Meanwhile, deep below where this Nouveau Marlene lived, down one of those damp stone staircases that exist in even the best-ordered minds, through dripping, dark, torchlit passageways, past spiked and barred gates, in a little low cell full of rustling vermin, True Marlene sat and wept. She knew she deserved this punishment, she was not complaining. People had died, people had suffered because of her stupidity, sloppiness, pride, and arrogance. Her vicious, sick lust for violence. Oh, she had evaded it for a long time, but it had finally caught up with her, more than a hot bath and a little drinking and a nice fuck could cure, far more. Those corpses in the Daumier, Wayne blowing bubbles through his nipple, that final fountain of blood and brains, arcing up, splattering off the ceiling, falling like a rain from hell on her head. Where it belonged. Get over it, say the people who haven’t been there, even Butch hadn’t been there. Get over it, easy for him to say. Lucy had been there, a little, but Lucy had God talking to her, Lucy was not available. God didn’t talk to Marlene anymore, and she was damned if she was going to beg. She would be damned. Post–traumatic shock was the approved phrase nowadays, a curiously sterile, medicalized bit of nonsense. She’s had a shock. Stupid! Not a shock; a shock was when you touch a hot wire—some sparks, some pain, and that was it—not like this, this erosion of the human, this imprisonment. She wept because she missed Butch, and her babies, and the brave boys and girls who guarded the stinking rich, and the life of the little pleasures of frugality, and action, too, the rush of it, and the intense, barbaric pleasure of seeing the bad guys in the dust. At some level, she still hoped for release, that the prince would come and rescue her from the dungeon. Or the princess. But herself, right now, she could do nothing.
“Why do you do that?” Grale asked.
“What?”
“That little pause when you go out a door. When I’m behind you, like just now, I have to watch myself so I don’t step on you.”
The doorway in question was the entrance to a convenience store on Tenth off Forty-third. It was owned by a pair of Dominican brothers named Santomas, and you could buy there the usual things convenience stores sold in that neighborhood—overpriced groceries, doubtful fruit, beer, sweet wines, lottery tickets—and you could also get at this particular one a wide variety of illicit pharmaceuticals, other than heroin and crack. The Santomas boys, decent fellows, drew the line at those, although they would cheerfully sell you Dilaudid, Percodan, Benzedrine, Darvon, Dexedrine, and Fiorinal, besides ecstasy and LSD. They considered themselves discount ethical pharmacists, like Dart, but without the bothersome paperwork. Lucy and Grale were not there to buy, but to inquire about Canman, a regular customer there for setups, a cocktail of uppers and downers he favored. But the boys knew nothing, having not seen the Canman in several weeks, but they expressed their concern.
They were well away from that door when Lucy answered, “A habit. Something Tran taught me.” A nervous laugh. “You know, checking for snipers in the street, people following. I was an impressionable child.”
“This Vietcong guy you’re always telling me about?”
“Ex-Vietcong. He was a Southerner. He spent twenty years fighting the French and us, and when the war was over, the Communists threw him in jail and tortured him. For a long time he was really my best friend. I mean among grown-ups.”
“Gosh, should I be jealous?”
She blushed. “Are you a grown-up?” she asked lightly, but he seemed to take the question seriously. “I’m not sure,” he said. “I think there’s something childlike about a certain kind of religious personality, a lightness of spirit that you get in very secure and happy children. Sometimes you see it in the faces of old priests and nuns. Unlined faces, a sort of light comes out of them. You’ve seen that.” She had. “Anyway, I think I’m that type, although with me it might be shallowness. Unlike you.”
“What type am I?”
“The suffering type. We only come in the two flavors, Good Friday and Easter.” He grinned at her. “You poor girl. You seem to be suffering more than usual lately.”
