Enemy within kac-13

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

Karp put down the phone. Into his mind floated an aphorism his mother had often used-the worst thing in life is not getting your heart's desire; the second worst thing is getting it. He had missed her, really missed her ever since he was a child and cancer had closed her eyes for the last time, but he felt an unbearable pang of loss just now, the kind that makes you want to wail "Maaaaaa!"

  The next thing that floated up unbidden was a bit of wondrous math: 1.2 million at 55 equals beaucoup, beaucoup buckerooskis. His mind skidded away from it. A ridiculous figure anyway, not real money even, some kind of accounting game. And too bad it had happened today, because he really wanted to talk this through with Marlene. Or did he? Hell, she got to do what she wanted, staying out however long the job took. Why couldn't he? Karp was not at all prone to self-pitying resentment, but he was not immune to it either. He felt a space opening between himself and the woman, and maybe part of what was prying it open was the fantasy money. Into that space rushed thoughts about being back at homicide, about having a real job again, the one job he was born to do. He walked the few steps to Keegan's office and told the DA that, yeah, he'd do it. If it could be fixed, he would fix it.

  9

  The next week or so passed in something of a daze for Marlene. Everyone in the office down to the secretaries had gone a little batty. They had set up a television set in the coffee room tuned to a business channel, and there was always a little knot of people around it, cheering and groaning with the movement of OSBN on the Nasdaq. People were not used to having their net worth rise or fall by several thousand dollars in an afternoon, not to speak of the few in the company for whom the daily wiggle was measured in millions.

  Of all Marlene's colleagues, none had embraced the new situation with more simple delight than Oleg Sirmenkov.

  "What do you think of Boxter by Porsche, Marlene?" he asked her one morning. "Is good car, yes?" He sat on the edge of her desk and flipped his new gold Dunhill on and off.

  "A good car, yes. Get a red one. Is what we call a pussy car, Oleg."

  He looked dismayed. "What? Is not strong enough the engine, you mean?"

  "No, it means beautiful, young girls will come over to you when you drive it, and ignore that you are old and decrepit, and wish for a ride."

  "Am not so old and decrepit yet. I can still go to the field with youngsters."

  "As in Kosovo."

  "Exactly so. And a good thing. Maybe we would not be rich as we are now if Perry and his friends are dead."

  "True enough. It was really amazing how you knew just how to find them. I can't get over it."

  Sirmenkov shrugged modestly. "We were lucky. Plus, good preparation, good contacts, good operatives." He laughed. "Unlimited bribery as well. But, now, tell me, what are you going to buy? You have so much more than I do, is crime."

  "I haven't bought anything. I thought you had to wait six months before selling any stock."

  "What? They don't tell you? No, of course, they tell-you was right there next to me."

  "I guess I wasn't listening."

  "You are so foolish sometime, Marlene, I do not believe you. Is margin account. Margin! See the little man, Mr. Amory. He has set up accounts for all of us."

  Indeed, as Marlene discovered via a call and a brief visit, Osborne had arranged for the broker to provide margin accounts secured with stock. Marlene went out at midday, cabbed downtown, had a nice chat with the Toad, who explained that a bank would lend Marlene spending money on the value of her stock. Typically, stock value rose more quickly than interest, so the loan could be financed by selling off small blocks from time to time. What if the stock declined? Marlene wanted to know, and was met with an expression of pity, as for someone worrying whether the earth would ever collide with the moon. Thus assured, she was handed off to Ms. Lipopo, at the private department of Manhattan Trust, and introduced to the pleasures of high-end private banking. No little glass cubicle, exposed to the gaze of the peasantry waiting for tellers; instead, a dark-paneled office, with Edwardian touches and a Kirghiz on the floor. Marlene wondered if they had extruded Ms. Lipopo especially for her, she looked so new and shiny, a slim, golden, thirtyish person of jumbled ethnic antecedents, precisely suitable for personally banking a one-eyed, burnt-out liberal matron. If, Marlene mused, Marlene had been an Irish brickie who had hit the lottery, would that Ms. Lipopo have had a beer gut and a skein of dirty jokes?

