“Yes, ‘bimbo.’ That’s what I mean. Funny, I didn’t tell you before, but I got a weird call a little while ago from somebody I knew in grade school. Bright girl, but she dropped out of school to get married. Some guys were chasing her because they thought she saw a killing. I let her walk out of here, and I think she’s probably dead now as a result, but all I could think of at the time was, that could’ve been me, Marlene. I didn’t want to think that, I didn’t want to think about her, Francine, her life. It was threatening.”
“There’s no point in getting into a guilt trip,” said Ariadne. “People make their own choices.”
“Do they? That’s the conventional wisdom. But you know what I was thinking during that interview? There but for the grace of God go I. The grace of God and a full scholarship to Sacred Heart. I knew a dozen men while I was growing up who would have liked to make me into a Frannie Del Fazio or a Julia Mackey. It would have been as easy as falling down the stairs.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t.”
“No, I didn’t, but the older I get the more I think it was dumb luck and not the brilliant wonder that is Marlene. Anyhow, what did you think of her story?”
Stupenagel was caught off guard by the change of subject. She had been thinking of an excessively tall and ungainly girl who had never been invited to fall down the stairs. After a brief moment she answered, “It’s hard to tell. She gets her language from the soaps. ‘I was completely fulfilled as a woman.’ ‘He said he would die for me.’ It wouldn’t knock me over if I found out she got the plot from a soap too. What was all that about a stadium deal? And Dan Logan?”
Marlene ignored this last remark. “It makes some kind of sense. At least it’s a motive, and it pins down the location of the initial abduction and maybe the time of the first shooting, and puts it in Manhattan, which means that we have an official reason to follow the case.”
“Wait a minute: how do you know he didn’t just leave the building and drive away?”
“It just makes sense. Look, he arrives at Mackey’s around eleven. They go into a clinch. Squish, squish, gasp, gasp. It’s got to be midnight at least. Meanwhile, the sister is waiting down in the car.”
“How do you know?”
“I didn’t tell you, we talked to the mother again. She spilled all this. Anyhow, the sister decides to go into the all-night drugstore. I checked: there’s one a couple of blocks west on 57th. She walks up there and when she comes back, the car is gone. Or so she says.
“The medical examiner says Simmons received his chest wound approximately two hours before the head shot that killed him and that he’d been dead between two and four hours. We were lucky; we got a good body-temperature reading. So, if she’s telling the truth about that at least, we have to believe either that Simmons drove off, leaving his sister miles from home in the middle of the night and immediately drove someplace else, where he was shot, or that he was shot either between the apartment and the street, or on the street between the building and the car. We know he wasn’t shot in the car because the slug went right through him and it wasn’t found in the car. I tend to believe the latter story.”
“OK, say it happened that way,” said Stupenagel. “What about the motive, this stadium deal?”
Carefully, Marlene said, “That’s still under investigation. I can’t discuss the details.”
Stupenagel’s eyes widened in amazement. “What! Fuck you, Ciampi! Can’t discuss, my ass! I thought we were together on this.”
“Up to a point,” replied Marlene calmly. “I said you could have first crack at it when it all jelled and we were ready with indictments. But it hasn’t jelled. Be patient, we’re almost there.”
Stupenagel rose to her impressive full height, a pugnacious expression tightening her face. “Fuck patience! I feel betrayed, you know that? Betrayed! I thought we could work together on this, make you look good, but now all bets are off. I’m going to get the whole story, the whole story, and print it with all the dirty laundry showing.” She threw on her greatcoat and stalked toward the door, pausing dramatically at the threshold.
“You’ve changed, Marlene,” she intoned in a voice of doom, “and not for the better. You’ve turned into a … a fucking mom! Go back to your goddamn knitting.”
“It’s embroidery,” said Marlene to the slamming door.
She sat and rocked for a long time after that, her little project untouched on her lap, watching the skylight darken as the short day faded. There was a brief drumming of rain against the glass. A chill gathered in the loft, and Marlene stirred herself to turn up the gas radiators.
