Immoral Certainty (6 page)

The five men arranged themselves around the large glass coffee table in the living room. Captain Kangaroo was blaring from the TV. Frank served the coffee and pastries. The men selected the pastries in order of their precedence in the family, first Piaccere and Sallie, then the others, with Impellatti last.

Piaccere said, “Looks like Little Noodles got the cannoli.”

Sallie said, “Yeah, right, looks like cannoli ain’t too popular today.”

Charlie Tuna said, “You eat cannoli, it could be bad for your health.” Everybody had a big laugh. Even Frank laughed, although he didn’t think it was very funny. Harry Pick laughed loudest of all, and as he did his eyes met Frank’s and he winked, and raised his hand and pointed his finger at Frank and let his thumb fall on the base of his index finger, in the bang-bang gesture familiar to children the world over.

Frank felt a shock of cold fear stab through his middle and the chill of sweat on his forehead. He looked at the cannoli on his saucer. Of course, he would be the one to get the single cannoli—they had set it up.

The men began talking business. Frank couldn’t concentrate on what they were saying. He was trying to recall something he had done or failed to do that would warrant being killed. He couldn’t think of anything, but he realized this hardly mattered. It could be that somewhere in the high politics of the Honorable Society a deal had been struck, some codicil of which required that Frank Impellatti take the fall. He was under no illusions about his value to the organization.

And he had taken the fall once before. Frank, at nineteen, had driven the car for the two guys (one of them Charlie Tonnatti) who had whacked out Alfredo Baggia in the barber shop of the Park Terrace Hotel. The cops had picked him up, slammed him around, pumped him for the names of the shooters. He had kept his mouth shut. Then a man had come to see him in jail, and gave him the deal: You keep quiet, say you pulled the trigger, we’ll take care of you. So he did, and they did. Eleven years in the joint and nobody ever looked at him funny. He got out, he was a made man. But this was different. Dead was dead.

Piaccere said, “Noodles, make some more coffee.” Frank got up and took the pot. As he walked away his back tingled and it was all he could do to keep from cutting and racing out the door with the pot in his hands.

He went to the kitchen and washed out the pot, filled it with fresh water, measured out the coffee and plugged it in. After a while, the smell of fresh coffee filled the apartment. Piaccere called out, “Hey, Noodles, you gonna bring that coffee in here?” There was no answer. Then they looked for him, but Little Noodles was gone.

The Ferro killing made the front pages of all the tabloids, which meant that Karp had to look at the photograph of Vinnie in the gutter at every newsstand he passed on the way to work, and his spirits sunk lower at each one.

He knew what to expect when he got to the office and he got it. A message from Bloom was waiting, and on the phone the district attorney made it clear that Karp’s job was to leave no stone unturned (his actual phrase) in the prosecution of the killers.

“Look, um,” Karp said, “I just got in here and I haven’t had time to find out what happened, except a hood got killed last night. After I meet with some people, I’ll know more.”

“Vinnie Ferro was not just a hood, Butch,” Bloom replied, a hint of condescension oozing into his voice. “He was big time. The media are suggesting this could be the start of another major gang war.”

And wouldn’t you love that, thought Karp. Nothing like a Mafia-organized crime-Cosa Nostra-gang war to put the D.A.’s office in the news. What he said was, “I don’t know about big time. They’re all mutts when you get right down to it. Mr. Garrahy used to say, whenever there was one of these hits, that if they wanted to shoot each other he’d be glad to make Yankee Stadium available at public expense, and pay for the bullets.”

This reference to Garrahy had its usual effect. Bloom’s tone stiffened and he broke the connection after a few meaningless rumblings.

“Something wrong?” asked the secretary, Connie Trask. Karp’s face was contorted into a rictus of disgust and outrage. He looked at her blankly and then massaged it slowly with a big hand.

“No, just what I expected. Ever since Tom Dewey, every damn prosecutor in the country’s been playing gangbusters, figuring they put enough Mafia skells in jail they could get to be president or some damn thing. Especially including our own leader. Which means I’m going to have to pull people off stuff that means real paydirt and chase down shooters who are in Palermo by now and witnesses who didn’t see nothing, don’t know nothing—aah, shit I wish they’d all kill each other and get it over with.”

Trask made sympathetic noises; Karp took a deep breath and collected his thoughts. Even at this late date, any interference in his bureau by Sanford Bloom, the district attorney of New York, got his back up, and made him want to shout obscenities.

