Butch Karp: Act Of Revenge Part 14

Tran grimaced and stuck all his fingers in his mouth and chewed them, growling.

When this fit concluded, he shouted at her, "Imbecile child! For a book? You put your life in danger for a book? Are you insane!"

And then, of course, Lucy did what she hadn't done yet, which was break down and blubber like a three-year-old, the deadly fear boiling up now that she was safe, but also because of the unfairness of Tran, to be angry with her when she had saved his relic, and so he had to comfort her, dragging her down the seat and pressing her against his small, iron-hard chest, and stroking her dirty, damp curls until she was calm again. He gave her a clean handkerchief to mop herself up, and he said, in gentler tones, "My very dear idiot child, we must decide what we are to do now. The Vo will be angry about this, and they are as relentless as hungry dogs. I cannot guard you every minute of every day. Therefore, we must remove the Vo."

"You intend to kill them?" she asked, a mixture of awe and disgust in her tone.

Tran rolled his eyes. "Of course I don't intend any such thing. Where do you get these ideas? No, we must go to the police and they will arrest them. They committed very serious crimes, and it will be better for us if they are in prison."

Lucy gaped, astounded. It was like hearing that the president of Pepsi was thinking about putting c.o.ke machines in the corporate headquarters snack bar. "The police! We never go to the police."

"Well, yes, as a matter of fact we do. Your mother has made it a principle never to engage in any activity that the police and the courts can do better-"

"My mother!" cried Lucy in an unpleasant sneering voice.

"Yes, your mother, who will, of course, have to be told of this. And your father also."

"You would tell them!" she cried, tears welling once more. "Traitor! I will never speak to you again as long as I live." She jumped off the pillion seat and flounced away, in the direction of Broadway. Tran cursed and called after her, but she didn't stop. He kicked his motor into life and followed her down the street.

She walked on, ignoring him, her back stiff and straight as a mast. Tran found himself quite baffled; his long career as a terrorist and guerrilla leader had not prepared him for combat with an American teenager in a snit. In time they reached Broadway, at which point Lucy stopped, turned, and came up to him.

"Go away!" she commanded.

"Lucy, have some sense," Tran said. "Get on the motorcycle and we will go someplace quiet and talk. You must be hungry-"

"No! You see that policeman over there?" She pointed to where a blue-and-white was parked, its occupant out ticketing cars. "If you don't go away, I will tell him I am a frightened little girl and you are the bad old man who has been following me and that you hit my face."

Tran took in a startled breath, so long and deep that his nostrils pinched and whitened. Without another word he swung the machine away and roared off back the way they had come. Lucy watched him disappear, feeling empty. Really empty, for she was starving as well as spiritually desolate. She had no money for food, but she did have a subway token. She never left the house without one secreted in the little change pocket of her jeans. She walked to Wall Street and took a northbound train, intending to go to Ca.n.a.l Street and home, but at the Chambers/Centre Street stop, she jumped to her feet, impelled by a pressure she could not have described, but which could not be resisted, and left the train.

"So much for the organization of the office and what you can expect to be doing in your first months here," said Karp. "I want to finish by telling you some stuff I wish someone had told me back when I started here, way back in the second Roosevelt administration." This raised a polite t.i.tter from the fifteen young lawyers a.s.sembled in the jury box of a temporarily vacant courtroom. Karp stood in the well of the court facing them, incidentally demonstrating how to stand in the well of a court and talk to a jury, which it seemed to him some of these kids might not know how to do, so green were they.

"First of all, you all have something in common, besides being lawyers. Can anybody guess what that is?"

The group looked around at one another speculatively. Eight men, seven women, four black, two Hispanic, one Asian, the rest white, or white-ish. n.o.body had a clue.

"I'll tell you," said Karp. "Every one of you partic.i.p.ated in a compet.i.tive sport. Most of you are team athletes, but we have a varsity sprinter, a couple of state-level tennis players, two women's varsity crew oars, and a junior chess master. This is not an accident. Prosecuting in an adversarial system requires the same kind of compet.i.tiveness, endurance, guts, mercilessness, and ability to play when hurt that're necessary to succeed in sports. Just like sports, this game is about winning under a set of rules, but it's not all about winning. It's mainly about doing the right thing. Just do the right thing and don't get all concerned about your won and lost record. Doing the right thing and keeping your integrity is important because you're probably not going to contribute much to making the world a better place, not that you're going to be able to see at any rate." Here he paused and looked a selection of them in the eye, using his ever useful Severe yet Compa.s.sionate Look.

