Irresistible Impulse bkamc-9

by Robert Tanenbaum

  At the sound of her voice, Ginnie Wooten stopped thrusting and looked up. She peered at Marlene through the eye holes in her mask and did a slow-motion double-take. Pointing an accusing finger, she snarled, “What the fuck is she doing here?”

  Robinson seemed mildly surprised at the reaction.

  “She’s a tourist, Ginnie. What’s the problem?”

  But Ginnie pulled back, staggering, the dildo coming free with a wet, disgusting noise, and stepped around the swinging man’s legs. She was clearly drugged and seemed to have difficulty keeping her feet. The thing sticking out in front of her groin made eccentric little circles. Marlene felt a laugh bubbling up in her. With difficulty she suppressed it, until the suspended gentleman started trying to look over his shoulder while making inarticulate but puzzled noises through his gag. Then Marlene began to laugh, and once started, she couldn’t stop.

  This had an effect on the assembly. Robinson stood up, an annoyed look on his face. Ginnie screamed a curse and took a step toward Marlene. She shouted, “She’s that fucking detective my sister hired. About the-about the-”

  “Shut up, Ginnie!” Robinson snarled. For the first time his face showed something other than contemptuous disdain, a slight furrowing of the broad forehead.

  Ginnie did not. “She’s-she’s … investigating … you don’t understand … the fucking bitch is … my sister …”

  Robinson backhanded her across the face, a solid, meaty blow that knocked her off her six-inch spikes. An interested noise issued from several of the observers. As she fell she grabbed vainly for one of the chains supporting the naked man and started him gyrating like a carnival ride out of control. His muffled cries grew louder and more frantic. Marlene had to lean against the wall to recover. Tears ran from her eyes, and when she wiped them, her hand came away with smeared mascara.

  Ginnie was wailing on the floor. Robinson knelt over her and grasped one of her nipple rings. He was saying something in a hissing voice. Marlene could not make out what it was. He twisted the ring cruelly. Ginnie screamed and writhed, kicking her legs against the floor. The other members of the group gathered around, leaning close like a bunch of relatives around a new baby. Marlene chose that moment to slip away, blowing a kiss at the wildly grimacing face of the hanging man.

  She found Wolfe in the bar.

  “No sign of her,” he said.

  “You’ve been asking the wrong people. I found her.”

  “And?”

  “Oh, I think it’s definitely them. Robinson didn’t make me, but she did. I must have made an impression. She was zonked on something, and she almost gave it up. Robinson had to practically knock her out to keep her quiet. Let’s get out of here.”

  “Urn, your, uh”-he gestured to her face-“is all smeared.”

  “I know. I was laughing so hard it ran.”

  He gave her an odd look but said nothing more as they left the club. The next thing he did say, as they approached his car, was “Oh, shit!”

  Marlene looked up, startled, and saw that two youths had the door of Wolfe’s car open. Wolfe yelled and ran toward them, Marlene following at a totter, cursing the over-long heels. One of the youths saw Wolfe coming and shouted, and the other one slid like an otter from under the dash, holding the stereo unit. They both took off, track shoes flashing under the streetlights, with Wolfe right after them. Marlene called out once and then gave up as they vanished down First Street, heading toward the Lower East Side. She sighed and lit a cigarette, leaning on Wolfe’s car. She doubted he would catch them in his new engineer boots.

  After a cigarette plus ten minutes worth of waiting, Marlene began to feel stiff and chilled. The rain had stopped, but it was damp and the air was misty, making rings around the streetlights and softening the neon of the signs. She thought of calling a cab, but it was not much more than a half mile to home and the weather was ideal for a brisk midnight walk through the city. And she was armed.

  East Houston Street was still jumping, of course: cruising cars and cabs were hissing in numbers down the broad, wet street, and the sidewalks were thick with little knots of people, mostly young and looking for a good time. Dressed as she was, Marlene got numerous offers from carloads of young men from Jersey, but nobody gave her any trouble.

