Tragic (7 page)

“I wouldn’t put it past him,” Karp replied. “But apparently Carlotta got caught up in an armed robbery outside of Marlon’s. I’ll know more after Clay fills me in when I get to the office. I’ll be heading in early.”

“Well then, you better turn off that light and come over here and hold your wife,” Marlene said. “This has given me a chill.”

“You don’t have to ask me twice,” he replied, and did as told.

•  •  •

“Hey, Karp! Did ya . . . whoop nuts tits oh boy . . . hear what I asked or not?” Dirty Warren demanded, squinting up at him.

“Uh, sorry, Warren, I got sidetracked,” Karp said, pulling himself away from the memory of how the night ended before Marlene let him go back to sleep.

“Uh-huh, you had kind of a funny look on . . . whoop oh boy . . . your face,” Dirty Warren replied. “I said that I . . . whoop . . . had a good trivia question for you.”

“Boy, you’re a glutton for punishment, but go ahead,” Karp said. The two friends had been playing a game of movie trivia for years; Warren had yet to win a single point, but it didn’t stop him from trying.

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll get you . . . bastard asswipe . . . one of these days,” Dirty Warren joked. “So . . . in the cab scene with Marlon Brando and Rod Steiger from which I just did an Oscar-worthy rendition of Marlon’s most famous . . . whoop oh boy . . . lines, why are the blinds pulled?”

Karp pursed his lips. “Good one,” he said. “Not many people even notice that you can’t see out of the windows of the cab. Even fewer know that it’s because producer Sam Spiegel forgot to pay for rear-projection equipment, hence nothing playing outside the cab’s windows.”

“Damn it, Karp, it’s not fair,” Dirty Warren exclaimed as he hopped up and down. “How can one man’s head be so . . . whoop whoop boobs . . . full of worthless trivia?”

“Uh, thanks for the compliment, I think,” Karp said. “But I’ve got to go. Duty awaits.”

“Sure, sure,” Dirty Warren said. “But just one more.” He pulled a piece of crumpled notepaper from the pocket of his dirty jeans. “Okay, okay . . . shit whoop oh boy . . . so there were two inspirations for
On the Waterfront
,” he said, reading from the note. “One was the series of articles written for the
New York Sun
about all the killings, corruption, and extortion on the waterfront in Hell’s Kitchen. Can you tell me
who
wrote those articles?”

“Malcolm Johnson. He won the Pulitzer Prize . . . back when it meant something to be a journalist,” Karp said.

“Now, now, your feelings for the Fourth Estate are . . . whoop crap oh boy whoop . . . showing and that’s my business.” Dirty Warren grinned. “But okay, you got that one. Now, what was the other inspiration for the story?”

Karp looked sideways at his friend. “Again, the question is below your usual degree of difficulty and comes with a hidden
meaning. The other inspiration was the 1948 murder of a popular union boss. It reinforced what Johnson’s stories had said and sort of woke New York up to what was happening down at the docks. It was the beginning of the end for the worst of it, though no one doubts that there’s a lot that still goes on under the radar. But I get your point. This is about the murder, isn’t it? You know something?”

Dirty Warren looked around as though he feared being overheard. “Word on the street is that this shooting ain’t all it’s cracked up to be in the press.”

Karp looked carefully at his friend. At first brush, Dirty Warren was just a simple news vendor with an odd affliction, but the man had a lot of contacts among the street people and more than once the information he’d given Karp had proven invaluable. “Anything specific?” he asked.

“Not yet . . . oh boy, ohhhhhh boy . . . just rumors that maybe it was a setup,” Dirty Warren answered as he handed Karp copies of the two newspapers. “I’ll let you know if I . . . piss shit . . . do.”

“Okay, thanks, you know I always appreciate it,” Karp said, giving his friend a five and then turning to walk around the corner of the building to the secure Leonard Street entrance reserved for judges and the district attorney. Inside, a private elevator deposited him in a small anteroom on the eighth floor outside his inner chambers, a way for him to bypass the reception area.

Fulton and Guma were already waiting for him. The detective was standing at the bookshelf that occupied an entire wall of the office, while Guma kicked back in a big overstuffed leather chair off to one side of Karp’s desk with an unlit cigar dangling from his mouth.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” Karp greeted them. “Clay, you’re looking good for someone I assume was up all night.” The big black detective still looked like the college football star he’d once been other than the slightly receding, and graying, hairline on his melon-sized head.

