Justice Denied

by Robert Tanenbaum

  “It’s an interesting theory,” Marlene agreed.

  The child pirouetted again, admiring her wings.

  “Fairies have special wings, so they could never get smooshed. I can really fly.”

  Marlene smiled uncertainly and gave the child a close look. Imagination was all very well, but the Princess, who, by the ragged look of her was not one of reality’s darlings, might be taking it too far. Oddly, Marlene thought of the Jane Doe on the slab at the morgue. Maybe she had thought she could fly too.

  “You know, Princess,” Marlene began, “pretend wings are very pretty, but they’re different from real wings, aren’t they? I mean, birds have real wings and they can really fly—”

  Marlene’s introduction to ontology was interrupted, as such discussions so often are in the City, by a major felony. There was a hoarse scream, and a ragged man came racing down the asphalt path, staggering, his face a perfect mask of blood. Before Marlene knew it, she was on her feet, positioned between the gory apparition and little Lucy. The wounded man did not, however, spare them a look, but crashed through a low bush and across the picnic field, to a chorus of curses and more screams. His pursuers, two tattered louts, one with a knife in hand and the other clutching a broken wine bottle, came racing after. By that time Marlene was wheeling her stroller rapidly in the opposite direction. After thirty yards or so, she thought to look for her recent companion, but the little girl had entirely vanished. In this respect, at least, a fairy indeed.

  7

  Have a good time?” asked Karp when Marlene arrived, breathless, at the loft. She put on a smile and declined to tell her husband that she had been chased from the park by armed thugs bent on murder. Instead she conveyed delight in the recreational opportunities of the neighborhood and then asked, “How did your thing with Roland go? Did he attack you with his triceps?”

  Karp also put on a smile and declined to tell Marlene about Roland offering him a piece of ass. He did mention the idea of a bet on the Tomasian thing.

  “You should have taken him up on it. We could use the money,” said Marlene, placing the baby, with a full bottle stuck in her gob, on a large mat in the center of the living zone. She then went into the kitchen and set the kettle to boil. Karp followed her in and sat on a stool at the butcher block counter.

  “Unless you don’t think it’s a lock?” she added, looking at him questioningly.

  He took a while before replying. “I honestly don’t know. I’d hate to think Roland was right, but like I said before, and like I said to him, that’s not the damn point. Why doesn’t anybody get this? The point is the investigation’s fucked. And I’ve been trying to think how I can straighten it out.” He paused, looked at her, and then glanced away. Then he asked, “Harry Bello’s coming to work starting Monday, isn’t he?”

  “Yeah, why?” She caught the expression on his face, and her eyes narrowed and she snarled. “Oh, no! No fucking way! You’re not going to take my only investigator away from me. You’ve got a hundred cops you could use.”

  “Yeah, but this is an off-the-books job. I can’t set up a regular cop and go, ‘A couple of your brother officers screwed up an investigation, why don’t you go straighten it out?’ Besides, where am I going to get them? Midtown South? Forget it! The D.A. squad? Those guys are all Roland’s asshole buddies. They love him. No way are they gonna put anything real into a job like this.”

  “Harry’s a cop,” Marlene protested.

  “In a manner of speaking. What he is is your personal ninja. There’s no way I can make him do anything. Which is why this has to be a favor, you to me.” He saw her jaw stiffen. “Honest, it’ll be a short-term thing. And it’s not gonna be anywhere near full-time…. Look,” he continued as he saw that these words were having little effect, “why don’t you do the whole thing?”

  Startled, Marlene replied, “What! Butch, I’m up to my ears with my regular stuff. I can’t take on a homicide investigation.”

  “It’s not a homicide investigation, Marlene. It’s just some checking up. Harry and you can do it in three or four days. See some people is all. Come on, you know you love this kind of stuff, cruising around with old Harry, the heavily armed semi-psychotic. Hell, you might even get shot. Make your week for you.”

  Marlene’s mouth wriggled as she fought to suppress a grin. “I’m being manipulated,” she said.

