Irresistible Impulse bkamc-9

by Robert Tanenbaum

  There are, generally speaking, two sorts of lawyers with respect to the voir dire: those who think that the selection of the right jury is tantamount to winning the case, and those who think that a properly constructed case will win with any but a blatantly prejudiced jury. Karp was of the latter persuasion; Lionel Waley was enthusiastically, famously, of the former: he had even written a little book on the subject, which Karp had, of course, read: Choosing a Winning Jury. It had not changed Karp’s mind, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t play Waley’s game, and right from the opening gun at that. It made him irritable, a mood he had to hide behind a mask of genial, bland interest (“Do you have any friends or relatives with emotional problems, Mrs., ah, Perkins? Your nephew? Could you tell us about him?”). That might, in fact, have been part of the reason why Waley did it.

  In any event, the man’s selection strategy was not hard to fathom. He wanted a jury composed of non- black people with crazy relatives whom they felt sorry for. This was somewhat unusual, since defense attorneys representing the average felon of whatever race typically wanted a “Bronx jury,” that is, one composed of blacks and Hispanics inclined to take police testimony with enough salt grains to cause cardiac arrest. In Rohbling, however, the police were not the issue (although Waley would fling as much dirt at them too as he could); the issue was which psychiatrist you believed. Waley had made the not-surprising judgment that the people he wanted on the jury would have to combine low sympathy for the victims and high credulousness when it came to shrinks.

  What Karp wanted was not as clear. He would have liked educated people, of course, people to whom an M.D. degree did not signify the shadow of God on earth, but he had scant chance of getting anyone brainy past Waley, whose attitude toward the well-schooled (on juries, at least) was similar to that of the Khmer Rouge. Waley was not going to allow any elderly women on there either, if he could help it, especially not elderly black women. What Karp had to look for, then, were bright undereducated people, skeptics about psychiatry and believers in justice, even for old black ladies. There were limits on Waley’s design, of course; the judge was clearly determined to end up with a sexually and racially balanced jury, a little scale model of the people of New York that no one could challenge.

  Within those limits, then, Waley and Karp were like a pair of poker players, each with the same number of chips, each chip a preemptory challenge that would scuttle one juror. The jurors were the cards they were betting on. Should Karp, for example, let this oyster-eyed white woman with the retarded kid on the jury? A dunce maybe, and doctors had helped her kid, hence a likely defendant’s juror. If he challenged her, on the other hand, he might run out of chips and be unable later to bump someone worse. Karp passed her, in the event, and then, four hours later, they got another one, a pipe fitter, the first black on the panel. Karp hoped he had loved his mother.

  Marlene finished reading Wolfe’s report on Edith Wooten’s associates and then looked up at the man himself. Today he was wearing a nubby gray sports jacket over a gray and orange plaid shirt buttoned to the neck. His tan hair had been recently trimmed to maintain the hard edge of geekiness he seemed to favor.

  She tapped the report. “This is good, Wolfe. Very complete.” She smiled.

  Wolfe, whose face had worn a look of apprehension while she read, now broke into one of his rare smiles, showing gum and a set of bad ochre teeth. Not a regular flosser, Wolfe.

  “You put in some overtime on this, yes?”

  Head bob. Worried look. Marlene wondered once again why a big guy who looked like he could walk through bricks should bear himself with so diffident a mien. Dane, and most of her other troops, all much smaller men, left damp trails of testosterone behind them. Of course, Wolfe had never been a street cop….

  The thought faded. She continued, “Well, you’re supposed to get it authorized first.”

  “Sorry.”

  He seemed so. “But we’ll let it slide this time,” she said. “The client’s loaded, and she wants closure on this real bad. I doubt she’ll bitch about the extra.” She leafed through the pages, all neatly typed and well organized. He wrote plain, grammatical English, with correct spelling, unusual in someone with his job history. As a rule, she had to rewrite the reports of her people. “This Felix Evarti looks interesting. The piano. What do you think?”

  “Possible. He had that sheet. Sex offenses with a minor girl. And his sex life in general …” Wolfe pursed his lips and waggled his big hand from side to side.

