Butch Karp: Absolute Rage Part 7

"Why?"

"Oh, partly it was practical. My mom had a lot of enemies at the time and he wanted to protect me. The other stuff . . . he was of the opinion that you never could tell what was going to happen in your life. He was planning to teach literature and ended up guerrilla fighting almost his whole life. So he wanted me to be prepared. Weird, but there it is. Yet more useless knowledge in my head."

"What happened to him?"

"Oh, he's a small-time gangster now. He's a pretty awful person, I guess, but he's our awful person. He and my mom get along fine."

Marlene had no problem putting another plate on the table, after having first called Rose Heeney to tell her these plans. They had a polite conversation, like two school mothers arranging an overnight for a fifth-grader, as if Heeney violence had not occurred on Marlene's doorstep. The weekend oozed along peacefully. Sunday, Lucy whipped the twins out of bed with the cry "Pagan babies! Up! Up! Prayer is better than sleep!" and drove them off to ma.s.s at St. Perpetua's in Southold. Just after one, the Heeneys came by, with their car packed for the trip. Marlene gave them a civilized lunch at which no alcohol was served, nor were the fights mentioned. Heeney discussed dogs he had known and trained for hunting, to all appearances an affable good old boy. It was perfectly artificial, but not at all unpleasant. Giancarlo gave Lizzie an origami crane, but secretly. Dan and Lucy allowed their eyes to meet for tiny instants, but otherwise kept away from one another. When the clan left, something heavy seemed to go out of the air. Dan Heeney felt a pang of disloyalty, for he felt this, too, but it did not prevent him from enjoying the rest of the day.

That evening, Marlene put Dan in a tiny room at the end of the upstairs hall, originally the hired girl's room, as Marlene explained, and more recently used for sewing. It held a narrow iron cot, a dresser, an old Singer, and a dressmaker's dummy.

"You won't mind sharing a room with Ermentrude, will you?" Marlene asked, indicating this object.

"No, ma'am."

"Feel free to run up a party dress, if you want."

He blushed and showed an uncomfortable smile. Oh, now I've impugned his manhood, Marlene thought. Should I watch the badinage henceforth? Maybe not; the boy needs a thicker skin, and this family is the place to get it.

While Dan was thus engaged, Lucy was on the phone with her best (and nearly only) friend, Mary Ma in New York. After the usual exchange of the latest, Lucy asked, "Listen, Ma, do you know Dan Heeney? He's in your cla.s.s."

"Dan Heeney the Lollipop?"

"The what?"

"If it's the same guy. Tall, golden curls, big blues, looks like an angel on a Christmas card."

"That's him. Why do they call him that?"

"Because everyone's dying for a lick. It takes something to draw us MIT girls from our studies, but he's a something in that cla.s.s. How do you know him?"

"He's living in our house out here."

"Lucy! You sneaky b.i.t.c.h! How did you arrange that?"

"I didn't; it just happened. Anyway, what's he like?"

"Smart enough to stay in Cambridge. Manners. Eats with his mouth closed, which is not universal among the elite here at MIT, I'm sad to say. Oh, the tragic flaw. He's in love with Olivia Hampton; she's sort of a s.k.a.n.ky, depraved SoHo wanna-be type, works in a coffee shop near here. The Human Bean? She's a singer, ha ha. Anyway, he worships her, apparently, and of course, she thinks he's appalling. What a waste!"

Lucy was not exactly let down by this news, as she had not allowed herself to rise very high up. If Dan Heeney noticed a certain cooling of her attentions, he did not show it. He was in any case used to being held in low esteem by girls he was interested in.

Karp left for the City on Tuesday, and life at the dog farm settled into a pleasant, disorderly routine. Dan often recalled during this period Lucy's remark about her mother's medieval aspect. The farmhouse often did resemble a lesser court of that period: the cooking of huge, spicy meals for many noisy people; enormous black dogs underfoot, snapping at sc.r.a.ps and being cuffed away from the plates; strangers arriving at the last moment, always fairly interesting ones, cops and dog breeders, relatives and priests; the dog handlers, louche, profane, and voluble, always in and out of the house, with their half-fabulous animal tales; the children raucous and filthy, bringing unwholesome objects in for inspection; oldies blaring from the greasy radio above the sink; the silence that fell in the midst of all this when Lucy bowed her head and said grace. It was as different as possible from his own family's mealtimes, which were nuclear and short, Red always having to dash for meetings, Emmett stuffing it in and jumping up to go play ball or see his girl. After that and after the intense year at school, monastic despite his best efforts, it was like living in a dream, the colors brighter, the scents more heady than in real life.

