Irresistible Impulse

SEVENTEEN

Karp was not popular with the courthouse press, who among themselves referred to him as N.K. Two, which stood for No Komment Karp. He considered that he had absolutely no obligation to inform the press about the progress of anything whatever sub judice. Since, in the nature of things, Karp controlled access to some of the hottest items on the calendars of crime, and since the defense bar was generally loquacious, it was difficult to compose a decent war story with balancing quotes from either side, which is all that distinguishes journalism from P.R. and writing about Elvis sightings for the checkout counter press. This rankled, and so the press was more than delighted to learn that the wife of the chief of the Homicide Bureau, and the prosecutor of the biggest case of the year, had herself just been arrested for killing a man on the street.

There were reporters and a TV crew lying in wait for him on Crosby Street when he came down in the morning. He had expected this and had arranged for a car and driver. It was extremely unpleasant, especially since he had Lucy by the hand. Just as they were about to enter the car, a hard-faced blond woman stuck a tape recorder in Lucy’s face and shouted, “How do you feel about your mom going to jail for murder?”

In a clear voice Lucy replied, in Cantonese, “Demons will suck your brains out through your eyes, pestilential cockroach.”

This ran taped on the CBS morning show (translated with some glee by a Chinese-American anchorperson), and for Karp this took some of the sting out of the succeeding shot of Marlene doing the perp walk out of a van toward her arraignment along with a string of whores.

In Rohbling, the morning was consumed by the next defense witness, Dr. Martin M. Morland, a child psychiatrist who had treated the young Rohbling. Karp objected to the witness on the grounds that Rohbling’s mental condition as a child was irrelevant to the issue of his current sanity, but Peoples cut him off sharply.

“That was harsh,” whispered Terrell Collins.

“Yeah,” Karp replied, “the judge figures since he gave us the big ones on the mistrial and the change of venue, he owes Waley. Waley’ll run wild for a couple of days.”

Morland was a small, cheerful, avuncular man with a monastic fringe of silver hair around his bald head. Waley got him to paint Rohbling as the sickest little boy who ever lived. At present he harbored an all-encompassing obsession with elderly black women, the result of the childhood traumas imposed by Clarice, the nanny. The crazy little boy still lived in the young man and took control, hence the crimes.

At the lunch break, Karp pushed silently past the press gauntlet and went to his office. He knew he needed something to eat, although his appetite was gone, and called down to a local deli. While waiting, he read the papers. The Times had given the shooting story page one below the fold, an unusually high status for a crime story in the Times, but it was an unusual shooting. The reporter referred to Marlene’s colorful past, noted this was the third person she had killed, and quoted the D.A. as saying that the office would offer no special treatment and that Karp had recused himself from any involvement. The News devoted its front page to a big photograph of the dead man on the sidewalk and the headline vigilante “hit” shocks fair.

Karp was eating his pastrami sandwich when Roland Hrcany and Ray Guma walked in and sat down at Karp’s conference table, carrying their own brown bags. They nodded to Karp, and Guma said, “So, Roland, what’s the story with Marlene?”

Karp said, “Guys, I can’t talk about this.”

Guma put on an affronted expression. “Excuse me, I don’t believe I was addressing you. I was talking to my pal Roland, here.”

Roland said, “Yeah, you can’t grab lunch in privacy anymore without somebody sticking their nose in. Anyway, Marlene got R.O.R. She’s probably home by now.”

“That is truly amazing!” exclaimed Guma. He spoke with exaggerated precision, like a rube reading a testimonial for a patent medicine. “She shoots some citizen in the back on a street full of people, and she gets to walk with no bail? What’s the city coming to? Probably it was favoritism, she being a former D.A. and the wife of a big shot.”

“It might look that way, but nothing could be further from the truth,” said Hrcany in the same stilted tone. “First of all, the vic had a violence sheet on him. Second, he had a gun and fired it. Third, we found the vic’s intended target, the lovely Miss Tamara Morno.”

“Remarkable!” said Guma. “How was this feat accomplished?”

“It seems that Dead Harry dragged her into the complaint room this morning, and she wrote out a full statement before the acting bureau chief of the Homicide Bureau-”

“Yourself, that is.”

