Falsely Accused

NINE

Professor Gloria Malkin of the New York University sociology department was twenty-nine years old, not bad at all for an associate with tenure. More remarkably, she looked about twelve. Not more than four-ten, Marlene thought, a little foxy in the face but nice clear brown eyes, the slightest indication of breasts under the prim white Oxford shirt and grass green sweater. She had frizzy pale tan hair yanked back into an old-fashioned ponytail tied with a bead and elastic holder. She was one of those women who fell into their look in sophomore year and found thereafter no reason to change.

Unlike Marlene. She had chosen to appear for the interview in her biker gang momma thug outfit: knee boots, black jeans, a Navy sweater, black leather jacket with the shiny zips. Her hair had grown out into thick, springy sable coils, which bounced around her face, Medusa-like. Also, she was wearing a patch over her eye rather than the glassie, and not a drugstore black paper model either, but a narrow, soft-leather item of the type favored by actors playing German officers in the last war. She told herself that it was a professional look, considering her new profession.

“My secretary said you were a private detective,” said the professor by way of opening. “I don’t think I’ve ever actually met a private detective before. It sounds romantic.”

“Yes, that’s odd, isn’t it?” said Marlene. “The professions that have attracted the interest of romance writers are a funny bunch. Pirate. Cowboy.”

“Spy. Artist. Yes, I imagine for the people who actually do them, they must be the same as-I don’t know-tax accountancy or installing washing machines.”

“Yes, that’s what you’re supposed to say,” said Marlene, “but in fact, it’s unutterably romantic. Rushing around in cabs following people. Wearing black clothes and sneaking into places. Violence.”

“I’m impressed,” said Malkin. “The violence. Is that how you …” She gestured at Marlene’s face.

“Yes. I got beat up.”

“And the eye the same?”

“No, that was a while ago. I was a prosecutor then. Somebody sent a bomb in the mail.”

Malkin’s eyes widened. “Oh, you’re that one! In the article in the Voice. I should have made the connection.”

“Yes. In fact, Ariadne’s a friend of mine. How I got your number.”

“Speaking of romantic occupations. Well, my gosh, this is just like being in a comic strip. First Brenda Starr and now a female crime fighter … Wonder Woman? No, the Cat Lady!”

They laughed at that together and then talked casually for a while, trading career backgrounds, until Malkin said, “Well, unless you’re recruiting for a mousy sidekick, you must have had a reason for coming to see me. I imagine it was that article.”

“Yeah, it was,” said Marlene. “I’m trying to develop a service that specializes in stalking cases.”

“Really? That’s fascinating. Do you have some kind of foundation support?”

“No, why?”

“Well, because most women whose lives have deteriorated to the point where they’re being stalked or brutalized are usually in no position to lay out any money for protection.”

“Good point,” said Marlene. “My husband raised it too. I guess it hasn’t been a problem yet. As a matter of fact, I just finished a case that was very lucrative. A fashion model.”

“You stopped whoever was stalking her?”

“So far. My sense of this guy is that he won’t be back. I don’t think he was a true obsessive, just a nasty who liked to torture the animals. Which is really why I came to see you.”

“Yes, the typology,” said Malkin almost dismissively. “But tell me, how did you do it? Make him stop.”

“You want to hear this? Yeah, well, briefly, first we got out a protective order. The guy called anyway, and we had him on the recorder. I got the client to egg him on, insult him, and he got really vile-totally lost control. Threats, obscenity-he really started wailing on how he was going to mutilate her sexual organs. Funny, because he was supposedly this classy guy. Drunk probably. In any case, we take the tape to the judge, and he issues a contempt citation, and the cops pick him up at work. Handcuffs, the whole nine yards. Of course, he makes bail and goes back to the office to straighten things out. I guess he figured he could use the hysterical woman mad with jealousy gambit.”

“And didn’t he?” Malkin asked. Her eyes were sparkling, and she had curled herself up in her chair, like a Girl Scout listening to ghost stories around the fire.

“No. Actually, my partner walked into his office while he was out and put a copy of the tape on the office P.A. system. I don’t think it did his career much good. He specialized in fashion advertising, and a lot of the heavy hitters in that business are women. Anyway, when he found this out, he threw caution to the winds and went straight for her. To her building, I mean. And he got in.”