“OK, Connie, set up a meeting. Get whoever caught the squeal from Midtown South, the detectives, me, ah, Tony Harris, Roland Hrcany, and let’s get Guma in on it too. As soon as they all can. Not that it’ll matter.”

“So where is this guy anyway, the guy that fingered Ferro?” asked Butch Karp. He was holding, unenthusiastically, but true to his word, the meeting on the shooting of Vinnie Red. Four men were sitting around the battered oak table in the bureau chief’s office: Roland Hrcany, Ray Guma, and Tony Harris, all Assistant D.A.’s, and Art Devlin, a police officer. None of them were quick to answer the question. Karp looked at the heavy, sad-faced man sitting at the far end. “Art? Any ideas?”

Art Devlin, the detective lieutenant who had caught the Ferro case out of Midtown South, said, “Could be anywhere, Butch. Out of town, probably.” He shrugged. “I mean, wise guys—who knows?” His tone implied that he didn’t much care either. This annoyed Karp. If
he
had to participate in this bullshit, everybody else was going to pull their weight. He frowned and replied, “Um, that’s not all that helpful, Art. I mean, has anybody seen this guy the last couple of days? You got
any
people working on it, or what?”

Devlin shrugged again and ran his big hand across the bristling blond stubble on his skull. “Yeah, we got people on it, like we got people on the other six hundred and twenty one unsolved homicides on the books. There’s just so much we can do. And also, a Mob hit….” A final shrug.

Karp sighed. “Sure, Art, I understand. What about the shooter? Any line on that?”

“Yeah, not that you’d ever get anybody to stand up in public and repeat it, but it looks like it was Botteglia—Joey Bottles, from the Bollanos. He has a distinctive appearance.”

“And he’s gone too, I bet.”

“I don’t know about ‘gone,’ but he’s sure as hell not at home.”

“So we have no leads?”

“I didn’t say that, Butch,” Devlin protested, “it just takes time for information to flow in on one of these Mob things.”

By which he meant, Karp knew, that the cops intended to put the minimum force into the effort until such time as mob rivalries or happenstance threw up a reliable snitch. This was fine with Karp; he would have done the same, in fact,
intended
to do the same.

He looked around the table. “Anybody got any ideas?” he asked. “Roland?”

Karp looked at the man sitting to his right. He was ever an interesting and unusual sight. A backswept mane of white-blond hair almost obscured Hrcany’s eighteen-inch neck. His massive shoulders and arms stretched his shirt to drumhead tightness. He had a heavy-browed, hawk-nosed, belligerent face. Karp and Roland Hrcany went back a long way, having begun working for the D.A.’s office the same week, eight years ago.

Hrcany snorted. “Yeah, I got an idea. Watch the river. That’s where you’re gonna find Little Noodles.”

“You think somebody killed him?” asked Karp. “What makes you say that?”

“It figures. He disappears the day after he fingers a hit on Vinnie Ferro—in public, by the way. We checked the planes, the trains, buses, car rental—he didn’t leave town any of those ways. His wife knows from nothing and he didn’t pull any money out of the bank. Also we got word from the state cops: Umberto Piaccere’s got this condo up in Nyack he uses for meetings and to stash people. The state cops and the Feds keep an eye on it, maybe there’ll be another Appalachin or something. There was what they call ‘unusual activity’ up there the morning after Vinnie got it. They spotted Piaccere and a couple of his heavy hitters and also Joey Bottles.”

Hrcany paused for effect. “They also saw Impellatti. That also happens to be the last time
anybody
saw Impellatti. The cops didn’t see him leave, and he sure as shit ain’t there now. So it’s got to be they gave him a ride down the river in a Sicilian speedboat.”

“I don’t understand, Roland,” said Karp. “Why would they do that? I thought he just did them a favor by helping them nail Ferro.”

“Favor, schmavor—come on, Butch. These are wise guys. Who else can tie Joey and Harry Pick to the Ferro hit? Hey, your nose is dripping, you’re grateful you got a piece of Kleenex, but do you keep it around after it’s full of snot?”

Karp grinned. That was one of the reasons he liked Roland. Karp’s view of the human race had become fairly bleak by this time, but Roland made Karp look like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. “That’s a nice image, Roland,” he said. “But if you’re right, we might as well pack it in.”

