Immoral Certainty

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  It took him three minutes to break in. The front door gave on an entry hall. Raney took out a pencil-beam flashlight and shone it around. Peeling brown paint, wall sconces without bulbs, gritty dust: It was obvious that this floor at least was unoccupied. A wide stairway with wooden banisters and tattered red carpeting led upward. Raney passed this by and explored the rest of the hallway. Someone was redecorating. Walls had been torn apart and the floors were littered with the detritus of heavy plumbing and electrical work.

  There was a door at the end of the hall leading to the back stairway, a relic of the age of servants. Raney descended. You search a building from the bottom up.

  The lowest floor was set up as an apartment: an expensively furnished parlor, a modern kitchen, a bath, and two small bedrooms, one furnished for a child with cartoon character sheets and a Popeye lamp, and the other spare. Like most ground-floor rooms in Manhattan, these had their windows covered with grilles.

  As he inspected these rooms, he became aware of a hollow booming noise, as if someone were beating on a metallic tank. It seemed to come from below him. He crouched and put his ear to a heat register. Bong. Bong-bong. And a voice, indistinct and angry.

  Raney took his Browning from its shoulder holster, jacked a shell into the chamber, and replaced it in the holster. Then he returned to the stairway he had just left. From the landing there a hallway ran to a glassed and wire-meshed door that led to some kind of yard. In the other direction, a short flight of stairs led down to a steel fire door. Following his ears, Raney went to the fire door, and pressed his face to the cool metal. The shouts and banging were louder. He opened the door.

  A gust of oily warmth flowed past his face as he advanced down a short corridor. It was lit by an overhead bulb, and Raney put away his flashlight. To the right a red door, locked and bolted; ahead a stout wooden door equipped with a padlock and a hasp hung half open. Raney stepped past the door in a fast crouching movement, pistol out.

  Moving deeper into the room, he saw the cot and the ropes hanging from it, and his stomach thrummed with tension. He turned and saw the furnaces. Someone had removed the filter panel from one of the sheet-metal ducts leading up from the new oil furnace. From this space, as from a stereo speaker, came the banging noise. Raney could make out what the voice was saying now. He ran out of the furnace room, through the corridor and the door and up the service stairs.

  Marlene lay in a heat duct two feet square, her head filled with Alonso’s bellowing and banging. “You come outa there! You’re in real trouble! I’m not your friend any more! Come outa there! COME OUTA THERE!” Over and over again. And banging with some hard object. Her head was splitting. She could see him by the light coming through the vent he had removed, see his arm and shoulder and part of his head, and the tool he was using to bang with.

  He could not, of course, come in and get her, but neither could she escape. The vent was just wide enough to allow her shoulders to fit snugly in the diagonal dimension. She had ascended from the furnace room by pushing with the sides of her bare feet against the sides of the duct. In this way she had made a slow progress to the second floor, where Alonso had found her.

  When she had entered the ductway, Marlene had counted on there being an unscreened heat vent from which she could escape. In fact, there were none open on the path she had chosen. In her horror and her blind rush to escape, she had not stopped to consider that, nor had she considered what the rough screws and edges of sheet metal that projected into the duct would do to her flesh and to the soles of her feet. Every time she pushed down against the metal it felt as if she was walking on fish hooks.

  Beyond her head lay the blackness of a vertical duct, but she no longer possessed the energy to climb it, nor could her bleeding feet bear the agony of a descent. She was stuck here until Alonso figured out how to tear the wall and the duct apart to winkle her out. That shouldn’t be hard; he was smart and clearly strong enough. Before he got her, she decided, she would go down the duct head first. Let him have the finger. Then the banging stopped suddenly and she heard Alonso’s voice raised in furious reproach. And there was another voice.

  Raney slid off the safety on his pistol and held it high in both hands as he moved forward. The banging and shouting was coming from one of the rooms on the second floor. He approached the doorway slowly over the litter of construction debris that lay all around. The room was lit by a single dim bulb hanging from wires from the ceiling. By its light he saw a huge man in black kneeling at the wall, yelling and banging something metallic within the wall. It did not occur to Raney to question why his quarry should be doing ductwork at this hour. He came up softly behind him and said “Hey, you!”

