Falsely Accused

EIGHT

Marlene waited a couple of days, until Karp was more or less over the snit he had got into over the Lanin affair, and they were comfortably settled in the marriage bed, before she sprang it on him. He laughed and said, “Yeah, right!” before it struck him that she was not laughing along.

“You’re not serious?” he asked.

“Yeah, I’m serious. I think it’s a good idea.”

“It’s the worst idea you ever had, Marlene,” said Karp, “and that’s a tough league.”

“Why? Why is it such a bad idea?”

He sighed. “Babe, private investigators are high school graduates. You went to Yale Law. You were on law review. You have a mind. I can’t believe you’re actually thinking of spending your life following sleazes around with a camera.”

“You’re not listening to me,” said Marlene in a controlled voice. “Listen to what I said. I want to start a service that specializes in helping women who are being harassed, and that’d include legal rep as well as straight P.I. I’m not talking about tort or divorce work.”

Karp shifted in bed and gave her a searching look.

“When you say P.I. work, you mean stuff like what gave you that face?”

“Not necessarily.”

“No? Then what? What are you going to do within a legal framework that the cops can’t do a whole lot better?”

“The cops do hardly anything, and you know it,” she retorted. “Enforcing protective orders is down below littering on their priority list. As for what I’m going to do, I’m going to do whatever it takes.”

“You and Harry Bello are going to do this?”

“Yeah. He likes the idea. He’s going to hand in his tin this week.”

“Oh, terrific! Marlene, he’s a psychopath.”

“He’s not a psychopath! How can you say that? He’s your daughter’s godfather.”

Karp tried another tack. “And the two of you think you can make a living from this?”

“What living? Harry’s got his pension, and as far as I know, we certainly don’t have any money problems. Why, is Daddy going to cut me off without a penny if I do this?”

“Oh, of course not, Marlene,” said Karp, starting to feel trapped. “But … God, with just the pair of you … I mean, it’s going to be an all-hours thing. What about Lucy?”

“What about her? We seemed to do okay when we were both at the D.A. working crazy hours and she was a lot younger and needed more attention.”

“And the new baby …?”

“I’ll deal with that when it happens,” she snapped, and then, in a more even tone, “Look, this isn’t about money or domestic arrangements. If I had a job with a firm or a prosecutor’s office, you’d be buying champagne. So what is it?”

“Oh, for crying out loud, Marlene, look in the mirror!”

“What, I got hurt? Jeez, Butch, so I got hurt. I’ve been hurt worse. I thought we had a deal on that.”

Karp paused before answering, trying for a locution that wouldn’t send this discussion off into a raging fight. Still, he could not keep a trace of bitterness from his voice.

“What deal was that, Marlene? The one where you get to do all the irresponsible stuff and I get to eat my heart out?”

Marlene looked at him soberly and nodded, twice. “Yes, I understand that it’s hard for you. But, look, Butch-right after we started going together, I got myself blown up by a bomb. A year later, more or less, I got myself kidnapped and tortured by a gang of satanists. That was before we got married. You must have had a hint, at least, that I wasn’t going to be like your mom.”

Karp did not respond to this verbally. Instead he riffled the pages of the law book he had been reading when this conversation began, and arranged his face in the mulish, tight-jawed expression that he adopted when Marlene was pressing him to come clean with some negative thought.

“Well?” she said, after a minute of strained silence. “Is that what it is? The danger business?”

“No,” Karp admitted. “Not that that doesn’t suck too, but no.”

“What, then? Christ, Butch, come out with it!”

It came, in a rush. “All right. What you’re doing, what you’re planning, it’s not just going to be P.I. work. It’s going to be more of the kind of thing you pulled with Pruitt-”

“Not necess-”

“Let me finish! When it comes down to a case of letting the law take its course, or making sure that some woman doesn’t get hurt, I know what you’re going to do and so do you. It’s going to involve taking out the male party, Marlene. And some of these guys are persistent. So maybe in the back of your mind, there’s a thought about making it permanent. In some cases. I’d bet my next three paychecks that stuff like that would not faze Harry one little bit. And it’s wrong. Don’t you think I know the law’s fucked up in the domestic area? Jesus, Marlene, I was a homicide prosecutor for twelve years! There are probably five domestic homicides for every crime-connected murder. But if you want to change that, do it right! Run for office, lobby Albany, be a legal counsel at one of those shelters, anything, but don’t do this, what you’re thinking about. Because as sure as my ass is on this mattress, you’re going to get in trouble, not little trouble, but big trouble, disbarment trouble, Class A felony trouble. And the worst thing is, while you’re getting in this trouble, you can’t talk about it with me. We can’t be-I don’t know-together in the way I want us to be, because I can’t know about that kind of shit. You understand what I’m saying? I can’t know about it.”

