Act of Revenge (45 page)

“Marlene!” shouted Karp. Marlene looked up and into the muzzle of a twelve-gauge shotgun. She had no idea who the man pointing it was.

Karp's arm whipped around almost without volition, and Zik's smooth round stone, with its tiny passengers aboard, flew through the intervening space and struck the man on his right forearm. The shotgun roared, sending nine 00 pellets winging over Marlene's head and into the side of the building.

Marlene pointed the big pistol and shot the man from the red pickup, the bullet entering about three inches above the left nipple. The man dropped the shotgun and sat down in the street. In a Western movie, guys shot with a Colt .44 often ride long distances on horseback, punch out the bad guy, and save the girl from the burning ranch house, but in real life they usually want to lie very still in a quiet place, and this man was no exception. Marlene walked over to him and kicked the shotgun away.

“Sir,” she said, “would you mind telling me who the fuck you are?”

“Reginald P. Burford,” the man said.

“Reginald P. Burford, the right-to-life vigilante?”

“Yes, ma'am. Could you please call me an ambulance?”

“I'd be happy to,” said Marlene. “Why were you trying to kill me?”

“It's the Lord, ma'am. Because of the baby killing. I saw you on the TV protecting those baby killers, and I opened the Bible to see what I should do and it opened up to Jeremiah 16:4. ‘They shall die of grievous deaths; they shall not be lamented; neither shall they be buried' . . . And, you know, I fought it back, but the Lord, He kept after me, like unto Jonah, and made me stretch out my hand against. It ain't nothing personal, ma'am.”

“Oh, I'm sure, I'm sure,” she said. “It never is.” Then she stood in the middle of the street and howled to the sky, “Anybody else? Let's go, people! Step right up! Take your shot! Here I am, Marlene the walking fucking death wish! Come on, you fucking crazy bastards! Come on!”

Karp ran to her and wrapped his arms around her. She collapsed against him, sobbing. “It's over, Marlene,” he said. “It's all right.”

“It's not over,” she sobbed. “It's not all right.”

Later, after Morris had organized the police necessities and Karp the domestic ones, Marlene paced her kitchen floor, smoking as she had not for many years, one after another. Karp sat on a kitchen chair and watched her with growing apprehension, glad that there was for once no gun in the house. There was on her face a look he had not seen for some time, her Medea look, made even more horrible by the absence of a softening coiffure. This was not the same woman who had lately built sand castles with her little boys and sung them gently to sleep.

At last he said, “Marlene, for crying out loud, sit down! Relax!”

She stopped short and stared at him, her eye glittering. “Relax. Good idea, but not quite yet, no. What just happened, Butch, out on the street? A woman I tried to help just tried to kill me. No good deed goes unpunished. And a guy gets a message from God, and what does it say? The envelope, please. Shoot Marlene Ciampi.
I
don't get messages from God. God only talks to assholes from Buttzville, New Jersey. Tell me, is this my
fate
?”

“What can I say, Marlene? You know how I feel about what you do.”

“Yes. Yes, I do know. And you know what?
I feel the same way
.

I know that I shall meet my fate,

Somewhere among the clouds above.

Those I fight I do not hate,

Those I guard I do not love.

“Yeats. I have to go out.”

“Marlene, don't be crazy.”

She came up to him and touched his cheek and kissed him. “You poor man. I'll be fine. I'll walk between the bullets.”

Before he could say another word, she ran into the bedroom and came out carrying her purse. She stalked up to him, grabbed his head, and kissed him again, this time solidly on the mouth.

“I'll be right back,” she said. “Don't worry.”

Then she was out the door. He heard her running down the stairs, and began to worry.

Chapter 20

THEY HAD REPAIRED THE DOOR AT THE East Village Women's Shelter. It was now a steel-sheathed monster with a small glass porthole in it, suitable for a nuclear submarine. Marlene pressed her face against it, and Vonda buzzed her in.

“Nice door, Vonda,” said Marlene.

“About time you showed,” said the guard, with her usual glower. “She's in the kitchen.”

