Falsely Accused

FOUR

Phil DeLino was a big, open-faced man with dark, humorous eyes. He wore a nice gray double-breasted three-piece suit that was working hard to cover the weight he had put on since he played tight end for Fordham. His greeting to Karp in his office was warm and seemed sincere.

The small office in City Hall was suitably elegant. It had a window, the appointments were made of wood or leather, and there was a genuine oil painting of a minor nineteenth-century civic luminary on the wall, looking smug and well grafted. Seated, they passed the time in obligatory catching up and discussing the prospects of the various New York teams.

When this pleasant diversion had gone on for ten minutes or so, there was a pause, and DeLino picked up a blue-bound legal notice from his desk and tapped it a few times. “This thing here, Butch. This is a problem.”

“Yes. You mentioned that the Mayor was not pleased.”

“You could say that. He called Josh Gottkind as soon as he found out, and I think they had to replace the phone wires; they were fried. Our corporation counsel is not in favor this fine day.”

“You mean it took His Honor by surprise? What did he think Selig would do? Say, ‘Gee, thanks for the job, sorry it didn’t work out’? It’s hard to believe Gottkind didn’t discuss the issue with him before he decided to go ahead.”

DeLino paused judiciously and smiled before saying, “I think ‘before’ is the operative word. Those of us who serve His Honor rarely get a chance to advise him before he makes his mind up. Our job, and he’s made the point more than once, is to keep him out of trouble when he does what he’s decided to do anyway.”

And take the crap he hands out when it goes sour, thought Karp. He said, “So he wishes this had never happened?”

“Profoundly. And he intends to be forthcoming and cooperative in every way, so that as little of the poo that’s going to be flying around sticks to him.”

“Dr. Fuerza’s been nominated to carry the can, in other words,” observed Karp. “But there’s going to be a lot to carry. The Mayor will not look great under the best of circumstances.”

DeLino nodded and considered this for a long moment. Then he asked, “I guess there’s no way to solve this little problem in a civilized way?”

“Well, yeah, actually there is. If Dr. Selig could be reinstated, with back pay, and with a public acknowledgment that the accusations about his professional and personal behavior were entirely groundless and the result of misinformation purposely conveyed to the Mayor by the parties that wrote the two memos …”

But DeLino was already smiling and shaking his head. “Yeah, right,” he said, “Gottkind would really go for that; we fire somebody for cause and as soon as we get threatened by a lawsuit, we announce that the cause was trumped-up? The City would look like an asshole.”

“The Mayor would, you mean.”

“Is there a difference? Okay, granted, we may have to go to the mat on this one, but”-he glanced again at the legal form on his desk, and at a sheet of paper that seemed to have notes scribbled on it-“do you really think you have a Fourteenth Amendment liberty claim here?”

“Yeah, we do,” said Karp.

“Really? What the hell’s the theory? It sure as shit isn’t a Bishop case.”

Karp grinned and replied, “You know, I still like the Celtics for the NBA title this year. They picked up Parrish and McHale, and if Bird is hot again …”

DeLino chuckled. “Okay, okay, I wasn’t trying to pump you. This is off the record anyway, just a couple of old jocks talking about sports and the grandeur of the law.”

Karp saw DeLino glance at him expectantly. Karp was familiar with the look of men wanting to pass him information, if he would only ask in the right way. He said, “Off the record, huh? Okay, Phil, off the record, I would like to know why.”

“Why what?”

“Why this happened,” said Karp. “Why the Mayor bought himself a bunch of problems by firing a man well known as one of the best forensic scientists in the country. It doesn’t make sense.”

“It does if you think the C.M.E’s slot is more than forensics. And the Mayor never impugned his forensic skills. He just said Selig was administratively sloppy and had an attitude problem. He was arrogant and-”

“Oh, horseshit, Phil! Arrogant? Well, compared to most of the people working for the Mayor, including Dr. Fuerza, he at least had something to be arrogant about. And since when is administrative competence a qualification for a job in New York?”

DeLino laughed. Karp continued, “No, really! And don’t give me the party line-you know there was political clout behind this, and Fuerza doesn’t have much to speak of, which leaves one person.”

