Corruption of Blood

by Robert Tanenbaum

  “Not yet.”

  “Then I won’t say anything about it; make up your own mind. But give me the point for a moment. That lie was the forerunner of the lies in service of a higher national purpose that got us into Vietnam, and kept us there until the army and the country were nearly wrecked. It was the premise for all the stuff that Nixon’s cronies did. The good of the country, as any bozo wants to define it, is more important than the truth. Hey, the good of the country demands that Nixon gets reelected? No problem, we’ll burgle, we’ll lie, we’ll cover up the truth. After a while the people stop believing anything the government says. Hell, we’ve got a presidential candidate now whose main platform is ‘I’ll never lie to you.’ Like it was a big thing. It’s pathetic! And it all started in Dallas, and what we made of it in the Warren Report. If we’re ever going to get the country back on the right track, we have to go back to the point when we ran off the rails. That’s why I’m pushing this investigation, my little favor, as I said, for the United States of America. Does that answer your question?”

  Karp nodded. “Uh-huh,” he said. It was a convincing speech. On the other hand, Dobbs was a politician; his profession was giving convincing speeches. Maybe he had even given this one before, like Flores with his hoe routine. Maybe it was even true. In any case, it was at least possible that Dobbs was prepared to support a serious investigation. Karp found himself liking the man, despite what Crane had said about Washington and dogs. Karp was himself a connoisseur of fine speeches, and lies, and his instinct told him that Dobbs at least believed what he was saying. Also, the contrast between the patronizing, overbearing Flores and the frankness of Dobbs, a man only two or three years Karp’s senior, was gratifying. A congressman, after all.

  The food came and they began eating and resumed talking, the subject having been changed by unspoken agreement to fields less fraught with passion and consequence.

  Karp walked back down the Hill to the office on Fourth Street. When he entered, Bea Sondergard was sitting on the floor amid a chaos of file boxes, moving papers among file folders of various colors. She looked up at him over the rims of her spectacles.

  “How was lunch? I heard you dined with Congress.”

  “I had the chicken,” said Karp.

  “That’s the first step. Chicken, then sirloin, then bribes and fancy girls. He’s in his office. Oh, and I had some furniture moved into your place. I took the liberty of deciding on a color scheme.”

  “Gosh, I had my heart set on something in rusting gray metal.”

  She flashed teeth. “Then you’ll be pleased.”

  Bert Crane was on the phone when Karp walked in. The office had been tidied some and Crane now sat in a high leather chair behind a handsome new mahogany desk. And the phones obviously worked. Karp sat down on a new-smelling black leather couch, and waited.

  When Crane got off the phone and turned to him, Karp observed, “You guys work fast.”

  “Yeah, it’s great, if we stay out of jail. Bea sometimes cuts the corners in procurement. I think she paid for all this stuff with an account that’s not quite authorized yet. How was your lunch?”

  “I had the chicken. How was yours?”

  “As I said, I ate with the press. We just went out on the veldt and they found a dead zebra. But, really—how did you make out with Dobbs?”

  “Pretty good, I think. He seems like a straight shooter.”

  “I agree. For a politician, anyway. What did you talk about?”

  “He filled me in on Flores, similar to what you said. And we exchanged boyish confidences. He told me a story about why he’s serious about doing the Kennedy investigation right.”

  “The one about JFK and his dad?”

  “Just hinted at it. I gathered they were political allies of the Kennedys in some way.”

  “More than that. Richard Dobbs was with Kennedy in the Pacific during the war. He was some kind of operations or intelligence officer with Kennedy’s PT boat squadron. They’d been at Harvard together, although Dobbs was a little older, and I think they were pretty close. He finished the war as a lieutenant commander and then went right into the Navy Department. When the shit hit the fan in the fifties, JFK was the only politician of any stature who stood by him. An unusual profile in courage for Kennedy, I might add. He was not prone to gestures that might have hurt him politically, and defending Richard Ewing Dobbs was sure as hell in that class.”

  “Well, none of that got mentioned. He also talked about how bad it was for the country, the doubts about Warren and all. He sounded sincere.”

