Robert Tanenbaum - Act of Revenge

“No, my guy talked in English. To a Captain Chui.”

Wu was grinning now. “Then you got bullshit. We hardly even bother talking to Hong Kong anymore. They’re so infiltrated with the triads it’s not even worth it. It’s bad enough if you’re speaking Cantonese, but in English, forget it. They’re shining you on, boss.”

“Uh-huh. Well, thanks for that information, Detective Wu. I appreciate your help. Sorry again about that little misunderstanding.”

Wu said, “Oh, no problem,” and he got up and they all shook hands again. Wu said, “Take care, Vasquez, and I’m going to keep you more in the loop on this, whatever turns up, okay?”

When he was gone, Karp said, “So? What was your take on that?”

“Nice guy, not that sharp. He’s gotten lazy because the tong guys hand things to him in return for not getting hassled. He was pretty open about it.”

“Yeah. Nice guy, but I don’t much like getting bullshitted by cops. What’s the lesson here, Vasquez?”

“Be more suspicious? Isn’t that always the lesson?” She did not look happy about it.

He smiled. “You got it, Vasquez. Meanwhile, until Leung turns up or we grab the Vo gang, we’re more or less back to square one.”

“Square two,” said Vasquez. “Square one was before you squeezed the shit out of Phil Wu, like I should’ve done already.”

After she left, Karp called Ray Guma to see if he had anything yet on Gino Scarpi, and learned from the bureau secretary that he was still out at Bellevue Hospital. Karp hung up the phone, swiveled around in his chair, gazed out the window, sucked softly on the eraser end of a new pencil, and tried to think whether he had left anything undone. He tapped out the rhythm of the Radetski March on his molars; nothing important came to mind. Guma dispatched to the Mob, V.T. mobilized and looking for the stain of dirty cash, Wu braced and put on notice, Marlene questioned and released. (She might even be home by now. He thought of calling but did not.) Lucy reasonably safe if their theories were correct. Okay, but what was nagging him? Oh, right, Willie Lie. Or Mr. Nia, as he might be. He stared at the phone, willing it to ring and convey to him some new piece of information about the Chinese. But it was silent. Karp slammed down the pencil, got up, and stalked out of the office and down to a courtroom, looking to make someone else’s life hell.

Ray Guma, like most people, did not like hospitals, but he had necessarily spent a good deal of time in this one, Bellevue Hospital, where Manhattan keeps its morgue and its medical examiner and its prison ward, and he knew his way around.

He found Gino Scarpi lying in a small, locked, windowless room with three other damaged felons, looking drawn and pale. A good deal of the tough had been blown out of Gino, which is what three 9mm hollow-points will often do, even if they do not hit a vital organ. Both of his arms were in casts, and he had his bed cranked up the better to watch Jeopardy! on the TV when Guma walked in holding a small white cardboard box.

Scarpi looked up with an expectant expression, which faded somewhat when he saw who it was. “Ray Guma,” he said. “Well, what do you know!”

“I brought you some cannoli, Scooter.”

Scarpi moved one of his arms. “How the fuck am I gonna eat cannoli, Ray, what that fucking cunt did to me?” He was a square-faced man of twenty-six, with a thick head of curls that took up most of a low forehead. He had a lot of teeth also, and the beginnings of a respectable set of jowls, which he had set off nicely with a dense mat of black chest hair. The half dozen golden neck chains he usually wore were absent.

Guma placed the package on the side table and sat down in a straight chair by the bed. He said, “When your girlfriend gets here, she can slide it in your mouth and you can suck the filling out, kind of turnabout is fair play. She might get a kick out of it.”

Scarpi started to glower in case he was being made fun of and then saw the humor in it and the sexual possibilities and decided to laugh instead. “Fuckin’ Guma! So, what’re you here about? I ain’t supposed to say shit without fuckin’ Kronsky holding my hand.”

“Kronsky must be a busy man these days, what with Joey P. in the federal slams,” said Guma. Marvin P. Kronsky was the Bollanos’ chief lawyer.

“I ain’t saying anything about that either.”

“No problem. Tell you the honest truth, Scooter, I figured you could use some cheering up, and I also thought I could do you some good.”

“The only thing’s gonna do me any good, Guma, I swear to God, is getting my arms back and shoving that bitch’s gun up her cunt and squeezing off ten rounds.”

“That’s not the way to be thinking, man. What you should be thinking is how do I get to spend my recuperation at home and not in a cell. What I hear is you’re looking at about a third of the New York penal code: attempted murder, attempted kidnap. . ”

Suspicion lit in Scarpi’s small, dark eyes. “Ray, I told you already, you want to deal, go see Kronsky. That’s all I got to say to you.”

“Hey, what’re you talking deal? They don’t send me out to deal,” said Guma in an aggrieved tone. “This is Raymond here, Scoot. I knew your parents, God rest them, I know your brothers, I knew you from when you couldn’t wipe your ass. This is not about a deal. We don’t need fucking lawyers. You know me, I’m in the famiglia , for chrissake. This is completely off the record here. I mean, when I heard what went down over by that fucking shelter, and I heard it was you, I couldn’t believe it. You were always a sensible kid, you know? Not a crazy-ass guinea. So I figured, out of the goodness of my heart, I’d come down here, talk to the kid, find out the real story, and, you know how it is, if I could put some words in people’s ears, off the record, you could maybe catch a break.”

Scarpi was nodding. This was how it worked. He said, carefully, “Off the record?”

“Yeah. Just between us. What I want to know is something’s got nothing to do with you, legally.”

“Take off your coat and empty your pockets.”

“Scooter! What the fuck, man! You think I would wear a wire?”

“Hey, it’s my ass, man. And they don’t call me Scooter for years. It’s Gino. Okay, I’m waiting, Ray.”

Guma took off his suit jacket and shook it upside down, grumbling, and emptied his pockets on the bed. He pirouetted slowly and pulled his shirt tight against his body so that Scarpi could see that no little Nagra recorder nestled in his armpit or the small of his back.

“Satisfied? Because if you want to look up my asshole, it’s no deal.”

“Sit down, Ray. What do you want to talk about?”

Guma sat. “The wife, Vivian. What’s the story there? Why she all of a sudden broke out.”

Scarpi’s thick eyebrows came together. “What the fuck you want to know for?”

“Hey, I told you. It’s something else. Got nothing to do with you.”

“Okay, you want to know about Vivian?” Scarpi leaned back on his pillows, considering. “What can I say. A cunt is a cunt, and as far as that goes, Jews are for lawyers, for accountants, not for in the rack. A piece of ass maybe, a change of pace, but for marrying, you should stick to your own, you know what I mean? But Little Sally, he’s got to have this Jew bitch. This was all before my time, you understand, I’m just saying what I heard. I hear that they fight, he raps her around, she fights more. The way I figure, that’s part of the deal-she likes getting hit, he likes to dish it out.”

“Okay, but this is going on years, why does she split just then?”

“This I don’t know. I’m not hiding under the fucking marital bed, am I? Maybe she found another guy. Sally sure as shit had other women.”