Absolute rage

5

Marlenedrove him toLa Guardia Airport in her truck, with his few belongings in a nylon bag that sat on his lap. He said nothing during the trip. Several times he passed the back of his hands across his eyes and sniffled. Twice he uttered a sigh, or groan. She did not try to initiate a conversation or to comfort him. Comfort was not notable among her talents. Vengeance was, but he did not ask for that, nor did she offer. When she let him off at the US Air terminal, he turned his face and said, thank you, ma'am, you've been very kind. She said, I'm sorry for your loss, if there's anything I can do…

Then he was gone through the glass door. She brought Gog into the front seat and drove off.

What she felt most was embarrassment, tinged a little with shame. Murder was like that, the instinct of the pack to turn away from the injured one. Marlene had never sympathized with the whole yellow-ribbon shtick, the little mounds of toys and notes and candles people placed nowadays at the scenes of killings. What possible good could it do to place a teddy bear? Selfish juju, stupid and sentimental. It said, hoo, boy! God, don't let it happen to me! This family had barged into her life, unasked, with their burden of violence. Now it had claimed them and they were gone, and she felt relief. That was part of the shame, but there it was, she had to be honest. Of course, she felt sorry for them, too-she had genuinely liked Rose, and the little girl, that was unspeakable, but there were so very many unspeakable things going on around the world. Sorry was such a pathetic little emotion. And the other part, the thrill of terror that violence brings when we think of our own loved ones, well, she had that covered. No one was going to take her babies, not unless they could get past a brace of ferocious, highly trained dogs, and her well-armed self, and her ferocious, highly trained friends. Still, a little uneasiness there, the old instinct still present, half-asleep. No, not anymore. She couldn't take it. Don't get involved, tattoo it on your forehead, Ciampi!

Suddenly, she swerved across four lanes of traffic and left the highway, occasioning a chorus of horns and a grand display of flip-offs.

"What we should do is go see Butch," she informed the dog. "How would you like that, honey? See the old neighborhood?" The dog shook himself, flipping drool. Marlene steered the truck onto the westbound highway and turned the radio on to WQXR. Some kind of motet, Monteverdi. Up with the volume, music from another time of rampant murder, soothing. It still worked. She picked up her cell phone and dialed.

The twins asked Lucy why she was crying, or Giancarlo did, his brother standing silent by his side. She told them, and Giancarlo burst instantly into tears. She was like him in this, she thought, crying easily. She cried often in church, at mass; a leaf falling, a certain cast of light, a poem by Li Po or Hopkins, would all start the faucets, although on the several occasions when she had faced real and mortal danger, she had not shed a tear. Since Dan's awful phone call, she had been dripping shamefully, off and on. Immediately after the call, she had embraced him, spontaneously, their first (and clearly to be last) fleshly contact, but he stiffened and did not want to talk or be comforted, at least not by her. Her mother had whisked him away so quickly, there had been no time to… what? Have a relationship? She could see he blamed himself, for not being there, for not dying with them, and she wanted to explain to him, to make him understand that this was not a wise thing to do.

So she and Giancarlo cried together, but Zak didn't cry. His face went white and pinched-looking and he slipped away, slamming the door.

"Why?" wailed GC, the eternally unanswerable question.

"Some gangsters wanted to kill her dad," she said, "and they wanted to make sure no one could identify them. So they killed everyone in the house. Anyway, that's what Emmett thinks. Emmett was out that night, so he escaped."

"I didn't mean that."

"I know. Here, wipe your face." She handed him her bandanna, already quite damp. "You meant, why do bad things happen to nice people like Lizzie and her parents. Because only God is good, and God is far away. Evil is in charge down here."

"But we're good."

"Only by reflection of God. We see the sun shining out of a puddle, but it's not the sun. We can't be good, really, but we're obliged to try. Meanwhile, the rain falls equally on the just and the unjust."

"It still makes me sad."

"Yes, me, too. Man is born to sorrow as the sparks fly upward, but we feel better after a good weep. We're a pair of weepers, aren't we?"

