A caterer had, of course, been engaged: no guests hanging around the kitchen and helping with the guacamole. Black men in maroon monkey jackets served turtle soup, then a radicchio salad, then little birds en brochette, with stuffed potatoes and some sort of bland orange vegetable sculpted into flower shapes. The servers also circulated with chardonnay; Marlene politely drank when they filled her glass, which was often.
Animated talk flowed around her. After a few perfunctory attempts to engage her in their conversation, the two men on her flanks chatted for a while to each other around her as if she were a pillar at a hockey game.
The dessert was served, a banana mousse. The conversation between the two men having flagged, the one on Marlene’s good side turned his attention to her, and seemed to notice for the first time that, although unimportant, and absurdly dressed, she was stunning. He was a fair, small, even-featured man of about thirty with a supercilious eye. Marlene recalled having been introduced to him; Jim Something.
“So,” he began, “what do you do in the government? No, let me guess—something arty, National Gallery? Kennedy Center?”
“I’m a housewife,” said Marlene in a dull, low voice.
“Please! Nobody’s a housewife anymore. You’re highly decorative. Fix yourself up a little and you could walk into any front office in town and get hired. Where did you go to school?”
“Smith.”
“Oooh, very Seven Sis! And you majored in marriage?”
“I guess.”
“Well, it’s never too late, my dear,” said the man in a hearty and patronizing tone. “We need to get your juices flowing again. You don’t want to be a Potomac widow, getting wan and shriveled while hubby conquers the world. I’m sure some deep fire still burns within that domestic exterior.” He reached over and kneaded her arm.
She froze, then looked up from her dessert into his watery blue eyes. “Oh? How can you tell?”
“Men know,” he said. “They can sense the heat.”
“Can they? Sense the heat. Can you sense the heat?” The booze seemed to hit her all at once and she laughed, louder than was usual at such tables. “Now I know who you remind me of,” she cried to her dinner companion. “God! I can’t remember his name. I remember the name of the Kool-Pop artist, though. Mary Ellen Batesy.”
The man looked at Marlene, polite confusion on his face. “Pardon, who is …”
“Mary Ellen Batesy. A big blond whore, walked the stroll on West Street and when she got a little old for it went into specialty work. You saying ‘heat’ was what reminded me. See, some men like hot women, as you were so suavely informing me, but others don’t. Others like to fuck dead women, and in the Kool-Pop trade, also they call it a slab job. See, the whore usually gets a couple three bags of ice and takes a bath in them to get the skin temperature down and get her looking blue, and then she stuffs the Kool-Pops up her snatch, and asshole and in her mouth—not the same Kool-Pop, three different Kool-Pops, until they melt, according to Mary Ellen. Anyway, Mary Ellen had this gurney in her crib, just like in the morgue, and when she was chilled down and ready, she’d lie on it and cover herself with a white sheet and the john would sneak in, and jump on her and do his thing. Mary Ellen said that aside from the risk of getting pneumonia it was a better gig than regular whoring, where they wanted you to pretend you liked it. And more money too.”
Marlene was now talking in quite a loud voice, the sort of voice they developed in New York City to cut through the screaming of badly ground subway car wheels, and her end of the table had grown silent. People had stopped eating their mousse; they were all staring at Marlene.
“But that’s not what I wanted to tell you about, not Mary Ellen, but the guy. Christ! What was his name—Osgood, Oscar, Oswald …” Then she raised her voice to a still higher pitch and shouted down to the other end of the long table, “Butch! What was that guy who liked to fuck dead women? With the rent-a-cooler. Oscar somebody?”
Now the whole table fell silent, and into this silence, Karp’s voice said evenly, “Oscar Sobell.”