  The young woman caused Marlene to sign a large number of forms (which, though a lawyer herself, she read only negligently, for who could not trust Ms. Lipopo?) and served coffee and petits fours on fine porcelain. After the signings, Ms. L. turned to her computer terminal, elegant fingers poised. "How much would you want to start with? The limit is fifty percent of market value, but you may want to set up with a lesser amount just for immediate use. Ten percent?"

  "That sounds right," said Marlene from Queens, suppressing the "duh."

  "At today's prices, let's say five-five." Ms. Lipopo smiled, showing white teeth and lovely pink gums. Everyone was being so nice to Marlene recently. Could it be the money?

  "Five-five meaning…?"

  "Five point five million." Another charming smile. Ms. Lipopo loved her work.

  "Oh, well, yeah, just for my immediate needs," said Marlene, a fine sweat popping out on forehead and upper lip. Shortly thereafter, she left with a nice checkbook bound in genuine black morocco, a little portfolio (ditto) containing a sheaf of forms and densely printed publications, and a credit/debit card of a peculiar dull metallic-gray color, which was apparently the loveliest and most prestigious color a credit card could ever be. No toaster, no mug with the bank logo, but you couldn't have everything, she thought. Or, thinking again, in my case you could, me now being so rich that… the metaphor machine stumbled here. More cold sweat. This was stupid. It's only money. Okay, a lot of money, but still…

  She passed a bank, an ATM lobby. Drawn by a mysterious force, like an earthling under the control of body snatchers, she found herself bellying up to the device, slipping the new card into the slot. My immediate needs, she thought, and punched in five hundred. The little door whined, and there were twenty-five twenties, actual money. She snatched up the wad and looked around, as if she were ripping someone off.

  This was nuts. She hailed a cab on Broadway, and on the ride uptown she tried to think of anything but the money, which was like the old saw about not thinking about a purple rhinoceros and, besides, she had never been much good at controlling her thoughts. Not a mental-discipline type, her, not like her daughter, apparently, or her husband, which was where the daughter must have picked it up, along with her other Karp-like characteristics, such as a tendency to be judgmental, a little self-righteous maybe, a bit hard on old Mom or wifey, as the case might be. Which might change with the new money, might it not? Money was supposed to grease the wheels, make things easier. Why people wanted it, right? Why they killed and whored for it, or killed themselves. Don't think about it, then. Clear the decks. Think about… what? Husband and family. What husband? Never around anymore, and when around difficult, irritable. Doesn't talk about work like he used to, a bad sign, he's worried about something, keeping something stashed deep away, what could it be? Another woman? Butch? Of course, the wife is always the last to know. Plus, he goes into this crazy job situation without a prior consult, violation of prime marital directive, not good. Lucy also never home, consorting with that guy, good-looking enough, thin and wiry, beautiful blue eyes: like mother, like daughter, in that respect. Sex? Ridic! But probably be good for her… no, what am I thinking? Guy's nearly thirty, she's a baby, practically, although the stories you hear about private-school girls nowadays, blow jobs galore at the junior prom. Still, time for the kid to drop that religious stuff, get on with real life, like I did, and look at me-one eye and fifty-five million bucks, ha! She'll probably want me to give it to the poor, or the Church. Maybe I will, some, just to show her I really am generous. Butch is a miser, but I'm not. He hasn't said a word about the IPO eithe
r, not even "Good for you, girl"; like he doesn't want to think about it. Or maybe I'll endow a chair at Smith, which is the only way my daughter is going to get in there. The Marlene Ciampi Professorship for the Study of Religious Hysteria in Language Geniuses. Or I could get away. They'd all be better off. Buy an island. Buy a town in Italy. Take the boys. No, not Zak, Zak needs a man, ninety-two pounds in his socks and most of that testosterone. Would Giancarlo come? Maybe. We could have a warped relationship. He could collect porcelains and incunabula and look after his crazy mother. Eccentric. Poor are crazy, rich eccentric. I could have a string of horses, but I hate horses. Cars. I love cars. A Ferrari for starters. And dogs. Hundreds of dogs, vast kennels, yes, the dog lady growing old in her palazzo with hundreds of dogs… No! Don't think about the money! Money would change things, not really change. I'm the same as I was before. We all are.

