Falsely Accused bkamc-8

by Robert Tanenbaum

  “I may have.”

  “And isn’t it true that for your own reasons you decided that Dr. Selig had to be fired well before you received any complaints about him from your staff …”

  “Don’t answer that!” said Wharton.

  “… and that you are in fact the source of this conspiratorial vendetta against Dr. Selig?”

  “This is preposterous!” said the D.A. A flush had spread across his smooth pink cheeks.

  “I take it you are answering no to my last question.”

  “Of course, no!”

  “Thank you. Turning now to the charges in your letter related to the case People v. Mann. When did you first become aware of the charges that Dr. Selig had allegedly lost evidence in that case?”

  Bloom seemed to relax as he answered the question, and the next, and the next. Karp took the D.A. over the four homicide cases mentioned in the letter to the Mayor. The questions were routine; Karp knew all the answers, having already deposed the staff people responsible for supplying the information. The purpose of the questioning was to establish the full involvement of the D.A. himself in the conspiracy to unseat Selig.

  The questioning continued for some hours, until late in the afternoon. The windows in Karp’s office had already gone dark. A dullness had settled over the group. Karp had made his voice monotone. The questions were repetitive: when did you, what did you, I show you this letter, this memo, have you seen, are you familiar with?

  And then, in the midst of this ennui, not changing his tone at all, casually Karp asked, “What occurred during the second or third week in May that convinced you that Dr. Selig had to be fired?”

  A frozen moment. The tap of the steno’s fingers petered out in a dry rattle. Everyone looked at Bloom. Karp saw what he was looking for, the startled flick of the eyes, the movement at his throat as he swallowed hard. Karp looked at Wharton too, and he saw that Wharton had his little cherub’s mouth open, and that he was looking at his patron with confusion on his face.

  This took only a second or two. Then Bloom cleared his throat, smiled, and shrugged. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Karp stared briefly at him and then continued, as if nothing had happened, with a question about some petty point about the chain of custody relative to a bloody shirt in People v. Mann.

  Bloom and Wharton left soon afterward. The steno packed up her machine and left too. When they were alone, Murray Selig said, “I thought that went okay. You shook him up a couple of times.”

  “It went about like I thought it would,” said Karp flatly, not looking at his client, arranging papers into piles.

  After a pause, Selig asked, “You’re still pissed off at me.” It was a statement, not a question.

  Karp said, “We’re not married, Murray. You’re the client. It doesn’t matter if I’m pissed off at you. The opposite, that would matter.”

  Selig laughed unconvincingly. “You’re a hard guy, you know that, Butch? I told you, I forgot about those jobs.”

  Karp looked up from his papers. “Murray, look: this is how it is. We prepped like crazy for your deposition by the defendants, and I remember telling you, I believe, numerous times, that a critical part of your case for damages was a showing that you could not be employed as a chief medical examiner, or as a competent authority in the field, because your reputation had been so badly besmirched by these momsers, and that therefore, if you had taken employment in your field, I needed to know about it, so I could advise you as to how to answer their questions relating thereto. Imagine how surprised I was, then, when the Mayor’s counsel asked you if you were negotiating for the job of chief fucking medical examiner of Suffolk County, and you said yes, you were.”

  “I explained that, Butch. It was my in-laws doing me a favor. They’re big shots out in Suffolk.”

  “Murray, it’s fine, God bless them. I just needed to know that beforehand. That, and the other little zingers that came out in deposition. A book contract you didn’t tell me about. That job you did up in Tuxedo-”

  “That’s chickenfeed!”

  “To you it’s chickenfeed. To a jury that we’re asking to give you a couple of million ‘cause you’ve been hurt so bad, fifteen hundred bucks for a day’s work doesn’t sound like injury. Most of them, they don’t make a yard and a half a day.”

  “Okay, you made your point. But the rest of it, my deposition, I thought it went okay. Better than Bloom just had, I mean.”

  “Of course it went better, Murray. You were telling the truth and he was lying. We’re the good guys. But I have to know what’s going on, or good guys or not, we’re going to look like dog shit at trial.”

