Falsely Accused bkamc-8

by Robert Tanenbaum

  “You don’t want to fire it?” said Arnolfini.

  “I’ll trust you it works,” she said.

  “Shoot it, Marlene,” said Harry.

  She met his eyes and looked away. He was serious about this, and it came from his concern about her safety, which it was not in her heart to despise. She nodded and said, “Okay, let’s shoot.”

  Arnolfini led them through a hallway to a firing range, a four-stand affair that took up most of his building. He turned on the lights, a rack of space heaters, and a blower. An icy breeze wafted over them, its chill hardly deflected by the gusts from the heaters. Arnolfini broke open a box of.380 semi-wadcutters, and they all worked silently for a few minutes loading three clips. The gun dealer snapped a silhouette target to a traveler and sent it twenty-five yards downrange.

  Marlene bellied up to the barrier, slipped muffs over her ears, and without preamble, in her usual casual way, began firing. She shot two clips of five into the target’s chest and, for a lark, shot the last clip into the head. Arnolfini flipped the traveler switch and brought the target back.

  “Very nice,” he said with new respect in his voice. The chest shots fell into two neat patterns, neither larger than a playing card. The five head shots were somewhat more dispersed, but still impressive shooting.

  “Of course, it’s a lot different on the street,” he added. “The guy’s moving, it’s dark, maybe he’s shooting back. That’s why you want a weapon that’ll put him down with one hit, which this little thing probably won’t do. It’s really a backup gun.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m a sort of a backup person, Frank,” said Marlene lightly. “Harry’s going to do the heavy killing, aren’t you, Harry?”

  She saw the shock on his face, and immediately wished she were a thousand miles away with her tongue cut out. How could she have! Bello turned away and walked out of the range.

  Back in the office, Marlene took out her checkbook and examined her bill for the Mustang, two extra clips, a nylon belt holster, and a box of Federal 90-grain jacketed hollow points. Arnolfini explained that she was getting the cop discount since she was with Harry. It made her feel worse.

  “You want one of these?” the dealer asked. He was holding a shiny.22 revolver. “For the price of a box of rounds? I bought out a guy last month. Made in Brazil. Not a bad little gun for plinking, but I can’t sell ’em.”

  Marlene was too tired to refuse. “Yeah, sure,” she said, “throw it in.” But the shiny gun had reminded her of Lucy’s cap pistol-and the reality of keeping weapons in the loft. “Have you got a gun box, a safe, with a lock?”

  He had several, and Marlene bought a green one about the size of a file drawer, with a push-button combination lock. Harry helped carry it out to the car.

  “I’m sorry, Harry,” she said when they were sitting in the car. “There’s absolutely no excuse for me saying that kind of shit to you.”

  “Forget it,” mumbled Harry as he started the car.

  “No, listen, you need to hear this! Look at me, Harry!”

  Bello stopped the car and looked at her, his face its usual mask. Marlene spoke quickly and in a low tone, as in a confessional. “I have problems with this, Harry. And they’re coming out in sneaky little digs like that in there. It’s driving me up the wall, and I don’t like the way I’m acting and feeling behind it. This gun thing. First, it’s going to drive Butch crazy all over again, having a gun in the house, and I’m going to have to deal with that, and then, for me personally, I don’t like being armed, or maybe it’s I like it too much. Maybe it’s the same thing, if you know what I mean. It was one thing, sort of exciting work, getting Pruitt and stopping the other guys we’ve been handling this past couple of months, but it’s something else completely, dealing with guys who want to kill their girlfriends and we might be in the way, and we might have to shoot them first. I killed one guy, and it almost wrecked me and I had dreams about it for weeks-did I have to do it, did it have to go down that way …?”

  “The way I heard it,” said Harry, “was you didn’t have a choice. The guy was shooting at a cop.”

  “Right, right, of course, but you always think, maybe you set up the situation. Anyway, that’s the point, what you just said, this business might put you in a situation where you’re getting shot at, and I have no right to be in a position where I can’t help you out. So I’m packing, but …” She shook her head, as if trying to jar sense into it, and then made a gesture of futility with her hands, saying, “It’s a fog, Harry. I mean, what the fuck … what’m I doing? What’re we doing?”

