“Yes, I’m checking out.”
“You shouldn’t. You’re not detoxed yet.”
“I’ll detox on my own.”
“I doubt that, sugar, but it’s your life. Try to eat something. You won’t want to, but force yourself. Bananas are good. And try to dilute it a little.”
“I’m not going to drink. I mean get drunk. Like I did.”
“Yeah, you are,” said Dottie confidently. “I been doing this awhile, and I’ve seen about four million runners, and every one of them thinks they’re different. I should go call Doctor, but I guess you don’t want to wait around for that.”
“No,” said Marlene as she finished her eyes. She stood erect and fluffed her hair. With the belt cinched and the coat buttoned to the collar she looked dressed. She saw Dottie in the mirror observing her.
“How do I look?” Marlene asked, only a little sarcastically. “Like a drunk on the run?”
“You got that right. If I was you, I would go on home before you start in drinking, put some clothes on you. You go into a bar that way, you liable to end up in a cheap motel with a line of guys out to the street.”
“Thanks for the advice,” said Marlene stiffly. She shook hands with the nurse and did not look long into her eyes, which held far too much compassion. The limo was waiting. The driver was Osman. Marlene gave him the Crosby Street address. She slumped in the corner, hiding in her beautiful coat, flinching under the waves of psychic pain that rolled up from hell into her mind. She pinched her naked thigh under the coat hard, but it did no good. How did she get here? she wondered. This is not me. I am a solid citizen. I am not a drunk. I am not a shopomaniac. I am a good mother and a good wife. Not convincing. The memories came back, in fearsome detail; she squirmed, she writhed, she cried out. Osman’s dark eyes appeared in the rearview mirror.
“Madam? Is something wrong?”
“No.” No, she thought, I am not, I am not going to sit in a church basement and tell my sad story to a bunch of strangers. I can control this. Her teeth hurt from the gritting she was doing. “Stop here, pull over,” she ordered. The car rolled smoothly to a curb, Thirty-second and Third. She jumped out and came back with an icy bottle of Chablis. The limo was supplied with stemware, and she had a corkscrew. Just one, make it last. She did make it last, almost to her door.
“Wait,” she told the driver, and entered her building. She left the wine in the car, which she thought was okay and proof that she wasn’t such a lush. A lush would never leave the bottle. In the loft there were cooking smells, something frying. In the kitchen was a woman she had never seen before, a stocky Latina not much older than she. The woman stared at her, essayed a formal smile. Marlene gave it back and lurched to the bedroom. A woman I don’t know is taking care of my family, she thought. The dog was waiting for her in the bedroom, on the bed, where he was forbidden to be. He jumped off with a loud thud and fawned, snuffling and drooling. A pool of saliva ten inches wide was on the center of the duvet. Everything is falling apart, she thought. She dropped her coat, yanked off her boots, and opened her wardrobe. A cascade of pricey gorgeousness fell out onto the floor, some of it still wrapped in store tissue, other items popping from shopping bags. She grabbed a pair of tan leather pants off the top of the pile and a red silk shirt from a Lauren bag and put them on. She heard the door open.
The boys were standing in the doorway looking at her, their expressions like those of refugee children staring through barbed wire. She sat on the bed and spread her arms.
“Come’ere handsomes!”
They sat on either side of her, and she kissed them both.
“Where were you?” asked Zak.
“I was in a hospital.”
“Were you sick?”
“Sort of.”
“Are you going to die?” Giancarlo here, always cutting to the chase.
“Eventually, but not until you both learn to clean up your room or get married, whichever comes first. Who’s in the kitchen?”
“Aemilia,” said Zak. “She’s making us fried chicken and french fries.”
“Good. All the important food groups. Is she nice?”
A pair of shrugs. “Okay,” said Giancarlo. “She mainly leaves us alone. Mom . . . ?”
“Yes?”
“Are we ever going to get back to regular again?”
“Regular like how?”
“Oh, you know . . . all of us together, and Lucy and all of us having dinner and fun and talking.”
“I sure hope so,” said Marlene. “But, look, I’m the problem here, not you or Dad. I’ll be straight with you guys, okay? I made a mistake, and it got some people killed and hurt, and other stuff happened that kind of knocked me off my feet. I’m not good for you all to be around right now. Lucy is staying with Uncle Tran in the country for a while, and I’m going to take off for a little while, too.”
