Immoral Certainty

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  But Felix was a mutt. He lied with every breath, and about things that could be easily verified, too, and that was what destroyed, at every turn, Klopper’s efforts to insert that doubt.

  The pants weren’t his because, he went on, they weren’t his style, because he had to dress well, because he was a sales manager. The knife wasn’t his, and he had never owned a knife like that. He couldn’t have done the murders because he had an alibi for the night: He had gone to Larry’s Bar, and he had been served by a waitress named Marge, whom he proceeded to describe in detail.

  Karp could see it in Klopper’s face and in his manner. He knew he was being lied to, and on the stand. There is nothing more obvious, or pathetic, than a defense attorney with a defendant witness who is out of control. Klopper began subtly to withdraw from his client. Once or twice, he even snapped at him, “Just answer the question, please.” But Felix loved to talk, especially about himself, and with all these people watching, hanging on his words, he gladly hung himself.

  Karp was practically salivating when his turn came to cross-examine. Not only had Felix owned a big bowie knife before, but he had used it to stab a policeman during the course of a burglary, wasn’t that so? It wasn’t like that. Didn’t you stab him? I can explain that. Didn’t you stab him and weren’t you convicted of stabbing him? Yes, but…. Next question.

  Karp went over the initial Q and A that Felix had recorded with Freddie Kirsch. Here he had lied about everything. He didn’t know Stephanie Mullen. He didn’t know Anna Rivas. He had never been in the apartment on Avenue A.

  He was confronted with his address book, with sworn statements from witnesses. Oh, that Anna Rivas. Yeah, I know her, but I never beat her up. Well, maybe we had a little argument. Oh, that Stephanie Mullen. Yeah, I knew her, but I never killed her. I was in a bar with a girl. Oh, not that girl, I remember now, another girl.

  Karp brought all this out, letting Felix tangle himself. Finally, under Karp’s relentless pressure, Felix admitted he had lied, because he was afraid Kirsch was trying to frame him. He hadn’t trusted Kirsch.

  “And did there come a time when you trusted Mr. Kirsch and at last told him the truth?” asked Karp.

  “Yes. I thought we had, you know, a rapport. I finally told him, you know, I knew Anna, and we had some words, and that woman called the cops. That happened. I told him.”

  “You mean, you lied until you were caught at it?”

  “That’s not what I would say. I would say, I didn’t trust Fred Kirsch, because I didn’t think he was, that he had my interests in mind at the time. I would say …”

  Here the judge interrupted. “Just answer the question, don’t make a speech.”

  “Well a lie, that’s not what I would call it.”

  But Karp could see, from a quick inspection of the jury, that the jurymen knew what a lie was. Frowns. Rolling eyes. Terrific.

  A good close, too, on the cross, Karp thought. Always leave them laughing: “Mr. Tighe, did you ever meet the murdered boy, Jordan Mullen?”

  “Yes, he was around. I think I met him once.”

  “You were introduced to him?”

  “Not actually introduced, no …”

  “But he knew you, he would have recognized you?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Is that why you stabbed him to death after you had killed his mother?” asked Karp blandly.

  “No.”

  “No further questions,” said Karp.

  On redirect, Klopper could do little to repair the damage. He tried to show Felix as a man who gave facetious answers under pressure, the kind of spunky guy who might appear to lie when pushed around by the bullies of the law. It was weak and brief. That ended the defense case.

  On his rebuttal, Karp focused on the alibi. Karp had elicited from Felix a detailed description of the cocktail waitress. He even had him point her out where she sat in the courtroom. Then he called her to the stand, where she testified that on the night of the murder, she had been off duty. Murmurs in the courtroom.

  On cross, Klopper could hardly attack the woman’s memory. She had never said that she recognized Felix—he had said he recognized her. He walked back to the defense table and broke a pencil.

  The rest of the rebuttal witnesses were Felix’s supervisors, from his current job and previous ones. He was not a sales manager, nor had he hope of becoming one. There had been complaints from clients. He had been fired repeatedly for skimming, for abusive behavior. The People rested. The defense rested. Final arguments were scheduled for the following day.

