Irresistible Impulse

by Robert Tanenbaum

  Inevitably, around the third quarter of the game, Marlene, who by then was starting to think that the Inquisition was not an entirely bad idea, would storm into the men’s retreat and give Karp a Look. Then, after a brief conversation in the hallway, conducted in harsh whispers, the Karps would make their excuses and leave, not, if the truth be told, much missed.

  Although used to this misery, Marlene found that its effect on her had increased in recent years. Perhaps she was getting shorter-tempered in her old age, or her work was somehow lowering the barriers against violence. One day, she realized, she would lash out at the stupid women in some unforgivable way, and that would be the end of it all.

  She glanced up from her book at Lucy, for whose sake, largely, she endured the torment; children, she believed, had the right to a complete family.

  Lucy felt eyes on her and looked up from her own book, a Nancy Drew, and smiled. “What’re you reading, Mom?” she asked.

  “I’m reading The Way of Perfection, by Saint Teresa.”

  “The Little Flower?” said Lucy with interest. She was at the age when Therese of Lisieux was most appealing.

  “No, Teresa of Avila.”

  “Is that her on the cover?”

  They inspected the cover together. It was, inevitably, a photograph of the great Bernini statue.

  “Hey, she looks like you, Mom,” said Lucy.

  “So I’ve been told. But that’s just the imagination of the sculptor. Maybe she didn’t look like that at all.”

  “What’s it about? The book.”

  “Oh, you know—saintly stuff. Teresa founded a bunch of convents, and this is what she thought the nuns in them should do.”

  “Like what? Teaching school and stuff?”

  “No, different kind of nuns. She wanted them to pray without ceasing.”

  “They had to pray all the time?” Astonishment.

  “Uh-huh. Every minute.”

  “Even … even in the bathroom?” Giggles ensued.

  “She thought,” said Marlene sternly, “that if she did, God would talk to her.”

  “Did it work?” asked the infant pragmatist.

  “Apparently so. That’s why she’s a saint.”

  A discreet pause, and the child studied the figure in ecstasy. “Do you ever try to do it?” she asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  A longer pause. “Did it work?”

  “No,” said Marlene in a tone discouraging further inquiry.

  Yes, thought Marlene as they both returned to their reading and foot rubbing, she had been a little older than Lucy was now when she tried it. How many thousand Our Fathers on her aching knees, sweat and tears pouring off her, her parents looking askance, her brothers teasing, her friends abandoned and hurt, and then the realization, unappealable, devastating, that there would not be a rapture, that the arrow from high heaven would not pierce her heart, that she would not hear the Voice say, as it had to St. Teresa, “I would not have you hold conversation with men, but with angels.”

  From the distance of years, Marlene could be easier on herself. Queens in 1960 was not as congenial to the contemplative life as sixteenth-century Spain; Teresa had not had to contend with rock ‘n’ roll, makeup, James Dean movies, and greasy beautiful boys roaring down the street on chopped Harleys and stroked and channeled candy-flake Chevys. Marlene, thin and exhausted after this venture (the booby prize was that she became even more exquisite out of the travail), had thereafter begun in earnest to hold conversation with men, and put the ecclesiastical world on hold for over a decade.

  Here she was again, however, with the same book, and a daughter who had the potential for being even wilder than her mother. How soon before Kermit the Frog comes down from her wall and AC-DC goes up, or the Sex Pistols? After that, how soon until the worthless boys started to hang out?

  Before Marlene could think, she reached out in an almost convulsive motion and pulled Lucy to her, jamming the child’s head tightly against her own.

  “Mah-ummm! What’re you doing? complained Lucy.

  “I’m trying to jam all my horrible experience into your head so you don’t have to go through it all over again and break my heart,” said her mother.

  Lucy struggled from the head lock and gave her mother a sharp look. Marlene was about to explain (not that it could be explained) when Zak let out a cry from the nursery. In a moment Zik had joined the duet.

