Tragic (6 page)

The rest of the evening went about as well as it could. Charlie was in fine form talking about the early days. “We busted some heads together, huh, Vince,” he said. “Before you went all academic on me. And hey, remember the ‘management meeting’ in Atlantic City? We had a good time then, and if I remember right, there was a cute little dancer who had an eye for you. I got a photo of the four of us put in the latest edition of the
Dock.
”

Vince laughed and told a few stories of his own while the cigars and whiskey made the rounds. At one point he excused himself and called Gorman to tell him how the evening was going. He couldn’t wait, however, to get home and let Antonia in on what had happened. He imagined holding her tight and telling her that everything was going to be fine.

“I need to get moving,” he said at last, feeling the effects of the last shot of whiskey.

“So do I,” Charlie agreed. “You parked around the corner. We’ll walk with you.”

Vince waved Randy McMahon over and sent him to get the car warmed up. “I’ll be right there.”

“You go with him,” Vitteli told his bodyguard, Sal Amaya.

Amaya, a huge man who’d had a brief career as an NFL lineman, frowned. “You sure, boss?”

“Yeah, I want to have a few last words with Vince,” Vitteli said and laughed. “I swear you can be a mother hen sometimes, Sal.”

“That’s what you pay me for.”

“Yeah? Well I also pay you to listen to what the fuck I tell you to do, so get going,” he said, frowning.

As the four remaining men left the pub and rounded the corner to the side street, Vince noticed that the three women were no
longer gathered around the oil drum, which stood black and cold at the alley entrance. They’d just about reached it when Vince spotted the old Delta 88 parked across the street. A man was sitting at the wheel.

“Hey, that’s the—” he started to say when two men wearing ski masks stepped out of the alley entrance.

“Give me fucking wallets,” one of the men said in a heavily accented voice as he pointed his gun at Vince.

In that instant, Vince recognized the voice. He could see the eyes beneath the mask; they were blue and widely spaced. He also knew that this was no ordinary robbery as his hand dove into his coat pocket and found the .380.

The young robber was slow to recognize the danger. Vince had the gun out of his pocket and had started to move it forward to aim and fire, but then he felt a hand grip his forearm, stopping him. He glanced over and saw Charlie, his face a mask of hate. Vitteli held tight to Carlotta’s arm, trying to wrestle the gun from him.

“You son of a bitch,” Vince swore.

“Do it,” Charlie shouted at the gunman.

Vince looked back just as the first round caught him in the chest, knocking him to the sidewalk as his own gun clattered to the ground. He sat up and tried to reach the .380 but the next shot caught him in the head, killing him instantly.

The masked gunman and his associate stood still for a moment as if trying to figure out what to do next.

“Our wallets, you idiot,” Charlie hissed.

“What? Oh,
da
,” the gunman said. “Give me your wallets and your watches!”

As the others took their wallets out and removed their watches, the second masked man stepped forward to get the loot.

“Now get the fuck out of here,” Charlie said, aware that people were starting to come out of Marlon’s down the street, having heard the shots.

The two men ran across the street and jumped into the Delta 88, which peeled away from the curb and tore around a corner, away from the crowd.

Charlie knelt next to Vince Carlotta, placing his hands on the dead man’s chest as if to administer CPR. “Help!” he yelled. “Somebody call 911. My friend’s been shot!”

Jackie Corcione, who had been staring at Vince and the growing pool of blood around his body, suddenly jerked as if he’d been awakened. He ran toward the crowd that was approaching. “Help! Somebody shot Vince Carlotta, call an ambulance!”

An ambulance showed up a few minutes later, the paramedics taking over from where Charlie Vitteli had been pushing on his dead rival’s chest. One of the rescuers looked up at where Charlie stood, his hands dripping with blood, and shook his head. “He’s gone,” the paramedic said.

Charlie slumped against the wall and took out his silk monogrammed handkerchief to try to clean the blood off his hands as Joey and Jackie gathered around as if to comfort him. A flash went off and then another. The press had arrived. “It will look good for the papers, but goddamn it, the shit doesn’t want to come off,” he complained, just as he glanced over Barros’s shoulder in the direction of the alley and stepped back as if he’d seen a ghost. Standing just inside the shadows were the homeless women who’d been around the oil drum several nights before.