“Oh, I’m all right,” she began, and then laughed, a sound tinted more than a little with hysteria. “My life is coming unglued, is all. I’m getting kicked out of school, and I don’t seem to be able to care about it. My mother . . . we came home from church today, me and my little brothers, and Mom was laid out on the couch, a classic scene, a bottle of booze in her fist, vomit. I got her stirred and she wanted to go shopping, she wanted to buy us stuff. I had to talk her out of calling her car and staggering out, and she screamed at me, which I don’t mind, because she’s always screaming at me about something, I mean lately. I sort of muscled her into bed and hung around until my dad got home.”
“Yeah, drunks are the worst. My mom was one, too.”
“She’s not a drunk,” Lucy snapped, and then sighed. “At least I don’t think so. I mean she never was before, but they say the family is the last to cop. My father seems to be pretending that nothing’s wrong, but you can see it’s really tearing him up. And even besides that, he’s worried about something, at work. He’s in some kind of trouble, I don’t know what. And I’m not helping, I know that. But I just don’t feel very charitable. I want to run away from everything, school, the family, church . . . just disappear into the languages . . .”
And more in this vein, Lucy was building up to revealing some of her real secrets, stuff she hadn’t ever told anyone. She was trying to trust him now, and it was an act of will, not unconsciousness, as it had been before, before she’d talked to the priest. They were walking slowly south on Tenth, heading toward Penn Station and the homeless congeries in its environs, in the hope that they would meet someone who had seen Canman recently, when Lucy suddenly realized that she had lost her audience. She felt a pang of intense embarrassment. I’m boring him, was her thought, oh, God, how stupid, laying all this shit on him . . . but he said, “There he is.”
David pointed across the street, and she looked and saw the Canman, unmistakable, the billow of dirty-tanish rattails, the pale blob of the face against the black plastic bag he carried on one shoulder, the long army overcoat, the loping stride. He was heading north on Tenth on the other side of the avenue. They both froze, like hunters just spotting deer across a naked autumn wood, but he was deerlike, too, casting his eyes back and forth, occasionally snapping a glance over his free shoulder, and he spotted them through the sparse Sunday traffic. He turned and headed back the other way, trotting, his cans making clanging music. Grale dashed into the street, crying, “Hey, John! Canman! Wait up!” Lucy started to follow, but had to step back in deference to a honking cab. She heard the squeal of tires behind her and a full chorus of horns. A black sedan zoomed out from a parking space across from the Santomas bodega, cut heedless across six lanes, and shrieked to a stop in front of the fleeing Canman. Both front doors sprang open at once, and two men leaped out. Canman instantly reversed course, streaking north again, his overcoat flapping, pursued by the two men, the one in the lead white, the other black. Canman dodged around a truck, and as he did, he dumped the bag of cans. The white man stepped on one of them, skidded, fell. His partner sidestepped around him and chased Canman, who was now running full tilt up Tenth, in the roadway. The traffic slowed as drivers stopped to gape, and this gave Lucy a chance to cut across the road, and so she was able to see Grale standing in Canman’s path, his arms out as if offering a hug. Maybe he really did want to hug the fleeing man, but what he got was a stiff-arm to the chest that knocked him back against a parked car. He rebounded just in time to trip up the black man pursuing, and they both went down in a sprawl. Lucy ran over to Grale, who was bleeding from a scraped chin, but before she could get to him, something slammed into her back, and she went facedown into the asphalt.
It knocked the wind out of her, and for a full minute she could think of nothing but drawing breath. When she was able to stagger to her feet, she saw that the black man had a handful of David’s hair and one arm up behind his back in a hammerlock
. He pounded David’s face a couple of times against the hood of a car and then snapped handcuffs on his wrists. So they were cops. She stuffed a tissue against her bleeding nose and plucked at the man’s sleeve.
“What are you doing?” she demanded. “He didn’t do anything.”
The man whirled around, his face set in a snarl, but when he saw her, he did a double take and said, “Police business, miss. Move along now!”
“But he didn’t do anything!”
