Falsely Accused

FIFTEEN

Isabella would come, it turned out, nervously and with many a hesitant step, out of the shelter, into the yellow car, and up to the loft. Hector, her perhaps brother, invited himself along. They sat together silently in the backseat while Lucy chattered like a tour guide, pointing out the neighborhood attractions. Hector held the girl’s hand, stroking it gently and whispering in some hissing language that Marlene could not make out from the driver’s seat. It was not Spanish.

Somewhat to Marlene’s surprise, neither of the shelter children were the least bit frightened of the dog, Sweety. Hector pulled its loose skin, and when it licked Isabella’s face, it elicited a ghostly smile and a near giggle, after which banana bread with butter and Ovaltine were served in the kitchen.

“We have big dog. Had,” said Hector, patting Sweety and surreptitiously slipping crumbs into the slobbering maw. “He was nice.”

“Oh? Where was this?” asked Marlene, feigning mere politeness. “Where you used to live?”

“Uh-huh. Our house.”

“Really? Where was your house, Hector?”

Hector turned his face away from her and looked around the loft with interest. “You got color TV?”

“Yes, we do,” said Marlene. “So, Hector-you had a big dog. Do you have a dog where you live now?”

“No, the soldiers shooted it.” The boy leaped from his chair and mimed shooting, with appropriate sound effects. “Is dead. Could we watch your TV now? A-team! A-team!” He leaped about the kitchen, spinning and kicking, playing all the parts in an action drama and humming suitable stirring background music. Before Marlene could stop him, he had snapped a clumsy karate kick at the table, which shook, bringing a glass half full of tan milk crashing to the floor. The dog jumped to its feet, snarled, and flashed teeth, never an amusing sight. Hector froze in a crouch. Isabella ducked under the table, her eyes shut, her hands covering her head. The first one to break the tableau was Lucy, who rose calmly from her chair and, tugging Marlene’s shirt to get her attention, whispered in her ear, “He doesn’t like grownups to ask him questions. It makes him sort of crazy.”

Then Lucy scooted under the table and started to coax Isabella out. After that, and after cleaning the spill, they went to the room designated “gym” and played with Karp’s rowing machine and Marlene’s boxing stuff. Marlene changed into sweats and put on speed gloves and did a punching-bag demo, which impressed Hector no end, and then he tried to bat the bag around, not doing too well. Then Marlene lowered the bag on its well slide to give Lucy a crack at it. Lucy’s expertise did not sit well with the boy, and he began slamming the body bag around, grunting and cursing under his breath. Marlene let him punch until he was sweaty and exhausted. It seemed to do him some good. He smiled and said, jerking his chin at Lucy, “I’m stronger than her.”

Throughout, Isabella watched from a corner, wide-eyed and silent as a carved saint.

Marlene left the children in Lucy’s room and went into her office to pay some bills and check her messages. After some time, she heard laughter, Lucy’s high-pitched giggle, Hector’s semi-manly chortle, and another, lighter laugh, one she hadn’t heard before. She rose from her chair quietly, went next door, and peeked in. They were all on Lucy’s bed, having a tickle and pillow fight with the stuffed animal menagerie. Lucy was making the animals talk, her usual nonsense, but clearly the height of wit to the other two. Isabella was laughing, and was utterly transformed by it, converted by an interlude of safety and nonsense from an icon depicting early death into what she really was-a child robbed of childhood.

Marlene gently closed the door. She was not as a rule sentimental about childhood, rather medieval about it in fact, un-American, which is what tends to happen to you when you run a sex-crimes unit for a while, and which accounted for much of her daughter’s social precosity. Nevertheless, for an instant the horror beat in past the shield of ordinary life, the sure knowledge of what millions of people were doing to millions of children all over the world, not just in benighted nations like the miserable homeland of her two foundlings, but doubtless within a long throw to home plate of where she now stood, millions shrieking in pain, little spirits crushed under brutal heels, the ravaging of innocence, the great unfinished project of the twentieth century. Her eye watered and she had to struggle to suppress a painful sob.