She was thinking “there but for the grace of God” thoughts not only about Julia Mackey and Francine Del Fazio, but about Ariadne Stupenagel as well. The sort-of moll and the sort-of man: two options she had turned down for reasons she still could not articulate. She was brought out of her study by the baby, who took this opportunity to pop her a good one in the region of the bladder. Marlene grunted and trudged to the toilet, this making it an even dozen visits for the day.
Emerging, she paced, at a loss. She put the embroidery away in its canvas bag. The loft was as clean as it ever got. She could not bear to read The Mill on the Floss, and the thought of watching crap on TV was repugnant. She couldn’t get drunk, and she didn’t feel like going downstairs and schmoozing with Stu and Larry. She got out her sleight-of-hand kit and practiced vanishes and productions. Before long the concentration chased, or seemed to chase, the plaguing thoughts about the three women from her mind.
But they still lurked there, throbbing like an old sprain, so when the door shook to a heavy knock, and she got up to answer it, and it was the oriental-looking man from Doone’s house, informing her that a car was waiting to take her to Doone and Leona, she, with scarcely a second thought, threw on a coat and left with him, into who knows what peril, leaving no note, but leaving Mom behind.
There was a black stretch limo parked on the street. A cold intermittent rain bounced off its shiny flanks and polished the ancient cobbles that showed through Crosby Street’s skin of black asphalt. Marlene’s guide threw open the back door and she looked in. Sitting on the far side of the plush seat was a thin youth wearing a long coat and a black, green and red knitted tam. He had a wary expression on his brown face and an Uzi submachine gun across his knees.
Marlene entered the car. The yellowish giant swung into the front seat and the car moved off.
When they were on Grand Street headed west, the boy in the back gave Marlene a black hood and told her to put it on. She did so without argument. She thought it unlikely that Doone wished her any harm, and she was well protected against the Bobbsey Twins. She relaxed in the stuffy darkness.
They drove for a period that Marlene estimated at a little under an hour, timed by her bladder. She was helped out of the car, guided down a concrete walk, and brought into a very warm room smelling of marijuana smoke. She pulled off her hood and found herself in what appeared to be a suburban living room, furnished with anonymous modern furniture—couch, two easy chairs, glass coffee table, a low cabinet with a TV on top of it. The windows were obscured by gray draperies. John Doone was sitting in one of the armchairs, smoking a joint the size of a young banana, and Leona Simmons was sitting on the couch. The young woman, in grubby jeans and a sleeveless top, looked frailer than ever. Her hazel eyes regarded Marlene coldly.
Marlene tossed the hood onto the coffee table. “Don’t you trust me, Mr. Doone? I got you out of jail like I said.”
Doone’s eyes narrowed and he pursed his lips. Marlene had the feeling that he put a lot of energy into keeping deadpan. He said, “I trust so far, but you still Babylon, nuh?’
“Yeah,” said Marlene, “Babylon to my bones.” She turned to the girl. “Leona, I’m Marlene Ciampi. I’m an assistant D.A. I saw you once very briefly at your mother’s house. I’d like to help you.”
“That’s a laugh,” said Leona in a tone as blank as the recorded voices of telephone operators.
> Wrong approach, thought Marlene. “I saw your mom the other day. She’d like you to come home.”
“Oh, yeah?” said Leona. “Coulda fooled me.”
Marlene sighed. She longed to chat with some nice people. “OK, a tough little girl,” she said, as if conducting an interior monologue. “She’s in trouble, but she doesn’t want help. She doesn’t care about her family. Too bad. Her mother would really like to know that she hasn’t been a total failure. Well, fine, we’ll try the tough-girl approach.” She stared hard at Leona and said, “Listen, sister! I want to know what happened the night your brother got killed—everything you did, everything you saw. I just bought that information from Doone here. So spit it the fuck out!”
Leona glanced nervously at Doone, but received only a cold stare. Her pathetic attempt to erect a tough persona sagged. She scratched her arms and licked her lips and began speaking in a tight, dry tone, almost a whisper.
