Corruption of Blood

by Robert Tanenbaum

  They were in the Dobbs kitchen sharing a cup of coffee as usual, before Marlene went off to do research and Maggie did whatever she had planned with the children. Marlene regarded her closely. “Um, is something wrong, Maggie?”

  “No, I just meant … well, I just wanted to know when you’ll be finished.”

  This was so lame a request, and so obviously a cover for a deeper distress, that Marlene hardly knew how to respond. She decided to take it at face value, and answered, “Well, that depends on what you want me to do. I could write up what I’ve got so far, and work on developing an index to the various commentaries on the case. That should make it easy on whoever does the actual writing. I’ve got the beginnings of a descriptive index to the films, and I could finish that. The real problem, though, is Gaiilov.” Marlene explained who Gaiilov was.

  “But how do you know he’s even still alive?” asked Maggie.

  “I don’t. But that’s the only big source I haven’t explored. So I’m looking for him, trying to follow up any traces he might have left.” Marlene didn’t mention that she had set Harry Bello on just this task. He was down at the Library of Congress now, doing searches, to see whether anyone, anywhere, had mentioned the name of Armand Dimitrievitch Gaiilov in any newspaper or magazine or phone book during the last twenty-five years. The reason Marlene didn’t mention it was because it was a hopeless task, and because she did not want to spook the already desperately nervous woman with the information that she had allowed another stranger into the Dobbses’ business.

  “Aside from that,” Marlene continued, “I plan to visit your mother-in-law again, and I guess I’d like to go out to Texas and see Harley Blaine.”

  “Is that necessary?”

  “Yes, I think it is. You’d have to spring for the airfare and expenses, of course.”

  “Oh, God! This is so complicated now. When we started, I just thought … I don’t know—organizing the things we had, the story. I didn’t expect all this investigation. It’s like having the police in the house, like we did some crime.”

  “Okay, I’ll stop,” said Marlene agreeably.

  “You will?”

  “Of course. It’s no skin off my ass if you never find out whether sterling Dick Dobbs sold his country to the Reds or not.”

  “But he didn’t!” cried Maggie in horror. Inanely, her glance darted around the room, as if she were checking to see if anyone had overheard this blasphemy.

  “Yeah, so you say, and I believe you’re right. But I talked to Viktor Reltzin the other day, and he swears he thought Jerome Weinberg wasn’t lying. And why should he lie at this late date, a lonely old Russian gent? He’s got no horse in the race: the Reds killed his whole family, so he’s sure as shit not protecting a Soviet secret.”

  “But it’s impossible!”

  “No, it’s only hard to believe, which is not quite the same thing. That’s why we need to talk to Gaiilov. Everyone else with direct knowledge of the affair has already weighed in, pro or con, or died. We can make a fair case for Richard’s innocence, true; but a fair case isn’t going to be good enough. We need fresh meat.”

  Maggie wished this disturbing woman had never come into her life. She wished the great Dobbs case were still a pile of dusty papers and films into which she might dip from time to time after Hank had needled her. He really hadn’t needled her that often anyway. Now she had Marlene needling her too. She felt an absurd urge to run back and lose herself in the aisles of her greenhouse. Suppressing it, ashamed of these thoughts, she swallowed hard and said, “I’ll talk to Hank.”

  The following day, Marlene awoke to the smell of coffee and the sound of domestic clatter in the kitchen. She pulled on a kimono and went to investigate. Her daughter was instructing Harry Bello on the preparation of the royal toast.

  “You have to make the jelly even,” said Lucy.

  “Good morning,” said Marlene. “What’s going on?”

  “There’s coffee,” said Harry.

  “Okay, even,” said Harry, as he finished coating the two squares of crustless toast with a millimetric layer of perfect purple. “Is that it?”

  “No,” said Lucy, “now you have to make them into triangoos.”

  The triangoos were cut. Lucy nodded in approval and tossed one of the pieces to Sweetie.

  Marlene said, “Lucy, go watch cartoons. And take the dog. And eat your breakfast yourself, understand?”

  The child trotted off with the beast and soon the little apartment was filled with the sounds of cute characters killing one another.

  Marlene poured herself a cup of coffee and took a welcome swallow. “This is nice of you, Harry. Did she get you up?”