The other man dropped his eyes and pursed his lips and then looked up again and said, “He’s been after the Mayor for months on this. We ran on a strong anti-crime platform, as you know, and this year we’re running on it again. We can’t have anyone big in criminal justice saying the Mayor is soft on crime or not supporting the work of the district attorney. Bloom claimed Selig was impossible to work with. He was inefficient, he lost evidence, his people were screwing up cases. The argument was made that we might get into a situation where a big, high-profile case went down the tubes because of an M.E. problem and that all of this would come out: the Mayor knew about it and didn’t act on time, and now a dread killer is back on the street, and so on, and so on. We were assured that the guy was, I mean-whatever his slice and dice skills in the morgue-he was a bum as a leader, and when the stuff we had on him was presented, he’d just slink away. I mean, it wouldn’t be the first time that a technician got promoted over his head and fucked up. So Fuerza got the job of digging up supporting stuff that’d make him look bad, and wrote his memo, and Bloom wrote his memo, and so here we are.”

DeLino looked at his visitor, examining his reaction to this information. He saw Karp staring blankly at the window, his cheeks sucked in. It was a characteristic pose that he recalled from his days with the D.A., one that signaled intense thought. It lasted for a long fifteen seconds. Then Karp asked abruptly, “When did it start exactly? How long has Bloom been nudging the Mayor to can Selig?”

“Gosh, I couldn’t say,” said DeLino, surprised. “Why does it matter?”

“Can you find out?”

The man laughed nervously. “Uh, yeah, I could probably find out, but-”

“But why should you help me?” Karp asked rhetorically. “Well, look at it this way, Phil. I believe my case is good enough to rip the City a new asshole, and you know I’m a pretty good judge of cases. I think you guys screwed up royally, on Mr. Bloom’s bad advice. Now, the Mayor doesn’t want to carry the can for it, and we agree that poor little Angie Fuerza can’t carry the whole can, so who’s left? And I’m sure you’ll want the Mayor’s experience on the witness stand at the trial-because, believe me, we’re going to trial on this one-to be as dignified and unstressful as possible. In fact, I think you’d like to be able to go in there right now and tell His Honor that the deal is done in that department, wouldn’t you?”

DeLino smiled the rueful smile of a fixer who has himself been fixed. “I take your point,” he said. “Let me get back to you on that.”

“Is it Sunday already?” asked Lucy Karp when she awakened to find her mother wearing a dark suit, a blood-colored silk blouse and stockings.

“No, baby,” Marlene laughed, “it’s a school day. I just have some business downtown. I put your clothes out for you.”

Lucy glanced over at the top of her bureau, where a red jumper, white shirt, and yellow- and red-striped tights were neatly arranged. She grimaced but said nothing. Ten minutes later, she appeared in the kitchen and sat down at the table. Marlene noted that instead of the pretty tights Lucy was wearing her worn jeans under the jumper, but decided to say nothing; healthful eggs, toast, and milk were going down without a murmur, and she did not have time for a major battle this morning. With a tiny pang she realized that a certain perfection in child rearing was going to go by the boards as she started working again, and hoped Lucy’s psychiatrist would explain this to her twenty years hence.

Keys, raincoat, slicker for Lucy were gathered up and the dog was marshaled, panting and dripping slime at the door. A grocery bag was found for Lucy’s project, a shoebox diorama depicting the purchase of Manhattan Island from the Indians by Peter Minuet. She had used one of her prized possessions, a plastic wedding-cake groom, as a stand-in for the canny Dutchman, who stood proudly extending a mass of cut-up Monopoly money to several glum paper Manahattas, while in the background ranged the forest primeval, populated by plastic animals: an armadillo, a polar bear, and a lavender warthog. Marlene was surprised to see that Lucy had done a second shoebox, in which Minuet was a tiny pink baby doll wrapped in cloth and glue, with a beard made of a swatch of Lucy’s own black hair, and the Indians were red modeling clay.

“You did two projects?”

“Yes.”

“What, for extra credit?”

“No. I made one for Bobby Crandall.”

“Why couldn’t he make one himself?”

Lucy shrugged. “He said he couldn’t. He wanted one like mine.”

“Urn, darling, I don’t think you’re supposed to do other people’s work for them. I think it’s against the rules, you know?”

At which point Lucy shrugged again and uttered a stream of twittering Chinese.

Marlene’s mouth opened in stupefaction. “What the f-, I mean, what was that, dear? Chinese?”

Lucy looked away, as if bored by her accomplishment. “Janice Chen says it.”

“But what does it mean?” asked Marlene.

An impatient grimace. “It doesn’t mean something, Mommy, it’s just a saying.”

