Corruption of Blood kac-7

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  Placing the Dobbs film on the counter, she asked how long it would take to make a copy.

  The pencil-necked young technician across the counter weighed the film in his hand. "Beginning of next week?"

  "No, I need it now. I mean right now."

  He shook his head. "No way, lady. I got work piled up-"

  "You do this yourself?"

  "Yeah, me and another guy."

  "Do mine at the head of the line and it's fifty in cash, under the table."

  "Uh, I don't know…"

  "A hundred. Cash."

  He considered this for six seconds. "Okay, I'll write up a ticket."

  "No ticket. Let's just do it." She moved down the counter and lifted the flap.

  "Hey, um…"

  "I'm coming with you. You said you were going to do it now, right?"

  "Uh, yeah, but…"

  "I want to watch. This is a special film."

  The technician was familiar with 'special films,' although this one was not as naughty as many he'd seen. Two hours later, Marlene, smelling faintly of developer, emerged from the lab and made her way to the local FedEx office. She borrowed a phone and, charging the call to her own phone, got Harley Blaine's mailing address from a polite young voice in Texas. Then she borrowed a pen and paper from the clerk and wrote: Dear Mr. Blaine:

  The enclosed film, which no one but me and my husband (and, of course, the photographer) has seen as yet, will be of interest to you. We know about the bishop and the pawn, the knight, the rook and the queen, and what they did. I believe a conversation would be useful. Please call at your convenience. We are prepared to depart for Texas whenever you wish. Like your own, this is not a government operation.

  She added her phone number and signed it, and sent it with the film copy, in the lab envelope to make clear that it was a copy, to Harley Blaine

  There was a travel agency across the street, and there she purchased two open return tickets to Dallas. She was about to return to her car when she had a thought and went into a nearby People's variety store for some additional purchases.

  "Hey, there," said a friendly voice behind her. She turned, and there was a black woman in a tan cloth coat over a pale green uniform skirt. It took a second for Marlene to recognize her as the nanny from the park.

  "Hi!" said Marlene. "How're you doing?"

  "Just fine! I'm goin' to Carolina next week. I'm starting school."

  "Dietician?"

  "Nah, X ray. That food smell make me sick. How about yourself. You take my advice?"

  "Yeah. Yeah, I did. I think I'm going to be working in a law office pretty soon."

  "Oooh, hey-paralegal? That's good work that paralegal, 'cept you need clothes." She cast a doubtful eye over Marlene's ensemble.

  "Um, yeah," said Marlene, "except this is more like quasilegal. They don't make you dress up as much."

  Marlene went home and called Harry and asked him to come down, without explaining the situation. Harry said, "Tomorrow afternoon."

  The following morning Karp went to the office, not at eight, as he had in the past, but around ten-thirty. The placed bustled with people who either did not meet his eye, so busy were they, or else, even worse, spoke briefly to him in sympathetic or condescending tones. Charlie Ziller was one of those who did not meet his eye. There were several call-back messages from Clay Fulton. Karp rang the New Orleans office of Pete Melchior, the retired NYPD cop turned private investigator, and found Fulton in.

  "What's up, Butch? I've been hearing all kinds of weird stuff."

  "It's all true. The word is, no further field investigation. Come on home."

  "No, further… what? I was going to go to Miami and show our pictures to Odio. And this Kelly guy is looking pretty good. I got an eyewitness who saw him with Carlos Marcello a couple times back in the sixties."

  "Forget Kelly. He's another dead end. V.T. figured it out. He's quitting, by the way. I guess I am too."

  A long pause on the line. "That bad, huh?"

  "Yeah. We got beat, old buddy. Come home."

  V.T. was in his office tossing personal items into an old leather satchel. "They accepted my resignation with regret," he remarked as Karp came in. "Jim Phelps is getting out too."

  "Phelps? Why him? He's a tech. I thought Wilkey wanted to up the status of the tech work."

  "Yes, up, but only in the desired direction. Phelps is convinced there was hanky-panky in the autopsy photos and the X rays. Wilkey wants a second opinion. Or a third, until, apparently, he finds a techie who believes there's no problem."