Karp walked in, whistling. She went to greet him at the door, and hung on his neck and kissed him with intensity.

“What? I did something right for a change?” he asked when they came up for air.

“No … just …”

“What? Tell me.”

“Nothing. Just … life.”

An unusually loud gale of laughter floated through the loft.

“Lucy has guests,” Marlene explained. “I think I’ll allow an overnight.”

“On a school night? Who is it? Janice?”

“No. A couple of kids from the shelter. They’re sort of refugees.”

They walked arm in arm back to the bedroom, where Karp began to change out of his court clothes.

“So, nice kids? What’re they, Lucy’s age?”

“No. They’re older. She’s about fourteen, he’s about twelve. As to nice-that’s probably not a good word. She’s practically a zombie most of the time from some kind of traumatic damage. He’s got a lot of anger, probably for a damn good reason. But playing with Lucy seems to help them, and Lucy, needless to say, is in paradise-big kid friends. Janice Chen is not in it.”

A louder gale of laughter. “Lucy is making the animals talk,” said Marlene.

“Always a crowd pleaser,” said Karp, now dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt. “Let’s check it out.”

They walked down to Lucy’s room. Karp beat a tattoo with his knuckles on the door and flung it open, crying, “What’s all this laughing? No laughing allowed!”

Lucy giggled and said, “Hi, Daddy!”

Isabella froze and crouched in the corner of the bed, her face blanching and stiff with fright.

Hector sprang from the bed and stood between Karp and Isabella, his eyes darting, looking for escape routes, or weapons.

Lucy was the first to catch on. She put a comforting arm around the boy’s waist and with her other hand stroked his arm, and told him in a soothing voice that it was only her daddy and that he wouldn’t hurt them. Then she suggested that they all help Mommy make dinner. As she walked by the stunned Karp, she held out her arms and he picked her up and kissed her. She whispered in his ear, “They hate men.”

“What the hell was that all about? When I came in to Lucy’s room?” Karp and Marlene were sitting in their living room watching Key Largo in black-and-white when he asked this question, which he had carefully avoided during dinner and the lengthy process of bedding down the three children.

“Yeah, good thing he didn’t have a knife,” said Marlene. “They probably have bad experiences around strange guys bursting into rooms. Lucy tells a garbled story they apparently told her about being attacked by soldiers and her getting raped. He’s a little confused about where all this happened, though, here or down there.”

“They’re orphans?”

“No one seems to know. Hector apparently lives on the streets and runs by the shelter every once in a while for hots and a cot.” She sighed. “A heart-breaker-number eighty-nine thousand and four. Why are you looking at me that way?”

“I’m thinking about how you got Sweety. Picking up strays.”

The mastiff, hearing his name, lifted his head and sniffed loudly, and then dropped it heavily to the oriental rug at their feet, where he was constructing a sizable lagoon of spittle.

Karp threw his arm over Marlene’s shoulder and kissed her hair. “Are you thinking of adding an orphanage to your empire of good works?”

“Empire is right,” she said. “Harry’s got six cops working moonlight for him. He’s a changed man.”

“Really? I thought the cops couldn’t stand him.”

“As a cop, no. Harry doesn’t fit the mold of the job. They don’t mind taking his money, though.”

“You’re making money?” said Karp incredulously.

“Yeah, smarty pants, we are. Mattie has money for the shelter people, some of her own, and some from foundations. And we have some celebrities-well, semi-celebrities. It turns out stalking’s a problem for them big-time. I got that model, she pays us a retainer. A rock singer. A woman on the pro-tennis tour. And Karen Wohl. I just saw her the other day.” “This is a name I should recognize?” “If you watch Lust for Life with us housewives. She plays Mary-Beth, the one with amnesia who’s going out with her brother, unbeknownst. Nice kid. Some scumbag’s sending her mash notes, I’ll kill you if I can’t have you, the usual. Anyway, Harry’ll be opening a little office next week, in a loft on Walker. Speaking of money, how was your day?”