“Thanks, boss,” Fulton replied. “And you got that straight.”

Turning to his other friend, Karp said, “Guma, well, you don’t look much worse than normal.”

All three men laughed but it wasn’t that long ago that such a remark wasn’t such a joke. The once-muscular and spry Guma had been reduced by cancer to a white-haired shell of a man with an old man’s body and lines of pain permanently etched into his face. However, his mind and, at least according to his own accounts, libido were in fine shape.

“Very funny,” Guma said. “I didn’t see you up at two a.m. taking statements from Vitteli and Co. I had to go home and take a hot shower with Mrs. Milquetost just to get the smell off. Charlie was bad enough with the big fake alligator tears. But that Barros character is bad news; he didn’t even pretend to be upset.”

Trying not to let the image of Guma and his receptionist in a shower together disturb his train of thought too much, Karp settled in behind his desk and got out a yellow legal pad so he could take notes. “So what do we got?”

Fulton tilted his head to the side and twisted his mouth before answering. “First glance, looks like a pretty straight-up robbery. Two bad guys on foot and another in a getaway car. Carlotta apparently went for his gun and one of the guys blasted him. They took off with wallets and watches.”

“Any witnesses?”

“Yeah,” Fulton said. “Vitteli, Barros, and Jackie Corcione, the union attorney and son of the founder, were all there. Apparently there’d been some sort of meeting to patch things up between them regarding the election. They were walking to their cars when it went down.”

“How convenient,” Karp said. “I guess we know what their alibis will be.”

“Yeah, pretty airtight,” Fulton replied, rolling his eyes. “Anyway, they were just getting ready to move the body when I got there. I talked to the officers and detectives on scene. Goom handled
the witness statements and we’ve been all over the reports. I agree with my main man here, something stinks, but we got nothing right now to prove it.”

“Anybody else see anything?” Karp asked.

“Carlotta’s driver, a guy named Randy McMahon,” Fulton said. “He’d been sent to get the car and was just driving back when he saw it go down. But it was dark, and he didn’t know what he was looking at. Saw flashes from the gun and two guys running across the street to the getaway car.”

“He get a license plate number?”

“No. Just a description: older model, four-door American sedan. Gray primer on the trunk.”

Karp made a few notes on his pad, then looked at Guma. “What did you do after you left the scene?”

“I went to talk to some of my people who know what’s going on down at the docks,” he replied.

“And?”

“And it’s no secret there was no love lost between Carlotta and Vitteli, especially after Leo Corcione died,” Guma replied. “There was a power struggle, and the union had an election a year ago to decide it. Got pretty ugly. Lot of charges flying around, particularly from Carlotta’s side after Vitteli won.”

“Any rumors about the shooting from your gangster friends?”

Guma smiled and shrugged. “There’s always plenty of rumors. Mob guys like to gossip more than little old ladies. But it’s too early to say what’s real and not, even for wiseguys with ears to the streets. However, no one I talked to was buying the ‘robbery’ charade. Also, I found this interesting; the Italians are a little nervous about one of the Russian gangs nosing around the docks. But no one knows if there’s a connection to this.”

Karp looked at Fulton. “What about you, Clay?”

“I went out to New Rochelle with the detective assigned to talk to the widow.”

“How’s she doing?”

“Not well,” Fulton replied. “I guess she collapsed when she was told by a captain with the New Rochelle Police Department. The paramedics had her drugged up when we got there, but she was pretty much in shock and crying nonstop. Tough thing to see; she obviously loved him. She kept saying that she begged her husband not to go to the meeting and claims that Vitteli is behind it. She couldn’t provide anything to go on. But it could be worth talking to her again when she’s had a chance to pull herself together.”

“I take it Vitteli and his guys all told the same story?”

“Practically word for word, which is suspicious enough,” Guma replied. “Two males jumped out of an alley, at least one of them with a gun, and demanded their wallets. Carlotta apparently was packing a .380 and tried to draw down on the gunman but got beat to the punch and took one in the chest and another to the head. He was gone by the time the paramedics arrived. I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to look at the papers yet, but there’s a photo of Charlie Vitteli slumped against the wall with blood on his hands. He says he tried to give Carlotta CPR.”