  V.T. looked around the gutted office. "I'm off. Oh, speaking of no problem, have you seen the prelim report from Dr. Selig and the autopsy boys?"

  "No, I didn't know it was in. They don't show me stuff anymore. What did they say?"

  "Briefly, all the wounds of the two men are consistent with two shots from the upper left rear. And thus the magic bullet is still magic."

  "Wendt signed on to this shit?"

  "He did not. A voice crying in the wilderness, however. He'll get his day in front of the committee, but I doubt it'll do much good. All the other docs, including your old buddy Selig, were being very cautious. Nobody wants to join the nut parade." He hefted his satchel and grasped Karp's hand. "What about you? You going to stay around for the whitewash? Tom Sawyer says it's fun."

  "I don't think so. Me and Marlene are going to fly down to Dallas on our own, to check something out. Marlene found some stuff. She… we think there's a good chance that Harley Blaine, Richard Dobbs's old lawyer, is the queen on the board."

  V.T. dropped his satchel with a bang. "You're not serious!"

  Karp nodded heavily and explained the nature of the evidence and what they had done about it. V.T. remained silent for a moment, thinking and chewing his lip. Then he said, "You think this is wise? Going out there, the two of you? Whatever you've got on him, this guy's got a track record of collecting evidence from recently dead people."

  "I don't know, V.T. I need to close this out, in my own mind. I mean, it's completely circumstantial. There's a million ways of laughing it out of court. The witnesses who might've talked are dead and the live ones aren't talking. It's not something I can show to Wilkey; he wouldn't understand it, because he doesn't have the instinct, and because he just wants to close this down with a minimum of fuss, and this could be big-time fuss. Marlene thinks there's a chance Blaine'll tell us something. I think you have to be Sicilian to think it'll work, but there it is: we're going, if Blaine calls back."

  Blaine called back at four that day. "Will you hold for Mr. Blaine?" said a polite male voice. Marlene would.

  When he came on the line, Harley Blaine sounded weaker than he had some months previously, but his voice still carried the same ironic tone.

  "Miss Ciampi. Well, here we are again, talking about the dear dead days of yore. Your package arrived, and I will say that I did not expect to be surprised by anything at my stage of life, but I was surprised. My heart must be stronger than my doctors are telling me, or it might've just gone off the rail when I saw that film. What a devil that Dick was! And we thought he couldn't keep a secret!"

  "I take it then that you didn't know about the film, or the shots of Weinberg at Arlington," said Marlene.

  "Mmm, why don't we reserve such conversation for our tete-a-tete. There's a Delta plane that leaves National at ten-twenty tomorrow. Do you think you could be on it? I'll have you met."

  "And my husband."

  "Of course, and Mr. Karp. I'll look forward to meeting you both. Until then."

  He broke the connection.

  "It was weird, Butch," Marlene said later, when Karp had returned home and they were seated on the ratty couch in their living room. "It was like we were doing him a favor. He wasn't even breathing hard, or no harder than he usually breathes-the guy must be on his last legs." The front bell rang.

  "That must be Harry," said Marlene, rising.

  "Or a Cuban gunman," said Karp.

 
; But it was Bello. They had a nice dinner. Marlene made a Sicilian dish, veal rolls with parsley and pine nuts, and Harry had brought a bottle of Vignamaggio Chianti from the city. Harry didn't drink anymore, of course, so Marlene had most of the wine herself, and became quite merry, despite Karp's continually referring to the dinner as the Last Meal. Harry was well briefed on the investigation and the purpose of the trip. The various negative outcomes were not mentioned, not in words, although Marlene and Bello exchanged a number of looks that contained major cable traffic.

  In the morning, Karp gave Harry the thick red envelope. "Hide it behind the refrigerator," he said. "They never look there."

  Harry accepted the thing solemnly. "Take care of her," he said.

  "Take care of Lucy," said Karp, the statement delivered in a tone that allowed interpretation: either "for tonight" or "until age eighteen."

  "No problem," said Harry. Meaning, either.

