Bad Faith

16

“Taking Gilgamesh out for a walk, babe,” Marlene called out over her shoulder as her 150-pound presa canario guard dog bounded around her legs like a puppy. When Karp didn’t answer, she turned around to where he was sitting on the couch in the living room of their loft, apparently lost in thought. “Butch?”

Karp looked up suddenly as if he’d been dreaming. “What?”

“Dog. Walk,” Marlene replied, holding up a leash.

“Oh, uh, no, thanks,” he said absently, then pointed at the papers on the coffee table in front of him. “I want to look these over again.”

Marlene sighed inwardly. She knew he was referring to the detective investigative reports, known as DD-5s, from the murder of David Ellis, which included the shooting of ADA Kenny Katz and subsequent killing of the shooter, Kathryn Boole, by one of the Reverend C. G. Westlund’s bodyguards, Frank Bernsen.

What a week it had been for the media. First there were the shootings in front of the courthouse, which had been followed by a whirlwind of stories and editorials, some of which had even blamed her husband’s insistence that the Ellises be tried for fostering the environment that pushed Kathryn Boole over the edge. Of course, Westlund had picked up on the theme and run with it.

The shootings had been followed two days later by the bizarre killings of a notorious Russian hit man, Boris Kazanov, and two of his known associates on the boardwalk along Brighton Beach. According to the medical examiner’s report, Kazanov had been cut dozens of times, none of them fatal, “but enough to cause the victim to lose a significant amount of blood while still living.” The fatal wound had nearly severed his head.

If that hadn’t been weird enough, one of the other victims-a man with a rap sheet as long as he was tall-had suffered a broken neck and crushed larynx. The coroner’s report had noted bruising on the victim’s neck, “consistent with finger and thumb marks left by a human hand … a very large human hand.” And, perhaps the oddest death of the three, the last victim had been pierced by three arrows, “any one of which would have been fatal,” according to the ME.

Curious, Marlene had called Butch’s cousin Ivgeny Karchovski, a Russian gangster living in Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach, to ask if he might know something about the murders that the newspapers weren’t reporting. Although involved in illegal activites, especially smuggling Eastern Bloc and Russian immigrants into the country and bootleg caviar and furs, Karchovski did not deal in drugs, weapons, or prostitution, which made him okay in her book. He carried on his business quietly and without bloodshed unless threatened, at which point the former Russian Army colonel could be quite ruthless with his competitors.

“If it was a gang hit, no one is taking responsibility for it,” Ivgeny told her. “It is good riddance though to a brutal monster, but it would take some-how do you Americans say … gonads to take on Kazanov and his men. To be honest, I think he must have pissed off a madman to have met such a fate.”

Marlene had told her husband what his cousin said, but his response had been, “It’s the Brooklyn DAO’s problem.” It was an atypically short retort for him, but she understood that his mind was on the shooting-and Westlund.

Obviously the trial had been postponed. One of the defendants was dead; the other, Nonie Ellis, who remained out on bail, had been hospitalized for acute depression and was basically incommunicado. And the lead prosecutor had suffered a gunshot wound to the shoulder.

Katz had been fortunate that the bullet had passed through his shoulder, nicking bone but missing the major blood vessels and nerves. He’d been released from the hospital two days after the shooting, and although he’d been ordered home for several more days’ bed rest, he’d appeared in the office that afternoon ready to discuss how to proceed. But that still had not been decided.

Marlene knew that Butch was torn over what to do. The legal justification behind the original reckless-manslaughter charge still applied to Nonie Ellis. But her husband was a compassionate man who believed in tempering justice with mercy, and it grieved him that the woman had not only lost her son but now her husband.

What to do about Nonie Ellis wasn’t the only aspect of the shootings that troubled her husband. On the surface, Boole’s actions appeared to confirm Gilbert Murrow’s fears. A mentally unhinged follower of Westlund had snapped and acted upon his virulent rhetoric.

However, Butch thought there was more behind it. “I understand why she chose to shoot at Guma and Katz, and then me,” he’d told her earlier that evening. “Westlund has pretty much painted us as devils incarnate to his followers. But her first target was Ellis, and that bothers me. Apparently, she must have heard that he planned to plead guilty, and I guess I can see that Boole would view that as a denunciation of her guru. But was that enough to scream ‘Judas’ and gun David down in front of a courthouse in broad daylight and then start blasting away at us? I wonder if Westlund and his henchmen were aware that David Ellis was going to give a Q amp; A statement.” He’d tapped the yellow legal pad he always carried with him when dissecting the facts surrounding a case. “I’d give a year’s salary to know what Ellis was going to say.”

According to the police reports, Boole had not left any written or verbal statements to indicate her thinking in the hours and days before she acted. She lived in a small apartment near the Avenue A building and apparently didn’t have a computer, so there were no e-mails, nor were there handwritten notes. “The apartment was clean,” Fulton had told Karp, “almost too clean, but the homicide guys got there pretty damn quick and sealed it off. No one would have had time to sanitize it.”

“At least not after the shooting,” Karp added.

Karp had been particularly incensed that Westlund had profited from Boole’s death. She apparently owned the building that housed the End of Days Reformation Church of Jesus Christ Resurrected, as well as the preacher’s living quarters, and she’d left it all to him, in addition to the rest of her estate.

“Well, wasn’t that convenient for him,” Marlene said. “A win-win. The trial goes away, maybe. David Ellis is dead so whatever he was going to say went with him to the grave, and so does the opportunity to ask Boole, a middle-aged widow with no prior record, why she decided to commit murder. To top it all off, he gets her building, which has to be worth a ton, plus her money.”