  “Yeah, and it’s working too. Hey, what’s that noise?”

  There was indeed a faint rattling sound coming from the living room. They both ran around the divider. The baby’s mat was empty.

  Hearts in throats, they followed the clattering noise to a corner of the living room where, under a rickety end table, their baby was yanking and sucking on an electric lamp plug she had just pulled from a wall socket, and seemed to be trying to pull the heavy ceramic lamp down on her delicate little head.

  “My God! She can crawl!” cried Marlene, delighted and terrified at once. She snatched the infant out from under the table and held it to her breast, kissing it soundly. “Butch, get the baby whip! This child needs some harsh punishment. What were you thinking of, you birdbrain? (Kiss.) Plunging into danger? (Kiss.)”

  “I wonder where she gets it from,” said Karp. Marlene raised an eyebrow at that, but he understood that it was a done deal. In the quite recent past he would have fought hard against Marlene taking up a task that involved her wandering the streets with someone like Harry Bello. Now he had arranged it. It was the baby, he concluded. His considerable endowment of protective instinct had become transferred from his wife to his daughter. It was not so much that he cared less about Marlene than he had in the past. It was more that he had come to realize that she was going to put herself at risk from time to time, for her own reasons, and that if he attempted to thwart her at this, she would simply lie to him and the relationship would eventually collapse. Looking around at the loft, which now seemed to hide a baby’s hideous death in its every cranny, he understood that this was the way it was supposed to work.

  That Monday was, besides Harry Bello’s first day, the baby’s debut at Lillian Dillard’s group day-care. Marlene arrived well before time in order to deal with any first-day terrors, but Dillard pounced on Lucy and charmed her out of her rompers. The faithless wretch didn’t even glance up as Marlene sidled out of the room, feeling ridiculously annoyed. After all I’ve done for her.

  Pausing at the entranceway, she watched Susan Weiner deliver little Nicholas with the aplomb of a Fed-Ex courier. Little Nicholas knew what was good for him too; he trudged into the center like a trouper, his shiny Sesame Street lunch box doubtless filled with food of matchless nourishment and perfectly free of harmful substances.

  Marlene waved to Susan, who smiled and approached her.

  “First day, huh? Any problems?”

  “Not a one. It breaks my heart.”

  “Yes,” said Susan, “it’s a long day. That’s why we try to schedule at least an hour of quality time in the evening.”

  Marlene gave her a look to see if she was serious and then smiled politely. Marlene didn’t believe in quality time. Kids didn’t have Filofaxes; their needs were unscheduled. Marlene wanted to be a full-time mother and a full-time prosecutor. That she could not was yet another indication that life sucked, and blathering about quality time to assuage guilt was not going to change the fact that both her child and her career were suffering a net loss because of each other.

  Susan was talking about how she had to go because there was this big rush on at work, where they were designing a custom façade for a gallery, and the architect wanted to pin the marble on with bronze roses and they couldn’t find exactly the right ones, and they ought to get together for lunch sometime.

  Marlene wanted to kick her teeth in. She was wearing two grand on her back, and both her eyes were real and she had a perfect life and Marlene couldn’t help liking her and wanting to bask a little in that sublime confidence and grace.

  Susan said good-bye and skittered off down the st
reet and of course found a cab instantly going in the right direction. Marlene clumped off disconsolately to Centre Street, where she found her secretary and her staff acting peculiar and Harry Bello waiting in her office.

  “Scaring the help, Harry?”

  “How’s the kid?” asked Bello. Marlene knew that he did not mean Marlene herself, but her daughter, his goddaughter. Marlene told him about the new day-care and, seeing the look that he gave her, explained that it was a good place that she had thoroughly checked out and then added the name of the woman who ran it and the address. She knew that before long Harry would determine for himself whether or not Lillian Dillard had lived a blameless life back through grade school, and would also have checked out the other children and their parents and whether the facility was up to code in every respect. I ought to give it up and let him be the mom, she thought.

