Robert Tanenbaum - Act of Revenge

“I haven’t had so much fun since the pigs ate grandma,” said Keegan without preamble.

“I’m glad you liked it,” said Karp.

“Like is not the word. You added ten years to my life, boyo, and you set public relations back twenty-five. McHenry’s been bending my ear for the last ten minutes. He’s going to require sedation. He reminds me, and I now remind you, that the press never forgets. You made one of them look like a jackass, boyo. I hope you’re prepared to live a life of absolute perfection from now on. You’re a marked man.”

Karp thought briefly not of himself but of Marlene and the extraordinary vulnerability and imperfection of her life and of what a couple of skilled investigative reporters could do to her with it, and then suppressed that unhappy line of thought. “Perfection? No problem,” he replied lightly, and asked, “How are your peers responding?”

“Mixed. I like to imagine all the honest ones are on our side. The guys I watched the show with were cheering, at any rate. How’s Ray holding up?”

“I sent him home with one of the guys from the squad for company.”

“You don’t think he’s in any serious danger?”

“I got the word out he didn’t know about the bug, but whether that will satisfy Scarpi and his brothers is another question. But fuck them, they’re the bad guys. I’m more worried about the good guys.”

“Meaning?”

“Well, Jack, not to put too fine a point on it, Ray Guma, in addition to being, as I said to millions, a helluva crime fighter, is also, as you well know, excessively fond of dipping his wick, and he has dipped it on occasion in places where maybe he shouldn’t have, being an officer of the court. Lovely witnesses, for example. Lovely former defendants, for example. High-class ladies of the evening with strong ties to some prominent Italian-American gentlemen, for example. Colombo puts the full-court press on this, he’s going to come up with a lot of dirt, and the media will eat it up. D.A.’s man in Mafia sex ring. Keegan’s Italian stallion in bed with Mob. .”

Keegan cursed briefly, and then there was an ominous silence on the line, leaving Karp to imagine that Keegan was thinking nasty thoughts about how to cut Guma loose, and about what he, the district attorney, could plausibly have known and when about the fellow’s deplorable lusts. Karp decided to save Keegan embarrassment by changing tack.

“Which means we have only a limited time to derail this entire operation and make Tommy look like a horse’s ass not only on the Guma thing but on the Catalano thing as well, so much so that the jackals will forget Ray. So I need some scope, and I need some cover.”

“What do you have in mind?” growled the D.A.

“Not a goddamn thing right now,” said Karp. “But I’ll think of something.”

Tran came to convey Lucy to the cops for her lineup, and Marlene and Posie, the kids and the mastiff, piled into the Volvo. All but Marlene exited at Central Park South for a healthy romp, and Marlene headed north and east. James Nobile was in the phone book, which meant that Marlene needed no detection skill greater than the ability to find a large tan apartment building at 70th and Third.

There was no doorman, and Marlene entered with the standard ruse: being well dressed, with nice legs, and fumbling with keys while a legit male tenant was entering.

As usual, Sym had called to determine if the man was home, and he opened the door at Marlene’s ring. She looked down, trying to hide her surprise. Abe had not mentioned anything about Nobile’s physical appearance, so she was unprepared for a man less than five feet high. Paint him red and screw a big hex nut into his skull, and he would have passed for a fire hydrant on a dim night. He must have been near seventy, and he had retained, or returned to, the face of an irascible infant.

“Yeah?” he snapped. “What is it now? And how did you get into the building? If this is another goddamn charity collection, you can forget it.”

“Mr. James Nobile?” Marlene inquired.

“Yeah?”

“Did you work at the law firm of Fein, Kusher and Panofsky in the fifties and sixties?”

“What if I did? Who are you, lady?”

Straight is not going to work with this guy, Marlene thought. Doherty might have been a bent cop, but as a human being he was relatively decent; this little fellow was warped to the core. She smiled and said, “My name is Ariadne Stupenagel, I’m a freelance writer, and I’m doing a story on famous suicides in the New York area. Can I come in?” So saying, she used her hip and entered the apartment, closing the door behind her.

“Hey,” said Nobile, “I didn’t say you could come in here.”

“I won’t take up much of your time, Mr. Nobile,” said Marlene, looking around. Musty, the smell of whiskey in the close air. Expensive, flashy furniture from twenty-five years ago, the low point in American design, crowded the living room, lots of crushed velvet, a Barcalounger, a twenty-one-inch television in an immense mahogany console, a nude on velvet on the wall; no sad clowns, but he might have saved that for the bedroom.

She chivvied him into letting her sit on his sofa; he sat in a fading brocade armchair facing her from halfway across the room, as if she were carrying a communicable disease.

“Now, what I wanted to ask you about was the suicide of Gerald Fein, one of the partners in the law firm you worked at. Do you recall that tragedy, Mr. Nobile?”

“Sure, yeah, but I don’t know anything about it. I mean, all I know is from the papers and whatnot.”

A lie, thought Marlene. A whopper. She was always surprised at how badly ordinary people lied. Being careful to stare into the interrogator’s eye more than was common, that was one sign. Nobile’s eyes were like some curdled dessert, a dab of grainy chocolate in stale, yellowing creme.

“But you worked for the firm at the time. You must have seen Mr. Fein every day, just about. Did you get the impression that he was troubled?”

“Hey, I just did my job. I didn’t poke into anybody’s business.”

“Mr. Panofsky thought that Fein was troubled, though, didn’t he?” Shrug.

“Did he ever mention it to you?”

“Hell, lady, it was twenty-five years ago,” Nobile said irritably. “You think I keep crap like that in my head? He must’ve been crazy or he wouldn’t have jumped off of the Empire State.”

“Uh-huh. Well, you’re right, it was a long time ago. I guess you’re retired now yourself.” She looked around admiringly. “You must have a nice pension to afford this place. Upper East Side, wow! I’m jealous.”

“Not a pension. Those days only the big guys gave pensions. Nah, I got Social Security and I got investments.”

“Lucky you! So, tell me, how did you come to work for Fein’s law firm?”

“I answered an ad in the Journal-American . I was with them seventeen years.”

“Uh-huh. And before that?”

“I was in building management.” His look grew narrower. “What do you want to know this stuff for?”

“Just background, Mr. Nobile. So, was carrying important packages part of your work? Confidential information and so on?”

“Yeah, I did that, I did a little of everything. What does that have to do with the suicide?”

“I’m getting to that. The packages were mostly from Mr. Panofsky, weren’t they? Thick envelopes. You took them to politicians all over town, didn’t you?”

“You’re not a reporter,” said Nobile, and shot to his feet.

“But you took them from Panofsky, not Fein, didn’t you? Fein wasn’t in the thick-envelope business. Except once.”

“Get out of here!” Nobile’s clay-colored face was going red around the edges.