Falsely Accused

SIX

Moore’s Bar and Grill is on Lexington Avenue between 119th and 120th streets, right around the corner from the Twenty-fifth Precinct, which occupies a four-story building on 119th. Moore’s is a cop bar, owned by an ex-cop and patronized almost exclusively by cops. There is at least one like it a short walk from each of the City’s station houses. At a quarter of four in the afternoon the place is usually jammed and noisy with the day shift taking off and the swing shift getting up attitude before starting work.

Ariadne Stupenagel chose this time to make her entrance. She was wearing tight red jeans jammed into black and silver cowboy boots with two-inch heels, and a pale gray silk blouse. Over this she wore a Soviet military greatcoat with colonel’s pips and blue KGB flashes on the shoulder boards. She carried a stained khaki haversack that had once held a medical kit. The loud male hubbub in Moore’s diminished perceptibly as she passed through.

“What the fuck is that?” asked the cop standing at the bar next to Roland Hrcany. He was not the only one asking the question either. Hrcany looked up from his scotch and looked away. He rolled his huge shoulders as if shrugging off a burden. Although Hrcany was not a cop, he spent a good time of his spare time in cop bars. He liked cops, and cops liked him, not a usual state of affairs between members of the police force and the prosecutorial bar. The cops liked Hrcany because he treated them like the men they were, because he was a real man himself, because he was a rake of legendary reputation, not averse to sharing his collection of willing girls with favored policemen, and because he was more tolerant than most other prosecutors about the universal and necessary perjury of the police. So tolerant was Hrcany that cops would often reveal to him just where they had violated the rules of evidence and arrest, and Hrcany would go so far as to advise them on how to bring off these fairy tales on the stand. On the other hand, he drew the line at actual fabrication, and knew enough about the ways of the police so that no one but a practicing idiot would try to sell him a total load of manure. The cops respected this. He was a very successful homicide prosecutor.

Hrcany replied, “It’s a reporter. I said I would introduce her to Joe Clancy.”

His companion gave him a cop look. Hrcany caught it and explained, “It’s okay. The bosses cleared it. It’s just some kind of hero story.”

The cop grunted and stared again at the woman, who had by now spotted Hrcany and was approaching. “Christ, you’d need a fucking ladder,” the cop muttered.

“Hello, Roland,” said Ariadne. “What a charming place!” she added in a tone implying the opposite. Stupenagel had, in her colorful career, met any number of men who hated her, but almost invariably it had been for good cause. She hadn’t done anything to Hrcany, however, yet, but he had been rude and uncooperative from the first moment. It surprised her but did not particularly dismay.

“Glad you like it,” replied Hrcany in the same tone.

“Buy you a drink?” she asked.

“I’m fine.”

“Well, let’s get started. Where’s Clancy?”

Hrcany got off his bar stool and walked off without a word. Stupenagel followed him across the floor and into a large back room. Like the bar proper, this was full of off-duty cops, but cops much drunker than the ones in the front. They were sitting at a dozen or so round wooden tables or swaying happily among them. Those at the tables were pounding their glasses and bottles to the beat of an amplified Irish band set up on a small stage in the front of the room. It was a retirement party, a racket, as the cops say, for one of the cops in the Two-Five. The air was thick with noise, smoke, and beer fumes. Someone had decorated the walls and ceiling with green and white crepe paper, and shiny paper shamrocks and leprechaun hats.

“He’s over there,” said Hrcany, indicating a tall man leaning against the wall, alone, waving a brown bottle of Schlitz in time with the music.

“Introduce me.”

“You want me to introduce you? Why, you want to date him?”

“That’s the point of this, Roland,” said Stupenagel patiently. “You’re a regular guy-you introduce me to him and then he’ll know I’m a regular guy, too. If I wanted to walk in here cold, I wouldn’t have been on your ass making myself unpleasant all these weeks. It’s nothing personal.”