  She looked at his face, which was the color of an old grocery bag left out in the rain for a long time, and just as empty of any human expression. He was unnaturally still too. He didn’t twitch his hands or rub his nose or do any of the small motions we inherit from the great apes, but sat, barely blinking, like a zombie waiting for a command from the hougan.

  Harry didn’t talk much either; he never had, even when he was still tearing up the bad guys in Bed-Stuy with his partner. The partner had done all the talking. And Harry’s wife had done all the talking when he wasn’t at work. Then they had both died in the same week, and the partner’s death at least had been Harry’s fault, and that was, more or less, why Harry was what he was: a soul waiting for reincarnation but still visible to the rest of us. Old women crossed themselves when they saw him coming.

  On the other hand, you didn’t have to tell him anything twice. Or once either. Without a word Marlene handed him the folder on the Alphabet City Jane Doe. He read it silently. Marlene turned to other work. After fifteen minutes, he put it back on the desk and said, “You think he might do it again.” Marlene felt a rush of gratitude and smiled at him. With no prompting at all, Harry had seen in the photographs and the autopsy report and the bare-bones investigation exactly what she had seen, and understood that of course this was why an anonymous death with some oddly sexual bits might be important.

  She said, “Yeah. What do you think? Too stale?”

  “I could try to find him.”

  Marlene’s brows knotted. “What, the killer?”

  He gave her a look, the one he gave her when she missed the subtext of one of his telegraphic messages.

  “No, the guy who called it in. For starters,” said Bello, rising and picking up the fat file. “Can I keep this?”

  Marlene nodded and Harry Bello disappeared, and she wasn’t entirely certain that the door had opened. Five minutes later, she cursed and banged her desk. She had forgotten about the agreement with Karp, about Harry and the Armenian thing.

  Karp had sort of forgotten about the Harry part too, in that he was still personally on the case. At the moment he was emerging from an unmarked police car onto the gravel drive of a large Riverdale house. It was a lovely house, a two-story Italianate villa in rusticated brown sandstone with a red tile roof. The grounds were bright with flowering trees, and there was a flash of silver through the boughs from the Hudson. Karp rang the bell, and a maid in a white uniform showed him in.

  He had called Sarkis Kerbussyan first thing that morning, and the man had agreed to meet with him immediately. Indeed, he seemed anxious to do so. The servant, a dour, elderly woman, led Karp silently through paneled halls that were floored with marble or dark wood where they were not covered with oriental carpeting. Karp was notably insensitive to works of art, but these carpets struck even him with their obvious quality, the depth and intricacy of their patterns, the brilliance of their colors. It was like walking on soft jewels.

  The woman brought him at last to a large semicircular room, white paneled, its walls made of bookcases except on the curved side, where high French windows gave onto a formal garden, just turning bright green. The floor was covered with a ruby carpet bordered in vivid blue. On the carpet, in the approximate center of the room, was a light writing table of some pale wood, and behind the desk was an old man.

  The woman left the room, closing the door silently behind her. This is like a movie, thought Karp, being of a class and generation that did not often enter houses of this style, and that instinctively used the fictions of Hollywood as a reference when encountering the remarkable in real life.

  The old man rose stiffly to his feet as Karp approached, and smiled and offered his hand, introducing himself as Sarkis Kerbussyan. Karp said who he was and took the proffered chair.

  “Nice place,” offered Karp, and immediately regretted it, feeling the hick. Kerbussyan nodded politely. “Yes, I like it very much. I bought it because it reminded me of my grandfather’s house at Smyrna, also on a hill above a river, also with a red tile roof and a garden in the back. I have been successful in growing figs here too, despite the climate. Perhaps, if you are interested, later I will show you the house and the garden.” He paused and smiled. “But first our business, yes?”

  “Aram Tomasian,” said Karp.

  “Yes. An unfortunate mistake. A tragedy for the boy and his family.”

  “I take it you don’t think he did it.”

