Falsely Accused

SEVEN

Karp was gone by the time Marlene awakened the next morning, which she did not at all mind. She looked blearily at the clock and uttered a small shriek of alarm. Fifteen minutes to get ready and off to school. She sat up quickly and let out another shriek, of pain this time. It felt as though the flesh were being wrenched from her face with a dull spatula. In the bathroom she took one look at the Technicolor glory of her face and completed the rest of her toilette with her eye averted.

Lucy gave no trouble about being jammed by brute force into her clothes and eating her breakfast (banana and bran muffin to go) as she did not want to rile the angry and hideous stranger who had mysteriously replaced her mom during the night.

“Aren’t we picking up Miranda?” the child asked meekly, when it had become clear that they were heading directly for P.S. 1.

“No, we’re not. Miranda can get to school by herself.”

“What about the bad man?”

“The bad man is in jail,” Marlene replied in a tone that did not encourage further questions.

After the drop-off, Marlene shopped briefly on Grand Street and went back home. There she found the message light on her answering machine blinking, which she ignored, and also discovered that she had been traipsing through her neighborhood with her sweatshirt on inside out and the fly of her jeans gaping. She cursed and tore her clothes off and threw on a black sweatsuit, the right way, and then allowed herself a good, heaving, mucousy cry.

In the midst of this the phone rang.

“What?” Marlene shouted into the receiver.

“Uh-oh, she’s got the rag on,” said Ariadne Stupenagel. “No, it can’t be, you’re knocked up, aren’t you? You’re supposed to have a peaceful glow, unless that’s a lie too.”

“What do you want, Stupe?”

“We need to talk, girl. Can I come over?”

“Not today. I’m not receiving visitors.”

“Oh?”

“I’m washing my hair. Those split ends? There’s a new conditioner I want to try.”

“Mmm, yes,” said Stupenagel after the briefest pause, “and I might have believed that, and I might have been hurt, thinking that you thought so little of me as to use such a moronic excuse to shine me on, had I not drifted by the old courthouse this morning and had a chat with Ray Guma …”

“Oh, shit!” said Marlene, with feeling.

“… and Guma filled my ear with a strange tale- my little housewife friend with her face rearranged coming into the complaint room in the small hours to swear out a complaint against a nutcase who was stalking another woman. Sisterhood is powerful.”

“Everybody knows about this now, right?”

“They will after I finish writing the story, which I will after you give me the details, which is why I’m coming over. I’m at Foley Square-I’ll be there in ten minutes. Shall I bring you some nice soup?”

“How about a nice quart of bourbon?” said Marlene gloomily, and hung up the phone.

She checked the messages. They were all from metro reporters or TV stations asking for an interview, except for one from Carrie Lanin and one from someone named Suzy Poole, a name that rang a bell but distantly. Marlene could not quite recall where she had heard it. She called Carrie and got her machine, and left a message, and called the Poole person, and got an answering service with a crisp British accent, which assured her that her message would be passed on to Miss Poole.

Shortly after she hung up, the front doorbell rang, and there was Stupenagel, grinning and waving a quart of Ancient Age.

“I can’t drink any of that,” Marlene said. “I’m pregnant.”

“Oh, don’t be silly, you can have a little drink,” said Stupenagel, entering the loft and focusing on Marlene. “Oh, God, look at your face! At last I’m more beautiful than you! I ought to send this bum a box of candy.”

“Thanks for your support, Ariadne. You always know how to say the right thing.”

“Oh, come on, it was just a joke.” She waved her bottle again. “Get a couple of mugs and we’ll forget our troubles.”

“Sorry. I meant it. You go right ahead, though.” Marlene turned away and walked toward the living room.

“You know, Marlene,” said Stupenagel, following, “I hope you’re not turning into one of those health fascists. Good God! My dear mother used to tell me she never passed a sober day during the whole time she was preggers with me.”