Marlene pulled a steno pad and a pen from her bag. In a loud, commanding voice she snapped, “Speak up, goddamn it! I can’t hear you.”
Leona jumped as if shocked and began again. “I picked Marion up at the stadium. I was on a run and I had the stuff in my bag. I figured I would take him home and then go make the delivery.”
“Wait a minute, why couldn’t you take your own car?”
“The Datsun’s too small for Marion. Was. But then when I picked him up, he said he wanted to stop off at the city. At Julia’s place. So I took him there. I figured I’d drop him off, and, like, he’d stay the night. He does it all the time when her husband’s away.… I mean, he did.
“But we get there and he goes, ‘Just wait for me, hon. I got to tell this woman something.’ So he goes into the building and I’m waiting in the car.”
Marlene said, “Your mom said something about him being excited about something. He’d found something out. About the team?”
Leona’s face stiffened for a moment and her eyes dropped. Then she said, “Oh, yeah, that. Julia told him some shit about a deal her old man was pulling to build this stadium. Some illegal shit or something. She said she could use it to bust out of her marriage so that her and Marion could get together.”
“And Marion was going for this? This blackmail?”
Leona shrugged. “I guess.”
“Leona, your brother kept a kind of diary, a notebook. Did he have it with him that night?”
“I didn’t see it,” said Leona. “Why? Is it important?”
“Maybe, and I’d sure like to see it. So go on: you were in the car …”
“Right, I was there in the car listening to the stereo and smoking and I run out of smokes.” As if the mention of smoking reminded her of the act, she drew a Salem from a pack, lit it, and drew the smoke deep into her lungs. Through a cloud, she resumed. “So, I didn’t know how long he was gonna be, see, so I remembered there was this all-night place on First and 57th. So I left the car where it was—”
“You shut off the engine and locked it?”
“Yeah, sure. It was my set of keys. Marion had his own keys. I put the stuff in the glove and locked it. I didn’t want it on me, walking down the street at night.
“So, I went up there and bought the cigarettes. I walked back and when I got to the corner, I saw two guys come out of the building with Marion between them. There was something wrong with him—he was staggering and they had to practically carry him. I ducked back around the corner of the building and watched. They got his keys and opened the door and shoved him into the passenger side. Then one of the guys got into the driver’s side of the Caddy and the other guy walked right toward me. I thought he spotted me, so I turned around and walked toward First. I looked back and he wasn’t following me at all, he was getting into another car. Then he drove away. I went back to the building and the Caddy was gone too. I was scared. I wandered around for a while and then I called him”—she indicated Doone— “and he picked me up and brought me back to Queens.”
“Did you get a good look at these guys?” asked Marlene.
“One of them, the guy in the other car.”
Marlene brought out the Polaroid she had taken and passed it to Leona. “Is this them?”
Leona studied the photograph and nodded. “The younger guy, not the driver. That’s one of them for sure.”
Marlene was putting the photograph away when Doone asked to see it. He stared at it as if committing the faces to memory. “You know dese men?” he asked Marlene.
“No. Do you?”
Doone shook his head. “I doan. But wha you t’ink? Is why dey kill ’er bredder?”
Marlene said, “You heard it. He knew something the husband didn’t want to get out, and he was using it to blackmail the husband into letting Julia Mackey out of her marriage. The husband didn’t appreciate it and had the man whacked out.”
Doone nodded: it made perfect sense to him.
Marlene said, “The funny part is these guys are following me around. They tried to run me off the road the other day. That’s what I can’t figure.”
“Maybe dey want a dead you befo you find out somet’ing else?”
“Like what?” asked Marlene. “We know the whole thing already.”
“Cho, maybe you do, maybe you doan.” He handed the photograph back to her. “But I tell you one t’ing, Babylon. I know you not afraid to die, but you should pray Jah dey doan get to you befo I get to dem.”
Marlene nodded absently. “Yeah, I guess. Where’s the bathroom?”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“Harry,” said Marlene into the phone, without preamble, “it was the elevator. They got him in the elevator.”
