Resolved

12

There was something wrong with the air conditioning in Part 34. The temperature outside the grimy windows was moving toward eighty, and inside the packed courtroom the ambiance was approaching that of the midsummer subway at rush hour. They brought in two large fans at Judge Higbee's order, so that it was like standing in front of the kitchen exhaust of a deli, without the greasy smell.

Karp didn't mind the heat particularly, although he noticed that Roland Hrcany was a little more red-faced than usual. He actually felt sorriest for the jury, who were fanning themselves with their instructional pamphlets: "Your Jury Duty, An American Privilege." The defendants didn't seem to be sweating at all. Perhaps they had rolled in Arrid.

But on the stand, Hugo Selwyn also seemed to be feeling the heat. He had a big bandanna out and often mopped his face with it, establishing a certain Inherit the Wind tone. The ballistics expert was a big man, in his mid-sixties, with a thick mop of silvery curls, like a cartoon senator, a bolo tie, and a powder blue three-piece suit. With his solid jaw and canny blue gaze, he looked like central casting had sent him over to play an expert witness. Karp imagined he garnered a good deal of his custom off his looks, that and his willingness to provide an expert opinion favorable to the defense, whatever the ascertainable facts might be. Selwyn had been on the stand once already, before the bomb had knocked both Collins and Klopper out, during which time the defense had been at pains to establish the man as a legitimate ballistics expert, and, according to the transcript Karp had carefully read, Collins had done a good job painting him in whore's colors.

Roland had a big easel set up next to the witness stand, upon which a gigantic color diagram of the crime scene, generated by a computer, Karp imagined, with the positions of Gerber, Nixon, and the victim, Onabajo, marked out according to the defense's theory of the case. The trajectory and final fate of the seven bullets also appeared, each bullet's path marked with a different color. Karp thought it was an effective chart, if largely fictional, and thought it was clever to use a computer diagram instead of a photograph, which was what Collins had used when he presented the state's version. There was a lot of blood in the photograph, a lot more than you saw even in slasher movies. That was one of the big shocks of real-life crime, just how much blood got spilled in a fatal shooting. The defense did not wish to draw attention to the blood.

Roland was taking the old fraudster through the expert testimony with his usual skill. Seven bullets, and they each had names by now. On a smaller easel off to one side, but well within the jury's view, was a photographic blowup of all seven, lined up like little soldiers, and exhibiting various states of deformation. They were all Federal 115-grain jacketed hollow-point nine-millimeter bullets, two fired from Nixon's Smith amp; Wesson Model 915 and five from Gerber's Ruger P89, and those that had hit something solid had turned into little mushrooms. Roland asked his expert to explain how each bullet had ended up where the cops had found it. Bullet one (B-1), the jury learned, had exploded from Detective Nixon's pistol while it was pointed seventeen degrees below the horizontal, entering the body of the assailant…

"Objection," said Karp. "Mr. Onabajo is not the assailant in this case. He is the victim. Mr. Gerber, the defendant, may be called the assailant if counsel so wishes."

"Sustained," said the judge. "Modify your question, counsel."

The body of Mr. Onabajo, then; it had glanced off Mr. Onabajo's hip bone, exited Mr. Onabajo's body, ricocheted off a fire hydrant, and buried itself in the tire of a parked vehicle. Was the position of the muzzle of the pistol consistent with struggling over the weapon? Could Mr. Onabajo's hand have been on the weapon when it was fired?

Objection from Karp. Calls for conclusion outside the alleged expertise of the witness. Sustained. Roland objected to the use of the word "alleged." Judge told Karp to watch it.

Karp sat down feeling fairly good about this first tapping of the foils. It was going to be an interesting trial, an enjoyable trial actually, if that wasn't the wrong word to use about any participation in this hideous disaster. Roland and he had been trained in the same school, were about equal in skill and knowledge, and were meeting as adversaries for the first time, the difference being that Roland really wanted to crush Karp, and Karp did not particularly care about Roland. He wanted to get Gerber and Nixon, though.