  In the airliner, taxiing to the runway, Marlene said, offhandedly, "He wouldn't risk bombing the plane, would he?"

  "Marlene," said Karp, "you should wait until we're high in the air before saying things like that." He slumped in his seat and tightened the safety belt another notch.

  No fireball, however, marred an uneventful flight. At Dallas-Ft. Worth International, there was a man in the arrival lounge with a sign that said Ciampi/Karp. He was a young blond, with an unstylish crew cut and a roughly triangular physique, his big shoulders straining against a neat tan blazer. He wore brown whipcord trousers over cowboy boots, and a western shirt with a bolo tie. On the clasp of the bolo and the breast pocket of his blazer was a seal that bore a silhouette of a chess queen in white, on a dark green field.

  They followed him out of the concourse to where a white Lincoln limo waited. The man held the door while they entered the back and sank into smooth, soft leather, and then he got behind the wheel and drove off.

  "It'll be about an hour, folks," the driver said. "There's drinks and things in the little refrigerator there, if you want."

  They each took a cold Coke. "Guy really knows how to run an assassination," Karp whispered. "We're going out in style."

  Marlene shushed him and looked out the smoked window. As they drove north on the Tollway, suburbs changed gradually into country: wire fences, rolling hills, white-faced cattle grazing in small herds. They left the freeway and proceeded down a succession of increasingly smaller roads until they came to a barred gate with a gatehouse nearby. The man inside it came out and swung the gate aside. He was dressed in the same costume as their driver, with the additional touch of a white Stetson. On the arch over the gate, Queen Ranch was picked out in carved wooden rustic lettering; between the two words was a large plaque with the chess queen emblem.

  They drove down a graveled road, across a little stream on a wooden bridge, and there, on a slight rise in the terrain, was the house.

  A bribe of four hundred dollars had gained Caballo admittance to the apartment formerly occupied by the couple Marlene called Thug 'n' Dwarf. The Federal Gardens manager was happy to do it, since in its currently wrecked state the apartment was unrentable, and he hadn't gotten around to arranging the repairs. The story the thin man gave him, of having to hide out from his wife during a messy divorce, made sense to him: he'd had several himself. Cash under the table that he could conceal from his current spouse was always welcome.

  Caballo waited for three days, eating cold food and sleeping a lot in the day, on the broken bed, when the man was away at work, with the stuff in his red envelope, and the woman and the child were in and out. He thought he would have to wait for the weekend. They would go out for a family excursion, and the stuff would be left behind and he could pop in and get it. He was fairly confident that he could find anything hidden in the small apartment. If not, he was perfectly prepared to burn the place down.

  He listened a good deal at the party wall too, but he could hear little except the sound of the radio or the TV. He hated not knowing what was going on. This should've been a job for half a dozen men, with complete electronics, bugs in every room and on the car. Instead it was just him, more of Bishop's paranoia. During his frequent light sleeps he had fitful dreams of green jungles and red earth, clumps of frightened people, explosions and screams. Pleasant dreams, in which he was in control of the situation. He woke and washed himself, giving himself a whore's bath at the sink, using only a trickle of water to avoid making a sound. There was an old towel on the floor, smelly, but he used it anyway to dry his face and his body. He had known worse dwellings.

  On the third day another man came to the apartment and the radio came on loud and stayed on until late. During the night, Caballo found a gallon jar under the sink. There was a hose attached to a spigot outside. He cut a few feet off this and slipped out to his rental car and siphoned gas, filling the jar.

  The next morning Karp and his wife left, leaving the other man alone with the child. The radio stayed off, but the man and the child did not leave. Evening came; Caballo stayed alert. He had decided that if the man and the child did not leave, he would burn the place that night.

  Around seven, Caballo heard their door slam, the voice of the child and the man's deeper voice telling her not to run in the parking lot, then the sound of a car starting and pulling out.

  Caballo waited two minutes. He took a miniature flashlight and a big folding knife and went out the back door. He was actually glad he did not have to burn the place. Sometimes they kept stuff in the refrigerator, where it might survive even a big fire. He intended to be on the last flight to Mexico City once the material was destroyed.