  “Okay, guaranteed, cross my heart,” said Selig, who had brightened considerably. “By the way, speaking of which, I thought Bloom was trying to slip one past his counsel. When you asked him that one about mid-May and why he wanted me fired. His lawyer looked like he’d been cold-cocked for a second there. What was that about, anyway?”

  “See? That’s how I felt,” said Karp.

  “Butch, enough already! You want me to squirm?”

  “Yes.”

  “But really, what do you think all that was about?” Karp shrugged, as if he didn’t care, and made some dismissive remark and they passed on to other subjects, but in reality there was nothing he cared about more at that moment than whatever it was about the middle of May that had brought that transient look to Bloom’s face, what it was that he had not shared with his closest political and legal adviser, a man with whom the D.A. had conspired, to Karp’s personal knowledge, in a half dozen serious malfeasances. But although he didn’t yet know what it was, he knew for certain what it meant. It meant that whatever Bloom had done, it was worse than a malfeasance. It had to be bad. Felony bad, going to jail in handcuffs bad. The thought warmed him like a log fire.

  TEN

  Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral, on Mulberry and Prince Street, had been built as the archdiocesan seat in 1815 when the surrounding area had been the heart of the City. The area had gone downhill since then, as the surrounding tenements had first filled with Irish and then Italians. Both tides had rushed in and aged and become rich and ebbed out to the ’burbs. Now Old St. Pat’s was just another church, its parishioners now few and largely Latin American. Every Sunday they were joined, at the latest possible Mass, by Marlene Ciampi.

  Who maintained, as she had since the age of fourteen, a complicated, variable, and heterodox relationship with the Holy and Apostolic Church. She tended to treat the various contradictions she found in her religion-all that business about women and who was allowed to place what sexual part in what opening and when-as she treated those in her quotidian life: with cavalier disregard. If she could be a good mother and an irresponsible rakehell, she could also be a weekly communicant and a kick-ass feminist. In her secret heart she believed that were she allowed a half hour with the pope, no holds barred, she could straighten him out, but failing that, she refused to either give up the Church or go along with it.

  Beyond that, Marlene’s natural cast of mind was contrarian, the single aspect of character that she shared with her husband. As a girl at Sacred Heart, she had read proscribed books and carried herself like an infant Voltaire; at liberal Smith, and later at cynical Yale, she had dragged herself up out of Saturday night debauches and, dressed in sober black, sporting a Jackie Kennedy-style lace mantilla, had floated off to early Mass, quite astonishing the circle of godless musicians and artists she frequented. Over the years she had drifted in and out of regular communion, although she acknowledged an increase in constancy since her marriage to Karp. It might have been, at first, merely a resurgence of her contrarian spirit-marry a Jew, become more Catholic-but lately she had felt a vague discomfort of soul, the sort of thing in which the Church was supposed to specialize, although it had been years, decades, since Marlene had actually brought such a problem to a priest. On recent Sundays, looking at the dull, sheeplike face of Father Raymond at Old St.
Pat’s, Marlene tried to imagine what he would say if she revealed to him her recent quasi-legal doings-and more disturbingly, her bloodthirsty prospects. Although she was barely able to admit it to herself, she had begun to hope for-in some undefined fashion-moral guidance.

  And, of course, there was Lucy. Quite apart from her own beliefs, Marlene had made a solemn commitment when her family’s parish priest had agreed to marry her to a non-Catholic that she would raise her child in the bosom of Rome, and she intended to do so. Happily, St. Pat’s had an excellent Sunday school, where she deposited Lucy while she attended the service. The girl had taken nicely to the Sunday ritual (her only bitch being the necessity for unnatural cleanliness, and the wearing of a succession of darling dresses, lace-collared velvets or elaborately ruffled muslins, lovingly purchased by her mother and a supporting body of female relatives), Lucy having reached the age where theology was of interest.

  This morning, entering the car in a glory of dark velvet, camel-hair coat, and wool hat, Lucy asked Marlene, “How come God has three names?”