“And a life insurance policy made out to him,” Karp added, clenching his jaw. “And where’d she get the gun? It was unregistered, with no fingerprints on it except for hers.”

Westlund’s bodyguard Frank Bernsen had been arrested at the scene. But as he’d claimed immediately after the shooting, he had a concealed-weapons license and had acted to prevent Boole from shooting Karp. The police reports bore out his version of events: that after shooting Ellis and Katz, Boole had turned her gun on Karp; when, after first lowering it, she’d raised it again as if to fire, Bernsen shot first.

Initial reports had not turned up much on Bernsen. He’d apparently served in the military and had a few misdemeanor assaults and a DUI, but no felonies-which would have prevented him from getting a concealed-weapons permit-and no prison time.

Marlene was glad that Bernsen had pulled the trigger, or she might have been a widow. But she knew that didn’t make her husband feel any better about the woman’s death.

There was even less on Westlund than Bernsen. All they knew was that he was originally from West Virginia and had worked as a coal miner until apparently deciding to become a minister. His “divinity degree” was of the mail-order variety, but there were no laws against that.

“You think he was behind it,” Marlene said before Gilgamesh let her know that it was time to go out for his last walk of the night.

“Believing someone is factually guilty of a crime doesn’t mean I have the evidence to do anything about it,” he’d replied, citing the mantra of his office. “But someday, I’d like nothing better than to make that son of a bitch pay for this.”

“We’ll be back in a half hour,” Marlene said, but her husband had already gone back to looking at the DD-5s, so she opened the door and took the elevator down to the street-level exit.

As she left the building with Gilgamesh and turned north to walk up Crosby, Marlene became aware that a shadowy figure on the other side of the street was walking in the same direction. She paused when the person began to cross.

“Marlene Ciampi?” a woman’s voice inquired. She was dressed in a dark hooded sweatshirt that shadowed her face.

Marlene looked down at Gilgamesh, who was attentive and watching the stranger, but he wasn’t growling or giving any other signal that he sensed danger. She decided to go with her dog’s intuition.

“Yes,” she replied. “And who are you?”

The woman stopped between two cars parked next to the curb near where Marlene stood. She looked up and down the block and then pulled back the hood of her sweatshirt. “My name is Nonie Ellis,” she said. “I believe you know who I am.”

Marlene’s jaw dropped. “I thought you were in-”

“In the hospital.” Ellis finished the sentence. “I was. They let me out this evening.”

“Why-”

“Am I talking to you? Because I think there are some things your husband should know about C. G. Westlund.”

Marlene pointed to her loft building. “Apparently you know where we live,” she said. “Butch-my husband-is upstairs. Why don’t you come talk to him yourself?”

Ellis shook her head. “I’m scared,” she replied. “I think Westlund got Kathryn Boole to kill my husband. But I’m not going to testify against him. You can investigate what I tell you, and I hope you and your husband can do something with it. But when we’re done talking, I’m leaving town.”

“I’m pretty sure the terms of your bail require you to remain in the city,” Marlene noted.

“It does, but I don’t care,” Ellis replied. “I’m going.”

“My husband would see that you’re placed in protective custody,” Marlene argued. “You’d be safe.”

“And if your investigation couldn’t prove that Westlund was guilty of anything, or he got off? I think he’d kill me, too. At least this way, I’ll get a head start.”

“I could stop you,” Marlene said. “My dog would hold you here until the cops arrive.”

“But you won’t,” Ellis said. “I read an article about you … about how you’ve helped other women. And how you don’t always follow the rules.”

She’s got me there, Marlene thought. “So what do you want to tell me?”

“Not here,” Ellis said, again looking up and down the block. “I tried to be careful coming over, but I may have been followed. Is there somewhere we could go?”

Marlene pointed farther up the block. “The Housing Works Bookstore is open,” she said. “They serve a mean cup of coffee and there are some private nooks where we’d know if someone else came in. After we’re done, you can sneak out the back way.”

An hour and a half later, Marlene walked back in the front door of her family home. Her husband looked up as she took off her coat and hat.

“There you are,” he said. “I was getting worried …” Suddenly he stopped. He knew the look on her face spelled trouble. “What’s up?”

It took about forty-five minutes for Marlene to tell him what Nonie Ellis had said, and another twenty minutes for him to run out of questions as he took notes. At last he set his pencil down on the legal pad and sat back on the couch.

“It’s a start,” Karp said. “Of course, it all needs to be checked out and expanded before I can take it to a grand jury. I’ll get Clay to-”

“I’m going to Memphis,” Marlene interrupted. “That son of a bitch, as you so rightly labeled him, has done this to other people. I know it.”

Karp shook his head. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he said. “This is a police matter.”

Marlene wasn’t having it. “You send detectives down there and it’s a fishing expedition,” she said. “Westlund, or LaFontaine if that’s his real name, will go to the press and raise hell about your trying to crucify him. I need to try to find some of these other people, and they’ll talk to me more than they will a cop.”

“You know I have to pick up Nonie Ellis,” he said. “I need to get a statement from her and get her to testify against Westlund.”

“Good luck,” Marlene said. “No telling which way she went after we finished. And besides, this is my case; she asked me to look into it. I’m a private investigator and that’s what I’m going to do.”

They argued a little longer, then their eyes locked. Karp knew that there was no way to stop her, so he reached out to hug her and whispered in her ear, “Say hi to Elvis for me, and be careful.”