IT TOOK MARLENE AN HOUR ON THE Long Island Expressway to get to the Nassau County line and nearly another hour on feeder roads roaming the cloned streets of Great Neck Estates to find the colonial split-level house occupied by retired detective John (Black Jack) Doherty. As usual when making a cold call like this, she’d had Sym make a telephone contact to make sure the mark was still alive and not senile. (No, Mr. Doherty did not want to buy any aluminum siding from the young woman.)
The house was large and white and clean-looking, an American-dream kind of dwelling, set back on a broad, closely clipped lawn shaded by well-grown red maples. There was a gray Chrysler Le Baron, three years old and spotless, in the driveway. Over the doorway, fixed in the center of the triangular pediment, screamed a black iron eagle, below which was a small flagpole carrying the stars and stripes.
Marlene stood under the sluggishly moving banner and pushed the bell button, which was set into a brass plaque with another eagle on it. A brass eagle also served as a knocker on the shiny black door. As she waited, she could not help reflecting how much grander this house was than the one her parents lived in, although as far as earnings were concerned, a cop and a plumbing contractor had been about on a par back in the fifties. Maybe his wife worked, or his kids struck it rich and bought it for him, she thought, not really believing it.
The man who answered the door was in his mid sixties, stocky, with a dark, angular face, black hair going speckled gray on the sides, thick black eyebrows over dark eyes, a good example of the physiognomic style called Black Irish, supposedly representing gene lines dumped on the shamrock shore by the wreckage of the Armada. He was dressed for suburban comfort in a green cardigan, tan Lacoste shirt, pale blue Sansabelt trousers, and woven leather slip-ons. The fishing magazine he was holding completed the picture of a prosperous retiree, but his eyes were still cop eyes when he looked Marlene up and down. She was still something to see, with the face covered in yellowy-mauve blotches, but she had made the effort, having donned a blue linen suit, a crisp primrose blouse, heels, and a snappy panama hat to hide the Frankenstein stitches on her bristly skull. The cops still had her gun, and she was in no great hurry to get another one.
“Yes? Can I help you?”
“You can if you’re John Doherty. Harry Bello suggested I look you up.”
She could see him thinking. The NYPD has something over two thousand detectives, of whom only two hundred or so are detectives first grade. Bello had been one and Doherty had not, and even if their careers had not been exactly contemporary, Doherty would have heard of Bello as a rising hotshot.
“Harry Bello. In Brooklyn, yeah. I was in the city my whole career. He still with the force?”
“No, he retired and went private. I’m his partner, Marlene Ciampi.” She held out a business card, one of the old Bello & Ciampi versions.
He read it, and when he looked up his gaze remained suspicious. They were still standing on the doorstep, and he had not yet made a gesture to invite her over his threshold. “What’s this about, Miss Ciampi?”
“One of your old cases bears on an investigation we’re running for a client. Harry thought you could be helpful, maybe supply some background that never got written into a DD–5.”
“What case would that be?”
“Gerald Fein. You remember it?”
The big eyebrows rose a quarter inch. “Hard to forget that one.” He looked at his watch. “I got an eleven o’clock tee-off at Fresh Meadows, but I could talk for a couple of minutes. Come on in.”
He turned and led the way back into the house, through a small entrance hall past a living room demonstrating that the Dohertys must be among the very best customers of the Ethan Allen Company, down a hallway lined with family photographs (wife, four good-looking kids, an assortment of probable grandchildren), and into a pine-paneled room that was clearly the master’s den. Doherty seated himself in a big maroon leather recliner and indicated a needlepoint-cushioned maple rocker for her to sit in. Marlene took in the unsurprising decor: framed photographs of Doherty in uniform and plainclothes with other smiling men, all Irish-looking, similarly dressed, awards, plaques, two stuffed fish of good size, a bass and a tarpon, an antique wooden eagle, hooked rugs on the floor, and the furniture, desk, chairs (except the man’s recliner) impeccably early American maple and pine. Esthetic consistency was clearly a major value chez Doherty.
Settled, Doherty did not beat about the bush. “You want to know was the suicide legit?”
“Yeah, that’d be a good place to start.”
He made a steeple of his fingers and looked out the window past beige drapes printed with flags and drums to a small stone patio and the yard beyond. “Officially, we found no evidence of foul play. The man went up to the observation deck, bought a ticket, opened a locked maintenance door, went out onto the overhang below the deck windows, and climbed over the parapet.”