“Why? Because you’ll turn me in?” She asked this lightly, not at all liking how this conversation was turning out, but Karp answered with grim seriousness.

“Yes,” he said, grimly. “In a heartbeat. Christ, Marlene, you know the damn law on conspiracy and accessory to felony. You got away with this goddamn Lanin deal because Harry’s a cop and he covered for you, but if he’s private, he won’t be able to do that.”

“Butch, this is a ridiculous conversation. You sound like I’m planning to set up Murder Incorporated. It’s a security and investigation service.”

“Is it?” he asked coldly. “Fine, then. I beg your pardon. Just so you know that there is no way in hell that our child-excuse me, our children-are ever going to end up with both their parents in jail.” Karp let a long breath out through his nostrils and propped his book up on his chest and started to pretend to read it. Marlene stared at him for a while and then plumped her pillows and got out a magazine. For a long time, until they switched off their lights, the only sound was the turning of pages.

Stupenagel’s article about Marlene’s work on behalf of Carrie Lanin was published two weeks later in the Village Voice. It was a good piece, Marlene thought, almost good enough to make her not hate the reporter for publishing a photograph of what Pruitt had done to her face. Marlene had not been the only interview: Stupe had broadened the article to cover the whole phenomenon of women being stalked in New York, and seemed to have ferreted out anyone in the greater metropolitan area who had ever thought seriously about violence against women resulting from that peculiar obsession.

Marlene read the article twice, underlining here and there and making marginal notes. Then she called Stupenagel.

“You total shit,” she said when the reporter picked up the phone.

“Marlene! You saw the article?”

“Of course I saw it, you jerk! How could you do that to me? Oh, crap! Why do I even ask?”

“What’s wrong? I thought you came out of it very well,” said Stupenagel. “They even put a sidebar in there describing your colorful past.”

“What’s wrong is that I’m going to have to carry this face to my mom’s house on Sunday, and it’s improved enough to give me a shot at passing it off with a white lie about a car wreck, which you have rendered impossible by printing that picture and dwelling on how it happened.”

“Yeah, but how did you like the piece?” said Ariadne.

Marlene bit back a ferocious response. There was as much point in getting angry with Ariadne for the wreckage she occasionally left in her wake as it would be to get miffed at a typhoon; the woman was as insensitive as a tropical low.

“I loved it,” said Marlene. “I’m going to have it bronzed. I was especially fascinated with that NYU woman you dug up-is she legit?”

“Professor Malkin? Oh, yeah, legit up the wazoo. Did you like the typology? Slobs, sadists, and strangers. I love it!”

“Yeah, but what I wanted to know was, did she have some way of telling them apart, I mean at the beginning?”

“Hmmm, interesting question,” said the reporter. “To tell the truth, I didn’t get into it with her that deeply. I went to her because she had the statistics I needed, and I just threw the three-types thing in because I thought it sounded neat. Why are you asking?”

“Oh, just curiosity,” said Marlene disingenuously. “Do you happen to have the good professor’s number?”

Clunk of phone and rustle of paper while she fished it out. After Marlene wrote it down she asked, “And what’s with you, Stupe? Anything happening in the great world?”

“I cut off all my hair,” said Stupenagel, to Marlene’s surprise. She was not surprised that she had done it, just that she thought it worthy of mention.

“Did you?”

“Yes. And dyed it black. Very punky.”

“Getting interested in fashion, are we, in our old age?”

“One must keep up,” said Stupenagel airily. “For some of us, the ability to make tempting popovers does not suffice. Speaking of fashion, though, did you ever get back with Suzy Poole?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And?”

“Bye, Stupe.”

Marlene pushed the button down in the middle of Stupenagel’s outraged squawk, and immediately dialed Professor Malkin’s number. She got a secretary and made an appointment for a week hence. Then she dressed carefully, with as much fashion as she could manage, and called a cab.