Anne Devulder was staring right at him, damnation in her eyes. The second woman cackled and pointed at him as the third, the large black woman, mouthed the words, “ ’Tis time! ’Tis time!”

Wild-eyed, Charlie turned to Barros. “Those bitches are back!” He ducked to hide behind his man.

Corcione and Barros both turned to look in the direction indicated, but then turned back around with confused looks on their faces.

“What bitches?” Barros asked.

“There’s nobody there, Charlie,” Corcione added.

Charlie straightened and peered around Barros. It was true, there was no one standing in the shadows of the alley. “They vanished!” he swore. “They were there but now they’re gone . . . like a breath in the wind.”

Barros’s mouth twisted. “Jesus, boss, you’re giving me the willies,” he said. “There’s no one there, and Vince Carlotta’s not going to give us any more problems. Here, give me that.” He reached down and took the bloody handkerchief from Charlie, then walked over and threw it in the oil drum. “It will be gone the next time some bum lights a fire,” he said. “Now, let’s get you home.”

Charlie nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Must have just been my imagination. The mind can play funny tricks on you. But let’s go back to Marlon’s first. I need another drink.”

“H
EY
, B
UTCH, WHO . . . CRAP SON
of a bitch . . . am I?” the little news vendor with the pointed and perpetually dripping nose and thick, smudged glasses said to the tall man in the navy blue suit standing in front of his newsstand. He puffed out his chest, and threw back his head pugnaciously.

“Here goes, here goes, take a guess,” he said, pulling his old down coat patched with duct tape around him as he hopped from foot to foot. “You ready? ‘You don’t understand. I coulda had class. I coulda been a . . . balls tits oh boy whoop . . . contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let’s face it.’ ”

“Um, let’s see . . . a very poor Marlon Brando as Terry in
On the Waterfront
,” Roger “Butch” Karp replied with a laugh. “And please, don’t ever do that again; you’ll ruin one of my all-time favorite movies for me. That was even below your standards, such as they are, as a trivia question. However, I take it your ‘impersonation’ was motivated by last night’s events and meant to make a point.”

As they spoke, the morning crowd swept past on the sidewalk in front of the Criminal Courts Building on 100 Centre Street in downtown Manhattan where Karp worked as the district attorney of New York County. The newsstand was owned by “Dirty Warren” Bennett, who now smiled mischievously and hooked a thumb
over his shoulder at the front pages of the
New York Times
and the
New York Post
tacked to sides of his newsstand.

“Read ’em and . . . fuck piss . . . weep,” stuttered the little man, who suffered from Tourette’s syndrome, which, besides giving him facial tics and sudden muscle twitches, caused him to spout profanity.

Karp scanned the headlines:
UNION BOSS CARLOTTA KILLED ON WATERFRONT; SUSPECTS FLEE,
read the
Times.
MASKED BANDIT BLASTS CARLOTTA
, the
Post
boldly advertised.

Karp nodded. He’d known what the headlines would be—or at least had a good idea—after he got a telephone call at one in the morning from Clay Fulton, the head of the NYPD detective squad who worked for his office.

•  •  •

“Thought you’d want to know,” his old friend had said. “Somebody shot and killed Vince Carlotta outside of Marlon’s. Looks like a robbery. I’m on my way over to the crime scene now. The press is going to be all over this, and I want to get there before the rumors start flying.”

Karp had swung his legs out of bed and turned on the nightstand light. It was no secret that Vince Carlotta’s supporters had been raising a stink about the last union election. The popular union boss had also been in the papers recently threatening to reopen the union investigation into a fatal accident involving dock cranes. The conspiracy theorists were bound to be out in droves. “I’ll get dressed and join you,” Karp said.

“Stay put. I think we’re okay,” Fulton replied. “Ray Guma heard about it from his Italian mob connections on the docks almost before we did. He called off the ADA who was catching cases on the homicide bureau night chart and is taking it himself. I want to talk to the detectives on the scene, maybe sniff around a little bit. But the initial report I got was pretty cut-and-dried. Carlotta got jumped and tried to pull a gun. Bingo, bango, he took one to the
chest and one to the head. Gunman ran away. I’ll let you know if it looks like more than that; Ray and I will see you in the morning and get you up to speed.”