  Marlene went down and chirped at them, changed them, tickled them, and, tucking one on each hip, walked back to the living room. They seemed solid and sturdy to her, indestructible. Boys. She had been surprised to find that although she loved them both dearly, she did not have the sort of terrified feelings for them that she had for Lucy, the sense that the child was clone of one’s own soul. The boys would be all right. They were little men already at age one, dividing the vast male province amicably between them: to the one War (Zak), Culture to the other. And, of course, they had each other: they had recently started communicating in a secret twin language.

  She plopped them on the living room carpet among a scatter of soft toys. They, of course, went straight for Lucy, who made a show of playing with them for five minutes and then flounced off to her room. Another family problem, but one that Marlene thought time would heal.

  Unlike, for example, the Wooten family problem, which Marlene thought that time would only make worse.

  Stop it, you’re ruining my life! A spontaneous and irrational outburst from Edie when Marlene told her about what had happened upstairs at Cuff’s, and she had even spared Edie some of the wetter details. Edie had actually put her hands over her ears to bar the knowledge that in all likelihood the Music Lover was a conspiracy of her sister, Vincent Robinson, and the pianist Evarti. Marlene had sent Wolfe off to tail Robinson, without much hope, to try to catch him in the act. Which meant that Marlene would have to go back on the street, since Dane was still recovering from the shooting, having found that gun-nuttery and actually killing a human at close range are rather different things. The grand jury inquiry into the death of Donald Monto would not take place for a month. While Marlene did not think there would be any problem with it, Dane was taking it very seriously indeed.

  Marlene tried to get back into her book but quickly saw the wisdom of Teresa in keeping babies out of the convents of the Discalced Carmelites. Setting the book aside, she descended to the floor and spent the next two hours in squealing mindless play, lost in motherhood’s Way of Imperfection, her lot.

  FOURTEEN

  Marlene came up from an unpleasant dream involving babies, whips, and priests to the furious shaking of her daughter.

  “Mah-om! Get up! I’m going to be late for school, and they’re screaming their stupid heads off!”

  They certainly were.

  Marlene sat up, rubbed her face, and shook her head. Clearly Karp was gone. No surprise on the first day of that miserable trial, but …

  “What—where’s Posie?” she asked around a thick tongue.

  “I don’t know. Anyway, she’s not here,” was the reply. Marlene groaned and slipped back into automatic mode: dress, no shower, babies cleaned and fed, dog walked, Lucy to school, Marlene to the office, with the little boys.

  “Sym, did Posie call or anything?”

  “No.” The girl looked doubtfully at the pair of squirming rug rats. “Do I have to take care of them?”

  “No, Sym, I’ll do it myself,” said Marlene, taking the proffered coffee and sticking the sheaf of message slips between her lips. “I’m sure they’ll be fine playing out on the fire escape,” she mumbled, and regretted it immediately when she saw Sym’s expression. Sym would kill for Marlene, or take a bullet, but watching babies was out, at least for now.

  Marlene gulped down her coffee, placed the babies in what used to be the nursery, and which had become something of a dumpster and storeroom, removed the poisonous and deadly materials and objects, dug out the few pathetic toys that had been left behind, set up the folding gate at the nur
sery door, and went to her cubicle to smoke and return calls, with the door open so that she could hear any wails.

  The message sheaf was unusually fat. Like Macy’s and Toys “R” Us, Marlene’s was a business that thrived amid the warmth of the holidays, reaching a crescendo around the twelve days of Christmas. It was then that the eggnog flowed and made rational such thoughts as, “Because you won’t take me back and let me be a loving dad again, I will kill you and the kids and myself.” Also, the merry season stimulated any number of women to let the guys come around, whereafter they almost always recalled just exactly why they had tossed them out in the first place, which no amount of tinsel and ho-ho-ho could disguise, and told the guys this, and got their lumps, again. It was not, for Marlene or for many of her clients, A Wonderful Life.

