Robert Tanenbaum - Act of Revenge

Marlene got up and stalked slowly toward him. “Except once, and that envelope was the one that got him disbarred. I bet you could tell me a lot about that deal, couldn’t you? Is that how you got your investments ?”

Sometimes they talked when they were scared, and sometimes they fought, and if they were decent folks, they called the police. Nobile was terrified, she could see that, but not necessarily of her. He turned and ran into the kitchen. Marlene heard a drawer violently open and metallic rummaging sounds. Gun, or knife, or hammer? She recalled that she was unarmed and dogless, and beat a retreat.

Tran and Lucy were about to leave the loft when the phone rang. Lucy picked it up. “Lucy Karp, please,” said an unfamiliar voice.

“Speaking.”

“Good. Listen, this is Detective Wu from the Fifth Precinct. You’re supposed to come down here and look at a lineup.”

“We were just leaving,” she said.

“Your mom’s there?”

“No, I’m coming with a friend.”

“Well, your dad said I was to go pick you up. I’ll be by in ten minutes. Why don’t you be outside your building, okay?”

“Wait a second, how come I can’t-”

“Just be outside, okay?” He hung up.

When she told Tran about the change in plans, he frowned. Tran did not like changes in plans at the last minute.

He said, in French, their best mutual language, “Let us go look at this policeman before he drives away with you. Anyone can say he is of the police.”

They went down in the elevator, and Tran led her a few buildings away and across Crosby Street, where they waited in a deeply shadowed doorway. A brown sedan approached from Howard and stopped in front of the Karps’ building. After a few minutes, a neatly dressed Asian man emerged and pressed the Karps’ buzzer.

“That must be him,” said Lucy. “The detective.” She began to wave and walk forward, but Tran swept her up, pulled her deeper into the doorway, and clapped a hand over her mouth.

“Be still,” he whispered. She could feel the warmth of his breath and smell his scent: nuoc mam and lilacs. “I have seen that man before, accepting something from our Mr. Leung. You mustn’t go with him.” He took his hand away from her mouth.

She stared at the man, who was now gazing up at the windows of the family loft.

“Are you sure? I thought he was a cop.”

“Whether he is or not, which I will determine later, I do not care to have you go off alone with anyone who takes thick envelopes from a triad agent. Ah, good! He is going into your building. Now we will make our getaway .”

“Where will we go?” asked Lucy, trotting along beside him.

“Well, as to that, here is the problem. We believe Leung has corrupted one policeman, but perhaps there are others who are on the take . A policeman comes up to you on the street, shows his badge, orders you into his car, and you go, and poof! No more Lucy. He takes you for a ride , yes? So properly, we should blow town .”

They reached the alley where Tran kept his elderly Jawa. Lucy said, “Uncle Tran, I don’t think people say blow town anymore.”

“Do they not? You astound me. In any case, I believe we will not do that thing at all, but instead travel to the Queens, where we will be quite safe. Climb on! I want you out of sight before he realizes you are not going to place yourself in his hands.”

If it was a tail, Marlene thought, it was a stupid one, or maybe they figured she would think that. Nobody sane would use a dirty red Dodge pickup with a pale green front fender to tail a car in the city. The vehicle had impinged mildly on her consciousness when parking near Nobile’s apartment building, and then moved up on the awareness scale when it appeared in her side mirror as she drove south on Second Avenue. She cocked her head to center the rearview in her good eye. There it was, two cars back. A man driving, wearing sunglasses and a dark ball cap-could be anyone. When paranoia strikes, Marlene believed, respond as if the danger were real, because all in all a little social embarrassment, even including a brief stay in a nice clinic enriched with soothing medication, is better than being dead. Consequently she signaled, hung a right at 54th Street, and was not really that surprised to see the Dodge make the same turn, nor to see it again after her left onto Third. Marlene now demonstrated why you need at least three cars in radio communication to set and keep a proper tail in a city. By 48th Street she had maneuvered herself so that when the light at that corner turned red, she was right at the crosswalk, and then, just before the cross-street traffic entered the intersection, she leaned on her horn and shot through, scattering pedestrians and summoning forth the usual cacophony of honking horns and screamed curses in several languages. The tail was pinned, and Marlene cut west at 45th, parked in a loading zone for fifteen minutes, and then continued south.

She left the car in a garage of a hotel on Madison off 34th and set out on foot. At a bank she changed a hundred dollars into a stack of crisp ones and fives and went looking for the homeless. After a couple of hours she was thirty-five dollars lighter and not much wiser. The homeless are not your best informants, especially when trying to locate one of their number, most especially when you don’t have a good recent description of your quarry. Shirley Waldorf could have been the Tinfoil Lady, or the Dog Lady, or the Leopardskin Lady, or Crazy Annie. She could have been the Demon Queen that haunted one particular person who, dressed in a toga and a paper hat bearing mystic signs designed to fend off just such evils, assured Marlene that the woman she sought was just across the street, but currently invisible.

“I know who you mean,” said a voice behind her.

A Latino man in kitchen whites was puffing on a cigarette under a ventilator blowing grease and coffee smells out onto 33rd Street. Marlene slapped a buck into the filthy palm of Toga Man and turned to her new informant, who had clearly overheard her recent conversation with the nut.

“You know Shirley Waldorf?”

“Oh, yeah, I know Shirley. She come by in the mornings, and I give her a cup of coffee and a bagel. A old bagel, you know? She give me fifteen cents.” He laughed. “Old lady think a cup of coffee and a bagel still cost fifteen cents. Crazy but never give me no trouble. But I ain’t seen her, three, four days now.” He raised his eyes to the vast gray cliff of the building across the street. “She was always going on about that Empire State. She used to work there or something, I don’t know. Anyway, maybe something happen to her. You check with the cops or the hospitals, I think that would be the thing to do.”

Marlene asked a few questions, but the man knew little more than he had already offered. He accepted a five-dollar bill and a card with her number on it, and promised to call if Shirley Waldorf ever came by again for a bagel and coffee.

Back in the Volvo, Marlene drove downtown to her appointment at the courthouse. The red pickup did not show, which meant little. There could be other cars. How about that tan Mercury with the two guys in the front? Control the paranoia, Marlene. Of course, she did have more than the usual number of enemies; still she was having trouble assuring herself that she was operating at her best. It seemed to take more effort just to keep focused, and she wondered about neuron loss.

She was an hour early, on purpose. She wanted to see Judge Paine in action, and so she slipped into Part 52, where the current show was People v . Macaluso . Jilly Macaluso ran a crew for Salvatore Bollano, and his prosecution for extortion and other felonies was a part of Frank Anselmo’s crusade against that crime family. Jilly had been nailed in the hope that he would turn and implicate higher-ups, but Jilly was a stand-up guy and here they all were.