Falsely Accused

NINETEEN

“Why am I not surprised?” said Karp. It was two in the morning, Monday morning. Marlene had returned from Pennsylvania an hour earlier, had stripped and plunged into a perfumed bath, ignoring Karp’s questions, and then had emerged and related the terrible events of the day, and what she and Harry Bello had made of it all.

“No, ‘surprised’ is not the word,” said Marlene. “Maybe ‘stupefied.’ Here’s a guy who has all the money in the world, he has a powerful position, he’s good-looking, personable. He could get all the sex, of any variety, that any man could possibly want. Why does he decide to rape the fourteen-year-old daughter of his maid?”

“Why not? He tried to rape the head of the Rape Bureau, didn’t he? And got away with it? And he probably would’ve gotten away with this one too if Jackson hadn’t been such a dumbass and Bloom had remembered to get his keys back.”

Marlene sighed and lay back on the pillows. At a certain level, she thought, evil becomes incomprehensible to the rational mind and exists only as agony, a bone cancer to the spirit. Tears were still leaking from her eyes at intervals, as much as she tried to push from her mind the thought of that thin white body curled into the filthy trunk of Jackson’s car. There had been no telltale marks on Isabella’s ankles. Jackson had hung her from the shower head; her own small weight had sufficed. Murdering the cabbies at the precinct, he had been forced into a horizontal technique, because the fixtures in the rotten ceilings (oh, yes, she remembered now, but she hadn’t made the connection at the time) wouldn’t have held the weight of even a skinny Central American. Jackson had probably intended to leave her dangling somewhere on the nuns’ property, another sad Latina suicide. Clearly not one to let a good idea go, Jackson, not that any of it mattered now. She would have to tell Lucy in the morning. And Hector.

“The only things that’re missing,” Karp said, “is, one, how Jackson and Seaver were brought into it in the first place, and two, how Isabella got to the shelter.”

Marlene brought her thoughts back to the present. “How do you mean?”

“Okay, the girl gets raped. The mother, the maid, finds out. She takes off, quits, gets a new place to live. Does she go to the cops? No, she’s an illegal, she wouldn’t dare. But somehow Jackson and Seaver find her, and they figure out that Bloom is the rapist. This would be last May. Jackson had murdered Ortiz in March and Valenzuela in April. Fuentes had just died too, and there was an investigation heating up. So they go to Bloom and they say, we got the girl you raped, make sure there’s no serious investigation of the guys we killed. It was manna from heaven, finding that girl. Anyway, Bloom says something like, hey, I can’t control the determination of murder, that’s the M.E.’s job and he’s an independent bastard. So they, Seaver probably, says, get rid of him, put your own guy in there. And he does. All the dates check like clockwork. Still, there’s something missing on how the two of them got on to the rape in the first place.”

“Yeah, but how she got to the shelter is easy,” said Marlene. “Bloom obviously says to them, okay, deal, but you have to get rid of the girl. She has to disappear. So Seaver takes her to the shelter and leaves her on the doorstep. That date checks too.”

“Why Seaver?”

“Because if it was Jackson, he would’ve killed her,” said Marlene. “He did kill her, may he burn in Hell forever. No, Jackson says, we got to whack the girl. Seaver says, hey, I’ll do it, you did the two spic cabbies, it’s only fair. But Seaver’s a softy; he doesn’t like rough stuff, and also he’s being a clever boy, because it gives him an edge, Bloom ever starts saying, ‘What rape was that, Detective?’ So he drops her at the shelter instead and tells Jackson and Bloom she’s buried out in the Meadowlands someplace.”

“So how did Jackson find her after all this time?” Karp asked.

“Ah, fuck if I know,” said Marlene groggily. “We haven’t quite penetrated to the bottom of this yet. We’ll find out the whole thing when they grab Seaver, though. He’ll talk.” She clicked off the bedside light, and they lay awhile in the semidarkness, in the pale moonlike glow of the street lights filtering through the blinds on the wide bedroom windows. “What’ll this do to your case?” she asked, suddenly remembering the ostensible cause of the entire cascade of revelations.

“I don’t know,” said Karp. “When the press gets hold of what happened down there, it’s going to really hit the fan. I’ll have to think about it in the morning.”