  “No doubt. Sounding sincere is in his job description.”

  “Is being cynical in mine?”

  Crane laughed enthusiastically. “Yes it is, the sine qua non, in fact. But seriously, Dobbs is solid on this investigation, and on most other things too. I didn’t mean to denigrate the man. If things get sticky, and they will, I think we can count on him. All you have to remember with Dobbs is, his daddy didn’t do it.”

  FOUR

  “I don’t see what’s so funny,” said Karp to the ceiling. He was in his office at the New York DA, his soon-to-be-former office. On a nearby chair, a chunky, milk chocolate-skinned man in a tan, pin-striped, double-breasted suit was bent over with helpless laughter. It was the hiccupping kind of laughter, nearly soundless, the infectious kind, and Karp himself felt it tickling his own face.

  “It’s a good opportunity—,” he added.

  The laughter increased in intensity, and the other man, who was a detective lieutenant in the New York Police Department, started to lose control of his limbs and slide off his seat.

  Karp started to laugh too, as the thought of trying to convince a hysterically laughing man to take charge of the field investigation of the death of John F. Kennedy suddenly struck him as hilarious.

  Several minutes passed in this way, and when the lieutenant, whose name was Clay Fulton, and who was Karp’s oldest and best friend in the cops, had advanced to the stage of gasping “Oh, God” and wiping his eyes with his lemon silk handkerchief, Karp took up his case again.

  “Seriously, Clay… .”

  “Oh, God, don’t start,” Fulton groaned. “My heart can’t take much of this anymore.”

  “Seriously,” Karp persisted. “I think it’s a good deal. You were set to retire from the job anyway.”

  “You are serious about this,” said Fulton, sitting up again.

  “I keep saying.”

  “You’re going to go find out who aced JFK, and you want me to help you?”

  “You got the picture. What’s your problem?”

  Fulton let out a whoosh of breath and scratched the side of his heavy jaw. He regarded Karp through narrowed eyes. “Well, I got a couple. One, what makes you think we’re gonna do any good on a thirteen-year-old investigation, that the guys who were there when the corpse was still warm couldn’t’ve done?”

  “Maybe they didn’t want to. Maybe they were incompetent. Besides, it was Texas. You ever been in Texas?”

  “Yeah, in the army. Why?”

  “Well, so you know what it’s like. Do they have food? Do they have shows? Do they have clothes? They’re hicks, face it. So, get a couple of sharp New York kids like us in there, a little hustle—it’ll be a whole different story.”

  Fulton laughed again. “So what you’re saying is because you can’t get a knish in Texas, we’ll make it happen thirteen years later, where they drew a blank?”

  “That’s it. I rest my case.”

  Fulton stared at him for a moment and said, smiling, “You need professional help, not a cop.”

  “Come on, Clay. You’re a homicide investigator. Investigate the homicide of the century! What’re you gonna do when you retire? Security for department stores? Teach at John Jay? You’ll go batshit.”

  “This is for me, right? You’re doing me a favor? Just a minute, let me make sure my wallet’s still here.” He patted at his suit coat pocket. “Okay, wise guy, how long you figure this gig is goi
ng to take? Months? Years?”

  “This I don’t know,” admitted Karp. “Say a year …”

  “Okay, that means I’m gonna have to go to Martha and say, ‘Guess what, baby? We’re going south. Back to the land o’ cotton …’ ”

  “Oh, horseshit, Clay! Washington isn’t the South!”

  “Do tell,” said Fulton, giving Karp a hard look. “And there’s Texas, too. Those old boys’re gonna love having a big-city nigger poking around in what they did or didn’t do, the heaviest case they ever saw.”

  Karp was taken aback, and felt himself flush with embarrassment. It had not occurred to Karp that Fulton and his wife would be at all discommoded by moving from their apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to a city that was still heavily segregated, in fact if not in law, or that poking into a Texas investigation might be a problem for a black man.

  Karp said, “Okay, forget it. I wasn’t thinking… .”

  Fulton stood up, leaned over, and placed his hand on Karp’s arm. “No, I appreciate being asked … I guess.”