"Uh-huh. We take after Mom. Dad doesn't cry much. I don't think I'll cry as much when I'm grown up, though. Zak doesn't cry either, and he doesn't like to watch it. That's why he left."

"Where did he go?"

"Probably to shoot something," answered Giancarlo equably. "That's what he does instead."

Karp listened to Marlene's news in silence, made the conventional noises, asked, "You think it was a hit?"

"The whole family? I doubt it, unless the Colombians are diversifying into coal. That poor child!"

He waited.

"I know what you're thinking. But I'm in the dog business now."

"That's good, Marlene," he observed neutrally. "You going back to the place?"

"No, I thought I'd come into town and stay over. I'm on the Van Wyck. I thought we could spend the evening together, go out, see a movie. I need distracting."

Karp hung up the phone and let the camera of his mind pan over the innumerable murder-scene photographs he had looked at during the twenty years he had been prosecuting murders. He had not, of course, viewed the ones of the Heeney murders, but he could slot in the faces well enough. They all looked like life-size dolls, the fresh ones did, instantly distinguishable, even without the visible blood and damage, from a sleeping person. You always passed them around to the jury, the defense always objected to this, and the judge always let them pass. A cheap trick; the jury wanted vengeance for the horror on the glossy eight-by-tens and the poor schmuck in the box was the closest they could get to it. But Karp always did it anyway. He had never known a murder victim personally. One "knew" lowlifes who got whacked, but that was not the same thing. He had come close from time to time, Marlene being what she was, or had been (he hoped), but it had never actually come to him.

The phone buzzed its intercom tone. The DA wanted to see him right away. Karp grabbed a pad and walked across the hall to his boss's office. Keegan was behind his desk, a burly, fleshy, florid Irishman with a still intact white mane, although there was a rumor that he weaved. He was taking a Bering corona from its metal tube as Karp walked in. This was a bad sign. It meant that something had happened to the prop cigar he always had at hand or in mouth, which never got wet or smoked, but which sometimes, in moments of anger or stress, got chomped on or flung across the room. As now, obviously.

Karp took a seat without being asked and sat erect, pad on lap, miming the loyal retainer.

"I had a call from the congressman just now," Keegan began. New York boasts a number of congressmen, being so very populous, but Karp knew which one had called.

"Oh? I hope you conveyed to him my very best regards."

"Don't be cute. What are you doing with this mutt, Bailey?"

"Prosecuting him for first-degree assault."

One of Keegan's bushy eyebrows elevated itself. "Personally?"

"No, of course not. But I'm taking a personal interest in the case."

"So I gather. My man was telling me all about it. He said you threatened to shove Bailey under the jail forever and a day unless Bailey told you a pack of lies about how the congressman paid for his last campaign."

"That's true," agreed Karp, "except for the lies part. Bailey is a smurf for Beemer Pennant, and Pennant, we know, is laundering pimp money through political action committees run by your pal. I thought it was worth a shot."

"I see. Even though I told you that there isn't remotely enough evidence of alleged laundering to justify pissing off my one political ally north of the park."

"I thought he was all for the other guy last year."

"He had to be for the other guy, but he wasn't for the other guy hard enough for him to win. And there are other elections."

Karp knotted his brow dramatically. "Okay, let's see if I got this. You don't want to annoy your guy uptown, since we don't have enough evidence to move forward, but you don't want me to put the squeeze on this mutt, which might result in us getting the evidence. So… um… how will we ever get your guy uptown?" Karp snapped his fingers. "Oh, now I understand. You think it's okay for the congressman to launder money for a pimp and a murderer, so we'll kind of give him a walk on it."

"Oh, for Christ's sake. Forget I said anything. I'll take care of it myself."

"Fine. What about Mr. Bailey?"

"I said, I'll take care of it." The DA's face was closing in on the color of fresh hamburger, and the prop cigar was directed at Karp like a weapon. Karp wondered if the DA was going to sacrifice this one so soon after breaking it out. Again he reflected upon how stupid it was, this silly duel between him and Keegan. Keegan would never change, would never quite get it. While in many respects his instincts as a DA were perfectly fine-he knew the law, knew procedure, was essentially honest-he remained capable of identifying his own political survival with the Good and the True. Casuistry was the technical term; maybe it had something to do with the twenty years Keegan had spent in Jesuit institutions. Lucy would know.