Marlene sought the woman out and found her on her back, surrounded by tools, replacing a fitting behind the shelter's ancient gas stove. She lifted her head an inch when Marlene came and stood at her feet. The work light shining on her grease-smeared face gave it a theatrical Phantom of the Opera look. She frowned when she saw who it was.

“Where the
hell
have you been, girl? I've been trying to get in touch with you for a week. Have you heard from Brenda?”

“In a manner of speaking. She tried to kill me with your gun.”

“
Chingada!
What happened?”

Marlene told her. Mattie was not pleased. “You had her arrested? Jesus, who the fuck's side are you on? What about the goddamn boyfriend? He's the one should be in jail.”

At that, Marlene felt she had two possible options: smash the woman's skull with the fourteen-inch pipe wrench that lay conveniently to hand, or laugh. She laughed, ever the correct response to fanatics, and walked away.

“Hey, when am I gonna get my gun back?” Mattie called after her.

Up in room 37, Marlene found that Vivian F. Bollano had settled in for a long stay. The small room now held a color TV, with VCR, both set up on a new chest of drawers, a larger bed with a thicker mattress, a thick rust-colored area rug, and a teak and leather sling chair. A tape of
The Sound of Music
was playing on the VCR. Vivian switched it off after letting Marlene in, and sat on the bed. Marlene sat opposite in the sling chair and examined her client. Vivian had had her hair done, by whom Marlene could not imagine, and looked rather more doll-like than she had before. But there was a fuzziness about her expression that indicated the presence of dope, probably prescription downers, since Mattie had a ferocious rule about the nonprescription sort. Aside from that, Marlene imagined, Mattie was perfectly happy to indulge this resident in every legal way. There was a sliding scale of payment at the EVWS: most women owned only the clothes they fled in and paid nothing, but Vivian was clearly at the top of the scale. She could probably have had a suite in the Plaza for what she was paying here, for the day or so before the Bollanos found her and dragged her through the gilded lobby by her hair.

“Well, Vivian, since our last interview, I'm happy to report I've made some progress.”

“Oh, yeah?” Mild interest only: she
was
tranqued out.

“Yeah. Your father did not commit suicide, as you suspected. He was murdered.”

“Uh-huh. Do you know who killed him?” No excitement, no shock, Marlene noted, and put that down to the meds.

“Yes, your husband did it, assisted by a man named Carlo Tonnati. I'm reasonably sure of my informant, and there are some other suggestive pieces of evidence. But I don't know why it was done, and I don't have enough at present to go to the cops with.”

Vivian nodded, and her face seemed to deflate a fraction.

“You don't seem all that surprised,” said Marlene.

The woman shook her head and turned her face away. “I guess that's it,” she said in a ghost's voice. “Thank you for your help.”

“Well, actually, Vivian, it's not quite
it
yet. Because when you enter into a contract like we did, there are mutual obligations. My obligation is to give you honest service and keep your secrets. Your obligation is to tell me everything relevant to the case. You fail to do that and I could poke into a hole that I think's got no bear in it, and the bear is waiting and I get my head bitten off.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” said Vivian to the blank television. “I just had some suspicions and—”

“No, Vivian, you had much more than suspicions, and ordinarily I would let it slide because it comes with the territory—clients lie, or they conceal. What else is new? But this time I got blindsided, because when you mess with the Mob, you might put yourself at risk, but not your family, because by and large, the Mob doesn't go after family. It's not like Sicily here. But because you didn't tell me what was really going on, my children were put at risk. Your father-in-law sent a thug after my babies. And I thought to myself, What would make a don send a thug after my babies? It would have to be something
outside
the normal run of Mob business, wouldn't it? What was it, Vivian? What's got Big Sally so scared?”

Her mouth was slightly open, like a hungry little bird unsure of whether that large shadow was really its mother. She shook her head again, reached for a beaded purse on the nightstand, took from it an amber plastic vial. Marlene jumped from her chair, snatched it away, and moved back to the chair. She tossed the pills into her own purse.

