Corruption of Blood

ONE

Nearly all Americans above a certain age can recall where they were the moment they learned of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. A much smaller number can recall where they were when they discovered who really did it.

One of these few was sitting in a dripping raincoat in a reading room on the fifth floor of the Lauinger Memorial Library at Georgetown University, in Washington D.C., on a rainy April day in the year 1977. On the wooden table before him was the sort of hinged cardboard box, the size and shape of a large book, that attorneys use to keep together all the material connected with some legal combat: a literal "case." Within it were several dozen typed pages, including a letter from a United States senator, several memoranda from the files of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a thick packet of handwritten notes on lined yellow paper, two bankbooks, a small ledger, some photographs and clippings, a tape cassette, and a reel of 8-mm home movie film. There was also a sealed olive jar full of alcohol in which floated a chunk of human flesh.

The man shivered and stood to remove his sopping raincoat. A young woman, four seats down at the long table, glanced up at him from her thesis research (American Policy in Honduras, 1922-39) and then, a moment later, gave him a longer look, for the reading she was doing was tedious and he was not an ordinary-looking man.

He was very tall, for one thing, a bit over six-feet-five. His body, in its damp and rumpled dark suit, was broad-shouldered and rangy. He walked over to a display case and seemed to stare unseeing at a selection of colonial maps, and she could see that he walked with a slight limp.

His face, profiled, was moderately beaked and high cheekboned, the eyes having a slight oriental cast, and the sallow skin of his face and the lank dark hair, soaked and plastered tight against his skull, contributed to the general impression of the East-some Tatar or gypsy blood perhaps, she thought. You got to see all kinds in the Georgetown library.

She thought idly about who he might be. Not a bureaucrat. A bureaucrat would not have been caught in the rain. All bureaucrats in Washington carried those little spring-loaded folding umbrellas. Not military either. The hair was too long, and he was not old enough to have been retained on active duty with that limp; mid-thirties, she reckoned. Too obvious for a spy, with that size. A diplomat, perhaps, maybe from the Other Side. That was romantic enough. But an Eastern diplomat would have been dry; they went everywhere in cars with dark tinted windows. A professor, then? A professor might have forgotten his umbrella…

Suddenly, he turned and stared directly into her face. She immediately dropped her eyes to her monograph and tried to get back into the reading. When she looked again, sideways, surreptitiously, he was still staring at her, unsmiling. He had peculiar eyes, long, slightly slanted, and very pale hazel, almost yellow. She felt them etching away at the side of her head. After a few uncomfortable minutes, she gathered her papers together and left. No, not a professor at all, she concluded.

She was correct. The man was a lawyer, surely the most common profession in Washington, but one that had not occurred to the young woman in her idle guessing, because he was not a Washington lawyer. He was a homicide prosecutor named Roger Karp, and he had come from the New York District Attorney's Office some seven months ago to serve as counsel to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, specifically to run the investigation of the murder of John F. Kennedy. This investigation was complete, as far as Karp was concerned. A few minutes ago he had quit. He certainly would have been fired if anyone knew what he was doing with the stuff in the box. Legally, it belonged to the United States government, and he was breaking the law by holding on to it.

Karp sat back in his chair and watched the back of the retreating graduate student. He rubbed his face vigorously, as if to massage from it the malign expression that had spooked the woman, vaguely regretting having used on a perfectly harmless citizen the tactical-nuclear stare that had wrung confessions out of desperadoes in the Tombs, back in the city.

He had been paranoid, of course, but paranoia had become his natural state. He could not remember a time when he had not been beset by people trying to screw him personally or at least trying to stop him from doing his job. It had been bad enough at the DA, and magnitudes worse since his arrival in the capital.

He opened the box and spread the contents across the table, resisting an impulse to look furtively over his shoulder. He had taken the subway (as he still called it, although everyone else used the pretentious "metro") from the Federal Center stop near his office to M Street, and then had walked to Georgetown. Karp was a devotee of public transportation and he had never acknowledged that there were wide swaths of D.C. that had no subway stops at all. The storm had broken while he was riding on the shiny, toylike train, and he had been soaked during the absurdly long walk to the university.