  He perched on the edge of the desk and looked at Karp with the fatherly expression he sometimes assumed with the younger man. He was only twelve years older, but he had spent most of his adult life as a street cop uptown, which worked out to an effective seniority of about a thousand and four years.

  “Goddamn,” said Fulton, shaking his head and grinning, showing his gold tooth, “our little Butch’s really gonna do it. A long time, the two of us.”

  “Yeah, eleven years. Dr. Fulton’s College of Criminal Knowledge for green-ass prosecutors. I would’ve sunk like a stone, you hadn’t grabbed me by the shorts.”

  “Mooney McPhail.”

  Karp smiled. “Yeah, Mooney McPhail. An easy grounder to short and I bobbled it.”

  “You were second seating for Joe Lerner.”

  “Right, another blast from the past. He’s in on this too, by the way, the MLK side. I had a witness said she saw Mooney use the knife, and picked him out of the lineup. That was the case. Holy shit! What a fuckup!”

  “Only she didn’t. It was her sister saw it and she told—what the hell was her name?—Esther, Ethyl?”

  “Methyl,” said Karp.

  “Methyl, right. She got the whole story from the sister and she decided to be the witness, because the sister had the arth-a-ritis.”

  “Yeah, it would’ve been a classic, if it’d come out on cross. Defense would’ve asked, ‘Did you actually observe this with your own eyes,’ and old Methyl would’ve said, ‘Oh, no, my sister told me the whole story and she don’t lie.’ Case dismissed.”

  Fulton laughed. “Turned out the sister didn’t see it either. Took me a month to find the girl who told the sister… Damn!”

  “What?”

  “It just flashed on me, where I was.”

  “What, when you found the witness?”

  “No, where I was when I found out about Kennedy. I was up on St. Nick, up around ‘forty-third, making a collar. Some pimp cut a girl. I was a detective second out of the Two-eight. I had him in cuffs on the street and my partner, Mike Samuels, was just opening the car, and I looked up and there was a crowd of about fifty people around this appliance and stereo store, pressed up against the grilles. They had a bunch of TVs there, on all the time. We locked the mutt in the back and I went over to see what was going on. We’d been in the building maybe forty minutes with this asshole, and in that time Kennedy’d been shot and pronounced dead. The man never meant that much to me personally, but it was a hell of a jolt—the president and all that. But the people on the sidewalk, most of them were carrying on like it was Lincoln all over again, a couple of old church ladies hollering, ‘Sweet Jesus God … ’ ”

  Fulton paused for a deprecating chuckle. “It affected a lot a folks up there. I guess it’s … they’ve seen a lot of young men die for no reason, just from meanness and stupidity. It must’ve kind of crystallized the whole thing for them. My mom, now … still got a magazine cover of JFK framed, and Bobby too. Right next to Dr. King. And Jesus, of course. Hell of a thing!” He shook his head.

  “Anyway, I ran back to the car and told Samuels what was up, and of course, he had to go over and check it out for himself. The mutt asks me what’s up and I tell him and he says, ‘Well, fuck him! When we gonna move?’ Like he was late for a big date.”

  Fulton stood up and said, “Tell you one thing. I do this, and it works, I’d get my momma off my case. She’s been pissed at me for joining the cops from day one. Can you believe, she still introduces me: ‘This is my eldest, Clayton, first college graduate in the family and he threw it all away to be with the police.’ ”

  Karp brightened. “So you will think about it.”

  “I’ll think about it, boss. We’re in the thinking stage here. Give me a couple of days. Meanwhile, I’ll see you later on at the party.”

  “You’re not supposed to tell me about it,” said Karp glumly. “It’s supposed to be a surprise.”

  Four hours later, Karp was in that state of woozy euphoria he obtained through drink, a state that for him lasted about twelve minutes before being replaced by faint nausea and a sick headache. Karp couldn’t drink at all, this lapse being a source of keen amusement to his friends and his wife, all of whom could put it away pretty good.