In the morning, as Karp had expected, the shooting death of an NYPD detective in a Chester motel room, the murdered illegal-immigrant child, and the involvement of a faintly notorious one-eyed feminist private detective made an irresistible story. Even the staid Times gave it page one, although below the fold. What Karp had not expected was what the Times ran above the fold, in a two-column piece on the left side: Murder Alleged in Custody Deaths of Gypsy Cabbies, read the headline, and the byline read A. A. Stupenagel. Karp devoured the piece on the subway going downtown to his office, muttering curses and imprecations in so energetic a tone that, although the car was crowded, a cautious circle opened up around him.

The core of the story was, of course, the reconsideration of the autopsy evidence; Murray Selig was identified by a ‘reliable source close to the plaintiff’ as the pathologist who had discovered foul play. (There was a brief review of the Selig civil case in a sidebar.) The article was enriched by the tale of the kickbacks from the cabbies, Seaver and Jackson being named, together with the other corruptions they had battened on. Stupenagel had made much of her personal adventures in disguise as a gypsy and of being roughed up personally by the late Jackson. Other “sources” were quoted suggesting very strongly that the two rogue cops were being protected for some reason by the D.A. himself. The D.A. himself had refused comment. The Police Department was quoted as saying that the investigation of the deaths and of the extortion racket would be reopened.

If Karp was less than pleased by the story, Judge Craig was furious. He called both counsel into his chambers before court opened that morning.

“This farrago, Mr. Karp, this mess of charges, did you have anything to do with planting them in the mind of this reporter?” asked Craig, tapping the unfolded copy of the Times on his desk with a clawed digit.

“No, sir,” said Karp honestly. “The reporter is a friend of my wife’s, who’s a private detective who’s been helping us with our case. We had Ms. Stupenagel’s assurance that this story would not be published until after the trial, or until we had the full story of why District Attorney Bloom was so anxious that my client be dismissed. I’m very distressed to see it out prematurely.”

“And do you now have what you call the full story?”

“Substantively, yes, sir. I believe I do.”

“And would you care to vouchsafe it to the court?”

Karp glanced over at Josh Gottkind, expecting some sort of objection, or even a motion for a mistrial, but Gottkind’s face was as bland as Buddha’s. Karp felt a wash of relief. Phil DeLino had done his work. The Mayor was pulling away from Bloom, as from a fouled anchor. Karp said, “Obviously, we would expect this material to form the basis of a formal criminal investigation, but in broad terms this is what we know.”

He told the story into a stony silence. When he was done, all Craig said was, “Do you intend to bring any of this material forth in my courtroom?”

“No, sir,” answered Karp. “We’ve rested our case. We think it’s sufficient.”

“Mr. Gottkind? You have a comment?” asked Craig.

“Yes, Judge. We would ask that the jury be instructed to ignore the press allegations as they bear on the dismissal.”

“Thank you,” said the judge. “If that’s all, let us repair to the courtroom and finish this wretched thing.”

It took Karp twenty minutes to demolish Dr. England with the transcripts Marlene had brought back from upstate. Karp had England read Selig’s statements verbatim, by which it was clear to all that Selig had not flippantly derided the large doses of amphetamine dispensed by Dr. Bailey, but had positively denied that he had any clinical expertise at all as to what constituted a normal dose, and mentioned, merely as an aside, that he had occasionally taken 15 mg. orally as a med student.

That concluded the case for the defense. After a brief recess, Karp rose and began his summation, which took almost four hours to deliver; the transcript ran to 256 double-spaced pages. He read over each charge in the original language of the memos, and then construed the stigma on Dr. Selig’s professional abilities that the reader was supposed to gather from that language. Reminding the jury of the charges was essential, because the stigma arising from the charges was the basis of the claim for damages. Then he demolished each charge, summoning up the testimony he had elicited and adding choice phrases from the transcripts. He omitted any mention of the growing scandal in the Twenty-fifth Precinct, or the possibility of a connection between the firing and someone wanting to cover up two murders in custody, but the networks and the papers were full of the story; the stink of it hung in the courtroom, too heavy by far for Judge Craig’s admonitions to disperse it. Closing, Karp asked for reinstatement, back pay, and damages totaling two million dollars if Selig were reinstated, and up to thirty million, depending on what lesser jobs, if any, Selig was able to get.

Gottkind asked for an adjournment so that his own summation would not be interrupted, which request Craig granted. It would take the morning and part of the afternoon of the next day, after which Karp would have a chance to rebut. That meant that Craig would charge the jury on Wednesday, which meant that the trial would probably conclude this week. Karp looked up from his note taking and regarded his client. Murray was pale, drawn, diminished, and Karp sincerely hoped that the money would make up for this, to some degree. A wretched thing, indeed.