The rest of Selwyn's testimony went off without objection. Roland knew how to phrase questions well enough, and Karp was never a lawyer to load on purely tactical objections designed to break the flow of the witnesses' narratives. He'd take care of Mr. Selwyn on cross. The only thing preventing Karp from being as happy as he ever got in a professional setting was that nagging thought- he had missed something, and it had to do with the bullets in some way, and unless he thought of it pretty soon, it would be too late to insert into the trial.

At three that afternoon, Marlene prepares to leave her loft for the purposes of placing under surveillance the residence of Bruce Newton, the cousin- according to the New York State Department of Corrections- of the late Felix Tighe. Her boys, with whom she had been spending a rare maternal day, are not pleased.

"Can we come?" asks Zak.

"No, it's work. I'll be back in two hours. And Lucy will be home soon."

"It's okay, Zak," says the brother, "we need to see Bogart and get some more skag. We're almost out and I don't want to have to kick cold turkey again."

"Yeah, right," Zak agrees, "But we have to knock over a convenience store first to get paid. Or we could sell your body in the West Village."

"Whatever," says Giancarlo, smiling angelically at his mother.

"I hate both of you," says Marlene. "It was a mistake to have you, and you're both going to foster care the minute I get back." She marches toward the door and trips over her dog, who rises in her path for just that purpose. The boys laugh cruelly.

"Oh, all right!" she snarls. "You can come."

Giancarlo says, "See, I told you, she loves the dog more than us."

"You're darn tooting, I do," says Marlene, "he's more useful and he's a lot cheaper to feed." She strikes like a snake, grabs both of them and kisses them both wetly on the cheeks, as they squirm and howl their disgust.

"Honestly," says Marlene in the descending elevator. "Did you ever hear such mouthing off? I was like the perfect mother all day. Jelly omelets and Canadian bacon for brekkie. A special trip to the video store for kung-fu movies. I mean, really! What would you do?"

Their flesh would feel the grip of my mighty fangs, snarls the dog.

"Oh, shut up!" says his mistress. "You only say that because you're not a mother."

Marlene keeps her Ford 150 pickup in a lot on Grand. She has her key ring out and is just about to push the little button that switches off the alarm, when Gog the mastiff barks twice. She freezes and looks at the dog. Gog practically never barks, and when he does, it is only in particular situations, as when warning someone off an area he has been instructed to guard, but that bark is a different bark from the one he now utters. This one is higher-pitched, with a little whine at the end. Chill flashes over Marlene's body. She stares at her truck, then at her dog, then spins on her heel and dashes out of the parking lot, fumbling for her cell phone as she runs.

Lucy saw the flashing lights as she crossed Grand at Broadway, and without thinking, began trotting toward the scene, with the pounding starting in her chest. It never occurred to her that a police emergency might be happening on her corner without her family being in some serious way involved. The cordon had been thrown quite wide around the parking lot at Grand and Crosby, the reason for that explained by the characteristic shape of the bomb squad containment vessel truck. She shouldered through the dense crowd- all the neighboring buildings had been evacuated, obviously- and then worked around the police lines until she spotted her brothers and her mother. Her mother was talking to a man in a NYPD hardhat and a white Tyvek suit.

"Mom! What's going on?" Lucy asked.

Giancarlo answered. "The Manbomber tried to bomb Mom's truck."

"You have to be kidding!"

"No lie," said Zak. "Gog sniffed it before Mom got into the truck."

"Mah-um!" cried Lucy.

Marlene broke away from her conversation with the detective and approached her daughter, who embraced her enthusiastically.

"We don't know it's the Manbomber yet, and what's with the hugs?" said Marlene. "Are you getting married?"

"No, Mom, it's my natural reaction when you're nearly blown to bits. It's allowed. Check out the Good Daughter's Handbook, page twenty-four."

"Please, I've already been blown up once. It can't happen again. Ask Lieutenant Tancredi here."

The cop, a heavyset man with a fat brush moustache, rolled an eye. "She's right. There's practically no one gets blown up by a bomb more than once."

"I bet it was the Manbomber," said Zak. "We're going to be famous."

"Not if I can help it," said Marlene, and to the cop, "Lieutenant, when can I have my truck back?"

"Couple of hours, maybe. CSU has to dust, and then they got to stand around hoping that a clue will turn up, the bastard dropped a matchbook with the name of a nightclub on it, and a phone number on the inside."