“Myself. And from this it appeared that Miss M. was indeed threatened with death by the vic, who, even when shot twice by the aforesaid Mrs. Karp, still tired to point his weapon at her. The facts of the case support a finding of justifiable homicide, since Mrs. Karp acted to prevent a violent felony. Of course, the grand jury will still have to render a finding, but …”

“We can rest assured that the grand jurors, guided by yourself, will find likewise with no trouble?”

“I’m confident of it, Raymond,” said Hrcany. “And you know what? It’s such a nice sunny June day that I think we should take our lunches outside to the park.”

“Good idea. If we stay here, we might be tempted to discuss the case with Butch Karp, and that would be a violation of official policy.”

They got up and walked to the door. “Yes,” added Guma, “poor Butch! He must really be worried about what’s going on with his wife.”

That afternoon Waley finished his direct examination of Dr. Morland, and Karp rose for the cross. A hard thing, cross-examination of a well-prepared, intelligent expert witness, and Karp was not at his peak, hardly even on the upper slopes. He had before him the background investigation of Morland himself, excerpts from Morland’s professional articles, the case notes from Morland’s examination of the child Jonathan, and his most recent examination of the defendant, and the notes he himself had made during Waley’s direct. Out of this material he had to sculpt ex tempore a line of questioning that would convince the jury that however tortured Rohbling’s mind had been back when, and however disturbed he might now be, he had not been legally insane at the time of the crime.

So, begin with the big question. At the time of the crime, in your opinion, Doctor, did defendant have substantial incapacity to conform his behavior to the requirements of the law? Morland had an opinion. Paranoid ideation. Lack of anchoring to reality. Long minutes of psychobabble drifted by. Karp hacked into it. Did the defendant know who he was? Yes. Did he know where he was? Yes. Did he know what he was doing? That depends on what we mean by “know.” A patronizing smile, and more babble, this time of an epistemological nature. Karp was looking at the jury, saw the eyes glazing. In a minute they would be blaming him for making them go through this. So: break and reverse field. Morland had an article differentiating obsessional character defects from psychosis in children. Using that and the therapy notes, Karp got him to admit that he had never diagnosed Rohbling as psychotic back then. Let that line alone. Change field again. Get an admission that obsessional-character defect was not psychosis. Cut off the doctor when he tried to expand the answer. Karp lost his place, repeated a question, got an objection. Sustained. He bore down. It was hard to keep focused on the mental image of the yellow sheet on which he had written his line of questions. He kept slipping away to night, the colored lights, the noise, gunshots, Marlene standing over the bleeding corpse, the sharp stink of burnt gunpowder wafting by, masking briefly the smell of the fair. Okay, recover. Breathe. His sense was that the cross was running out of steam. Fine. Fall back on the standard: are you being paid by the defendant, Doctor? How much? Then, close with a strong note. Karp asked, “Doctor, why, in your opinion, did the defendant refuse to acknowledge the suitcase?”

No sooner were these words out than Karp felt a chill roil through his belly. He couldn’t believe he had asked the question in that form, but there it was, hanging in the air like a thick gas.

Morland smiled, shrugged, answered in so many words that the defendant was so divorced from reality that he really didn’t understand that it was his suitcase. Try to recover-or was it that he knew the suitcase was full of incriminatory evidence? Pathetic! Objection, of course, witness has answered. Sustained, jury will disregard. A no-brainer. Karp attempted to obscure this disaster by picking at details, secondary stuff, but he had heard that deadly murmur, seen the faces in the jury box.

Sitting down, he caught Collins’s eye. The kid looked stunned. Judge Peoples checked the clock, asked Waley if he had redirect. Of course Waley did not, he was quite satisfied to leave the witness with Karp having beat himself to death with the blue suitcase. Would Mr. W. like to call his next witness fresh the next morning? Mr. W. would, thank you, Your Honor.

The crowd of newspeople was thicker than ever outside the courtroom, heading toward the blood Karp had just spilled in the water, yelling and pushing against the court officers trying to keep a lane clear from the courtroom door to the parts of the building restricted to D.A. personnel. How does it feel? How does it feel? Karp wished he could tell them. He was still numb, although this feeling was being replaced by a dull anger, at Marlene, at himself, the two angers inextricably mixed and tangled. A small, neat black man with a cassette machine leaped in front of him.

