The voice that answered was light and youthful sounding, decked with the long, multi-toned vowels favored by the New York upper crust and made famous by the late FDR and his Mrs. (Yea-es? How gooo-od of you to cah-all!)
Marlene inquired as to why Ms. Wooten required the services of a security firm.
“Well. As to that, Ms. Ciampi, I would rather not discuss it on the phone. But, briefly, I have been getting disturbing letters. And other tokens.”
“This is someone you know?”
“No. It’s, um, I suppose one could call him a fan.”
“You’re a performer?” asked Marlene, and then mentally kicked herself for not finding out who Edith Wooten was before calling. There was a pause on the line, and then the voice, which now was tinged with amusement.
“Yes, I am. Do you suppose you could visit me at my home. I have quite a busy schedule and-”
“No problem, Ms. Wooten,” said Marlene quickly. She got an address on Park in the seventies and ended the call.
She immediately punched in a familiar number, one that, if answered, would connect her with the only person in her acquaintance who might conceivably know someone with that sort of voice at that sort of address.
“V.T.? Marlene.”
“Hello, Marlene,” said Vernon Talcott Newbury. “This is remarkable. I am abandoned by the Karp clan for weeks on end, and now I get calls from both of the principals in one day. I have a message from Butch. Is this about the same thing?”
“I doubt it, V.T. This is a private thing. I was wondering if you knew the name Edith Wooten.”
A laugh. “You need to get out more, dear. This is the cultural capital of the world, you know.”
“I know. I took Lucy to see The Great Muppet Caper just last week. Who is she?”
“Ah, well, where to begin? She’s a Wooten, of course, of the Wooten Island Wootens. Only two privately owned islands in the Sound, the Gardiners have one and they have the other. Her mother’s a Temple, of the Sag Harbor Temples. Her brother, who I think is named Rad or Had, went to Harvard with Foley Maynard, who-”
Marlene interrupted. V.T. could go on. “She’s a friend of yours?”
“Not a friend, exactly. She went to Brearley with my cousin Sniff, though, I think for a couple of years, and then switched to Juilliard; she was probably about twelve or thirteen. You really don’t know who she is?”
“A musician obviously. I doubt it’s rock and roll.”
“Quite. Well, I’m no expert, but Mother, who is on the Philharmonic board, says she’s another Jacqueline Du Pre, potentially in a class with Rostropovich. I’m sorry, maybe those don’t ring any bells either?”
“Don’t be snide, V.T., I’m just a dumb guinea from Ozone Park. So she’s a cellist, huh?”
“Yes. Why the interest?”
“Oh, just checking something. Anything else about her? She married?”
“No, but she’s not more than, say, twenty-four. She’s Ginnie Wooten’s sister, of course.”
“Of course. V.T., who the fuck is Ginnie Wooten?”
“You do need to get out more, Marlene. She was on Life once. The Avedon shot, buried in sand, tits sticking out, with the sweat?”
A vague memory tugged. Like most native working New Yorkers, Marlene did not pay much attention to the antics of celebrities, most of whom were out-of-towners who came to the City to get famous, got famous, and then disappeared like the dirty snow on its streets.
“That’s it? She’s a model?”
“Not quite. A professional naughty, Ginnie, like what’s her name in the sixties-Edie Sedgwick. Screws artists and rock stars, a major supporter of the pharmaceutical industry, like that. So, my curiosity is boiling over. What’s going on?”
“It will have to turn into steam, then, dear. Thanks a million for the info. I owe you a Coke.”
Marlene put the phone down and went into Harry’s office.
“You still mad at me?”