"Out of curiosity," said Karp, "what are you going to let him cop to? Community service?"

"If I want, gaddamn it." the DA said, his voice rising.

"Okay, but just so you're aware: he sliced his girlfriend's nose off. She took a hundred and eight stitches. I thought we frowned on that kind of stuff. In any case, the poor woman is attracting some press interest. A big-time plastic surgeon from Downstate is volunteering to fix her up."

A little lie there. In the old days, before he became corrupt, Karp would never have told it, nor would he ever have used the press as a shillelagh. On Keegan's face he observed the frustrated anger turn into a more calculating sort. That was one thing Jack Keegan would never do, place himself in the position of seeming soft on a heinous offense in the light of publicity; no, not for a wilderness of congressmen.

"Ah, you can do what the hell you like," Keegan snapped. "One thing though-I want to see any deal you make on this whole issue, and I want to see it before it's made. Is that clear?"

Karp rose. "Perfectly clear, boss."

Back in his office, Karp made a call to Bill Ricci, who was the ADA officially in charge of the People's case against Bailey, and instructed him to make no deals whatever with Bailey, to go for the highest penalty allowed by law, and to prepare for a trial. Then, after an uncomfortable interval of self-contempt, he dialed the number of the Post and spoke to a woman he knew who specialized in human-interest crime stories and gave her the details of the situation of Ms. Carolyn Watson, the former (he surmised) love interest of Mr. Bailey. After that, inured to perfidy, he had no trouble in calling a famous plastic surgeon for whom he had once done an enormous legal favor. This favor was called in. The man seemed relieved to be off the hook. Having thus arranged reality to comport with his recent spontaneous fiction, Karp signed out of the office and had his driver take him to the Sloan-Kettering Center at Sixty-seventh and First.

The call to Downstate, which was just across the street, had reminded him of a neglected duty. Neglected because Karp hated hospitals. He was ashamed of this, but he could not help it. The smell got to him, the disinfectant, the sweetish floor wax, the sharp tang of alcohol, and the darker odors against which the cleaner ones fought; and lost to a large extent. His mother had died in a place like this when he was fourteen; Marlene had spent considerable time in hospitals, too, and each time he had to go was like a small death.

Raymond Guma was sitting up in bed talking to Eddie Bent. Guma was a very old friend of Karp's. He had been a veteran at the DA's when Karp arrived, and although not strictly speaking a mentor, since his reputation was not the best and everything he had to teach was barely legal, Karp treasured him as a reminder of the dear old days at the DA, when guys in fedoras and three-piece suits with watch chains had fought the Mob in its power, and neither Miranda nor Escobedo had yet been heard from. Guma knew more about the Mafia than anyone else in New York, not excluding the heads of the traditional Five Families.

"Butch Karp!" exclaimed Guma when Karp walked in. "For a minute there I thought you were the priest. Got a little worried."

"You don't look like you need a priest, Guma," said Karp. "A girl maybe."

Guma brought up a hoarse laughlike noise. He actually did not look as bad as Karp had expected and feared. He looked like a shriveled, old monkey, true, but he had always looked a little like one. The cancer had made him into a 7/10 scale model of himself. He wore a blue stocking cap with a Mets emblem on it over his hairless head, which did not detract from the simian appearance at all.

"You know Eddie, Butch," said Guma.

"Sure. Long time, Eddie."

Eddie Bent nodded gravely to acknowledge it had been. Edigio Frascatti, a turtlish man of past seventy, was a retired caporegime of the Genovese. Guma had once put him away for a decent interval, but Eddie Bent had no hard feelings. It was never personal with those guys.

"We were just talking about great unsolved hits of the past," said Guma as Karp pulled up a straight chair. "You'll recall Sam Riccardi."

"Oh, yeah, Sam," said Butch. "Fat Sam Riccardi. We never found the body, and I always entertained the hope that Fat Sam slipped away to South America. I kind of fancied him in a flowered shirt and a big straw hat drinking margaritas with some senoritas. You're telling me no?"