  In through the kitchen door; the lock was a joke. He started his search from the top, as he had been taught long ago. Large bedroom, the adults' obviously. Drawers out, scattered, bureaus turned over, closets emptied, pottery lamp smashed. Nothing. Slash mattresses and pillows. Kick baseboards and walls. Nothing.

  Bathroom. Nothing in the medicine cabinet, ripped from the wall, or the hamper. Nothing in the toilet tank or under the sink.

  Down the hall. The kid's bedroom. Fling apart the bureau. Overturn the toy chest. Rip the mattress and the pillows again. Slash apart the stuffed animals, break the heads of the dolls. Pull down the bookcase. He made the colorful books fly, tearing the bindings, scattering the pages.

  He was working fast and efficiently. No more than five minutes had elapsed since he entered the apartment. A thin sweat lay on his brow, but his hard breathing was more from excitement than exertion.

  He folded his knife and put it away and flung open the door to the closet, shining in the thin beam of his flash.

  The smell, the hateful smell, the scent of screaming and beating and choking and shaking. Another person, another's scent was under it somehow, that and the reek of gasoline, soap, and anger, but there it was, definite, horrible, coming from the figure standing in the closet doorway.

  Caballo saw the eyes in the thin beam, glowing disks. Another toy, was his first thought, a teddy bear. Then the eyes moved and he heard the snarling growl. He backed away a step and something enormous and black was on him like a piece of the darkness come alive. He was on his back beating at it with the puny flashlight, struggling to get his knife out of his pants pocket. There was something wrong with his right hand; he couldn't move it. Then the pain hit him and he screamed.

  The taste of blood, forbidden, exciting. The great head heaved, teeth met, the sharp carnassial teeth at the side of the jaw, cutting through flesh and tendon and bone. The screams stopped. The bad scent was gone. Sweetie played with what he had taken for a few minutes, chewing until most of the juice and all the bad scent was gone, and then went back into the closet and slept.

  TWENTY

  Harley Blaine's house was not the house in the Depuy film. That had been a traditional ranch house with a patio. Karp and Marlene now entered a much larger, more contemporary structure, a place of sheer white walls cut with the narrow clefts of windows.

  "The architect was obviously inspire
d by The Guns of Navarone," Marlene whispered as their driver ushered them into an entrance hall tiled in glazed blue Mexican ceramic. "Notice how the house is on a little rise with the trees and shrubs cut back for a couple hundred yards? And the slit windows. The joint is a fortress."

  "Yeah, you expect to see Richard Widmark coming down a rope in a watch cap," Karp agreed. "Speaking of movies, what happened to the lion and the scarecrow? And why are we whispering?"

  Marlene suppressed a giggle. "I think we're trying to not scream. I wonder where the dungeons are?"

  They were led through several doors and found themselves again in sunlight. The house was built around a vast atrium, glass-covered and heavily planted along its borders. Its center was occupied by a large swimming pool. By this stood a hospital-style bed. On the bed lay Harley Blaine.

  "Have a seat," said Blaine when they approached the bed. "Welcome to Texas. And the Queen Ranch." They sat in the two elegant sling chairs that had been placed next to a low table by the bedside. "There are refreshments on that little bar by the pool, and I have arranged a luncheon for you all. I regret that I take my own nourishment nowadays through a tube."

  He smiled, a ghastly sight. Blaine was wasted in the manner of victims of end-stage cancer, shocking to Marlene, whose image of him was based on films taken from his early youth onward to maturity. Once a good-sized man with a full head of hair, he had become a living skeleton, his head a death camp inmate's skull bearing a few wisps of dull fuzz. His eyes, however, sunken as they were, still blazed with energy, and with, Marlene thought, an unnatural, puckish glee that seemed almost obscene in so devastated a frame.

  She looked at her husband, who appeared distinctly uncomfortable, his skin pale and damp-looking, his jaw tight and twitching, his hands clenching and uncoiling. It occurred to her that the last time he saw someone in this state it had been his mother lying there, and he had been fourteen.