Harry looked at her and shook his head, a millimetric negative. Harry Bello was fifty-seven going on ninety, a solid, cylindrical Italian-American man with a tan, wrinkled face like a grocery bag left out for a month in the sun and rain. His eyes, deeply socketed, were still, black, holding no hope, void of compassion. A hard case, Harry. He didn’t drink anymore, but on the other hand, as far as Marlene knew, he had not done any of the Twelve Steps either. Harry had until recently been a detective with the N.Y.P.D. There are around four thousand of these, of whom somewhat over a hundred occupy the highest rank, detective first grade. Harry Bello had been one of them, elite of the elite, for which reason, when Harry’s wife had contracted a particularly miserable form of cancer, and Harry had started to drink heavily, and been drunk when his partner of fifteen years had gone into a building alone on a routine canvass and been killed, and Harry had drunkenly hunted down and executed a kid who may or may not have been the murderer, the Department had pulled a cloak over the affair and assigned Harry to a meaningless job and waited for him to drink himself to death or eat his gun. At that point, however, Marlene had casually extended a hand, which Harry, for reasons Marlene had never quite understood, had gripped with a dead man’s grip. Harry was Lucy’s godfather, a role he took with sometimes frightening seriousness, as if this antique commitment represented his sole remaining link with the human community, a reason for not becoming in actuality what he often resembled around the eyes, a corpse. During the period when he had worked for Marlene at the D.A.’s Rape Bureau, they had called him the Doberman. Before that, when he was still a cop, he was known as Dead Harry.
Meanwhile, there was that remarkable brain at Marlene’s disposal, and a protective will that, while focused mainly on Lucy, spread its penumbra also over the mother, in a way that often pinched, as now.
She said, “I don’t see why we should change anything, Harry. Honestly, you worry too much. We’re doing okay.”
“Marlene, I went over this,” said Harry in his tired voice. “Domestics are poison. Either you got some guys want to whack out their women decide to punch your ticket while they’re at it, or you keep on trying to reason with the same kind of guys, and things heat up, and you whack them out, which puts you up in Bedford on a felony.”
“None of that has happened, Harry.”
“You don’t have cancer either, but I notice you’re trying to quit smoking. I’m thinking of the kid here, Marlene. Leave that kind of shit to the cops, is what I’m saying. That’s what they get paid for.”
“God, between you and my husband!” Marlene cried. “Okay, you want out? You’re getting nervous in your old age? Good! I’ll work it by myself.”
Harry held up a mollifying hand. “Marlene, I didn’t say that. Look, this is getting to be a broken record. I got no problem with the protection program. Tennis players, the loonies and the celebrities, fine, okay. The others, help with protection orders, moving them into apartments, the shelters. You want to keep doing that, we can handle it. It’s a business. But …” Here he paused.
“But, what, Harry?”
“No more setups. That’s out. And no more Polaroids on the assholes.”
Marlene took a deep breath. Another. “Okay, fine, Harry, you made your point. I won’t involve you.”
Harry stared at her for a moment and then nodded once. He had made his point, and Marlene would do what she was going to do. She might keep doing setups, which was where she used a stalked woman as bait and when the stalker came after her, armed, performed the justifiable homicide, which was the only way to make sure some (admittedly, a small fraction) of men engaged in this activity would never do it again. Or she might still get some other people she knew to pay visits to guys who pounded their wives, and show the guys Polaroids of what the women looked like at the emergency room and then work them over so that they looked just exactly like the Polaroids. But he thought it would slow her down, at least. He was thinking of Lucy.
Karp had expected Roland Hrcany to blow up when he told him that he, not Roland, wo
uld do the Rohbling case, and he was not disappointed. Crying, “Why!” Roland sprang from his chair and slammed his hands down on Karp’s desk, beetling his brows, rolling his mighty shoulders, bulging his seventeen-inch neck, tightening his jaw, exhibiting, in fact, the full repertoire of anthropoid male aggression, and causing him to resemble a blond gorilla even more than he normally did.
“Sit down, Roland,” said Karp in a calming voice. He had seen the display before.
“What, did I screw something up? What?” “You did fine, Roland. Sit down and I’ll explain.” Roland glared and then flung himself back into his seat, making it creak dangerously.
Karp said, “The reason is, this is the biggest and most politically important case we’ll get this year. I planned to take at least one, and this one is going to be it.”