  Three from Edie Wooten, one marked urgent. Marlene put these aside: it couldn’t have been that urgent or Sym would have beeped her. A call-in from Wolfe. Six violations of protect orders, two serious, three phone harassments. Four cold calls, ladies having problems with their gentlemen. These first, some counseling, referrals, an appointment made. Some calls to friendly cops. Calls to men, at work, telling them to cut it out, that someone was watching. An hour, two hours, passed this way. Suddenly, Marlene leaped to her feet, heart in mouth, and slammed down a ringing phone. The silence had just struck her. The babies! She dashed out.

  Tranh was sitting on the floor next to the playpen. He had made up a solution of dish-washing liquid in a pan, from which he was drawing bubbles with a piece of twisted wire. The twins were rapt and cooing, clinging to the playpen’s bars, bouncing on their chubby legs and grabbing at the iridescent globes as they floated past. Tranh looked up and smiled.

  “L’innocent parodis, plein de plaisirs furtifs/Est-il déjà plus loin de l’Inde ou que la Chine?” he said.

  Marlene’s heart went back into its place. A Vietnamese assassin who quotes Baudelaire is watching my kids, she thought briefly, then sighed and trotted back to work. Good, affordable child care is hard to find in New York.

  Karp had blocked out his opening statement over the weekend, and that morning he had reviewed it carefully with Terrell Collins, even rehearsing it a couple of times, which was a thing he rarely did. The presentation of an opening statement is a peculiar art form that, like singing the blues, has many pretenders but few masters. Like the blues, the opening statement tells a story; like the blues, it is, or must seem, extemporaneous, natural. It must have a sort of artless grace to it, yet it must also penetrate deeply, so that all the evidence that appears during the course of a long trial will be slotted by the jurors’ minds into the places that the prosecutor has prepared for each piece.

  Karp was good at this, and liked doing it. On the other hand, this was not your usual liquor-store shooting. He was starting to feel … not precisely nervous, but that he was overtraining, that Waley had him spooked. Since he had arisen that morning at six, something had been nagging at his mind, and he couldn’t bring it to the surface. It irritated him, like a ripped cuticle. A half hour before they were due in court he found himself walking back and forth down the length of his office, taking deep, slow breaths and trying not to think of anything.

  “I’m taking notes,” said Collins, watching him. “This is great, the secrets of trial prep revealed. By the master.”

  “No, the secret is, wear three pairs of underpants. Also, rub the Speedstick over your whole face, so they don’t see you sweat.”

  “You’re kidding,” said Collins.

  “Yes, I am.” Karp looked at his watch, again. “Okay, last minute: what did we forget? Witnesses all here, we’re missing witnesses …”

  “Yes,” said Collins,” they were all here ten minutes ago, the last time you asked, but I sent them down to Coney, get some hot dogs, some beers, relax a little.”

  “Nobody likes a wiseass, Collins,” said Karp, not unkindly. He had grown to like and admire the young man. Without being asked, Collins had taken over all of the tedious tasks involved in trial preparation—the marshaling and scheduling of witnesses, sending the cops of the D.A.’s squad on necessary errands and ensuring these were accomplished, tracking down and securing physical evidence, and keeping in order the mass of paperwork associated with any major trial. As a result of having this work taken from his hands, Karp had arrived at the first day of trial tired but not utterly exhausted.

  Collins replied, “Especially not a preternaturally handsome Negro wiseass. I know it. I try to deal with it.”

  “Try harder,” said Karp. He shuffled through Collins’s carefully done backgrounders on the defendant and the witnesses, reflexively, to do something with his twitching hands. He was reading through Rohbling’s brief biography for the twentieth time when the thought finally emerged, like a bubble in thick soup. He snapped his fingers. “Oh, I know what I wanted to ask: did a nanny called Clarice ever show up as a subject in any of this?”