  “He likes getting the shit pounded out of him. Yeah, there’s that, but it doesn’t exactly connect with the kind of person who becomes a stalker.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, your average stalker is a regular person with an obsession about a particular woman. She left him, he can’t stand it, so he chases her. Or he saw her in the bank and she’s his heart’s desire, but he can’t get up the nerve to meet her, so he stalks.”

  “Like Pruitt.”

  Marlene nodded approvingly. “Sort of. Pruitt did get up the nerve to ask her out, originally, but he’s that type. My point is that stalkers tend to be people with low social skills and outwardly ordinary. If they were born middle-class, they’re downwardly mobile-like Mark David Chapman, the guy who did John Lennon.”

  “Ted Bundy had great social skills.”

  “He did, but serial-killing psychopaths like Bundy are not really stalkers in the sense we’re dealing with here. I guess my point is we don’t see successful, talented people like Evarti doing stranger stalking.”

  “He’s not a stranger; he’s a … you know, he works with her.”

  “A colleague. Okay, good point. He lusts after her, she doesn’t know he’s alive, except when he’s tinkling those keys; he’s like an appliance. So he gets pissed off, he tortures her with these notes and invasions. That could work. But I hate that he’s an S-M freak. It seems somehow an … excess of weird, even for a musician.”

  Marlene thought about the last time she had seen Felix Evarti. He hadn’t liked her, she recalled, and she had, in turn, been repelled by something vaguely wrong in his demeanor, a Peter Lorre-ish oiliness, a furtive quality. And he certainly had access to Edith Wooten, not to mention possessing the musical knowledge that the stalker had shown.

  “Okay, let’s put him on the short list. I’ll ask Edie if he ever made a pass at her. We’ll set up a watch on him, a little discreet shadowing, see if maybe we can catch him with the roses and the note.” She shuffled through the pages of the report. “I see you found Edie’s main squeeze.”

  “The violin, Ten Haar, yeah.”

  “He a possibility?”

  “A long shot. He lives in Europe. He could be hiring it, though.”

  “Never happens,” said Marlene confidently. “They love to do it themselves. It’s the fun part. Forget him-I’m just glad she’s getting laid, the poor little bitch. While we’re on bitches, what about the sister?”

  Wolfe rolled his eyes, a dramatic gesture on the usually impassive face. “The sister. Also into whips and chains. And drugs too. Strictly prescription, though, like I said in the report. Gets them from her boyfriend.”

  Marlene leafed through until she found the right page. “This is the doc?”

  “Uh-huh. Very Park Avenue type too. Matter of fact, we ran into him the day I met Wooten, in the hallway outside her place. Big blond guy …?”

  “Yeah, I know. He was at the concert too.”

  “He was?” Wolfe seemed surprised.

  “Yeah. And he knew me. And he had a shot at it while I was making that phone call. What do you think about him and the sister for it?”

  “Oh, she’s mean enough. And he’s not, you know, too tightly wrapped either. And Evarti could be in with them too, for the music part.”

  “Evarti knows Ginnie and what’s his name, Vincent Robinson?”

  “Uh-huh,” said Wolfe. “They all go to the same club to get whipped. I got it down there somewhere. Cuff’s.”

&nb
sp; Marlene looked at the page. “Yeah, I see it here-it’s on First off the Bowery.” She looked across at Wolfe, considering, trying to suppress a loony image-a faded socialite, a Romanian concert pianist, and a Park Avenue doctor with their white buttocks in a row, waving in the air, waiting for the lash. It was all she could do to suppress a guffaw.

  “What?” said Wolfe, who was beginning to squirm under her gaze.

  She snapped out of the reverie. “Oh, nothing, just thinking. Look, have you got a black T-shirt?”

  “A black T-shirt?” Wolfe repeated.

  “Yeah, and black jeans, a leather jacket … you know, swinging stud garments.” A blank look from the man. “Don’t get out much, eh, Wolfe? Okay, there’s a place called Naughty Boys on East Eleventh. Go over there today and pick yourself up an outfit. We’ll pay for it, or rather, Edie Wooten will. I’ll meet you back here at, say, ten tonight.”

  “We’re going there. Cuff’s.” Wolfe said it like “So the tumor is malignant.”