“We did good,” said Karp after a moment’s reflection. “I had James Warneke on the stand in the morning. He’s the A.D.A. who supplied Bloom with the information about Murray and People v. Lotz.” “That’s the snails in the snatch one?” “Uh-huh. Mr. Warneke’s memory proved to be foggy under examination. It turns out that Dr. Selig never actually hinted, implied, suggested, or in any way spoke in such a way as to lead a reasonable man to believe that he thought that the deceased had inserted snails in her vagina and thus that no possible disrespect for said deceased had ever been uttered. Then there was all the bullshit about lost evidence and the incompetence of the tour doctor, the hired physician on the case. I believe I was able to show that Mr. Warneke’s training was deficient in that he did not appear to know what standard procedure for handling evidence was at a crime scene. We established beforehand that the cops are responsible for securing evidence at the crime scene, not the M.E., and further that the relevant evidence was not lost, although the poor schmuck didn’t know where it was for a time. As far as the competence issue goes, we established that Warneke had used the damn tour doctor as an expert witness in Lotz’s trial, praising his expertise to the skies.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah. Not a prepared witness. The whole thing’s a zoo. The guy reflected the excellent training he got from his boss.”

“Whose knowledge of criminal procedure is proverbial,” said Marlene. “What happens next?”

“Same as with Fuerza’s charges. Bloom made four: the Lotz things, one in People v. Mann, where Selig was also supposed to have lost evidence, People v. Ralston, where we have a young lady A.D.A. who says that Selig publicly humiliated her and refused to make himself available for testimony, and a couple, three charges in People v. Girton, which-”

“Girton? Isn’t that the one where the gay guy killed his lover and confessed? Last year, right?”

“That’s the one.”

Marlene looked puzzled. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t Murray solve that case? He was the one who redid the autopsy and showed that the guy who confessed really did it.”

“Uh-huh. Girton walked into a precinct in tears and confessed that he murdered his lover. The cops looked it up and found that the M.E.’s office had declared it a suicide and kicked the guy out. He kept coming back, and they kept giving him the boot, until the one detective they had there who wasn’t brain-damaged figured there might be something in it and called Selig. Selig had the vic dug up and re-autopsied him and sure enough, the guy’d been strangled manually. Girton went with a plea of temporary insanity. I have his lawyer scheduled to testify that if not for Dr. Selig’s skills, the case never would have been made.”

Marlene laughed. “And they’re dragging this out to demonstrate Selig’s incompetence?”

“Yeah, I know,” said Karp. “It’s like the rest of it-makes no sense. The thrashing of wounded beasts. Anyway, a week, ten days from now, I’ll have Bloom up on the stand. Then we’ll see.” He paused for a moment, then added, “Speaking of faked suicides, I need to get going on those kids who died in jail, but I’m not sure how to start. For sure I can’t involve Stupenagel.”

“Why not?” asked Marlene, although she well knew.

“Because if somebody went up and told her that the suicides were faked, she’d want to know how they knew, and that would lead to knowing that my plaintiff conducted an unofficial and probably not strictly lawful study in this very joint where we’re sitting, which would be splashed all over the press in the middle of the trial in which we’re painting him as the picture of probity, and that-” He stopped and looked at his wife’s face. “Oh, shit, Marlene! Tell me you didn’t tell her!”

“I didn’t! She asked me about the autopsy records she asked me to get, and I had to tell her something or she would’ve tried to get them some other way and found out that we already had them. She guessed the rest. Don’t look at me that way! It’s her job and she’s good at it.”

Karp groaned and threw his head back against the sofa. “She’s going to print this, right? When?”

“She’s not going to print it. She said she’d hold off if I got the whole story and gave her the exclusive.” She summarized the heated discussion she had had with Stupenagel at the hospital. Karp listened patiently until Marlene got to the reporter’s suggestion that the Mayor might be involved in the cover-up.

