Falsely Accused

by Robert Tanenbaum

  Which was largely white and black, with splashes of meaningless abstract color and neon sculptures on plain stands, an obvious package by a decorator at the forward edge of au courant. Poole herself was garbed in black—tights and a sort of loose Chinese jacket in heavy cotton, an outfit that, in combination with her essential physique, made her look like a recent releasee from a Japanese prison camp. Her face, despite the famous razor cheekbones and a nose that appeared to have more than a normal complement of tiny, angled bones, seemed, without the intervening miracle of photography, curiously malformed, like that of an embryo bird.

  Marlene was seated in a complicated chrome and leather sling, offered a drink, stared at with frank horror, and subjected to a long story of persecution. She took notes. The gentleman was named Jonathan Seely. He was an account executive at a big ad agency that had hired Ms. Poole to associate her cheekbones with an upmarket new perfume. A romance had blossomed, then faded, when Ms. Poole had discovered the gentleman was, as she put it, a sadistic son of a bitch. He had hit her. In the face. Now he wouldn’t stop calling. Somehow he was able to obtain her private, private number, however often she changed it. Every time the phone rang she jumped. It was interfering with her work. She was a prisoner in her own home. And so on.

  Marlene closed her notebook. The model stopped talking and looked at her expectantly. Marlene said, “Well, I think I have enough to go on. Let me do some nosing around and get back to you. Tomorrow?”

  Suzy Poole let a crease of doubt mar her perfection. “Umm, sure, but what do you think now? Will you be able to help?”

  “Oh, yeah, I think so.”

  “Like what? Not guards.”

  “Oh, no. You don’t need me for guards, and the point is not to make a more secure prison for yourself, but to make him stop bothering you. For example, I noticed you haven’t filed for a protective order. That’d be one of our first steps.”

  Poole made a moue of distaste, charming. “Ooh, do we have to, like, involve the courts? I mean, can’t we handle it in a more discreet way?”

  “You’re concerned about this guy messing with your career if you name him publicly in a legal action?”

  “I guess.”

  Marlene fixed the woman’s enormous dark blue eyes with her solo jet one, and said, “Let’s get one thing straight before we go any further, Ms. Poole. This man has declared war on you. He is torturing you. He is beyond decency. Pleas haven’t helped. In order to make him stop, we must therefore make his life as unpleasant—no, more unpleasant—than he has made yours. Now, I think I can do that, and going to court is—”

  The phone rang. Suzy Poole uttered a little startled noise and touched her hand to her heart.

  “I’ll get it,” said Marlene, and picked up the nearest phone before Poole could say a word.

  “Bitch!” said a hissing voice in Marlene’s ear.

  “Mr. Seely?” said Marlene pleasantly. “This is Ms. Poole’s protective service. We ask you please not to call this number again.”

  Silence, and then the click of a disconnection.

  “He’ll call again,” said Marlene. “If you’re going to go ahead with this, I’ll have my partner make an appointment to rig up a recording device on your line. It’s critical that we get a physical record of him annoying you. So, are we hired?”

  Suzy Poole nodded. “Yes. You’re hired. Do you, ah, want me to give you a check?”

  “Not right now,” said Marlene. “I want to get my license first.”

  When Marlene left Suzy Poole’s she cabbed downtown (marking the cab ride as a legitimate expense in a little book she had purchased for this purpose) and filed a P.I. application at the New York State Building on Foley Square. It was a formality. The state of New York does not want lowlife types carrying guns and poking into the private affairs of its citizens, and so keeps its private-investigator licensing laws strict. The stringency is, however, greatly reduced for former members of the NYPD, and a cynic might see a connection between the verve with which the police resist any relaxation of the City’s laws against legal gun ownership (in a town where any fifteen-year-old can pick up a piece for pocket change) and the ease with which retired cops float into the armed security business. Harry would have no trouble getting a P.I. license, and, of course, neither would the respectable lawyer and former prosecutor Marlene Ciampi.

