Robert Tanenbaum - Justice Denied

“We should,” he said. “But first, how about slipping into the bushes and fooling around?”

“Get married, Raney,” she said, laughing.

“I’m waiting for you, babes,” he said. “You really want to go? They’re gonna let off fireworks later.”

“Next year,” she said. “No, really. There’s no food in the house, and my husband’s hopping around there on one leg. I could grab a cab if you really want to stay….

Raney drove her home, carefully. He was fairly loaded too. The Chopin tape he always had going on the car stereo played the Polonaise in A-flat major, and Marlene nearly drifted off.

In front of the loft, she kissed him solidly on the mouth, thanked him for a terrific day, and ran upstairs. Harry Bello’s car sneaked around the corner two minutes later, cruised by the front door of the loft, and parked across the street.

Karp was on the floor with the baby when Marlene came in, the baby banging a spoon on a pot and on Karp-an appealing domestic scene. She joined them, hugged the child, kissed Karp.

“Whew!” he said, fanning the air in front of his face. “A few beers, dear?”

“A few, if you must know. How have you two been amusing yourselves? Did I miss anything exciting?”

“Yeah, actually you did. Watch this! C’mere, Lucy.”

Karp rose on his good knee, reached for the baby, and stood her on her feet. “Go ahead, walk to Mommy.”

To Marlene’s incredulous delight, Lucy took three tottering steps and fell giggling into her mother’s arms.

“I’m squirming with guilt now. I missed her first steps.”

“Unnatural mother!” said Karp. “But that’s nothing. Okay, Lucy, let’s show Mommy.” He picked up a pink sponge ball and handed it to the baby. Then he made his arms into a wide horizontal loop. “Okay, there she goes. She’s driving down court, she’s in the lane, she fakes, she fakes again, there’s the shot … shoot it, Lucy!”

Almost on cue, with a convulsive heave Lucy shot the ball straight up into the air so that Karp, by contorting his body and shuffling on one knee, was able to arrange for the ball to fall through his arms. “Two points, and the crowd goes wild!”

Much was made of this, and there ensued a period of the sort of wordless familial being that stands at the root of any human capacity for happiness.

After this, time to eat. Marlene decided to take the baby with her to the store so that Karp could relax, deep ethnic and gender conditioning causing her grossly to underestimate the amount of time a man can be alone with an infant without murdering it, abandoning it, or suing for divorce.

Passing 23rd Street, making for the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, Jim Raney was suddenly aware of an emptiness in a characteristic place below the base of his spine. He cursed. Marlene still had his wallet. He couldn’t face the weekend without cash or plastic. He whipped his car into an illegal U-turn and headed south again.

Marlene changed the baby, filled its bottle, and carried the child downstairs. At the ground-floor landing she paused to unchain the stroller from its pipe. She put Lucy in the stroller, rolled it down the shallow steps to the sidewalk, and set its brake. It was quiet on Crosby Street this late on Saturday. No more deliveries and almost no through traffic. Crosby Street, narrow, cobbled and inconvenient, is only six blocks long and goes nowhere in particular. This is one of its virtues as a place to live.

Harry Bello saw Marlene emerge from her building with Lucy. He briefly considered getting out and saying hello to them, but thought that Marlene might be pissed at him for hanging around. Instead he drifted back to his consideration of the case of Mehmet Ersoy. He already knew who had done the killing. That was the easy part. The hard part was why, and if he didn’t know that, it would be almost impossible to assemble a compelling case. There was a treasure, with a willing buyer, and then it hadn’t been sold to the buyer at all but stolen from the seller, and it was now about to be sold to the mob for what must be a lower price. It didn’t make sense. Harry cogitated, staring blankly at Marlene, Lucy, and the empty street.

Vinnie Boguluso came swiftly out of the alley where he had been hiding and ran across the street, barely twenty feet in front of Harry’s windshield. Marlene had her back to him. She was double-locking the big front door of the loft.

Harry Bello, heart in mouth, flung open the car door and pulled his.38 in almost the same motion. “Vinnie! Freeze!” he shouted.

Marlene spun around and saw Vinnie coming toward her, toward the baby. Vinnie checked in surprise when he saw the cop with the gun, but then continued toward Marlene.

Harry’s gun was pointing at Vinnie, but there was no way he was going to fire a pistol with Lucy anywhere near the line of fire.

Vinnie reached the stroller. He yanked the baby out by her arm and clutched her roughly to his chest. He had his switchblade knife out. He pressed its blade into the tender flesh of the baby’s neck.

“Drop the gun!” he shouted.

Harry didn’t move. Marlene stood frozen against the door. She couldn’t breathe.

“Drop it! I’ll cut its fuckin’ head off!” screamed Vinnie.

The baby became frightened. Her face grew red and crinkled up, and she began to wail. Tears sprang from her eyes, and then from Marlene’s eyes.

Slowly, carefully, Harry Bello bent his knees and placed the pistol on the cobblestones.

“Back away from it!” shouted Vinnie. Slowly Harry did so, never taking his eyes off Vinnie, part of his mind cool under the terror, considering options, looking for an opening. Vinnie would have to put the baby down or take the knife away from her in order to pick up the gun. That’s when he’d make his move.

Harry was a lot faster than he looked. He figured he’d have to take at the most two bullets before he got to the guy.

Vinnie shuffled forward into the street, toward the pistol. Marlene followed behind him.

Then the roar of an engine gearing down filled the canyon of Crosby Street, and a green Karmann-Ghia whipped around the Howard Street corner and screeched to a halt twenty feet from where Vinnie stood. Jim Raney stared at the scene through his windshield. It was not hard to figure out what was going on.

Raney got out of his car and walked a few steps toward Vinnie. He took his Browning Hi-Power out of its holster, jacked a round into its chamber, and took up his stance, pointing the weapon at Vinnie’s head. “It’s over, Vinnie,” he said. “Put the kid down.”

Vinnie had no intention of putting the kid down, not until he had a gun. With the baby under his knife, he was in control of the situation. He had seen all the movies. The cops always dropped their guns when you had the kid. He shouted, “Fuck you, cocksucker! You drop it! I’ll rip its throat out, I swear …!”

Raney looked at Marlene. She stood white-faced behind and to Vinnie’s right. Their eyes met. In a conversational voice he said, “Marlene. Red dog. On three.”

Vinnie heard this. He didn’t understand it, but he didn’t have to. He was in control. Again he shouted.

“Drop the fuckin’ gun!”

Raney took two deep breaths and let the second one out very slowly. Holding the pistol in both hands, he brought the little Day-Glo dot on the front sight in line with Vinnie’s sloping forehead. He said, “Hut, hut, hut.”

On the third “hut” he pulled the trigger.

On the third “hut” Marlene started to move.

Vinnie saw the flash of the gun. He formulated a thought: he would stab the baby and grab the woman.

This thought was still turning itself into neural impulses when Raney’s 115-grain 9mm parabellum silver-tip hollow-point punched through the bone of Vinnie’s forehead as if it were wet cardboard, expanding to the diameter of a champagne cork as it did so. The resulting shock set up a cone of destruction in Vinnie’s brain tissue, turning that thought and all the other thoughts he had ever had, and all his memories, and his unpleasant personality, into a reddish slurry that was, within the next hundredth of a second, ejected out the back of his skull in a graceful arc.