  Marlene shot her daughter an inquiring look. It seemed unlikely that Sister Theresa, who ran the junior Sunday class, had exposed her charges to the mysteries of the Trinity.

  “What do you mean, dear?” asked Marlene.

  Lucy counted the persons off on her fingers. “One is Jesus Christ, right? Two, is baby Jesus. Three: Harold.”

  “Harold?”

  “Uh-huh. AreFatherwhichArtnHeaven, Harold Be thy name.”

  “Ah, mmm, I think that’s ‘hallowed,’ baby. It means blessed. Also, Jesus Christ and baby Jesus are the same person.”

  At this Lucy gave Marlene a disbelieving look. She said, “I’ll ask Sister Theresa,” and withdrew into what seemed like religious contemplation for the remainder of the ride.

  Throughout the service, Marlene made a greater than usual effort to open herself to divine guidance. A faint headache was, however, the only result. Afterward, the sermon was on one of Father Raymond’s two favorite themes: the need to support the foreign missions as a front line against the spread of godless communism (the other being the Evils of Unsanctified Sex). The featured mission today was the Missionary Sons of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, this particular Sunday being the feast day of St. Antony Claret, its founder.

  Marlene let the words wash over her, hardly hearing, as one waits for a TV commercial to end. Fr. Raymond was, on this Sunday as usual, dull but thankfully brief, and Marlene was inclined to reward the brevity at least with the acknowledgment that St. Antony C. was the devil of a lad and his Charetians deserved at least a sawbuck. She reached into her wallet when the collection started, yanked forth a bill, and saw that her fingers had also plucked out the very slip of paper upon which Professor Malkin had written the name and address of Mattie Duran. A sign, was Marlene’s first thought, and then she carefully put that thought aside. But she gave twenty dollars to the mission when the plate came around.

  After church, Marlene found herself driving east on Houston. Lucy glanced out the window, recognized the route, and asked, “Are we getting knishes?” A swing by Yoneh Schimmel’s for a bag of the tasty bricklike pastries was a frequent coda to their Sunday devotions.

  “Maybe later. I want to stop off someplace first.”

  “Where?”

  “A place. It’s a women’s shelter I want to take a look at. It won’t be a long visit.”

  “What’s a women’s shelter?”

  “It’s a … sometimes there are bad men that like to hurt women and kids, and this is a place they can run to and hide.”

  “Are we going to hide there?”

  Marlene laughed and gave her daughter a squeeze. “No, silly! Daddy wouldn’t hurt us.”

  “If he did, Uncle Harry would shoot him with his gun,” said Lucy matter-of-factly. “Then I would take care of him, and you could hide in that place.”

  This comment produced enough distraction from the task of driving to have caused a serious accident on any day but Sunday. As it was, there was a squealing of brakes and a honking of horns.

  “Good plan, Lucy,” said Marlene upon recovery, to which her darling returned a glance both blank and sweet.

  The East Village Women’s Shelter was on Avenue B off Sixth, occupying the whole of a store-fronted six-story tenement. The former shop windows had been covered with steel plating, painted black, upon which the institution’s name was neatly lettered in white. There was an iglesia on one side of it and a shoe-repair shop with a traditional hanging shoe sign on the other. Most of the businesses on either side of the street-stores selling salsa records, cheap clothing, and furniture on credit-had their corrugated steel shutters down, and these were covered with graffiti, much of it gang spoor. There were graffiti on the iglesia too, but none on the women’s shelter-not a one, despite the blank, smooth expanse of black steel.

  Marlene observed this and thought it significant. She parked and ushered Lucy up to the door, which was solid, also black, and equipped with a peephole. She rang the buzzer. A voice emanating from a little box affixed to the doorframe asked her business. She said she wanted to see Mattie Duran. The voice told her to wait, and she was aware of being observed through the peephole.

  Shortly she heard clankings, as of heavy locks being disengaged, and the door opened. In the doorway was a young woman in her late teens, with a long, thick braid in her black hair and a suspicious look on her face; the face, which was thin and biscuit brown, had darkened channels cut under the eyes, as if by corrosive tears. She was dressed in a black sweatshirt and jeans. This person looked Marlene up and down, and was clearly unimpressed, although she smiled and said hi to Lucy. Without another word she barred the door with a dead bolt and a police lock and turned away, allowing Marlene to follow her if she would.