Marlene experienced another of the peculiar feelings she was having about Lucy in recent months, compounded oddly of loss, fear, and pride. Her daughter spoke Chinese! Her daughter had a secret life at seven years! The birth closeness was fading, was almost gone; what would replace it was at the moment still in flux.

They left the house early to pick up Miranda Lanin on Duane Street. Carrie Lanin was waiting by the door with her daughter. “Any contact?” Marlene asked.

“The usual. He called a couple of times last night.”

“You have the tapes?” Carrie nodded and handed Marlene a cassette. “And this.” She gave Marlene a box containing a cheerleader doll and a note in the same precise writing. It said, “My Love is strong and True. I’d do anything to be with You. Love always.”

“Unsigned, as usual. Did you see him?”

“No, this was left on the seat of my car. I almost fainted.”

“Was the car locked?”

“Of course!”

“Okay, that’s good. A little B and E never fails to impress. You know what to do?”

“Yeah, go to work and come home.”

“And stay there. Things may start to heat up.”

Marlene gathered the two girls and drove them to P.S. 1. She looked for Pruitt’s blue Dodge but didn’t see it. Maybe stalkers took a day off; she hoped he hadn’t picked this one.

Two hours later, Marlene was waiting impatiently at a scarred metal desk in the nest of cubicles used by the D.A. squad, a group of detectives that did special tasks for the district attorney’s office. In the main these involved corruption investigations, but squad members also took on the jobs that in private practice fell to private detectives: finding and bringing in witnesses, looking things up, and other official minutiae. Marlene was waiting for one detective in particular, who was engaged, she hoped, in none of these official duties.

She saw him come in the door, a compact man in a rumpled gray suit and the traditional gum-soled black shoes. Harry Bello was in his early fifties but looked older. He had a face like a fallen leaf in a gutter, brownish gray and drooping and crumpled with lines. If he stood on a corner, or in a doorway, or sat on a park bench, not one in a thousand would see him, or would notice him only as part of the furniture of the street, a trash basket, a standpipe, which was one reason why he was a great detective.

He had been known for it in Brooklyn for twenty years until his wife had gotten sick and Bello started to drink heavily, and then his partner was killed in a shoot-out, while Harry sat hung-over in the car, and then his wife died and he drank more heavily, and during a long bout of this he gunned down a kid who might or might not have been the kid who killed his partner. The cops had covered that up and shifted Bello to a quiet precinct to log hours until retirement.

From this living tomb Marlene had redeemed him, if not to full life, then to a useful sort of walking death. Bello no longer drank, but neither was he working a spiritual program at A.A., unless you figured that his relationship with Marlene and her daughter filled that purpose. His eyes were like cinders, burnt and dangerous.

Bello approached his desk, acknowledged Marlene’s presence with a nod, and handed her a slip of paper. She looked at it and, rolling a legal form into the old Royal on the desk, typed for a few minutes.

“You have any trouble?” she asked.

“No. The guy followed her cab until she went into the building. He parked the car and followed her in there too, and a security guard booted him out. He got a ticket.”

“Good. Then?”

“He drove around for a while and then went home. I came back here.”

Marlene looked at the address on her form, which was an application for a protective order. “Avenue D? I thought the guy had money. It must be a dump, in that neighborhood, right?”

“The pipeline,” said Harry.

Marlene stared at him. She was by now used to Bello’s habit of announcing a conclusion without any intervening explanation, the result of having worked the street for many years with a partner to whom he was exceptionally well tuned. Although she often found, to her surprise, that she could follow him in these logical leaps, this particular one left her baffled.

“What pipeline, Harry? What are you talking about?”

“Alaska. He worked there a couple, three years. Made about fifty K a year, didn’t spend a dime. No sheet. It was in the car.”

Marlene rapidly translated this into human speech. Harry had broken into Pruitt’s car and found some papers, probably old pay stubs, that had enabled him to make some phone calls. Harry was inarticulate by choice, not through defect; he could charm and bully people as the need arose with the best of them, and he had obviously wormed his information out of some clerk in Prudhoe Bay. And he’d run Pruitt’s name through the NIC computer and come up blank. Marlene imagined Pruitt wrestling giant pipes under the midnight sun, lost in a fantasy of reclaimed nonexistent love; she thought such a man unlikely to be seriously dismayed by a protective order. Nevertheless, that was the next step.

She collected her papers and stood up. “Thanks, Harry,” she said and kissed him on the cheek. “Let me go and file this, and we’ll see what happens.”