  The cell phone buzzed just then, and she answered it, relieved to be out of the coils of racing thought. It was Wayne Segovia.

  "Marlene? I'm down at the Daumier. It could be we got a situation here."

  "The Daumier?" She was still a little narcotized by mammon.

  "Yeah, Kelsie Solette's place. I got a call from Donny Walker. He thinks he spotted Jimmy Coleman cruising the street. Saw him a couple of times. What do you think?"

  "Stay there, I'll come by." She checked outside. "I'm at Third and Forty-sixth. I should be there in ten minutes."

  She gave the cabbie the new address. Donny Walker was a kid they had put on the staff of Kelsie Solette's building, in the reasonable expectation that a short jolt in Rikers was not going to dissuade the stalker Jimmy Coleman from his heartfelt vow to make Solette his own or, failing that, kill her and himself. People like Coleman represented the most difficult challenge in the celebrity-protection business. The law couldn't touch them beyond petty sentences for harassment, which typically only solidified their determination. The only way around this was to nail the guy on a major felony, without endangering the client at the same time. That, or shoot him, one; but Marlene didn't do that anymore. She felt her brain slide into a different mode as adrenaline cleared the stupid monologues from her mind like a stiff breeze blowing through a smoked-up kitchen. Ah, action!

  It had taken Karp the better part of a week to get his homicide chops back. Roland had vanished without a word to anyone-no farewell party, no parting gift from the loyal staff. Karp had called once and left a message on the machine at Roland's place, and so far no reply. He was secretly relieved. He was also relieved to find that Roland had run a fairly tight ship. The people were reasonably competent, the records were in order. The ship was somewhat tighter than Karp would have liked. Roland was the kind of administrator who kept everything flowing through his fingers and ruled by yelling, which meant that the staff tended to keep mistakes to themselves and hesitated to seek guidance. Karp made no major changes in procedures, but met individually with each of the thirty-odd staff members, assured them of his continuing confidence, received a rundown on their caseloads, made some gentle suggestions, and in general attempted to suggest to them that he was not one to bite their heads off if they goofed. Which they would. Tony Harris was Roland's deputy, which was good; Karp had known Harris from his first day on the job, had trained him, and trusted him. He made it clear that Harris would handle the day-to-day running of the bureau, while Karp focused on the big-ticket items, Benson and Marshak. And Lomax, but Karp did not mention that to Harris.

  The homicide bureau chief's office was a little smaller than the one he'd occupied up on the eighth floor, and more crowded, with a desk at one end, a glass-topped conference table in the middle, a worn and cracked green leather couch along one wall, and the rest so occupied by bookcases and filing cabinets that a normal person had to navigate by walking sideways. The paint was yellowing and dirty, as were the windows. No young law school graduate going private would have tolerated such conditions for a minute, but Karp and his colleagues in the courthouse were used to it, and to the notion that public officials were obliged by their choice of profession and its critical importance to the commonwealth to work in squalor.

  Two people were sitting on the couch at the moment. One was Terrell Collins, a tall, caramel-colored, crop-headed man wearing hornrims, a gray suit, and glistening Florsheims. The other was a broad-shouldered young woman wearing an olive suit with a white silk T-shirt beneath it. She had bold indio features and a mass of thick black hair: Mimi Vasquez. Both Vasquez and Collins shared some history with Karp, and as a result of it were slightly nervous with him, or rather expectantly concerned. Collins had second-seated Karp on a notorious trial, the same one whose loss had lost Karp his original job as homicide bureau chief. Vasquez had prosecuted a teenaged infanticidal mom a couple of years back, in which Karp had involved himself in a way that, while serving Karp's idea of justice, had cut Vasquez out of the real action. Both of these people had no doubts about Karp's basic integrity or competence, but they both considered that working closely with him could, under the right conditions, be like accepting a copilot's berth on a kamikaze bomber.

  "I suppose you're wondering why I asked you here," said Karp in a mock-portentous voice. They both laughed. "Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to get the DA out of the jam he has gotten himself in because of this goddamn election, and by so doing serve justice, God, the people, and our precious American way of life. Whaddya say, kids?"

