Reckless Endangerment (15 page)

After his first such game that morning, Karp sat against the fence with a towel around his neck, sucking on an icy Yoo-Hoo, enjoying the loose, hot feeling in his limbs and the biting pain in his back teeth, and watching the more athletic contest that was now going on on one of the full courts. His attention was drawn to one of the odd mismatches common in playground games: an Irish-looking man of average height was guarding a black man with five inches on him and a full step of speed. The Irish guy was getting the hell beat out of him, but not as much as he should have, because he stuck to the bigger man like a cocklebur, his teeth gritted with effort. Karp could see the sweat flying off him in sheets, although it was a cool March day. And he was using his brains, psyching out the other man’s fakes, countering to the extent he could the other man’s superior athletic skills. His team lost anyway.

When the man came over to the fence to retrieve a towel he had shoved into the chain-link, Karp said, “Nice game,” and realized that the man was Jim Raney.

“I got creamed,” said Raney, wiping his face. He went out to the snack wagon parked outside the gate and came back with an orange soda.

“I’m surprised to see you here,” Karp remarked as Raney sat down beside him. “I thought you lived in Queens.”

“Just moved this month. I got a deal on a condo in Clinton, or Hell’s Kitchen, as my old man still calls it. He thinks I’m a nut case. ‘Jimmy, what is it, are you broke, have you lost your job?’ They busted their humps to get out to Woodlawn, and here I am going back again. I like being in the city, though.”

“The culture,” Karp said.

Raney laughed. “Yeah. That and ten minutes to work instead of an hour.”

They talked casually for a while, watching the games and commenting on the plays, in the careful, polite way that men do when one of them is a close friend of the wife of the other, as Raney was of Marlene. So, talking in this wary way, with a part of his mind focused on gently pumping the detective a bit about the sequel to the blowup in Roland’s office, and the identity of the floating Arab corpse, a memory rose up like a scrap of dirty paper in the gutters after a rain. Karp snatched at it and said, “Ali something, Ali al something … Haddad mentioned it. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before.”

Raney stared at him. “You mean Ali al-Qabbani?”

Karp smiled and snapped his fingers. “That’s it! I just remembered John Haddad, this city councilman I’m supposed to keep in touch with, mentioned the name to me. He said the kid used to hang with our suspects, and he was missing. So you found somebody who knew him? In Brooklyn?”

“Yeah, it was no big deal,” said Raney. “We went back to the garage where we found the other two, and the owner I.D.’d him off the morgue Polaroid. What did Haddad say about him?”

Karp thought for a moment. “Nothing much that I recall—just about being friendly with the perps and that he disappeared about the time of the Shilkes murder. He hinted pretty broadly that the Jews got him.”

“What, he was thinking retaliation or something?” When Karp agreed, Raney asked, “What’s your take on that?”

“It’s possible but doubtful. This Ali disappeared the night after you picked up his pals, which was the same day as the murder. It would mean some Jewish revenge group found out the names of those assholes about the same time you did, figured out Ali was part of the plot, found him, and popped him in the very slick and professional manner in which he was in fact popped. So the question then becomes, do we have a Jewish revenge group around that’s as stylish as that?”

“Lowenstein?”

Karp shook his head. “The will is probably there at some level, but not the ability. The rabbi likes to run his mouth and organize marches, and he’s got a gang of black hats with clubs and walkie-talkies on neighborhood patrol. Does he have a secret death squad he runs out of a shul? Haddad probably thinks so. I don’t.”

Raney grunted in a noncommittal fashion and filed this away, together with the known fact that Karp was one of them too. He said, “So if not, we’re back to either a personal thing or the famous shadowy terrorist mastermind that Roland hates.”

That was a trailing cloak. Karp put out his large foot. “You sound like you don’t. Hate the idea, I mean.”

“Well, I’ll tell you,” said Raney, “I’ve talked to these mutts. These mutts are followers. Not original minds. They think they’re like, some kind of fucking
soldiers
in this organization nobody ever heard of. Like they’re under orders. They got the literature, the tapes. You ask me, and this is just my opinion, then yeah, somebody set them up, somebody they had no direct contact with, because these guys are not really swift enough to keep the guy out of it if they were pressed. And I did, and zilch. In which case, old Primo’s idea that the mystery guy aced Ali to keep him quiet makes a lot of sense.”