“And unofficially?”
“Unofficially . . . ? Well, I was the junior guy on the case. Arnie Mulhausen was running it, and he couldn’t get rid of it fast enough. But I had some problems, yes.”
“Like?”
“Okay, no note. Not unusual, but you have to figure, a lawyer, a man uses words every day . . . it made me itch a little. Arnie’s take was, hey, the guy was nuts, right? Who else takes a header off of the Empire State? So I’m doing interviews, family, friends, associates—”
“Excuse me a second, Mr. Doherty, this kind of investigation for a jumper—it’s not that usual either, is it?”
“Well, it’s sad to say, it depends on the person. A cop eats the gun, hey, it’s pretty cut and dried. Some guy gets out of Creedmore and jumps in front of a bus, same thing. Guy, a Mob lawyer, no history of depression, goes off a building, we look a little harder. So, my other problem, like I was saying, I couldn’t get anyone to tell me Fein was depressed, despondent, whatever. The wife, the daughter, colleagues. He was laughing, he had plans to recover, he wasn’t hurting that bad for money.”
“Except for Herschel Panofsky,” said Marlene.
“Yeah, except for him,” said Doherty, giving her an interested cop look.
“That didn’t make you suspicious?”
“Oh, suspicious, yeah. But, like Arnie said, who’s to say the guy didn’t have a great front, the only guy he leveled with was his partner? I checked up on Panofsky, just on my own, and he was alibied pretty tight on the day of. The guy became a judge later on. Changed his name. Anyway, I let it go.”
“Anything else fishy?”
He frowned. “Fishy isn’t the word I would use here. But, yeah, there was the key business. The door to the maintenance area was always locked. The management was real careful about that, for obvious reasons. Fein had a key. We found it in his pocket after he hit. Where’d he get it? We figured he bought it off one of the maintenance guys, and we sweated every one of them, every person who had access to a copy, and came up with zip.” He paused and stared out the window again. From the yard came the liquid trilling of a robin, and they both listened to it for a while.
Doherty looked at his watch and leaned forward in his recliner. “I got to start moving,” he said.
Marlene put away her notebook and stood. “You’ve been very helpful.”
“I wish I had something else for you. You know, you have, detectives have, hundreds of cases, and most of the time you figure you gave it your best shot. Here, though . . .” He waggled a hand. “Nothing to go on, not really. And the family bought it, and that was it, case closed. Everybody bought it, as a matter of fact, except the secretary. She wasn’t in any doubt.”
“Secretary?”
“Uh-huh. Fein’s personal secretary. She took it harder than the family, practically. She got to be something of a pain in the you-know-where after. She couldn’t understand why we were treating it as a suicide when she knew for a fact that it wasn’t.”
“What was her evidence of that . . . oh, first, do you recall her name?”
“Yeah, as a matter of fact I do. A hard one to forget. Waldorf, like the hotel; first name . . . ?” He closed his eyes for a moment, opened them. “Jesus, it’s gone! Sheila? Sharon? One of those. What she had was a bunch of letters, carbons, of stuff he’d sent out, all about relocating in California, applying for the bar there. Plans, you know? Therefore, not going to kill himself. Arnie looked at her stuff, didn’t find anything definite. She kept coming by, here’s more papers, Detective. After a while we didn’t bother looking. I mean, the case was closed. Panofsky had to get rid of her. I guess she was an embarrassment.”
Marlene made a note, shook hands, and they walked together to the front door, in her head asking the questions that couldn’t be asked out loud, like how does an ex-cop on a pension afford a half-million-dollar house and a country club membership, tarpon fishing in Florida, and exactly how bent had Arnie Mulhausen been, and who else got paid off, and by whose money, for whisking Gerald Fein’s murder under the rug back in 1960?
Ray Guma walked into Karp’s office unannounced, slammed the door behind him, and flipped the thing onto Karp’s desk. Karp looked at it, and then up at Guma, who was frowning so hard that his chin showed dimples and his thick eyebrows nearly met in the middle.
“That looks like a subpoena, Ray,” said Karp. He picked it up with two fingers, like a dead fish, and snapped the folded document open. “Yep. I was right. It’s a federal subpoena. When did you get it?”
“Just now. What the fuck is going on, Butch?”
“You got me,” said Karp. He read through the document. “No indication of what they want you for, but there never is. The statute is 18 U.S.C.371, the good old criminal-conspiracy steamer trunk, could be anything. Got a guilty conscience, Goom?”