Marlene gave her a baleful look and said, “No further questions, Your Honor.”

Stupenagel snorted a laugh. “I guess I waltzed into that.” She strode into the living room, flung her greatcoat onto the couch, sat down, and placed the bottle on the coffee table. “Well, shall we get started, then?”

Marlene fetched a tumbler and sat down in the bentwood rocker. “What are we starting, Stupe?”

“The story I’m going to write about you, of course.” She reached into her canvas bag and drew out a steno book and a pencil.

“There’s no story, Stupe. I helped out a friend is all,” said Marlene wearily, and looked with longing at the bottle.

“Don’t tell me my business, girl. You’re news. Okay, let’s start with when this Lanin character first told you she was being stalked.”

Marlene looked at her friend, at the sharpened pencil poised quivering over the pad, at the bright and merciless gleam in her eye. The thought entered Marlene’s mind that it was like having a pal who became a gynecologist: whatever the prior relationship, it inevitably became different when you were up on the table with your legs spread, watching her approach with the shiny instruments of the profession.

“What’s funny?” Stupenagel asked, seeing the expression that now crossed Marlene’s face.

“Oh, nothing,” said Marlene, putting her mug into neutral. Then she began the tale of Carrie and Rob, the official version, of course, and hoped that Stupenagel was not as perceptive as Karp.

Someone had once told Karp that clients were to the law what the serpent was to the Garden of Eden. Heretofore the truth of this had not been pressed upon him, as he had spent virtually all of his professional career as a prosecutor, for whom the client is the People, a pleasant abstraction having no propensity to deviousness or complaint. It was different now that he had a real client breathing, complaining, and being devious in his office. He did not much like it.

“Murray,” said Karp in a soothing voice, “it won’t matter. We’ll get by.”

“Yeah, you say that,” replied Selig. “How’re you going to do all the things you need to do for this trial without support from your firm? It’d be like trying to do a solo on a coronary bypass.”

“Right, and if I needed a coronary bypass, I’d take your advice. You need this trial, so take mine!”

A moment of glaring, and then Selig shook his chunky frame and grinned sheepishly. “Oh, crap, Butch-look, I didn’t mean to give you a hard time. I just hate this.”

Karp smiled back. “That’s because you’re a decent human being involved in a lawsuit. You’re supposed to hate it. If you liked it, I wouldn’t have anything to do with you. Anyway, as I was about to point out, we can hire support on the outside. I have a freelance paralegal lined up, and a steno who’s going to come in a little while and take the Mayor’s deposition. That’s part of what’s happening now, at this stage of the proceedings. I’ll be deposing the defendants-”

“Just the Mayor?”

“No. Fuerza too. And the D.A.”

“What’s the point of him? I didn’t work for the D.A.”

“No,” said Karp smoothly, “but his defamation helped form the basis of the firing, and added to the stigma you’re suffering now.” This partial truth was accepted without demur, and Karp continued. “We’ll also depose all the people who supplied information in the two letters that formed the basis of the decision to fire you.”

“The lies.”

“As we will prove,” said Karp. “Also, the defendants will get a crack at you and all of our witnesses, and they’re obviously going to concentrate especially on you.”

“That’s okay,” said Selig lightly. “I have nothing to hide.”

Karp shot a stern look across his desk. “Wrong thinking, Murray. Everybody has something to hide-Mother Teresa, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, I don’t care-everybody. The issue here is, you want to win this case, you don’t hide it from me.”

Selig nodded soberly. “I understand.”

“Okay, let me make sure that you do. This case is about reputation. They said you’re a sleazeball, you say you’re not. It is to their very great advantage to blacken you even more than they have already. Now, they’ve restricted the calumny to your professional behavior as C.M.E., but at this point any sleaze will do, because they’re trying to paint a picture for the jury and they want to make it the portrait of Dorian Gray. Look, let’s say for the sake of argument that you enjoy fucking chickadees in the privacy of your own home …”

Selig guffawed.

