Robert Tanenbaum: Justice Denied

Afat man with a jaunty air and five minutes left to live walked out of the Izmir Restaurant on Third Avenue and 46th Street on the island of Manhattan and turned east. He moved with the twinkle-footed gait adopted by many of the stout, but his progress would have been faster had he not, at nearly every convenient window, slowed to check his image in the reflecting glass. He saw a bland moonlike face, neatly mustached in the manner of the late King Farouk, a face that demanded topping with a fez but which at the moment supported a smoke-colored homburg. Below the man’s several chins there lay a heavy silk rolled collar, a large-knotted Sulka tie in burgundy, and a dark double-breasted pinstripe suit of a beautiful, if antique, cut. Small oxblood cordovan shoes were on his feet, kid gloves were on his hands, and he had a fawn cashmere topcoat resting on his shoulders, in the manner of Italian filmmakers of the fifties.

It was a Sunday morning, and though few of the other strollers were as formally dressed as the fat man, he did not draw unusual attention, not in that neighborhood. The United Nations, whose headquarters stands on First Avenue between 48th and 42nd streets, employs thousands of diplomats, most of whom live in the immediate area, and many of whom are peculiar in their dress. The fat man was, in fact, a diplomat, but his mission this morning, as every Sunday morning, was personal.

He was a man of fixed habits. Each morning save for the holy day of Friday, he arrived at the Izmir at eight and ate Turkish pastries and drank thick, sweet coffee, while he perused the New York Times and Washington Post, together with the previous day’s editions of an Istanbul and an Ankara newspaper that had come by air. This occupied no more than ninety minutes.

Then, on the four weekdays and Saturday, he would walk down 46th Street to the tall slab of One U.N. Plaza, where he had his office. On Sunday, he would instead turn south on First to the Tudor City apartment block, where he had his mistress.

He had reached the intersection of Second and 46th. Traffic was light, but there were a number of pedestrians about, enjoying the late winter sunshine. A young woman in a stocking cap walked a blond afghan hound. A couple in Norwegian sweaters pushed a stroller containing a well-bundled toddler. A blue-black man in a Burberry loden coat and an African cap spoke in French to a like-colored woman wearing a turban. Across the street, the proprietor of a northern Italian restaurant unrolled his awning. It was a peaceful Sunday in one of the more peaceful and pleasant New York neighborhoods, a district that was exotic without being dangerous and policed like the Kremlin because of all the diplomats.

The light changed, and the fat man twinkled across the broad avenue, casting an interested glance at the girl with the afghan. As he mounted the curb, he heard a car door open, and a figure moved into his path. The morning sun pouring westward formed a corona around the shape of a man. The fat man smiled and politely moved to his right, but the shape moved to block his way. The fat man looked more closely at the person before him, squinting hard against the light. There was something wrong about the man’s head: it was bright blue, he was wearing a ski mask.

The fat man turned sharply, alarm flooding his body, and saw that there was another man blocking his path to the west. He had no difficulty seeing that this man wore a ski mask and a blue parka, and that there was an automatic pistol in his hand.

The fat man was frightened, but he was not a coward. He was a Turk, and Turks are tenacious in defense. He grabbed the lapel of his slung topcoat, whipped it out at the face of the man in front of him, and took three rapid steps toward Second Avenue. He heard a woman scream, and shots, many shots, and felt them strike his body, and saw the white, distorted face of the girl with the afghan whirling across the sky as he fell.

The police were there in four minutes, a sergeant and a patrolman from the permanent mobile post set up at the U.N. to control the almost perpetual political demonstrations. They secured the crime scene, rounded up a group of stunned witnesses, and made the necessary calls. They prevailed on the proprietor of the Villa d’Este Restaurant to make a room available for processing these.

Shortly thereafter came the meat wagon from the medical examiner and the car from the crime-scene unit and an unmarked Plymouth Fury containing two homicide detectives out of Midtown South. The two detectives were a Mutt and Jeff act: one tall, angular, watery-eyed, with a lugubrious tan fringe hanging below his bony nose-Barney Wayne; the other shorter, younger by a dozen years, stockier, darker, a feisty man and a cigar chomper-Joe Frangi.

Both of them bore the rank of detective second grade. Wayne thought that being a detective second grade was pretty good going. He was not the sort of Wayne who gets called “Duke” in the NYPD. Frangi thought the same but also thought that he himself was good enough for a gold hat and meant to get one. Frangi thought Wayne was a good guy but a little too cautious. Wayne thought Frangi was a good guy but a little too reckless. They were a reasonably good team: neither the flawless heroes of the TV shows nor the corrupt villains of the hard-hitting investigative reports. Like most NYPD detectives, they were somewhat heroic and somewhat corrupt.

Wayne and Frangi introduced themselves to the sergeant. The sergeant was glad to see them, and to turn over possession of the crime scene. The sergeant was a detective from Brooklyn who had been placed back in uniform on a series of crummy details, of which this U.N. thing was one. Placing detectives “back in the bag,” as the saying went, usually for crowd control duties, is a means of petty discipline or harassment in the NYPD, and is one reason why crowd control in the City is often unpleasant for the crowd.

“What do we got, Sarge?” asked Frangi.

The sergeant gestured at the prostrate corpse. “They hit him at ten past eleven. It’s a fresh one. The owner of that Italian restaurant called it in.”

Frangi said, “‘They’? We have witnesses?”

The sergeant nodded. “Yeah, at least half a dozen. I put them over in the restaurant. Two guys in ski masks did it and got out in a blue car.” He pointed at crime-scene technicians photographing the tire marks left by the putative blue car.

“They hauled ass down Forty-sixth. They must have come right by me.”

“You didn’t spot the car?”

The sergeant shrugged, then laughed. “Hey, I got my hands full with the fuckin’ Palestinians or Pakistanis or whatever the fuck they are.”

The sergeant was about to get himself in trouble trying to think of a way to explain how a blue car with two assassins in it driving like a bat out of hell away from a place where moments before at least ten shots had been fired, that place being not a hundred yards from the sergeant’s own command post, had escaped all notice. Embarrassed for the man, Frangi forestalled any further lies by asking the sergeant to show him the witnesses. They walked off toward the restaurant.

Wayne approached the corpse. As usual at such moments, he let his mind go blank, to convert it into a receptive sponge for any clues that might be invisible to the willing intellect. As usual, his mind remained blank, except for a vague sadness about the finality of death. The murdered man was not wearing two different shoes or unmatched socks. He did not have in his mouth, which was open and full of congealing blood, a mysterious signet ring, and Wayne, sighing, did not believe that he would find in the man’s pocket a torn matchbook with the killer’s name written on it.