  Collins thought for a few seconds. “Not that I recall. Where did you get the name?”

  “Perlsteiner mentioned it. It could figure later, so why don’t you dig a little—find out what happened to her. She apparently made our boy what he is today, or helped.”

  Collins scratched a note. Karp resumed his pacing and breathing. Collins said, “You think that between your opening and Waley’s we’ll take the whole morning?”

  Karp stopped and turned. “Oh, Waley won’t open now.”

  “He won’t?”

  “No, why should he? He doesn’t have a theory of the case that’s different from ours. He’s not out to show there’s a reasonable doubt that Rohbling killed Jane Hughes. He’ll let us go ahead and do that, and stress the bizarre aspects of the case on cross, and then when we conclude, he’ll get up and say yes, yes, this terrible crime, but it could only have been committed by a madman.”

  Wolfe came in just before noon, looking haggard and worried. Marlene asked him what was wrong. “You talk to Edie yet?”

  “No, what happened?”

  “The guy came in last night, into her bedroom.”

  “Oh, Jesus! Did he do anything?”

  “No, just stayed there and stared at her. Sat on the bed. He had a stocking on his face. Didn’t say anything.”

  “Was it Evarti?”

  “She couldn’t tell who it was, but it wasn’t Evarti. I checked. He’s in L.A., playing piano. Anyway, she didn’t recognize the guy. She was pretty freaked out.”

  “You saw her? Last night?”

  Wolfe did not answer immediately. He rubbed his face and cleared his throat. “Well, what it was … I was following Robinson. Guy left a club downtown, not Cuff’s, another one on St. Mark’s, about eleven. Got in a cab, going uptown. I followed him in the car. I think he made me. He must’ve, because he got off at Lex and Forty-first and ran into the subway. I parked and tried to chase him, but you know—it’s a big station. I went up to the street again and I saw a guy go by in a cab that I thought was him and I followed that, but it turned out it wasn’t. So then I went by her apartment to check, and he’d already been and gone. The doorman didn’t see anyone. I feel real bad about it, Marlene.”

  “Don’t. It takes three people to set up a real tail, which means twelve for a continuous job. We’re not set up to do stuff like that. You did good, Wolfe. At least now we know for sure who it is.”

  “She called him,” said Wolfe.

  “Oh, crap, she shouldn’t have done that!”

  “Yeah, I said. She said he just laughed at her and told her to relax and enjoy it.”

  “That sounds Like Robinson. I should call her.”

  She did. It was a brief conversation. When Marlene put down the phone, she said, “Well, well, that’s interesting.”

  “What?”

  “She wants somebody to sleep in, dog her steps. Doesn’t care what it costs.” She looked at Wolfe. “Interested?”

  She saw his Adam’s apple move as he gulped. “Um, yeah, I guess. If you think it wouldn’t be, you know …”


  “What, improper? For crying out loud, Wolfe, the sister is the town pump! High society isn’t going to worry if Edie’s got a live-in guard.”

  He shrugged and bobbed his head. “Then, okay, I guess. Sure.”

  She laughed. “Gosh, Wolfe, you sound like somebody was twisting your arm. You get a nice room on Park Avenue, get to mix with the culture vultures, travel to exotic places—” She stopped. His jaw was tightening. She said, “There’s a problem here that I don’t see. What?”

  “Oh, nothing. Just, you know, being around classy people. It’s, um, I keep thinking I’ll do something dumb.”

  “Hey, ninety percent is don’t drink from the finger bowls, don’t fart too loud, and always flush. The rest you’ll pick up. So, can I tell her you’re the guy?”

  He nodded.

  “Great! One thing, though. If Robinson is serious about this, and he feels blocked, he could try to get through you. I need to know that you’re ready for that. Whatever it takes.”

  “Oh, yeah. That part I got no problem with,” said Wolfe with a ghostly smile, and then Tranh came in and announced that he had made lunch.