  She turned south on Mulberry Street. Passing Old St. Patrick’s, she paused at the steps to tighten and retie the laces of her boots, which, she had discovered, had been designed for walking on faces rather than sidewalks. Finished, her eye was attracted to something moving within the shadows of the Gothic archway. A man, in a long black coat: she could tell he was watching her. She tensed, and then relaxed when the man moved slightly and she saw the faint flash of white at his neck. A priest. But not Father Raymond-he was not the sort to be standing in the doorways of churches at midnight.

  Intrigued, Marlene waved and called out, “Good evening, Father!”

  The priest waved back and stepped forward into the light from the street lamp. He was a blocky man, not tall, about fifty, his dark hair in a vaguely European-looking brush cut. His face was an Irish one of the bony and beaky rather than the smooth, pug-nosed type, with the eyes shadowed under bushy eyebrows.

  Marlene smiled up at him and he smiled back. She took a crumpled pack of Marlboros and lit one. There was something about strolling down a night street on a damp night that called out for ciggies, and she decided to invest one of her rationed daily half pack in the experience.

  “Ah,” said the priest, “here I was yearning for a cigarette and not wanting to go back to the rectory.”

  Marlene held out the pack and her Zippo. The priest walked down the steps and took them, lit up, inhaled gratefully. “A filthy habit,” he said. He had pale blue eyes that seemed colorless under the orange sodium light. They were intelligent eyes, she thought, yet with a sliding-away quality that masked considerable pain.

  “You’re new at Old St. Pat’s,” Marlene observed. She recognized his voice, of course.

  He gave her an appraising look, taking in her costume. “A parishioner, are you?”

  “A regular communicant,” said Marlene. She held out her hand. “Marlene Ciampi.”

  He took it. “Michael Dugan.” He paused. “So. What brings you down Mulberry Street on a fine soft night like this?”

  “It’s a long story, Father. I’m just walking home from … I guess you could say work.” She saw his expression change to one of pastoral concern and quickly added, “I’m a private detective, Father. I was at a sadomasochistic club as part of an investigation.”

  A grin flashed across his face that took twenty years off it. He chuckled. “Allow me to compliment you on your disguise. A sadomasochistic club, hm? I’ve always wondered what such places were like.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. You know, homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto?”

  They smiled and exchanged a little Catholic moment, dense with information about each other. Of course she would understand the tag, hence educated in a very good convent school; he could quote Terence with a perfect accent, hence almost certainly a Jesuit elaborately overeducated for a curacy in a poky city parish.

  She said, “Believe me, Father, you wouldn’t want to have anything to do with S-M clubs.”

  “No,” he said reflectively, as if he had been seriously considering it. “No, I suppose you’re right. Although some would say that I’m already in one.”

  They both laughed. He had a loud one, although it seemed out of use, rusty. Marlene asked, “And what about you, Father? What brings you here?”

  “Here? It’s a church. I’m a priest.” Blandly.

  “Right. But this is a church for priests like Father Raymond. Whom God protect, but you know what I mean. Dwindling parish, the only reason they don’t get rid of it is because of the historical importance of the building and the parish and so on. Someone like you I’d expect to find a little higher up in the Church. On the provincial’s staff. A dean at Ford-ham. Or running a mission. Or in Rome
.”

  He examined the glowing tip of his cigarette and said, off-handedly, “Well, I was in Rome for a time. Some time ago.”

  “Really? What doing?”

  His smile thinned, and when he answered his voice was flat. “You certainly are a detective, aren’t you? Since you ask, I was at the Gesu.”

  Marlene raised her eyebrows. She thought, My, my, you must have been quite the boy to get busted all the way from the headquarters of the Society of Jesus back to here, and wondered what it was he had done, but forbore asking.

  Yet the question hung in the air between them and made further conversation difficult. When their cigarettes were gone, they said good night. Marlene walked home thinking about why a Jesuit so clever as to have once been one of the dozen or so aides to the Black Pope himself should have ended up as a curate in Old St. Pat’s, and then ran through a similar set of questions about herself: why a Sacred Heart, Smith, and Yale graduate was trotting along Mulberry, fresh from the kind of evening she had just had, with a gun in her pocket and her garters flapping in the chilly breeze, and had as little answer.