  “One day at a time,” said Bello.

  “That’s a platitude, Harry,” she snapped.

  He stepped on the accelerator and moved the car down the street. They drove back to the runnel in silence. In the roar of their passage through the tube, he said, and his words were low-pitched so that she had to strain to hear them, “You’ll get used to it. You’ll probably never have to use it. Frank, there, the gun expert? Thirty-five years in Bed-Stuy, never shot one. You have to, you’ll do the right thing.”

  “You say that, but how do you know that, Harry?”

  “I’m here, right?” he said.

  The rain did not let up all that afternoon, and when the sun went down it changed to sleet, driven by a nasty east wind. It was, however, positively halcyon compared to the weather within the loft when Karp discovered how Marlene had spent her Jersey morning.

  “You brought guns into our home? Guns?” was his anguished cry. This was at the dinner table. Marlene had made a favorite dish of Karp’s, veal parmigiana, which that barbarian considered the epitome of Italian cuisine and which she rarely degraded herself to prepare, but did this time, feeling queasily like Lucy Ricardo.

  “Don’t raise your voice!” she said.

  “Why not? You’ll shoot me?” he shouted.

  “Lucy, dear,” Marlene said, “if you’re finished, you can go to your room now.”

  “Can I see your gun, Mommy?” Lucy asked, her eyes widening.

  “May I see your gun, Mommy?” said Marlene automatically.

  “May I see-”

  “No, you can’t,” said Marlene. “What you can do is get ready for your bath, and then you can watch Gilligan’s Island.”

  “Oh, why don’t you show it to her, Marlene?” said Karp nastily. “Let her play with it, even. She will anyway, sooner or later.”

  At this Marlene turned upon her husband a look of such bone-chilling malevolence that he shut up. After Lucy had run off, she said, “How dare you suggest that I’m endangering my child! How dare you!”

  They locked gazes and ground teeth for an interminable-seeming moment. Then Karp sprang to his feet, knocking over his chair with a clatter. He had his big fists clenched and appeared to be looking for something to break.

  “Shit, Marlene!” he shouted. “Why are you doing this? Why are you fucking up our life with this shit?”

  “I am not doing any such thing,” responded Marlene in a voice unnaturally calm. While Karp gaped and glared and shot flames from his nostrils, she continued, “You object to what I’m doing. It upsets you. A couple of years ago, you dragged this family off to that hellhole in D.C., taking Lucy away from her friends and her relatives without a moment’s thought …”

  “Wait a min-”

  “… without, as I say, a moment’s thought, and as I recall I did not scream or yell or insult your integrity or your love for your daughter, or me …”

  “I didn’t-”

  “… whereas I have given this a great deal of thought. Are you going to sit down and listen?”

  Karp picked up his chair and sat down in it, after the manner of men who are tied into similar chairs with paper targets on their breasts.

  “As I say,” Marlene resumed, “a great deal of thought. I didn’t want to get a gun at all. Harry thought I needed one-let me finish this, please! — because he was concerned for my safety. I decided to get one because I was concerned for his safety. W
e’re going to get in the way of domestic violence from time to time, and I intend to back him up just like he backs me up, and I need a gun for that. As far as safety goes around here, I have a gun safe, in which the guns will sit, locked and unloaded when they’re not attached to my body. I also intend to show them to Lucy and let her handle them so she knows what they are and what they can do.” She leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms.

  “Is that it? You’re finished?”

  “For the nonce,” she replied.

  He sighed and rubbed his face. It had taken Karp a long time to learn that in domestic disagreements, the point was not, as it was in the courtroom, to win, but rather the restoration of felicity. This apparently required a different set of skills from those he had honed to a diamond edge, and it was clear to him that he had still not got it right. “I said/she said, “I was sorry a million times about Washington, and you keep bringing it up whenever I give you shit about something you want to do. It’s not fair.”