“Get out of here! Me?”
Karp laughed. He read the name of the issuing assistant U.S. attorney. “Douglas E. Eitenberg. You know him?”
“Never heard of the asshole. He must be new.”
“Call him yet?”
“No, I was so pissed I didn’t trust myself not to blow up on the phone there. I figured Jack’s out of town, you’re the man, I’d talk to you first.”
“Wise. You want me to call him?”
“I want you to rip his lungs out.”
“Maybe later. Okay, Goom, calm down, go back downstairs, give Roland a heads-up on it so he knows what’s happening, and since I’m king for a day, I will call our colleagues and find out what the story is.”
Keegan was at the Greenbriar in West Virginia at a big-time legal institute barbecue of the sort that he never offered to let Karp stand in at. Karp would be the district attorney for two whole days. As such, according to protocol, he should have called the U.S. attorney directly, or Eitenberg’s boss in the organized crime and public corruption division, but he decided to let protocol go hang for once, and just penetrate through the bureaucracy in the hope that his temporary clout would blast some plain speaking loose from the lowly worker bee across the square.
He had O’Malley make the call (this is the office of the district attorney calling) and got the guy on hold and kept him there for a minute.
Eitenberg had a light voice, one that seemed only recently to have changed, and he spoke very carefully, with more than the usual number of ahs and ums.
After the briefest pleasantries, Karp said, “Yeah, Mr. Eitenberg, just checking out this subpoena you issued to one of our assistants, Mr. Raymond Guma. Do you recall that one?” Eitenberg did. “Well, here’s the thing, Mr. Eitenberg, as a rule, we in the criminal justice business, being the good guys and all, we try to avoid this sort of thing, throwing subpoenas at one another. I mean, just as an example, if one of your fine federal law enforcement officers inadvertently violated the laws of New York state, we would not expect to find them in shackles walking the perp walk the next morning. No, a couple of phone calls, a friendly meeting or two, we’d straighten it all out. Unless there’s some particular reason why Mr. Colombo doesn’t want to go that way.” Silence on the line.
“Is there?” Karp asked. Ums and mumbles, and Mr. Eitenberg would like to consult with his management.
Fifteen minutes later, that management called, in the person of Norton Peabody, the head of the organized crime division, a man Karp knew to say hello to, and by reputation. Buttoned down and intense was the rep. More pleasantries, after which Peabody said, “Doug Eitenberg tells me you have some issues on this subpoena we sent out to Raymond Guma.”
“Issues, yeah. I didn’t mean to get your boy all bent out of shape, but we were a little concerned. A subpoena? Why not a call? Or a visit? You look out your window, you could wave at my office.”
“Well, the problem with that approach, Butch, is your guy showed up on surveillance saying some pretty disturbing things to a pretty bad wise guy. We thought it was best to keep the whole thing formal for now. You understand, given the sensitivity—”
“What wise guy was that, Norton?”
“Gino Scarpi. We have them taped in the prison ward at Bellevue.”
“Oh, for crying out loud, Peabody! Ray was interviewing Scarpi at my direct request.”
“That’s interesting. It was clear from our tape that he had no recording device on him. Was there one in the room?”
“No, because he wasn’t there to gather evidence. He was there to gather intelligence. It’s not the same thing.”
A pause. “Don’t you think it’s irregular to send an assistant district attorney to talk to a Mob gunman? Don’t you have investigators for that?”
“Yes, of course, but so what? He wasn’t sneaking off to conspire with a criminal, for God’s sake. He was interviewing a prisoner at my direction. And for this he becomes subject to a subpoena? What is wrong with you guys?”
“You should see the tapes, Butch, before you go off half cocked. They look bad, real bad. Your boy sounds like he’s a fully paid-up Mafiosi. He even says it out of his own mouth.”
“Oh, Peabody, that is such horseshit!”
“Hey. I’m trying to be constructive, here. I tell you what: come over, we’ll run the tape for you, and then look at me with a straight face and tell me you don’t have a problem with it.”
“I’ll be right there,” said Karp.
Marlene’s next appointment was her lunch with Abe Lapidus, which had been scheduled for a restaurant in the Village, but on the way back from the Island Marlene decided that she was not up to facing stares in so public a place on her first day out, and so she called Lapidus from her car phone to cancel and he, sensing the problem, said, “Don’t be ridiculous! You’ll come up to our place. We got food, we got drinks, and later, if you want, you can visit Sophie.” To this she readily agreed; she was accustomed to making light of her physical beauty, as a good feminist ought, but in fact, although she had learned over the years to deal with the missing eye, she found that the loss of hair and the marred face had proved too much for mere ideology. She didn’t like being repulsive, and she was not going to expose herself to its consequences if she could help it, at least not before age seventy.