Hrcany opened his mouth, but stifled the remark he had in mind, which was personal in the extreme. Instead he marched up to Clancy and held out his hand.

“Hey, Joe. Nice racket.”

“Yeah,” said Clancy. “Jerry’s a popular guy.”

The two men chatted about Jerry, a detective second grade who was retiring after thirty on the job. The reporter hung behind Hrcany and pretended to be fascinated by the anecdotes about old Jerry, and studied her quarry. Clancy was a large man in good shape: his gut did not hang puffily over the belt line she could see under the tan suit jacket. The jacket itself, though plainly off the rack, hung nicely on his square shoulders, and Ariadne concluded that he was one of those fortunate men whose physiques fell precisely into the dimensions of the standard sizes, a 44R in his case, she reckoned. His hands were large and calm and covered with crisp, short red hairs, as was his skull. He wore his hair in a Marine Corps buzz cut, which revealed patches of twisted scar tissue. Not a man to shrink from honorable blemishes, thought Ariadne, an observation that recommended him to her. His face was the traditional map of Ireland edition: square jaw, softening a little underneath, snub nose, lipless, wide mouth.

After a minute or so of chatter, Hrcany became aware that the Aqua Velva-colored eyes that went with this face were resting ever more often on the large woman standing behind him, whose head, he was uncomfortably aware, was hovering an unacceptable distance above his shoulder.

He said, abruptly, “Joe, I’d like you to meet Mzzz Stupenagel. Mzzz Stupenagel, this is Joe Clancy.”

The woman extended her hand, said, “I’m glad to meet you. I’ve heard a lot about you,” and received a firm, formal grasp. Clancy was not the sort of man who either gripped too hard or sent a sexual message. Another point scored.

At that moment three men drunk enough to think wearing shiny green paper leprechaun hats amusing rolled up, hailed Roland as a lost brother, and urged him away to the free beer. He left with no discernible reluctance.

“You got to the bosses,” he said.

“I did.” In the pause that followed Clancy seemed to be concentrating on the music. Stupenagel read it as demonstrating that although he was now cleared to talk to her, he had not been ordered to do so, and was doing it of his free will.

“You’re a friend of Roland’s?” Clancy asked. His voice was soft, but it seemed to cut effectively through the clamor. Stupenagel had spent considerable time among men whose work required them to make themselves clearly heard in extremely noisy and violent places, and she recognized the trick. She could do it too.

“Like a brother to me,” she lied. “He said he would introduce me to you, so you could tell me all about being a hero cop-”

Clancy uttered a derisive snort. “You believe everything you hear?”

“You ran into a burning building. You rescued those kids from that fire.”

Clancy shrugged. “Hey, I was there, I was helping them evacuate the building, I was leading some kids down a hall. The fire was in the building next door. There was an explosion. The next thing I knew I was on fire, so I picked up the kids and ran out. They played it up big, because we were in the middle of the Knapp scandal and they needed a cop who saved a bunch of P.R. kids.”

He told the story wearily, as one who wishes it would go away. Stupenagel had seen this before as well. The denigration of heroism by the hero is often a form of boasting, and she wondered whether it was that in Clancy’s case. The man was starting to interest her. Time for a pinprick.

“Speaking of Hispanic kids, they seem not to do well in your lockup. Why is that?”

Clancy remained calm. “You read my report?”

“No.”

“I’ll send you a copy.”

“Thank you. What’s the short version, for now?” Clancy looked out again at the revelry. He asked, “Do you want a drink?” Stupenagel nodded. “Sure. A beer’d be fine.” Clancy walked off through the crowd to a cloth-covered table on which a tin tub full of ice and beer bottles rested. A large, dark-haired man in a blue sports coat hailed him, and they spoke a few words. The dark man looked briefly over at her, but she was too far away and the room far too dim and smoky for her to be able to read any expression on his face. Clancy returned with a cold bottle and a paper cup. Stupenagel remarked the cup. She poured her beer into it and sipped it, like a lady should. Then she took out her notebook.