“Interfering with an officer, miss. I said move along!” He finished cuffing Grale and marched him back to the black sedan, with Lucy worrying at his heels. The cop tossed Grale into the backseat of the car, which Lucy now saw was an unmarked police vehicle. She tried to stick her head into the doorway of the car, but the cop grabbed her roughly and threw her back. He slammed the car door, and they were just standing there arguing when the other man came trotting up. His face was red, and his pale hair stuck sweat-soaked to his forehead. Lucy found it hard to look at his face, so ferocious was the expression of frustrated rage. Although taken feature by feature it was a handsome face, now it was peculiarly distorted, the eyes retreating into slits, the brow bulging over them, the teeth bared, the jaw muscles knotted. He almost seemed to have a muzzle.
“I fucking lost him,” he said to the black cop. “I lost him!” He struck the trunk of the car with his fist, full strength, dimpling the metal but doing no apparent injury to his hand. He paced rapidly back and forth, fists clenching and releasing, while his partner waited calmly, like a lion trainer giving some beast the time to come around.
“Fucking guy is like smoke,” said the white cop, and then he shook his head, “or maybe I’m losing it.” He laughed, took a few deep breaths, and looked into the car.
“What’s this?”
“Guy who tripped me. Looked like he knew the suspect.”
“Well, of course, he knows him,” said Lucy angrily. “We’re church workers, we’re both volunteers out of Holy Redeemer. We were trying to find Canman, and we did find him, and then you showed up and chased him away.”
“Who’re you?” asked the white cop. His face, while still blotched, had once again become the face of a human.
“My name is Lucy Karp. And that’s David Grale in there. He’s a Franciscan, for God’s sake.” Lucy saw the black cop whisper something into his partner’s ear.
“You know where this Canman character hangs out?” the white cop asked her. “Where he’s hiding?”
“Of course not. If we knew where he was, we wouldn’t have been walking all over the city looking for him.”
The white cop nodded. “Okay, sure, but you could see where we might’ve made an honest mistake. We’ve been staked out by that bodega for two days. The guy finally shows up, and you queer the collar. You got to expect we’re going to react a little.” He turned to his partner and made a gesture, and the black cop pulled Grale out of the car and took off the cuffs. He had a bib of blood down the front of his shirt, and his face was bruised and red-splattered.
“Are you okay, David?” she asked.
He smiled his dreamy smile and said, “I’m fine. Denied my martyrdom yet again.”
Lucy turned angrily to confront the white cop and saw that he was staring at her.
“You’re the kid who found his last victim, aren’t you?” he asked.
“I found a victim, but I doubt very much that it was his.”
“You do, huh? On what basis, can I ask?”
“I know him. He’s weird, but he’s not a killer.”
“Really? You’ve got a lot of experience with killers?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. More than you have, probably.”
She could see the anger start up again in the cop’s face, and then vanish, like a small cloud that blocks the sun for an instant. He grinned wryly. “No kidding? But, unfortunately, we can’t just take your word for it. The thing is, if your guy is innocent, his best move is to come forward, talk to us, and if he’s solid on the facts and the evidence, then he can walk away, and God bless. The way it is now, we got fifty cops running around looking for a serial killer, and he’s in the cross hairs. He could get hurt, which would be a shame. Assuming he’s not the slasher. Also, you see him again, either of you, you better get on the phone and call the cops.” He pointed a finger. “I mean it. Meanwhile, I’m sorry you got in the way of a pursuit, and you ought to get your accidental injuries looked at. You want us to call an ambulance?”
“No, but I want your names and shield numbers,” said Lucy.
Again that little black cloud across his face. Then he grinned broadly and said, “Don’t push your luck, girlie.”
Without another word, both of them got into their car and drove off.
12
“GOOD GOD!” SAID KARP. “WHATHAPPENED!”
His daughter had tried to slip-slide into the loft that evening, but the dad was lying in wait for her, wanting to discuss earlier events, and grasped her by both shoulders while he checked out her face. It had been washed in a rest room, but the cheekbone and temple flashed a blossoming red-violet bruise, and the firm little chin had road burns.
“Nothing,” said Lucy. “I tripped and fell.”