He picked up the stack of yellow legal pads held together by rubber bands-his notes of the last seven months-and began a familiar activity: paging through the scribbled notes and making private marks here and there, recasting the information onto fresh sheets of paper, turning a mass of associated evidence into a story that he could tell to a jury. That he would never tell this particular story to an actual jury was at this point irrelevant. He wanted to make the complex material accessible and convincing to… whomever. God, maybe. It was both an irrational and a sacred act, like washing a corpse.

He worked quickly, because the material was familiar and he had kept good notes. He marked the various documents and other evidence with large circled letters, which he then keyed to the appropriate sections of his expository text. He also wrote a brief provenance for each item. It wasn't a legally acceptable chain of evidence, but it would have to do.

As he concentrated, his tongue crept out between his lips, a boyish trait. Any number of these survived in him, a remarkable fact given the atmosphere of grotesque cynicism in which he plied his trade. His friends called him Butch, a ridiculous name for a huge, dignified, grown man, but one that, oddly enough, suited him. In any case, he refused to answer to any other, as he had since the age of four.

Karp wrote very quickly, boyishly, of course, in a large round hand, the same school penmanship he had learned in the New York City public schools, in an era when they still functioned as educational institutions. He still got his hair cut in a barbershop run by an elderly Italian in a white smock; his inability to find one of these in the razor-cut, blowdry capital of the world was evidenced by the current length of his hair, which crept below his collar for the first time in his life. Karp had skipped the sixties.

He retained most of the Boy Scout virtues. He was courteous, loyal, brave, clean, and thrifty, passing on reverent. Many of the types, on both sides of the law, with whom he dealt in the New York criminal courts, took this as evidence that he was also a sucker, a mistake few made more than once.

Karp had, in fact, the best homicide prosecution record in the recent history of the New York DA's Office. He had tried over a hundred cases, losing not one. He was arguably the best person in the country to investigate the assassination of John F. Kennedy, assuming that anyone in charge really wanted to find out what happened in Dallas. As it turned out, they did not.

Putting down his pen, he riffled through a stack of legal bond, looking for a reference. A square yellow slip of paper dropped out onto the table. Karp picked it up and studied it. It was a telephone message slip dated seven months and three days earlier. The overture to this farce.

Karp shuffled through his message slips after lunch, arranging them in order of importance. Most of them were bureaucracy at work, it being a fine habit of bureaucrats to call during lunch hour, passing the buck, but not having to actually come to any closure on the issue at hand. Karp, as the chief of the homicide bureau, got a lot of these calls.

In turn, he would spend the odd lunch hour in his own office, eating a greasy sandwich and returning the calls to vacant offices, leaving his own messages. One slip popped out at him because it had an area code in front of the number. A Bert Crane called While You Were Out. Karp pulled the phone book out of a bottom drawer and found that the code was for Philadelphia.

Oh, that Bert Crane. In the narrow world of prosecuting attorneys, Crane was something of a star-or had been. Karp seemed to recall that he had resigned as district attorney in Philadelphia some years back and was now a prominent member of the criminal bar. His reputation was based largely on a case against the assassins of an insurgent union leader, in which he had convicted not only the killers but the racketeering Teamster boss who had hired them.

He's going to offer me a job, thought Karp. This happened at least once a month, mostly from white-shoe law firms in the city who wanted a name prosecutor to handle the criminal stuff that occasionally came their way, as when the drunken heir runs the Ferrari over the old lady. Occasionally, Karp would get a serious offer from a big-time criminal lawyer, the kind who write books about their own genius. Like Lucifer with Christ, they stood him on a mountaintop and showed him the treasures of the earth. Karp had always turned them down, for reasons he could not quite articulate.