“It was a real bad thing,” said Clancy. “The first one, Ortiz, we thought it was a fluke. Bring a gypsy cabbie in for a hack violation and he kills himself? Unbelievable. What, he had remorse because he picked up a fare on the street? Okay, there’s an investigation, like there always is, we lose somebody in custody, and they cleared us. Guy hung himself on his shirt, the M.E. confirms it. Suicide. The next one’s a couple of weeks later, same thing. Jorge Valenzuela, his name was. Now we’re going crazy. We got bosses up the ying-yang, running around trying to find, did we follow procedure. And we did, to the letter. These guys, they weren’t considered suicide risks, like a guy gets drunk and wastes his wife and kids, he sobers up, you figure he might try for a hat trick, do himself too. But these were bullshit charges, maybe a fine at most. So we-I mean, the detectives-investigate. Okay, it turns out these guys are not your regular Hispanics, they’re more like Indians, from down in Central America somewhere, Guatemala, I think. Salvador. And they’re wetbacks. So they, like, have a psychological problem with jail.”

“The detectives told you this?” asked Stupenagel.

“Yeah, they interviewed some professor up at Columbia. They get into a situation they can’t handle, they just check out-I mean, more than regular people.”

“I’ve heard the theory. What do you think?”

Clancy chewed his lip and then shrugged heavily. “Look, lady, I’m just a cop, right? What do I know? — you get all kinds in the City. The fact is, we can’t watch everybody in the cells, every minute. We don’t have the troops. And we can’t strip the prisoners buck naked, the civil liberties people would go nuts. We frisk them and take belts and laces and move them out to Central Booking as soon as we can. And the third one of these guys, he didn’t hang himself at all.”

“What happened to him?”

“Roberto Fuentes. He just died. He went in there at eleven-ten at night. At six-thirty in the morning, when they went to wake them up for the trip down to Central, he was cold. Not a mark on him-just curled up and died. Sad. The kid was-what? — twenty-two. But …” He shrugged again and sighed. “That’s it. There’s some more detail in the report. Meanwhile …”

He put his beer down on the table and picked up a raincoat from a chair.

“I got to go,” he said and hoisted on the raincoat.

She eyed the beer bottle, which lacked but a few swallows. “Not much of a party animal?”

“Not much.”

“My, my, a non-drinking Irishman! This is a better story than I expected. Hold the front page.”

He smiled a tight smile. “Nice meeting you. I’ll send you that thing if you give me an address.”

She fished a card out of her bag and handed it to him. She did not want him to leave, and not because she thought there was specific information she needed from him. There was something wrong about the vibrations she was getting from him, some blankness in the picture. Stupenagel did not expect every man in the world to come on to her. Hrcany, for example, hated her. But she expected there to be something, some response to the electrical probes she was constantly emitting via voice and look and body language. Either Clancy had some dead circuits or she was losing her touch.

“Where are you off to?” she asked casually.

“Work. Around the corner. I usually take the swing shift if I can get it.” He started to walk away, and she set off after him.

“Four to twelve? Must be hard on your wife.”

He looked at her, into her eyes, and she thought she saw something unexpected flicker behind the un-revealing blue-duplicity? Or pain.

“As a matter of fact, it works out for us,” he said. “With the kids and all.”

“Oh? How many do you have?”

“Four. Joe Junior is ten, then there’s Bridie, she’s eight, Terry is six, and Patrick is two and a half.” He paused. “Patrick is a Down’s kid.”

“Oh,” she said, “that must be rough.”

He asked, “Want to see a picture?”

She nodded and smiled encouragingly, and he pulled a color snapshot from his wallet. She studied it: three little snub-nosed, grinning extroverts, and a worn-looking but still pretty blond woman smiling uncertainly, holding the dough-faced baby that would never grow up. She handed it back to him, and as she did she caught on his face an odd look, almost an expression of triumph, as if he had played a card that couldn’t be trumped.