"This is a hopeless job," he said vehemently. "Your work will not help make things better, because we don't understand what causes crime, and it's not entirely clear that punishment, which is what we mostly do here, helps the problem. It may even make it worse. This society, this city, is like a ship that's. .h.i.t a rock. We don't get to steer it to safety and we don't get to plot the course to avoid more rocks and we don't get to evacuate the women and children. What we do get is a crummy little office in the bilge of the ship, where we work the pumps, keep the water level down, and prevent the ship from going under entirely. Right now the water's coming in a little faster than we're pumping it out, which sucks, so to speak, but on the other hand, if we stopped pumping, it'd be all over in a pretty short time. What I've just described is d.a.m.ned near the full extent of the job satisfaction: pump, pump, pump, and listen to that water slosh out. That's the good part. The downside . . ."-here he waited for the laughter to subside-"the downside is you may screw up and let someone out who should've been in the can, and he does something bad again, and it's on you, he kills someone, say, and it's on you." He waited for that to sink in.

"Fortunately, there are ways around both these problems. It turns out there are some objective standards for doing this job, about how to prepare a case for prosecution, and you will find that preparing a case in this way is a source of real satisfaction. Once again, sports: it's great to win, but sometimes the other guys are just better, so you have to be content with just playing your best. Justice and success are not defined by the vagaries of jury deliberations. The only issue for you is whether each case is a legitimate case to prosecute. Are you convinced a thousand percent that the defendant is guilty and that you had legally admissible evidence to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt? It's a gem of a system, folks, but it can be corrupted by the people in it. Don't become one of those people! Now, we will ensure that you prepare cases in the proper manner, and that you play your best, by yelling at you when you don't. We have a large number of expert yellers on staff, and you'll meet all of them as time goes on. If you really push at it, and you can take the yelling, you will learn how to prepare cases in such a way that the likelihood of s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up is reduced to near zero. One final thing: it's never personal. You're doing the law, you're not trying to get some guy. You start eating your liver on these cases, in a month you won't have enough liver to make a decent chopped-liver sandwich. Oh, yeah, one final, final thing. You think what I just said is cynical. It's not, it's just hard-boiled. This is a hard-boiled outfit here. It's also the best prosecutorial organization in the free world, because, by and large, it's not cynical. I'll tell you what cynical is. Cynical is saying, rules are made to be broken, and then breaking them. Cynical is drilling some poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d because you think it looks good in the press. Cynical is letting politics into your legal decisions. Cynical is rolling over for the cops because it's popular and it makes your job nicer if the cops like you. Cynical is not trying because the Supreme Court has tied your hands with all these crime-coddling decisions. Don't be cynical, guys. It's not part of the job, and it's not nice."

Karp looked up as a short brown woman in a dark blue suit came through the door.

"Ah, here she is," said Karp. "Folks, this is Rita Mehta, one of our fine a.s.sistant bureau chiefs. Rita helps run the Criminal Courts Bureau, where you'll start your work here at the D.A. Criminal Courts handles the misdemeanors we cop felonies down to when we're feeling cranky, and Rita here is going to teach you how to slap the wrists of hardened criminals."

"Softened criminals, too, don't forget those, Butch," said Ms. Mehta.

The usual relief of nervous laughter. He had noticed some of the kids really listening, not being embarra.s.sed, or just taking notes, as in law school. He turned the group over to Ms. Mehta, got the (also usual) nice round of applause, some worshipful stares, most of them from the women, and left the courtroom.

She was curled up on a couch in his office, reading a small blue book, and when he saw her face, he cried out, "Good G.o.d!" and felt a clench around his heart. He knelt down beside her, his face close, examining the bruises. "Lucy, what happened to you?"

"Nothing, I, like, got mugged," said the daughter blandly.

"Mugged? Where? Did you report it? Did the cops bring you here? What-"

"Dad, settle down. I'm not hurt. It looks a lot worse than it is. But I have to talk to you, now. I think I'm in trouble."

Karp drew up a straight chair and sat down on it, his heart pounding. There was an instant of ice-cold, ign.o.ble rage against his wife (why isn't she watching this child?), which he suppressed, and a cacophony of head voices suggesting modes of trouble-drugs, thefts, s.e.x, diseases-which he could not. He swallowed hard and asked, "Felony or misdemeanor trouble?"