Lucy and Dan became friends. Aside from a minimal spell Dan spent at the farm office, they were together all day, working the dogs, corralling the twins, doing the necessary ch.o.r.es, and all the while talking. They discovered that they were both serious people, more serious than the average person their age, far more serious than the type of youth the media held up for emulation. He told her about superstrings and explained relativity to her so that she almost got it. She taught him how to say ridiculous things in foreign tongues- Help, a dwarf has burgled my kaleidoscope -in Urdu, in Yoruba, in Gaelic, and showed him Chinese poetry in calligraphy, and what the calligraphy meant and the poetry, how that whole ancient culture danced in the sounds and in the lines. They told stories about their parents. Almost all of his were about his father; almost all of hers were about her mother. They agreed that neither of them was from a normal family.

"What if my father had married your mother," Lucy proposed.

"A perfect family," he said. "Meals on time. No craziness. The most exciting thing would be waiting for SAT scores to come. And the reverse-your mom with Big Red Heeney?"

They both laughed. "Homicide," she said. "Two weeks after the wedding, tops." About religion they did not speak seriously, only in the half-joking way that friends do when one is devout and the other is not. She took him to ma.s.s once because he was curious, but she didn't ask him what he thought and he didn't volunteer anything beyond the polite. He didn't ask to go again.

This life went on for some weeks. On the Fourth of July, Karp came out and stayed for four days, and when he returned, Lucy and Dan went with him. A year in Cambridge had not turned him into a city boy. He frankly gawked: at the loft on Crosby where the Karps dwelt over the Chinese grocery store; at the continuous circus of SoHo and Chinatown; at the sort of people Lucy seemed to know-beggars, street Arabs, elderly Chinese, nuns. She would fly across a crowded street to have a long conversation in Spanish with a bundle of rags.

They went to dinner at a Chinese restaurant owned, it seemed, by the parents of a girl he recognized vaguely from MIT, and in a private room they all ate a large meal, no single item of which was recognizable to him, after which they went uptown to the ballet. She had tickets. He paid for the cab. She never had any cash; she was always giving bills to people on the street. He had never seen a ballet before and did not think he would ever make a habit of it, but the prima was certainly the most beautiful and graceful being he had ever seen in his life. Who turned out to be a dear friend of his little guide. They went backstage afterward, and the G.o.ddess flung herself on Lucy's neck and insisted that they all go out to Balthazar and have drinks. This they did, together with several of the company and a.s.sorted balletomanes. They drank a good deal, Dan being heavily vamped by beautiful people of both s.e.xes, which he was not used to, but which he handled fairly well. He knew he would definitely not have handled it well had Lucy not been sitting there, speaking Russian to some blonde and occasionally giving him a friendly eye-roll.

After a night spent in the loft, they went back to Southold on the early train. Marlene had a worried look on her face when she picked them up.

"You need to call your brother," she said to Dan. "He called early this morning and I gave him the loft number, but you'd already left, because he called again. He sounded upset."

"Oh, it's probably nothing. Emmett spends a good deal of time upset. He probably can't find his fishing rod and thinks I know where it is."

Dan called from the phone in the office. Lucy was in the yard when she heard him cry out, "What! Oh my G.o.d!" She ran into the house. He was slumped on the old couch, his face paper white, the dead phone clutched in his hand.

"Dan! What is it?" she cried.

"I have to go home," he said in a horrible, creaky voice. "They're all dead. Somebody killed them. They even killed Lizzie."

5.