  As Karp left the courtroom, he saw Felix speaking urgently in Klopper’s ear. Klopper didn’t seem to be listening.

  CHAPTER

  16

  This must be what sensory deprivation is like, thought Marlene. Since she had conspired with Alonso to bring her undrugged food she had been left in the dark and unmolested, except for mealtimes. There had been three of these, or four, she was not sure. Kid food, and she was glad to get it: pizza, hot dogs, burgers, candy bars, milkshakes. In between she was left tied up on her cot, in total darkness. Ten days, Mrs. Dean had said, until the full moon. Marlene wondered how many of them were left.

  As the unmarked hours passed, deprived of vision, hearing little but her own breathing and the creak of her cot, her sense of smell had become preternaturally sharp. She had become aware of a universe of subtle odors: the damp smell of old stone, the sharp odor of the canvas, the oily smell of the wool blanket, a musty rotting odor she couldn’t quite identify—perhaps some food that had been forgotten and had gone bad. Pervading all these was the stink of her own unwashed body, and the spicy-sulfur smell she remembered from childhood, before her house was converted to oil heat. She was in a coal cellar.

  This discovery gave her some pleasure, as indicating that her brain was still working and that she was not entirely helpless. She thought about coal cellars for a while, about the excitement when, as children, she and her older sisters would hang around the coal truck on delivery day to see and hear the black lumps rattle and roar down the tin chute.

  More excitement—coal cellars had chutes! That meant there was a way out of this place, or had been. Maybe it was still open and she could slip through. From this moment Marlene began to think actively about escape. All she had to do now was to free herself from her bonds and overpower or evade a monster the size of a Mack truck.

  Pending that, she occupied herself with thought. What else could she do? And some action, even mental action, was better than dissolution into sobbing terror. Marlene had no difficulty admitting her fear, but she had long practice in suppressing it through an act of will, which is the only way a person with a vivid imagination can achieve courage.

  She thought a lot about Karp. Karp would not be afraid, she thought, and thought half-enviously that his bravery had nothing to do with controlling imagination. Karp had, she knew, no more imagination than a manhole cover. Despite all the proof to the contrary, despite all the destruction that fate had visited on his body, he retained a belief in his own indestructibility.

  Yes, Karp was brave. He was also ferociously honest, about deeds, if not feelings, trustworthy, intelligent, a great piece of ass, good-looking, neat. He washed dishes; he picked up dirty clothes: in short, he was a storehouse of all the manly virtues, beneath which noble edifice Marlene had detected an impacted zone of tender sensitivity, to whose excavation she intended to devote a good portion of her energies after marriage. If she didn’t die here in this hole.

  She also thought about escape. She had given up on rescue. Judge Rice knew that she was going to visit St. Michael’s, but that was no help, because Mrs. Dean had only to say, “Yes I was expecting her, but the dear girl never showed up.” Why shouldn’t the cops believe her? Even Karp would believe her.

  The key to escape was also the greatest barrier: the Bogeyman, Alonso. She had already won a concession from him, in the form of undrugged food, and where one concession had been given, others might follow. In
an odd way, he seemed anxious to please her, almost as much as she (exhibiting, as she realized, florescent Stockholm Syndrome) was anxious to please him.

  He seemed to enjoy feeding her and tucking her in and tending to her physical needs. After he fed her, he would sit at what looked like a child’s desk near the doorway, a desk that came barely to his knees, and play with little toys, which he would set out on the surface of the desk and converse with. Marlene could not see them clearly enough to make them out, but they appeared to be tiny Kewpie dolls, dressed in bright colors.

  But Alonso was not mentally retarded. Somebody (and Marlene thought she knew who) had through some hideous warping of the processes of nurturance frozen him emotionally at about the age of five. His two governing emotions seemed to be a terror of his mother and a bottomless loneliness. Marlene sensed that he was making her into a little friend. Marlene understood that she had to extract from this friendship enough concessions to enable her to break free before he did to her what she suspected he had done to his other little friends.

