Immoral Certainty

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  “You’re nice to me and I was so mean to you,” she said after a few moments. “You come back from a trip and you’re going to put like the entire Mob in jail and I don’t even give you a kiss.”

  “You can correct that. It’s never too late.”

  “Oh, I will, when the time is right.” She leaned back and gave herself over to the curiously intimate business of having her hair cleaned. Karp had strong, sensitive hands, she reflected—odd when you thought about it, because in so many ways Karp was not sensitive, to art, for example, or food or music or literature. Even Raney liked Chopin, or pretended to. She would have to ask him about that.

  “Rinse,” said Karp into her ear. “I’ll soap you up again.”

  She took a deep breath and slid down into the water, wagging her head from side to side to clear the suds from her hair. Her limbs floated loosely in the warm water and they were starting to tingle with sex.

  Nature’s own heroin, she thought, and Karp was her pusher. Whatever differences they had, in some unexplainable fashion he held the key to her body and its pleasures. She sat up abruptly and tried to shake these feelings off. That was the problem—there was stuff they had to talk about, but rarely did because when things got spiky it was too easy to slip into flesh. Or storm out, with a loving reconciliation to follow.

  So, to Karp’s disappointment, when the shampoo was over, instead of rising like Aphrodite from the waves and leaping into his arms, she dried herself off properly, put on a red silk robe, lit a cigarette and sat down in a bentwood rocker in the living area. Karp clumped down again on the couch.

  “Now,” she said briskly, “tell all. How was California?”

  “Like always. Hot and crazy.”

  “And Susan?”

  “Looks good. Didn’t give me any trouble about the papers, the divorce. We were getting along good, very civilized, until I asked her if me and Noodles could hole up on her farm for a while, just ’til Guma could figure some way to extract us with security. Then she blew her top. Ran us off as a matter of fact. That’s how I came to drive home.”

  “What about Guma’s arrangements?”

  “Oh, yeah. It turned out that the day after I spoke to him he won a pile on a ball game. Took a week’s leave and went to Saratoga with a bimbo to play the ponies. I slipped his mind. You know what he said when I laid into him about it this afternoon? ‘I had faith in you, Butch.’ Then he wanted to hear spicy lesbian commune stories.”

  “Have you got any?”

  “If you consider being glared at by a bunch of average-looking women spicy.”

  “Yeah, it’s funny the way some men are fascinated by lesbian sex,” said Marlene thoughtfully. “You see it a lot in pornography. I’ve always wondered why. You would think it would repel the male libertine.”

  “Well it doesn’t fascinate me; in fact, it gives me the creeps.”

  “Does it? I don’t know. I went to girls’ schools for eight years, and there’s always a low buzz from that corner in girls’ schools. Of course, at Smith in the sixties the buzz got to be more of a rattle. Long kisses in the common rooms, gasps through the walls at night and everyone being terribly sophisticated. Kind of attractive in a way, I always thought.”

  Karp felt a deadly chill starting in his middle. “Uh, Marlene, did you ever … you know, ever …”

  Something in his tone made her look directly at him. “Me? Oh, I see. You’re worrying whether you picked another joker. No, I never did, not that there weren’t offers. I guess I got real close a couple of times because I had a sneaking admiration for women who were totally free of something I felt was going to drag me down. Marriage. Kids. My mom’s life. As Ti-Grace used to say, ‘Lesbians are the shock troops of women’s lib.’ So I guess I honor them for that. And for guts.

  “On the other hand, you are or you aren’t. I’m not. And now?—I’m not as freaked out by domesticity as I was when I was twenty. My mom sure has gotten a lot smarter in the last ten years or so.

  “And I like men. I like them because of the difference, as irritating as that is sometimes. Not the cheap joke difference either, but the mysterious part, something to do with understanding the way the world’s put together, what being human is all about. Shit, I’m drifting into metaphysics. Typical, when I just made one of the worst boners of my undistinguished career—another proof I’m in the wrong business, I guess.”

  “What boner?” asked Karp.