The model, Suzy Poole, lived in a high-rise apartment building on Fifth Avenue at Seventy-first Street. The security was about what you would expect in a government installation holding mid-level nuclear secrets. Marlene was examined, checked over the intercom, and elevatored to the fifteenth floor by a manned car, whose operator waited to see her admitted to the Poole apartment.

Which was largely white and black, with splashes of meaningless abstract color and neon sculptures on plain stands, an obvious package by a decorator at the forward edge of au courant. Poole herself was garbed in black-tights and a sort of loose Chinese jacket in heavy cotton, an outfit that, in combination with her essential physique, made her look like a recent releasee from a Japanese prison camp. Her face, despite the famous razor cheekbones and a nose that appeared to have more than a normal complement of tiny, angled bones, seemed, without the intervening miracle of photography, curiously malformed, like that of an embryo bird.

Marlene was seated in a complicated chrome and leather sling, offered a drink, stared at with frank horror, and subjected to a long story of persecution. She took notes. The gentleman was named Jonathan Seely. He was an account executive at a big ad agency that had hired Ms. Poole to associate her cheekbones with an upmarket new perfume. A romance had blossomed, then faded, when Ms. Poole had discovered the gentleman was, as she put it, a sadistic son of a bitch. He had hit her. In the face. Now he wouldn’t stop calling. Somehow he was able to obtain her private, private number, however often she changed it. Every time the phone rang she jumped. It was interfering with her work. She was a prisoner in her own home. And so on.

Marlene closed her notebook. The model stopped talking and looked at her expectantly. Marlene said, “Well, I think I have enough to go on. Let me do some nosing around and get back to you. Tomorrow?”

Suzy Poole let a crease of doubt mar her perfection. “Umm, sure, but what do you think now? Will you be able to help?”

“Oh, yeah, I think so.”

“Like what? Not guards.”

“Oh, no. You don’t need me for guards, and the point is not to make a more secure prison for yourself, but to make him stop bothering you. For example, I noticed you haven’t filed for a protective order. That’d be one of our first steps.”

Poole made a moue of distaste, charming. “Ooh, do we have to, like, involve the courts? I mean, can’t we handle it in a more discreet way?”

“You’re concerned about this guy messing with your career if you name him publicly in a legal action?”

“I guess.”

Marlene fixed the woman’s enormous dark blue eyes with her solo jet one, and said, “Let’s get one thing straight before we go any further, Ms. Poole. This man has declared war on you. He is torturing you. He is beyond decency. Pleas haven’t helped. In order to make him stop, we must therefore make his life as unpleasant-no, more unpleasant-than he has made yours. Now, I think I can do that, and going to court is-”

The phone rang. Suzy Poole uttered a little startled noise and touched her hand to her heart.

“I’ll get it,” said Marlene, and picked up the nearest phone before Poole could say a word.

“Bitch!” said a hissing voice in Marlene’s ear.

“Mr. Seely?” said Marlene pleasantly. “This is Ms. Poole’s protective service. We ask you please not to call this number again.”

Silence, and then the click of a disconnection.

“He’ll call again,” said Marlene. “If you’re going to go ahead with this, I’ll have my partner make an appointment to rig up a recording device on your line. It’s critical that we get a physical record of him annoying you. So, are we hired?”

Suzy Poole nodded. “Yes. You’re hired. Do you, ah, want me to give you a check?”

“Not right now,” said Marlene. “I want to get my license first.”

When Marlene left Suzy Poole’s she cabbed downtown (marking the cab ride as a legitimate expense in a little book she had purchased for this purpose) and filed a P.I. application at the New York State Building on Foley Square. It was a formality. The state of New York does not want lowlife types carrying guns and poking into the private affairs of its citizens, and so keeps its private-investigator licensing laws strict. The stringency is, however, greatly reduced for former members of the NYPD, and a cynic might see a connection between the verve with which the police resist any relaxation of the City’s laws against legal gun ownership (in a town where any fifteen-year-old can pick up a piece for pocket change) and the ease with which retired cops float into the armed security business. Harry would have no trouble getting a P.I. license, and, of course, neither would the respectable lawyer and former prosecutor Marlene Ciampi.

After that, she walked a few blocks south and met Harry Bello at a cop bar near One Police Plaza, where he had just finished the act of handing in his gold potsy. There would be no big retirement racket for Harry. He had used up his friends on the Job. Harry had shot a kid, a kid who might or might not have killed his partner, killed him in cold blood and then dropped a cheap pistol on the corpse, and the cops knew it and covered for him, to protect the department, but people didn’t want to know him after that.