  “Nah. I don’t sleep. I enjoy it.”

  “She’s a monster. Triangoos, my ass!” Marlene laughed. They sat down across the battered table.

  “So, Harry, any bright ideas?”

  “No. The guy’s gone. I couldn’t even find his name, from the time when the Dobbs trial was big news. It’s all this ‘Mr. X’ crap in the papers from back then. He’s not in any phone directory. He doesn’t run a business, not under Gaiilov anyway. He’s got no credit. He doesn’t have a gas card. He’s got no criminal record. I’m thinking they covered him.”

  “What, like witness protection?”

  Harry nodded.

  “Yeah, well,” said Marlene, “that’s it then. Fun while it lasted.”

  “So, did he?” asked Harry.

  “Dobbs? Nah, what it was, I think they just squeezed this pisher Weinberg, waved the chair at him—this was just about when they toasted the Rosenbergs—and told him they’d let him cop if he gave them Mr. Big and he just pulled Dobbs’s name out of a hat. The guy just doesn’t say ‘spy’ to me. I mean, why the hell should he? He had money up the ying-yang, a wife, a kid, a good war record. He was planning on going into politics, for crying out loud! He was golden.”

  “There were those guys in England. Same story.”

  Marlene stared at him. It always surprised her when Harry Bello proved to be other than a mobile machine for solving crimes in the greater metropolitan New York area. “You mean Burgess and McLean. And Philby. Right, but they were commies from the beginning. Way back in college.”

  “And he wasn’t. Dobbs.”

  Marlene shook her head, but then realized with some surprise that she knew relatively little about Richard Dobbs’s early life. Some films from college days, some anecdotes from family and friends, but nothing that gave her a picture of the man’s formative years. Of course, she had focused on the events and circumstances surrounding the spy case. On the other hand …

  “The widow,” said Harry, and Marlene laughed.

  “Harry, stop doing that!”

  “What?”

  “Reading my mind. As a matter of fact, I was going to see the Widow Dobbs anyway. I could do it today, except … Maggie Dobbs has been acting a little, I don’t know, not exactly hostile but like she’d be just as happy if I was involved in a fatal accident. Something’s scaring her.”

  “You.”

  “Me?” Marlene fluttered her eyelashes fetchingly. “Little me?”

  “Yeah,” said Harry. “You scare me, and I got a gun.”

  “Hmm, maybe you’re right,” Marlene agreed after a moment’s thought. “I’m probably not the most suitable companion for a proper Washington matron. Of course, Lucy’s going to miss playing with Laura—for about six minutes. They’re heartless at this age, and now she has the dog too. It’s going to create a jam in the short run, though. I can’t exactly take her to Mrs. Dobbs… .”

  “No problem,” said Harry, which was what he always said when Marlene asked him to watch Lucy.

  She dressed in her one Washington lady outfit again, with a different shirt and a scarf to oblige the tradition that it was tacky to show twice at the same place wearing the same clothes, called, was told to come over, and headed to the house on L Street.

  A whey-faced redheaded young woman in a pale green uniform and
apron greeted her at the door with a suspicious stare.

  “I’m here to see Mrs. Dobbs.”

  “An’ who shall I say?” said the woman in a thick brogue.

  Marlene gave her name and was ushered to the study at the back. Mrs. Dobbs was seated at her husband’s desk talking agitatedly on the telephone. She motioned Marlene to a chair and went on talking for a few minutes. When she put down the phone she said, “Miss Ciampi, I’m terribly sorry, but something’s come up. A dear friend of mine has been taken to the hospital and I’m afraid I have to go out right away. I tried to reach you at home, but you’d already left. Would it be possible for you to come back another time?”

  “Oh, gosh, Mrs. Dobbs, I really wanted to finish up this week,” said Marlene. “I mean, I’d hate to overlook anything, even some little thing; it might just be the one piece that brings it all together. Would it be possible for me to just look through things around here—the office … ?”

  Marlene could see by the curl of the woman’s mouth that it was not going to be possible. Time for a lie.

  “By the way, I got in touch with Viktor Reltzin,” she said quickly, “and he said he thought Weinberg was lying about your husband because he had a grudge against him, something, um, from back in the past.”