  After that, she walked a few blocks south and met Harry Bello at a cop bar near One Police Plaza, where he had just finished the act of handing in his gold potsy. There would be no big retirement racket for Harry. He had used up his friends on the Job. Harry had shot a kid, a kid who might or might not have killed his partner, killed him in cold blood and then dropped a cheap pistol on the corpse, and the cops knew it and covered for him, to protect the department, but people didn’t want to know him after that.

  The place was busy, yet Harry had two empty stools on either side of him at the bar. He was drinking club soda and shuffling through a set of retirement papers.

  “How’s the pension?” she asked as she sat down.

  “I got Lucy as my beneficiary,” he said. “Is that okay?”

  “It’s fine, Harry. I just this minute came from our first customer.”

  Raised eyebrow.

  “I think we can help her. The guy is a taxpayer; he won’t stand up to a serious nudge.”

  Harry said, “No way. Not again.”

  “I wasn’t thinking about anything as elaborate as the Pruitt thing, Harry. This guy is a different type. There’s a woman I need to see at NYU; apparently she’s got a line on who stalks and why. I think this model’s bum is going to be easy money. Oh, by the way, I got these.”

  Marlene reached into her bag and brought out a small brick-shaped box. She opened it and handed Bello one of the business cards it contained, printed with:

  Bello & Ciampi

  Investigations • Security

  with the Crosby Street address and an unfamiliar phone number.

  “The number’s an answering service,” Marlene explained. “We’ll work out of my place until we’re rich enough to spring for an office. What do you think? Bello and Ciampi, pretty classy, huh?”

  “Fresh fish,” said Bello, deadpan.

  “Why, Harry,” said Marlene in a tone of exaggerated wonder. “I believe that you have just made a light or humorous remark. You know, I think retirement is going to do you some good.”

  Phil DeLino’s call caught Karp just as he was about to leave. He stood in his office holding his coat and took it.

  “May twenty-third,” said DeLino.

  “What’s May twenty-third?” asked Karp.

  “What you were so hot to find out. I spoke to His Honor and went over his calendars. May twenty-third is the first date that we can remember Bloom bringing up that we ought to fire Murray Selig. After that it was the subject of lots of calls and at least three meetings.”

  “Why?” Karp asked with growing interest. “What was the reason? And why just then?”

  “I drew a blank there, buddy. The Mayor doesn’t know either. Guy just got a bug in his bonnet.”

  “Mmm. Maybe. Look, thanks, Phil, and if you chance across anything else, I’d appreciate knowing about it.”

  “Will do. By the way, the Mayor enjoyed his session with you. It made him wish he was still practicing law. And he told me to tell you, quote, when Jack Weller fires his sorry Jewish ass, he can come by and work for me, unquote.”

  Stupenagel drove slowly up Lexington Avenue in East Harlem, trying to steer the ancient black Chevy around the worst potholes. The shocks were nearly gone, and when she went over a bad one the jolt made her teeth clatter. It was her third night on the job, and she had by now acquired the greatest respect for the way in which gypsy cab drivers made their living.

  She was wearing a tattered leather jacket and had a greasy Mets cap pulled down over her eyes. It did not do Stupenagel’s vanity much good to be able to pass as a man so easily, but it had often been useful to her professio
nally. She was good at it too. The guy running the garage, a Dominican, had barely looked at her before sending her out in his worst beater.

  The garage boss was, in fact, only interested in the phony license she presented, and her demonstrated facility in both Spanish and English. Gypsy hacks didn’t last long in New York, and bilingual ones were a prize. She had a crackling dashboard-mounted radio that occasionally squawked her number and told her where to go for a pickup. The gypsies, she was learning, fulfilled an essential social purpose, in that they were the only automobile transportation available to the City’s legions of poor. Into her cab whole families had piled, clown-car fashion, to go to a christening or a funeral, and when the poor moved, which was often, they loaded their entire worldly store into the gypsies for shipment from one rotten apartment to another. This much was legal.

  The other side of the gypsy business (illegal) arose from the reluctance of the real taxicabs, the yellow ones with the high-priced official medallion from the hack bureau on their hoods, to travel in upper Manhattan, or other rough regions of the City, or to pick up from the street members of the darker-hued minorities.