"It was definitely the guy, though?"

A raised eyebrow. "You didn't hear it from me, but yeah. Hell, even your little kid knows it's him." He grinned at Zak, then said to Marlene, ungrinning. "We're going to have to talk."

"Well, you know where to find me. Let's go, kids, show's over."

It was. The bomb truck rolled away, the blue-and-whites cranked up and moved out of barricade position, the technicians and detectives departed, as did the throng. Soon the only police presence that remained was clustered around Marlene's pickup truck, which was still marked off from the rest of the lot by yellow crime-scene tape.

The Karp family went back to their loft. Lucy had to spend a good deal of time being loved by her dog, Magog, who had been sleeping under her bed while she was gone. Marlene observed them rolling around on the floor with a professional eye. "They're not supposed to be one-man dogs like that, but Maggie sure is. How did you manage it?"

"She's a freak of nature like me," said Lucy, kissing the huge black muzzle. "Aren't you? Aren't you? Yes, you are."

Marlene did not call Lucy on the freak business, as she had reflexively in the past. They were past that, it seemed, and Lucy had, after the spontaneous embrace down on the street, slipped into the correct formality she had used with her mother since the grim events of the previous summer. Marlene studied the girl. She looked good; there was a glow coming off her as she laughed and played with the dog. She wondered if she had at long last become Dan Heeney's lover, and had opened her mouth to say something that would move them back into the intimacy they had once shared, but the words stuck in her throat. She went into the kitchen and poured out a glass of Barolo. She could have a glass of wine, she thought; she had almost been killed.

A buzz from the intercom: it was Lieutenant Tancredi from the Manbomber task force, and could he come up. The detective had shed his helmet and white suit, and was now in a short-sleeved blue shirt and tie and a wilted cotton jacket. He was accompanied by a younger cop named Fox. She installed them on stools in her kitchen, poured them iced tea, and another glass of wine for herself.

They did an interview. The central questions involved the other victims. Tancredi showed her a short stack of sheets they had made up, a little picture of a dead person, a name, a description. Marlene pointed to Pete Balducci's image. "I knew him. We were friends."

"Pete Balducci," said Tancredi. "Yeah, I knew him, too. A shame. No one else?"

"Some of the other people were involved in the criminal justice business and I knew them by rep or we had some casual contact. Klopper, Horowitz, this Daoud guy was the father of a girl I knew once." This was not the time to bring up Felix Tighe and Raney's odd obsession. See the cousin first.

"Uh-huh, well, that's not unusual, then. Everyone seems to know a victim or someone who knew a victim. It hasn't added up to anything yet. So- anything at all, anyone you know who'd want to put a bomb in your car? Assuming it wasn't, that all of these aren't, totally random?"

"To kill me? Are you serious?"

The cop put on a mollifying smile. "Well, we have to ask."

"Dozens. Scores."

A frown. "No, I meant I am serious."

"So am I. You don't know who I am?"

"No, who are you, ma'am?"

"I used to be a PI. I shot a few people, and messed up a larger number, mostly guys who wanted to beat up their women friends. I discouraged stalkers as a profession. On the other hand, I can't really think that any of them blew up half the city in order to disguise a hit on me. It's a little overelaborate, even for a stalker."

"Why don't you let us be the judge of that. I'd like to have a list of names and addresses."

"Sure. Just a second."

She rose from her stool and disappeared into the loft, returning a minute later with a set of laser-printed sheets. Tancredi looked at them, his forehead knotting.

"What is this?"

"Like it says up there, a list of people who would not be unhappy if I died violently, and might be inclined to do the job themselves. Oh, you thought I'd have to scratch my head over a yellow pad? No, I've been adding to it over the years and I kept it where it'd be found if I got killed." She watched as he glanced through the names.

"Any of these you like especially for this?" he asked, passing the list to his partner. Fox looked through it and stared at her, with either horror or wonder.

"Not really." She realized she had never crossed Felix Tighe's name off. Again, it was on the tip of her tongue to lay out the theory, but the flaws in it dissuaded her. Ridiculous when you thought about it. Tighe wasn't a bomber. He was a knife artist. He liked to get close. She added, "Some of them might be dead or out of town, though. You'll find out. And, look, if there's nothing else, I got an appointment in Queens. Can I get to my truck now?"