  The man looked over his shoulder. His mouth dropped open in surprise. Then a furious scowl came over his face and he rose with astonishing swiftness and waved a fourteen-inch pipe wrench at Raney.

  “You better get outa here! Nobody’s allowed in here but me,” he shouted.

  Raney kept the gun trained one-handed and flashed his shield. “Police officer. Put that wrench down and put your hands against the wall! Move it!”

  “You better get outa here,” said the giant again, as if he hadn’t heard. He moved a step closer. Raney looked in the pale jerking eyes. The Bogeyman was maddened with fear, but Raney had the odd feeling that it was not fear of Raney’s gun.

  Raney clicked the Browning’s hammer back and pointed the weapon at the man’s face. Looking down at the muzzle of a cocked 9 millimeter pistol usually had a sobering effect on bad guys, but the giant seemed not to notice it. He seemed, in fact, to be working himself into a tantrum. His face was crumpled and red, and to Raney’s amazement he had started to cry. “You’re in real trouble if you don’t get outa here,” he bellowed. “I mean it!”

  The detective worked to control his own growing anger. He understood that it was something of a standoff. This monster probably knew where Marlene was, might be the only person who knew, which precluded blowing his brains out.

  As he thought of this it flashed briefly through Raney’s mind that he might have permanently lost his taste for shooting people in the head. He could shoot him in the knee, but one, he might miss; and two, there was no guarantee that this jerk couldn’t take him apart standing on one leg; and three, he might pop an artery in the guy and have him bleed to death, and then he would have to explain why he went into this with no backup, telling no one where he had gone.

  No, the important thing was to find the woman. In a reasonable tone he began, “Look, fella, this is a gun. I’m a cop. Just keep quiet, back off and tell me where you have her and I’ll get out of your hair.”

  At that moment there was sound behind the Bogeyman, a scrape of metal, a little cry, and Marlene Ciampi staggered, naked and bleeding, into the room.

  Time seemed to slow down. The sight of Marlene’s nude body caught Raney’s attention, as evolution had designed. His pistol wavered. Alonso moved like a snake, faster than anyone that large had a right to move. The pipe wrench flashed out, breaking Raney’s thumb and sending the pistol skittering away. It went off when it landed, the shot reverberating through the room and sending up a cloud of dust. Marlene screamed. Raney yelled, “Marlene! Run!” and launched himself at Alonso, his left fist clenched in what he expected would be his last punch in this life.

  “V.T., you seen Butch?” asked Guma, eyes wildly searching V.T.’s little office as if his chief might be hiding behind the furniture. V.T. looked up from his work. “Have you been swimming, Raymond?”

  “No, it’s raining like a sonofabitch outside. Where is he? I gotta see him right away.”

  “I think he’s in court.”

  “Which one?”

  “Beats me. It’s People v. Tighe. Look it up on the calendar.”

  Guma made for the door, and V.T. called after him, “What’s the crisis this time?”

  “I got a lead on Marlene,” he said, and told V.T. what he had learned at the meeting with the Bollanos.

  V.T
. whistled softly. “That’s really interesting, Raymond. I just had a cop named Raney in here a half hour ago, desperate to have a look at the material I’d pulled together on Mrs. Irma Dean. Wanted the address of a building she owned. So it looks like our girl was really on to something. The only problem was, why would Dean want to kidnap Marlene? She hasn’t been active in that case for months now.”

  “Maybe she found out something new.”

  “Maybe. But Raney came in here with this idea that Irma Dean is also the mother of the guy that Karp is now trying for a double murder, and I looked, and sure enough, Irma Tighe was married for seven years back in the fifties to a man named Francis Tighe. Issue, one son. She called herself Denise Brody, in those days.”

  “Holy shit! That’s weird! How come Marlene didn’t realize this a long time ago?”