A well-honed instinct led her to pounce. “Oh, one more thing: the detectives who arrested the boys who died-what were their names?”

He didn’t stumble, which almost disappointed her. “Paul Jackson.”

She wrote it down. “And …?”

“And his partner, John Seaver.” He started to move away again.

“Are they here?”

“No. I mean, I haven’t seen them. You could ask around. Look, I got to-”

“Anything to these rumors about your guys shaking down gypsy cabbies?” she asked abruptly, her voice with a bright edge.

Was that a thin smile as he turned away? She couldn’t tell. She experienced briefly an urge to run after Clancy, like Lois Lane on TV, grab his arm and become a pest. She quickly suppressed it; that was not her style. On the other hand, her style was not generating the usual results, In Stupenagel’s experience, men in the various macho trades were not famous for marital fidelity, and she was surprised that she had not been able to raise even a flirt from the cop. An unusual specimen, she thought, or maybe it was guilt about wifey at home with the bent kid. Or fidelity? Did that still exist? Or maybe she was losing her touch. She drained her beer and headed for the bar to eliminate that dread possibility.

Between the two of them, Marlene and Harry Bello kept Rob Pruitt pretty well stalked. Marlene took the shift between suppertime and the small hours of the morning, so that Harry could obtain the unnaturally tiny amount of rest that he needed. Harry objected to this-there was no telling when Pruitt might turn on his tormentor-but relented when Marlene agreed to take her dog along in her car. Karp knew better than to object.

They were not tailing Pruitt, precisely, only making sure that he understood that he was under observation. Carrie Lanin had been supplied with a new, unlisted phone, and she reported happily that she had not been bothered by the man either over its wires or by any additional personal invasions.

Pruitt had a new car, a dingy green Toyota Corolla. When Marlene took up her station outside his building, she could see him watching it from his window or from just inside the street door of the tenement. He was waiting for another sabotage attempt, which Marlene had no intention of providing. On several occasions, she followed him on long, seemingly aimless car rides through lower Manhattan, making only desultory attempts to keep him in sight. She was not interested in where he went. When she lost him, she would just drive to Duane Street and park in front of Carrie Lanin’s loft. Often on these occasions Pruitt would come by, and then she would wave gaily, and have the pleasure of seeing him roar off with squealing tires.

This went on for a week. Two weeks. Then Harry Bello called one evening and reported that Pruitt had started to drink heavily in a local saloon.

“You think?” asked Marlene.

“Your call,” said Bello.

“Let’s do it. Say, ten.”

Marlene fed her family and then tried to watch television with Karp, unsuccessfully. Nothing held her interest. She kept getting up and pacing, doing little meaningless errands and chores. Karp finally asked her what was wrong.

“I have to go out,” said Marlene.

“All right,” said Karp.

“Not now, a little later. I’m meeting Harry.”

Karp nodded. No news here.

“I have to get dressed,” she said, and hurried away to the bedroom.

No ninja look tonight. A sweet vulnerability, somewhat antique and out of fashion. Marlene had several elderly great aunts who, on each Christmas and birthday, supplied her with the sort of clothes a nice Catholic girl might be expected to wear on Queens Boulevard should 1955 ever make an appearance again. Marlene was thus able to dress herself in a white frilly blouse with a Peter Pan collar, a heavy tan wool skirt designed to conceal the lines of the body, and a white angora sweater that closed with a little gold chain. Her hair, which usually framed her face in a shaggy mane of natural curls, cut to shadow her bad eye, she now pulled back into the old schoolgirl center parting, held in place by industrial-strength plastic barrettes on either side. A dab of pale pink lipstick and a pair of round spectacles completed the image. Marlene thought she looked a lot like her cousin Angela, who was a bookkeeper for the archdiocese.

“I’m going now,” she said, presenting herself at the door to the living room. Karp looked away from the set and cast an appraising glance at his wife.

“Could you do ‘A Bushel and a Peck’ before you go?”