M ARLENE DROVE HIM TO L A G UARDIA A IRPORT IN HER TRUCK, WITH HIS few belongings in a nylon bag that sat on his lap. He said nothing during the trip. Several times he pa.s.sed the back of his hands across his eyes and sniffled. Twice he uttered a sigh, or groan. She did not try to initiate a conversation or to comfort him. Comfort was not notable among her talents. Vengeance was, but he did not ask for that, nor did she offer. When she let him off at the US Air terminal, he turned his face and said, thank you, ma'am, you've been very kind. She said, I'm sorry for your loss, if there's anything I can do . . .

Then he was gone through the gla.s.s door. She brought Gog into the front seat and drove off.

What she felt most was embarra.s.sment, tinged a little with shame. Murder was like that, the instinct of the pack to turn away from the injured one. Marlene had never sympathized with the whole yellow-ribbon shtick, the little mounds of toys and notes and candles people placed nowadays at the scenes of killings. What possible good could it do to place a teddy bear? Selfish juju, stupid and sentimental. It said, hoo, boy! G.o.d, don't let it happen to me! This family had barged into her life, unasked, with their burden of violence. Now it had claimed them and they were gone, and she felt relief. That was part of the shame, but there it was, she had to be honest. Of course, she felt sorry for them, too-she had genuinely liked Rose, and the little girl, that was unspeakable, but there were so very many unspeakable things going on around the world. Sorry was such a pathetic little emotion. And the other part, the thrill of terror that violence brings when we think of our own loved ones, well, she had that covered. No one was going to take her babies, not unless they could get past a brace of ferocious, highly trained dogs, and her well-armed self, and her ferocious, highly trained friends. Still, a little uneasiness there, the old instinct still present, half-asleep. No, not anymore. She couldn't take it. Don't get involved, tattoo it on your forehead, Ciampi!

Suddenly, she swerved across four lanes of traffic and left the highway, occasioning a chorus of horns and a grand display of flip-offs.

"What we should do is go see Butch," she informed the dog. "How would you like that, honey? See the old neighborhood?" The dog shook himself, flipping drool. Marlene steered the truck onto the westbound highway and turned the radio on to WQXR. Some kind of motet, Monteverdi. Up with the volume, music from another time of rampant murder, soothing. It still worked. She picked up her cell phone and dialed.

The twins asked Lucy why she was crying, or Giancarlo did, his brother standing silent by his side. She told them, and Giancarlo burst instantly into tears. She was like him in this, she thought, crying easily. She cried often in church, at ma.s.s; a leaf falling, a certain cast of light, a poem by Li Po or Hopkins, would all start the faucets, although on the several occasions when she had faced real and mortal danger, she had not shed a tear. Since Dan's awful phone call, she had been dripping shamefully, off and on. Immediately after the call, she had embraced him, spontaneously, their first (and clearly to be last) fleshly contact, but he stiffened and did not want to talk or be comforted, at least not by her. Her mother had whisked him away so quickly, there had been no time to . . . what? Have a relationship? She could see he blamed himself, for not being there, for not dying with them, and she wanted to explain to him, to make him understand that this was not a wise thing to do.

So she and Giancarlo cried together, but Zak didn't cry. His face went white and pinched-looking and he slipped away, slamming the door.

"Why?" wailed GC, the eternally unanswerable question.

"Some gangsters wanted to kill her dad," she said, "and they wanted to make sure no one could identify them. So they killed everyone in the house. Anyway, that's what Emmett thinks. Emmett was out that night, so he escaped."

"I didn't mean that."

"I know. Here, wipe your face." She handed him her bandanna, already quite damp. "You meant, why do bad things happen to nice people like Lizzie and her parents. Because only G.o.d is good, and G.o.d is far away. Evil is in charge down here."

"But we're good."

"Only by reflection of G.o.d. We see the sun shining out of a puddle, but it's not the sun. We can't be good, really, but we're obliged to try. Meanwhile, the rain falls equally on the just and the unjust."

"It still makes me sad."

"Yes, me, too. Man is born to sorrow as the sparks fly upward, but we feel better after a good weep. We're a pair of weepers, aren't we?"

"Uh-huh. We take after Mom. Dad doesn't cry much. I don't think I'll cry as much when I'm grown up, though. Zak doesn't cry either, and he doesn't like to watch it. That's why he left."

"Where did he go?"

"Probably to shoot something," answered Giancarlo equably. "That's what he does instead."