"Um, well, I didn't do anything bad, but there's like a big felony involved."

"You want to tell me about it?"

She looked away from him. "I can't, Daddy, that's the problem. I swore an oath I wouldn't and there are other people involved, and they'd get in giant trouble if I told and they didn't do anything wrong either."

Karp resisted the impulse to switch from Daddy mode into interrogator mode. This was hard on him because he had no doubts about his skills in the latter and considerable doubts about his skills in the former. He made himself say, gently, "That's quite a problem, Luce. How are you going to handle it?"

"I don't kno-o-o-w," she wailed, and started to cry. Karp moved next to her on the couch and swept her into his arms. Lucy was startled by the difference between being hugged by her father and being hugged by Tran, so much so that she stopped crying. She totted up the differences, fascinated. The smell. Daddy was regular American, like the air, a little soap, a little aftershave, clean cotton and wool, Home. Tran was fish sauce, lilac hair oil, motorcycle oil, leather, foreign, Other. The feel. Daddy was large, comforting, deep, summoning thoughts of babyhood, absolute security, the moments before sleep. Tran was hard, protective, too, but like an iron shield, something you had to use, not just sink into, and a wild heat came off him, in her imagination like hugging a leopard. It then occurred to her that once Tran had hugged his own daughter, and that he had not been like that to her, no, he must have been to that girl the same as her father was to her. She tried to imagine Tran different, softer, and then the Asian thing struck her again, the suffering. She was sobbed out by now; still, thick tears trickled down her cheeks. And a last thought, more of a wordless feeling: this sinking safety, delightful as it was, belonged to her past, she was going away from it even now, but Tran, or something Tran-like, was her future. She recalled how she had acted the spoiled baby and threatened him and felt deep, blushing shame.

Karp held his daughter away from him, at arm's length, saw the agony in her face, said as gently as he could, "Lucy, listen to me. You are a kid. This is over your head. You can't handle this yourself. You have to tell me about this, now, the whole story."

"I can't, Daddy."

"Well, then let me tell you what I think I know already," he said, his voice growing sterner. "You witnessed a crime. What crime? A good guess would be the double murder at the Asia Mall. Why? It went down in a place you hang out in all the time. I know you and your pals like to play hide in that storeroom; maybe you were there when it happened and saw who did it. I know you got beat up today, and I doubt it was a random mugging. Somebody was sending you a message. They were telling you to keep your mouth shut. And you're doing just what they want, just what the bad guys want."

"That's not why I'm not telling. I told you, I swore I wouldn't."

"Lucy! Listen to me! This isn't a kid thing anymore. You have to tell me."

As soon as this was out, he knew it was the wrong thing to say. She stiffened, and on her face appeared the very tintype of her mother's mulish expression. He changed tack.

"All right, Lucy. You came to me for help. What do you expect me to do? Huh? Hey, great, you're concealing evidence of a felony, here's a dollar for ice cream, run along and play? You know, I swore an oath, too, to uphold the law. I'm not allowed to ignore stuff like this. If you weren't my daughter, I could get a judge to hold you as a material witness, and then you'd be put under guard, and when it came to a trial you would have to tell what you knew and if you didn't you could be jailed for contempt and kept in jail until you talked. That's the law."

"Okay, arrest me, then! Go ahead! I don't care."

Karp sighed. "Oh, sh . . . I'm not going to arrest you, okay? I'm in the same fix you're in, kid. I'm your father, you come first, no question. But as of now, I'm breaking the law. So we're both in a pickle."

"Could you, like, lose your job?" she asked. This aspect of the situation had not occurred to her before. Indeed, she was over her head.

"I could, if anyone found out about this conversation," answered Karp, feeling horribly guilty at putting this kind of pressure on the girl, but what else could he do?

Lucy wrapped her arms around her head to shut out the tormented choices and buried her face in the cool, smelly leather of the couch. Karp waited. She said something he didn't catch.

"What was that, honey?"

"Kenny Vo," she whimpered.

"Who's Kenny Vo?"

"The guy who beat me up. He's a Vietnamese gangster." She described what had happened to her, and he took notes. His throat and nose ached with stalled weeping. When she ran down, and had another cry, he asked, "Did he do the murders, too?"

She blinked away the silvery tears, and her pale brown eyes stared levelly into his. "I don't know anything about any murders," she said.