“Oscar Sobell!” shrieked Marlene. “Yeah, Oscar. Whatta guy!” She looked right at Jim Something and said, “Yeah, Oscar. He was a little washed-out blondie like you, maybe a little more chin than you have. Oscar was one of Mary Ellen’s clients, only after a while it started to get old because as good as Mary Ellen was, she wasn’t really dead. I mean, he knew that. Also, Oscar was blowing a good chunk of his paycheck on Mary Ellen because she got a hundred a pop for a slab job, plus ice. So, what he did, he rented a cold locker, like people do for their furs and all, and then he went out and found a regular girl and he customized her for his special needs. Well, great, except he had to sort of wear a parka while he got his rocks off, which was inconvenient, but the real problem was—how to put this delicately … ?”
“Say, Marlene … ,” Karp rumbled from down the table. She ignored him. A murmur from the guests had begun.
“… delicately, as I was saying,” she declaimed in her powerful, clear, courtroom voice, “the problem was that after a few months, his girlfriend was becoming, ah, gummy, from all the jelled semen, which apparently cut into the quality of the experience he was after. So he racked her, hung her up by the mouth on one of the hooks they supplied there, and went out to the stroll and customized another one. And another one, and another one. Well, what happened then is that the warehouse made an error and gave Oscar’s key by mistake to a nice old lady who wanted to store her minks, and of course she complained to the management, because naturally she didn’t want to share her cold space with a pervert and four dead whores, you could see why, and they called the cops. Oscar had, needless to say, given a phony name and address, and it was all over the papers, so Oscar didn’t come back to the warehouse. The police were baffled, as they say. They circulated a description to the other cold-storage places, but no luck. Oscar didn’t show. Which was when the kid herself here thought of Mary Ellen Batesy and the other ladies who specialized in slab jobs. There are more of them than you’d think. Anyway, Mary Ellen remembered Oscar. And there he was at his place on Staten Island; he’d just ordered a big cold locker for his basement. My brilliant and famous husband, only he wasn’t my husband then, just screwing me on the side, put him away for consecutive life terms. And a good thing too, because, who knows, with his tastes, he might have started on Jewish American princesses… .”
“Marlene … ,” said Karp, more sharply. The table remained silent except for embarrassed whispers.
Marlene paused, not because of Karp’s interruption, but because of the insistent nausea rising from her stomach, the result of pouring unaccustomed rich food and a lot of alcohol, quickly drunk, into the seething acids of despair.
“Silly me,” she said in a lower voice, “I’ve monopolized the conversation again.” She rose shakily and pushed back her chair with a rattle that now seemed as loud as gunfire. “Be right back,” she muttered, and stumbled out of the room.
Dinner resumed in her wake as if nothing had happened, and the truth is that such scenes are not at all unusual in the more refined precincts of the capital. Washington, as Alice Roosevelt once remarked, is full of brilliant men and the women they married when they were very young. Being a wife-of is a harder career than one might imagine, and many of these women, suited by nature, if not society, for different work, get drunk a good deal as a result, sometimes publicly. Remarkably, this nearly always generates substantial sympathy, not for them, but for their husbands.
Everyone at the party was, in fact, especially nice to Karp after dinner. The guests returned to the living room, where coffee and after-dinner drinks were served. Karp had decided not to think about Marlene for a while. No one seemed particularly concerned about her behavior, and Karp was, in truth, happy that it hadn’t been worse. That Marlene could be a gigantic pain in the ass, he well knew, and he accepted it as a fact of nature. That her behavior could have a specific cause never entered his mind.
Besides, he was
enjoying himself. There is a form of flattery worked on people in important positions in Washington that only a saint well advanced in humility will be able to resist; sadly, few of these are summoned to government service. Karp was perhaps less susceptible than most, but still far from Zion.
Now he sat comfortably on a love seat with an intelligent, pixie-faced woman in her early forties. The woman, whose name was Felicity McDowell, had her silver-blond hair cut short and was dressed in a splendid blue silk pants outfit that had not obviously been thrown together at the last moment, nor was she drunk and disorderly. They had a nice conversation. She knew who Karp was, of course, not just his current job, but his former one. She had lived in New York and was familiar with some of his more spectacular cases. Admiration flowed. She was a journalist and a documentary filmmaker. The possibility of doing a film about the DA’s work arose. Difficulties in doing this were explored. Interesting possibilities were dangled.