When the policemen left, Marlene had a minor nervous breakdown. It came upon her unexpectedly as she poured another glass of wine. Her hand started to shake. It shook the glass right out of it, to shatter in the sink, and she could hardly put the bottle down without knocking it over. Then she started shaking all over, like a malaria victim. She tried to sit on a chair and knocked it over instead, and finally collapsed against the stove, with strange, honking hoots coming out of her mouth and tears gushing from her eyes.

Her daughter found her like this. Without wasting any time on hysterics of her own- for the more extreme mental states were no strangers chez Karp- she got the mom seated in a chair and a roll of paper towels handy for sopping up the leakage, and sat next to her with her arm across Marlene's shoulders. When she was sufficiently recovered to make words again, she said, "I wasn't going to take the dog. I could've taken the kids. You know how they run ahead and jump into the truck when I pop the locks. They would have both… both of them…" More weeping. Then, "I have to go. I have to go out."

"Mom, sit down. You're not fit to go anywhere."

"No, this was the capper. It wasn't a random bomb. It's Felix Tighe."

"Who?"

"A case. Before you were born. He was a kind of violent con man, a psychopath. He used to get next to women, move in on them. Strip their assets, dominate them. He liked to torture them, too. One of the girlfriends complained and he beat her up, and the woman in the next apartment called the cops. He came back later and slashed her to pieces along with her little boy."

"She was one of your clients? The victim?"

"No, not at all. I never met her. It was one of your dad's big cases. He convicted Felix and sent him away, twenty-five to life."

"So this is because Dad convicted him? And how did he get to be the bomber? Or escape from jail?"

Marlene looked at her daughter, who had an expression on her face that no parent likes to see, the one that comes before "Gee, Mom, maybe you ought to see somebody."

"I'm not crazy, Lucy," she said and proceeded to relate Jim Raney's theory of the Manbomber case, adding the information about the way Mary Chalfonte and her little girl had died. "And this just now, like I said, is the capper. Only he's dead, which is why I have to go see the cousin."

Unlike most children, Lucy didn't ask for an explanation of this seeming paradox. Instead, she said, "You're not going out of this house by yourself."

"What!"

"What I said. Look at you, you're still shaking."

"I am not!" Marlene protested, holding out her hand, which fluttered like a pennant in a stiff breeze.

At that moment, they heard the elevator door thump open, and a moment later the sound of the loft door opening.

"Good! Dad can watch the boys," said Lucy, as she snatched the truck keys up from where the cop had laid them.

The drive to Hampton Street in Elmhurst, Queens, took a good long time, as it was nearly the height of rush hour. Lucy drove: the Midtown Tunnel, Roosevelt Avenue, Elmhurst Avenue, and the street itself, a row of asphalt-shingled or aluminum-sided two-story semidetached houses with tiny front yards, under maples and sycamores in dense leaf. The streets were spotted with men and women coming home from work, and others going to work, and children playing noisily. The people here were Asians of various flavors, and Latin Americans.

The yard on the one they wanted was unkempt: weeds shot up among the deep mulch of last year's leaf fall. The blinds were closed on the front windows.

"Wait here," said Marlene.

"You're sure you're all right?"

"Yeah, I'm fine. I just want to talk to this guy."

"Okay, but if you're not out of there in twelve hours, I'm calling nine-one-one."

Marlene forced a chuckle and went through the chain-link gate and up the cracked walk.

Ding dong.

The door was hauled open and the guy who opened it did the sort of double take you get when someone expects a caller and gets someone else. He was wearing greasy gray canvas work pants, a sleeveless undershirt (with gold chain and shiny crucifix), and a black ball cap with a Rangers logo on it, bill cocked to the side. He had a broad, high-cheeked tan face, coarse black hair spattered with little white grains, and a drooping Fu Manchu moustache and short beard.

Marlene said, "Hi, I was wondering if Bruce Newton was home?"

The man started to close the door. "No hable inglйs."

"But we speak Spanish," said Marlene in that tongue, making beckoning motions. Lucy got out of the truck. "My daughter speaks it very well," she promised. This statement virtually exhausted her colloquial Spanish, although she could follow simple conversation fairly well.