"Okay," said Karp, knowing when he was beaten. "Here's what we're going to do. I'm going to get Ed Morris to take you back home, and I'm going to arrange for a policeman to watch the loft. I don't want you going out by yourself until we get this thing cleared up. Do you understand that? Not even down to the store, or to Mott Street, or Janice's. If you can't promise me that, then you really will have to go into protective custody."

"Okay, Daddy," she said meekly, carefully not promising, and to her immense relief, he turned to the phone and did not press her on it.

When Morris, Karp's driver and also a D.A. squad detective specially trained not to ask questions, had taken Lucy away, Karp went to the men's room, splashed cold water on his face, dried it with a towel, and looked deep into the mirror to see if the monster he had become showed much yet. No, not much, which said something for clean living and an absence of cynicism. Karp had been perfectly sincere in his lecture. He was not cynical about the law, was in truth as deeply in love with it as he had been when as a young, dewy bride he had first stepped across the threshold of 100 Centre Street long ago, and was continually amazed at how a system so inherently stupid and run, by and large, by moral imbeciles, kept cranking along, doing as well as it in fact did. What had not come up in the lecture was what to do when dedication to the law ran up against love of family. Marlene's shenanigans were bad enough, but Marlene was at least an adult, and Karp truly believed that if he caught his wife in a conscious felony, he would turn her in. It was different, he discovered, when his child was involved, a child who was turning out more like her mother than Daddy felt comfortable about.

Yes, the mother. Karp went back to his office and placed a furious call to the mother, and, fortunately for his marriage, did not get through. He was too old-fashioned a man to allow himself to express anger to an anwering machine, so he left a mere urgent message. He did the same at her office, and then tried the car phone (nothing) and then left another message at her paging service. He then put his notes into shape for a warrant and called Mimi Vasquez, who was in, and available at that very moment.

Nor was that the only favorable contrast with his wife. Mimi Vasquez was in her fifth year with the D.A. and her second in Homicide, and clearly a rising star, quite apart from her status as a Hispanic woman and thus an affirmative action two-fer. Karp had spotted her as a comer early on, and nudged her career helpfully when needed. Vasquez had the broad shoulders, solid build, and narrow hips of a distance swimmer, which she was, a neat round head, and short thick straight hair, cut close. With her round face, huge dark eyes, flat nose, and tawny skin, she presented the appearance of a not entirely terrestrial creature, a seal perhaps, recruited into the legal profession in exchange for those shiploads of lawyers the jokes are always drowning. She and Karp agreed perfectly on what was important; she was one of those who had instinctively understood his corny lecture and gone on to put principle to the test of action. Not in the least frightened of trials, she'd won a couple of nice ones recently, without becoming obnoxious about it as so many of her male peers did after similar victories. She reminded Karp strongly (and sadly) of his wife, when his wife had been a respectable colleague rather than a loose cannon with a short fuse.

For her part, Vasquez was always delighted when Karp took an interest in her work. Not only did he know a lot, but he was not, like Roland Hrcany, her immediate boss, trying tediously to get into her pants. As to that aspect, should anything unfortunate and permanent befall Mrs. Karp, Mimi Vasquez was perfectly willing to dispense entirely with pants in re: Butch Karp, a willingness she shared with any number of women at 100 Centre Street, and of which the object was entirely oblivious.

Upon receiving Karp's call, Vasquez had spent three minutes in front of the gla.s.s in the sixth-floor ladies' getting herself into perfect court-appearance order and two minutes after that was sitting in Karp's side chair, legs neatly crossed, ears perked, pad on lap.

"How's the Sing double going?" asked Karp.

"Nothing new since the last time you asked," replied Vasquez, and seeing his frown added, "I realize that's not the right answer, but it's always like that down there, especially in this case, where it looks like an out-of-town job. You know the story: a couple Ghost Shadows. .h.i.t a Flying Dragon one night on Ca.n.a.l Street, at least there's talk on the block, some history behind the crime, and we can bring in the snitches, not that Chinatown is full of snitches, but the cops hear stuff. Here . . . it's like it never happened. A couple out-of-towners with heavy triad connections in Hong Kong walk into a stockroom, followed by person or persons unknown, and wind up dead. n.o.body the cops talked to will admit to seeing anything unusual."

"Who caught it in the Five?"

"Phil Wu."

He waited, but she did not elaborate. "And . . . ?"

"I never worked with him before, but Roland says he's okay. Smart, speaks Cantonese and Mandarin. He had the collar on that pool hall shooting in '81, Bayard Street. He seems to be doing the right things, but . . ."