  “We are. Why so glum, Wolfe? There was a time when a young dude would’ve jumped at a chance for a night at the clubs with Marlene Ciampi. Tell me I haven’t lost it all!”

  Wolfe’s face blossomed so with confusion that Marlene felt obliged to reach across and pat his arm. “Joke, Wolfe. We’ll check the place out, get some background on our friends. We could get lucky and learn something useful. At worst, we’ll have to watch them get whipped.”

  “Or whip,” said Wolfe with a strange, cautious look. “What I hear, Robinson likes to whip.”

  When Wolfe had gone, Marlene called Lily Malkin, a sociology professor at NYU who specialized in the study of violence against women and who, like many among New York’s panzer-feminists, was a big fan of Marlene’s.

  She was in but unavailable. Marlene left a message and then made a set of calls to a half-dozen of her clients, reminding them of court appearance, making referrals, and generally checking on how they were. All seemed quiet for a mercy, and she was pleased to learn from Tamara Morno that Marlene’s dog interview with Arnie Nobili had borne fruit. Morno had heard from friends that he was going to meetings, had stopped drinking.

  Marlene was thus feeling very much like a contributing member of society when the phone rang with Lily Malkin returning her call. Marlene told her what she was doing and what she wanted to know.

  Malkin stayed silent for so long that Marlene thought something had gone wrong with the phone.

  “Lily? Are you there?”

  “Uh-huh. Just thinking. Exercising the great card catalog that is my mind. What you want to know is not quite in my field.”

  “But I thought sadomasochism would be right up your alley,” said Marlene.

  “So to speak,” said Malkin, chuckling. “No, conventional S-M has nothing whatever to do with the kind of stuff I study. It’s not violent. Or probably I should say it’s 99.5 not violent.”

  “Wait a minute: you’re saying sadomasochism isn’t violent? Isn’t that like saying water isn’t wet?”

  “Not at all. S-M is a sexual game. The people who play it are by and large solid citizens, high S.E.S.- sorry, socioeconomic status-by and large. They have code words that they use to stop themselves from actually getting hurt.”

  “That sounds like a joke, Lily,” Marlene objected. “The masochist says ‘hurt me!’ and the sadist says ‘no!’ You’re serious about this?”

  “Yeah, it’s all for fun. I’ve got a study here I could ship over to you, explains the whole dominance and submission scene. That sort of includes both straight sadomas and bondage and discipline. It’s quite a read. There’s another paper about professional mistresses-dominatrixes-that’s a hoot and a half.”

  “My God, it shows you how sheltered I’ve been. I had no idea. Why do they do it?”

  “Well, like I said, it’s not my field, but, as with everything else, it’s the mother-”

  “What a surprise!” said Marlene, and they both laughed.

  “I’ll send those papers over.”

  “Okay, great,” said Marlene, “but one thing-you said it was 99.5 percent harmless. What about the other half a percent?”

  “Oh, well, in any communal activity you’re going to see some deviance. For God’s sake, look at marriage! The S-M community apparently does attract some actual psychopaths. You read the various S-M newsletters, you see photographs of guys with captions, ‘This is John Jones, stay away from this stinker, he hurt me.’ Like that. That’s why it’s actually unusual to find real what you’d call really violent sadists in S-M gatherings. It’s like you wouldn’t expect to find real professional killers at those fast-draw exhibitions where everybody dresses up like the Cisco Kid.”

  “Amazing! As a matter of fact, I’m going to one of those clubs tonight.”

  “Are you? Fascinating! Are you going to participate?”

  Marlene hadn’t thought that far ahead. “I’m not sure. It’s never really attracted me. I guess I’ll have to see what the scene looks like.”

  “Well, then,” said Malkin, “if the opportunity arises for you to pee on some guy’s face, I would encourage you to do so, if not for yourself, then for me.”

  After depositing Lucy back at the loft, Marlene spent the late afternoon doing some special shopping. Later, after the children were safely in bed, Marlene decided to push the New Openness by modeling her purchases for her husband in their living room.

  “So? What do you think?” she asked.