“What?”

“What. Okay, let’s see,” Karp remarked, “nearly every other night this past couple of weeks you slip out of here looking like Richard Widmark going up against the Nazis, and now you look like Rosemary Clooney. Is there something going on I should know about?”

“Not really,” she said.

The bar was so small and crummy it hardly had a name, just a dingy white sign supplied by a mixer company and a fizzing neon that said B R. Inside, a bar ran nearly the length of the room, which was about the size and shape of a railway car. Most of the lighting, dim and reddish, came from a collection of beer company signs hung on the wall. Sitting at the bar when Marlene walked in were three Latina whores, a short, dark man in a suit of aqua crushed velvet (their business manager), a pair of deteriorated alcoholics in grimy rags, and, at the extreme end of the bar, almost invisible in the shadows, Harry Bello in his usual gray suit. The barkeep, a chubby Puerto Rican with a shaved head and a wad of hair like a toilet brush under his nose, looked up as she entered. So did the whores and the pimp. The drunks looked at their drinks, as did Bello.

Marlene took off her raincoat, further astonishing her audience. It was not a venue that went in much for frilly blouses and white angora sweaters. She walked to one of the two round plywood tables and took a seat across from Rob Pruitt. He was drinking straight, cheap bourbon behind beer, and he stank of it across the table. He looked up woozily when Marlene sat down, and focused his eyes with some effort. Marlene noted that his clothes were soiled and his eyes were red-rimmed. Nor had he shaved in a couple of days; Marlene wished she had him in court this very minute.

“What the fuck do you want?” said Pruitt.

“You don’t look so hot, Rob,” Marlene replied. “I think you were a lot better off up in Alaska. I think it might be time for you to leave.”

“You’re following me around,” he said. “You’re … and that cop, following me. I saw you.”

“You think I’m following you, Rob? We live in the same neighborhood. We’re neighbors. Our paths cross.”

He stared at her, his jaw working.

“And why that accusing tone, Rob?” she asked. “Wouldn’t you like being followed? Didn’t you think Carrie liked it?”

“I love her,” he said, his voice robotic and dull.

“But she doesn’t love you.”

“She loves me,” in the same tone.

Marlene glanced at one of the beer clocks. “No, she thinks you’re a schmuck and a pest. She hates you.”

He looked at her, his eyes narrowing. “Why are you doing this? Why are you trying to break us up?”

“I don’t know, Robbie,” she replied lightly, “maybe because I’m obsessed with you. Maybe I want you for my very own.” She paused and then said, very carefully, “Forget her! Come to me, my darling! Only I love you as you deserve.”

It took several seconds for it to register. Marlene thought he hadn’t gotten the point and was about to say something further, as a result of which her guard was down when Pruitt snarled and lunged at her across the table.

He grabbed the front of her sweater with his left hand and swung a roundhouse right that landed on the side of her jaw, not a solid blow because of the clumsy angle, but hard enough to make her see red. The table went over, as did her chair. Pruitt was yelling something. He was on top of her on the beer-stinking floor, his left hand on her throat now, and his right crashing down on her mouth, this time a solid hit. She tasted blood. She tried to claw his eyes, but he knocked her hands away and struck her again as she turned her head, landing a good one on her ear. Sound vanished into ringing. His knee pressed into her chest; her breath failed and she saw his rage-distorted face begin to gray out.