The apartment of Abe and Selma Lapidus was furnished in what Marlene always thought of as bad good taste: that is, they had paid a decorator to give them whatever look was fashionable at the moment, although in this case successive waves of fashion were in evidence, like tidemarks on a beach. The wall-to-wall was pale beige, the couch was Duncan Phyfe in pale blue silk, the coffee table was thick glass and chrome, the chairs were designish Scandinavian in teak and leather, the breakfront was massive mahogany from the current plutocratic era, and it was full of bits of pre-Columbiana and African fetish work to exhibit the right political sympathies with the oppressed. The wall art was expensive investment-grade abstract, plus one bright rya from the sixties decor, and a couple of original oils, pasty sad clowns by, Marlene would have bet a million, the chatelaine herself. The room was spotless, and smelled of Pledge and rug shampoo.
“Selma will be out,” Abe had confided over the phone. “We won’t be disturbed.”
Nor were they. Abe served tuna fish salad on croissants, which they ate around the coffee table, with a big bottle of San Peligrino to wash it down, drunk out of cut-glass tumblers almost too heavy to lift to the mouth. A silent brown woman in a white uniform drifted in and served and quickly vanished.
They small-talked during the meal, and when the servant had removed the plates, Marlene got out her notebook. Before many minutes had passed, it was clear to her that Abe Lapidus liked to talk, that he regarded her as a captive audience, and that he considered himself free to ramble on about whatever interested him, something, she suspected, that was fairly rare in his life with Selma. He spun anecdotes of the New York bar of thirty years before, political perceptions, contacts with the famous of that era, general appreciations of the urban scene then and now, comparisons of same, to the detriment of the current era, and around and around the old barn until he was ready to discharge a useful nugget.
“I’m rambling,” he confessed. “You wanted to know about Jerry Fein, and I’m rambling.”
“That’s okay,” said Marlene. “Take your time.”
He peered at her, tilting his head back to catch her image in his bifocals, and shook his head and tut-tutted. “What a shame! All your hair! And those bruises! That little son of a bitch, they should throw the key away, that . . .” He drew a breath. “Always, he was like that, a vicious, brutal piece of dirt. I don’t know how many times Jerry pulled him out of trouble, starting from young, thirteen, fourteen. But what do you expect from that family?”
“You mean that they were gangsters, Mafia?”
“Oh, Mafia, schmafia! Darling, believe me, it doesn’t matter what side of the law, it’s the character I’m talking about. I knew Meyer Lansky quite well, and he was always a perfect gentleman. Lucky Luciano the same. Murderers, dope pushers, but also gentlemen. Can you understand that?”
Marlene could. “I know people like that,” she said.
“Right. And there are distinguished citizens, businessmen, attorneys, never even dropped a piece of paper on the sidewalk, I wouldn’t trust them alone with my daughter for five minutes. This one, the little Bollano, was a momser from the cradle, and the father was worse. If Jerry Fein had lived to see his daughter married to that piece of scum, he would have killed himself.”
They both froze for an instant at this, and both then let out a burst of embarrassed laughter.
Abe took off his glasses and wiped his eyes with a handkerchief. “My God in heaven, some things are so tragic the only thing you can do is laugh.”
“Yeah, about that: Why did Vivian Fein marry Sal Bollano? Any ideas?”
“Oh, well, you know, I only knew Jerry as a colleague, I wasn’t intimate with the family. It’s possible Sophie would have some thoughts on that, if you can get her to talk about it. She and Ceil were close for some years.”
“Ceil is the mother?”
“Yes, and I believe she’s still in their old house in Brooklyn. You think you’ll talk to her? I hear she’s not so good.”
“If she’ll talk to me. Vivian doesn’t want me to.”
“Ah, Vivian, what a shame, what a shame! Oy! A gorgeous girl, and he worshiped her, Jerry. For her sweet sixteen party he took over the Versailles ballroom, everything the best, fountains flowing with champagne, Lester Lanin orchestra, must have been five hundred people. Let me tell you, darling, if a bomb had gone off at that party, it would have wiped out organized crime in New York, and half of law enforcement. Jerry knew everyone, on both sides, and if you treated him with respect, he treated you with respect, he didn’t care from what you made your money.”