It was, after all, past time for him to leave the DA's. He had been there twelve and a half years, ever since law school; it had been his only real job. It was more or less expected that after a period of seasoning in the DA, lawyers with ambition would go private, or switch over to the federal side, or, after a little longer, become judges. He looked around his office. It was a small spare room with a frosted-glass-windowed door that gave on the bureau's outer office, where the clerks and secretaries sat. It contained a battered wooden desk, a leather chair behind the desk and two in front for visitors, and behind these a long, scratched oak table with a miscellany of chairs around it, for conferences.

These furnishings were part of the original equipment of the criminal courts building, which had been constructed in 1930. The leather of the chairs was cracked, and gushed white stuffing. To the right of the desk were two large windows looking out on a short street and the New York State office building across it. If you stood at the window and leaned out you could see the trees of a tiny park, beyond which was Chinatown. It was the office's best, or rather its only good, feature.

Karp was no sort of status hound, but he understood that the tattiness of his personal surroundings and the even worse conditions with which his staff had to contend were petty symbols of the contempt for Karp and all his works that steamed perpetually in the heart of Karp's boss, the district attorney, Sanford Bloom.

Bloom had not the guts to fire Karp outright, but neither Karp nor anyone who worked for him would ever get a new office or new furniture. The paint would rot off their walls. Their promotions would be delayed and their personnel records screwed up.

Everyone in the DA's office knew this. As a result, only the intrepid came to work for Karp in the homicide bureau, and what should have been the cream of the DA's prosecutorial staff grew milky with the years.

People didn't stay long, and those who did were mostly the hacks, or those too uncouth for private firms. Fanatics like Karp, who lived only to try cases and put asses in jail, were fewer and fewer as the years passed.

Karp didn't want to be a judge. He wanted to be twenty-four and working, as he had then, for the finest prosecutorial office in the known universe. He sighed and looked at the little yellow slip, and dialed the long-distance number.

He gave his name to the woman who answered and she put him through to Crane instantly. Crane's voice was deep and confident, and "cultured" in the style of classical music announcers on FM radio.

Crane got quickly to the point. "Joe Lerner gave me your name. As you probably know, I've been appointed chief counsel to the House Select Committee on Assassinations."

Karp didn't know. He had almost no interest in political news and restricted his newspaper reading to the crime reports and the sports pages. Nor did he watch much television. But he had a vague recollection that Congress was reopening the investigations into the murders of both Kennedy and Martin Luther King. And he knew who Joe Lerner was.

"How is Joe?" Karp asked.

"Fine. He's working for me now."

"No kidding? Doing what?"

"I'll have two assistant chief counsels. Joe is going to be running the Martin Luther King side of it. He recommended you highly."

"That's a surprise," said Karp, genuinely surprised.

"Oh?"

"Yeah, Joe and I had a little bit of a falling-out just before he split from the office. He was my rabbi when I was breaking in and I guess he assumed I'd keep following his lead."

"This was about some case?"

"No, it was a political thing. Joe thinks I lack political judgment."

A pause. "Well, he thinks you're a hell of a prosecutor, anyway. The best is what he said, actually."

"Next to you, of course. And him."

Crane had a booming laugh. "Of course! Look, maybe the best thing would be if you could run down here to Philadelphia and we could discuss it face-to-face. I'd like to meet you and I'm sure Joe would like to see you again. I know you've got a tight schedule, but could you make it, say, Thursday, day after tomorrow? We could have lunch and talk."

The man's diffidence was starting to annoy Karp. Just once, he wished one of these guys would call him up and say, "Hundred and ninety grand a year for defending scumbags, plus you kiss my ass. Yes or no?"

"And what would we be talking about, Mr. Crane?" Karp asked.

"Please-it's Bert. Well, of course, about you joining our team. Joe suggested that you might be interested in new pastures. Something with more scope for your abilities."

"You mean as Joe's assistant?"

Crane chuckled. "No, no, of course not. I want you for the Kennedy half. In charge of it."

"Oh," said Karp, and then couldn't think of a bright rejoinder.

"You're interested?"

"That's a good word," Karp admitted.

"Fine. I'll expect you in my office Thursday, eleven-thirty." Crane passed on some details about how to get to his office and then closed the conversation.