The conversation turned, as if reluctantly, from Karp’s glory to her own modest achievements. McDowell had just completed a feature on, of all people, the Lee Oswalds.
“Oh?” said Karp when she announced this. “It must have been hard to do.”
“You mean Marina? Oh, no, she’s quite good with her English now. She’s a smart woman, actually. Lee didn’t want her to learn any English, you know. He was afraid it would loosen her attachment to him.”
“No, actually, I meant Oswald. His character. A very strange and complex man.”
“You’re joking,” she replied with a charming laugh. “He was a … a … putz—is that the right word? A nonentity. Nobody at home.”
“Maybe. A guy I work with says if he was such a schmuck, he didn’t kill the president, and if he did kill the president, he wasn’t such a schmuck.”
She laughed again and put her hand casually on his knee. “Oh, God! Please don’t tell me you’re one of those!”
“One of what?”
“An assassination nut, silly.”
Karp said, with some stiffness, “Well … yeah, I guess. I guess I’m supposed to be a kind of official assassination nut.”
“So, you honestly don’t think Oswald did it? Forget about the obvious defects of Warren. Let’s say it was a sloppy investigation because everyone was running around terrified. The fact remains that they came up with the right guy.”
Karp shrugged. “Well, they haven’t proven it by me. How come you’re so sure?”
“Because I’m a journalist and this is the story of the millennium. If there was anything there that was real, that couldn’t be interpreted in sixteen different ways, then serious journalists would have dug it out within weeks of the assassination.”
“Wait a minute!” Karp objected. “There are dozens, hundreds, of books digging at the thing.”
“No, I meant by serious journalists. All these buffs—they’re all lawyers, or politicians, or sociologists, or historians. Or ‘experts.’ None of them ever made a dime out of any writing except writing about the assassination. There’s not a real hard-rock working journalist in there. Why? Because journalists are suspicious—the good ones, anyway. They check their facts. And they can read people.”
She looked hard at Karp. “Just like I can see you don’t believe me—you’re becoming a conspiracy buff yourself.” She smiled at Karp in a way he didn’t much like, the smile of a mom patronizing a preschooler.
“Look,” she said, “I spent hours and hours and hours with Marina Oswald. This woman is just what she says she is. Lee Oswald is just what she says he was and what every reliable record of him says he was—a bum with delusions. He’s exactly the kind of person who has been the killer in every presidential assassination: Booth, the failed actor and disgruntled southerner; Guiteau, a petty office seeker with a grievance against authority; Czolgosz, an anarchist, whatever that means. Zangara, the guy who tried to kill FDR, when they asked him why he did it, he said he had pains in his stomach. Oswald was cut from exactly the same cloth. Believe me, I spent some time with the man, so I know.”
“You knew Oswald?”
“ ‘Knew’ is a little strong. I was a stringer for the Post in New Orleans in September 1963, when he was arrested and went on the radio to debate the anti-Castro Cuban. The peak of his life until then—people actually paying attention to him, the little shit. I interviewed him after the program, but he was so boring and inane that I didn’t bother to write it up. What was interesting was what he told me about his wife. I thought it might be interesting to talk to a Russian defector—a defectoress, actually. I was thinking of a piece for the woman’s page as we then called it, so I went to Dallas and looked her up. I did the piece, but the paper didn’t use it, and weren’t they sorry the following month, when Lee pulled the trigger! In any case, after the hassle died down and the FBI quit holding her hand, I renewed our connection, and did some articles and now this film.” She laughed. “Who am I to criticize? I’ve done pretty well myself off the JFK hit.”
They were silent for a moment, and then Karp asked, “And you have no problem with all the discrepancies, the lost evidence, the—I’ll say apparent—cover-ups?”