Karp thought about it for a moment. Special Assistant District Attorney Ray Guma was one of his oldest friends. They’d both come onto the DAO at the same time, fresh out of law school and as different as the law schools they’d attended. Karp at Cal-Berkeley and Guma at NYU. Karp was tall, long-limbed, with gold-flecked gray eyes; a highly recruited college basketball player who still worked at staying fit. Guma was built like an ape with a gargoyle’s face; he’d gone to Fordham on a baseball scholarship and played for a year in the minor leagues for the Yankee organization.

Karp was a straight arrow, the son of a Brooklyn businessman and an English teacher. A dedicated family man, he’d always preferred an evening in with his wife and kids to going out on the town with the boys.

Guma grew up in the rough section of Bath Beach in Brooklyn, one of six children of an Italian plumber and his stay-at-home wife. Through his extended family, Guma had connections to the Mafia, though he’d put plenty of mobsters away. Also, there was an understanding that “those” members of the family kept their business affairs out of Manhattan. Most of the time Karp had known Guma, his friend had used a hard-drinking, cigar-chomping, womanizing front to hide a heart of gold. He would lay his life on the line, and had, for his friends.

What they had in common—besides their Brooklyn roots and an obsession with Yankee baseball—was their love for the law and the work they did with the New York DAO. Under the guidance of the legendary District Attorney Francis Garrahy, they’d both discovered early in their friendship a mutual admiration for the beauty of the justice system when applied fairly and objectively.

However, even in the courtroom their differences in demeanors stood out. Karp was the methodical, persuasive tactician who
wielded dramatic moments—such as when a touch of righteous indignation was called for—like a fencer with a rapier. Guma, with his hot Mediterranean blood, was more emotional in his delivery, also skillful and smart but more likely to use emotion as a cudgel. They were both formidable in court, striking terror in the hearts of the defense bar because they knew they’d be in for a dogfight and there’d be no plea bargain and after conviction the maximum sentence would be imposed.

•  •  •

Sitting on the edge of his bed, Karp knew that Guma could handle anything at the scene and didn’t need “the boss” hovering over his shoulder. So he hung up with Fulton and started to turn off the light when the woman beneath the sheets next to him turned over.

“Who’s dead?” his wife, Marlene Ciampi, asked.

Turning to look at her, Karp smiled. He was amazed at how she could look so good awakened from a dead sleep. Even though she had one glass eye—a casualty of a letter bomb intended for him many years before—she was still a beautiful woman with short dark curly hair that framed her olive-hued face. The petite body beneath the sheets was still lithe and desirable, though he noted the pink puckered wound where she’d been shot that past summer, a new reminder that the woman he’d married when they were both young assistant district attorneys was pretty as a rose, but also tough as thorns.

“What makes you think that anyone’s dead?”

“Well, even if I hadn’t been able to hear Fulton clearly, which I could—I swear the man’s getting deaf he talks so loud—I could tell by your demeanor and the fact that you were ready to hop out of bed with me and rush off to play with your cop friends. That usually means some sort of murder and mayhem is afoot.”

Karp laughed. “Excellent detective work, Ms. Ciampi.”

“Thank you. Now give. Who bought the farm?”

“Vince Carlotta,” Karp said.

Marlene’s playful countenance turned instantly to a frown.
“That’s horrible,” she said. “He seemed like a good guy, at least from what I’ve read. Remember we met him at that Hell’s Kitchen Boys’ Club fund-raiser? Him and his wife. A good-looking couple, sort of a spring–fall romance; she was lovely and he clearly adored her. I think they recently had a baby.”

“Yeah, I remember them,” Karp replied. “I’ve actually run into him a few times over the years. Dockworkers’ union guy, tough as nails, but he was also fair and reasonable. The word ‘integrity’ comes to mind when I think about him, unlike his counterpart, Charlie Vitteli, who’s a walking felony if I could just prove it.”

“Think Vitteli had something to do with it?” Marlene asked.

Karp considered her comment. His wife did not ask idle questions about murder. She’d once been the head of the DAO’s sex crime bureau, and had quit there to start a VIP Security Firm. Most recently, she’d hung up her shingle as a defense attorney/private investigator, working mostly cases in which she felt the justice system was messing up.