  The farewell party was well under way. The homicide bureau had kicked in for a catered spread—chopped liver, little shrimpy hors d’oeuvres, fried wontons, tiny pizzas—and some decent liquor and beer. There were about fifty people in the bureau’s outer office, where the desks had all been pushed to the walls. The secretaries had set up a big boom box, which was now blasting out the Village People’s “YMCA” for the fifth time and people were getting funky in the center of the floor, doing the peculiar spastic dancing that made the 1970s such a world of fun.

  “No more,” said Karp to the man attempting to refill his glass with champagne. “I’ll get blotto.”

  “That’s the point,” said the man, continuing to pour. “If the guest of honor can walk out steadily, it’s an insult to his friends. We’ll carry you on a door.”

  The man’s name was Vernon Talcott Newbury. He was a lawyer in the fraud bureau and Karp’s closest friend among the people he had started with in the old DA’s office. A rare bird, Newbury, in the gritty environs of 100 Centre Street: rich, for one thing, very rich, a sprig of a family of New York bankers who regarded the Rockefellers as pushy newcomers. Yale College and Harvard Law for another, unlike most of the people working at the DA, who were more likely to have come from places like Fordham and St. Johns. A lean, small man with longish, ash blond hair, he had the remarkable good looks, “chiseled” as the expression has it, of one of the gentlemen in white tie that Charles Dana Gibson used to draw in company with his famous girls.

  Karp had never figured out what had brought V.T., as he was universally known, into the DA, or what kept him there. V.T. would not give a straight answer. “One slums,” he might say, or, “My family are practitioners of fraud; I prefer to study it.” It did have something to do with his family, Karp had concluded early on: that great intermarried, extended family of WASPs, with names off the street signs of lower Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn, as exotic as Nepalese to Karp, and as fascinating. Such clans tend to produce at least one maverick in each generation, and V.T. was the one in his. He might as easily, and with about the same level of family disapproval, have chosen to have become a lion tamer at Ringling’s or opened a delicatessen in Passaic.

  Karp himself had a contracted family, and had he been a reflective type he might have considered that a vicarious association was one of the things that attracted him to V.T., as well as to his wife, whose clan was also vast.

  There she was now, dancing with a young black paralegal. She was wearing a full plum maxiskirt with the bottom three buttons undone, so that as she danced it whirled upward, showing her thin and splendid legs. Her black curls were shoulder length and cut so that they fell over the left side of her face.
In that way, if Marlene held her head cocked, as she always did, it would be more difficult for someone to tell that her right eye was glass.

  This damage had never interested him; he had loved her before, when she was stunning and perfect, and afterward, when she was merely a gorgeous exotic. As always, when he watched her dance, he was excited and vaguely saddened at the same time. Marlene loved to dance; Karp did not. He hadn’t even before his knee had been replaced, thinking himself gawky on the floor and conspicuous with it.

  As he watched, she caught his eye and winked and went through a set of parodically dirty contortions.

  “Marlene’s not going down with you, I hear,” said V.T.

  “Not right away,” said Karp, turning back to his friend. “We’re being modern.”

  V.T. nodded and smiled ruefully. He himself had been carrying on for a number of years a hopeless affair with an artist who lived in the Berkshires and who would on no account move to the city. “Yes,” he said, “how well I know it! Prisoners of women’s liberation, a burgeoning gulag. And without even the balm of self-pity, since we richly deserve anything they can dish out, we swine. Sins of the fathers. The best cure is more wine.”

  He poured himself another glass of champagne. V.T. had sprung for a case of Moet magnums, a typical gesture, and one that had contributed mightily to the current hilarious mood of the party. Nor had he stinted himself in the use of his own gift. A bar of scarlet had appeared across his cheekbones, and his intelligent blue eyes were starting to approximate the cheap plastic glitter of a baby doll’s.

  “Fuck ’em, anyway,” said Karp woozily. “You know, Newbury, you should get out of here, too.”

  “Why? The party’s roaring and we have four bottles of wine left.”

  “No, I don’t mean the party. I mean the DA’s.” Karp put an affectionate arm across Newbury’s shoulder. “Look, V.T., I have a slot for a head of research on our staff. Why don’t you take it?”