"He's in Shea," said Eddie Bent, pointing Queens-ward with the corkscrew index finger from which he derived his sobriquet.

"But not taking in a game?"

A barely audible chuckle from the mobster, and the finger pointed downward. Meaning, in the concrete.

"Any idea who did it?" asked Karp, feigning an innocent grin. They both grinned, too, but wolfishly, showing a good deal of gold.

"It was an open contract," said Eddie Bent, a generous admission. "It's better to do it like that, you know? Sam was…" Here he looked pained and touched his chest.

"A friend?" Karp inquired.

"Yeah. Sam was good people. Not, you know, una bagascia."

"That's a cheap cunt to you, white man," Guma interjected.

"But he was skimming," said Karp.

Eddie Bent nodded sadly. "He was comfortable, you know? No fuckin' reason for it at all. He was warned. He was slapped around. Fuck, I slapped him around myself. What can you do, the guy won't listen to reason. What it was-I'll tell you what it was, and this is the sad part. Sam was a soft touch, you know? Guy walks in with a hard story, Sam liked to peel off from his roll. Which is fine, God bless him. But he was peeling off from our roll, too. He liked to be liked, Sam. Anyway, there's a guy you call in cases like this, been around for years. Everybody uses him. There's maybe a couple three guys in the business like that in the country, it's like a-what d'ya call it, like Con Ed?

"A public utility?" suggested Karp.

"That's right," said Eddie Bent, smiling. "A public utility. No fuss, no muss. The guy walked in here right now, I wouldn't fuckin' know him from Adam."

Karp did not actually believe this, but did not object. Instead he said, "Funny you should be talking about this stuff. I just talked to Marlene. She said a guy she knew, actually I knew him, too, a union guy, just got whacked the other night. We had dinner with them a little while ago. They killed the whole family: him, his wife, and their little girl, ten or so."

"Ah, shit, that's terrible!" said the mafioso. "That's fuckin' awful."

"Not a professional hit, would you say?"

"Oh, no. No fuckin' way. A pro, the target just vanishes, he's gone. Unless you're talkin' animals, Colombians, or the Chinks. They do shit like that. A union guy, you say?"

"Yeah. In West Virginia."

"Oh, well, West fuckin' Virginia, you're talkin' amateur hour there. That would definitely be a local thing. I would also say definitely it wasn't us. We're more or less out of that shit now, is what I hear."

"And the perp probably not one of those guys you were just talking about, either?"

Eddie Bent gave a contemptuous snort. "Nah, them're class guys. And never with a kid, like you was telling us, not a chance. Hey, expensive? Mamma mia! But, like they say, you get what you pay for."

Karp couldn't argue with this. Guma told a few stories about what was being done to him cost, and they all speculated about what he could've bought for the money, had Medicare been into fun stuff. A nurse came in and told them they had to leave in five minutes.

"Yeah," said Guma, "for what these last two months cost, I could have had myself whacked out, what, twice?"

"About there," Eddie Bent agreed. "Fifty grand, a hundred. It depends."

Karp asked, "What did Hoffa go for? Back in the days when you still did unions."

Eddie looked up at the ceiling and smiled. "I'll have to check my tax returns, see what I paid."

"But a guy like you were telling us about, that would be the kind of thing you'd call them in for. An open contract."

"That kind of thing. This one guy I'm thinking of, I mean, they don't give those, what the fuck, resumes, we did this one, we did that one. No advertising. But if you told me for sure he did Hoffa, I wouldn't fuckin' fall off my chair. You know what I'm saying?"

After her daily cry session, Lucy washed her face and spent the afternoon running dogs, first Malo and then Gringo, until her body was covered in sweat and dust. The sky was nacreous and seemed to press down heavily on land and sea. She took the twins swimming. Neither of them seemed affected now by what had befallen their late playmate. She tried to keep from resenting the easy amnesia of childhood. She could not shoo from her mind the image of Dan Heeney's face as he held the telephone tightly clenched in his hand.