“My God! Didn’t she have security in the building?”

“Oh, yeah, plenty. But it turned out the doorman was distracted for the moment, and Mr. Nice got up to her apartment by the fire stairs. Fortunately, my partner was there with the client. The guy became violent and had to be subdued.”

“Subdued?”

“Yeah. He broke his arm and his jaw in the struggle. Lost a number of teeth too. He’s in the prison ward at Riker’s, charged with assault, criminal trespass, and contempt. What is that look for?”

“I imagine that you are referring to the look that we sociologists give to our informants when our informants have chosen to leave valuable information unvoiced. For example, to take the present case, we observe a remarkable and unlikely set of circumstances. The culprit is enraged, the doorman is distracted-by what, we may wonder-the former victim is at home. Strangely enough, she lets him into her apartment, and by another great coincidence there is a guardian capable of subduing the culprit and causing him severe injury. The word setup springs to mind.”

“The police are satisfied that we acted within the dictates of the law,” replied Marlene primly. “Scumbags who get their lumps tend to be even less of a priority than women being stalked, if you can believe that.”

“I can, barely,” said Malkin. “So, is making sure that scumbags get their lumps going to be your usual service?”

“Not at all, although I should point out that if some unpleasant and reckless person wants to walk into a doorknob, I don’t think it’s our obligation to yank it away. I’d like to be able to adjust our service to the degree of risk to the client.”

“I see. That’s where the typology comes in, you think?”

“Yes.”

“Okay-briefly, my belief is that there are three separate types of stalkers. What the article called the slobs are blue-collar types with a history of batting the girls around. When the women get tired of it and want to leave, they become insanely jealous. Why would they leave unless they want to screw somebody else? So they stalk, and they sometimes kill, and when they do they often kill themselves too. The sadists are usually white-collar or better, control freaks, who get their kicks out of torturing the ladies, and the stalking is just a refinement of the torture. The strangers are wackos who fix on some woman as part of their twist. Could be a movie actress or a rock star, or somebody they saw on the street that triggers the twitch.”

Marlene broke in. “Yeah, okay, three types-and what I’m asking is, is there, do you have some way of, like, taking some data from the guys-appearance, activities, how they do the stalk and so on- that would let you decide which type they are?” She took a notebook and a pencil out of her jacket pocket.

Malkin thought about Marlene’s question, staring up at a corner of the ceiling and knotting her brows in an appropriately professorial manner. At length she said, “For what I think are your purposes, the answer is no. That is, the typology isn’t firm enough to use as the basis for a predictive model. We’re talking about a much broader population than we are for, say, serial killers. We can look at a murder set, for example, and say with a pretty high degree of confidence, a serial killer did these and he’s going to kill again. In the same way, serials form such a small, tight group that we can make good generalizations about them: white male, twenty-five to forty, middle-class, menial work, lives alone or with Mom, and the rest of it. Stalkers, we’re talking about a much, much more ill-defined bunch of people. First of all, the act itself: what’s stalking? Driving by the old girlfriend’s house a couple of times? How many unwanted phone calls, how many unwanted bouquets do we have to have before we call it pathological? Okay, to start breaking down the problem, I developed these three groups. I don’t know if they’re organic groups or not, whether they’re different because there’s something really different going on in their heads, or whether the apparent differences are superficial. That’s because I don’t know enough about the causes and etiology of obsession. Nobody does. There’s no … natural history, no close observation over generations, like there were when biology, say, first became a real science. You could say that we’re back there where Aristotle was with nature. Some trees are pointed, others are bushy. Some animals have four legs, some two, some none. Okay, given those caveats, let’s take the slobs first. Those are her names-the reporter’s, by the way-not mine. The slob is into romance, big-time. You know what they say, in real love you want what’s best for the loved one; in romantic love you just want the loved one. The romantic construct is created in the mind, of which the actual woman is the living symbol. The construct offers unconditional, infinite love, transcendent love. It’s a substitute for religion, in fact. But the loved one is an actual woman made of meat. She has needs, a personality. Sometimes she has to withdraw from the relationship, from her symbolic role, in service of her own ego. This is a disaster for him. He can’t handle the dissonance between his romantic construct and its symbol. Why would she withdraw? he asks, and since he doesn’t see her as a real person who might have a perfectly good reason for withdrawing, such as a need to work, or child care, it must be another man who’s stealing his possession. So now we’re in Othello. The escalating violence begins; the escalation is diagnostic, by the way. Shouting, to hitting, to serious injury, maybe. So she leaves, and then the stalking starts. Continued profession of love throughout, another diagnostic. He literally would die for her, and he often does, after he’s killed her, naturally. In maybe eighty percent of these things we have drugs or alcohol involved. The good news about the slob type is that if you catch it early enough, and you get tough, and you have the right situation, you can penetrate the illusion, establish a considerate, humane relationship. The bad news is that a certain percentage of these guys will never stop until the woman’s dead.”