  “What? That’s ridiculous! Richard never knew that man. If he did, don’t you think it would’ve come out at the time?”

  “No, I didn’t say Richard knew him. Reltzin just said that Weinberg had a grudge against him, from something that happened in the past, which could mean anything. Maybe Weinberg was a waiter, or a relative of someone who thought Mr. Dobbs had wronged him. Anything. But, see, it’s a new lead, actually our only new lead, so I just thought it might be worth looking through old material with that in mind. It could be anything, a photo, or a souvenir, something to connect the two men and give us more leads. Otherwise …” She let the word hang.

  “Otherwise, what?”

  Marlene shrugged. “There’s no point in going on. Hank doesn’t have a viable book, in my opinion. All we have is the old assertions, which amount to ‘Richard Dobbs was a nice guy and Weinberg lied.’ Not prime time. Hank’ll be pretty disappointed.”

  She watched Mrs. Dobbs’s face working, as if from far away, as the older woman balanced the violation of her privacy against the chance of hurting her son yet again. Why am I doing this? Marlene wondered. It wasn’t a case. It wasn’t even a real job. A habit, maybe. An itch that made her want to get to the bottom of secrets, even if she had to he to and browbeat a dignified old lady at a vulnerable moment, when she was concerned about a sick friend. She thought briefly about what Harry had said, about being scary. It might be true, although right now she didn’t feel frightening as much as simply nasty. Which didn’t mean that she was about to stop.

  “Oh, I suppose it’s all right,” Mrs. Dobbs said with a sigh. “Although I can’t imagine what there might still be in this house that’s of relevance. Hank cleaned out the desk and the files in this office long ago. All that’s here now is mine. There’s the attic, I suppose. You can poke around up there—there are some photo albums and some of Richard’s old books and other, I suppose you could call it junk, but I’ve never been able to get up the energy to throw it all away. It’s in cartons, and on some old bookshelves up there. I’m afraid you’ll get awfully dirty.”

  “Don’t worry about that. And thank you,” said Marlene, without a blush.

  Mrs. Dobbs rose, as did Marlene. “I really must be going. Kathleen will show you out.”

  She paused. “Oh, one thing. There’s a high-backed wooden trunk up there that contains some of my personal things. I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t disturb it.”

  “Of course,” Marlene said.

  The attic was low ceilinged and lit by a dusty round window and a bare forty-watt bulb. Marlene found the high-backed trunk right away, a construction in blond wood and dark iron bands of the type that wealthy people used in the twenties to take their clothes to and from the resorts. Searching around in the dark corners she found a short piece of angle iron, which she used to spring the lock.

  The chest was nearly empty and smelled of dust and the ghost of some light sachet. It contained a yellowed, moth-eaten V-necked sweater with a blue Y on it, several packets of letters tied with faded red ribbons, a black portfolio, a shoe box full of postcards and photographs, and, in the very bottom, a set of leather-bound, identical diaries for the years 1930 through 1948.

  Marlene sat down in the dirt and began to explore the secret life of Selma Hewlett Dobbs.

  The day after he killed Mosca, Caballo drove through the quiet streets of Hialeah, squinting in the bright sun, looking for house numbers. Like much of Latin America, Hialeah was not overly concerned with precision of address. Your friends and family knew where you lived and it was no one else’s business.

  He spotted a likely house, a small, lime green concrete-block-stucco with a gray tile roof, barely visible behind a wall of purplish crotons. He drove past it, stopped, and walked back to check. The number was printed on a sheet of shiny tin half-buried in the croton bushes. It was the right number. The people for whom Caballo worked had kept good track of Angelo Guel

  Caballo went back to his car and drove to a gas station on Flamingo, where he bought a tin two-gallon fuel can and had it filled with gas. He put it in his trunk, next to his golf bag. Then he visited an auto parts store nearby and made a few more purchases. Next he had lunch in a Cuban restaurant, and after lunch found a movie theater and watched two features in Spanish, twice. During the second show he had a refreshing nap.

  When he emerged it was past eight and dark. He drove to Guel’s house and went past the low, chain-link gate and through the dark wall of the crotons. Then he walked around the house to the back.