Back at the farm, the Damicos had arrived with blasting gear, to remove the boulder that blocked the new water line. Assured by this event that the boys would be fixed and fascinated and out of trouble for at least a few hours, Lucy went into the house with the intent of retiring to her room for reading and a nap. Perhaps she might pray, although this had been dry for her recently. At one time, prayer had been able to move her into an alternative state of being, and this had taken the place of much that girls her age considered indispensable to life. The saints, however, had withdrawn. Perhaps that part of her life was closing down; perhaps she would become more like her mother. Thinking this, she shuddered slightly.

As she passed through, she noticed that there were messages on the answering machine and played them: her mother, from the City, informing her that she would be staying in town that evening, and issuing instructions for feeding children and animals. Next, several for her: Dr. McGinnis, from MIT, wondering when she would return to Boston, and trying to schedule something for next week; ditto, Drs. Sykes, Omura, Dunn, Salmonson. Lucy was popular in the research community, which held, not without reason, that somewhere between her ears was a clue to one of the major unsolved problems of science-how natural languages are acquired and processed. These demands tended to depress her. She understood that her gift came with responsibilities, but lately these had become more onerous, the demands of the scientists more irritating. Resentfully, she considered transferring to a school far from the centers of science, someplace isolated, West Virginia maybe, ha ha. In any case, she was too tired to return the calls just then, or not exactly tired, but drained. There was no call from Dan Heeney, not that she had really expected one, but that added to the draining.

She went upstairs, removed everything but a halter top and underpants, turned the fan on high, and took up Lockwood's Indo-European Philology, of which she got through two pages before sleep claimed her. From this she was awakened by a dull thump, which shook the bed and raised puffs of dust from the chalky walls. She pulled on shorts and sandals and went outside. Phil Damico was up in the backhoe, using its grab to lift thick steel-mesh mats out of the trench and deposit them neatly in the bed of their truck. She watched the operation for a while and did not object when Phil allowed Zak, delirious with joy, to sit on his lap and tweak the controls.

Later, she prepared supper, a cookout, and invited Billy Ireland to join them, thinking it was unfair to let the scent of grilling meat float around the place without so doing. It was a pleasant meal. She liked Ireland. She thought her mother a fool for flirting with him the way she did and felt no urge to do so herself, although she had to admit that she shared her mother's taste for the bad boys. After eating, they sat at the redwood table in the yard, drinking beer and watching the boys chase fireflies. Ireland told her a long and involved story about his hard life on the wrong side of the law. Meth had been his downfall. He had got hooked and had done some stickups under the influence. Lucy had spent considerable time among the addicted and the down-and-out and knew they loved to retell their former degradation. She listened companionably and was not shocked. Somewhere during this conversation she decided that she would not return to Boston, but spend the summer at the farm. She did not pursue the reasons for this, beyond telling herself that she needed a break from being a lab rat. She did not mind the linguists so much, but the neuro guys were starting to get to her. She knew that in their secret materialist hearts they were dying to dissect.

Marlene drove back to the Island the next day, full of good food and drink, having spent also a night of lust that made both her and her husband ask themselves why they did not get away together more often. Against her always upwelling feelings of discontent she counted her blessings: money, a loving husband, health, one eye, money, a body in the early stages of decrepitude-up a whole size since college-a large number of ugly, fierce dogs, three lovely mutant, peculiar kids not as ruined as they might have been by exposure to violence when young, but who knew?; an amusing and distracting business, but distracting her from what? Yes, that was sort of the problem now, wasn't it? Marlene had reached the age where she no longer thought either love or friendship would save her, that the decades of her career would not make her mark on the world. The children, of course-the children still needed her, the twins anyhow, Lucy hadn't needed her since age seven, what with her constant commerce with God and all the saints, but even the twins wouldn't need her for long. Already Zak was squirming away when she hugged him and tried to sniff his hair. Giancarlo was more patient, of course, but she could feel that he was suffering her intimacies as a favor, not because he needed them anymore. Empty-nest syndrome? Not likely, as she had never been much of a nester when it had been chock-full. So what was it, this niggling feeling, this tendency to snap, to be bored with the stuff of daily life?