“Did he have any enemies that you know of?”
The man made a sour pickle face. “Enemies? What are you talking enemies? He was an attorney. He wasn’t in politics, he didn’t have the kind of practice where he would screw people. He represented defendants in court, that’s what he did. If some of them were gangsters, then some of them were gangsters, big deal, the law says bad people are entitled to representation, too. This is not a life that makes enemies.” He paused and looked at her more sharply. “So, how come you’re asking ‘enemies’?”
“The cop who investigated his suicide thinks there was something not right about it.”
“Who, that what’s-his-name, the big Nazi?”
“Mulhausen. No, he’s dead. His partner, Doherty.” She offered a summary of what she had learned from the former detective.
Lapidus waved a hand dismissively. “Ah, don’t get me started on the cops. They do a perfunctory investigation, and then this guy gets a guilty conscience twenty-five years later. Phooey!”
“You think they were bent?”
“Think? No, they were all Abe Lincolns. Don’t be ridiculous, the fifties? In New York? Sal Bollano had a bigger payroll in some precincts than the police department.”
“Just a minute, Abe. You’re suggesting that Sal Bollano had Fein killed and bribed the cops not to look so hard?”
“No, I’m suggesting look at the facts you just told me. One, no note. A man who loved his family? He wouldn’t try to explain, say he loved them one last time? I can’t believe it. Two, his appointment book was chock full for weeks after the death. A man makes dozens of appointments he knows he’ll never keep because he’s going to kill himself? Nah!”
“Were you interviewed by the police at the time?”
“Me? Nah, I told you, we weren’t that close. But they did people I knew, and it was naturally, such a thing, a subject of discussion around the courthouse. No one could believe it, no one!”
“Except Panofsky.”
“Aha!” Abe raised a finger in the air, as if he had discovered something. “Smart girl. Except Panofsky.”
“But eventually everyone went along with the suicide finding, nobody objected.”
Abe sighed. “Darling, the family accepts it, the law partner accepts it, what can you do? We all figured there was stuff, disgraceful things, we didn’t know about. You know, back then some people wouldn’t say the word ‘cancer.’ This other business, what you see on the talk shows, people wouldn’t even confess to their closest friends.”
“But his secretary didn’t accept it, did she?”
“Oh, well, that was different, the poor woman! See, that was Jerry again, he would make people love him. Charming, even if you would have lunch with him, a casual thing, you would go away thinking what a guy! And to tell the absolute truth, you would think you were closer to him than you really were. Anyway, Jerry took in this kid, Shirley, just out of high school, a nice girl, plain but nice, very efficient. She was with him years, never married, devoted, totally, you know? And, you know how it is, that kind of thing, she thought the sun shone out of his tuchas. So it was a killer for her when he died, she couldn’t understand it. And she would go around with the appointment book, showing it to everyone, to prove that he couldn’t have done what they all said he did, jump like that. Panofsky, the momser, threw her out right after the funeral. He didn’t have the balls to do it himself even, is what I heard, he got Jimmy Nobile to do it.”
“Who?”
“Nobile. They called him the office manager, but he was a, what they call a gofer, he did a little investigation work, collections, like that. If he’s still alive, he’d know a thing or two.”
“Any ideas on where to look for him?”
Abe shrugged. “No, no idea. You know, after I said to you, I mean there in the hospital, I could help you on this, I got to thinking, Who really knows the story? And it occurred to me, the people who know if there even is a story, they’re either dead or they probably won’t talk. Panofsky—”
“What’s the book on him? I don’t like that he was the only one who thought Fein was despondent.”
Abe leaned back and rolled his eyes. “Oh, don’t get me started on Heshy Panofsky! What can I say? You know the man from the bench. You know what he looks like, how he acts?”
“You mean arrogant?”
“Yeah, not unusual among judges, but Heshy was arrogant when he was a pissy little shyster with a walk-up office on Joralemon Street in Brooklyn. There was some family connection, in-laws or something, I don’t know what, but in the early fifties it must have been, Jerry took him into the firm. And he found out—and you know, this was a litigating firm, pardon the expression, balls of brass, sue their ass, that kind—anyway, Jerry found out that Heshy was from hunger in the courtroom. It was all front with Heshy. It came time to put it on the line, he shut down. So, and this shows you what a decent guy Jerry was, he still kept him on. Him and Bernie Kusher took the court work, and Heshy became the fixer.”