  “I’m too embarrassed to tell you now,” said Marlene, which wasn’t strictly true, but she did not want to get into the Mrs. Dean story just now, when the feelings she had partially suppressed in the bath were now releasing themselves unmistakably in her body.

  “Besides,” she continued, cocking her leg and letting her gown slip away from her middle, “I think the time is right.”

  After coming up for air from a kiss worth a week of waiting or more, she added, “It just occurred to me that I love you because we have nothing in common. It explains a lot.”

  “Oh, yeah?” replied Karp. “I thought we had a lot in common.”

  He had managed to pry one of Marlene’s perfect little breasts from its nest of red silk and was contemplating it like a jewel thief would the Hope Diamond. He was lying on his side and his free hand was cupping the thick mat of black hair between her thighs.

  “No, not that office shit. I mean real difference. Family, ideas, what’s important. It’s like a guarantee against submerging myself, losing it …” She broke off the thought in a series of gasps. Marlene in this mood had a trigger pull a good deal lighter than that of a Browning Hi-Power automatic.

  “Butch, take off your clothes! Quick, quick!” she cried, throwing off her gown. “Now, do it slow. I want to watch it. Oh, my! It’s so …” Then a period of inarticulate gasps and cries. “Oh, Butchie, this is so … ah, why, why can’t we talk and come at the same time?”

  “Because God is kind,” said Karp.

  From his perch behind the roof parapet of the building opposite Marlene’s the Bogeyman could not see what was going on in the loft. He had an expensive pair of 10x20 binoculars that his Mommy had given him, so he could watch people better, but the screen hid the green couch from his view. He had seen the bad witch get into her bath, though, and in front of the tall man too. That was bad, he knew. Ladies with no clothes was bad. Except in church.

  He kept watching. He was comfortably situated; the night was warm and he had a container of milk and some chocolate chip cookies. And he had nothing else to do. Mommy had said follow the bad witch and say everything she did. After a while, the tall man and the bad witch came out from behind the screen and climbed up on a sleeping platform and went to bed. The bed was right under the windows that faced the street and there were no curtains or shades, so he had a good view. They both had no clothes on. The man was very big, almost as big as the Bogeyman himself. He wondered if he could beat him up. He wondered if they would do dirty in the bed, but they just went to sleep. He watched for a while, dreamily, and finished his milk and cookies.

  A movement in his coat pocket aroused him. He reached in carefully and removed a black pigeon. He stroked it absently for a few minutes, then replaced it in his pocket and went down the fire escape to the street.

  He crossed the street to the outer door of Marlene’s building. Taking out the pigeon, he stroked it a few times to calm it down and then smashed its head against the door. In its fresh blood he drew an upside down cross on the door and let the corpse drop onto the doorstep. Then he went a block down the street and sat in a doorway to wait for the dawn.

  CHAPTER

  10

  “My mom’s bleeding,” said the little boy’s voice on the phone. The 911 operator was a skilled listener to people in trouble and caught the note of barely controlled panic in the high voice. She quickly extracted the child’s name and address and dispatched a patrol car to the address given, while encouraging the boy to remain on the line. Obviously something awful had happened in his home and she want
ed to keep in contact should whoever did it return.

  Patrolman Martin Dienst, working the four to twelve shift out of the Ninth Precinct, caught the 911 call and was at the door of 217 Avenue A within ten minutes. He left his partner in the blue-and-white and climbed the three flights to apartment 3F North. Dienst had eleven years on the job and a year in Danang with the Marines before that, but what he saw when he reached the top of the landing was rich even for his system.

  A woman lay on her side in the hallway, with her feet in the open doorway of apartment 3FN. Her blond hair was matted and dark with blood, and the blue robe she wore was slashed and stained almost black with it. There were thick ropes of congealed blood on the floor, and Dienst stepped carefully to avoid these as he approached the body. It was certainly a body. The throat had been slashed so deeply as to almost entirely sever the head.