  Kerbussyan made a dismissive gesture. “An impossibility! I have known the boy since he was born, and also his father and his mother from a very young age. In Beirut, in fact. They were brought there as orphans, and my uncle arranged for them to come to this country. So I know them all very well. They are all businessmen, peaceful people, like me. There is no possible chance that Aram was involved in such a thing.”

  At that moment the servant reappeared with a tray containing a coffee service and a small plate of baklava. In the necessary pause while this refreshment was served out, Karp took the opportunity to study his host. Old, at least eighty, thought Karp, but not frail. Rather the opposite, with a full head of thick white hair swept back from a freckled, ivory forehead. He had a strong, fleshy nose over a thick, stiff-looking mustache, also white. He was dressed neatly, as for business, in a well-tailored gray suit, a white silk shirt, and a blue tie. He became conscious of Karp’s examination as he poured the coffee and met Karp’s gaze out of deep-set brown eyes.

  The eyes held an expression Karp had seen before: veiled, layered, amused, ruthless, an expression common to powerful men of a certain stripe. Some of the dons had such a glance, and some lawyers around town, and Karp had also seen something like it in both an Israeli intelligence agent and a Nazi fugitive. Sarkis Kerbussyan was not a simple businessman, or a simple anything.

  They drank, they nibbled. Small talk flowed. Kerbussyan, it turned out, had started as a rug merchant—a deprecating smile, denoting his concession that such a trade was almost a parody for an Armenian—and while expanding his businesses into real estate and investments, he had retained his love for carpets and antiquities. Karp learned that the rug beneath their feet was worth a good deal more than the house in which it sat.

  “That’s a lot of money for a rug,” said Karp, willing to be impressed. “That’s pretty nearly enough to bail Tomasian out.”

  An incomprehensible look, that could have been anger or pain, flashed across Kerbussyan’s eyes for an instant. He put a stiff smile on his mouth and said, “That is being attended to. Five million is a great deal of money to assemble at short notice. As for the rug and other antiquities of value, I am afraid that the courts are reluctant to accept them as bailable items. Not like cash and real estate, you understand.” He glanced away, seeming to take in the carpet and the room’s other furnishings for the first time, or as if he were looking at them for the last time.

  “Yes, a great deal of money. It is an Ushak medallion carpet made in the region around Smyrna in the seventeenth century. There was one like it in my grandfather’s house. But there are only a few of this quality and size left in private hands in the world, and that is where value res
ides—quality, craftsmanship, beauty, yes, but uniqueness above all.

  “Something else too. Objects, certain objects, have a kind of soul. Rugs, for example. In the old days, they say, the rug makers would buy little girls from poor peasant families and wall them up in rooms with a loom and wools of many colors, and the little girls would spend their entire lives working on a single rug. When you bought such a rug, you would, in effect, be buying a whole life, a soul.

  “That people would do such a thing is an indication of our fallen state. After all, what is more unique than a human being? Yet we treat one another so badly; we murder for objects. There are objects in this very house that are dripping blood. If we were truly godlike, we would become connoisseurs of souls and not objets d’art, don’t you think?”

  “We have a way to go,” said Karp. “Meanwhile, people kill for lots of reasons that have nothing to do with objects. Passions. Causes.”

  “Yes, but it takes a particular sort of man to kill for a cause, don’t you think? To return to the reason for your visit, not a man like Aram Tomasian.”

  “No? He sure had enough equipment for it. And he’s a member of an organization called the Armenian Secret Army, and he’d written threatening letters to the Turkish mission.”

  Kerbussyan put down his coffee cup, pressed his palms together beneath his chin, and looked at Karp. “Mr. Karp, I do not see many people anymore, outside my community, that is. I was curious about why the chief of the Homicide Bureau wished to see me, and so after you called I made some telephone calls of my own. It appears that there was recently a difference of opinion between you and the gentleman who is handling Aram’s case.”

  “I’m not at liberty to discuss the internal operations of the district attorney’s office,” said Karp, irritated both by the other man’s knowledge of his argument with Roland and by his own pompous response.