“What kind of fixer?”
“Oh, you know—traffic tickets, drunk driving, getting a contractor’s license. He knew all the pols, all Tammany back then. The machine. Heshy moved a lot of fat brown envelopes around town, and a lot of the money wasn’t so clean, if you catch my drift.”
“Panofsky supplied Mob cash to politicians?”
Abe smiled. “You didn’t hear it from me, darling. Which is why it was so ironic and so fishy that when somebody finally got caught moving one of those fat envelopes, it was Jerry and not Panofsky. Makes you think, don’t it?”
“Panofsky framed Jerry?”
“Go and prove it.”
“Jesus! How did he ever get to be a judge?”
Another smile, this one more patronizing. “Darling, listen to what you’re saying. I told you he had the politicians by the you-know-whats. What, you think you get to be a judge because of your legal brilliance?”
“I stand corrected. Okay, forget Panofsky for now, who else besides this Nobile would know something?”
“Well, that’s like I say, the problem. Mulhausen the cop, but he’s dead. The judge in the tampering case, Mohr, and the prosecutor, Currie, also both dead. Bernie Kusher, who knows? Probably dead already—”
“Tell me about Bernie. He was the third partner, right?”
“Right, Bernie Kusher, the third partner. He defended Jerry in the tampering case, or he would’ve if Jerry hadn’t copped out. Another character. Bright, tough, a damn good lawyer. Very close to Jerry, very close: they went to Columbia Law together, started their practice together. I didn’t know him well, but the pair of them were devastating in a courtroom. They won a lot of big cases back in the fifties. Sophie socialized with them more, the Feins and Bernie. He was divorced, I seem to recall. You could ask her. I don’t have to tell you Panofsky hated him; they were poison together.”
After that they talked desultorily about the tampering case, for Abe Lapidus recalled only the broad outlines of the plot, which centered upon the famous zippered bank envelope full of cash (the envelope itself amply stamped with Fein’s prints) and a note typed on Fein’s office typewriter, indicating that a vote for acquittal in the Gravellotti case would earn double what was inside.
Abe began to maunder again, supplying unwanted details about some peripheral courtroom figures.
“Oh, hell, Abe,” Marlene broke in with heat. “You’re telling me everything but what I want to know. Why didn’t Jerry fight the thing? Why did he cop on it?”
Abe poured out some water, rattled the ice cubes, took a long drink. He gave her an odd look, compounded of assessment, affection, cynically exhausted humor.
“You’re a smart cookie, Marlene. That’s the big one. We all wondered about that too. Why did one of the sharpest courtroom jockeys around go into the tank when his own tuchas was on the line?” Another long pause.
“And? And?”
Lapidus chuckled dryly. “You remember the old Lamplighter? It was a saloon on Baxter. A courtroom hangout. It shut down.”
“Yeah, in the early seventies. What about it?”
“This was the evening after Jerry pleaded. Bernie was there in the Lamplighter. He was falling down drunk, which we never saw before, believe me. All of us were what you would call hard drinkers in those days.” He tapped his glass with a fingernail. “They didn’t move much Italian seltzer in the Lamplighter. You drank scotch. Or martinis. But controlled. You got out of hand, they’d call a cab and stick you in it. Anyway, Bernie was there, buying rounds for anyone who’d yell, ‘Fuck you, Panofsky!’ And pouring Chivas down as fast as they could set it up, all the time raving about Heshy. How he wasn’t going to let Heshy get away with it, he’d confess, he wasn’t going to let his pal take the fall, cursing out Heshy and also Frank Currie . . .”
“He was the D.A. in the case?”
“Yeah. Not an ornament to the profession, if you want to know. Bernie was saying things like, ‘I’ll confess, and Frank Currie can kiss my ass!’ People were looking at each other, you know, like when there’s an embarrassing drunk. But trying to ignore it. The man was bellowing. And then Jerry walks in and goes right over to him. I figure Pete Demaris, who was behind the bar at the time, must’ve called him. They did stuff like that in the Lamplighter all the time. It was a club, like. So Jerry goes up to him and puts an arm around him and tries to lead him out, but Bernie won’t go, he’s holding onto the edge of the bar. He’s saying things like, no, no, Jerry, you’re not taking the fall for me, I’ll confess, and Jerry, angry, telling him to shut the fuck up, excuse my French. Everybody pretending it wasn’t happening, but ears flapping like Dumbo. And then Pete came around the bar, this was a real bulvan, if you know what that is, and he just tucked Bernie under his arm and they all walked out and stuffed Bernie into a cab and Jerry got in, too.” He took another drink.