Marlene explained to Lucy what was required. Lucy asked the man if Bruce Newton were available.

"Who're you?" the man asked.

"We're working with the corrections department, checking up on some things. Don't worry, he's not in any trouble." She tried a smile, which was not returned. "Is Mr. Newton at home?"

"No, he's away. On a trip. Business."

"But this is his residence, yes?"

"Yes. But he's not here now."

"When will he be back, do you know?"

"No. Month, two months. I don't know."

Marlene said, "Ask him about the funeral."

Lucy said, "Yes, excuse me, Mr…"

A pause. "Gonzales."

"Mr. Gonzales. Did Mr. Newton attend a funeral recently? His cousin Felix?"

"Yes. They sent the body to the funeral home and he went there. They cremated him."

"Ask him what funeral home," hissed Marlene, but when Lucy did so, the man professed ignorance. "In the neighborhood, I don't know. He wasn't my cousin, you know?"

Marlene thanked the man, who went back behind his door. The two women returned to the Ford. Lucy drove away. After half a block, Marlene said, "Pull over here."

Lucy did so. "What now?"

"What did you think?"

"Of Mr. Maybe Gonzales? Not forthcoming. Why? Maybe he's got fifteen Salvadorans back there with one green card between them. He's a working stiff, though. He had pipe grease and plumber's dope on his pants, and concrete dust in his hair, too. Construction plumbing, I'd say. Also, he's not a Latino himself."

"No? What is he?"

"I don't know. His Spanish is fluent enough, but still a second language. And it's not a Latin American accent. He's a Spaniard, or someone who was raised in Spain but was originally from somewhere else."

"That's very impressive, Lucy."

Lucy polished her knuckles on her breastbone and blew across them. "Language is ma game."

"Yes, but you got he was bent and that he was a plumber. And if you go into detective work, I'll break your knees for you."

"It's too late, Ma." Laughing.

"We'll see about that. So, you can't tell where he comes from? From the accent?"

"Not offhand. If I had a tape, maybe I could."

"Let's get one, then," said Marlene, pulling a microrecorder from her bag. "Come on!"

With that, she was out of the truck and heading down to the Newton-Mr. Maybe Gonzales residence, with Lucy following. They slipped down the side alley between that house and its neighbor, crouching low so as not to be spotted from any of the windows. These were all wide open because of the heat, and they could hear sounds coming from the houses on either side- an argument in Spanish, a pop song in the same language playing on a radio, and from the kitchen window of the Gonzales house the dull roar of a fan. And talking. Marlene lifted an eye to the corner where sill met window frame. Gonzales was on the kitchen phone, his back to the window. She held up the microrecorder and pushed the button. The conversation went on for some time, the man speaking nervously in a language Marlene had never heard, which was not going to be a problem because here was Lucy with all the answers in that department.

But when they were back at the truck and Marlene asked, Lucy said, "I have no idea."

"What? Why not?"

"Because there are around sixty-five hundred languages spoken on this planet, and I can speak fifty or so with some fluency and can identify maybe fifty more, and those are only the really common ones. There are hundreds of languages that I've never even heard, each one of them spoken by millions of people. On the other hand I can probably make some guesses."

"Like…?"

"Well, clearly not in the top forty, because I know all those. Not an Indo-European, not Asian. Could be an Amerindian tongue or something out of Africa- I would guess Africa, because, like I said, his Spanish isn't really American, plus I have a gut feeling it's in the Afro-Asiatic family. The gutturals, the dentalized t's, the glottal stops, the voiced implosives…"

"I thought you just said it wasn't Asian."

"No, Afro-Asiatic takes in north Africa and the Middle East- Arabic, Hebrew, Amharic, like that."

"That guy could have been an Arab, huh?"

"I don't know about that, but he probably wasn't Gonzales from San Salvador. I'd figure a guy from the Middle East who grew up in Spain."

"I'd like it if he was an Arab. Bombs and Arabs go together in my mind, I'm afraid."

"Yes, racism is alive and well in New York," said Lucy. "Give me the tape. I'll play it for some people and we'll find out."

