“The girlfriend is gone,” replied Roland with an unpleasant smile. “Her office says she’s on leave. So I got a warrant to search her place, knowing, knowing, that you would bug me about her. They found a VISA counterfoil for a ticket to San Francisco. We checked with the airlines: she was on a flight that left late that Sunday. I wonder why.”
“You think she’s involved?”
“I know it. Her place was full of Armenian nationalist literature, some of it copies of the stuff we found in Tomasian’s office. They were in it together. In fact, it wouldn’t blow me away if we found out that she was the other gun.”
“So we’re looking for her.”
“Yeah, she’s out on the wire. But whether she turns up or not, it shoots the shit out of our boy’s alibi.”
Karp nodded agreement. “Yeah, it does, provided he needs one.”
“What?”
“Roland, what happens to your open-and-shut case if there’s five kilos of Turkish heroin in his box? Or a letter from a shark that says, ‘Pay up or else!’?”
“This is horseshit, Butch!” cried Roland, going red again.
“Just open the box, Roland,” said Karp, and walked away.
Detective Camano turned out to be one of those cops who had retired on the job. The Jane Doe from Avenue A was an easy clearance, one of hundreds of miscellaneous bodies and parts of bodies that turned up in the City every year.
“It ain’t homicide to get a bite on the ass,” he told Marlene confidently. “The M.E. says there was no sign of foul play.”
“Biting isn’t foul play?”
“I mean not a cause of death. Look, honey, there’s no knife wound, there’s no gunshot wound, she wasn’t strangled, or tied up-”
“You haven’t considered the possibility that she was raped and thrown out of a window?”
A long-suffering sigh on the line. “We checked the houses on both sides of the street. Nobody saw nothing, and there’s no woman missing from any of the apartments.”
“What about the street girls?”
A laugh. “They haven’t missed a trick, is what I hear. Look, we got forty, forty-five homicides on the chart here that we know are homicides. We don’t need to invent any, especially when the M.E. isn’t ready to call it.”
“What about the rape part?”
“We don’t know that either. I got nobody on the block saying they saw this chick dragged into the bushes. Nobody’s coming around saying where’s my Mary. So what am I gonna go on? Fingerprints? Sperm samples? You know how I figure it? This chick gets off a bus, tries the sporting life, a customer gets a little rough, and she decides to take a jump.”
It was a dead end with this guy. Marlene decided to waste no more time. She said, “I hope you’re right, Detective Camano. On the other hand, if we get three more women’s bodies turning up with bite marks in the same places, and one of them is the mayor’s niece, I’ll remember this conversation and bring it up whenever I can with whoever will listen.”
She slammed her phone down and reached for the next call message in the stack.
After fuming in his office for a half hour and being rude to everyone within easy reach, Roland called Frangi at Midtown South and told him to get over to the bank where Mehmet Ersoy had maintained a safety-deposit box, with key to same. Roland stood impatiently over a secretary while a warrant was typed out, whipped into a judge’s office, got it signed, and left immediately for the bank.
Frangi was already there. He had identified himself to the bank branch manager. Roland flashed his warrant, and they were allowed to follow a uniformed guard into the vault.
“What’s going on?” asked Frangi.
“Nothing. My boss got a hair up his ass about this case.”
It was one of the large kind, a smooth steel box nearly the size of a bus station locker. The guard used Ersoy’s key and the bank’s key to remove the box, and carried it with dignity to a little room, where he placed it on a table and departed.
Frangi flipped up the lid of the box. He let out a wordless exclamation. Hrcany looked inside and cursed and stamped his foot.
“How much you figure?” asked Frangi.
Both men had considerable experience in judging large volumes of cash. Roland rummaged in the box, flipping stacks of bills at random. They were hundreds, all of them, in fresh bank wrappers marked “$10,000.”
“A million,” said Roland, “at least. Maybe a little more.”
“Thrifty guy,” said Frangi glumly.
5
Karp sloshed his drink idly in his glass and looked around through the milling crowd for Marlene. As a rule, he disliked workplace parties. He had to pretend to like drinking, to find amusement in what drinking did to the brain and behavior (in order to avoid being thought a spoilsport, one of Karp’s big fears, and somewhat justified), and to socialize with people he would not have shared three words with had they not had a function in his professional life, and, since his profession was criminal justice, that included socializing with an unusual number of unpleasant people.
He would have avoided this party, as he had many others, had not the guest of honor been Tom Pagano, the outgoing director of the Legal Aid Society offices for the Manhattan criminal courts and a man for whom Karp had immense respect and affection. Pagano had been copping pleas when Karp was still in grade school, and now, in his early sixties and tired, had been rewarded with a judgeship, which in comparison to running Legal Aid was a paid vacation.
There was Marlene, by the bar, of course, smoking and sucking wine coolers and talking animatedly to a short curly-haired man. Karp pushed his way through the crowd to her side.
She hailed him gaily. Marlene at least was enjoying herself. She liked parties, which was yet another reason for coming to this one, to forestall the “he never takes me anywhere.”
She gestured possessively at Karp and said, “Paulie, this is my husband, Butch Karp. Butch, Paul Ashakian. He just started working for Legal Aid. He’s from the old neighborhood; the Ashakians used to live across from us in Ozone Park. I used to run around with his sister Lara, and Paul and my brother Dom were on the gym team together at St. Joe. A giant family, bigger than ours. My kid brother and Paulie used to think the Chuck Berry song was about them.”
“Song?” said Karp.
“Honestly, Butch! Where were you? A Whole Lot Ashakian Goin’ On? Get it?”
The two men shook hands. “Marlene thinks I’m culturally deprived, I missed rock and roll,” said Karp, smiling. He gestured to the party at large. “You’re losing a great boss.”
Ashakian nodded vigorously. “Yeah, he recruited me, and now this.”
“Any word on the replacement?”
Ashakian laughed. “Hey, I can barely find the men’s room. I’ll be the last to find out. You’ll know before I do.”
“No, they don’t tell me anything either,” said Karp. “I never hear the gossip.”
“Nobody tells you gossip because you can keep a secret,” said Marlene. “People come into your office and swear you to secrecy and tell you some juicy stuff, and then what do you do? You don’t tell anybody! Of course they stop telling you-you never tell them anything. You’re out of the grapevine, Butchie.”
“Luckily, I have you to inform me,” said Karp.
“Yes,” said Marlene, “I blab. I’m so deep in the grapevine I’m covered with sticky purple juice.”
“So who is it?” asked Ashakian.
Marlene threw down a healthy gulp of her drink. “I’m not gonna tell, since I’ve been sworn to secrecy. It’s Milton Freeland.”
Blank stares from both. “Freeland. From Sussex County Legal Services. Apparently a hotshot, hard-charger, good political connections.”
“I wish I was impressed,” said Karp. “I never heard of the guy. I was expecting a promotion-one of Tom’s people.”
“Go figure,” said Marlene, “and speaking of blabbing, I was just telling Paul about your doubts on Tomasian.”