  “Beats me, but now that I recall it, when I gave her the file she seemed really distracted, like she didn’t even want it any more. I just touched on the high points with her—money, mostly. I’m sure I didn’t mention the connection. Not that there was any connection to make, because that was before Karp got involved with Tighe.

  “Another thing: you say, ‘weird.’ It’s weirder than you think. The original Mr. Tighe was something of a sinister figure: He had a police record from upstate. Ran some kind of spiritualist racket with violent overtones. Black masses, orgies, grave robbing—the whole nine yards. Accused of statutory rape, no conviction, but they got him on an extortion charge in Plattsburg and he served nine months.”

  He tapped a folder on his desk. “It’s all here. After Daddy Tighe died in ’fifty-nine, Mom and son moved to the City, where she took up with and married a businessman named Horace Dean. A son from that marriage, too, but he’s institutionalized, according to my info. Anyway, Mr. Dean died after a couple of years, in ’sixty-six, that was, and left her with three buildings on the West Side, but no money. He had a family from a previous marriage, who fought the will. She got a loan on one of the buildings for ready cash, but she needed an income. That’s when she hooked up with Andrew Pinder and started this day-care operation.”

  “They let this lulu run a day-care center?”

  “Why not? She had no record. She was the widow of a respectable businessman, with property. She was vouched for by pillars of the community. Just to make sure, she started using her middle name, Irma, but that’s no crime.”

  “So if Marlene wasn’t on to her racket,” said Guma, “why the snatch?”

  “The son, Felix. To protect him.”

  “What, to blackmail Karp? But why the call about the Mafia?”

  “According to Raney, a diversion—and it worked.” V.T. leaned back in his chair and pursed his lips thoughtfully. “But, I’ll tell you—I could kick myself for not making the connection at the time, but Marlene thought she was being hexed, that somebody was using witchcraft against her.

  “So maybe it wasn’t blackmail at all. If Marlene was right about Dean, if she was kidnapping children and using them ritually, as—I don’t know—human sacrifices to get the dark powers on her side, then who better to use than the consort of her son’s chief tormentor?”

  Guma rolled his eyes. “V.T., do you realize how fucking crazy that is? This is the twentieth century in New York, for chrissake!”

  V.T. folded his arms. “I rest my case,” he said.

  As Karp left the courtroom after the verdict in Tighe he realized that he had no idea of where he was going or of what he was going to do with the remainder of the day. He would drop his briefcase back in his office and get something to eat. Then there was the evening. And the weekend. And then the rest of the month. And his life. Even his workaholism had failed him; he had no spirit left for putting more asses in jail. Several people passed him and congratulated him on the conviction. He nodded and mumbled conventions.

  Then Roland Hrcany was standing in front of him, a sardonic smile on his lips.

  “The winner and still champeen,” Hrcany said. “You wouldn’t believe the points the books are getting on you. You want to shave it a little one time, we could make a fortune.”

  “Sounds good. What’s another shit-canned felony more or less?”

  “Right,” said Hrcany, falling into step beside Karp. “Listen, I came up here to get you. We pulled off that sting operation on the fencing ring. Got about a million in stolen goods and most of their mid-level management. There’s a black dude we picked up. He’s down in the pens. Says he knows you personally and needs to talk to you.”

  “Yeah, they all know somebody. Not tonight, Roland. I’m whipped.”

  Hrcany said, “Yeah. A wacky story, anyway. About one of his burglars went into a house after some antique dolls and got, I don’t know, captured by some demon worshippers. Some shit like that.”

  Karp stopped walking. His stomach churned. “Let’s see this guy, Roland,” he said. “Now.”

  Before she knew it, before the pain from her bleeding feet could even register in her brain, Marlene was out of the room and running down the hallway. She did not know where she was going, except that she was not ever going back to that furnace room. She heard thumps and cries behind her, but she did not spare a thought for what was happening to Jim Raney.