  Swallowing hard, Dienst stepped over the woman’s corpse and entered the living room of the apartment. The place was a shambles, in the literal sense, being as thickly sprayed with blood as the floor of a slaughterhouse. Furniture had been overturned and the remains of glassware crunched under the patrolman’s shoes. A child’s stuffed toy in the shape of a small white goat lay beside an overturned chair. It too was stained with blood, and seemed to Dienst to be the most pathetic object in the entire dreadful scene.

  Nearby lay the crumpled shape of the goat’s probable owner, a boy of about seven, blond like his mother, dressed in shorty pajamas with little clowns on them. He was lying on his back, his limbs spraddled like those of an abandoned doll. His chest had been split nearly in two by a tremendous blow from some great blade. Blood was splashed high up the wall near where he lay. Dienst hurried by this door to the next room, which was the kitchen-dinette.

  There at the kitchen table sat a dark-haired boy of about nine holding a telephone receiver to his ear. Dienst quickly checked the apartment’s two bedrooms and, finding them empty, returned to the kitchen, where he gently took the telephone from the boy and identified himself to the 911 operator. Then he hung up the phone and knelt to face the boy.

  “What’s your name, sonny?” he asked.

  “Josh Mullen. Is my mom OK?”

  “We’ll have to see. We have to call an ambulance. But first we both have to get out of here. I’m going to carry you, OK?”

  “I can walk.”

  “Sure, but the police rules say I have to carry you. And also you have to keep your eyes closed.”

  “Why?”

  “Regulations,” said Dienst, and, scooping the child up and holding his head tight against his broad chest, he ran out of the apartment.

  “You can’t possibly want more after last night,” said Marlene Ciampi sleepily, as she felt the suggestive probing of Karp’s big hands. The morning sun was just blasting through the grime of the two large windows that stood behind Marlene’s little white bed. This was why she had no curtains: any prospective peeper in the building opposite would be dazzled by the glare on the glass, and besides, that particular building was used as a warehouse and its windows were covered with thick green paint.

  “Just a quickie to wake up on,” said Karp. He lay on his back and lifted her easily so that she dropped on top of him in the right position, with many a squishing noise.

  “No, wait,” said Marlene, not with much conviction. “I have to tell you what I did.”

  “Can’t it wait for ten minutes?” groaned Karp.

  “How do you make it last ten minutes, as the schoolgirl said to the nun. No, really, I need to tell you.” And with that Marlene spun out the whole story of the second trash-bin victim, and the transfer of the case to Queens, and what had transpired with Mrs. Dean at St. Michael’s.

  To Karp’s credit, he did not make soothing noises and continue in the direction his body had until lately been leading him. Instead he put his hands behind his head, knotted his brow and scrooched up his chin, as was his habit when thinking hard about unpleasant things.

  “You think I fucked up?” said Marlene.

  “Yeah, I do. I’m trying to figure out what came over you. What did you expect to gain by it? A spontaneous confession?”

  Marlene rolled away from him onto her stomach and propped her chin up on her hands and elbows. “No, of course not,” she replied with heat. “I guess I thought if we told her about the bogeyman, she might—I don’t know—do something. I just couldn’t sit there while they took the case away from me.”

  “Well, you’re sure as shit not going to get it back now. Bloom’ll skin you. And as much as I hate to say it, with justification.”

  “What the hell do you mean, ‘justification!’”

  “I mean that on the basis of no fucking evidence whatever you’ve seized on this woman as being some kind of sexual monster, who may be connected with a couple of nasty homicides. And you’ve been harassing her in a way that compromises you, the Office, and maybe even the case, if there ever is one.”

  Marlene’s jaw dropped. “No … what? No evidence! You don’t call the doll evidence?”

  “It’s crap, Marlene.”

  “Yeah? Raney thought it was pretty good,” she said angrily.

  “Who gives a shit what Raney thinks! Raney’s not going to the Grand Jury with this garbage, you are. God damn, Marlene! What the fuck’s wrong with you? Since when do D.A.’s get involved in this level of an investigation? If Raney wants to go over to St. Michael’s and blow smoke, let him! Cops do shit like that all the time. But it’s not your job.”

  “Yessir, boss,” she snapped, turning away on the bed. He sat up quickly then and grabbed her by the shoulders, forcing her to look at him.