Karp made the rest of his calls and then futzed around for the remainder of the afternoon, irritated that he was unable to maintain his usual focus. His job consisted largely of supervising the work of thirty other prosecutors, which meant that he had to be passably familiar with several hundred homicide cases at once.

There was a man talking to him who suddenly stopped. Karp realized with a start that the man was waiting for a reply. He was a junior prosecutor and he had just asked Karp for some direction on a case.

Karp felt an embarrassed sweat blossom on his face.

"Sorry, I was somewhere else. Hit me with that again."

The young man said, "This is Wismer. Defendant beat his estranged wife to death with a blunt instrument. The case… the charge is murder two…"

The kid was nervous. Karp recalled that this was probably his first murder case solo, and could be his first homicide trial. It did not occur to Karp that the kid was nervous because he was presenting an issue to a demigod. Awe made Karp uncomfortable, and so he simply refused to recognize that it existed.

Collins, his name was, Karp recalled. A neat, strong-looking black kid from upstate somewhere, and an athlete, like nearly all the people Karp hired. He had a pencil mustache he kept fiddling with. From time to time he glanced at his watch.

Karp reached into his mental files. "Yeah, Wismer, guy's got a sheet as a petty thief and dealer, seen leaving the wife's apartment, picked out of a lineup. What's the problem?"

"Somebody called the cops, wouldn't give the name. A woman. Said there was a boyfriend, and he did the crime. The boyfriend's a man named Warren Hobart. Also not a taxpayer: did time on a 120.10 a couple of years ago plus the usual drug shit."

"Don't tell me-he looks just like Wismer."

Collins smiled. "Well, they're both medium-sized, skinny, medium-dark black guys. Surprise."

"So, put them in a lineup and see which one the witness likes best."

"Um, that's the problem. The cops think it's bullshit. They got the guy, Wismer. Case is cleared."

Karp's brow clouded at this, and he asked, "What's the rest of Wismer? We have any physical evidence?"

"We have a print on the murder weapon."

"Which was?"

"A juice machine."

"A what?"

"Yeah, right. It was one of those old-fashioned kind of orange-juice squeezers-all steel, weighed a ton. Must've just grabbed it there in the kitchen and whapped her a couple upside the head. Crushed in her temple bone."

"Okay, on the cops-who caught the case again?"

"Angeletti, Zone Six Homicide."

"Yeah, Vince Angeletti. Look, here's the thing: the cops got a lot to do, especially uptown there, and the last thing they want to do is to piss on their own cleared cases. But with the situation as it is right now you couldn't convict Wismer of criminal mischief, much less murder two. You got to get them to check out this character Hobart. Don't ask them, tell them. If you get any more shit from Angeletti, let me know and I'll fuck with his head. His lieutenant is a good buddy of mine. You got to remind these guys once in a while who's in charge of a criminal prosecution. When you got Hobart, do the lineup again, and make sure whoever's on D is there to see it. If your witness waffles, I think we're fucked. Or we could get lucky and find a bunch of bloody clothes in Hobart's closet. He's got that assault conviction."

"But we have Wismer's prints…"

"Come on!" Karp said impatiently. "The guy lived there. You want to put him away for twenty-five because he squeezed some orange juice last April?"

Collins looked down at the thick file folder on his lap, weeks of work gone glimmering. "But," he said despairingly, "Wismer did it."

"Yeah, I agree. He probably did do it. But probably isn't good enough. Domestics are hard to prove circumstantially anyway. The killer was intimate with the victim and they shared a space-fibers, hairs, prints don't mean much. You need an eyewitness to the crime itself, or a confession, which is how we clear ninety percent of domestics. Without that…" Karp shrugged and added, "I like it when they keep the bloody knife, or bury the stiff in the basement."

Collins was looking stunned. "So… what? He walks on this?"

"Not necessarily. If your witness gives him a good ID in the lineup with the boyfriend, or if the boyfriend has a cast-iron alibi and Wismer's loose for the time of, then you got something to work with."

"You mean plead him?"