The place was busy, yet Harry had two empty stools on either side of him at the bar. He was drinking club soda and shuffling through a set of retirement papers.

“How’s the pension?” she asked as she sat down.

“I got Lucy as my beneficiary,” he said. “Is that okay?”

“It’s fine, Harry. I just this minute came from our first customer.”

Raised eyebrow.

“I think we can help her. The guy is a taxpayer; he won’t stand up to a serious nudge.”

Harry said, “No way. Not again.”

“I wasn’t thinking about anything as elaborate as the Pruitt thing, Harry. This guy is a different type. There’s a woman I need to see at NYU; apparently she’s got a line on who stalks and why. I think this model’s bum is going to be easy money. Oh, by the way, I got these.”

Marlene reached into her bag and brought out a small brick-shaped box. She opened it and handed Bello one of the business cards it contained, printed with:

Bello amp; Ciampi

Investigations Security

with the Crosby Street address and an unfamiliar phone number.

“The number’s an answering service,” Marlene explained. “We’ll work out of my place until we’re rich enough to spring for an office. What do you think? Bello and Ciampi, pretty classy, huh?”

“Fresh fish,” said Bello, deadpan.

“Why, Harry,” said Marlene in a tone of exaggerated wonder. “I believe that you have just made a light or humorous remark. You know, I think retirement is going to do you some good.”

Phil DeLino’s call caught Karp just as he was about to leave. He stood in his office holding his coat and took it.

“May twenty-third,” said DeLino.

“What’s May twenty-third?” asked Karp.

“What you were so hot to find out. I spoke to His Honor and went over his calendars. May twenty-third is the first date that we can remember Bloom bringing up that we ought to fire Murray Selig. After that it was the subject of lots of calls and at least three meetings.”

“Why?” Karp asked with growing interest. “What was the reason? And why just then?”

“I drew a blank there, buddy. The Mayor doesn’t know either. Guy just got a bug in his bonnet.”

“Mmm. Maybe. Look, thanks, Phil, and if you chance across anything else, I’d appreciate knowing about it.”

“Will do. By the way, the Mayor enjoyed his session with you. It made him wish he was still practicing law. And he told me to tell you, quote, when Jack Weller fires his sorry Jewish ass, he can come by and work for me, unquote.”

Stupenagel drove slowly up Lexington Avenue in East Harlem, trying to steer the ancient black Chevy around the worst potholes. The shocks were nearly gone, and when she went over a bad one the jolt made her teeth clatter. It was her third night on the job, and she had by now acquired the greatest respect for the way in which gypsy cab drivers made their living.

She was wearing a tattered leather jacket and had a greasy Mets cap pulled down over her eyes. It did not do Stupenagel’s vanity much good to be able to pass as a man so easily, but it had often been useful to her professionally. She was good at it too. The guy running the garage, a Dominican, had barely looked at her before sending her out in his worst beater.

The garage boss was, in fact, only interested in the phony license she presented, and her demonstrated facility in both Spanish and English. Gypsy hacks didn’t last long in New York, and bilingual ones were a prize. She had a crackling dashboard-mounted radio that occasionally squawked her number and told her where to go for a pickup. The gypsies, she was learning, fulfilled an essential social purpose, in that they were the only automobile transportation available to the City’s legions of poor. Into her cab whole families had piled, clown-car fashion, to go to a christening or a funeral, and when the poor moved, which was often, they loaded their entire worldly store into the gypsies for shipment from one rotten apartment to another. This much was legal.

The other side of the gypsy business (illegal) arose from the reluctance of the real taxicabs, the yellow ones with the high-priced official medallion from the hack bureau on their hoods, to travel in upper Manhattan, or other rough regions of the City, or to pick up from the street members of the darker-hued minorities.

It was, of course, well known that gypsy cabs picked up people who hailed them on the street. Since their cabs had no meters, each driver would engage in a brief negotiation with the passenger for the fare and then pocket it. The garage that owned the cab only had claim to the radio pickup fares, and it was understood that gypsy cabbies would supplement their fares in this way; indeed, it was virtually a necessity of survival, given the miserable wage paid by the garages.

Stupenagel had done plenty of street pickups, far more than was usual for real gypsies, who had constantly to worry about being pinched by hack bureau inspectors or cops. She, on the other hand, was looking to get caught, and in three days she had taken in over two hundred dollars.