What happened was that a few days later Marlene received from a bored and harried judge a protection order forbidding Robert Pruitt from approaching or attempting to communicate with Carrie Lanin on pain of contempt of court, which event was duly celebrated by Marlene and her client with a delightful dinner at Rocco’s on Thompson Street; after which, Marlene, who had crashed heavily into sodden sleep, was awakened at a quarter to three in the morning by the phone ringing in her ear.

It was Carrie Lanin, crying and screaming by turns.

“Calm down, Carrie, I can’t understand what you’re saying,” Marlene said.

“What is it? Who’s that?” asked Karp, startled out of his own deep sleep.

“Carrie Lanin,” answered Marlene shortly, and then said into the phone, “Carrie, calm down and tell me what happened.”

“Christ, doesn’t she own a clock? It’s three in the morning,” Karp mumbled, and put a pillow over his head.

“He was here!” Lanin sobbed. “You said it would be over, but he came here! He sat on my bed and talked to me and stroked my fucking hair!”

Marlene felt her stomach roil, and a sour bubble of used food rose into her throat. She was out of practice, but she remembered how to suppress the empathy and get the facts from the vic. She sharpened her voice to penetrate the blubbering. “Did he assault you? Were you raped?”

“No! No, he just stroked me. He said … he said he was saving it for when we got married! Oh, God, make this stop! I want my life back!”

More crying. Marlene relaxed slightly. If there wasn’t a rape, there was no immediate need to get Carrie Lanin picked up and packed off to a hospital rape center. “Carrie, listen to me. He broke in to your home at night. He touched you. That’s burglary and assault right there; plus he violated the protection order. We’ve got him. He’s going to jail.”

Lanin didn’t seem to hear. “He kept saying you were keeping us apart, like in high school. ‘Your snotty friends.’ He said, ‘You shouldn’t have done it, darling. Going to court. We can solve all our problems ourselves. You don’t need that bitch lawyer.’ I was paralyzed. I didn’t want to scream. I didn’t want to wake Miranda. God, can you imagine? What she’d think? The effect…? So I just let him talk. I played along with his crazy rap. I thought he might get violent.”

“You probably did the right thing,” said Marlene. “Look, from one point of view this is the best thing that could’ve happened-”

“Oh, right! It would even’ve been better if he’d raped me and carved his initials on my forehead. Then he would’ve gone away for a long time- maybe. What do really bad rapists get nowadays? Ten years?”

“About that. It depends,” Marlene replied, uncomfortable in the knowledge that, to judge from the statutory sentence ranges, the state of New York considered selling marijuana in bulk a lot more serious than first-degree rape. A really horrendous, violent rapist might draw six to eighteen, and be paroled right after the minimum, and people who raped women they knew, especially women of the same age and race and class, usually got a lot less. Or walked. But Marlene kept all that to herself, instead pumping assurances over the wire for all she was worth, ignoring for the moment the possibility that she would not be able to deliver on them. After forty minutes of this, she had calmed Lanin down enough to end the conversation in good conscience, with a promise that she’d see her in the morning.

Which was not that far off. Marlene could not fall back asleep and stared resentfully at Karp, who could and had, pillow still in place over his head. She rose, showered, dressed, made coffee, and drank it in her little office at the far end of the loft, watching dawn come up Crosby Street and listening to the late-night sounds of the City, the sirens, the occasional roar of a car, slowly build to the crescendo of a working day.

She was slow and stupid as she pressed through the morning chores. Karp was up and out early, with only a perfunctory word and a hurried kiss. He obviously had a full plate with the Selig case, and Marlene was reluctant to worry him with Carrie Lanin. And if she allowed herself to think about it, she was worried, because if ever she’d seen a ticking human grenade, it was Pruitt, and she’d seen a lot of them in her work, of the DAD KILLS MOM, TOTS, SELF variety, and she wanted to share the problem with Karp. That’s what marriage was for, in her opinion, or would be, were the marriage not between a basically cryptic and surreptitious woman and a man for whom the expression straight arrow might have been especially devised.

As she drove to the Lanin residence, she was therefore running through her head one of those fictitious conversations that are the chief barrier to actual communication between people married to each other. She told Karp what was going on, about her fears for Lanin, about her general frustration with a system that seemed incapable of protecting women from the lethal fantasies of certain men, about her fears of being sucked into a cycle of violence, about her inexplicable fascination with deadly risk. In her head, Karp answered logically, maddeningly obtuse: you know the law; some get away with it, some don’t; work inside the system; we’ve got our own lives to worry about; do what you can, but don’t go crazy. But what if doing what you can made you crazy? To that the mentalized Karp had no answer. Nor did Marlene.