“Stupe, goddammit, how could you!” yelled Marlene over the phone as soon as she knew who was on the line.

“Sorry, kid-like the Mob says, it’s nothing personal. No way I was going to be scooped on this one, not taking the kind of lumps I took. As soon as I knew Dalton was nosing around the Two-Five-”

“You’re still a total shit.”

“Thank you. How’s the trial going?”

“Fine, despite your best efforts,” Marlene snarled. “They’re doing summations. Butch expects a verdict Thursday or Friday.”

“Oh, so they didn’t throw it out because of my story, huh? What a bunch of fraidy-cats you all turned out to be!”

“It was only because we found out what was really going on. The Mayor wants to get the thing behind him as soon as possible, and cut any connection he has with Bloom.”

“Oh, so it was Bloom!” exclaimed Stupenagel. “What was he doing? It couldn’t have been something to do with that Guatemalan kid who got killed? By the way, what happened down there in Chester? What was it like killing Jackson?”

“Actually, Stupe, I was just about to call Jimmy Dalton and give him the whole story,” replied Marlene with the nastiest tone she could manage, and hung up.

The phone rang again immediately. Marlene let it ring ten times before she picked up.

“You weren’t serious about calling Jimmy, were you?” asked the reporter.

“I don’t know, Stupe. As long as we’re being bitches, why don’t you give me a good reason why I shouldn’t?”

Marlene was only playing with the reporter, so it was with considerable surprise that she heard Stupenagel say, “I know where Corazon Machado is.”

“How? How do you even know her name?”

“You forget my contacts in the Guat community, dearie. As soon as your girl’s surnames were on the wire, I started pumping. It was hard, because the Machados all really are witnesses to the San Francisco Nenton massacre. But I convinced the community to help because it’s obvious they need protection.”

“So where is she?”

“In Miami. At the Krome Avenue Detention Center, en route for Guatemala and certain death. I’m flying down there tomorrow to talk to her. The story I get is that someone ratted her out to la migra. Any idea who that could be?”

“Bloom, obviously. He called in some favors and got her processed on a fast track. Quasi-legally, of course, but who gives a shit about another greaser shipped off? Look, Stupe, I got to get off and call Butch. He might be able to do something.”

“Wait a minute! You were going to tell me-” Marlene hung up and redialed the federal courthouse.

In the break after Karp finished his summation, a clerk handed him a sheaf of phone messages. Most of these were from the press, which he tore up and trashed. One was from Marlene, marked urgent. One was from Bloom.

He went to a public phone and called Marlene first. He spoke with her for five minutes, and then hung up and called a number in Washington, D.C. He spoke briefly, then terminated the call, and called a number in Miami, where he did the same. Then he returned Bloom’s call. As he dialed, he noted that the number was not that of the D.A.’s centrex board, but Bloom’s private number, the one his friends called, the one that rang on the special phone on his desk.

“Let’s talk,” said Bloom when he picked up and Karp announced himself.

“We’re talking.”

“Not on the phone. Come by this evening. Say six? We’ll have some privacy.”

Karp was about to say something violent and obscene, but stopped himself. The sentiment would be better expressed face to face. Besides, he was truly impressed with Bloom’s apparently inviolable chutzpah. He said, “Okay. Six,” and hung up.

Karp walked into the D.A.’s private office at a quarter past six. The outer office was deserted; Bloom had left word with the guard below to let him up. The D.A. was sitting behind his desk, with only the desk light on. The blinds were drawn. The scene was almost parodically noir; Karp idly wondered why Bloom had arranged it that way, and decided that he could not understand it, which was also true of nearly everything else the man did. Bloom’s face was in shadows, but did not appear to be dripping sweat, nor were the eyes wild and bulging with terror. Bloom looked as he always did, prosperous and comfortable. He was in shirtsleeves, with yellow suspenders. He had a long cigar in his hand.

“Sit down,” said Bloom, gesturing to one of his leather and steel sling chairs.

“What do you want?” said Karp, not sitting.

“I want to put this all behind me,” answered Bloom.

“What is this ‘all’? That you raped a child? That to conceal that you covered up two murders by the police? That you connived to have a decent man fired to cover that up?”

Bloom waved his cigar dismissively. “First of all, I didn’t rape anyone. And besides, the kid is dead and so is the man who killed her. For all we know, Jackson was the rapist. So we can cancel all that out. The Selig thing-I want to tell you I regret that. I was misinformed by my staff.”