“Oh, horseshit! It’s Bloom.”

“I’m just saying what she said.”

“Don’t tell me you agree with her?”

“I didn’t say that. I just said it was a possibility. There was once a pretty good A.D.A. who used to say, ‘Don’t fall in love with your theory of the case.’”

It was, in fact, one of Karp’s sacred maxims. He thought for a while and then announced, “Okay, fair’s fair. I’ll check it out. So, are you going to pursue this for us?”

“Us?”

“Yeah. You’re a P.I., remember? I’ll put you on the payroll. That way, anything you find out will be protected by confidentiality of counsel.” He saw her hesitation and added vehemently, “Come on, Marlene! Otherwise it’ll be a pain in the ass-we’re working on the same case and keeping secrets from each other? It’s not like we’re in an office and I’m your boss. Besides, if you don’t do it, I’ll have to bring in somebody fresh who doesn’t know the players and has half your brains and Stupenagel will get impatient and blow us out of the water.”

After a brief but uncomfortable silence, Marlene nodded and said, “Okay, but no kibitzing! I run the investigation my way, me and Harry, and we tell you what we find.”

“No problem,” replied Karp sincerely.

“Okay. Let’s start with where we are now. Paul Jackson is the obvious suspect. I.A.D. isn’t investigating him actively because there’s supposedly a hold on Jackson coming down from the D.A.’s, because of some big joint corruption investigation, but I talked to Guma and he says Fred Spicer says there’s no investigation, which means …” She paused and stared at Karp. “What the hell does it mean?”

“It means that Bloom is generating the heaviest possible cover for Detective Jackson, and he’s doing it directly, without involving his official people. God! What in hell could the little fucker have done?”

“Him or the Mayor; Bloom could be covering something the Mayor did.”

“Yeah, yeah,” agreed Karp for form’s sake, “the Mayor too. By the way, Bloom didn’t even tell Wharton. I saw that during deposition. When I asked him what happened in May to make him want to fire Murray, he went white, and Wharton was obviously totally unprepared for the question. This is a very private party.”

Karp rose and began pacing, his face blank with thought. He mumbled to himself in time with his steps, “What did he do, what did he do?” He stopped and spun, facing Marlene. “It was May. What happened last May? About the middle of the month. That’s when it all started.”

“The gypsies died before that,” said Marlene.

“Exactly. They killed the two kids, hanged them somehow. They must have been scared shitless of a serious investigation. Everybody knew they were shaking down cabbies; the whole thing was set to blow up, and then they lucked out. They caught the D.A.-sorry, the D.A. or the Mayor-doing something that gave them a lock on any conceivable investigation-except an investigation cranked up by the one person they couldn’t control. . ”

Marlene slapped her thigh, a whipcrack sound that stopped Karp’s musings.

“Seaver!” she cried. To Karp’s puzzled stare she added, “They. You keep saying ‘they.’ I just realized who the other guy besides Jackson had to be, because Stupe got ripped off by two cops. A private party, you said: yeah, but not just Jackson and Bloom. Guma told me Bloom name-requested a cop from the Two-Five, a cop who got promoted mysteriously fast to detective second, a cop who’s working in the D.A. squad, the same D.A. squad pulling this phony investigation routine. It’s John Seaver. I’ll bet he pulled those autopsy files from the M.E. And … I’ll bet when we check, we’ll find that Seaver’s partner up at the old Two-Five was …”

“Paul Jackson,” they both said in unison, and laughed.

Karp sobered quickly. “Fine, say Seaver and Jackson are it; what does that buy us? We have no evidence, no witnesses …”

“Stupe can ID them ripping her off as a cabbie.”

“Uh-huh, a reporter’s word against two cops. No, that’s the problem, Marlene. We can’t proceed in bits and pieces like in a normal criminal case. We need the whole enchilada, with proof, or we have nothing.”

“I’ll talk to Seaver,” said Marlene. “Maybe he’s bursting with remorse.”