“Please! You look like you’ve been six rounds with Sonny Liston. What happened?”
And he chivied her into the kitchen and made her some tea and listened while she told him the story.
“I think they must have been the same guys that roughed up Real Ali. The white guy . . . he was really scary.”
“Cooley,” said Karp. “The other one is Nash.”
“How did you . . . ? Oh, right, you said you’d check them out.”
“I didn’t have to. I’ve had my eye on them for a while.”
“Really? How come?”
Karp contemplated his daughter and considered the events she had just described and this question. He was not one for bringing the office home, but from time to time he would discuss a case with his wife, especially when she had some peripheral connection with it. But Marlene was now . . . somewhere else, and Lucy had, in fact, become involved in this one, and he was under no illusions about her innocence when it came to acts of blood. So he said, “How come is that Brendan Cooley killed a man named Lomax last month. He said he spotted Lomax in a stolen car, pursued him onto the Hudson Parkway, and shot him when Lomax tried to ram his car. The black cop you saw, Willie Nash, was there, too, driving. Our guys set a record for running the case through the grand jury, at which time it was not brought out at all the bullets that killed Lomax came from behind. I also found out that the car wasn’t reported stolen until after Lomax was dead.” He paused and was not disappointed when the penny instantly dropped.
“So they were chasing Lomax, not a stolen car. Why?”
“Ah, that’s the big question, which actually I seem to be the only one who wants to know.” And he went on to explain Brendan Cooley’s unique status in the NYPD.
“So they let him go after he shot this guy, and now he’s going after the slasher?”
“They did let him off, but as far as I know, he’s not assigned to the slasher team. That’s Detective Paradisio’s guys—you remember him? And Cooley’s not one of them. So . . .”
“So he wants Canman for something else,” said Lucy, and Karp saw her face light up in a way so reminiscent of her mother that it brought a stinging to his eyes. “What could it be?” she asked, and supplied the answer. “Obviously, he’s running some kind of racket. Lomax was in with him, and he whacked him, and Canman was . . .” She stopped, and her brow knitted. “No, that’s not right. Canman wasn’t in any racket. Unless . . .”
“What?”
“Well, he had this cart, like a laundry cart, and he used to push it around town collecting cans and other stuff, like from trash piles in the rich neighborhoods. He would sell the stuff to the sidewalk vendors and keep the metals for the recyclers. And people knew him, street people, and like rip-off artists, not real bad guys, just l
ike people who had pipe or aluminum scrap.”
“Thieves, you mean.”
“I guess. I guess at that level the line between thieves and scavengers is pretty thin. And he’d buy their stuff and put it in the cart and haul it to the recycler. That was his business. So he could have had some contact with stuff that was worse than he usually went in for. I know he used to go by Second and Twelfth sometimes.”
“I see,” said Karp, not really surprised that his darling was familiar with the city’s big nightly thieves’ market. “What kind of guy are we talking about here?”
“Canman? He’s smart, but he keeps it hidden, mostly. He wasn’t always a street person. Back in the life—that’s what he calls it, ‘back in the life’—he was pretty well-off, I guess, a family, a suit type. I think he was an engineer of some kind. He can make anything out of anything. And then . . . it’s hard to say. The only time he ever talked about his life was when he got sick and I was taking care of him.”
“Oh? When was this?”
Lucy realized that she had let a secret slip, thought of a covering lie, and then declined to use it. It didn’t make sense anymore, especially now that they were sharing confidences. She bobbed her head and had the grace to blush. “Yeah, well, I told you guys I was staying over with friends, to study. This was this past winter. Basically, he just went crazy. He was angry all the time and got into fights at work, and starting weird projects, and he lost his job, and his wife had him committed, and they shot him full of drugs and kicked him out, like they do nowadays, and his wife divorced him, and he ended up on the street. He takes pills. He says he knows enough to medicate himself. He’s still angry, but he can function okay. I mean he makes real money. He keeps it in a mail-drop box.”
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