  Karp was still awake when she let herself in, propped up in the bed with a scatter of papers and files around him, making notes on a legal pad.

  He grinned at her when she came in. “So how did it go? Did you always hurt the one you love?”

  She groaned and flopped crossways on the bed.

  “Don’t ask! And if you were any kind of loving husband, you would help me get out of these fucking boots. Christ, my poor feet!”

  “Gosh, I was hoping you’d walk all over me in them and show me all the tricks you learned.”

  She twisted herself around and looked at him. Yeah, she thought. What better way to get that place and that man out of her head. “All right, wiseass,” she said, “you asked for it.”

  She went to her bureau, pulled out four scarves, grabbed a corner of the duvet, and yanked it off the bed, scattering legal papers. As usual, Karp was wearing only a T-shirt.

  “Hey!” he protested. “What’re you …?”

  Marlene got onto the bed and seized Karp’s wrist.

  “Marlene. What are you doing?” he asked. “I was just kidding, Marlene. Marlene? Marlene, come on …”

  But he did not, however, resist physically as she tied all four of his limbs to the bedposts.

  Then she went to his closet and got his black leather belt.

  “Marlene,” he said, giggling, “you touch me with that thing and you’re history. I mean it, Marlene.”

  “Silence, disgusting worm!” cried Marlene, leaping up onto the bed and strutting around on it.

  “Disgusting what …? Marlene, cut it out!” They were both laughing and trying to stifle themselves at the same time, in the fashion of couples in bed who share a dwelling with minor children.

  She dangled the belt over his groin. “Hm. See, he’s pretending he doesn’t like it, but the body never lies, does it? Does it?”

  She fell to her knees and straddled his chest and slowly inched her way up until her crotch was nearly at his face.

  “Take my panties off, slave!” she hissed nastily. “With your mouth.”

  Remarkably, Karp was able to stop laughing long enough to do it.

  Some time later, Karp whispered into her ear. “Dear, could I say something? Could we never do this again?”

  Marlene shifted so she could fix him with her real eye. Except for her underpants she was still fully dressed, boots and all.

  “Gee, Butch, you could’ve fooled me. I thought that really turned you on. I was just thinking that we could get our money’s worth out of the ten bucks I had to shell out for the membership card in that S-M club. You could borrow it, go down there, make a regular thing of it.”

  “Maybe in my next life.”

  “So … what? It’s back to the biweekly three-minute special in the missionary position?”

  “I guess so,” said Karp. “I now find I’m really an old-fashioned girl. Although … I could maybe crank it up to four minutes. I hear there are dietary supplements … say, could you take off that dog collar? I’m getting spiked here. Jesus, I go to bed with my wife, it’s like playing second base against Ty Cobb.”

  She laughed. “Oh, it’s always something with you. The good thing about real masochists, I’ve found, is that they never complain.” She removed the spiked collar and said, “Now. I am going to take a long, hot one and then return in my shapeless virginal white nightie. That should make you happy.”

  “It will,” said Karp. “Oh, before you get too comfortable, you had a message from Bello on the private line. Some kind of emergency in Brooklyn.”

  She sat up with a start. “What! Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I was tied up,” he said with a grin. “There’s a number by the phone.”

  Marlene found the slip of paper, dialed it, got an answer from a precinct house in Brooklyn, asked for Bello, and when her partner came on the line said, “Harry, it’s me. What happened? What? How? Oh, shit! Harry, okay, I’m sitting down. Please, please, tell me he didn’t use that fucking machine gun. Oh, thank you, Jesus! Where is he now? They haven’t booked him through yet? Have you talked to the homicide A.D.A.? Okay, I’ll meet you at the precinct in like half an hour. Okay. Okay. Bye.” She slammed the phone down and glared at Karp.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “Oh, Lonny Dane shot and killed Donald Monto over in Bensonhurst. He came after Mary Kay Miller with a.22 rifle, and Dane took him down. I got to go over there and straighten it out. Oh, shit! This had to happen tonight!”

  She staggered to her feet and scooped her car keys off the dresser and her leather jacket off the floor. She blew Karp a kiss and said, “Sorry about this-it shouldn’t take too long, but if I’m not home by the time you have to leave, please don’t forget to walk Sweety. Posie’ll handle the kids, except don’t let Lucy wear jeans to school, okay?”