  She began to sing, to keep her spirits up and to pass the time; and to sass anyone who might be listening she sang prison songs. She sang “Parchman Farm,” “Morton Bay,” “No More Cane on This Brazos,” “The Peat Bog Soldiers,” in English and again in German, and Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released.” In between prison songs she sang “My Bonny Light Horseman,” and thought about Karp and about Raney, or rather about some unlikely blend of their best features.

  As she sang, she heard the rattle of a heavy lock being opened and the squeak of hinges. In a minute, she gradually became aware of a presence hovering near her, a soft breathing, a change in the pressure of the air currents on her cheek, and the smell of frying. She stopped singing. Silence and then a chair scraped and Alonso turned on the light.

  The overhead light was dim but it dazzled her. When her vision cleared she saw that he was carrying a brown bag. He said, “I brought lunch.”

  “Oh, is it lunchtime already? What did you get?”

  “Cheeseburgers and french fries and chocolate milk,” he replied, unwrapping these things.

  He pulled his chair closer and made as if to lift her head up and bring the cheeseburger to her mouth, but she whined and turned her head away.

  “What’s the matter? I thought you liked cheeseburgers.”

  “I love cheeseburgers, Alonso, but I want to eat them myself, with my own hands. Couldn’t you untie me? Just my hands?”

  He looked doubtful. “I’m not sposed to.”

  “Come on,” Marlene urged. “What am I gonna do, beat you up and escape? You’re a great big boy and I’m just a girl.”

  He considered this for a while, chewing his puffy pink lips. Then he said, “OK. But don’t tell, all right?”

  She smiled at this and nodded for all she was worth and he reached over her and untied the ropes that held her hands to the cot. He smelled faintly of some light and distressingly familiar perfume. Baby powder, she realized with a shock, and something sweeter and not as wholesome underneath it.

  Then he handed her the food and watched her as she tore into it. “Mmmm, chocolate milk,” she said through a full mouth. “I used to love this when I was a kid. St. John Bosco was my favorite saint because I thought he invented chocolate milk.”

  Blank look.

  “Because of Bosco—you know, chocolate syrup.”

  “What’s saints?” he asked.

  “Saints? You know, saints—people who were very holy and had special grace of God, and intercede for us in Heaven.”

  Alonso frowned. “We don’t like that,” he said, with a dull finality she decided not to challenge. Catechism class could wait.

  “No, I guess not,” said Marlene quietly. The giant continued to watch her as she finished her meal. She licked the grease from her fingers and then said, “Well, Marlene needs to go potty now. Could you untie my feet?” Be polite and others will be polite to you. Sister Marie Augustine, she thought, I hope you knew what you were doing.

  He loosened her ropes and led her, wrapped in her blanket and grasped tightly by the arm, out of the coal cellar through what appeared to be a furnace room, past a heavy door with a big outside hasp and padlock, and down a dim corridor.

  Off this corridor was the toilet. Marlene had shameful drug-dimmed memories of being carried to this room and placed on the toilet while her captor watched. Now when she started to close the door, Alonso stepped forward and stood dumbly on the threshold.

  “Can’t I have some privacy?”

  “I want to watch.”

  “You can’t! It’s naughty. Don’t you know that? Didn’t your Mommy tell you that it’s naughty for girls and boys to go to the bathroom together?” This is the right play, Marlene thought. This is the weak place. He’s never had a real adult to deal with before, except her. She had understood, almost instinctively, that the key to controlling Alonso was using the same tone she had used with her little brothers and their friends when she was eleven. It worked. He pulled back, his face worried and confused, and she slammed the door shut.

  Later, back in the coal cellar, Marlene sat on the cot while Alonso played with his dolls. He seemed restless and irritable. The little dolls fought one another and conversed, through the man, in high-pitched angry squeaks. He broke off the game after a few minutes and placed the dolls between layers of tissue in a gold candy box.

  He rose and came toward her. “I have to tie you up now,” he said.