“… okay, you’re a little embarrassed, you don’t tell me. So at deposition, they got this, oh, say, some secretary up there on what looks like some minor paper trail matter and they ask her, did you bring those papers to Dr. Selig? Yes. And what was he doing when you got there? Oh, he was fucking this chickadee out by the birdhouse. Now, at that point I object, of course, but it’s now part of the public record, and unless I can get it thrown out by the judge via a motion in limine, the jury will hear about it, and that’s what they’re going to see when they look at you, a guy with a vice he’s ashamed to admit, and they’re going to inevitably think, if he’s covered this up, what else is there, and even if we destroy all their charges one by one, they’re still going to think, hey, where there’s smoke … You follow the logic?”

“Uh-huh. Okay, but I have this secret, what does it matter if I tell you first? What can you do? It’ll still come out.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” said Karp. “The point is, if I’m not surprised, then we’re in control, not them. We can do a deal. Let’s say we find out the Mayor likes to get sucked off by a python, he keeps it in a bathtub down at City Hall …”

“I love your imagination. Snakes can’t suck anything, though-they have no lips.”

Karp rolled his eyes. “Let me write that down, I never want to forget it. It’s just an example, Murray, for chrissake. Okay, we tell the D.: forget the chickadees, we won’t touch on the snake. Alternatively, we bring up the chickadees ourselves.”

“What’s the point of that?”

“Anything you bring up voluntarily has less sting than it does if the other side brings it up. In the hypothetical we’re discussing, we’d go in with a shrink: Dr. Selig has this chickadee problem, he’s fighting it, he’s in recovery. In your professional opinion, did it affect his work one iota? No. No further questions. Now the jury sees a courageous guy who’s trying to conquer an embarrassing fault, and isn’t afraid to admit it. Shit, if he’ll come out about the chickadees, he’s sure as hell not hiding anything else. Get the point?”

“Point got,” said Selig. “But I’m sorry-right now no secret vices spring to mind. I’ll talk to Naomi, though. She knows my faults better than I do.”

Karp gave his client a hard and unamused stare, but his client’s eyes slid away. Karp was about to say something when the buzzer on his desk bleated, and the receptionist announced the arrival of the Mayor of the City of New York.

Stupenagel stuck her pencil behind her ear and flipped through the pages of her steno pad. The story she had just heard was consistent and logical, but still it stirred some reportorial instinct of suspicion. “It was lucky that this cop Bello was there when this guy started to beat on you,” she said, trolling.

“There was no luck to it, Stupe. I told you, he was shadowing her. We figured Pruitt would make a move sooner or later.”

“Sounds almost like you baited a trap.”

“Carrie Lanin is not a criminal,” Marlene said with some heat. “She has the right to go anywhere and see anyone anytime. She doesn’t have to live like a hermit because some asshole is harassing her. Besides”-here she pointed at the livid bruises that covered most of her face-“do you think I planned for this to happen?”

Stupenagel did not. She had a good imagination and considerable experience with violence, but this experience did not support the notion that someone who looked like Marlene Ciampi would risk her face to put some jerk in prison. She nodded slightly and changed her tack.

“How long do you think he’ll get?”

“Oh, maybe five years, maybe three.”

“Is that worth it?”

Marlene took a deep breath and searched for an answer. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe somebody will shank him in prison. Maybe he’ll discover he likes fucking punks up the ass.”

“Not very likely, is it? The guy sounds truly obsessed.”

“Yeah,” Marlene agreed. “Maybe that’s why I got involved. Maybe I thought that the only thing that worked against an obsession was a counter-obsession, a stronger one. I just felt … impelled to stop him, you know? Do you ever get feelings like that? Yeah? Anyway, it felt good.”

Stupenagel wrote this down and then put her pad on the coffee table. “Speaking of obsessions, I think I’m getting one over this gypsy cab business. And the jailhouse suicides.”