  “Marlene, listen to me,” he said, his face serious. “I love you. But this is really aberrant behavior and it worries me. I want to make some sense out of this, and I can’t if you snarl at me. OK?” She nodded glumly. He was going to lecture her and it made her stomach churn with resentment.

  “Now let’s look at this like lawyers,” he resumed. “One. You got an accusation that is not only hearsay, but attributed to a child of six. Have you interviewed the child? No. Have you determined by a medical examination that the child has been sexually abused? No. Have you obtained a formal complaint from the mother? No. Did you interview any of the other kids at the center or their parents? No. No hits, no runs, the side is retired. That’s the sexual-abuse-of-a-minor part.

  “On the murder part—forgetting for a minute that you knew it was a Queens D.A. case, and that you might have fucked up their investigation by dicking around like you did—we have, again the unsupported testimony of a child, plus a police report that some miscellaneous witnesses maybe saw a man of a certain description accompanying a child who might have been the deceased.

  “Do we have that man? No. More to the point, do we have a shred of evidence that this maybe-man is connected with Mrs. Dean or her center? Sure we do. We have the statement of a three-year-old child that her deceased sister was given an expensive doll by the bogeyman, and a statement by a doll expert that a doll like that one might have been in Mrs. Dean’s collection or in any of a dozen other collections in the city.

  “Was it Mrs. Dean’s doll? We don’t know. Can we find out? No. Why? Because not only is this horseshit not a case, it’s not even probable cause for a search warrant. And yet on the strength of it one of the smartest lawyers in the damn Bureau—that’s you, dummy—goes off and plays Nancy fucking Drew. And I’d love to know why.”

  Marlene tightened her jaw and tried to stare Karp down. “I know she’s mixed up in it.”

  To her surprise Karp nodded. “Right. I believe you. You’re a great investigator, Marlene. It’s the truth. You got brains and energy and you got the nose for a fishy pattern. So Mrs. Dean is selling chicken out of her day-care center. So what! That’s not the point.

  “Christ, Marlene! I could stand on top of the courthouse and hit fifty people with a rock who I know—I know—did stuff that would make Dean look like Mother Theresa. And I can’t touch them. Wh
y? Because I don’t have a case against them that’ll stand up in court. That’s what we do, baby—remember? We develop and prosecute cases. We don’t ride out and chase the bad guys.”

  Marlene dropped her gaze and let out a long, silent breath. As usual, Karp had brought forth a great summation. It was a technique Karp had learned from the tough old lawyers in the Homicide Bureau and he had every right to use it on her. She was guilty, no question: aggravated fuckupery and dumbness in the first degree. She could handle that. She understood that getting beat up was part of being one of the guys.

  But what made her shudder and bite her lip was that Karp didn’t understand, had never made the effort to understand, and probably never would understand her feelings. Who did he love anyway? The perfect investigator? The great fuck? Why didn’t he say, “I understand what seeing children hurt does to you, and I understand why it clouded your judgment, and I’ll find some way to fix it, and I’ll support you, and together we’ll catch those fiends and make them stop.” That’s what she wanted and at some level she despised herself for wanting it.

  She stood up and said in as calm a voice as she could manage, “I’m going to take a bath.” Karp watched her climb down from the sleeping platform and walk naked across the floor to the great tub. He felt a pang of tenderness, mixed with remorse. She looked so vulnerable from the back—you could count her ribs and the bumps in her graceful spine and she had angel wings like a ten-year-old. With her shoulders slumped and her dragging pace she seemed like a whipped child.

  He knew himself to be the whipper, and was agile in his retreat from acknowledging his own mean streak, the faint sadistic tincture in his relations with Marlene. Instead he blamed her and affected puzzlement. He knew she was smart, brilliant even. But she would get on these nutty one-track toots and everything she knew would go out the window. And he would have to yank her back, and then she would get all depressed, like now. Why did she do this to him?

  They washed and dressed in silence. Karp went to the door and said, “I got an early meeting and then I’m taking a calendar for one of the guys. You coming? We could get breakfast at Sam’s.”