  It was, of course, well known that gypsy cabs picked up people who hailed them on the street. Since their cabs had no meters, each driver would engage in a brief negotiation with the passenger for the fare and then pocket it. The garage that owned the cab only had claim to the radio pickup fares, and it was understood that gypsy cabbies would supplement their fares in this way; indeed, it was virtually a necessity of survival, given the miserable wage paid by the garages.

  Stupenagel had done plenty of street pickups, far more than was usual for real gypsies, who had constantly to worry about being pinched by hack bureau inspectors or cops. She, on the other hand, was looking to get caught, and in three days she had taken in over two hundred dollars.

  There was a man standing in the avenue at 147th, under a streetlamp, with his hand up. Stupenagel swerved and slowed and looked the man over. A short man, vanilla gringo or P.R., with a mustache, wearing a raincoat and a leather porkpie hat with the brim turned up. She figured him for a musician; uptown musicians made up a considerable proportion of the gypsies’ late business. She stopped and the man got in.

  “Where to, man?” she asked, pitching her voice low.

  He leaned forward and held out a gold shield in a leather holder. “Make this next right and pull over,” he said.

  “Ah, shit!” she said. “You from the hack bureau?”

  “Shut up and move it!” he replied.

  She made the turn, and her passenger directed her to park behind a black Plymouth Fury.

  A man got out of the Fury. The passenger said, “Get out!” and she did and he did too. The man from the Fury was large and dark and wearing an expensive tan topcoat. He had a broad, heavy-browed face, on which he carried that peculiar expression, both amused and predatory, characteristic of men confident in some arbitrary power, shortly to be used. Stupenagel had seen it dozens of times around the world, on Eastern European apparatchiki and policemen, on guerillas at Central American crossroads, on the officers trying to extirpate those guerillas. She had not encountered it before in her own country, however, and she felt the beginnings of fear.

  “You been a naughty boy, Pedro,” said the big man, coming closer and looking her up and down. “You picked up a fare off the street without a license.” He held out a meaty hand. “Give it over!”

  “What?” asked Stupenagel stupidly.

  The hand flew up in a blur and cracked her across the jaw. She sprawled backward against the cab’s fender.

  “Hey, he ain’t a spic, Paulie,” remarked the other man.

  “No, he sure ain’t,” agreed the big man. “Hey, shitface, what’s a white man doing driving a gypsy up in greaser heaven?”

  Stupenagel’s head was still ringing from the blow, and she didn’t answer. The big man kicked her painfully in the ankle.

  “Pzhalsteh, gospodin, pzhalsteh …” she gasped in the most obsequious voice she could manage.

  “What’s that, Polack?” asked the other man.

  “Or Russian. You a Russky, shitface?”

  “Yes … Russian,” Stupenagel answered.

  “Jesus, the fuckin’ foreigners are taking over the damn country,” said the big man. “You understand money, right? Stand the fuck up when I talk to you! Let’s have the money.”

  Stupenagel stood and dug into the pocket of her leather jacket, coming out with a thick wad of bills, which the big man snatched from her hand.

  “Hey, hey, look at this!” the man exclaimed. “You been a hard worker, boy.” He separated out most of the bills and let the rest, mostly singles, drop to the pavement. After a second’s hesitation she stooped and picked them up.

  “That’s for your license. You understand license?” the big man said in the unnaturally loud voice used to communicate with idiots and foreigners. “But look, Ivan, you got to renew it every week, understand? Today’s Wednesday—you understand?”

  “Yes, Vednesday,” said Stupenagel.

  “You come back here every Wednesday, this time. You have a hundred for me, yes? Understand?”

  Stupenagel nodded.

  The big man grinned at her. He had white, evenly capped teeth, she noticed, the kind that very few of the people who drove gypsy cabs had in their mouths. “Good,” he said. “But if you drive in my neighborhood without a license … not good.” He popped her on the shoulder a couple of times, playfully but hard. “Boom, boom, go to jail. Understand? Okay, get the fuck out of here! Back to work!”