“Why? I thought you said it was likely that they really had killed themselves.”

“Yes, yes, I did,” said Stupenagel impatiently, “but … I have a feeling that not all is as it should be in the old Two-Five. I went to a retirement racket the other night-your good buddy Roland set it up-and after I talked to Clancy, I lounged in the bar, keeping my little ears open and engaging in good-natured sexist banter. There was so much testosterone in the air, I felt myself growing a beard. Anyway …”

“What about Clancy?”

“Clancy’s just a bureaucrat. Nice guy, knows nothing. This Jackson character, on the other hand-”

The phone rang. “I better get that,” said Marlene, and left for her office at the end of the loft. Stupenagel refreshed her drink and began to compose in her mind the story she would hand in later that afternoon. After five minutes, Marlene returned and sat down with a puzzled look on her face.

“Who’s Suzy Poole?” she asked. “I know the name.”

“Of course you do. She’s the super model. Cover of Vogue this month? Why do you ask?”

“Oh, that was her.”

“Suzy Poole called you? What did she want?”

“Oh, you know-fashion tips, my famous makeup secrets-”

“No, really!”

“Off the record, Stupe,” said Marlene heavily. “I mean it.”

“Swear to God.”

Marlene gave her a hard look. “If this gets out, it will not be God who will punish you.” She leaned back and lit a Marlboro, only her third of the day, she was happy to realize. “Well, she’s being stalked. By this guy she had a fling with. And she wants me to help her out. Carrie Lanin knows her-from the rag trade. That’s how she got my name. Carrie was talking up my prowess in some ladies’ john on Seventh Avenue.”

“Wait a second-models at that level must have security up the ying-yang. Doesn’t she have, like, a regular bodyguard?”

“Oh, yeah, that was my thought too. She said she’d tried that. It’s like living in jail, she said. The guy is everywhere. He’s got some money too. Somehow he always gets her number no matter how many times she changes it. And he’s smart too. There’s no physical evidence, no threats.”

“What does she expect you to do?”

“Get rid of him, of course.”

“Will you?”

Marlene watched the smoke from her cigarette circulate up to the ceiling and said lazily, “Oh, I might. I just had the thought when I was talking to her that it could be an interesting thing to do. I mean, as a business.” She turned an interested face to Stupenagel’s bemused one. “So, what happened with the gypsies?”

“Oh, yeah. I was telling you about Jackson. Paul. The cops at the Two-Five are not anxious to talk about Detective Jackson, even when a little drunk and getting any number of cheap feels off the kid here. Something’s smelly going down up there in Spanish Harlem. This morning I got with a guy I know at Internal Affairs, Tommy Devlin. They have their suspicions, but nothing solid. Jackson lives a little too well, but that could mean he’s just lucky at the track. They haven’t had any complaints, not that a bunch of illegal Guats are going to make much of a stink if they’re getting shook down by a cop. They think that’s how the government collects taxes. I asked him about the suicides too. Those he swears’re strictly kosher. The M.E. autopsied the first two as genuine hangings. Apparently there’s ways to tell hanging from getting strangled. The third kid just stopped breathing like the ones I told you about in Asia. They called it ‘panic death.’”

“So where are you going with it?”

“Oh, I think I’ll work the gypsies a little more, see if I can find someone who’s not too scared to help.” She finished her drink, stood up, and shrugged into her coat.

“In fact, I’m off now. I’ll let you know when the story comes out.” Marlene walked her to the door. “You know, we should really get a picture of you for this piece.”

“Never!” said Marlene vehemently.

“Suit yourself.” Stupenagel paused by the door. “You know, you may think me a cynical bitch, but my heart really goes out to those poor bastards. They escape from total hell down there, and they come up here and some fucking scumbag cop takes their few pathetic dollars, when a rookie cop’s base salary is about eight times the per capita income of Guatemala. If that fucker is running a racket, I’m going to have his ass for it.”