Carrie Lanin was drunk when Marlene came to her door; it was clear that she hadn’t slept either, and she hadn’t spent the small hours calmly watching the dawn break. She looked at Marlene with a hard eye, her face saying, you should have saved me from this. And there was nothing Marlene could reply to this, except hollow, comforting banalities, as we do to a friend’s news of cancer.

Marlene dropped the kids off and went back to her loft to work the phone. The first person she called was Luisa Beckett, once something of a protégée of Marlene’s, and now in charge of sex crimes at the New York D.A.

“What can I do for you, Marlene?” Beckett asked without preamble as soon as Marlene had announced herself. The two women had become estranged after Marlene’s sudden unexplained exit from her job, a move that had left Beckett with an impossible burden and a radical, and equally unexplained, dimunition of support from the district attorney. Beckett was a true believer; Marlene, having bugged out to wealth and indolence, was clearly not, and her tone indicated that she had little time for chat with well-off housewives.

“I did some work recently for a friend of mine,” began Marlene, and tersely laid out the facts of the case. As she feared, Beckett was not impressed.

“You say she wasn’t raped.”

“No, but the guy broke into her car and then her loft and assaulted her-”

“Assaulted her by … what was it? Stroking her hair?”

“Luisa, I realize it sounds odd, and low-priority, but believe me, I’ve met this guy, and he’s a disaster waiting to happen. Maybe for once we can do something besides shampoo the carpet after the guy’s done what these guys always do.”

There was a pause on the line, and Marlene imagined what was going through Beckett’s head, which was not hard because it was probably what would’ve gone through Marlene’s head a couple of years ago when she had been sitting where Beckett was now and someone had called with a story like this. She knew Beckett’s desk was covered with files representing first-degree rape and aggravated-assault cases, hundreds of them, the walking wounded of the sexual wars, and here was this bozo-ette bending her ear about some rich bitch having a little trouble with her boyfriend.

On the other hand, five years ago Marlene had seen the talent in a skinny black kid from a third-rate law school and made Luisa Beckett her assistant chief, so there was a debt and probably always would be. Marlene heard a faint sigh over the wires. “Okay, okay, what do you want me to do?”

“Just make sure the case doesn’t drop through the cracks. This is the kind of thing worth fifty seconds in a calendar court. He could just walk.”

“You want him to do time?” Beckett’s tone was incredulous.

“Of course I want him to do time.”

Beckett laughed. “Honey, you got me confused with Super Woman. Is there something wrong with your memory? You know what this place is like. What if he pleads not guilty, which you know he will, because these assholes never think they did anything wrong. You think I’m going to get a trial slot for a case of hair stroking?”

“Okay, Luisa, I understand all that,” said Marlene resignedly. “Just do your best, all right? I appreciate it.”

When she got off the phone with Beckett, Marlene immediately redialed the same number and asked to be connected with Harry Bello. He wasn’t in, and she left a message. While she waited, she rushed around the loft, making beds, picking up after Lucy, and running a load of dishes through the washer. She was just taking a container of soup for her lunch out of the refrigerator when Bello called back.

She told him what Pruitt had done. “I talked to Luisa, Harry. You can pick him up.”

“Uh-huh.” The tone was not enthusiastic.

“Yeah, yeah,” said Marlene, “I already got the line about it’s a shit charge from Luisa. But maybe the judge who issued the protection will be hard-assed for once. We could get lucky. And Harry? I want him to know he’s been arrested. Also, if any illegal items are lying around in plain view-”

“Right,” said Bello. “In plain view.”

Karp looked at the chart he had constructed and tapped out the rhythm of “The Yellow Rose of Texas” on his bottom teeth with a pencil. It helped him to think. The chart consisted of two sheets of legal paper taped together. On it Karp had written, among other things, the statements contained in the memos and letters to the Mayor from Dr. Fuerza and District Attorney Bloom that comprised the charges against Murray Selig, the “cause” for which he had been fired. Next to each was a list of people he wanted to depose in relation to the veracity thereof, together with notes on relevant case law and statutory references. Karp always made charts like this when he was organizing the presentation of a case. As the thing progressed, the chart would accumulate notes, in increasingly smaller writing, and balloons and red arrows and legal references. It would become furry with constant handling, and Karp would carefully repair the inevitable tears at the edges and folds with cellophane tape until the thing looked like something that ought to be preserved in an argon chamber at the National Archives. What he never did was copy the chart onto new paper. This was only partly a superstitious act. In fact, Karp’s memory was eidetic for patterns in space; he could remember the moves of every basketball game he had ever played in, and the layout of every place he had ever lived. Not so his memory for things told to him (like names) or for faces, which was dreadful, and accounted for much of his reputation as a somewhat cold and distant man.