Karp listened to Marlene's news in silence, made the conventional noises, asked, "You think it was a hit?"

"The whole family? I doubt it, unless the Colombians are diversifying into coal. That poor child!"

He waited.

"I know what you're thinking. But I'm in the dog business now."

"That's good, Marlene," he observed neutrally. "You going back to the place?"

"No, I thought I'd come into town and stay over. I'm on the Van Wyck. I thought we could spend the evening together, go out, see a movie. I need distracting."

Karp hung up the phone and let the camera of his mind pan over the innumerable murder-scene photographs he had looked at during the twenty years he had been prosecuting murders. He had not, of course, viewed the ones of the Heeney murders, but he could slot in the faces well enough. They all looked like life-size dolls, the fresh ones did, instantly distinguishable, even without the visible blood and damage, from a sleeping person. You always pa.s.sed them around to the jury, the defense always objected to this, and the judge always let them pa.s.s. A cheap trick; the jury wanted vengeance for the horror on the glossy eight-by-tens and the poor schmuck in the box was the closest they could get to it. But Karp always did it anyway. He had never known a murder victim personally. One "knew" lowlifes who got whacked, but that was not the same thing. He had come close from time to time, Marlene being what she was, or had been (he hoped), but it had never actually come to him.

The phone buzzed its intercom tone. The DA wanted to see him right away. Karp grabbed a pad and walked across the hall to his boss's office. Keegan was behind his desk, a burly, fleshy, florid Irishman with a still intact white mane, although there was a rumor that he weaved. He was taking a Bering corona from its metal tube as Karp walked in. This was a bad sign. It meant that something had happened to the prop cigar he always had at hand or in mouth, which never got wet or smoked, but which sometimes, in moments of anger or stress, got chomped on or flung across the room. As now, obviously.

Karp took a seat without being asked and sat erect, pad on lap, miming the loyal retainer.

"I had a call from the congressman just now," Keegan began. New York boasts a number of congressmen, being so very populous, but Karp knew which one had called.

"Oh? I hope you conveyed to him my very best regards."

"Don't be cute. What are you doing with this mutt, Bailey?"

"Prosecuting him for first-degree a.s.sault."

One of Keegan's bushy eyebrows elevated itself. "Personally?"

"No, of course not. But I'm taking a personal interest in the case."

"So I gather. My man was telling me all about it. He said you threatened to shove Bailey under the jail forever and a day unless Bailey told you a pack of lies about how the congressman paid for his last campaign."

"That's true," agreed Karp, "except for the lies part. Bailey is a smurf for Beemer Pennant, and Pennant, we know, is laundering pimp money through political action committees run by your pal. I thought it was worth a shot."

"I see. Even though I told you that there isn't remotely enough evidence of alleged laundering to justify p.i.s.sing off my one political ally north of the park."

"I thought he was all for the other guy last year."

"He had to be for the other guy, but he wasn't for the other guy hard enough for him to win. And there are other elections."

Karp knotted his brow dramatically. "Okay, let's see if I got this. You don't want to annoy your guy uptown, since we don't have enough evidence to move forward, but you don't want me to put the squeeze on this mutt, which might result in us getting the evidence. So . . . um. . . how will we ever get your guy uptown?" Karp snapped his fingers. "Oh, now I understand. You think it's okay for the congressman to launder money for a pimp and a murderer, so we'll kind of give him a walk on it."

"Oh, for Christ's sake. Forget I said anything. I'll take care of it myself."

"Fine. What about Mr. Bailey?"

"I said, I'll take care of it." The DA's face was closing in on the color of fresh hamburger, and the prop cigar was directed at Karp like a weapon. Karp wondered if the DA was going to sacrifice this one so soon after breaking it out. Again he reflected upon how stupid it was, this silly duel between him and Keegan. Keegan would never change, would never quite get it. While in many respects his instincts as a DA were perfectly fine-he knew the law, knew procedure, was essentially honest-he remained capable of identifying his own political survival with the Good and the True. Casuistry was the technical term; maybe it had something to do with the twenty years Keegan had spent in Jesuit inst.i.tutions. Lucy would know.

"Out of curiosity," said Karp, "what are you going to let him cop to? Community service?"