“You didn’t do it to cover up Jackson’s murders, you’re saying.”

“Of course not!”

Karp was interested to note that Bloom’s famous imitation of moral outrage remained intact. “So why are we here?” Karp inquired.

Bloom essayed a smile, not a pleasant expression to see. “Why not? After the battle’s over, we’re all colleagues, right? Members of the bar? I won’t pretend that I like you personally, and I know you as sure as hell don’t like me, but we’ve always been able to work together. I’m thinking chief assistant district attorney. I’ll handle the politics, you run the office.”

“You’re going to jail,” said Karp.

A short barking laugh from Bloom. “Don’t be stupid! There’s not a shred of-”

Karp kept talking, to himself it seemed, but out loud. “You’re trying to distract me with this moronic offer. From what? There are only two people who can put you away. One is John Seaver, but I sense that you’ve already gotten to him. He’s a flexible man, Seaver. Why should he piss off the D.A., especially when there’s no confirmation of any accessory to murder charges and he can lay it all off on his dead partner? The other is Corazon Machado. Who knows what kind of physical evidence she kept? That’s probably part of what Jackson was looking for when he tossed her place, that and information about where the girl was. Well, he found that, all right, but he missed your apartment keys. Maybe he missed something else. So you got some of your friends in immigration to frog-march her out of the country. Even then it’ll take some time to process her, and you don’t want either me or Marlene to spend time looking for her, so you come up with this … scheme, offering me this job.”

Here he paused and rubbed his chin and gave Bloom a look of the type we bestow on the two-headed calf or the baby with scales and fins floating in murky fluids at the carnival side show. “I can’t figure you out,” Karp said, genuine puzzlement in his voice. “You really think this is just another peccadillo you can wiggle away from, and that I’ll sort of be party to it. Even though you tried to rape my wife.”

“I didn’t-”

“Shut the fuck up! And in a way, I don’t blame you. I’ve been covering your ass for years. Your corruption. Your incompetence. Your actual crimes. I guess I thought I was doing it for the office. I’m really a sort of good German, in a way, and you saw that, and used it. But now, now you’re going down. See, what I did, a couple of hours ago, is that I called another corrupt fuck I know, who happens to be a U.S. congressman who owes me a big one, and I got him to spring Corazon Machado, pending a full investigation of her case, and I called a P.I. I know down there to pick her up and take care of her. She’s flying back here in the company of a newspaper reporter who speaks fluent Spanish. I bet they’ll have a lot to talk about on the way up. The papers’ll be a real interesting read tomorrow morning. I can’t wait.”

Bloom said nothing. His face had started to twitch around the eyes.

Karp took a deep breath and looked around the office. He said, “They’ll have to fumigate this place with a flame thrower before they let the next guy in here,” and then he turned and walked out.

“What did he say then?” asked Marlene.

“He didn’t say anything,” said Karp. He shifted in bed, trying to ease the pain in his knee, the result of a day spent mostly on his feet. “I just walked out. To tell you the truth, I was getting nauseated just being in the same room with the bastard. I mean really, physically. My stomach was heaving, I wanted to hit him so bad. The worst thing was thinking it was partly my fault that he’s still in there. I should have knocked him out that first time, years ago.”

“Oh, wah! You’re not a plaster saint. I want a divorce.”

“Oh, yeah? You think you can do better?”

“Of course. They’re lining up out there for one-eyed, eight-fingered babes with three kids. They’ll have to use velvet ropes to control the crowds.”

Karp laughed, swooped his head under the covers, and lifted her nightgown. He nuzzled her swelling belly. “How’re Heckle and Jeckle doing in there?” he asked, and things might have developed in an interesting manner had not the sound of knocking, light and tentative, sounded on their bedroom door. Karp groaned. “Oh, Christ, not again!”

“What is it, honey?” Marlene called. Karp reluctantly emerged from the steamy cavern. Lucy entered, looking forlorn. “I’m too sad to sleep,” she said in a weak voice.

Marlene patted the bed and Lucy climbed up next to her. Nothing had been kept from Lucy about the events in Chester. It was Marlene’s firm belief that there was no enormity that would scar a child’s mind worse than a secret that could not be discussed in the family. Snuggling in next to her mother, Lucy asked, “Is Isabella in Heaven yet?”

“Yes,” said Marlene confidently. “She probably has one of the good seats too.”