“Oh, it’s too important for me, is what you’re saying,” said Roland in a tone that approached petulance.
“And since I’m taking the case,” continued Karp, ignoring the comment, “I need someone to watch the bureau, which has to be you. You’re the most experienced guy on the staff, and the best.”
“Next to you,” Roland growled.
Roland glared when he said this and rolled his jaw. Something must have happened to my testosterone, thought Karp, reflecting that a couple of years ago he would’ve snarled right back and the two of them would have been screaming and throwing things at each other. Now, however, Roland just looked silly, like Zak when he wanted a toy. Maybe, he thought, it was the result of having two male babies in the house. The real thing spoiled you for the imitations.
Pitching his voice low, he said, “Actually, Roland, to be frank, yes, in this case, which is what we’re talking about. And I’ll give you two reasons: one, an insanity defense is highly likely here, a serious insanity defense, and as it happens, I’ve tried three major cases where that defense was offered and you haven’t tried any. Okay, they’re rare, but there it is. I’m familiar, you’re not, and going against Waley we need all the edge we can get.”
“I’m not afraid of Waley,” snapped Roland.
“You’re not? Mazeltov, Roland. But he scares Jack Keegan, and anyone who scares Jack Keegan scares the shit out of me. You want the second reason? This case is dripping with racial politics, white defendant, black vies. I don’t like it, but I have to deal with it.
Jack has to deal with it. You are not the first person I would pick for a situation like that.”
“What, now I’m a fucking racist?” Roland’s neck grew dangerously crimson.
“No, Roland, of course you aren’t, but the prosecutor in this case is going to be under a microscope, and you got a mouth on you. You are free with racial expletives-”
“What, you mean nigger?”
“… and you spend much of your time with white cops, cracking the kind of jokes that if a black juror heard about them, they would be less than well disposed toward the People-”
“For crying out loud, Butch, you been down the jail recently? The fucking niggers call each other nigger.”
“I rest my case,” said Karp.
Roland opened his mouth; it stayed open for a couple of beats, and then he let out most of his air and said, “This is fucked, you know that? I was pumped for this case.”
“Great, then I’m sure your prep and notes are in terrific order. We’ll do the grand jury together and then you’ll phase out. Could you let me have them as soon as possible?”
Roland stood, snarling. “Yeah, boss, and fuck you very much!”
“Thank you for your support,” said Karp genially as Roland slammed out.
The phone rang. It was V. T. Newbury returning Karp’s call.
“I need a friend,” said Karp. “Everyone hates me.”
“With some justification, I might say. You’re really going to take on Rohbling?”
“You heard already? What is it, on TV?”
“No, Keegan was unloading to Zepelli and some of the other bureau chiefs about your loose cannon-hood, and Z. mentioned it to me at a Fraud Bureau staff meeting.”
“He was really pissed, was he?”
“Mmm, not as such. I gathered he was irritated but ruefully admiring of your chospeh.”
“Chutzpah, V.T. You have to try to generate more phlegm with the Yiddishisms: chhhhhutz-pah.”
“I’ll try, but as you know, my people are phlegm-impaired.”
“True. Look, why I called, let’s have lunch, soon.”
They made a date for the following day. Unlikely as it might appear from their respective backgrounds, V.T. Newbury was one of Karp’s best friends and probably the smartest person Karp knew. Just now he badly needed both friendship and smarts.
A knock on the door and Connie Trask came in pushing one of the wire-basket carts used to transport case files around the halls. It was stacked with red cardboard folders, one for each of the murders for which Jonathan Rohbling stood accused, plus additional files Roland had assembled since the arrest.
“That was fast,” said Karp.
“Yeah, he seemed upset,” said the secretary. “He said he peed on them. You might want to check that out before you take them home. Oh, Lieutenant Fulton called. I told him you were in there with Roland giving him bad news. He laughed and said you could call him back.”
“Thanks, Connie,” said Karp, reaching for the phone.