“Excuse me, I have to take my medication. What do you think—”

“No, Vivian, no pills. We'll save them for after, okay? Don't want to talk, huh? Vivian, I will have the truth out of you, if it takes all day and all night.” Dumb silence. The woman now had the glazed and stupid look of a shot antelope. “Okay, Vivian, let's see if we can prime the pump. We start with the peculiar case of the Chinese gentleman Mr. Leung. Or Mr. Lie. This person has some interesting characteristics. He is a gangster, a triad member, in fact. He is in business with your husband's organization. He seems to have an uncanny understanding of American law. He went through a lot of trouble to kill one of your father-in-law's two chief subordinates and hang the murder on the other one. It seems that Mr. Leung doesn't like the Bollano family at all. No reaction? Well, you might say he's a gangster trying to take over the Bollano family. True enough, but that's not all that's true. This particular Chinese had a relationship with an American in Macao. My daughter found this out, by the way. Mr. Leung can speak English with a New York accent. So, now remember, Vivian, Mr. Leung knows something about New York law, can speak phrases with a New York accent, has it in for the Bollanos, and was in close contact with an American in Macao. Can you make a guess as to whom that American might be? Excuse me, I didn't hear you.”

“Bernie Kusher,” said Vivian, just above the limits of audibility.

“Yes, it would explain a lot that is otherwise very strange indeed. It would explain one of the two big questions I've been wanting to ask you ever since I started on this, and which I would've asked you if your husband hadn't kicked me in the head that night. Why you suddenly, after twenty years, bailed out on Little Sally. Bernie's dead now, apparently, but he was obviously working on this a long, long time. He didn't want to contact you until he had his little guided missile in place and ready to fire. Leung saw you, didn't he?” Nod. “And he brought word from Bernie about who really killed your father, didn't he?” Nod.

Marlene made an exasperated sound and crossed over to sit on the bed beside Vivian. She put her arm around her, and found that she was trembling like a caught mouse.

“Look, Vivian. This has to come out. It has to
all
come out, right now, so your life can start up again and the people who murdered your father can get what they deserve. It's like vomiting, Vivian: if you try to hold it back it gets worse and worse. Just heave it up, and brush your teeth and it's over.”

“Please, could I have a . . .” Her hand twitched toward Marlene's purse.

“No. First talk. Leung came to see you, didn't he?”

The woman uttered a small sigh, and Marlene knew that it was the sound of the cork going on a magnum of poisoned mental champagne; it would all come out now. “He called first. He said, ‘Hiya, princess,' which is what my dad used to say, and then Bernie picked it up, too. I almost fainted, because the accent was so right on. He said he came from Bernie, that Bernie had died in Macao and had told this guy to come see me. He wanted to know could we meet, and I said, yes. I would've crawled over broken glass. So we met the next day in some hole-in-the-wall place in Chinatown. He said Bernie had saved his life after some war they had there, I didn't follow that part. He said Bernie had landed in Macao, which is kind of a wide-open town. If you have money, they don't care what you did anyplace else. And Bernie had plenty of money. He bought some real estate, had some businesses. He got into opium, too. And when he was high, he would talk, about what happened to my father, about what Panofsky had done, to my dad and him. He couldn't go to the cops with what he knew, or guessed, because the cops were all bought by the Bollanos. So he just stayed in Macao, talking to this kid. The kid got into the triads—they practically run Macao anyway, and Bernie was connected with them too. And they figured out this plan. The first step was to come to me and tell me that Sal had killed my father.”

“You never suspected this? Before, I mean.”

Vivian seemed surprised at the question. “No. Why should I? Big Sally came to me right after it happened. He told me . . . oh, God, it's so screwed up. I can't remember which lie came first. Look, I'm sixteen. My father's dead. My mother . . . well, she's not much help. She's a little vague, Mom. There were two people I could count on. One was Bernie, and the other was my dad's secretary, Shirley Waldorf. Both of them thought he'd been murdered, and they were going to try to prove it. Then, all of a sudden, Bernie runs away and Shirley gets fired instead of Panofsky.”