  Karp took his time replying. His wife, heavily made up with scarlet lipstick, glittered eyeshadow, and thick mascara on her real eye and the other one covered by a thin wash-leather patch of the type favored by members of the Prussian general staff, was wearing lace-up knee boots with six-inch spike heels, a leather mini-skirt that barely covered her buttocks, black fish-net stockings held up with lace garters, and a black leather neck band with little chrome studs on it. Over this ensemble she had thrown her old black motorcycle jacket. To prompt his response, she threw open the jacket to reveal that on her upper body she wore only a skimpy black leather bra decorated with little spikes arranged in a spiral pattern.

  “Jesus H. Christ!” said Karp.

  “Impressive, no?”

  “You could say that. I hadn’t realized we were so short of money. Don’t bring home any diseases.”

  “How dare you!” said Marlene in mock indignation.

  At this juncture snorts and giggles were heard nearby. Marlene turned to see the faces of her daughter and her nursemaid peeking around the doorjamb.

  “Far out, Marlene!” said Posie.

  “Mommy, you look like Kiss,” was Lucy’s contribution.

  “You! Bed!” said Marlene in her best dominatrix tone. To Karp she added, “And as for you, I resent the implication that I look like a …” and observing that her daughter had not budged, spelled the word.

  “Mother! I can spell, you know,” said Lucy indignantly. “And I know what a prostitute is, for your information.”

  “I bet you do. Scram! I mean it, girls.”

  They scurried off, giggling.

  “So,” said Karp. “What’s with the outfit?”

  “I got a date with Wolfe. We’re going to visit a leather bar. We’re checking out some characters who could be involved in the Edie Wooten stalking.”

  “I see. A plausible cover. Look, Marlene, I can see where you might be tired of me, you want to try some new things-”

  “Oh, stop it!” cried Marlene, laughing and throwing herself down next to him on the couch.

  “No, really, I understand. I get the ratty bathrobes, he gets the leather and lace … Ow!”

  She had dug her knuckles painfully between his ribs.

  “What is this, the home version? A little sadism before … no, don’t touch me-I’ll scream.”

  “You faker! This is turning you on, isn’t it?”

  “Me? I’m a public servant. I’m a pillar of the community.”

  “Yes, and I can see it right there in your pants.”r />
  He ran his hand slyly up her thigh. “What are you wearing under that …”

  “None of your business, buster,” she said, slipping away from him and slapping his hand. “You pervert!”

  That left him speechless and laughing, and she skipped out of the room.

  TWELVE

  They drove north up the Bowery in Wolfe’s old tan Caprice, a light rain spotting the windows, to the beat of the wipers and the radio, which was tuned to a soft rock station. Wolfe had his usual stolid expression on, one that went oddly with his outfit, which was black and moderately vicious. He had a well-studded leather vest on over a long-sleeve black turtleneck, engineer boots on his feet, and a chain belt around his waist with a clasp in the shape of a grinning demon. He seemed like an unusually dour farmer on the way to the milk barn rather than a stud primed for an evening of kinky fun. His car was well kept, remarkably well kept, and scented with artificial pine. Marlene, who had traveled in a large number of bachelor vehicles in her time, imagined he had cleaned it especially for her that evening, which she thought rather sweet. The car stereo, she noticed, was not the standard Delco crap but a pretty good Kenwood deck, with good Jensen speakers.

  “Wolfe, got any tapes?” she asked.

  “I keep most of them in the trunk, sorry,” he answered. He slowed the car, rummaged under the seat, and pulled out a dusty cassette. “Conway Twitty?”

  Marlene suppressed a snort. “Um, no, we’re almost there anyway. And we’ll probably get more music than we need at this joint.”

  This was, as it turned out, the case. Marlene had not been to a real club since her spinster days, and while she was vaguely aware of the growth of the club scene in lower Manhattan, she had never felt the slightest desire to participate in it. In this she was like the majority of her fellow native New Yorkers, and unlike those who came to the city from elsewhere. Marlene did her drinking in working-class saloons, of which there were, thank God, still two surviving in Little Italy, and would occasionally, very occasionally, drag Karp out for an evening of jazz. She was prepared, however, for noise, mediocre performance, crowds, bad drinks, and discomfort, and was not disappointed.