  At the rear door, he pulled from his pocket the paper bag from the auto parts store and removed a four-inch flashlight, a roll of gaffer’s tape, and a heavy pliers. He taped one of the narrow jalousie panes of the rear door, snapped the pane in two silently with the pliers, pulled out the pane, unlocked the door, stripped off the tape, and replaced the pane in its slot. Then he went in.

  Guel was not at home. The thin man checked the refrigerator, which contained half a paper case of Bud and some condiments. He took a can, cracked it, and settled down to wait in the dark.

  “This is bullshit,” said Karp. “I’m not going to wait around this goddamn motel for Tony to decide if he’s going to tell us did he find Guel or not. And just you and Al cruising around town trying to find him is hopeless.”

  It was the afternoon of the second day after Mosca’s murder, and Karp and Fulton were indeed hanging around their government-rate motel, the Arrowhead, off Brickell in Miami proper. They were at the side of the tiny pool, sitting in uncomfortable aluminum armchairs. When it had become clear that they were stuck in Miami for some time, Karp had broken down and purchased a pair of wash-and-wear tan slacks and a couple of short-sleeved shirts. The sporty look was constrained by the thick cordovans he continued to wear on his feet. Fulton was a good deal more Miami in flip-flops, plaid Bermudas, and a Hawaiian shirt printed with a banana motif.

  “What do you suggest, boss? It’s police work. It requires patience, which you ain’t got. I tell you what, why don’t you go back to D.C. and I’ll stay down here and work the streets with Al. You can wear your suit again.”

  Karp seemed not to hear this. He was staring at the water, lost in thought. Suddenly he sprang up and walked quickly back to their room. He returned fifteen minutes later.

  “Let’s go!”

  “Where’re we going, Butch? We told Al we’d meet him here at four.”

  “FBI. They have a tap on Tony’s phone.”

  Fulton gaped in surprise. “How the fuck did you find that … oh, yeah, your buddy in New York. You called what’s-his-name, Pillman. The Feeb.”

  “He’s a Feeb, but he’s not my buddy. He’s an unindicted felon and I have his ass in my hands and I get to
squeeze it in the public interest about once a year. He set things up so we can get a feed from the phone tap. We have to see a guy named Lorrimer.”

  Lorrimer was a tall, clean-cut gentleman with graying brown hair who treated Karp and Fulton like a pair of piss-bums who had wandered in off Flagler Street.

  “You’re not going to screw up this investigation,” he stated in steely tones when they arrived at his downtown office and explained what they wanted.

  “Of course not,” said Karp. “All we’re after is any information that’s conveyed to Buonafacci about a man named Angelo Guel.”

  “How come he’s looking for Guel?” asked Lorrimer.

  “Pure coincidence,” Karp lied. “We got a tip that he was, is all.”

  “Uh-huh. And this Guel figures in the Kennedy investigation? What, as the umbrella man?” He used the tone that the FBI adopts when citizens offer accounts of being abducted by flying saucers.

  Karp ignored this. “Timing is the thing. We need to get to him before Tony does. I want to be at the tap site.”

  After some meaningless argument—meaningless because in the FBI, New York swings a deal more weight than Miami, and both of them knew that Karp was going to get what he wanted anyway—Lorrimer made a couple of phone calls, and half an hour later Fulton and Karp were sitting in a room in a house on Sixty-third Street in North Miami Beach, across from the La Gorce Golf Course, off of which Tony Bones had his spacious home.

  The observation house was vacant and unfurnished except for some camp beds and folding chairs and tables. The Feds had rented it because it afforded a good view of the front of the target dwelling and because it was convenient to the phone lines that served the gangster. In an upstairs room, several agents took turns looking through an immense tripod-mounted telescope, while in the back, another set of agents manned the tap.

  “What about the phone at the Bal Harbour?” asked Karp when the agent at the tap had explained the layout.

  “We got that too,” the man replied. “The material from that line is fed into that machine over there. When the sun goes down, they’ll break from the hotel, fart around at a couple of clubs, and get home about eleven, twelve. We got bugs on his usual tables, and a couple trucks that follow them around and pick up the radio feed from the bugs and send them to this radio here. That gets taped too. This is Tony Central.”