"What is it, dog? Analyze me. What should I do with the pathetic tag end of my life? Do I want to run a corporation? Tried that. Private eye? Tried that. Lawyer? Yeah, but only certain kinds of cases, and even then, do I really want to get into that dusty pit with Butch? Doing good? I gave all my money to the Church. Should I also make soup and visit smelly old people, in competition with my daughter? No, thank you. So what?" She nudged the dog. "So? Give me some advice-are you my best friend or not?"

The dog raised its great head and stared at her. It said, maybe it's been too long since you felt the bones of your enemies crunch between your jaws and tasted the rich tang of their blood.

"Oh, right," she snapped, "that's what you always say."

"Really?" said Marlene when Lucy told her the changed plans. "I thought you had all kinds of stuff they wanted you to do in Boston."

Lucy made a sour face. "Yes, but I don't want to do it. I decided to play hooky. Let there be wailing and gnashing of teeth up and down the river Charles!"

Marlene registered mock surprise. "Lucy! You're being bad? Oh, come to my arms! You are my little girl after all!"

"Cut it out, Mom," Lucy said as her mother enveloped her in a theatrical hug. "So, is it all right? I mean, I could work. I could finish Malo and Gringo."

"No, don't be silly-I mean, you live here, just as much as the twins do. I'm delighted, to tell the truth. If you're here with the boys, it'll free me up to do some things. We'll have a nice time."

"We won't snap and snarl at each other, will we?"

"Of course not, darling," said Marlene in a sugary voice. "As long as you don't oppose me in any way and anticipate my every need, we'll get along fine."

"I mean seriously."

"Seriously? What can I say, baby? I love you. I realize I get on your nerves sometimes, and I accept that most of it's my fault. I'm not an easy person to get along with."

"Well, you're not boring anyway," said Lucy, not wanting just at the moment to pursue the subject of why Marlene was hard to like. "What things?"

"Excuse me?"

"The things you said me being here to watch the boys would free you up for."

"Oh, you know… things," said Marlene airily, and then Billy Ireland had to see her about something and the moment passed.

As did the next ten days, amid the welter of ordinary life. The water line was completed, hose was laid, the vegetables therefore flourished in the face of unrelenting heat, and those parts of kennel life that depend on plentiful water became easier. The bitch Magog emerged from her confinement stiff and blinking and coursed around the exercise field with her mate and with Lucy, whose special dog she had always been. The puppies, remarkable for sturdiness, curiosity, and hideousness, were everywhere underfoot. Ads were placed; people came in expensive vehicles to look them over. On these occasions, Marlene demonstrated with Gog what a 210-pound Kohler-method guard dog looks like in action. She had added a few personal fillips to the standard training, in one of which Gog knocked his agitator to the ground and, on command, ripped his balls off, in fact, a brace of handballs sewn into a leather bag and attached with Velcro to the crotch of Russell's padded overalls. This always drew gasps of amazement and a pattering of applause from the ladies attending. Magog, who was actually a bit brighter than her old man, also demonstrated the location of personal objects, her forte.

Lucy got her trainees to float on the end of a lead with hardly a tug, to sit, to lie down, to stay. With the aid of a live wire from a fence charger, she taught them what every guard dog must learn: not to eat food except from their bowls. (Zzzzzt! Howl!) Lucy did not mind doing this in the least. She was tenderhearted, but not sentimental. GC harvested early tomatoes and young, tender lettuces. Zak shot three rats and a particularly stupid crow.

Lucy happened to be in the office when the phone call that ended all this arrived. It was Dan Heeney on the line. She felt her heart unexpectedly lift when she heard his voice and cruelly fall when he asked bluntly, "Is your mom there?"

"Sure, she's around. How are you?"

"Fine. Okay, I guess. Getting along."

"Wow, that's vivid. It really gives a precise word-picture of your mental and emotional state."

"Lucy, I really have to talk to your mom." Now she heard the tension in his voice and said sure, she'd go get her, and did.

When Marlene came on the line, he did not pause for pleasantries with her, either.

"Why I'm calling, ma'am, I mean bothering you, is you said, if there was anything you could do…"

"Sure. If you call me Marlene instead of ma'am, I'm at your service. What's up?"