  "Will it take long?" asked Collins innocently. "I have a dentist's appointment."

  Vasquez said, "That was incredibly inspiring, Butch. I want to say that I'm behind you all the way, or until it becomes personally inconvenient."

  "Gosh, you guys!" said Karp. "I'm deeply touched. Let me pause and wipe away the tears." He clapped his hands smartly. "All right! We have two cases, both politically hot. Whichever way they go, they are each going to piss off an important constituency that the DA needs to get elected. The DA told me to fix them, and I intend to fix them. I have a suspicion that what the DA means by fix, whether or not he knows it himself, has to do with figuring out what the maximum political advantage is and then crafting our cases to make that happen. But this is not what I intend to do." He paused to let that sink in.

  "My own feeling," he resumed, "is that the DA is mistaken, and that skewing cases in this way is a disastrous strategy because the office of DA is different from a general political office. The mayor and the governor have to balance competing goods, and if the goods they support have more beneficiaries than the goods they don't support, then they stay elected, and if not, not. But that's their job, that's what they're for. But we don't have competing goods, or anyway we shouldn't. We have the law; we have procedure; we have skill and judgment. We know what a good case looks like. And so I propose that the best politics is to just go by what's carved in stone on the outside of the building: 'Every place is safe to him who lives in justice-be just and fear not.'"

  They stared at him. After a short pause, Collins asked, "Are you serious?"

  "Damn right I am."

  Vasquez said, "Um, Butch, that's very idealistic, but…"

  "No! It's not idealistic. In this case, it's pragmatic as hell. Look, Vasquez, as soon as we start thinking directly about political consequences, we get lost in a tangle we can't get out of, which is not the case in plain-vanilla politics. The side that loses the election might feel sorry for itself, it might have to pay more taxes or get less services, but it doesn't feel betrayed. If the losers were actually right about policy, sooner or later things will get worse and they'll win the next time out. Rah-rah, democracy in action. But here, if we screw around with a prosecution, it is a betrayal, and people will see that, and they won't forgive Jack Keegan for it, and all the political influence in the world won't save him. I'm not sure he realizes that, but I do, and that's how we're going to proceed in both these matters."

  "Shit, man," said Collins, "we have to be honest now?"

  "I'm game," said Vasquez. "It'll be a refreshing change. What
do you want us to do?"

  Karp could see that she wasn't letting herself believe him, but at least she was peeping over the wall of cynicism all these young attorneys erected after a few months on the job. He smiled encouragingly. "Good. You have Marshak. Raney's the cop on it, a very bright guy, inclined to be helpful. Go see him, get involved. I know they don't like us hanging close to them, and usually we don't have the time, but we're going to free you both up of everything else you have for the duration of these two cases. Push him to find the other guy, if any. Check out the vic. Talk to the people he hung with. We want to try to reconstruct his last day. Most important, did he pack a knife, did anyone ever see him with a knife? And the watch. Where did it come from, where did a homeless guy get a highend Rolex watch? There's a story there; find out what it was. On the Marshak end, what was she doing in that garage? You need to talk to my wife on that. And my daughter."

  "What?"

  "Yeah, the accused was a client, or almost a client, of my wife's. She thought she was being stalked. In any case, it happens that Marlene was at the vicinity of the crime at or near the time of. She saw Marshak make her getaway. Also, people who knew her in the weeks before it went down, what was her general behavior, her morale? Most important-did she know the victim, any connection whatsoever? Raney will help you out."

  "You said your daughter?"

  "Oh, yeah. Lucy helps run a soup kitchen down in Chelsea. Ramsey was one of the regulars. She can give you background on him and his homies. Along with that, see his family, get a sense of what the guy was like. Details, Vasquez, it's all details. Bring 'em in, the more the better." She nodded, scribbled on a yellow pad. He pointed a big finger at her. "Every day on this, okay?"

  "Got it." She seemed a little brighter now, energized. "I have an appearance in ten minutes."

  "Okay, go. See Tony about getting out from under everything else. See you tomorrow."