“So . . . what are you saying? That it was Bernie bribed the juror?”
“Oh, no. That was definitely Panofsky. I told you, he was the fixer. No, just when they were dragging him out the door, Bernie yelled something like, ‘I did it!’ and then some names—Mintzer, De Salerno, Maddux, and some others. Well, he was raving, so no one paid any attention. Later, they remembered.”
“You’ve lost me, Abe.”
“Yeah, it’s complicated. I’m amazed I can remember it myself. They were names of trusts. The firm didn’t have much of a trust business, mostly local guys who made a pile in the forties, wanted to protect their families. Maybe thirty million total. Bernie was in charge of the trust operation.”
“And he was looting them.”
“Looting is strong. He was doing floats, kiting checks, stripping a little interest. He never touched the principle. But definitely stuff that would not stand up to an audit. Heshy found out about it, needless to say. Not much got past Heshy. So, Heshy sets up the frame on Jerry, who practically laughs in their face when they indict him. He’s gonna cram it up Currie’s you-know-what. Now, Currie, like I mentioned, is a piece of work. He’s desperate to get Bollano, he’s got political ambitions, wants to be Tom Dewey number two fighting the mobsters. No ethics to speak of. He figures he squeezes Fein with this bribing a juror charge, it’ll be like . . . what’re those things the kids break and all the toys fall out? Mexican . . . ?”
“A piñata. But what about client privilege? Jerry was their lawyer.”
“Hey, I said the guy was a nogoodnik. Fein knows all about the Bollanos, and Currie figures he’s facing ruin, disbarment, he’ll open up and spill goodies all around. He don’t have to do it in the open. Crack the Bollano mob like that piñata. But Fein wouldn’t play that game, no, he’s ready to go to trial. Then Currie finds out about Bernie and the trusts, you can guess how. Now, from here it’s speculation. I don’t know any of this. You want to hear it?”
“Desperately.”
He laughed. “Okay, cookie. Let’s say Currie calls up Fein. We got the goods on your partner, he’s going down unless you play ball. Jerry thinks fast. He says, here’s the deal—I cop to misdemeanor tampering, you lay off Bernie, and don’t schtup me with the bar. Currie says, what about the Bollanos? Nothing doing, says Fein, you don’t like it, I’ll see you in court, and Bernie can take his chances. So Currie, who’s no dummy, he thinks, one way I got a good collar on a Mob jury tampering, the other way I got to go up against Jerry Fein and Bernie Kusher with a weak case, I could lose my ass. And what do I care about technical violations of the trust regs? No juice there. So they deal. But afterward Currie does put it to him with the bar, and Jerry gets the shaft. Besides the rest of it, Currie was a mean, vindictive son of a bitch.”
“That’s some story,” said Marlene, “but it makes sense. Currie’s dead, you said?”
“Yeah, Garrahy, the D.A., canned him when Bernie took off.”
“Bernie took off where?”
“Oh, after Jerry died, he really did loot the trusts. Lifted over a million and disappeared. That’s why I say that the people who were in the Lamplighter that night recalled the names. It was a big scandal, especially when it came out that Currie knew about the trust irregularities and did nothing as part of the deal with Fein. Bernie put that in a postcard he wrote from Papua or some South Pacific place—wrote it right to Garrahy. You know what Garrahy was like, what he’d do if he found out one of his people was blackmailing a lawyer by suppressing evidence of a crime. Fried Currie’s shorts for him and gave him the boot. The man keeled over a couple of years after that. Heart. Bernie disappeared completely, lost in the Pacific.”
“Like Amelia Earhart,” said Marlene.
“Yeah, but believe me, darling, there were more people looking for Bernie.” Abe smiled faintly, leaned back in his chair, and took his glasses off. He looked tired, as if this journey to the past had given him a kind of jet lag.
Marlene leafed through her notes. “What about the secretary, this Shirley Waldorf? I guess she’s gone, too.”
“Oh, no, she’s still around. I see her from time to time on 34th Street. She lives there.”
“Oh, great! You have her address?”
“No, I mean, she lives on the street. She’s a bag lady, Marlene. Completely meshuggeh. Has been for years.”
“She can’t communicate at all?”