“You’re getting divorced, aren’t you?” Giancarlo’s eyes started with tears. His brother was impassive. The emotional life of the twins was not really his concern. Zik handled that end of things.
“I am not. I just need a time-out, just like you need a time-out once in a while.”
“You could take it in your room.”
“No, grown-ups can’t take a time-out in their rooms. They have to go away for a while. But, look.” Here she grasped a hand from each in her two hands. “I swear to you I will fix myself up and then we will all be regular together.”
And she jollied them and got them smiling, which she could always do (skilled phony that she was), and got them into the kitchen for their meal, then threw some things into a suitcase and stuffed into a duffel bag clothes that never imagined that they would ever be so stuffed, then dashed down the hallway to her office and grabbed up a pile of mail and tossed it into her bag. She found the lead and clipped it to the dog’s collar. Someone to talk to. A quick good-bye, a flurry of kisses, and she was out.
The driver goggled when the dog jumped in and curled up on the seat. He was about to say something when Marlene got in, slammed the door, and thrust two $100 bills at him.
“It’s just a dog,” she said.
Like a playing card snapping over, his thoughts changed from worrying whether the dog would rip the damned upholstery and get him into trouble with the limo service, to contemplating what he would buy with the money.
That accomplished, Marlene dabbed at her damp eyes with a tissue, then poured and drank off a glass of crackling dry Chablis and heard as if for the first time the voice that said, oh, hell, you’ve had two, you might as well finish the bottle. No, not quite yet. Osman wanted to know their destination.
“I don’t know. Some hotel. The Plaza. Go up Broadway.” He nodded and pulled away, out to Canal, then north on Broadway.
Just a couple of nights, get myself together. Taper off a little. These were her thoughts, and to keep her mind occupied with trivia, she started to open her mail.
There must be, she thought, a jungle telegraph that tells everyone when you get a hold of a chunk of money. She had never received mail like this before. Business envelopes from people skilled in managing money, or stealing it. Prospectuses from firms needing capitalization, in larger, thicker ones. Large, creamy envelopes, almost as rich as leather, with invitations to gather at cultural events and give money to worthy causes. This appealed to her. A worthy cause. Here was one. The New York Foundation for the Arts. What more worthy, and it was tonight. At the Regency. She might be worthless herself, but she could still do some good. Besides, it would be an opportunity to wear some of those clothes, and there would be champagne. Here she could test her resolve. A couple of glasses, three at most, write a check, show the flag, and away. Like a regular person.
14
TRAFFIC STOPPED KARP AT A CORNER. FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE HE HAD FLED the clinic, he looked around to see where he was. A glance at a street sign located him in Murray Hill. He knew this corner—that deli, that chicken place, that saloon, the red awning in front of the Italian resta
urant. He crossed the street, went through a glass door into a tiny entranceway, found and pressed a little button.
“Yeah?” said a gravelly voice out of the rosette of holes in dull brass.
“Guma, it’s Butch.”
A pause. “Butch Karp?”
“No, Butch Stellarezze, the numbers guy. Let me in, huh?”
The buzzer sounded. Karp went through and took the creaky elevator to six. The hallway he entered was dark and peeling, lit by a single fortywatt bulb. Water stains splotched the ceiling. This was a rent-controlled building, and the landlord was not generous. Raymond Guma was waiting in his open doorway. Karp had been prepared for some changes—he had not seen Guma (and he felt the shame of it now) in over six months—but he was startled by the man’s appearance. Guma had always been a stocky, fleshy man, a combination of Yogi Berra and something out of an illustration in Rabelais or Boccaccio. Now his flesh hung slackly on his frame, his once-generous belly shrunken almost to nothing. He was wearing a velour bathrobe in dark green, gray sweatpants, and a white T-shirt, none of them too clean.
“Been a while, Butch,” said Guma, shaking Karp’s hand. “Come on in. Don’t mind the mess. The girl’s coming in tomorrow.” He stood aside to let Karp enter.