There was a man standing in the avenue at 147th, under a streetlamp, with his hand up. Stupenagel swerved and slowed and looked the man over. A short man, vanilla gringo or P.R., with a mustache, wearing a raincoat and a leather porkpie hat with the brim turned up. She figured him for a musician; uptown musicians made up a considerable proportion of the gypsies’ late business. She stopped and the man got in.

“Where to, man?” she asked, pitching her voice low.

He leaned forward and held out a gold shield in a leather holder. “Make this next right and pull over,” he said.

“Ah, shit!” she said. “You from the hack bureau?”

“Shut up and move it!” he replied.

She made the turn, and her passenger directed her to park behind a black Plymouth Fury.

A man got out of the Fury. The passenger said, “Get out!” and she did and he did too. The man from the Fury was large and dark and wearing an expensive tan topcoat. He had a broad, heavy-browed face, on which he carried that peculiar expression, both amused and predatory, characteristic of men confident in some arbitrary power, shortly to be used. Stupenagel had seen it dozens of times around the world, on Eastern European apparatchiki and policemen, on guerillas at Central American crossroads, on the officers trying to extirpate those guerillas. She had not encountered it before in her own country, however, and she felt the beginnings of fear.

“You been a naughty boy, Pedro,” said the big man, coming closer and looking her up and down. “You picked up a fare off the street without a license.” He held out a meaty hand. “Give it over!”

“What?” asked Stupenagel stupidly.

The hand flew up in a blur and cracked her across the jaw. She sprawled backward against the cab’s fender.

“Hey, he ain’t a spic, Paulie,” remarked the other man.

“No, he sure ain’t,” agreed the big man. “Hey, shitface, what’s a white man doing driving a gypsy up in greaser heaven?”

Stupenagel’s head was still ringing from the blow, and she didn’t answer. The big man kicked her painfully in the ankle.

“Pzhalsteh, gospodin, pzhalsteh …” she gasped in the most obsequious voice she could manage.

“What’s that, Polack?” asked the other man.

“Or Russian. You a Russky, shitface?”

“Yes … Russian,” Stupenagel answered.

“Jesus, the fuckin’ foreigners are taking over the damn country,” said the big man. “You understand money, right? Stand the fuck up when I talk to you! Let’s have the money.”

Stupenagel stood and dug into the pocket of her leather jacket, coming out with a thick wad of bills, which the big man snatched from her hand.

“Hey, hey, look at this!” the man exclaimed. “You been a hard worker, boy.” He separated out most of the bills and let the rest, mostly singles, drop to the pavement. After a second’s hesitation she stooped and picked them up.

“That’s for your license. You understand license?” the big man said in the unnaturally loud voice used to communicate with idiots and foreigners. “But look, Ivan, you got to renew it every week, understand? Today’s Wednesday-you understand?”

“Yes, Vednesday,” said Stupenagel.

“You come back here every Wednesday, this time. You have a hundred for me, yes? Understand?”

Stupenagel nodded.

The big man grinned at her. He had white, evenly capped teeth, she noticed, the kind that very few of the people who drove gypsy cabs had in their mouths. “Good,” he said. “But if you drive in my neighborhood without a license … not good.” He popped her on the shoulder a couple of times, playfully but hard. “Boom, boom, go to jail. Understand? Okay, get the fuck out of here! Back to work!”

He turned away, dismissing her. She climbed back into the Chevy, cranked it up, and drove off. She went directly to the garage, which was in Inwood, by the river, parked, and went into the tiny garage office. When she turned her keys, money, and trip sheets in to the night man, he looked meaningfully at the clock.

“Your shift ain’t over until four,” he said.

“I’m quitting,” she said. The man shrugged, counted her cash, peeled off some bills, and shoved them across the grimy desk at her. She pocketed the cash without bothering to count it. The night man whistled, as for a dog.

A small man, with red-brown skin, with high cheekbones and crow-wing hair stood in the doorway. The night man asked him in Spanish if he wanted a ride. The man said yes. Stupenagel wanted to tell him, to warn him, but couldn’t think of what to say, how to explain what was going on up there. And he wouldn’t understand. Even ripped off, the man would make in a month what would take him a year to earn in Central America. Instead, what she said, in Spanish, was, “You can drive me home, brother. I can be your first fare.”