"If I want, gadd.a.m.n it." the DA said, his voice rising.

"Okay, but just so you're aware: he sliced his girlfriend's nose off. She took a hundred and eight st.i.tches. I thought we frowned on that kind of stuff. In any case, the poor woman is attracting some press interest. A big-time plastic surgeon from Downstate is volunteering to fix her up."

A little lie there. In the old days, before he became corrupt, Karp would never have told it, nor would he ever have used the press as a shillelagh. On Keegan's face he observed the frustrated anger turn into a more calculating sort. That was one thing Jack Keegan would never do, place himself in the position of seeming soft on a heinous offense in the light of publicity; no, not for a wilderness of congressmen.

"Ah, you can do what the h.e.l.l you like," Keegan snapped. "One thing though-I want to see any deal you make on this whole issue, and I want to see it before it's made. Is that clear?"

Karp rose. "Perfectly clear, boss."

Back in his office, Karp made a call to Bill Ricci, who was the ADA officially in charge of the People's case against Bailey, and instructed him to make no deals whatever with Bailey, to go for the highest penalty allowed by law, and to prepare for a trial. Then, after an uncomfortable interval of self-contempt, he dialed the number of the Post and spoke to a woman he knew who specialized in human-interest crime stories and gave her the details of the situation of Ms. Carolyn Watson, the former (he surmised) love interest of Mr. Bailey. After that, inured to perfidy, he had no trouble in calling a famous plastic surgeon for whom he had once done an enormous legal favor. This favor was called in. The man seemed relieved to be off the hook. Having thus arranged reality to comport with his recent spontaneous fiction, Karp signed out of the office and had his driver take him to the Sloan-Kettering Center at Sixty-seventh and First.

The call to Downstate, which was just across the street, had reminded him of a neglected duty. Neglected because Karp hated hospitals. He was ashamed of this, but he could not help it. The smell got to him, the disinfectant, the sweetish floor wax, the sharp tang of alcohol, and the darker odors against which the cleaner ones fought; and lost to a large extent. His mother had died in a place like this when he was fourteen; Marlene had spent considerable time in hospitals, too, and each time he had to go was like a small death.

Raymond Guma was sitting up in bed talking to Eddie Bent. Guma was a very old friend of Karp's. He had been a veteran at the DA's when Karp arrived, and although not strictly speaking a mentor, since his reputation was not the best and everything he had to teach was barely legal, Karp treasured him as a reminder of the dear old days at the DA, when guys in fedoras and three-piece suits with watch chains had fought the Mob in its power, and neither Miranda nor Escobedo had yet been heard from. Guma knew more about the Mafia than anyone else in New York, not excluding the heads of the traditional Five Families.

"Butch Karp!" exclaimed Guma when Karp walked in. "For a minute there I thought you were the priest. Got a little worried."

"You don't look like you need a priest, Guma," said Karp. "A girl maybe."

Guma brought up a hoa.r.s.e laughlike noise. He actually did not look as bad as Karp had expected and feared. He looked like a shriveled, old monkey, true, but he had always looked a little like one. The cancer had made him into a 7/10 scale model of himself. He wore a blue stocking cap with a Mets emblem on it over his hairless head, which did not detract from the simian appearance at all.

"You know Eddie, Butch," said Guma.

"Sure. Long time, Eddie."

Eddie Bent nodded gravely to acknowledge it had been. Edigio Frascatti, a turtlish man of past seventy, was a retired caporegime of the Genovese. Guma had once put him away for a decent interval, but Eddie Bent had no hard feelings. It was never personal with those guys.

"We were just talking about great unsolved hits of the past," said Guma as Karp pulled up a straight chair. "You'll recall Sam Riccardi."

"Oh, yeah, Sam," said Butch. "Fat Sam Riccardi. We never found the body, and I always entertained the hope that Fat Sam slipped away to South America. I kind of fancied him in a flowered shirt and a big straw hat drinking margaritas with some senoritas. You're telling me no?"

"He's in Shea," said Eddie Bent, pointing Queens-ward with the corkscrew index finger from which he derived his sobriquet.

"But not taking in a game?"

A barely audible chuckle from the mobster, and the finger pointed downward. Meaning, in the concrete.