“Or he’s dead,” said Marlene.

Malkin seemed startled by this, as if it had not occurred to her. She nodded. “Of course. Or he’s dead. Okay, sadists. The sadist is rarer. Here the operator is not romance and jealousy, but domination. By the way, we’re not talking about consensual sexual games, which is an entirely different bunch of people, the S-M crowd. No, here we have a psychopath and his victim. Often we have a respectable citizen, a taxpayer. We have cold, dispassionate punishment, not hot rage and jealousy. You’ve been a bad girl and Daddy has to punish you. They have actual torture implements sometimes. The woman has to fetch them from the closet and so on. The rule is control, the woman reduced, once again, to an object, and since that’s the case, we don’t see quite as many homicides here. What we get is suicide; the woman can’t take it anymore, he’s stripped her so far down that she really is a nothing, and she checks out. Then he goes and gets another one, or maybe he doesn’t wait, he goes after the daughter, or somebody else. Here’s where you get your bigamists, your secret families. This guy is a narcissist too; he’ll stalk because he’s into torture, but he doesn’t want to deal with any punishment, so he can be turned aside from a particular woman, as you may well have done with your Mr. Seely. If you find a nasty kid tearing wings off flies and you take the fly away from him, he’s not going to break his neck chasing after that particular fly. He’ll get another fly that’s just as good.”

“You think they’re not as dangerous as the slobs?” Marlene asked.

“It depends. On the one hand, if you expose the dirty secret, threaten him, the guy will often back down. On the other hand, I suspect that this type shades into a heavier psychopathology and your true serials. They dispense with even the pretense of an actual relationship and move into a stereotyped pattern of stalk, torture, murder, dispose. Jack the Ripper. Ted Bundy. But that type wouldn’t come into your purview, would it?”

“I hope not,” said Marlene with deep sincerity. “And what about the strangers?”

Malkin stretched and performed an elaborate shrug. “Who knows? They’re even rarer; there’s practically no data. I think we’re looking at a variant of the slob, except the relationship is entirely in his head. Sometimes they’ll fixate on a movie star or a singer and follow her around. Or him: John Lennon. These guys are generally disorganized individuals, drifters. But sometimes not. I happen to think that a lot of rape comes out of this kind of psychology.”

“Me too,” said Marlene. “I think these guys sometimes become what we used to call ‘gentleman rapists.’ They assault the woman and then they want to make polite conversation, like they were on a nice date. Some of these guys actually have made dates with the women they raped and we grabbed them when they showed up with candy and flowers. Go figure.”

“That’s what I try to do,” said the professor, smiling. “And you’ve just had the lecture, in short form. I give a course on patterns of sexual pathology at the New School. You saved yourself ninety dollars.”

“It would’ve been worth it,” said Marlene. “I appreciate the time.” She put away the notebook she’d been using.

“And now you’re going back to your crusade?”

“Is it a crusade? Unfortunately, you can’t smite everybody who might be wicked. The law frowns on it. And by the time they’ve shown their worst, the woman’s dead. How many is it getting to be now?”

“Nationally? Between thirteen and fifteen hundred, year in and year out. Slain by their loved ones. Do you know who Simon de Montfort was?”