"Offer man one, settle for man two. Ask for twelve, they'll offer six, you'll close on eight. He'll do maybe four and a half."

Collins's smile was rueful. "You've done this before."

"How can you tell?" said Karp, returning the smile. "So. I think that's how it's gonna play. On the other hand, you know how I run the office; it's your case, your call. You want a trial slot on this?"

"I think I'll pass this time," said Collins, looking relieved and at the same time faintly ashamed of being relieved. He looked at his watch again and leaped to his feet. "Jesus! I'm due in calendar court four minutes ago. Thanks a lot, sir!"

"No problem," said Karp, "and don't worry about Wismer. You stay around long enough, you'll catch him on his next wife."

Collins laughed racing out.

Sir? When the hell did they start calling him that? Karp sighed and rubbed his face. He looked with distaste at the pile of case folders waiting his review in the wire basket on his desk. They came in at an average of three a day, each one representing a New Yorker who had dealt with one of life's little problems by terminating the existence of a fellow citizen. Most of them were pathetic shards from the rubble of life in the lower depths, like Wismer.

He knew he had cheered up Collins. He did that for his staff half a dozen times a day. Collins was a pretty good guy, in fact, better than some of the newer people he'd had to take in just to keep up with the killing. Collins would probably get it after a while, get the sense of what was possible in a system essentially corrupt, a system designed to fail most of the time. A lot of them wouldn't, ever. And, of course, Collins would probably leave shortly after he knew what he was doing, and Karp would have to pump up another kid.

And the pumping, what he did for Collins and the others, drained him, which was to be expected, but the problem was, nobody was pumping him up. Zero strokes for old Butch these days. The only thing that kept him going was doing trials himself, but running a bureau with thirty lawyers in it didn't give him much time for trials, not the way he liked to do them.

He thought about his conversation with Crane. There were some strokes in that. "The best," for example. He might even have meant it. The notion of working for somebody who liked and respected him had a certain appeal. Since the death of the legendary Francis Phillip Garrahy, the district attorney who had made New York a mecca for every serious criminal prosecutor in the country, and the accession of Sanford L. Bloom, Karp had not had the pleasure. It had been eight years, all uphill.

Karp picked up the phone and punched the intercom button. Connie Trask, the bureau secretary, came on.

"Connie, what do I have Thursday?"

"Nine, you have staff with the DA, moved back from Monday. Ten-thirty, you have a meet with Sullivan at felony, his place. Lunch is open. Then, one to three, meeting of bureau chiefs on affirmative action, three to four, meeting on paperwork reduction, four to five you have marked off for grand jury. After five you're free as a bird, except it's your day to pick up the kid at day care."

"Okay, cancel the whole day. Get Roland to cover me on the grand jury, and reschedule Sullivan. The rest, get somebody to pick up any paper they hand out."

"Right. Taking a mental health day?"

"No, I'm going to Philadelphia."

"A day in Philly! Lucky you! Is this business? You want me to cut a travel voucher?"

"No, it's personal."

"What should I say if he calls. Which he will if you cut that staff meeting."

"Tell the district attorney I'm visiting our national shrines in order to renew my commitment to our precious civil liberties," said Karp. "He'll understand."

At 5:15, Karp was immersed in a case, writing notes for one of his people, when the intercom buzzed, and Connie Trask said, "I'm going. Want anything?"

"No, go ahead."

"Don't forget the kid."

"Oh, shit!" cried Karp, looking at his watch to confirm that yet again he had left his daughter waiting at the day care on Lispenard Street. He shoved some reading into an old red pasteboard folder and cleared the building in three minutes.

Six minutes after that, he was at the day care, a cheerily decorated Tribeca storefront, at Lispenard off Broadway. Karp went in and found his daughter playing with a small ocher girl (they were the last two kids in the place) and Lillian Dillard, the proprietor. Dillard, known to all as Lillie-Dillie, was an unflappable ex-hippie who wore her graying hair in a long plait that hung to her tailbone, and favored fashion statements that included tentlike smocks made of Indian bedspreads and lots of clanking silver. She had somehow, in the midst of her serious participation in the sixties, obtained a degree from NYU in early-childhood education, and she ran her operation with love and a slightly wacky efficiency. Her most valuable trait in Karp's eyes was that she allowed forgetful dads to pick up their kids a half hour after the agreed time without coming in for a load of horseshit.