Smells of cigars and Scotch over the base pong of old apartment, unwashed clothes, of which a pile sat on a straight chair, a stink unpleasantly familiar, reminding Karp of forced childhood visits to aged relatives. When did Guma get old? He had retired barely a year ago, after forty-odd years prosecuting for the DA both here and in Brooklyn, and at the retirement party, a blast of historic dimensions, he had still been the Mad Dog of Centre Street, the Goom, grabbing women, sucking down his Teacher’s, singing in Italian, telling the old nasty jokes. Playing the clown. A pose. He was not, in fact, a clown. Among other things, he knew more about the New York Mob than anyone else on either side of the law and had taught Karp rather more than Karp wanted to learn about manipulating the legal system.
Guma led Karp into the living room, pointed to an armchair, closed the door to the kitchen (not before Karp had seen its piles of soiled dishes, the brown bags overflowing with garbage, the stacks of pizza boxes), and sat down on a dingy sofa with a little sigh. It was dim in the room; the avenue just visible through three big windows dressed with venetian blinds, all at different heights, one crooked. The sofa faced a large TV set, switched on with the volume a low grumble, the screen showing thousands of white birds in some rookery. Karp recalled that Guma was a nature-documentary fan, a surprising taste in one so thoroughly urban.
“Want a drink?” Guma asked. “You look like you need one.”
“I’m fine. You go ahead yourself.”
“Sure? Okay, I think I will.” A fifth was on the coffee table among the stacks of black videotape boxes, and Guma splashed a little of it into a squat tumbler, raised it, said, “Absent friends,” and took a sip.
“You lost a little weight there, Goom. You feeling okay?”
“You mean besides the cancer? I’m doing great. Never better.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“Yeah, well, the networks didn’t pick it up for some reason.” Guma shrugged, grinned, showing large, uneven teeth. “Hey, what the fuck—I’ll go out with all my marbles intact.” He held the glass up, swirled its contents. “Actually, they chopped a couple parts out, they say I’m in remission. I’m supposed to revamp my lifestyle, but I can’t see the percentage in it, you know? If it comes back, it comes back.” He plucked three-quarters of a Macanudo Lonsdale from a brown-glass ashtray and relit it.
“It’s funny,” he said, leaning back in a cloud of pungent smoke, “months go by, I don’t hear from my old pals at the office, and then in the same week I get a visit from Roland and now from you. I figure Jack’ll be by tomorrow.” He looked around the room appraisingly. “Maybe I should redecorate, my social life is starting to look up so much.”
“Roland came by?”
“Yeah, right after you guys canned his ass. He was drunk and looking for someone to get drunker with. Which we did. We watched my Serengeti tape. I figure he wanted to see rending flesh. He’s really pissed at Jack. You, too, matter of fact.”
“Why me? Christ, I was on him for years to keep a goddamn cork in it. And I practically begged Keegan to let it slide.”
“Yeah, well, he wasn’t being that rational. He thinks he was set up.”
“I know.”
“Was he?”
“Probably. Why, I don’t now. Not that he had any shortage of enemies.”
“No. Still it’s a shame. What about you? I hear you’re running homicide again.”
“Not exactly. He wants me to clean up the political cases, make sure nothing interferes with his coronation. If anything goes wrong, he’s got someone to toss out the door after Roland.”
Guma squinted at Karp through the smoke. “That don’t sound like the old Butch. You were never a cleanup type of guy. You were more of a look-under-the-rug kind of guy, see what other people stuck in there. How’s Marlene?”
Karp shot him a sharp look. “As usual. Why do you ask?”
Shrug. Puff. Sip. “Oh, you know. Even here in the leper colony people drift by. Such as yourself. Roland. A couple others. You know, share views, listen to the drums of the distant villages.”
“Oh, yeah? And what do the drums say?”
“They say Marlene made a bundle off her firm’s IPO. They say she started buying out the stores, riding around in a limo. They say she started hitting the bottle pretty good, and she fucked up and got some people killed.”
“You believe that?”
“I don’t know. No offense, but you know and I know your bride was never that tightly wrapped to begin with. Be honest? I never figured her for a lush, but still you got to admit she pulled a lot of weird shit back in the day.”