"Uh-huh. He talk to the Chen family, do you know?"

"They own the place? Yeah, in the original canva.s.s at the crime scene."

"But not afterward?"

"Not that I know of." She gave him an interested look, scenting something. "Why? You think they're connected?"

"The vics got in through the back door and so did the killer. That back door is always locked. Somebody opened it from the inside. Also, there are always people in and out of that stockroom. If n.o.body saw anything, then either they're lying or they were pulled away from there."

She was frankly staring at him now, as if he had just produced a live chicken out of thin air. "Jesus, Butch! How the h.e.l.l do you know all that?"

Karp glanced away, as if embarra.s.sed. "We've known the Chens for a long time. That door is on Howard Street right down from where we live. I've seen delivery guys ringing the bell back there or pounding on the door a million times. It's never unlocked except when they're taking in merchandise."

Vasquez waited a moment and then asked, "So . . . what? You want me to bring in the Chens or . . ."

"Yeah, bring them in. Nothing heavy, but you need to find out whether there've been any threats, keep your mouth shut or else. Re-interview the whole staff there too. Explain to everyone that keeping information from the authorities is a serious crime, and so is threatening people who have information about a crime. Get Wu to explain things in Chinese just to make sure they understand."

She wrote rapidly on her pad and then looked up again. He asked, "You ever hear of a Kenny Vo? Some kind of Vietnamese thug?"

"Doesn't ring a bell. Is he involved in the Sing double?"

"It's possible. Swear out a warrant and have him picked up. He's got an a.s.sociate with a busted face, so have them check the emergency rooms. The charges are kidnapping one and a.s.sault two. Here are the details." He pa.s.sed a sheet of yellow bond across the desk. She read it and gaped.

"Your daughter?"

"Don't ask, Vasquez," he said. "Just do it, and when you've got the son of a b.i.t.c.h I want to see him. And make sure Roland's in the loop on this. Go ahead," he ordered, blocking the questions he could see forming in her eyes. "Do it now!"

After Vasquez left, he stared at the door that closed behind her, his ordinary impulse to action quite overcome by confusion and dull despair. Over the years he had become used to Marlene's quasi-legal and perilous lifestyle and had even accepted that it might involve some danger to their children-Manhattan was in any case a risky place to raise kids. Karp was good at accepting things he couldn't change. But the idea that Lucy was on her own hook getting into Marlene-style trouble had struck him like a clout on the ear. It was not to be borne. It wasn't fair. He didn't deserve this.

Karp was several leagues into the sere and unfamilar country of self-pity when the phone rang. Listlessly he raised it to his face and spoke his name.

"Butch? It's me. What's so urgent?"

"Where are you?"

"At Mattie's. What is it?"

"Oh, not much. Your daughter was kidnapped and beat up today while you were out solving everybody else's problems." He heard a quick gasp over the wires, and then Marlene asked in an over-controlled, even voice, "Is she all right?"

"Yeah, she got out of it with a shiner and a b.l.o.o.d.y nose. She's home and I got a cop watching the place. Marlene, what the f.u.c.k is going on? Will you please tell me before you get our kid killed?"

"I get . . . ? What the h.e.l.l are you talking about? You think I was involved in getting her . . ."

"No," he shouted, "I'm the one who's modeling semi-criminal behavior, and sometimes not so semi either. Jesus, Marlene, she's up to her little ears in a double murder, and those f.u.c.king Chinese pals of yours are in on it, too. You better tell me what the h.e.l.l is going on, because if I don't get some straight answers right away-"

"Oh, shut up! How dare you accuse me of endangering my child!"

"No reason, except you've done it about a dozen times that I know of."

"I'm not going to talk to you when you're like this. I'm hanging up."

"Marlene, don't you dare put down that phone! Marlene . . . ?"

He heard a scream over the phone, coming as from far away, and then a loud bang, and then more screams, and a string of pops that sounded like firecrackers, but which Karp doubted very much were firecrackers.

"Marlene, what the h.e.l.l. . . ."

"Oh, Jesus!" said Marlene, and then, "Butch, I got to go now."

He yelled her name a couple of times into an instrument unmistakably dead and, slamming it down, cursed fervently to the unsympathetic heavens. Then, being a good, even a model, citizen he dialed 911 and called in the shots fired and gave the address of the East Village Women's Shelter.

Chapter 11.