“Is she an angel too?”

“Arguably,” said Marlene. Lucy sniffled and began to weep silent tears. Marlene hugged her closer and said, “Look, I know you miss her, Luce, and I miss her too, but she’s gone. You have to cry and remember her, which you did, and then it’s time to stop crying and just remember.”

“Hector isn’t crying. He just stares at the ceiling. He says he’s going to kill the soldiers.”

“It wasn’t soldiers who killed Isabella, Lucy. It was a policeman.”

“And you and Uncle Harry killed him. I’m glad he’s dead and he has to go to Hell.”

“Well, you may be glad, but I’m not. It was horrible. I threw up.”

“You did? Because of the blood and goosh?”

“Partly that, but it’s a horrible, horrible thing to kill a human being. It’s not like on TV. You only do it when it’s necessary to stop something worse from happening. The bad policeman would have killed Uncle Harry and me, so …”

“It wouldn’t have bothered me,” said Lucy boldly, and then started to weep again. “Why did he have to kill her?” she wailed. “I thought police were good guys.”

“Most of them are, baby.”

“Like that one who got me ice cream when you were seeing the scumbag?”

“Yes, Clancy.”

“Uh-huh. I was wearing my scarf from Isabella with the flowers, and he said it was pretty, and he asked me all about Isabella, how old she was and where she lived. I told him she lived in the shelter but she sleeped over my house a lot. He was nice.”

“Yes, he was.” Marlene bent over and kissed her daughter once on each eye, a magic kiss to stop the tears, and then got out of bed and lifted her up. She carried the child down to her own bedroom and tucked her in, and then checked next door, where Hector was sleeping on a cot in the playroom. He lay still, but Marlene was sure he was not asleep.

She was halfway back to bed when it hit her, so hard a thought that her stomach churned and she grew light-headed. Walking unsteadily, she went to her office and called information. She dialed the number she got and managed to pry from a sleepy night nurse the information she wanted. Then she rummaged through the slips of paper on her desk until she found the right one, and dialed again. Her fingers were trembling.

After ten rings a man’s voice answered, rough with sleep.

“Yeah?”

“Oh, Clancy,” Marlene said. “Oh, Clancy, you piece of work, it was you, all the time, you, and all of us just dancing around the helpful Sergeant Clancy.”

“Who the hell is this?”

“It’s me, Marlene Ciampi, Sergeant. Joe. You remember, the one with the charming daughter, with the scarf. You recognized the scarf, because you’d seen it before. It was you who fed Isabella to those two monsters, wasn’t it? One of your guys must have picked her up on the street after Bloom raped her and brought her to you, clutching that scarf, the only thing she had from her miserable country, and you must have thought that she came from heaven because your lummox Jackson had just killed another little spic and you knew that one you could explain away, but two was a bit too much, even for a fine Irish hero like yourself. And it was your racket all along, wasn’t it? God, how could I have been so stupid! When was there ever a racket in a precinct where the night-shift patrol sergeant wasn’t up to his neck? It must have been a shock to know she was still in circulation, and not only in circulation, but real close to someone who was investigating the scam you set up to cover the murders your boy pulled off. Oh, you shouldn’t have worried, Clancy! I never would’ve thought of you. And what threw me off, you know, was that you weren’t a gambler like Seaver or a sadist like Jackson. You were a fine family man with a great misfortune, and you stuck your great misfortune in the Southampton Institute, which I just found out charges every year a little over nine-tenths of your total annual salary. Good thing you didn’t have to live on your salary, Clancy, you bastard! Does your nice wife know, Clancy? That you bought her relief from her little idiot with blood money? Because you murdered her, Clancy. You murdered Isabella Machado, just as sure as if you used your own hands. And you’re going down for it, Clancy. I.A.D.’s on Seaver already, and he’ll spill his guts. Oh, yeah, you’re going down, you scumbag!”

Clancy had been utterly silent during this. Now he spoke. “Seaver’s dead. He ate his gun at eleven-fourteen this evening.” The voice was calm and unruffled, the voice of a man who had done what was necessary to protect his family. Marlene could think of nothing to say. There was nothing to say. He was going to get away with it. “Don’t call here again,” he continued. “If you call here again, I’ll have you charged with harassment.” The line went dead.

Marlene stood up. Her chest was tight and a sheen of sweat covered her face and body. She turned around. Lucy was standing there, staring at her, her face unreadable. After a few moments the child let loose a great sigh, turned, and walked off to bed.