“I’ll bet,” Karp replied sarcastically. “Somehow I think a photograph of him with blood on his hands may be apropos when all is said and done.”

“Maybe,” Fulton said. “But Vitteli’s a crafty son of a bitch. You can bet that if he’s involved, there isn’t going to be a lot pointing directly at him.”

“Probably not,” Karp agreed. “But what about Vitteli’s men? Maybe there’s a weak link.”

“I’ll stay on the boys over at homicide,” Fulton said. “Maybe call Vitteli’s guys in one at a time for a few questions. Might get somebody to slip up.”

“I’ll bet somebody already has,” Karp said. “We just need to figure out who.”

“H
EY,
DETKA,
COME HERE, BABY
,”
Alexei Bebnev shouted drunkenly as he grabbed at the waitress, who slapped his hand away from her hip and deftly moved past the table where he sat with Frank DiMarzo. A wave of anger passed over his face as the woman disappeared into the crowd at the bar, but then the Russian laughed as he glanced at his companion. “I don’t want that
telka
anyway; she’s a fat bitch. Plenty of fish in sea, right, my friend?”

DiMarzo smiled though he disliked the Russian and wished he was elsewhere. It had been a week since the murder of Vince Carlotta and the guilt weighed on him. All he had to do was close his eyes and he’d see the look on the doomed man’s face when Charlie Vitteli grabbed his arm and the first bullet slammed home.
“You son of a bitch!”
The words echoed in his mind and caused his gut to clench as though they’d been directed at him and not Vitteli. He heard them again as he watched the evening news coverage of Carlotta’s funeral and saw the man’s grieving widow holding his infant son.

Only at the moment of the shooting did DiMarzo realize that Vitteli was behind the plot. He’d of course recognized him as well as the other four men from the photograph that had been ripped
out of the magazine and assumed that Joey Barros, pictured in the magazine and present at the murder, was the “Joey” who Bebnev met, with Marat Lvov, to set up the assassination. And Bebnev’s account of the comment he overheard that “Charlie wants this done ASAP” could have only meant Vitteli.

The photograph was now safely tucked away inside the Bible on a bookshelf in his childhood room at his parents’ modest brick row house in Red Hook. He wasn’t sure why he was reluctant to get rid of it—after all, it might be evidence to connect him to the crime—but something told him the photo could be important later, so he stashed it.

He just wanted to be done with it all, but things kept dragging out. Three days after the murder, Bebnev had paid him eight thousand to split with Gnat Miller. When he complained that they were owed another six thousand, the Russian said he needed to collect the rest from Lvov, which was why they were now sitting in a noisy club in the Little Odessa area of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.

At first, DiMarzo wondered why Bebnev insisted that he accompany him to the club. The Russian made it sound like he just wanted to party before handing over the money. But looking around, DiMarzo figured that his partner in crime wanted backup.

DiMarzo was a tough kid from a bad neighborhood, but the crowd in the club was made up of some of the roughest-looking men he’d ever seen in one place. Many of the rugged Slavic faces bore scars and disfigured noses; the predominant language was Russian spoken in loud, coarse shouts over the repetitive pounding of Euro/techno/Russian music, and he knew that many of the dark tattoos he could see on various arms and necks represented Russian Mafia affiliations. Everybody, including the women—some of whom looked as tough as the men—seemed to be dressed in black leather.

Making DiMarzo even more nervous, Bebnev apparently felt so emboldened by his presence and several beers that his boasts
about pulling off “the job” kept growing in volume. He also made a show of pulling out a fat roll of bills to pay for their drinks, tipping the waitress lavishly. DiMarzo noticed that some of the clientele were paying attention.

“You see look on asshole’s face,” Bebnev shouted over the music. He laughed as he made his fingers into a gun. “It was like, ‘Oh shit, man, now I’m going to die.’ And ‘bang, bang,’ I make it happen, fucking damn straight, man.”

“Not so loud,” DiMarzo said. “You’re talking too much.”

“Fuck that,
sooka,
” the Russian replied, slurring his words. “These are my people. And no one fucks with Alexei Bebnev.”

At that moment, a fat, bald man entered the pool hall followed by a couple of big, thuggish-looking men dressed all in black and wearing sunglasses. The fat man looked around the bar until his eyes settled on Bebnev.