  Marlene thought about that for a little. “You’re right,” she said, “it’s not. I’ll try to lay off of that.”

  “Okay, and I’m sorry I said that about Lucy and the gun. It was a cheap shot.” He sighed again. “But.”

  “Yes?” she said, a long, drawn-out yes.

  “I don’t know what ‘but.’ Sometimes I think I’m inside this, ah, plastic bubble, and if I can just push through, everything will be clear and I’ll just accept everything. I mean, I’ll stop worrying about you and the kid the way I do. I mean, if you’re here, I’ll love you, and if you’re gone, you’re gone and I’ll be sad. But no churning stomach all the time. And sometimes I think, I’ve done it, and I’m through, but then something like this goes down and I realize there’s another bubble outside the one I just went through. And I think things like, she’s acting crazy because she wants me to stop her. That’s not true, is it?”

  “No. Of course, if I was really crazy, I wouldn’t tell you the truth, would I? Or would I? Tell me, do you trust me?”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said immediately. “With my life. I trust your integrity. I trust your decency. However, it’s my learned opinion as a professional criminal justice guy of long standing, and some reputation, that you’re into something that’s way over your fucking head. That’s not a trust thing, that’s a judgment thing. I could be wrong.”

  “Thank you for that opinion. I will consider it in my chambers.”

  “You do that,” said Karp.

  Both of them had on their faces the kind of shy smiles they wore when they realized that they had yet again escaped the shoals and riptides and were back on the fair, broad seaways of marriage.

  “So,” said Karp brightly, “what kind of gun did you get?”

  “A Colt Mustang.380. The guy threw in a cheap revolver too.”

  “Well, mazeltov,” said Karp with a bland smile. “Use them in good health.” He stood up. “I think I’ll help Lucy with her bath.”

  In all, a good day, was Marlene’s thought when, toward midnight, she floated into the antechamber of sleep. Karp had given her one of those violent fucks she dearly loved, and which she thought one of the ways in which a good marriage discharges otherwise unappeasable aggression and discontent. She was sore and lightly bruised, and Karp, now breathing huskily beside her, had numerous flaming bite marks on him, at least one of which, she hoped, would show above his collar the next morning.

  At this point the phone, her closely guarded private number, rang next to her ear. She snatched it up on the first ring. There was a woman on the line.

  “Is this Marlene Ciampi?”

  “Yes?”

  “This is Harlem Hospital Center Admitting. Do you know a person named”-she pronounced it wrong, carefully-“Ariade Stupenagel?”

  “Yes, Ariadne. Has something happened to her?”

  “Yes, she’s in the E.R. now. She doesn’t have health insurance, and when we asked her for a responsible party, she gave us a card with your name on it.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “Urn, ma’am, are you the responsible party? Otherwise, you know, I can’t, um, discuss-”

  “Yes, yes, I’ll be responsible,” Marlene snapped. “What was it-an accident?”

  “Uh, no, ma’am,” said the woman. Marlene could hear paper rustling. “We have police involvement in this case. This is an assault case.”

  TWELVE

  “They picked her up by the Mount,” said the detective. “That’s up at the north end of the park near 104th Street, east. It’s used as a composting area. Real deserted.”

  “How did you find her?” asked Marlene. They were sitting on plastic chairs in a crowded hallway in Harlem Hospital’s E.R., surrounded by sick or bleeding people, some on gurneys, some slouching exhausted in the same sort of chairs. Marlene was in the sweats, sneakers, and leather jacket she had thrown on after getting the call. The detective was dressed in a rumpled blue suit and a damp tan raincoat, a chunky, sad-eyed black man. He seemed intelligent and concerned. Marlene had identified herself as the victim’s closest friend, a former D.A., and a current private investigator. The detective was therefore somewhat more forthcoming than detectives usually are when interviewing people connected to victims.

  “We got a call at the precinct,” he said. “Anonymous, of course.”

  “Of course. What precinct? The Two-Five?”

  “No, the Two-Three,” said the detective. “Anyway, a night like this, she would have died for sure, exposed like she was. We’re treating it as attempted murder.”

