“Not the gun itself?” asked Roland.
“No gun,” said Bello, and continued with his inventory: “Four, a rental agreement from a National car rental in Maspeth for a ’78 Ford Fairlane two-door, blue. The make and model identified at the scene. Rented March 12, returned March 13, the day of the murder, two hours later than the hit. Fifth and last, a card showing rental rates from a mini-storage locker at Boulevard Storage, also in Maspeth. I called them. They have a hundred-square-footer rented to Ahmet Djelal. That’s it.”
Everyone looked at Roland, who sat, working his jaw, saying nothing, as the seconds passed heavily by. Finally he observed, “You don’t have much. No gun. The mask and parka don’t mean a lot. Same with the car. And I thought Nassif had an alibi.”
“Yeah, from the workers in his restaurant, who’re scared shitless of him,” said Bello. “They won’t hold up once we start pushing, start yanking their phony green cards around.”
Some more silence. Everybody there knew that Roland’s case against Tomasian was not that much more impressive than the case against Nassif. At last Karp spoke up. “Guma, what’s the story on the tap?”
“The deal is still set for Thursday, day after tomorrow,” Guma replied. “Aside from that, nothing new.”
“Why don’t we give them something new? Goom, do you think you could arrange to have Joey Castles learn that we picked up Nassif for fraud? If it comes through in the phone tap, then at least we’ll know that we’re talking about the same Turks.”
“I think I could arrange it,” said Guma.
“Do that. The next thing to do is to talk to Nassif. We’ve got him next door. V.T.? And …” Karp paused and looked at Roland. It was the critical moment, akin to the first time you sit down in a divorce lawyer’s office with your erstwhile sweetie. Roland had every right to interrogate Nassif. It was his case, and he was arguably the best interrogator in the office. The question was, would he?
The expressions raced across Roland’s face, and Karp thought he could read them like stock quotes on a tape. If he didn’t go after Nassif, Karp would do it himself, and then, if it turned out that the Turks really had done it, Roland would look like a complete asshole. Whereas if Roland got a confession out of the Turk, he’d still be the man on a hot case, the TV lights would still shine on him. Of course, the Turk could be a dud too, but then he still had Tomasian.
“Okay, let’s take a look at him,” Roland said at last.
“Terrific,” said V.T. “I’ll be the nice guy.”
The two men left the room. Frangi got up to go with them, but Karp gestured for him to remain. Marlene said, “I notice Roland didn’t mention his jailhouse snitch. What about that?”
“Yeah, what about that?” said Karp. He stared at Frangi, who was down at the other end of the table, looking ill at ease.
Frangi shrugged. “Hey, all I know is, I got a call from the jail captain said this cell mate Medford, wanted to talk about Tomasian for a deal. I told Roland and we talked to the A.D.A. on the guy’s check kiting and then we went and talked to Medford. That’s all I know.”
“Well, if we’re right about Nassif,” said Karp, “it looks like the guy’s lying.”
“Snitches lie,” said Frangi.
“Yeah, they do, but it’s hard to believe a mutt like Medford would’ve come up with a hoax like that on his own.” Frangi started to protest, but Karp held up his hand and continued, “I don’t mean it was you. Or Roland either.”
“Who, then?” asked Marlene.
“I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter at this point,” Karp said quickly, although he thought it did matter a lot. A suspicion was growing in his mind, but he couldn’t do anything about it at present. It would have to wait. He said, “Thanks, Joe,” and Frangi left, followed soon by Guma.
Karp said, “Djelal, guys. How do we get him?”
“Not a prayer,” said Marlene, “unless his cugine rats him out, or unless you want to totally shit on the D.A. and harass Djelal’s butt and start an international incident. Even then he’s clean. We don’t have anything on him we could put on a warrant. Renting a locker and buying a jeweler’s furnace? Having a sleazy cousin? On the other hand, I’m dying to know what he has in that locker.”
“Yeah, me too,” said Karp, “but we’re going to have to keep dying, because we got no way into it legally.”
Marlene and Bello exchanged a look, so brief that no one else saw it, but one that compressed megabytes of data, like a satellite transmission.
As they walked out of the office together after the meeting, Harry said, “I got a delivery truck I can borrow, with a lift on it.”
“Good,” said Marlene. “Don’t hurt your back.”
Roland stopped by Karp’s office at ten that night. Karp was on his cot, memorizing his summation notes for the next day.
“You look comfy,” said Roland. “Comfy but lonely. Want me to send somebody up?”
“I’ll survive. This is the last day. What did you get?”
“We got shit. Nassif wouldn’t talk. I don’t mean he wouldn’t confess. I mean he wouldn’t talk, literally. And he was scared too. I never saw anyone in that much terror. His teeth were actually chattering.”
“Well, he does have the right to remain silent,” said Karp. “I guess he took it seriously.”
“No, he was waiting for us to start the tortures. Isn’t that Turkey where they hang you upside down and beat your feet with sticks? Frangi and me were screaming at him and dancing up and down, and he must’ve thought we were the good cops.”
“So you think they did it? The cousins?”
Roland frowned. “I didn’t say that. I think they did something, but I got noreason to believe that Tomasian wasn’t part of it.”
Karp nodded. “Okay.”
“Okay? That’s it?”
“Yeah, Roland, that’s it. It’s your case, like I’ve always said. We’ll see how things develop. Meanwhile, we’ll book Nassif for the fraud and see how he likes jail, with his cousin running around free. Maybe he’ll come around.”
Karp shaved and took a whore’s bath in the hall john that night. He was too tired to walk over to the jail; more than that, he didn’t want to see Russell again, except in court.
The next morning, of course, he did. Russell did not look welclass="underline" even older than his years and his cheap suit was loose around his neck. Perhaps Freeland was giving him lessons in appearing pathetic and harmless, or maybe the reality of his situation was finally coming home to him.
Freeland led off on summation, as tradition demanded. He spoke for twenty-two minutes, a shortish speech, but then he didn’t have a lot to say. His own evidence was fairly weak: Tyler’s it-wasn’t-him and Ashakian’s gymnastic feat and the Sister. He spent most of his time pointing out the various places where the authorities might have lied. If you believed in conspiracies, it was a good story.
Karp spoke for nearly three times as long, but then, he had a lot more material to cover. He started off with James Turnbull’s testimony, the dramatic scene in the police station-Russell sitting there without his blue shirt and Turnbull leaping at him, accusing him with no prompting at all, the man who was physically the closest witness to the actual murder. You swine! This was the guy.
Then the chain of police testimony-Thornby’s adventure in the stifling black basement, the hiding fugitive, the sales slip found. Then Jerry Shelton’s identification-this was the man who had fled from the pursuing crowd.
Then the discovery of the purse and the knife and the shirt, and the identification of the shirt in the jail by the defendant himself.
He disposed of Tyler: a ridiculous witness-a one-second, impossible full-face glance at thirty, or was it forty-five, feet, compared to people-the Digbys, Shelton, Turnbull-who had positively and independently identified the defendant.