“Do that. I’ll call Phil DeLino in the morning and lay this out for him, maybe it’ll rattle some cages. If the Mayor’s involved in any way, Phil’ll start sniffing for a deal. If not, maybe we can get His Honor to start distancing himself from Bloom.”

After that, they talked details: who would do what and when, and who would mind the kid, the companionable bargaining of married life, in which Karp found himself remarkably able to forget that his wife’s career involved dealing with extremely nasty armed persons. Marlene made a pot of tea and they settled in to drink it, and munch on biscotti, and watch Bogart get the girl and send the bad guys to perdition.

“Do you think our life is becoming too much like a movie?” said Marlene as the final credits rolled. “Excessively romantic?”

“Having second thoughts?”

“Oh, yeah,” admitted Marlene, “and third and fourth ones. Don’t think it doesn’t cross my mind in the middle of some of the things I’ve been doing lately that I could be drafting contracts in some cozy office. Still, somebody must be living lives like they do movies about. I mean, Don Quixote was crazy, but there were actually knights, weren’t there?”

Karp gave her a look that mingled love and apprehension and then adopted a more cheerful expression, replying Bogartly, “Whatever you say, shweetheart.”

The next day Marlene dressed in civilian clothes, a plum-colored wool suit, with Ferragamo pumps and her glass eye, and went uptown to Dr. Memelstein’s office for her six-month maternity checkup, where she received something of a shock, such that on leaving she repaired to a nearby cocktail lounge, where she ordered a Jameson’s up, soda on the side, which, when it came, she decided not to drink, but sat there for a half hour, sipping the chaser.

She then called Harry Bello from a phone in the place.

“Harry, it’s me. John Seaver, D.A. squad. Did you know him when you worked there? He started in the spring of last year sometime.”

“To talk to. Why?”

“What’s he look like?” asked Marlene, ignoring the question.

“Five eight, one sixty, brown hair, brown eyes, mustache, dark complexion. A dresser. Could be some P.R. in there. Why?” More insistently.

“Harry, I’ll tell you the story later. Let’s meet for lunch at the office. Bye.”

After this, she took a cab down to the courthouse on Centre Street, where, using her old ID, she inveigled herself into the D.A. squad offices and lay in wait for John Seaver.

This is a guy in trouble, was her first thought when he walked in. He was a dresser, though. He wore a blue-gray Italian suit, with what was probably a Sulka, and the little tasseled loafers with the gold trimming that all the boys in narco like to wear. The face didn’t fit the jaunty outfit: it had gone yellowish and soft-looking, like something was rotting it from inside, and the eyes were deeply shadowed. John wasn’t getting his eight hours, Marlene concluded.

“Detective Seaver? I’m Marlene Ciampi,” she said, standing in his path before his cubicle door and holding her hand out for him to shake. Which he did, limply. “I wonder if you could spare me a minute.”

When they were seated in his space, she said, handing him a card, “I used to work here, but now I’m in private practice with Harry Bello, who used to work a couple of doors down. We’ve been retained by Bohm Landsdorff on the Selig case. You’re familiar with it?”

“Uh, not really.”

Marlene smiled charmingly. “Oh, well, neither am I, to tell the truth, but they asked me to clean up one little item, which is this investigation that the D.A. squad is apparently, supposedly, running on the medical examiner’s office. Now, I’ve already checked through official channels, Lieutenant Spicer and all, and he doesn’t know anything about it, and the defendants in this case, um, the Mayor, and the D.A., Mr. Bloom, they sure haven’t shared any information about any investigation, like they’re supposed to.” She paused.

“Excuse me,” said Seaver, “I don’t understand why you’re talking to me. If there’s no investigation-”

“Oh, yeah, but see, Detective Seaver, the thing is, even though there’s no investigation, you’ve been investigating. That’s what sort of threw us.”

“I have?” Coolly said, but Marlene saw his throat working.

“Uh-huh. You went down to the M.E.’s files and flashed your D.A. squad ID and pulled three sets of autopsy records and told them that it was part of an investigation.” Guessing, but who else could it have been?