“Problems? Of course I have problems!” she replied sharply. “Who wouldn’t? Do I know that Lee never talked to anyone who worked for someone who worked for the CIA or the FBI? That his name isn’t stuck on some obscure file? Of course not! Christ! The Hosty thing alone would cause conniptions. FBI agent Hosty visits the assassin a couple weeks before the killing, and he knows he’s a nut, who threatens violence, and a political wacko, who just happens to work in a place that’s on the president’s motorcade route, and nobody thinks to check this guy out while the big man is in town? So were there cover-ups? Probably. But not of conspiracy; the cover-ups were about incompetence. Like I said, Warren messed up, my boy, messed up big-time, but they got the story right.”
“Well, there I can’t agree with you. Obviously, right? I mean that’s what the House investigation is for, isn’t it? To figure out what went wrong with Warren, and fix it.”
She looked surprised. “Surely you don’t believe that? In fact, the point of your committee is to dispose of the criticisms of Warren and come up with approximately the same results.”
Karp bridled and snapped, “That’s not what Bert Crane thinks.”
“Yes, I know,” McDowell said darkly. “That’s the problem. Look—you seem like a very nice man, honest and forthright and all that, so I’m going to give you some free advice. Don’t hitch your wagon to a falling star. Hello, Blake.”
The man standing over them and smiling was large and built on an angular plan. His shoulders were squared off and broad, his jaw was sharply drawn, there was a sharp fine dividing a short crop of crinkly black hair, graying on the side, from a flat, smooth forehead. Below that were thick eyebrows straight across and black squarish glasses like Clark Kent’s. The lines in his face and his wide mouth seemed also to run rectilinearly, as if drawn on graph paper. He wore a sharply cut, expensive dark suit, pinstriped, of course. Karp knew who he was: next to Jack Anderson and perhaps James Reston, Blake Harrison was at the time the most influential political newspaper columnist in the country.
Harrison said, smiling, “Hello, yourself, Felicity,” and then said his name to Karp and stuck out his hand. Karp rose and took it, and said his own name.
Harrison said, still smiling, “Felicity, would you mind terribly if I poached a bit? I have to get somewhere and I do need to have a few words with Mr. Karp here.”
“Not at all,” said McDowell, her smile a trifle forced. “Nice talking to you, Butch.”
Karp nodded and voiced similar sentiments, and was led away, noticing that no one had asked him. Apparently, when Blake Harrison wanted to talk to you, it was not a negotiable issue.
Karp followed Harrison out of the crowded living room and down a hallway. Harrison was hailed by several people on the way, and returned their greetings, but refused to stay for conversation. He also seemed to know his way around th
e Dobbs house. They reached a doorway and Harrison ushered Karp into a small room that appeared to be some kind of den: wooden bookshelves along one wall, a desk, an elaborate stereo system, sporting prints and political cartoons on another wall, two large red leather library chairs flanking a coffee table piled with magazines. Harrison sat in one of the chairs and propped his feet up on the coffee table, seeming quite at home. He motioned Karp into the other.
Harrison said, “So … Butch. They still call you Butch, don’t they?”
“Or worse.”
Harrison smiled briefly. “Yes, I’ll bet. I’m Blake, and they call me worse things than they probably call you. Well, I could butter you up with tales of what I’ve heard about your reputation, but knowing that reputation as I do, I know that you have no use for flattery. So I’ll get to the point. Your boss is going down. It may be this week or the next one, I don’t know, but for sure he’s finished. The question—”
“Why?” Karp interrupted. “What’s he done?”
Harrison smiled, the same smile that McDowell had given him, the patient smile of an adult addressing the question of a child. “Why does anyone fail in Washington? He has not made happy the people he ought to have made happy, and he has made unhappy the people he ought not to have made unhappy.”
“I thought he was supposed to run an honest investigation, not put on A Chorus Line. Who exactly are these people he’s pissed off?”
“His committee, for one. Elements of the press.”
“You mean Flores? He’s a jerk.”
Harrison chuckled. “Doubtless, but that does not disqualify one from a position of power in Washington. No, Bert made a very serious mistake in accepting this invitation to speak before the caucus without clearing it with Flores. Flores is hurt and he’s going to lash out. Bert could have opposed him if he himself was in a position of unassailable power or if his own record were absolutely clean, but such is not, apparently, the case.”
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