Marlene started. “That was from left field,” she said. “Hmm. Crusader type? Not a sweetheart as I recall.”

“No. He was in charge of the crusade that suppressed the Cathar heretics in southern France. Thirteenth century. The story is his men asked him how they could separate the heretic captives from the good Catholics, and he said, ‘Kill them all. God will know his own.’”

“Sounds like my kind of guy,” said Marlene lightly. It was the wrong tone; Professor Malkin was giving her a peculiar look, admiration mixed with a horrified avidity. The humor had drained out of her face. Marlene had to look away. She wants me to kill them, thought Marlene, and imagined what it would be like to spend all one’s time as the clerk in the abbatoir, the keeper of the rolls in our mild, domestic Belsen, immersed in case histories, in the horror stories of implacable men, of perverted love, of tortured and slaughtered women. Kill them all. Marlene did not have to plumb too deeply to reach those same feelings; she had to suppress a shudder.

“There’s somebody I think you should meet,” Malkin was saying as Marlene snapped back to attention. “If you’re going to be a crusader, you should meet the others.” She riffled through a Rolodex and wrote something on an index card.

“I didn’t know there were others,” said Marlene, taking the card. “And I’m not sure I’m a crusader.” The name on the card was Mattie Duran, and the address was the East Village Women’s Shelter, on Avenue B.

“You and Mattie should have a lot to talk about,” said Malkin confidently. “She’s quite a character. They call her the Durango Kid.”

When Marlene left the professor’s office and walked out into Washington Square, she was thinking that Professor Malkin probably considered Marlene quite a character too. A wave of regret passed over her, and she suddenly felt ridiculous: her outfit, her recent activities, her plans, all seemed at that moment absurd. She cursed under her breath, put her head down and her hands in her pockets, and strode off down the street, kicking the damp piles of fallen leaves. Respectable people moved out of her way.

Karp said, “Would you please state your name for the record?”

“You know who I am,” said the district attorney, Sanford Bloom. He smiled his famous perfect smile at his lawyer. His lawyer smiled too. Bloom’s lawyer was named Conrad Wharton, and he smiled with the purse-lipped pucker of an old-fashioned kewpie doll, which, with his puff of colorless hair and round pink face, he disturbingly resembled. He was not a particularly good lawyer (it was Karp’s opinion that the D.A. would not know a good lawyer if one bit him on the ass), but Wharton had once been Bloom’s administrative chief and hatchet man, and Bloom, for whatever reason, trusted him. Besides that, Wharton probably disliked Karp with an intensity greater than that of any other person in the state of New York, not excluding the several score people Karp had sent to Attica for murder. Karp thought that this was a big part of why Bloom had chosen Wharton. He wanted to piss Karp off. He wasn’t taking this deposition or the case very seriously.

Karp repeated the question calmly and got the same answer. He said, “Mr. Wharton, tell your client that if he doesn’t give me his name, I will leave these proceedings right now and go over to Judge Craig and get an order requiring him to do so, and when the press asks me what’s going on, I’ll tell them that the D.A. required a court order to reveal his name.”

Bloom rolled his eyes at Wharton and said, “Sanford L. Bloom.”

“Thank you,” said Karp, and swore him in. The stenographer’s keys clattered. Karp handed Bloom a Xerox of the letter Bloom had written to the Mayor. “I give you a letter dated June twentieth of this year. It’s addressed to the Mayor and signed by you. Did you write it?”

“Yes, of course I did,” said Bloom after glancing at the document.

Karp consulted his notes and began with the most inflammatory charge. “In this letter you state that in late May of this year Assistant District Attorney James Warneke apprised you of deficiencies in the performance of the chief medical examiner, the present plaintiff, Dr. Selig, in reference to a homicide case, People v. Lotz, to wit: that he had failed to properly supervise the person who made the initial examination; that he had lost certain evidence in the case and threw other evidence away; that he altered the logbook at the morgue to conceal this; and finally, that he made remarks of an unprofessional nature, insulting to the dead victim in this case, namely that a positive acid phosphatase test performed on the victim’s vaginal secretions might not have been the result of seminal fluid but of snails. Mr. Warneke told you that Dr. Selig had said, quote, maybe she put snails up her vagina, unquote. Is that substantially correct?”