“He’s not right, Butch. In fact, it’s total bullshit,” said a gravelly voice from the other end of the table. Its source was a chunky, dark-jowled, greasy-locked, pop-eyed figure slouched back in his chair and looking like a heap of dirty laundry. He wore a lavender brocade tie with a knot the size of a jelly donut yanked down to the second button of his shirt. The shirt, a white-on-white silk job, was open at the collar, revealing a mat of dark hair like old Brillo.

“Why is it bullshit, Guma?” asked Hrcany testily.

“Because,” said Guma, “there is no fuckin’ way Harry Pick would be worried that Noodles would rat him out on this thing. Noodles is a stand-up guy.”

Hrcany rolled his eyes. “Christ, Guma! You really believe that
omerta
shit? You really think that if we dragged that little mutt in and hit him with a felony murder rap he wouldn’t roll?”

Guma placed his finger beside his nose and screwed his face into a reasonable likeness of a crafty Sicilian peasant’s, which did not, after all, require much screwing.
“Cu’e orbu, bordu e taci campa cent’anni ’n paci,”
he replied.

“What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means, ‘He who is deaf, dumb, and blind will live a hundred years in peace.’ It’s like a motto, like ‘Better Living Through Chemistry.’ You better believe these guys take it seriously, especially Noodles.”

Hrcany looked away in disgust, but Karp signalled Guma to go on. Guma said, “You know why they call him Little Noodles? He got the name in the joint—this was Sing Sing, so it was maybe twenty years ago, before they closed it down. Impellatti was the wheelman on the Baggia hit. You remember that, Art?” Devlin nodded and Guma continued, warming to his tale. He had been with the D.A. longer than anyone else in the room and had an encyclopedic memory.

“What a mess! It was in the old Park Terrace Hotel at Thirty-fifth and Lex. There was a barbershop in the hotel with a window on the street. Al Baggia used to get shaved there every morning, get a little hot towel. Needless to say, given his line of work, he always had a couple of buttons sitting in the hallway leading to the shop. Anyway, Impellatti, he couldn’t of been more than about eighteen, whips this big Caddy up onto the sidewalk right up against the window of the barbershop and the shooter—who was Charlie Tonnatti, by the way—smokes Baggia with a shotgun. And they’re gone, boom!

“So the cops pick up Frank and they take him over to the Fourteenth Precinct and they give him the business, and this was before Miranda was fuckin’
born,
so they had no problems with really tearing into him. But no way could they get the name of the shooter out of him. The D.A., same shit—nothing! Then—boom! All of a sudden he confesses to being the gun. So he gets the max, nineteen years they sentence him and he don’t even blink. He’s in the can eleven years, not a word about the hit to anyone, and believe me they sent ringers in there to listen, too.

“Oh yeah, about the name. There was a guy in the joint at the time, a huge hulk, looked like Primo Camera, but beefier and not as smart, name of Angie Lasagna. Frank hung out with him a lot, they kind of looked out for each other. So, naturally, because of his name they called Lasagna ‘Big Noodles’ and Frank was Little Noodles. Angie died a couple a years back, walked in front of a bus—”

Karp broke in, “And the point is, Goom … ?”

“The fuckin’
point
is that no way is Harry Pick gonna waste Frank ’cause he’s worried he’s gonna rat. Not if Frank had to go over for fifty years.”

“OK, I see what you mean,” Karp admitted. “So where is he, and why’d he skip?”

“Hey, the fuck I know! Am I his brother? But the Pick didn’t kill him.”

Devlin cleared his throat and said, “Ah, Butch, I got to agree with Guma. Now that we’re talking about it, I remember one of my guys telling me that some Bollano people were asking around after Impellatti the weekend after Ferro got hit. They don’t seem to know where he is either.”

There was silence in the room for a few moments after that, which was broken by Tony Harris. “What about his car?”

Everyone looked at Harris. He was a wiry young man in his fourth year with the Bureau, a good lawyer and the regular third-baseman on the D.A.’s softball team. “What car, Tony?” asked Karp.

“Impellatti’s car. He’s got a car, hasn’t he? I mean, he doesn’t go to work on the subway. Also, he’s a driver. He wanted to get away for some reason, he’d probably take the car.”

Karp looked at Devlin, whose expression was admissible evidence that no, the cops hadn’t thought of looking for Little Noodles’s car.

CHAPTER
4

“S
o, you goin’ a work today, Felix, or what?”

“Yeah, maybe, if I feel like it. You goin’?”