  The hallway appeared to end in a blank wall. The thumping stopped. Her teeth chattering with terror, Marlene threw open what appeared to be a closet door and went in, shutting the door quietly behind her. Blackness. Marlene stumbled forward. Now she could feel her feet again and was nauseated by the pain. She stepped again and her foot came down on air and she fell into the dark, stifling a cry. She was on a stairway.

  Gingerly, she rose to her feet and, walking on the uninjured outsides of her soles, she descended a winding series of short flights. There was a light ahead, coming from a slit under a door. Opening this, she found herself in a dimly lit corridor. A metal fire door stood open to one side, and looking through it she saw her former prison. She went the other way, through a safety-glassed door that, to her delight, led out of the building.

  She was in the open air: night, clouds above, lit by the eternal glow of the City, and the smell of recent rain. Her heart lifted as she scented freedom and she limped on. To either side high wooden fences walled off a narrow yard-like space between the building she had just left and the dark loom of one ahead. She tripped over something that clattered and spun away on the concrete. It was a plastic riding horse with wheels, suitable for ages three to five. She was in a play area for small children. Toys and wooden blocks were scattered around a grassy patch and the lumpy surface of a large sandbox. Marlene at last knew exactly where she was.

  The back door into St. Michael’s day-care center was locked. Marlene went to the sandbox and picked up a child’s building block, a foot-long slab of solid maple. As she looked back along the concrete path she had traveled she gave a cry of dismay. A perfect line of dark, crescent-shaped bloody footprints led from where she now stood back into the darkness whence she had come. Alonso would be along shortly and he would know precisely where she had gone. She smashed a pane of glass in a small window near the door, twisted the window catch, and climbed in.

  It was a utility room. By the gray glow coming from the yard she could make out large sinks, mop buckets, an automatic washer and dryer. She opened the dryer, found a T-shirt, ripped it into strips and bound her feet. She heard a door slam. It was some distance away, but it revealed that someone else was in the building. Maybe Raney had brought some back-up.

  Then she heard a familiar bellow and the sweat broke out anew on her face. A glance around the little room showed nothing that could help her; she was not going to hold Alonso off with mops and brooms. Then the glint of dim light on the glass of an electric meter gave her an idea, something from an old movie. She went to the fuse box attached to the meter, yanked out all the fat cylindrical Buss fuses and threw them to the corners of the room. Then she hobbled out.

  Outside the utility room door lay the glistening floor of the center’s grea
t ballroom of a main play area. It glowed in the light of the red emergency lamps like an anteroom to hell. As she started across the floor, she saw a huge shape appear at the entrance to the playroom. Clever Alonso! He had seen where she was going and had run around the corner and come into the child-care center from the front. Now he was between her and the only door out; she knew she could never make it back the long way she had come. He would catch her climbing out of the utility room or in the yard, among the children’s toys.

  Looking down, she saw to her horror that her feet were bleeding through their bindings, not footprints any more, but quarter-sized blotches. Even in the dimness they were visible against the pale linoleum. Alonso was clicking a light switch on the other side of the room. He was calling her, shouting threats. Suddenly, Marlene remembered the last time she was in the center, a century ago. A nice young woman was showing her the play equipment in a little room. There were windows in that room, windows that had shown the color of green trees on the street.

  She moved cautiously through the door to the equipment room and closed it silently behind her. The room was filled with cold blue light from a streetlamp and Marlene felt an involuntary sob of frustration burst from her throat. There were windows but, this being New York, they were barred by heavy ornamental iron grilles. She heard heavy footsteps on the linoleum. They were slow and deliberate. Alonso was moving in the darkness from stain to stain, tracking her by her own blood. She looked desperately around the shelves, and all at once she saw her only, thin chance.

  “I hear you got something to tell me, Matt,” said Karp when the guards brought Matt Boudreau into the interrogation room.

  “You mind if I sit down first? I had a hell of a day.”

  “Suit yourself,” said Karp. The tall man slumped into a chair and arranged his ankle-length leather coat around his legs.

  “About the doll …” Karp suggested.