Street.

While he waited for the booze to supply him with ideas, he wondered idly why he was risking his skin to save a woman who had never given him the time of day, except for that last conversation before she vanished. It had to do with Karp. Karp was barely human to begin with, in Guma’s opinion, but at least if he got enough nooky he was willing to make an effort. Guma thought about the Karp of the last three days being projected into the indefinite future and shuddered.

No, he was doing the right thing. Somehow he had to extricate Big Sally from the net that Karp was tightening, which meant that, like a search and destroy mission in Vietnam, he had to shaft Karp in order to save him. He finished his drink. Yes, he thought, it could be done, although Mrs. Buonofacci would probably have bet that he had indeed stepped longer than his leg.

Steve Lutz awoke with a start and the knowledge that there was somebody else in his bedroom, somebody who didn’t belong there, somebody silent and very large. This person sat in a straight chair by the window that gave on the street. Lutz could estimate his size from the silhouette made by the street light, and he could also see that there was something wrong with the man’s head, some subtle misshapenness that added immeasurably to the horror of the moment.