They drove back to the city. Marlene smoked one Marlboro after another, which was something she did not often do, and never did out at the dog farm. It's working at this again, she thought, it's not good for me. I should be happy, getting somewhere with this case, getting along with my daughter, but all I can think of is I'm back in the salty soup and something awful is going to happen to the kids because of it.

"What's wrong, Mom," Lucy asked, after they had driven almost to the tunnel in virtual silence.

"Nothing," Marlene said. "I'm just a little tired. You can slip in there behind that bus."

Felix was in the crowd that watched the removal of the bomb from Marlene's truck. He wore a Caterpillar cap pulled down low on his forehead and wrap-around sunglasses, and blue mechanic's overalls with the sleeves hacked off and Larry embroidered in red on the breast. He watched the bomb squad work with interest as they x-rayed the bomb and then did some things he couldn't see, because they set up screens for the guy in the Kevlar suit to work behind. In any case, the thing didn't go off and they placed it successfully into the bomb vessel and drove it away. It was a shame there wasn't a dual circuit on the thing, Felix thought, radio and trembler, because then he could've set it off and watched the bomb guy fly through the air.

The bitch had escaped, however, and he had to call Rashid and tell him about it, which he didn't really feel like doing, because the little fuck would carry on like it was the end of the world and Felix's fault. Seeking to delay the confrontation a little, he walked up Broadway to West Houston, found a coffee shop, slipped into the john, swallowed a handful of pills, drank a cup of coffee, and then went to the pay phone he'd spotted in the narrow alley near the restrooms.

To Felix's surprise, however, Rashid listened calmly to the story. He asked about the dog and then said, "A bomb dog, interesting. Who could have imagined she would own a bomb dog. In any case, it is no big thing. We will succeed another time. But it is important that you come here right away."

"What, your place?"

"Yes, immediately."

"What's up?"

"Immediately," said Rashid in a harsher voice and then hung up.

Felix slammed the phone down and karate-kicked it a couple of times, leaving it askew on the wall. He went out into the street and walked aimlessly north, keeping up a rapid pace, pounding the anger out of his system. It was really important to remain perfectly calm just now, plan it out. Being a nigger's nigger was something Felix simply could not bear for another minute. He thought he could, but no; it made him too crazy, and he could not afford to be crazy anymore, not hanging out like this, with no resources, carrying explosives around. All it would take was one cop… no, it had to stop.

He got to Sixth and walked uptown. Before long, he passed the window of a kitchenware shop, stopped short, examined the display, and went in. There he purchased an eight-inch carving knife, which fit neatly into the long, narrow tool pocket that ran along the leg of his overalls. If he saw an opportunity, if only one of the fake Spaniards was around, he could take him out silently and get the drop on Rashid. Once he had him tied up there shouldn't be any trouble about the money, or anything else. A good plan, and simple. If he could keep calm.

He turned east on Eighth Street, feeling a lot better as the pills kicked in, more confident that the plan would work. This was a lot better than what he had thought back after the council of war, blackmailing Rashid by threatening to go to the police with the plan to blow the tunnels. And also no fun involved. And supposing there was an organization behind Rashid, he could maybe get to them and still pull some money out of them for not telling. And then, of course, rat the fuckers out.

From Eighth Street and Broadway he took the R train to Steinway Street in Astoria. He played a little eye game with a cute Latina woman on the subway, and thought briefly of pursuing it, but no, this was more important, and he didn't want to lose the peak of the high, the uppers making him confident, giving energy, the downers making it mellow and suppressing the jaw-grinding twitches. He nearly floated down the few streets to the house and was almost to the door when he stopped. Something was wrong. The windows were closed, for one thing, and the blinds were drawn. It was a broiling day, they should have been open. Another thing: Rashid's green car wasn't parked where it usually was, and neither was the truck that Carlos and Felнpe drove. He climbed the stoop and pressed his cheek against the little window at the side of the door. No sound, no movement.

If there was no one home, why had Rashid told him to come, why had he been so insistent that he come? He put his hand on the doorknob and turned it. Unlocked? He pushed a little and then froze as the explanation hit him. He spun on his heel and took the four steps of the stoop in a single leap. He was running full tilt down the walk when the house exploded behind him.