  He turned away, dismissing her. She climbed back into the Chevy, cranked it up, and drove off. She went directly to the garage, which was in Inwood, by the river, parked, and went into the tiny garage office. When she turned her keys, money, and trip sheets in to the night man, he looked meaningfully at the clock.

  “Your shift ain’t over until four,” he said.

  “I’m quitting,” she said. The man shrugged, counted her cash, peeled off some bills, and shoved them across the grimy desk at her. She pocketed the cash without bothering to count it. The night man whistled, as for a dog.

  A small man, with red-brown skin, with high cheekbones and crow-wing hair stood in the doorway. The night man asked him in Spanish if he wanted a ride. The man said yes. Stupenagel wanted to tell him, to warn him, but couldn’t think of what to say, how to explain what was going on up there. And he wouldn’t understand. Even ripped off, the man would make in a month what would take him a year to earn in Central America. Instead, what she said, in Spanish, was, “You can drive me home, brother. I can be your first fare.”

  NINE

  Professor Gloria Malkin of the New York University sociology department was twenty-nine years old, not bad at all for an associate with tenure. More remarkably, she looked about twelve. Not more than four-ten, Marlene thought, a little foxy in the face but nice clear brown eyes, the slightest indication of breasts under the prim white Oxford shirt and grass green sweater. She had frizzy pale tan hair yanked back into an old-fashioned ponytail tied with a bead and elastic holder. She was one of those women who fell into their look in sophomore year and found thereafter no reason to change.

  Unlike Marlene. She had chosen to appear for the interview in her biker gang momma thug outfit: knee boots, black jeans, a Navy sweater, black leather jacket with the shiny zips. Her hair had grown out into thick, springy sable coils, which bounced around her face, Medusa-like. Also, she was wearing a patch over her eye rather than the glassie, and not a drugstore black paper model either, but a narrow, soft-leather item of the type favored by actors playing German officers in the last war. She told herself that it was a professional look, considering her new profession.

  “My secretary said you were a private detective,” said the professor by way of opening. “I don’t think I’ve ever actually met a private detective before. It sounds romantic.”

  “Yes, that’s odd, isn’t it?” said Marlene. “The professions
that have attracted the interest of romance writers are a funny bunch. Pirate. Cowboy.”

  “Spy. Artist. Yes, I imagine for the people who actually do them, they must be the same as—I don’t know—tax accountancy or installing washing machines.”

  “Yes, that’s what you’re supposed to say,” said Marlene, “but in fact, it’s unutterably romantic. Rushing around in cabs following people. Wearing black clothes and sneaking into places. Violence.”

  “I’m impressed,” said Malkin. “The violence. Is that how you …” She gestured at Marlene’s face.

  “Yes. I got beat up.”

  “And the eye the same?”

  “No, that was a while ago. I was a prosecutor then. Somebody sent a bomb in the mail.”

  Malkin’s eyes widened. “Oh, you’re that one! In the article in the Voice. I should have made the connection.”

  “Yes. In fact, Ariadne’s a friend of mine. How I got your number.”

  “Speaking of romantic occupations. Well, my gosh, this is just like being in a comic strip. First Brenda Starr and now a female crime fighter … Wonder Woman? No, the Cat Lady!”

  They laughed at that together and then talked casually for a while, trading career backgrounds, until Malkin said, “Well, unless you’re recruiting for a mousy sidekick, you must have had a reason for coming to see me. I imagine it was that article.”

  “Yeah, it was,” said Marlene. “I’m trying to develop a service that specializes in stalking cases.”

  “Really? That’s fascinating. Do you have some kind of foundation support?”

  “No, why?”

  “Well, because most women whose lives have deteriorated to the point where they’re being stalked or brutalized are usually in no position to lay out any money for protection.”

  “Good point,” said Marlene. “My husband raised it too. I guess it hasn’t been a problem yet. As a matter of fact, I just finished a case that was very lucrative. A fashion model.”

  “You stopped whoever was stalking her?”

  “So far. My sense of this guy is that he won’t be back. I don’t think he was a true obsessive, just a nasty who liked to torture the animals. Which is really why I came to see you.”