Karp wanted to go. This had been a stupid idea, coming here. He hadn’t seen the guy in a while, he was in the neighborhood, he dropped by. Guma had never been what you could call a confidant of his, not like V.T., but there were things you couldn’t even say to a confidant, stuff you needed a wife to talk about, but his wife was out of action just now, occupied by a hostile power. So now he had to either get up and leave, like an asshole, or start talking about Marlene, which he definitely did not want to do, not to Guma—but he could change the subject. And, of course, Guma knew the DA, knew not only where the bodies were buried, but who had stashed them there and why, and now Karp started in on it, the whole miserable thing.
“You leaked that story on Cooley? You?” was the response when Karp got to that part.
“Yeah, I did. It was that or quit and go public with it, which for some reason I wasn’t willing to do. I couldn’t in good conscience ask Clay to help any more than he had already. Keegan was in the tank. I wasn’t going to get any resources for doing an investigation. I was pissed, Goom. I figured if I lit a fire, make it impossible for them to bury it, Roland would get behind it—”
“Roland?”
“Yeah, I know he’s a cop groupie, but there’s a line. He’ll blink at a little perjury, and little taint in the evidence, but he’s hell on bent cops. It’s a point of pride with him. Was. He was no way going to stay quiet for what’s starting to look a lot like an assassination and a cover-up. Not by the cops so much, but by us. They presented us with a load of stinking fish, and we said, ‘What smell? We don’t smell anything.’ The fucking election.”
“You should’ve got Roland in on it from the beginning.”
“Yeah, I know, I know! But I had no idea he was going to get sandbagged at that press conference or ruin himself after. It was the background I didn’t count on, the racial thing. Benson, boom! Marshak, boom! Lomax, ka-boom!”
“You have a political-wile deficit, pal, is what it is. It’s a murky pool.”
“I know it. I still can’t believe I took that route.” Karp paused, remembering, reconstructing the origins of the debacle. “You know what it
was? It was Shelly Solotoff. I had lunch with him just before, and he gave me this load of horseshit about the DA, how corrupt it was, Garrahy was a fraud, I was wasting my time—you know, the usual crap you get from people like that. God knows why they feel it necessary to shit on the system. But, anyway, he went on and on, and I just decided right after that I was going to do something crazy, just to kick-start the damn thing, bring Jack to his senses—”
“Oh, Shelly Solotoff,” Guma interrupted. “He’s a piece of work. You knew I got him canned?”
“You did? I thought he quit to go private.”
“We let him resign, let’s say. This was way back there. Garrahy’s last year; Jack was heading homicide. You were doing that crazy liquor-store holdup artist, and Shelly was working the Victoria Falla case. It was his first major, and Jack had me looking over his shoulder. You remember that one?”
“Little girl, found naked, raped and murdered up in Inwood, yeah. They liked a guy for it, a bum, and then . . . didn’t it turn out he was the wrong guy?”
“Right. The bum’s name was Manuel Echiverra, a local drunk. Had a sheet on him for dickie-waving, annoying little schoolgirls. Anyway, you know the cops always grab up characters like that in a child sex case, and they looked at him pretty good because he was on the block a lot where the vic lived. He stayed in a box under the highway. Slept on a bag of rags, and when the cops tossed it, some of the rags turned out to be little Victoria’s clothes.”
“Uh-huh. It’s coming back now. You got the indictment.”
“Of course, but some stuff didn’t fit. Not a hint of violence in the record. The guy could barely walk around. He was crippled up some way, I forget how, and he had the syph, too: the guy’s brain was cheese. On the other hand, after claiming he found the clothes in a Dumpster, he made a full and free confession after a couple of days in custody, hoho. Okay, the bottom line was that the cops also looked at the vic’s stepdad hard, too, but since they had Manuel—you know how it is. They filed and forgot. It ain’t like in the movies, as you well know. Shelly was all set to nail Manuel, but wonder of wonders, there was a serious player on D, Jerry Felkes; you know Jerry? . . . Right, he’s a judge now. A terrific lawyer, and Shelly was getting spooked a little. So it comes time to hand over the Rosario material, he doesn’t hand over the incriminatory stuff on the stepdad. I mean, why cloud the issue with another guy who also attracted the attention of the cops? Reasonable doubt, shit, we don’t want any of that.”
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