“So the next step is … ?”

Raney yawned and stretched elaborately. Some man on the court called out, asking if he wanted a game, and he stood up and shouted in assent. “The next step … I was thinking I could talk to Walid again, the bakery kid that tipped us. Maybe he’d talk if I could work with that conspiracy charge.”

“That could be in play,” said Karp carefully. It was still Roland’s case. “You think he knows something?”

“Well, he’s a dim bulb, but he used to hang with the late Ali. The problem is, all this is in Brooklyn, and Brooklyn North ain’t got shit to spare for anything but that goddamn shotgun party in Red Hook. You heard about this?”

“Just on the news. It’s Brooklyn. What’s the story?”

“Oh, the usual. Some scumbag waltzed into a joint called Rudy’s and took out six guys and the bartender with a twelve-gauge. Drugs, is what I hear. Rudy’s was a place where guys who handled serious weight hung out. The six of them were in the business, and the bartender wasn’t shy about holding product either. They find the perp, most of Brooklyn North’ll probably pass the hat, give the bastard an award dinner. Look, nice talking to you—anything works out with this bozo, I’ll keep in touch. Give my best to Marlene.”

Raney trotted off. Karp rose creakily, tossed his drink bottle in the trash, and began to walk home. It had been a typical cop interaction, of the give-a-little, get-a-little type. Raney got confirmation of the floater’s connection to Shilkes and a little coverage if he wanted to work around Roland; Karp got some details without having to go through Hrcany. The mention of Marlene at the end there—just sociable, or was he being cute? Karp dismissed it from his mind; he had no jealousy at all in his nature. He thought about the shotgun killing and something nagged at him. Drugs. The Mexican brothers. Maybe a load of dope from a new source, dropped into the dog pit of the city’s great dope exchange—always good for a peck of murders. Had the brothers been in Brooklyn? Had the dead cop Morilla? Something else to look at.

Marlene cooked infrequently, but when she did, she cooked on a heroic scale. Her neighborhood, the area just north of Canal Street, had at one time, before the tony restaurants and galleries made their appearance, been the center of the restaurant-supply business in Manhattan, and Marlene had furnished her kitchen largely with its wares. Two forty-quart cauldrons now bubbled on the vast black Vulcan, one containing a winey beef stew and the other basic tomato sauce. A slightly smaller pot held furiously bubbling water, and on the fourth burner a dozen sweet sausages browned in a fourteen-inch cast-iron skillet, while in the oven roasted a free-range chicken and a pan of veal shins. Marlene herself was in a fine sweat, moving from pot to pot, stirring, prodding, shaking, leaving the stove entirely for strategic seconds while she worked up the filling and the strips for her famous Every Day of the Week Three-Cheese Lasagna, of which she planned to make about half a cubic yard.

Although she lived in the take-out capital of the habitable universe, she refused to surrender her responsibility to provide her family with daily rations of the dense, nourishing, spicy food of her ancestors. And no Progresso-canned cheating either. It also gave her something to talk to her mother and her more domestic sisters and sisters-in-law about, and helped stave off the ever recurring pangs of guilt: children stuffed to bursting with lovingly made lasagna could not be considered neglected, even by a mother who was out a lot and at odd hours and occasionally shot people. She enjoyed, too, generating meals in a fury like this, alone, in charge, juggling ten balls with no audience but her own pride. It was a simpler version of the juggling she did every day: the emergency runs, the court work, the cases, endless cases, the long, slow crawl, like a maggot, through the dead body of romance. In the books and movies the private eyes worked only one case at a time. Marlene would have liked to try that. And they didn’t have nursemaids who needed a day off either. (Marlene imagined Mike Hammer threatening one of his molls with his .45: “You’re not going anywhere, baby. You’re gonna watch these kids or I’ll blow a hole in you big enough to park a grapefruit.”) She tossed the raw lasagna strips into the boiling pot and set her unfailing internal stopwatch for six and a half minutes.

Marlene suddenly stopped what she was doing and cocked a suspicious ear. The living room was quiet. Too quiet, as your regular private eye was fond of saying. She put down her spoon and rushed out the door.

The TV was still on, purveying the usual mercantile indoctrination and cultural mores in the form of cartoons, but the twins were no longer propped drooling on the couch, happily rotting their minds, a dodge Marlene used only in the last extremity, as now. Murmurs emanated from beneath a side table. She stooped.