Lucy Karp caught sight of her father and, as usual, shrieked, "Daddy, Daddy, Daddy," flung herself into his arms, and otherwise behaved as if he had just returned safely from four years on the Western Front. Karp did not mind this one bit.

He hugged her and inhaled that ineffable smell that rises from the skin of well-tended young children: eau de kid, the world's most expensive fragrance. He put the three-year-old down, found the lunch box and the drawing to show Mommy, said good-bye to Lillie-Dillie, and they headed off, hand in hand, north on Broadway. As usual, they stopped as Dave's for a couple of chocolate egg creams, which they sipped at the marble outside counter.

"So, how was your day?" asked Karp.

"Okay. Jimmy Murphy threw up."

"That was the high point, huh?"

"And… and… Patrick Allessandro hit me with a big block, right here." She indicated a patch of flawless skin beneath a lock of black hair. "I hate Patrick Allessandro."

"It looks all right. Does it need a kiss?"

"No. Lillie-Dillie already kissed it. Daddy! Why does that lady have purple hair?"

Karp looked over at where Lucy was pointing.

"That's actually a man with purple hair, baby. And I guess he thinks it looks pretty." Karp did not admonish his daughter that it was impolite to point, and that loudly noting the personal peculiarities of passersby in New York was a good way to get yourself killed. Time enough for that.

They finished their drinks and walked a few more blocks to the industrial loft building where they lived. Since he had started to drop off and pick up Lucy twice a week, Karp had gained a better appreciation of what a miracle it was to have superb day care halfway between where he worked and where he lived, all of it within convenient walking distance.

The downside was the five-flight climb to the loft itself. Karp had an artificial left knee, the result of a basketball accident in his sophomore year at Cal Berkeley, the agony of which he had nobly ignored for years, until it finally crapped out. He would never have chosen to live in a walk-up, and had not chosen this one either, but rather its owner, who flatly refused to live anywhere else.

The two of them clumped up the dusty stairs together, singing "A Hundred Bottles of Beer," a ritual which required also that Karp become confused about how many bottles of beer were left on the wall, with Lucy correcting him, and then arguing about it, and giggling, until Karp started tickling her on the last flight of stairs, and then, snatching her up and throwing her over his shoulder, running up the last flight, to arrive breathless and laughing at their red door.

Marlene, the wife, was not home. Karp and family lived in a single room, thirty-three feet wide and a hundred long, a former electroplating factory loft. It was divided like a movie set by plasterboard walls into suitable areas: master bedroom (a sleeping loft) with closet space beneath, a bathroom, a kitchen-and-dining area, a living room, a nursery, a gymnasium, and a study, all facing on to a long corridor that ran end to end. Karp went to the closets under the sleeping loft and changed into chinos and a black T-shirt. Lucy ran to watch "Sesame Street" on the TV in the living "room."

Karp efficiently set the table for three, opened the freezer and removed one of the many Tupperware containers waiting there, and ran hot water over it for ten minutes. A large wet reddish brick, loosened by the heat, dropped out into the pot Karp had prepared, and he placed this on a low heat. He didn't know what it was, but it would probably be good. Marlene staged a giant cookfest once a week, on Saturday, making some huge treat from scratch-lasagna, chicken cacciatore, spaghetti and meatballs, ravioli, beef stew with wine. They feasted on it fresh and then she froze the rest in boxes, and they ate from these the rest of the week-that or takeout. Karp couldn't cook and Marlene wouldn't, during the workweek.

Karp sat with his daughter, learning letters and numbers, while the loft filled with the odor of dinner. It was spaghetti and meatballs, a winner. After dinner, Karp cleared up and chivied Lucy into the bath. Marlene had saved one of the thousand-gallon black rubber electroplating tanks from the former factory, scrubbing it out and adding a heater and a filter to make a huge hot tub.