"Okay. Well, Emmett doesn't know I'm calling. I mean maybe this is crazy."

"What is?"

"I mean… okay, they arrested this guy for the murders?"

"Good. I'm glad. Who was it?"

"A guy named Moses Welch. He lives down in Fairless Holler, about three miles from our place. Mom used to give him odd jobs, like hauling stuff, digging the garden, like that. He's about Emmett's age, a couple of years older."

"How did they find him?"

"From his shoes. He had blood all over these yellow boots he was wearing, spatters and along the sole. He was in town and someone noticed and told the cops, and they went and picked him up. It was human blood and the right kind. When the tests came back from the state lab in Charleston, they charged him."

"And…?"

"Well, it's crazy. Moses Welch didn't kill my family. Moses Welch can hardly drive a car. He's got an IQ of about twenty. He wouldn't know which end of a gun to point."

"So how did he get their blood on his shoes?"

"They weren't his shoes. He said he found them under the bridge over the Guyandotte. Almost new shoes. He thought it was paint on them."

"And you believe him?"

"Well, yeah! The guys who really did it tossed them over the bridge and he found them."

"And the cops don't buy that?"

"Oh, hell, ma'am… I mean Marlene-we don't have any real cops here. We got J. J. Swett. He's been the sheriff for about a hundred years and he's got a total of six officers, and none of them can tell their sorry butts from a hole in the ground. Besides, all of them are in with Weames or the coal company."

"Weames is the man your father was running against."

"And he beat him, too. Emmett did an exit poll after the election; Dad won by ten points. Then Weames announces the results, and of course he said he won. Dad was going to bring DOL into the election to investigate. That's why Weames killed him. Or had it done."

"You sound pretty sure about this."

"Well, hell, I didn't need to go to damn MIT to figure that out," said Dan, his voice grating and loud over the phone. "One-he threatened Dad; two-he knew he was going to go down if there was an investigation of the election; and three-it wasn't some damn retard that did this."

"Is that what Emmett thinks?"

"Oh, yeah. Except he thinks he's going to find out who did it and kill them himself. That's why I need your help. Could you come here? My mom told me… I mean about what you used to do, and you're a lawyer, too. Moses got a lawyer, but he's a joke, the courthouse drunk. He can't defend anyone on a murder charge. We've got some money from the insurance. We could pay you…"

"Hold on a second. You want me to defend this man, this suspect in your family's murders?"

"Well, yeah, to start with. If they convict him, hell, it's all over. No one will ever look at the thing again, not in Robbens County, anyway. And then after you get him off… well, you know, find out who did it."

"Find out…?" exclaimed Marlene incredulously. "Okay, look, Dan-I appreciate that you have a problem there, but first of all, I am not licensed to practice law in West Virginia. Second-"

"You went to Delaware. My mom told me about that girl who killed her baby."

"She didn't kill her baby. And that was different. I had a local cocounsel and-"

"Well, you'd have Ernie Poole, wouldn't you?"

"Who?"

"The fella who's defending Moses now."

"The drunk? Oh, thank you very much! Second, as I was saying, in the real world, as opposed to books and movies, crimes are solved by the cops, not by private investigators. I can't just drop into a strange part of the country, ask a few pointed questions, beat up some villains, and come out with the answer. It don't work that way. A triple-murder investigation is a big, big operation."

"You have to come," cried Dan, his voice breaking. "I haven't got anybody else. Everyone around here is too scared now, or bought out by the company or Weames. And Emmett is drinking and talking big about going over to Weames or one of his people and beating the truth out of them, and he's going to get killed, too, and he's all I've got left in the world." Heavy breathing, then stifled sobs.

Marlene sighed and rolled her eyes upward. Lucy, who had not gone far, asked, "What's wrong?"

Marlene put her hand over the mouthpiece and said, "He wants me to go down there and… Okay, Dan, calm down. Get hold of yourself! Look, here's what I think you should do." She paused there. What should he do? She had no idea, except maybe not to have called, not to have had a mother who struck up a conversation on a Long Island beach with a woman who should have known better than to blather on about her colorful past, and then gotten herself killed in some godforsaken hole in West… No, that was the wrong line of thought. The question was, what should she do? Marlene felt Lucy's eyes on her.