Seaver had to clear his throat. “No, I didn’t.”

Marlene breezed on, as if he hadn’t spoken. “Yeah, and we thought it was kind of strange that it was you, considering the nature of the autopsies. The dead people, I mean. We thought, hey, if they thought there was something phony about the suicides, and if they thought that Dr. Selig had somehow screwed up in calling them suicides, why would they involve the very detective who arrested these kids? And probably interrogated them at the precinct. Or maybe it was just a funny coincidence.”

Seaver was trying to assemble a shit-eating grin on his sallow face, but the pieces kept getting lost. “I really don’t know what you’re-” he started, but Marlene continued:

“Yeah, actually, you do. And we also contacted Tom Devlin at Internal Affairs. He’s not interested in the suicides, because the M.E. said they were legit, but he was real interested in a gypsy cab shakedown racket up by the Two-Five, until he got orders from the D.A. to stop it, because it was part of a bigger investigation, a bigger investigation that does not seem to exist. Very peculiar. You wouldn’t have any perceptions you’d care to share with me on any of this, would you, Detective?”

Seaver licked his lips, which looked raw and much chewed. “No, you lost me there. Look, I don’t really see where I can help you, and I got things I have to do, so-”

“No problem,” said Marlene cheerily, “I appreciate the time, and as a matter of fact, I have stuff to do too. But, you know, I’m sure we’ll be running into one another again because, as I’m sure you know, as a professional detective, that when somebody’s put together a really fancy scam, they always leave a few threads loose-hey, we’re all human, right? You can’t think of everything. But when somebody else starts to pull those loose threads, it’s really hard to keep the whole thing from coming unraveled. Now, whoever put this together figured that Dr. Murray Selig would be the one pulling the threads because, you know, between you and me, Detective, two of those kids were murdered in custody-the suicide findings don’t bear a second look-so, the thinking was, get rid of him and you’re home free. And, really, it should have worked out fine. They had no way to figure that Selig would hire just the lawyer who had a wife whose friend was an investigative reporter investigating the mysterious deaths of a couple of gypsy cabbies, and that they would all put their heads together, and the whole thing would come unglued. By the way, pounding on Ariadne Stupenagel was a serious mistake, because it confirmed that the gypsy shakedowns were serious enough to kill somebody for. Another little pull on the tangle. In fact, I would say that in a little while all the principals in this scam are going to be running around like maniacs looking for some kind of a deal, and I would also say, speaking as an attorney now, that the very first person to come clean about the thing would get the best deal going. Wouldn’t you agree, Detective?”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Seaver. His color was bad, and he seemed not to be able to stop swallowing.

Marlene rose. “So long, Detective Seaver. Call me if you think of anything that might be useful.” She left him staring at her back.

It was a good while before he was able to begin stabbing a familiar number into his phone with shaking fingers.

“Twins?” Karp exclaimed.

“Yes, each with a little heartbeat, and didn’t I need a drink when I heard it, and wasn’t I a good girl not to have one?”

Karp shook his head and stared wonderingly at his wife. “Did you find out? I mean, girls, boys, mixed…?”

“No, Memelstein offered to do a sonogram, but I said that if God wanted us to know that stuff in advance, He would have supplied us with little glass portholes.” Marlene sat down in the bed. “My God! We’ll have three children!”

“We can afford it,” said Karp practically, sitting next to her. “Or will, if we win this case.”

“Seaver has three kids,” said Marlene musingly. “There was a picture on his desk. Three kids, no wifey. Probably a divorce. Maybe he’s got money problems. It’s probably why he went into it with Jackson, the shakedowns. The guy doesn’t seem the type; I mean, a little easy graft, but nothing heavy-not murder, anyway. He’s coming apart behind it.”

Marlene filled Karp in about her interview that morning. “Will he crack, you think?” he asked.

“Maybe. When the hounds start getting closer. Which I will endeavor to arrange. Jesus, three kids!”