  “She was naked?”

  “Underpants, socks, and sneakers.”

  “Raped?”

  “We’re checking that. It looks like a gang thing to me. Some of these kids are pretty nasty little suckers.”

  “I doubt that,” said Marlene. “That it was a kid gang.”

  The detective looked at her sharply. “Oh, yeah? Why is that?”

  “Ariadne is six-one and strong. She isn’t your typical New York housewife or secretary. She carried a nine-inch Arab dagger almost all the time and she knows how to use it too. For the last ten years or so she’s been playing risky games with guerillas, bandits, and secret police all over the world. She could eat the average gang of kid muggers for breakfast.”

  “You think she was a target? It wasn’t random?”

  “I’d bet on it.”

  The detective wrote something on his notepad. He asked, “So she had enemies.”

  Marlene snorted a laugh. “You could say that. Ariadne enjoys pissing people off. She thinks it’s her professional responsibility as a journalist.”

  “Like who, in particular?”

  “I don’t know,” said Marlene after a brief pause. “Take your pick. Last year she exposed some nasty connections between American officials and the generals who’re murdering Indians in Guatemala. She did a piece recently on stalkers that might’ve gotten some people annoyed.”

  “Uh-huh,” said the detective, writing. Then, casually, he asked, “By the way, how come you thought the call came in to the Two-Five?”

  Smart guy, thought Marlene, and was about to tell him Stupenagel’s interest in the cabbie suicides, and the involvement of Paul Jackson, but thought better of it. It had been some time since she had spoken to Stupenagel about it; maybe the whole thing hadn’t panned out. And the woman had not mentioned being followed after that one time. And, more to the point, she didn’t know this guy, or his connection, if any, with the cops out of the Twenty-fifth Precinct who were supposedly doing the shakedowns.

  “I don’t know-Two-Three, Two-Five-I guessed it was one of the East Harlem precincts, considering where you found her.”

  The detective grunted, wrote, asked a few more questions and then flipped his notebook shut. He handed Marlene a business card. Lester Moon, Detective Third Grade. She gave him one of hers.

  “Call me if you think of anything else,” said Moon with a meaningful look, and strode off through the deep misery.
/>   Marlene managed to track down the harried Panamanian intern in charge of Stupenagel’s case, from whom she learned that her friend had survived surgery; that her internal bleeding was under control; that her broken bones had been set; that she was out of immediate danger; and that he had another patient he had to see right away.

  Marlene then marched into the administration office and obnoxiously flashed her checkbook and her gold Visa card to attract the attention of various civil servants, through whom she arranged for Stupenagel to be transferred from Harlem Hospital Center to Columbia-Presbyterian. The Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons supplies interns to both hospitals. They send the ones with good American M.D.’s to Columbia-Presby and the ones from third world countries holding degrees from places like Guadalajara U. to Harlem. Marlene knew this, and she had no compunction about buying her friend’s way out of a public hospital, and thus supporting a dual health-care standard she would have abstractly opposed at any cocktail party. Then she went home and cried and awakened Karp, who comforted her and wisely refrained from expressing his constant fear that the next midnight phone call would be about Marlene.

  It took three days for Stupenagel to recover her senses enough to converse for any length of time. On each of those days, after taking care of Lucy and dropping her at school, Marlene had come, and sat through the visiting hour, and chatted inanely to the unanswering, white-swathed figure on the hospital bed.

  When she arrived on the third day, Stupenagel’s bed was propped up and her eyes were open. They were ringed with yellow-violet bruises. Much of the rest of her face was concealed by plaster, except for a rough hole at the side of her mouth, through which she could suck nourishment and carry on a slurred conversation.

  “How are you, Stupe?” asked Marlene, sitting in a chair by the bedside.

  “Oh, I’m having a ball. Dope’s pretty good. Nurse said you’re paying the freight for this. Thanks, but you don’t have to. Call my dad.” She gave Marlene a telephone number with a 216 area code, and Marlene wrote it down.

  “You want to know what happened, huh?”