“Yes. That’s what’s in the letter.”

“Good. When Mr. Warneke conveyed all this to you, what action did you take?”

“Action?” asked the D.A.

“Yes. These were serious charges against a prominent official. Did you investigate them to see if they were true?”

Whispered consultation with Wharton. Bloom said, “I had no reason to doubt the report of Mr. Warneke.”

“Did you confront Dr. Selig with these charges?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I was not under any obligation to do so. And besides, Dr. Selig was often arrogant and dismissive when confronted with the failings of his office.”

Karp felt a stirring to his right. Murray Selig was getting steamed.

“Was he arrogant and dismissive to you personally, at face-to-face meetings?” Karp asked.

This required a consultation too, after which Bloom said, “Not to me personally, no, but to my people.”

“To Warneke?”

“No, Davis.”

“Oh, you’re referring to Miss Marsha Davis, the A.D.A. in People v. Ralston?”

“Yes.”

“I see. Now, according to Mr. Warneke’s deposition, which we have already taken, he brought these charges to your attention on May twenty-eighth of this year. Is that correct?”

“Yes, around about there.”

“All right. Referring now to the charges in the letter regarding the People v. Ralston case, Miss Davis accuses Dr. Selig of not making himself available to her in this case, of being late for a trial, although she gave him-what was it? — four weeks’ notice of the trial date, and also that on one occasion when she went to visit him in his office, he humiliated her in front of another gentleman. Is that what you meant by Dr. Selig’s arrogant and dismissive attitude?”

“Yes, that’s an example.”

“I see. But according to Miss Davis’s sworn deposition, you were not informed of these problems until mid-June at the earliest. Yet you still declined to investigate Mr. Warneke’s serious charges of late May, because Dr. Selig was arrogant and dismissive? Is that correct?”

The district attorney huffed and made an impatient gesture with his hand. “The details of when somebody came to me about this or that problem are not the point. It was well known that there were plenty of problems.”

“Was it?” asked Karp, leafing through a folder on the table. “I give you a copy of a letter dated February 11, commending Dr. Selig for the timely and expert assistance of his office in several difficult cases. It’s signed by you. Do you recall this letter?”

“I sign a lot of things,” said Bloom. He did not look at the letter.

“I’m sure you do. Can you account for the deterioration of Dr. Selig’s performance from exemplary in February to incompetent and worthy of dismissal in late May and early June?”

“I have no way of answering that.”

“Are you familiar with the letter written to the Mayor by the commissioner of Health, Dr. Angelo Fuerza, dated June fifth, containing a number of complaints about Dr. Selig’s performance?”

“I’ve seen it.”

“Did you at any time meet with Dr. Fuerza and the Mayor with the purpose of developing a case against Dr. Selig?”

“No.”

“Did you solicit, did you demand from your subordinates in the D.A.’s office, damaging information about Dr. Selig?”

“No, I did not.”

That’s a lie, thought Karp with satisfaction. Now let’s try for a few others. “Did you meet with the Mayor on May twenty-third to discuss your problems with Dr. Selig?”

Consultation with Wharton. “I’d have to consult my calendar.”

“No need. I give you a copy of the Mayor’s appointment book page for that date. You met with him. And did you discuss Dr. Selig?”

“I may have.”

“And isn’t it true that for your own reasons you decided that Dr. Selig had to be fired well before you received any complaints about him from your staff …”

“Don’t answer that!” said Wharton.

“… and that you are in fact the source of this conspiratorial vendetta against Dr. Selig?”

“This is preposterous!” said the D.A. A flush had spread across his smooth pink cheeks.

“I take it you are answering no to my last question.”

“Of course, no!”

“Thank you. Turning now to the charges in your letter related to the case People v. Mann. When did you first become aware of the charges that Dr. Selig had allegedly lost evidence in that case?”

Bloom seemed to relax as he answered the question, and the next, and the next. Karp took the D.A. over the four homicide cases mentioned in the letter to the Mayor. The questions were routine; Karp knew all the answers, having already deposed the staff people responsible for supplying the information. The purpose of the questioning was to establish the full involvement of the D.A. himself in the conspiracy to unseat Selig.

