Robert Tanenbaum - Enemy within

"Yeah, well, I'd love to stay and chat, Shelly, but I have an appointment. A former pal of yours in the DA. You remember Ray Guma, don't you?"

"Oh, yeah. Good old Ray. Send my regards," Solotoff said, still smiling, but with a fading voice. Karp shook his hand and strode off. If Solotoff had hold of his client's pistol, he would have shot Karp right there in the courthouse hallway.

For his part, Karp wasted little time thinking about Solotoff as he took the elevator down to street level. The weather had changed within the last few days, and it was warm enough now to venture out without a coat. A presage of spring, and Karp took it as a sign. Maybe the ice would break up now, maybe Guma had something to go with. He walked up Baxter to the China Palace, as unimperial a place as could be imagined despite its name, a red-daubed, dark, and dingy joint smelling of oriental greases, with a dying snake plant in the front window. It was favored by bail bondsmen and an older generation of courthouse workers for its dimness, its quiet, and its cheap food; more important, like most Chinese joints over a certain size, it had a full bar.

Guma was sitting in the back at a table he had frequented for over twenty years. He was wearing a powder blue knit shirt and a check jacket, which made him look more like a minor Mob guy than he usually did. He had a Scotch started, and Karp ordered an iced tea to keep him company.

"You know," Guma said, "I'm gonna do this, I should get a PI ticket. Then I could charge expenses. I must've blown a hundred bucks on cabs alone. Not to mention the drinks I had to buy."

"I'll take care of it. You find out anything?"

"A little. I'll give you the bad news first. You ever know Bud Cropsey?"

"Rings a bell. He was a snake, wasn't he? One of the guys Mollen used."

"You got it. Bud started out as a field associate, then he got blown on that case up in the Two-six where the cops were running a bunch of whores, '89 or so, and then he went inside and went right up the line, retired captain, head of Confidential Investigation Unit One. His specialty was OC connections to the cops, so I saw a lot of him. Anyway, like I say, he's retired now, got a place out in Great Neck. I got him to make some calls for me. Not a whisper. Zilch."

"Cooley's clean? He can't be!" said Karp with a sinking feeling.

"What can I say? That's what the man told me. And he's got no reason to lie. The man's a snake for thirty years, he's got no friends in the department. I tried to tell you that before. The Cooleys are their own breed-they don't take shit and they don't take money."

"Okay, okay, I believe you provisionally. Crap! Was there any good news?"

"Yeah, that shooting, Lomax. There was a smell on that, and it got up pretty high in the department. One PP got involved. Chief Battle, our old pal, handled it personally."

"He got to Catafalco."

"Yeah. The funny thing is, it was a straight-up report. Steve Amalfi did the homicide. He noted the funny stuff. The skid marks and the traces on the guard rails were wrong for the story Cooley was telling, and so were the bullet wounds, which you picked up when you read the abridged report."

"Abridged?"

"Must've been, unless you left something out when you told me about it. I went to see Amalfi, too. He wouldn't talk to me, but he said the report speaks for itself, and it does, if you get the whole thing. It's adding up the little bits that knocks Cooley's story all to shit. On the surface it's just barely plausible. A DA who wanted to find something would've said, whoa! Hell, a DA who was above room temperature would've seen it."

Karp was not really interested in why Catafalco had not seen it, more likely, seen it very well but had declined to act. Karp understood that part of it perfectly. What he still did not understand was Cooley. He asked, "Why did he do it then? Amalfi have any ideas? Or Cropsey?"

Guma shook his head and drained his Scotch. "Not a clue. Cropsey thought it might be something personal. The Cooleys got hot tempers, and they hold grudges. Speaking of which"-here Guma checked his watch-"we should get going if we want to beat the rush to Jersey."

"We're going to Jersey?"

"Yeah. Oh, right, I didn't tell you. Connie Cooley said she'd meet with us. She's over in Harrington, her house. It's forty-five minutes if we miss the traffic."

"Guma, how're we supposed to get to Jersey? The bus?"

"What, they don't give you a driver anymore?"

"Yeah, I have a driver, but this whole thing is off the books. And the driver is a DA squad cop, and the DA squad works for Norton Fuller."

Guma shrugged. "We could rent a car."

"We could, but… wait here a minute."

Karp got up and found a pay phone in the hallway near the men's room. A crazy notion, but something about it seemed right, a way to break some of the Lilliputian threads that were tying his life to the ground. He called her private number and after some preliminary chat, he blurted out, "Marlene, I need to borrow your limo. Me and Guma have to go to Jersey."

"Uh-huh. What's wrong with your driver?"

"We're visiting a brothel, Marlene. Look, I'll explain later. Just make the call, okay? And, Marlene? Order something kind of discreet."

The limo, when it pulled up in front of the restaurant twenty minutes later, was a superstretch Caddie large enough for all the Spice Girls, white with smoked windows.

"I always wanted to ride in one of these," said Guma, sinking back contentedly into the pillowlike upholstery. "I especially like the way little honeys stare in the windows. Look at this trifecta coming up here. You could fit all three of their butts in a grocery bag, like casabas." He grinned horribly, waved. "Yes, girls, it is Brad Pitt, but it's my day off." To Karp he remarked, "We should make quite a splash out in Harrington."

"A lot of cops live in Harrington, I hear."

"Yeah, there's quite a population. Connie hasn't been too happy there since the divorce, but he won't let her sell the house. A funny guy, Brendan."

"How so?"

"He has his little ways, she tells me. But I'll let you hear it from her." Guma leaned forward and switched on the television, flicked through channels, and got the third inning of the Mets game. He poked around in the built-in bar and found that someone had filled the tiny refrigerator with Bud. He cracked one, offered one to Karp, who declined, took a long swallow, and sat back with a gratified sigh. "This is the life. You could get used to this."

"Yeah, you could, but then it wouldn't be the same. It's great because we're not used to it. If we rode around in one of these things every day, it'd get old fast, and then we'd feel like shit in a regular cab, forget about a bus or a subway."

"Yeah, well, you can say that because you're rich. Look at that fucking guy! He should've had that ball. You notice nobody can field nowadays?"

Karp was about to say that he wasn't rich, his wife was rich, and only paper-rich at that, but he let it go and watched the game companionably with Guma as the gorgeous vehicle took them north to the Washington Bridge, over the river, north again on the Palisades Parkway, and then through smaller roads lined with suburban trees coming into leaf, past a school, a shopping center, then through still narrower roads, until they came to the house.

Karp got out and stared at it. It was remarkably like the house he had grown up in, a good-sized split-level, clapboard painted pale cocoa, set on a little hill with a sloping lawn bordered with low shrubs. A blue Voyager sat in the driveway. Above it hung a basketball hoop. Two bikes leaned against the garage door. The woman who answered their ring was petite and dark, with remarkable, large black eyes, and glossy black hair cut in a jaw-length shingle. She looked about thirty, but seemed younger because of her slightness, and at the same time older because of the circles under her eyes and the deep lines under each one, tear trails, Karp thought. The woman was a crier. She looked as if she had recently been crying. She wore a tan tracksuit with blue stripes up the seams and Adidas. She smiled at Guma and kissed him on the cheek and showed Karp a graver face as she shook his hand.