"What I think you should do," Marlene resumed, "is get your drunk lawyer friend to hand you copies of all the paper he's got on the case, as complete a record as he can-arrest reports, evidence reports, whatever. I'll need to look at all that. Where are you guys staying now?"

"At our house… Wait, does that mean you're coming?"

"At your house?" cried Marlene. "You're living in the crime scene?"

"Uh-huh. It's our house. They took all the, you know, the murder evidence out. And we hired a couple of women to clean it up and paint and all."

"Oh, great!"

"What's wrong? Did we make a mistake?"

"Oh, no, it's not your fault-but just so you know, in the regular world, crime scenes are usually sealed for a considerable time. Sometimes even until the trial. I've known defense lawyers and prosecutors to actually tour a jury through a preserved crime scene. Well, it doesn't matter now."

"But you're coming, right?"

She blew out a long breath. "Yeah, I guess. Hang in there, kid. And try to keep your brother from doing something stupid." After a few more similar encouraging banalities and a brief logistical discussion, she hung up.

"Speaking of stupid," she said to the air.

Lucy was almost trembling with frustration. "Mah-umm! What is going on?"

Marlene explained the situation. "I want to come, too," was the response.

"Idiot child, you can't come. I couldn't go at all if you weren't here. The boys…?"

"They could go to summer camp. And you might need help down there."

"Yes, and if they held court in Estonian, you would be invaluable."

"That is really nasty."

Marlene hung her head and controlled her temper. "Yes. I'm sorry. Look, here's what's going to happen. What we have here is a case of panic. It's a delayed reaction to the shock, and God knows those poor kids have a right to be a little weird. I will go there, take a look around, calm them both down, find them a decent West Virginia lawyer, and depart. It should take a week, two tops."

"You going to take your gun?"

"No, but I am going to take a lot of Kleenex." Marlene held her hands palms up and pirouetted once. "Look, this is the new nonviolent mom, just like you always wanted. It's a mission of mercy."

"Uh-huh. Are you taking the dog?"

"Well, yeah," said Marlene, startled a little by the question. Of course she was taking Gog. She would take her shoes, her toothbrush, and a change of undies, too.

Lucy raised an eyebrow over a baleful look, then left the room.

This is ridiculous, thought Marlene-why am I trying to impress my daughter with my benevolent intentions? Feeling annoyed at herself, at the Heeneys, and at Lucy, she decided to call her husband and vent.

"Well, any comments?" she demanded after she had apprised him of the situation and her plans.

"I'm jealous," he replied. "You get to go flitting off to fight evil, and I have to stay here and be evil."

"I thought you were the good guys."

"Oh, yeah, maybe once a week. Meanwhile, 75 percent of the cases we handle involve putting black and Latino kids in jail forever for selling dope. The really evil still flourish, as you may have noticed. And my youth and beauty are fading and every day is like every other day, and it's hot as a bitch in here, and you're wandering away to the cool mountains to wipe noses. It's not fair."

"You're right. Are you going to whine any more?"

"Yes. I might even get all red and sweaty and snotty-nosed."

"Seriously, what do you think?"

Karp paused before answering, detecting one of the numerous no-win queries (Am I too fat? Does this look good on me?) that husbands are so often called upon to answer.

He said, "It seems like a charitable act as long as you don't get involved. I assume Lucy is going to watch the boys. You have no problems with that?"

"Of course not-for a couple of days? She's the most responsible creature on God's earth. They'll be prepping for seminary by the time I get back."

"Maybe I'll take some leave anyway."

"Do that. What did you mean about getting involved?"

"I meant involved. Legally, emotionally-it's not your problem, it's a complex situation in a part of the world you don't know diddly-squat about, and where you're liable to make things worse." In your inimitable fashion, Karp thought, but declined to say.

"Make things worse? Gosh, this is just fucking great. I volunteer to upset my life and go help out a couple of kids I barely know, and all the support I get from my family is a kind of insinuating suspicion. For crying out loud, don't you trust me?"

No, thought Karp. "Of course," he said.