“Good luck,” said Marlene, pleasantly surprised by the cynical bitch reporter’s words. The two women hugged and Stupenagel stepped out of the door. She felt in her bag.

“Oh, crap, I left my pad on your sofa,” she said.

“I’ll get it,” said Marlene.

Stupenagel waited in the shadowed hallway, pulled from her bag a Leica M3 loaded with ASA 400 black-and-white film, and looked through its eyepiece. As Marlene, returning with the pad, stepped into the light from the track unit outside her living room, Stupenagel silently snapped two frames and put the camera back into her bag.

“I thought that went pretty well,” said Murray Selig. The Mayor had just been ushered out amid a flurry of false smiles and the usual faux collegial banter between Karp and his opposite number, the corporation counsel, Josh Gottkind.

“You did, huh?” replied Karp sourly. He was thinking that at this moment the Mayor was visiting with Jack Weller, accepting apologies and being assured that the firm was not involved in this sad and messhugah affair.

“Yeah, I thought the guy was, you know, more cooperative than I thought he would be,” said Selig in an uncertain tone.

“Oh, he was cooperative, all right. On the other hand, he doesn’t know much, and I didn’t push him very hard for it. Did you notice that he got annoyed every time Gottkind told him not to answer?”

Selig nodded. “But he didn’t want to talk about the probation business.”

“No, he didn’t, because the City changed the probationary period from six months to one year after they hired you, and he never officially informed you of that fact. You had a reasonable expectation that your probationary period was over. I needed to pin him down that he never told you.”

“And you did.”

“That’s right. He’s in a tough position, which is why, when he refused to answer, I told him I would be in Judge Craig’s chambers this afternoon and walk out with an order to compel in my hand, and this evening the news would be ‘Mayor Refuses to Answer Questions in M.E. Case.’”

“So we’re doing good?”

“Oh, the Mayor’s easy. Pinning down the other people will be a lot harder. Speaking of which, the fun’s about to begin on your end. Tomorrow Gottkind gets his crack at you.”

Selig shrugged. “Let him take his best shot.”

“It’s not that simple, Murray,” said Karp, a hint of irritation in his voice. “You’re under oath, and they’ll be scrutinizing every word you say for fishhooks to hang favorable precedents on. I know we’ve been through this a little before, but let me lay out the legal situation as it affects what you’re supposed to say.”

Selig looked at his watch. “Will this take a long time?” The doctor, having placed his affairs in Karp’s hands, had shown little interest in the nuts-and-bolts aspects of the case.

“No, Murray, about as long as an autopsy,” said Karp. “Okay. You know we’re suing under the Fourteenth Amendment because we hold that you’ve been deprived of liberty and property without due process. The property part is your interest in your job; you can’t be deprived of it without a formal hearing beforehand, which you did not get. The liberty interest involves the stigma created by the charges made against you, which has deprived you of your ability to pursue your normal occupation. The classic case is Bishop v. Wood: a cop got fired for insubordination and ruining morale. Plaintiff argued that accusing him of that behavior in public constituted a badge of infamy,’ such that he could never again pursue his usual occupation as a cop, hence deprivation of liberty without due process. Same with you. Liberty to pursue your normal occupation, a chief medical examiner of a major city, was taken from you without due process of law. What we’ll be asking the court for is, on the property side, reinstatement and back pay, and on the liberty side, damages, to recompense you for that damaging loss of reputation. Stigma plus, as we call it.” “That’s what pays you, the damages.” “Right, Murray, that’s what pays me. Now, the defendants are going to try to demonstrate two things. The first is that you did not have a property interest in your job. The Supreme Court gives a lot of leeway to states for determining if an employee actually has such an interest. They don’t want a situation where every town clerk who gets canned thinks he has a federal case. The idea is that coincident with your taking a public job, you admit to understanding that there are legitimate causes for dismissal, as established under statute. It’s called the ‘bitter with the sweet’ doctrine. There are two ways the City can do this. One, they can show that you were still on probation and hadn’t yet acquired any job rights. They say it’s a year, we say it’s six months. I think we can roll them on this. It falls on employer to inform employee of any probationary period, and they told you it was six months when they hired you, and that should be it. The more serious problem is whether you in fact had a rational expectation of a right to a job that couldn’t be taken away without a hearing. That is, we have to point to actual rules that say whether the C.M.E. position requires a formal hearing before dismissal.”