“Oh, yeah, she communicates, all right. You want to go through her files, as she calls them, and pretend that she’s still a legal secretary, she’ll talk your ear off. She carries pathetic piles of trash around in a couple of supermarket carts. Her files. Another casualty of what Jerry did.”
“If he did it,” said Marlene.
“Yeah, right, if he did it.”
In a conference room in the organized crime division they showed Karp the tape of Guma talking to Gino Scarpi at Bellevue. The camera had been concealed in the TV set, and the audio treated with sophisticated electronics to remove the sound of the TV programs so that the targets’ voices came through with clarity. After the viewing, after Eitenberg had turned up the lights, Karp asked Norton Peabody, “This is all you have?”
“Isn’t it enough? It looks an awful lot like conspiracy to me. Your boy’s in bed with the wise guys, and apparently has been for years.”
Karp rubbed his eyes. He pointed them at Peabody, charged heavily with contempt. “Peabody, how old are you?”
The man hesitated, and then said, “Thirty-seven. Why?”
“Yeah, same as me. Ray Guma is fifty-eight, which means he was putting killers away before either of us got out of high school. He started with the Kings County D.A. in 1949. That was just after that office took apart Murder Incorporated. You have any idea what organized crime was like in New York in 1949, how powerful?”
Peabody affected a bored look. “Yes, I saw The Godfather, too. Where is this leading, Butch?”
Karp stared at Peabody until the other man dropped his eyes. “That’s a movie, Norton. I’m talking about real life. Ray Guma started work in that environment, and three years later he got an offer from New York County and he went for it. He has over thirty years in the best homicide bureau in the country. He’s probably put more actual Mafia killers in jail than anyone else in the United States. And you have the gall to call him dirty?”
Peabody shrugged. “So they threw him a fish once in a while, just like a trained seal. He still looks like a trained seal to me.”
Karp got up, and reflected yet again how nice it was to be big and tall. Peabody was, by contrast, well named. Karp loomed over the smaller man for a long moment, fists clenched, until Peabody discovered that it was urgent to turn off the VCR and retrieve his tape. He stayed by the machine, a comfortable three yards from Karp, who said, with conviction, “This is going to be an embarrassment for you guys if you try to construe that horseshit as serious evidence. And I know that Mr. Colombo really hates to be embarrassed in public. His long, scaly tail lashes around in fury and does all kinds of damage to the people close to him.” He nodded politely to both men and left.
He trotted across Foley Square to the courthouse, went directly to Guma’s office, knocked.
“I’m on the phone,” said the occupant’s voice. Karp barged in anyway and made urgent circular motions with his index finger.
Guma said into the phone, “Sol, I’ll have to call you back, I got a crisis here.”
He replaced the receiver and looked up at Karp, who said, “I just came from the Southern District. Your subpoena is because they got the prison ward thing on tape. You and Scarpi.”
“Fuck! Ah, shit, I should’ve figured they had the place bugged.”
Karp threw himself into an old-fashioned wooden swivel chair, making it rattle. “Well, according to them, said tape demonstrates that you’re the Mob’s mole in the D.A. They were pretty convincing. Quote, I’m in the famiglia. Quote, you’ll be the first to know. Quote, the fix is in. Unquote. Easy to misconstrue, no?”
“Misconstrue? Shit, Butch, you can misconstrue ‘good morning’ negative if you put your mind to it. What went on between Gino and me was just the usual horseshit I do with those guys. Nobody takes it seriously.”
“Colombo does.”
“Right, and he’s a fuckhead, we know that. Next question.”
Karp took a deep breath. “Okay, you’re right. Jack will go a little ballistic, but who the fuck cares? Right is on our side, and that’s what counts. It looks like shit, but I don’t care about appearances, and you sure as shit don’t either. I mean, Guma, look at you!”
Guma looked down at his chest and then at Karp. Then he laughed. Karp laughed, too, and said, “Meanwhile, I can’t do anything about whatever passed between you and Gino, so you will respond to their fucking subpoena like a good citizen, and answer all questions asked, and explain what a jocular remark is, and fuck them if they can’t take a joke.”
Guma laughed briefly, then sobered. “It’s a damn good thing grand juries are secret.”
“Why?” asked Karp, and then it hit him. “Oh, you mean the boys might think you . . .”
“Guaranteed. This gets out, nobody in town with a vowel on the end of his name’s gonna want to talk to me, and I’ll be wearing Kevlar underwear for the rest of my life.”