Then she heard, through the ringing, a sharp crack, a sound like a bat hitting a ball or a book falling off a table. Instantly, his weight was gone. She coughed and gasped and rolled onto her side, trying to get the air flowing again and her vision working. Blood was flowing down her chin in a steady stream. She caught a pool of it in her cupped palm and wiped it off on her white sweater, and then she pressed the satin hem of the sweater tightly against her mouth

As the ringing faded she became aware of a grunting, shuffling noise, punctuated with meaty thuds. She struggled to a sitting position and looked around the barroom. A tableau: the patrons and the bartender frozen in place, their expressions ranging from avid to dull; at stage center Harry Bello calmly breaking Rob Pruitt to pieces with a short length of lead-loaded one-inch pipe wrapped in neoprene. Pruitt was on his knees, held up by Harry’s hand on his collar. Marlene saw at once that Pruitt’s jaw was out of line and his right wrist hung at a bad angle. As she watched, Harry’s pipe swung out in a short, precise arc and cracked his client’s collarbone. She watched him for a moment, both horrified and awed. Harry wasn’t even breathing hard. He was beating a man to death with the same effortless skill that Fred Astaire used when he began the Beguine.

“Enough, Harry,” she croaked. She rose to her feet, trailing drops of blood and put a restraining hand on his arm. “Enough,” she said again, louder.

He looked at her and said, “Are you okay?”

She said, “Yeah, it’s just a cut lip. It looks worse than it feels. You better make the calls.”

Harry nodded and let go of Pruitt’s collar. The man collapsed at her feet like a sack of golf balls. Harry cuffed him to the bar rail and went off to phone. Marlene sat down. One of the whores gave her a damp cloth. Marlene smiled thanks at her and dabbed at the dried blood. She checked the beer clock and looked at the door expectantly. Right on schedule, in walked Carrie Lanin.

After the cops and the ambulance and the emergency room and swearing out the multiple complaints against Pruitt, it was two-thirty before Marlene walked into the loft. They’d cleaned up her face and put a few stitches into her mouth, but she was turning interesting colors. Her lip looked like a raw Italian sausage, her outfit like a butcher’s apron.

Unfortunately, Karp had dozed off in front of the TV, and was awakened by her return.

“Jesus Christ, Marlene…!”

“I don’t want to hear about it, not tonight,” she said, moving past him toward the bedroom. He followed close behind.

“Wait! What the hell …?”

“I’m okay, I’m not badly hurt, I’ve been to the emergency room …”

“But what happened?”

She stripped off the gory angora and blouse and tossed them into a corner. “It was Pruitt. I went to meet Carrie, he followed her, we went into a bar, he followed us in and he jumped me.”

Marlene was stripping off her filthy skirt as she uttered this whopper, the official tale she had concocted and sworn to, and had her back to Karp, so she did not observe the expression on his face as he took it in. She would have been dismayed to have seen it.

“And …?” he said.

She slipped into a robe and turned to face him. “And what? Harry was backing me up and he arrested Pruitt. He’s in jail now. Look, it hurts when I talk, and I want to take a hot bath-can the interrogation wait?”

“No, it can’t,” said Karp, blocking the door. “Let me understand this. This guy comes strolling into a bar where you and his girlfriend are sitting and just cracks you in the face? And your tame cop is just standing by waiting to arrest him? Do I have this right? Why did he hit you?”

“Why?” cried Marlene on a rising note. “Because he’s a nut, that’s why. He thinks I’m standing in the way of true love. We were just talking and-”

“Oh, horseshit, Marlene! You set this up. You concocted a trap for this bozo to generate an assault charge and a probation violation. And you’re going to go to court and swear to a pack of lies to put him away, aren’t you?”

Karp’s voice had risen to a shout, and Marlene unconsciously retreated a step.

“He belongs in a cell,” she snarled through clenched teeth. “What do you want? For me to wait until he kidnaps her, or rapes her, or murders her? He’s a stalker, for Christ’s sake!”

“Right, and who’re you?” Karp yelled. “God almighty? Deciding who gets put away, who’s the unacceptable risk?”

“Oh, you know, I can’t stand you when you get this self-righteous attitude. Like you never cut a corner in your life to nail some scumbag.”

He stared at her and she at him for a long moment. Then he said, slowly and carefully, “You don’t fucking understand, do you? There’s a difference, Marlene. I cut corners, you’re a felon.”

The word hung in the air like sewer gas. Karp turned and left the bedroom. She heard his heavy steps and the slam of the little guest room door.