  “Alonso, please. I can’t escape. You have that big door with a lock….” She made her voice high and trembly. “And I’m scared of the dark.”

  He looked confused. “You can’t be scared. You’re a bad witch. My Mommy said.” He said this with absolute finality and Marlene was not about to contradict him. Something flashed into her mind.

  “Yeah, right, but, if you don’t tie me up, I’ll give you my evil eye. Then I won’t be able to do anything magic to you, or escape.”

  Marlene saw his huge round face light with interest at this suggestion. “Really?” he asked.

  “Sure. But only if you don’t tie me.”

  He held out an immense hand and she removed her glass eye from its socket and solemnly handed it to him.

  He examined it closely, openmouthed in amazement, and then carefully placed it in the inside pocket of his black suit jacket. He turned to go, then spun around on her with a fearsome scowl. “You, you better not try to run away, all right? If you run away, I’ll be in big trouble. I’ll have to squoosh you, just like him.”

  “Like who, Alonso?”

  “The little man. He stole a doll and it was my fault. Mommy said. And I got a licking and I had to squoosh him. I squooshed him with my feet.”

  Marlene felt a rush of guilt. Junior Gibbs had taken her hint and died for it. She swallowed hard and said, “You’re really a good squoosher, aren’t you, Alonso. Did you squoosh a lot of people?”

  The great head shook vigorously from side to side. “No. Only him.”

  “Not Lucy.”

  He looked hurt. “No! Lucy was my friend. But she got broken. I put them in the garbage when they get broken.” He smiled and said proudly, “That’s my big-boy job.”

  She stared at him, and felt the smile curdling on her face. He gave her a little wave. “I hope you don’t get broken for a long time. I like you,” he said and walked out.

  Marlene waited until she heard the sounds of the furnace room door shutting and the lock scraping against its hasp as he locked her in. She stood up and began to explore her prison.

  She quickly determined that there was no longer any chute from the old coal cellar to the outside. There was a patch of relatively new brick to show where one had been in the past. The doorway from the coal cellar led to a room measuring about three yards by five yards, containing the dusty hulk of an old coal burning furnace that had long since been converted to oil. Next to it was a shiny new forced-air oil burner feeding into three wide galvanized sheet metal ducts.


  The work looked brand new. There were still chips of glittering sheet metal lying on the floor. Marlene felt a thrill of hope. She recalled that on one of her early visits to the day-care center, Mrs. Dean had been supervising duct work. It must have been part of this furnace installation, which meant that she was still in Manhattan, probably in the basement of St. Michael’s.

  She went over to the door and pushed on it without much expectation. It was firmly padlocked from the outside. No chute, the door locked—come on, Marlene, use your noodle! She paced back and forth waiting for something to enter her mind. It was warm in the furnace room and she had dropped the blanket. She looked down at her nude body. She appeared to be putting on some weight from all that junk food. Still, she remained pretty skinny. If there was a window, even a small one, she might be able to … suddenly she stopped pacing and struck herself on the forehead.

  The ducts! She pulled Alonso’s little desk across the floor to the new furnace and stood on it with her ear against the warm metal. Nothing but the gush of the blowers. That was surprising. If these ducts led to the school she should be hearing voices or at least some indication of an active building. Alonso had said that the meal she had just eaten was lunch, but that could mean anything. But if there was no one in the school, it was probably late at night. She stood listening until her legs grew tired, and then jumped down.

  She decided to move at once. Alonso had just left, which meant he might not be back for several hours, which would give her enough time to open a duct, crawl through, and run. She examined the duct joints, and found that they were held together by four sheet-metal screws. A screwdriver, she thought, there’s always an old screwdriver in a furnace room, sometimes two, along with the babyfood jar of assorted screws.

  She searched with growing frustration, running her hands along the base of the walls, peering behind both furnaces, but nothing like a screwdriver turned up. There was a fuse box, but no cabinets to search. The only drawer in the place was in the little desk. She yanked it open. Some marbles. A comic book. A gold candy box. The sweetish odor that she had detected on Alonso seemed stronger here. She opened the box.