“Of course it requires one,” said Selig vehemently. “It says so in the position description in the City Green Book.”

“So it does,” Karp agreed, “and we have general support for right to hearing before dismissal in several sections of the state Civil Service Law. But section 557 (a) of the Administrative Code says the Mayor can boot you out just by telling you why. Which, of course, he did.”

A puzzled frown appeared on Selig’s face. “But that doesn’t make any sense. How can the law say two different things?”

Karp laughed briefly. “How indeed? Now you know why lawyers make the big bucks. Look, Murray: doctors wear white coats because they have to make sure there’s no dirt on them. Judges wear black robes so the dirt don’t show. The job here is to devise some way of saying that although there appears to be conflict, precedent tells the judge to resolve it in our favor.” Karp studied his yellow crib sheet and made a note on its margins. Then he handed his client a document of some twenty or so closely typed sheets. “This is how I think the questioning is going to go. What I mean is, those are the questions I’d ask you if I was on the other side. Let’s go through them one by one, because I want to hear your answers.”

“Don’t I swear to tell the whole truth?” asked Selig lightly.

“Only if they ask for it, Murray,” said Karp. “And if I let you.”

Before her visit to Marlene’s loft, Stupenagel had no thought of doing anything dramatic with her evening. She had planned to return to her West End Avenue sublet to work on her story over a bag of take-out Chinese. Marlene’s tale, however, and the evidence of her damaged face, had gotten under her skin. Although she was genuinely fond of Marlene, she was most fond of her when Marlene kept to her place, which in Stupenagel’s mind was Mom, Wifey, and at the most, Legal Drudge. It was entirely unacceptable for Marlene to have the sort of adventure she had just experienced, except, of course, by accident. That Marlene had planned to risk her neck in this way vexed the reporter no end, because if Marlene could have her luxurious and now trendy loft, and a baby, and a husband whom she did not despise, then she simply couldn’t be allowed to embark on that kind of adventure, the kind that Stupenagel herself routinely arranged to have. That was the deal that Stupenagel had made with life, and it did not bear thinking that it might not be universally valid.

To her credit, she did not have for Marlene any ill will because of this; nor did she plan to discommode her in any way, beyond the sort of nastiness native to the profession of journalism. But she did enjoy twitting Marlene for being a hausfrau, and planned to continue to do so, and this was only feasible if she continued to outclass Marlene in the adventure business.

These thoughts occupied her as she strolled aimlessly up Grand Street and across Mulberry, past the shuttered groceries and import shops, and the storefront social clubs around which clustered groups of flashy young men, leaning on their double-parked cars. There was trouble, she thought, but not precisely the right kind. She received a good deal of commentary as she walked past these knots of wise guys. One of the men, short, hairy, and drunk, stood grinning in her path, demanding an obscene favor and handling his genitals, while his pals urged him on. Stupenagel had in her bag, beside camera and notebook, a short, razor-sharp, bone-handled Arab dagger she’d picked up during her first visit to Syria, and she considered briefly gutting this man with it and then escaping from the country with the Mafia on her tail, and whether that would make a good story. That such an action would cross her mind at all showed how irritable she had become out of this silly Marlene thing. She straightened herself, gave the man a withering look, and walked around him as if he had been a load of dog poop on the pavement.

It was at that moment that it popped into her head that she would go undercover as a gypsy cab driver and catch Detective Paul Jackson at whatever it was he was doing.