“Panofsky was going to get fired?”

“Yeah. He was . . . he was always hanging around me, coming on to me. Christ, I was sixteen! My dad saw him grab me once, and he blew his top. He said if he ever did anything like that again, he was finished. But he wouldn't stop. No. Then, after Shirley disappeared with the ledger, Big Sal came to our house one night and . . .”

“Wait a second, Vivian, what ledger?”

“Oh, that was part of Shirley's craziness. She started acting weird after Bernie went away, after the scandal. She just couldn't handle the changes. Hah! Like
I
could, right? She kept every birthday card my dad ever gave her, and she came over here one night, with all of them and a whole bunch of office papers and laid them out on the coffee table . . .”

“You don't mean
here
, Vivian, you mean your home, in Brooklyn.”

“Oh, yeah. Anyway, she had the cards, and some diaries of my dad's, and she gave us this, I don't know, some kind of
lecture
about how my dad couldn't have killed himself, and there were papers all around our living room, and my mom, who's not too tightly wrapped to begin with and the doctor had been giving her prescriptions, she fell asleep in the middle of it and there I was, sixteen, trying to follow this crazy woman. She was paranoid, too, she thought people were following her, they were going to kill her if anybody ever found out she had these papers, and that I wasn't supposed to tell anyone. And I didn't. She got fired after that. I guess she must be dead, because I never heard from her again.”

“Okay, go back to when Big Sally came over.”

“Uh-huh. That was a couple of days after Shirley was by. He was really serious and calm, and it was a relief after Shirley, you know, to think someone was in charge. I didn't know who he was or what he did. He was just a businessman, a client of my father's, and he was with Panofsky, so he was all right. And Sal was there, too. My future husband. And they told me that my father
had
been murdered, and they were going to find out who did it and get him. And a few weeks after that they sent a car to get me, after dinner, Little Sal and some of his men. We got the guy, is what they said. And we drove out to south Brooklyn, by the bay. You could smell the ocean, and you could smell the garbage dump, I remember, a sweet, horrible smell, and we went to a big building where they made cement, you could see lines of cement trucks parked outside, and inside the building it was dark except for the one bright light they had on and Big Sal was there and Charlie Tonnati, and they had this guy tied to a chair. They must have burned him. You could smell that burned-feather smell, and gasoline. This was the guy, they said. And Big Sal said, tell her, and the guy started talking, in this soft, tired voice, like he'd just walked a thousand miles, and he said he was from another gang and they wanted to kill Big Sal, and they were trying to get my father to sell him out, because they knew Big Sal trusted my father more than anyone, but my father wouldn't do it. This was up on the deck of the Empire State, where they met, where my dad had his office, and when he wouldn't they dragged him outside and held him over, to frighten him, but he still wouldn't and then they dropped him off.”

She fell silent. Marlene asked, “What was the guy's name?”

“Frank Crespi.”

“Who was he working for?”

“I never found out; they never told me and I didn't ask.”

“And what happened after that?”

“Nothing. They took me home. Nobody ever mentioned Frank Crespi to me again. I guess they killed him. I was glad. Then I had my life, and then this Chinese guy walks in and tells me it was all a lie, that Sal killed my father. I guess the joke's on me. Ha-ha.”

“Did he give you any proof, Vivian?”

She shook her head. “No, but I knew that it was true, and . . . that scared me. I thought I was going crazy, maybe. Maybe I invented this weird Chinese guy. I don't have a happy life, Marlene. Sal found out I'd been out to see somebody, and he asked me who it was and I wouldn't tell him, so he whipped me and put out a cigar on my . . . skin, and . . . did other stuff to me, but I still wouldn't tell him, so he locked me up and took away all my clothes. But I got out a window and called a cab, and came here. Naked came I. Heh. Not a
happy
life. That's why I take a couple of pills once in a while, when I'm a little down. That's why I hired you, to see if there was anything in it. And there is, so . . . now I know. Okay, I told you everything, could I please have my pills back?”