“The blonde,” said Harry Bello.
“Yes, and Butch has found out why they’re burning your buildings down, and which ones are the next to go.”
“We should talk.”
“I’m here,” said Marlene.
“Forty minutes,” said Bello and hung up.
Nothing like a warm heart-to-heart between friends, thought Marlene as she replaced her phone. She had just returned to the loft from her visit to Doone’s hideaway and had called Bello first thing. While she waited for him to arrive, she ran over her notes from the interview. She was physically tired, but the depression that had grown out of the interaction with Ariadne Stupenagel and Julia Mackey was gone.
She heard heavy steps and a knock. She unlocked the door and saw Karp staring down at her, his hair still damp from his after-practice shower. “Oh, it’s just you,” she said.
“Paul Newman couldn’t make it,” he said, closing the door behind him. “What kind of greeting is that—oh, it’s just you?”
“Sorry, I was expecting Harry Bello.”
“Should I take a number?”
“Very funny,” said Marlene sourly. “You know, as a matter of fact, this exaggerated jealousy when I’m in the state I’m in could be construed as a form of chauvinistic insult.”
Karp walked over to the refrigerator and poured himself a Pepsi. “Marlene, don’t start …” he began, and then there was a knock at the door and he said, “Ah, here’s your guy.”
Bello looked better than he had when Marlene had last seen him. He looked like a very sad, very tired man instead of a living corpse.
They settled around the oak table, Bello accepting a soda (which he did not touch), and Karp and Marlene told the detective what they had learned. Karp led off, explaining the link between the arsons, Mackey and Chaney. He finished by giving Bello the addresses of the two properties in the target block that were both unburnt and not the property of the syndicate. Bello wrote this down, although he had taken no other notes.
“Our guys are still in town. At least they haven’t passed through La Guardia, we think,” said Bello. “Have you got that picture?” Marlene handed over the Polaroid original. Bello glanced at it and put it away. He said, “This is good stuff. I’ll stake out the buildings and we’ll see. What about that elevator?”
Now Marlene summarized her interview
s with Julia and Leona. When she was finished, Bello asked, “Do you believe the Mackey woman?”
“About what happened the night of? Yeah. She was wide open and blabbing. If she had the talent to act like that, we’d all have seen her on Broadway.” A sharp look at Karp. “Not that I ever get to go to any plays.
“Anyway, I believe that Simmons walked alive and intact out of the Mackey apartment and was dying from a gunshot wound in the chest when Leona saw him being hustled into his car. The two stories jibe pretty well. They probably were waiting for him in the building; they knew where he was going. The shooting had to take place in the hallway, the elevator, the lobby or the street outside. For reasons of privacy, I’d pick the elevator. They got in the elevator car after him, shot him, and walked him out of there.
“On the motive angle—the business about Simmons blackmailing Mackey to let her go? I think she believes it. It fits with her personal drama. And Leona sort of confirms it. Maybe it’s a case of life imitating art.”
“So the husband ordered him whacked,” said Bello.
“It’s our only plausible line. But we’ve got zip without the shooters.”
Bello stood up. “I need to set up this stake-out. And I’ll get somebody to take a look at the elevator. See you.”
He walked out. “Chatty guy,” said Karp.
“Silent, but sober, you’ll notice. Yes, Marlene adds brilliant therapeutic skills to her panoply of achievements.”
“You think he’ll stay that way?”
“Mmm, I’d like it better if he spilled his guts about how his partner died,” she replied after a moment’s thought. “I think he fucked up royally and it’s unbearable to his sense of who he is; if he’s got nothing but the job, and he screwed up the job, what is he? And so on. Unlike you, for example, who has a family, friends, a terrific alternative career—speaking of which, did you get a chance to talk to Wallace about Leona?”
Karp had fallen into a fog of thought about his own legal screw-up, and Marlene had to pluck his sleeve to get his attention. “Wallace? No, I didn’t get a chance,” he said. “Actually, I forgot. Is it still important?”
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