Weingarten said the only thing he could say, which was that he had no other commitments and would be right up, and then he spent a frantic five minutes juggling his many commitments, and arrived at Karp’s door breathless, a long-faced young man with pale eyes and thinning blondish hair. Karp pointed him to a seat and held up the case file.
“People v. Ragosi, nice job,” Karp said.
A smile pulled tentatively at Weingarten’s mouth and the ginger mustache that sat upon it. “Uh, thanks.”
“Yeah, how long did it take you to build the case, a year?”
“Fourteen months, including the grand jury.”
“Yeah, this Ragosi seems to be the kingpin, all right. And you got him the usual way, by turning each layer of his organization. The cops went undercover, posed as car thieves, got the evidence on the chop shops, the chop shops gave you the parts brokers, and one particular parts broker, what was his name? I got it right here. .” He thumbed through the thick file.
“Ortiz, Luis Ortiz,” said Weingarten.
“Yeah, here it is. I see Luis was a very bad boy. You started him out on fifty-seven separate B-felony counts, criminal possession of stolen property, first-degree-wow, this was a multimillion-dollar operation-plus forgery of a VIN, forty counts, plus odds and ends: falsifying business records, illegal possession of a VIN, and then you let him plead down to, let’s see here, three counts of CPSP four, an E felony, plus some misdemeanor trash, and the payoff was he gave you Mr. Ragosi, who is the mastermind behind the ring. Is that right?”
Weingarten said, “Yeah, we thought that was a good deal for us. The cops and the feds have been after Ragosi for years, but he was always too sharp.”
“Yeah, I see where Ortiz testifies to the grand jury the guy always used cutouts for cash transfers, would never meet face to face with his suppliers. And I don’t see any evidence from the phone taps and mail covers, so I presume you got zip. A careful guy, Ragosi. So it was real fortunate that Mr. Ragosi decides one fine day to personally hand a manila envelope with forty grand in it to your pal Ortiz, and even more fortunate that Ortiz decides to keep that envelope, and sure enough, it’s got Mr. Ragosi’s prints on it. And on that evidence the cops get a warrant and raid Mr. Ragosi’s place of business, and what do they find? All sorts of incriminating paperwork from our boy Ortiz. None from all the other limbs of his vast criminal enterprise, only from Ortiz. What do you make of that, Weingarten?”
“What can I say? The guy got sloppy for once, and we got lucky. It happens.”
“Yeah, it does. It also happens that defendants under the hammer of a big jolt perjure themselves, and it also happens that cops anxious to close out a big one encourage that perjury and plant evidence. Ragosi may be a criminal mastermind, like you say, but I would be willing to bet my next paycheck that in this case he was framed.”
Weingarten felt sweat bead up on his hairline and resisted the urge to wipe at it. “Wait a minute, you don’t seriously think I-”
“Suborned perjury? No, I don’t. I think the cops arranged it, and you bought it. Be more careful next time. Do you realize that you have no real independent corroboration of Ragosi’s personal involvement in a criminal enterprise?”
“But we have half a dozen of his employees-”
“The same as Ortiz. They’re ratting the boss out to save their asses. No, as far as I can see from this, you have a legitimate case against Ragosi for a number of counts of falsifying business records, period.”
The young prosecutor gaped. “But that’s. . nothing!”
“It’s not much,” agreed Karp, “but it’s all I’m going to let you go ahead with on Ragosi. The shame of it is that this is a really good operation. Ortiz and the other chop kings are bad guys and you got them. You broke up a major car-theft ring. If the big guy beat you, hey, you might get him the next time. There’s no shame in getting whipped. The shame would be in this office bringing a case that stinks of perjury and manufactured evidence. If you’re still set on Ragosi, my advice to you is go back to his operation and look harder.”
“But we did!” cried Weingarten in a strangled tone. “We looked everywhere, his wife, his banks, his daughter, his fucking cousins, we bugged his house, his office. . Jesus Christ, every skank, drugged-out car thief on the East Coast knows Ragosi is the man, and we didn’t find a fucking mark on him, and if it wasn’t for Ortiz. .” He stopped, flushed, and hissed, “Ah, shit!”
“I rest my case,” said Karp.
When Weingarten had slunk off, Karp made a note to talk to Keegan and Sullivan about canning the Ragosi trial, and also to let the police chain of command know in the nicest possible way that he wasn’t having any of that particular brand of horseshit this month. Then he picked up the phone and called his wife.
“Where are you?” Karp asked when she answered. Marlene’s car phone was still enough of a novelty that Karp always asked, even though he had been talking to cops in their cars for years without querying their 10–20 unless necessary. It was different when it was your wife.
“I’m on Woodhaven in Queens,” said Marlene.
“Oh, yeah? Seeing the folks?”
“No, an old boyfriend. Rocco Lopata.”
“Uh-huh. Is this like something I should be worrying about?”
“Nah, it’s just that every so often I have to get it on in a grease pit with a short, hairy, overweight body-shop manager. I’ll be in and out of there in twenty minutes.”
“Hey, no problem, I’m an eighties guy. You’ll wash up after?”
“Of course. Oh, also, I had a charming conversation with your daughter on the subject of how the Chens are taking this shooting thing. I happened to mention I had been by there, and she went ballistic on me. Apparently, I totally destroyed her life, and none of her friends will ever talk to her again.”
“What? By offering to help?”
“Yes, and don’t ask me to explain it because half of it was in Chinese. What I sort of gathered was that by appearing there I implied that I wished them to incur even more obligation to me than they already owed, which is sort of an insult, if you can figure that out. Also, she’d already heard through some grapevine that I was wearing a yellow shirt, which made it worse, yellow being an inauspicious color in time of trouble. Anyway, I was elaborately cursed out and had the phone slammed in my ear. I called back right away, and Posie said she’d stormed out.”
“Wait a second-Lucy? She used language to you?”
“Oh, not in English, she’s not that crazy, but I got the tone through whatever she was speaking-Cantonese or Tibetan, for all I know. Butch, we’ve got to do something about that kid.”
“I’ll talk to her,” Karp said grumpily, thinking, as he did often these days, why can’t she for God’s sakes get along with the kid-Lucy’s perfectly okay with me. The family drama was something of a closed book to Karp, who still thought that mere kindness and honesty would suffice to untangle that tale.
Marlene worked to keep the snap from her voice. “Yeah, well, I was thinking more along the lines of a Catholic military school in Alabama, but give it a try.”