“What’re you doing, boys?” she asked and then, seeing what they were doing, she made an ungraceful dive and dragged Zak out from under. All the baseboard electrical outlets were, of course, baby-proofed to the technological limit, but Zak had gotten hold of a teaspoon and had nearly managed to pry the gadget off. Interrupted in his quest for a 110-volt surprise, he squalled.

She hauled him into the kitchen. He made his objection known and turned pale blue. Zik followed under his own power. She plonked them both down under the table, set out some unneeded utensils for them to play with, scooped up some dough, sculpted two spiders, as nearly identical as she could make them, sat on the floor, invented a game involving the spiders, and a spider playground made up of bowls and spoons and strainers, sang “Itsy-Bitsy Spider” in a maniacal voice several times, and, with thirty seconds to spare, grabbed the lasagna pot and tottered over to the sink to drain it. At which point the intercom buzzed.

“Yeah?” Marlene snarled into the little box.

“D’Agostino’s,” said a cracking voice.

“That you, Robby?”

“Yo.”

She pressed the red button that activated the outside elevator and heard the rattling thump of the mechanism spring to life. Check the oven, baste the chicken, turn the veal shanks. Turn down the beef stew, a little water, a little salt in the sauce, uncork the Gallo, cup of burgundy for the stew and a cup for the cook, Marlene’s usual breakdown. Knock on the door.

Robby, a muscular youth with a ponytail and a team jacket that read HOLY FAMILY on the back, dropped a heavy carton on the floor of the kitchen. He looked around, stated that the place smelled real good, asked after Posie, took his tip, and left.

Marlene started to assemble the lasagna, alternating layers of fresh tomato sauce, chopped sausage, the cheeses, and the broad noodles. This was a curiously sensuous activity, requiring little dexterity, allowing the hands the comfort of immersion in warm food, food her family would consume, that would turn eventually into more child substance, that would fuel the enterprise of the family toward whatever fate awaited it. Although the various timers governing the other dishes she was preparing were still ticking away in her skull, this was the nearest thing to a break she had had in hours. She took another swallow of the indifferent red, and thought vaguely about what to have with the chicken tonight and whether she had it together enough to bake something.

Then an unearthly shriek burst through her reverie and she shot to her feet, hands dripping red like Lady Macbeth’s. The boys, Zak actually, had managed to strip the top off a box of frosted flakes from the delivery carton and had spread them liberally over the floor, himself, and his twin. Zak was holding the box; Zik was wailing and holding his face. Further investigation was not necessary—this happened at least several times a day—Zik, the junior twin (by four minutes) always grabbed and Zak always slugged him with whatever object was at hand, in this case the cereal box, whose hard corner must have caught Zik on his tender cheek.

As she alternately cooed and kissed the boo-boo away, while staring daggers at her older son and chastising him, Marlene once again experienced that tremor of doubt that underlay her rearing of these two aliens. Where did it come from, that signal that made them crazy? It’s always the mother, of course, the one who gets to sit calmly in the courtroom while Junior faces the music, but how does it happen? Marlene had seen it often enough in her work, the boys of mothers who got beat up become men who beat up women, and even acquired the added skill, more often than not, of finding women who would take it. Who even sort of liked it. A feminist heresy that, but she’d seen it, every cop had seen it—he’s pounding her pretty good and the cop steps in to break it up and what does she do? She goes and cracks a vase on the cop’s head. Not on the guy’s head, the cop’s head. The Valone woman, for example, heading for corpse-hood with a song (“My Man”?) in her heart, what to do about that, if anything, and Zik, sniff-sniff, need a diaper change—amazing, identical genes and they both ate the same stuff at the same time, but never did their diapers need changing simultaneously—and Oh, Christ! the oven …

She spun, still clutching Zik, and raced for the stove, slipping on masticated frosted flakes, banging her knee painfully against the table leg, put the child down, opened the oven, body-checking to keep Zik from the flames, grabbed a fork, rescued the roasting shanks (barely), at which point the dog, who had been lurking, waiting its chance, romped forward to scarf up the cereal, knocking down Zak with its mighty tail, who fell with a coconut-knocking sound to the hard floor and set up a howl, which got Zik started up again, of course. At that moment the door sprang open and Karp walked in, invigorated from his sport, and said brightly, “Wow, that smells good! When’s dinner?”