  A short corridor made from plywood led to a glass door. Marlene and Lucy followed the teenager through it and into a room carved out of the center of the former retail store. The room was clearly an office: four unmatched filing cabinets stood along one wall, and another wall held a corkboard covered with messages. Two battered steel desks in the center of the room were occupied by a pair of women, one black, one white, who were talking on telephones. Another phone rang unanswered. There were grubby toys strewn in odd corners. The place smelled of cooking soup.

  “She’s in there,” said their guide, pointing at a door.

  Marlene knocked and, in response to a vague noise from within, opened it, revealing a tiny office, no larger than an apartment bathroom. It contained a rack of steel shelving overflowing with stuffed manila files, a scarred wooden desk, one leg of which was missing and replaced with phone books, a miscellany of straight chairs in dubious repair, and, affixed to the walls, an office clock, a calendar, much inscribed, and a color reproduction of one of Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits, with mustache. On the desk was a rough-looking, large black Persian tomcat, nesting in a wire basket full of what looked like official manifold forms. Behind the desk was a swarthy woman of about forty.

  Or Marlene guessed her age at about that; she could have been any age from a hard thirty to a light fifty. She was a Latina of some variety, but probably not a Puerto Rican. Her skin had a cinnamon sheen to it, her cheekbones were broad and sharp, and her mouth had that lovely, lanceolate sculpting of the lips that said Mexico. Her eyes, oddly, were gray-blue.

  The woman was giving Marlene the once-over too, and Marlene could see that she was somewhat put off and confused by the fancy clothes. Her gaze, however, softened when she examined Marlene’s face, which still bore the yellowing bruises left by Pruitt’s fists.

  “Can I pet your cat?” asked Lucy, who had wormed her way past Marlene’s hip.

  The woman smiled at this, showing powerful teeth and a flash of gold, and beckoned the child forward. Lucy stroked the cat, who spat briefly and then submitted to a stroking. The woman stood and held out her hand to Marlene. “Mattie Duran,” she said. Her hand was large and rough, with thick, square-cut nails. She was dres
sed in a black cotton turtleneck under a cover-all garment of vaguely military cut, with many pockets and zips on it. It was also black, which seemed to be the color of choice at the Women’s Shelter.

  Marlene said her own name, and Duran gestured her to one of the straight chairs. She sat down again behind her desk and said, “Look, we’re a little jammed now, but I’ll try to help.” She pulled a clipboard from a wall hook and took a pencil from behind her ear. “Where are you living now?”

  “In my loft,” answered Marlene, puzzled.

  “Is he still there?”

  “Who?”

  “Your husband, your boyfriend-the guy who beat you up,” said Duran.

  “Umm, I think we’re off on the wrong foot. I’m not a client. Professor Malkin suggested I come talk to you, and since I was passing by …”

  Duran laughed heartily and tossed the clipboard down. “Oh, yeah, the little professor. You’re that one … in the article. That’s where you got the face. Well, well! Yeah, we should talk … don’t do that, honey, he’ll scratch the shit out of you.”

  Lucy had been trying to lift the cat out of his basket, and the animal was making increasingly more aggressive noises.

  “He doesn’t like to be hauled around,” explained Duran.

  Lucy asked, “What’s his name?”

  “Megaton,” said Duran, and then, to Marlene, “You know, we have a playroom upstairs; there’s kids and a bunch of toys. Maybe Lucy would like to go up and stay there while we talk?”

  “How about that, Lucy? Would you like to play with the kids who live here?” asked Marlene.

  “The ones who’re hiding from the bad men?” asked Lucy.

  Duran gave Marlene a quick sidelong glance. “Yeah,” she said to Lucy, “those’re the ones.”

  The woman took Lucy by the hand and led her away. She was back in a few minutes. Sitting down again in her chair, she considered Marlene thoughtfully for a moment and then said, “You don’t look like what I thought you would.”