The questioning continued for some hours, until late in the afternoon. The windows in Karp’s office had already gone dark. A dullness had settled over the group. Karp had made his voice monotone. The questions were repetitive: when did you, what did you, I show you this letter, this memo, have you seen, are you familiar with?

And then, in the midst of this ennui, not changing his tone at all, casually Karp asked, “What occurred during the second or third week in May that convinced you that Dr. Selig had to be fired?”

A frozen moment. The tap of the steno’s fingers petered out in a dry rattle. Everyone looked at Bloom. Karp saw what he was looking for, the startled flick of the eyes, the movement at his throat as he swallowed hard. Karp looked at Wharton too, and he saw that Wharton had his little cherub’s mouth open, and that he was looking at his patron with confusion on his face.

This took only a second or two. Then Bloom cleared his throat, smiled, and shrugged. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Karp stared briefly at him and then continued, as if nothing had happened, with a question about some petty point about the chain of custody relative to a bloody shirt in People v. Mann.

Bloom and Wharton left soon afterward. The steno packed up her machine and left too. When they were alone, Murray Selig said, “I thought that went okay. You shook him up a couple of times.”

“It went about like I thought it would,” said Karp flatly, not looking at his client, arranging papers into piles.

After a pause, Selig asked, “You’re still pissed off at me.” It was a statement, not a question.

Karp said, “We’re not married, Murray. You’re the client. It doesn’t matter if I’m pissed off at you. The opposite, that would matter.”

Selig laughed unconvincingly. “You’re a hard guy, you know that, Butch? I told you, I forgot about those jobs.”

Karp looked up from his papers. “Murray, look: this is how it is. We prepped like crazy for your deposition by the defendants, and I remember telling you, I believe, numerous times, that a critical part of your case for damages was a showing that you could not be employed as a chief medical examiner, or as a competent authority in the field, because your reputation had been so badly besmirched by these momsers, and that therefore, if you had taken employment in your field, I needed to know about it, so I could advise you as to how to answer their questions relating thereto. Imagine how surprised I was, then, when the Mayor’s counsel asked you if you were negotiating for the job of chief fucking medical examiner of Suffolk County, and you said yes, you were.”

“I explained that, Butch. It was my in-laws doing me a favor. They’re big shots out in Suffolk.”

“Murray, it’s fine, God bless them. I just needed to know that beforehand. That, and the other little zingers that came out in deposition. A book contract you didn’t tell me about. That job you did up in Tuxedo-”

“That’s chickenfeed!”

“To you it’s chickenfeed. To a jury that we’re asking to give you a couple of million ‘cause you’ve been hurt so bad, fifteen hundred bucks for a day’s work doesn’t sound like injury. Most of them, they don’t make a yard and a half a day.”

“Okay, you made your point. But the rest of it, my deposition, I thought it went okay. Better than Bloom just had, I mean.”

“Of course it went better, Murray. You were telling the truth and he was lying. We’re the good guys. But I have to know what’s going on, or good guys or not, we’re going to look like dog shit at trial.”

“Okay, guaranteed, cross my heart,” said Selig, who had brightened considerably. “By the way, speaking of which, I thought Bloom was trying to slip one past his counsel. When you asked him that one about mid-May and why he wanted me fired. His lawyer looked like he’d been cold-cocked for a second there. What was that about, anyway?”

“See? That’s how I felt,” said Karp.

“Butch, enough already! You want me to squirm?”

“Yes.”

“But really, what do you think all that was about?” Karp shrugged, as if he didn’t care, and made some dismissive remark and they passed on to other subjects, but in reality there was nothing he cared about more at that moment than whatever it was about the middle of May that had brought that transient look to Bloom’s face, what it was that he had not shared with his closest political and legal adviser, a man with whom the D.A. had conspired, to Karp’s personal knowledge, in a half dozen serious malfeasances. But although he didn’t yet know what it was, he knew for certain what it meant. It meant that whatever Bloom had done, it was worse than a malfeasance. It had to be bad. Felony bad, going to jail in handcuffs bad. The thought warmed him like a log fire.