Lucy Karp sat in spelling, morosely waiting for her turn to come around again. Resemble had been her word last time. Briefly, it had flashed through her mind to say, when using it in a sentence, “Mrs. Lawrence’s face resembles a snotty kleenex,” but had chickened out. Spelling was not a problem. Math was the problem. Math and Mrs. Lawrence, what she did in math class.
At the next desk, Robert Liu stood up and misspelled surrender, and sat down blushing. Lucy stood and spelled it right and said, “The general promised he would never surrender,” looking Mrs. Lawrence in the eye as she did so. The teacher gave her that phony smile and called on the next kid, and Lucy knew she was plotting her revenge when math class came along.
As it would, inevitably. There would be a recess at ten-thirty. They would stream out to the schoolyard, and Lucy’s friends would set up the long ropes to dance double Dutch, chanting, and Lucy would leap among the strands, best of all of them, having learned to jump rope from her mother so far in the past that she could barely remember acquiring the skill. But then they would have to return to the orange-peel-smelling, hot-paint-smelling school building and have math, and Mrs. Lawrence would return the homework, Lucy’s marked with shameful red crosses, which she folded quickly and hid away in her backpack. None of her friends, not Janet Chen, or Franny Lee, or Martha Kan, who could barely speak English, had the slightest problem with long division, with problems that made Lucy’s brain freeze up and sweat start from her forehead. Then after the passing out of the homework, Mrs. Lawrence would chalk four problems up on the board, and of course she would pick Lucy for the hardest one, and Lucy would march up to the board, her face blazing, her stomach roiling, with three other kids, and the others would all do their problems right away and sit down, and Lucy would be up there trying to remember seven into sixty-four and what over, and the whole class would be silent, waiting, and then Mrs. Lawrence would say sweetly, “Lucy needs some help,” and then she would talk Lucy through the whole problem as if she were a tiny little moron, with many a sarcastic aside about “somebody didn’t pay attention when we were learning how to carry the number into the next column,” and the sweat would run down her sides, and her vision would go gray from loss of face, and no, she could not stand it, not even one more time.
So, when recess came, Lucy put her coat on with the others and lagged behind with the fat kids who didn’t like recess and, when she saw that the teachers weren’t looking, dashed through the open gate, slipped between two parked cars, and was gone, a fugitive from long division, running up Catherine Street toward the Bowery, her mind as blank as a washed blackboard.
FOUR
> “What’s up?” said Karp into the phone.
“You asked me to check out your Jewish doctor,” said Detectrive Lieutenant Clay Fulton.
Karp’s mind had been so immersed in People v. Rohbling that the statement made no sense to him. Was Fulton sick? Had Karp recommended someone?
“Um … Jewish doctor?” he ventured.
“I don’t believe it! I’ve been running around all day on this. For crying out loud, Butch! Davidoff?”
“Oh, yeah! Davidoff. The dead nurse. Murray’s case. Okay, I got it. So what went down? He’s kosher or not?”
“Not. The opposite. Tayfe.”
“Trefe, Clay. What did he do?”
“I’m not sure yet, but one, he didn’t attend this Longren woman at all as far as I can find out. Also, the apartment where the woman died is owned by a guy named Robinson, Vincent F., also an M.D., apparently a friend, or acquaintance, of Dr. D. Want to hear the kicker? Longren was insured, a private policy via Prudential with her parents as beneficiaries, plus another policy where she worked, through Mutual New York, beneficiary her boss, guess who, Vincent Robinson, M.D.”
“Longren worked for Robinson, he’s a doc, she gets sick, she dies in his apartment, and then he brings another doc in to do the death cert. Smells.”
“Stinks. I talked to the insurance investigator from Mutual. He went by Robinson’s place to check out the death scene and the beneficiary. While he was there, he used the John and noticed pills. Little white pills and caps, caught in the shag rug around the toilet, like someone wanted to flush a lot of stuff and didn’t notice a few extras. He scooped them up and they turned out to be phenobarbs and Dalmane, sleeping pills.”
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