Lucy cavorted in the warm water with a variety of floating toys. Her mother had drown-proofed her at eight months, and she swam like a little eel. Karp knelt on the concrete tank stand and washed his child's hair, to some men, Karp included, life's most sensuous delight not connected to actual sex.

After that, into the yellow nightie printed with rosebuds, and some sitcom TV. At eight, Goodnight Moon was read and the duck-shaped night-light switched on. Karp sat by her bedside for half an hour, watching her fall asleep.

He fell asleep himself shortly thereafter, stretched out on the tatty red velour sofa, reading cases. He was awakened by the slam of the front door. He looked at his watch: ten-thirty, nearly.

He heard the sound of a heavy briefcase hitting the floor, then the toilet door slamming, then peeing, then a flush, then a cupboard being opened, then the cork going out of a bottle, and the clink and splashing he knew to be wine pouring out into a glass, then some mixed kitchen noises-opening and shutting of refrigerator door, dish rattling, and so on-and then his wife appeared around the hall of the living zone, with a sloppy meatball sandwich on a plate and a large tumbler full of cheap red wine.

Marlene fell into a sling chair across from the couch and kicked her shoes off, sighing.

"Don't ask," she said and took a deep swallow of wine.

Karp took a long, fond look at his wife. Even flustered and worn from a long day working one of the city's more trying jobs, she was good to see, and he always had to suppress, as he had from earliest times of their acquaintance, a spasm of disbelief that she had chosen him, of all people.

Then and now a remarkable-looking woman. Classic features? A phrase used loosely enough, but Marlene actually had them the way they liked them in fifth-century Athens: the heart-shaped face, the straight nose, the rose-petal mouth, the broad cheekbones. Her skin was a dusky bisque, on which she typically wore no makeup, nor did she need any. The sculptor who lived downstairs from them said she looked exactly like the statue of Saint Teresa by Bernini. Marlene had lived a rougher life than the saint. She had a glass eye and was missing two fingers on her left hand.

"Morgan again?" asked Karp.

"Needless to say. With his fucking wife, actually."

Morgan and his fucking wife had taken care of a series of foster children in their large Inwood home, model citizens, until a school nurse had become suspicious. What she thought was a bladder infection in the Morgans' seven-year-old turned out to be gonorrhea. All six of the Morgans' fosterlings had it as well; the youngest, age seventeen months, had the oral version.

Marlene chomped away at her sandwich, leaning over her plate, dripping fragments and talking around mouthfuls. She had been hunting Morgan for weeks now, having the kids examined by psychologists, making sure the evidence they generated was genuine and that the enraged social workers did not encourage them to stretch the truth in any way. Marlene was in charge of a small unit at the DA's specializing in sex offenders, and Morgan was the current hot case.

Morgan would admit nothing and he had a good lawyer. His wife was the key to the case.

"I hit her with recordings of the oldest kid's testimony, right. Timeesha, nine years old. The shitbag has been fucking her since she was six. No response. Din see nothin'. He's a good man. Wait'll I nail her as an accessory. Then we'll see."

Finishing her sandwich, she took a long swallow, and sighed. Then she looked up at Karp as if she had just noticed him. "Pretty speedy, huh?" she said, laughing at herself.

"I'd say so. How about a juicy one?"

"Sounds right."

She crossed over and sat on his lap and gave him a wine-and-marinara kiss. "Mmm, good! And the last straw? Ann Silber came into my office as I was just about to leave and totally collapsed. Out of control. I had to stay with her for an hour before she was fit for company."

"The new kid? What happened to her?"

"Oh, she went out with the cops on an abandoned child call. They found this six-month-old boy in a shooting gallery. Skin and bones, with maggots crawling over his eyes." She shuddered. "How's Lucy?"

"Fine. Relatively maggot-free."

"Nice to hear. How was yours?"

"The usual," said Karp. "I got an interesting call about a job."

Karp didn't expand on this, nor did Marlene pump him. Karp got lots of offers.