  “Fine,” said Karp, keeping a straight face. “You sure you haven’t forgotten anything?”

  She wrinkled her brow. “I don’t think so. Why?”

  Karp held up a scrap of lacy black. “Your panties, one, and two, you’re going to make a better impression down at Brooklyn Homicide if you change out of that outfit.”

  After they stopped laughing, Marlene said, “I’m glad to see you’re not all bent out of shape about this, at least.”

  Karp shrugged. “Hey, what can I say? As long as you guys shoot them in Brooklyn.”

  THIRTEEN

  The third week in November and they still hadn’t finished picking the jury in Rohbling. Judge Peoples had made it clear that he did not want to go into the holiday season without a completed panel, and neither Karp nor Waley thought it prudent to defy him in this. In truth, there was little choice, for the weeks of grinding had eaten away their initial thirty peremptory challenges until, on the last day, Karp had two left and Waley had none. Karp was not sure whether that was a victory or not. He had bitten his lip to keep from challenging some venirepersons who had ultimately been impaneled, and had used his challenges to knock off some people he thought should have been removed for cause, most of which had to do with attitudes toward psychiatry. Peoples, of course, had steered this process through his ability, which he was not loath to use, of ruling what was “cause” and what was not.

  Nevertheless, they now had a jury-seven women and five men on the panel and two alternates, both male. Of the fourteen, five were black, two were Asian, four were Hispanic, and the rest non-minority white. No singletons that anyone could observe; Karp made it a rule never to have singletons on homicide juries, because having someone who felt isolated from his peers was asking for a holdout and a hung jury. Karp made an exception to the rule with respect to college educations, and there was but one on the panel who had a degree, a retired NYU professor (male) who had been the last one picked, after Waley had exhausted his challenges. Karp felt pretty good about that, although the man was just an alternate. The rest were your
basic New York solid types- homemakers, small business owners, clerks, artisans, a bike-messenger manager, three housewives. Their average age was rather older than the city’s average age, retired people being the only citizens who want to get picked for a jury. Five of them were, in fact, retirees.

  Judge Peoples swore in the jury and announced that the trial would start on the day after the Thanksgiving weekend. He said that he had decided not to sequester the jury because of the season, and filled the air with blue smoke and rockets about not paying attention to media coverage of the trial and not discussing the proceedings with anyone outside the courtroom. Then he sent everyone home for the long, somnolent weekend.

  Karp went back to his office and was delighted to find no one waiting for him and only two message slips, one from Dr. Emanuel Perlsteiner and one from V.T. Newbury. The staff of the Homicide Bureau had at last got the message and were now bothering Roland Hrcany. Karp hoped they were all enjoying it. He pocketed the one from V.T. And returned Perlsteiner’s call, which led him to ring up his police driver and have himself driven to Bellevue Hospital.

  There, in one of the oldest and shabbiest corridors of Bellevue’s psychiatric hospital, he found Dr. Perlsteiner, in a tiny office hardly larger than a janitor’s closet. This office resembled one of those apartments that the police have to break into after the neighbors complain of the smell. It held a metal desk, a desk chair, and a straight-backed visitor’s chair. Its residual volume, save for narrow paths necessary to reach the two chairs, was almost entirely consumed by books and papers, stacked in teetering piles that reached nearly to the ceiling. Barely visible among this wrack was the proprietor.

  Karp entered and stood by the desk. The visitor’s chair was covered with files and journals.

  “Dr. Perlsteiner?”

  Perlsteiner smiled up at him. He was a seventy-four-year-old man who looked ninety. His head was a hairless dome covered with tight skin the color of faded burlap, adorned with large liver spots and (as almost always, and now) on the broad forehead a pair of heavy, thick tortoise-shell eyeglasses. His teeth as he smiled were startlingly false. His eyes were bright and dark, shining out from deep, ash-colored pouches on either side of a little falcon nose. This head sat precariously on a short, thin, wattled neck. The general impression was of an extremely ancient sparrow.