Thus his recall of the facts and personages of every case he tried was keyed to the position it occupied on that double sheet of yellow lined paper. By the time he had to stand up in front of a judge to argue a motion or in front of a jury to plead his cause, the chart, the body of the case, would be set into his mind like a bronze casting, and the chart itself would be folded away in its file, never to be looked at again. But he never threw them away either.

He was shaken out of a state of extreme tooth-tapping concentration by the phone. The receptionist announced that a Mr. Hrcany wished to speak with him.

“You sicced that reporter on me,” said Hrcany when he came on the line.

“How are you, Roland?” said Karp. “Long time, no hear.”

“Well, you know we public servants get real busy, not like you guys in white-shoe law firms.”

“This is a gray-shoe law firm at the most, Roland. White-shoe law firms don’t hire Jews.”

“And very wise of them too. What’s the story on this cunt reporter? Mzzz King Kong?”

“It was Marlene, and I wouldn’t say ‘sic’ Stupenagel asked if Marlene knew anyone knowledgeable about cops and your name came up. Why? Did you talk to her?”

“Did I talk to her! Jeez, it was up to her I wouldn’t do anything else. The bitch won’t leave me alone.”

“You could hit on her. That usually gets rid of them for you pretty good.”

Hrcany ignored the last part of this. “Come on, Butch, I have standards. You may not think I do, but there’s a limit.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“Get out of here! She’s closing in on menopause, she’s got a big nose and no tits … need I go on?”

“Actually, she’s around thirty and the real reason is because she’s taller than you. A lot taller.”

There was a pause, during which Hrcany decided not to pursue this line of conversation. Instead he said, “She wanted to know about Joe Clancy. You got any idea why?”

“Didn’t she tell you?”

“No, all I got was a load of horseshit about a feature on traffic cops.”

“Clancy’s a traffic cop?”

“Not really,” said Hrcany. “He’s a patrol sergeant in the Two-Five, uptown. But he could have something to do with traffic, with parking, with hack violations-”

“It was the latter, I think. Something about shaking down gypsy cabs up by there and some Spanish guys who died in custody. She thought Clancy was in charge of the case.”

“Yeah? That’s stupid. Clancy wouldn’t have been in charge of any investigation. He’s patrol, for chris-sake, not a detective.”

“What about the shakedown?”

“The fuck I know. What I told her was as far as I knew, Joe Clancy of the Two-Five was prime. Got the police medal of valor in seventy-one: ran into a burning building and came out with three little kids hanging off him and his hair on fire. Family man, got a bunch of little paddies and so on. A churchgoer.”

“So? What’s her problem with that?”

“Nothing except she wants to talk to him direct, and Clancy, being a Patrol Guide reader, won’t talk to the press without authorization. And she keeps bugging me to get her together with him. And …” Hrcany paused significantly.

“And now you’re bugging me about it. What do you want me to do, Roland?”

“You’re a famous big cheese-”

“Medium-size cheese. Ex-medium-size cheese.”

“Famous ex-medium-size cheese. You know the big shots up on the twelfth floor in the P.D. Make a call. Get Clancy to see her. Get the bitch off my case.”

Karp considered this request for a long moment. Ordinarily, he would not have minded doing a favor like this for Roland Hrcany. He liked Roland, especially when Roland was in this kind of faintly embarrassing bind. And he had the contacts. He had been very close for a long time to the chief of detectives, and as head of the Homicide Bureau he had been a major player in Manhattan’s criminal justice bureaucracy. He had met most of the current superchiefs and their aides. Even if he was no longer a player, there were people who owed him favors. The only thing that made him hesitate was the suspicion that Ariadne Stupenagel had figured this out too, and was using Roland, all unconscious, as a means of manipulating Karp. On the other hand …

“Butch? You still there?”

“Yeah, Roland. Okay, no problem. I’ll call Barry McGinnity at Public Affairs. It shouldn’t be any big deal.”