“Butch! What happened in there today? Could you respond to the rumors in the black community that you’re throwing the case?”

Ordinarily, Karp would have said “excuse me” and edged around the man, but there was no room and the lights were blinding and his adrenaline was pumping, and so his body took over as it had been trained to do. He faked a step, the reporter went with it, Karp gave him the hip and cruised by. But instead of merely staggering, the man caught his foot on a power cable and went flying against a sound man, who tripped too, bringing his boom around to catch a cameraman across the temple. The camera went loose, the cameraman lunged and tripped. The heavy camera went flying and landed on the head of the original reporter. Blood flowed. Strobes popped continuously, catching Karp in dozens of shots, looking over the chaos he had caused, the close of a perfect day.

He thought, but there was more. Back in his office there was an urgent message from the principal of Lucy’s school-come at once. Karp arrived at P.S. 1 in an unmarked police car, lights flashing. He found his daughter slumped in the principal’s office wearing a big shiner and a split lip. She had, it turned out, gone after a good-sized fifth-grade boy after a day of insults related to Marlene’s arrest. Such behavior was not tolerated in P.S. 1, Karp learned, and Lucy and the boy were both suspended for three days.

Lucy was sullen and uncommunicative on the way home. The mob of newspeople in front of their door was much larger than it had been in the morning; the news had spread that Karp had viciously attacked one of their own. They were baying, foaming. Besides the questions they had been asking all along, about the trial, about Marlene, and newer questions about the vicious attack by the racist giant Karp on a small, tiny, harmless black reporter, the sight of Lucy’s injured face prompted others. Hey, Lucy, look over here! Did your mother do that? Did your father? Lucy started crying on the way up the stairs and went straight to her room without saying anything to Marlene.

Marlene was in the living room, watching Jeopardy with the sound off. She was in her bathrobe with her hair done up in a pink towel. She smelled of roses and red wine, a bottle of which was on the coffee table, two-thirds empty.

“So. You’re back. How was jail?” said Karp, feeling inane, not knowing what else to say, resolved to control his anger.

“Jailish. What was with Lucy?”

“She got into a fight. Some kids were ragging her about you.”

Marlene nodded, played with her lip, drank some more wine.

Karp sat down next to her. “Marlene …”

She shook her head violently. “No. I don’t want to hear it.”

“What? What don’t you want to hear?”

“How bad I am. How I’m screwing up your fucking trial of the decade and my daughter’s life, not to mention my own life. Harry too. He laid down the law, you know. To me! My Frankenstein, Dead Harry Bello. He wants to get out of the crazy-boyfriend business. Completely. I got this after he brought in Tamara and saved my ass. He wants to move uptown and expand the celebrity security operation.”

“Maybe that’s a good idea, Marlene,” said Karp carefully.

“It is!” Marlene cried. “It’s a great idea. Fuck ’em all anyway, the stupid bitches! Let ’em all die.” She poured her glass full again and drank half of it. Then she glared at him. “Look at you!” she said, her voice thick. “You think I’m disgusting, don’t you? I can see it on your face.”

“Don’t be an idiot. I love you,” said Karp in an unloving tone.

“Yeah, when I do what you want.”

Karp stood up suddenly, shaking the coffee table. He took a deep breath. “Look,” he said, not looking at her, “let’s just clear some of this shit away. You killed a guy on the street. It was a justifiable homicide, legally. But … Jesus Christ, Marlene! You shot him in front of your own children. There could have been bullets flying all around. He could’ve turned around and shot back at you. What if Lucy or the babies had caught a round? Didn’t you think? Okay, you have some … need to go out and risk your ass on this crusade of yours, okay, you’re an adult, but to put your own children at risk …”

She regarded him stonily. “So what’s the moral calculus here, Butch? I should just stand by, let an innocent woman go down because there’s a faint chance that one of my kids could get hurt?”

“Yes!” shouted Karp. “Yes! There were nine hundred and sixty killings in Manhattan last year, and there’ll probably be more this year. You know what one or three or seven extra mean to me compared to the safety of my kids? Nothing! Zilch!”

“I see.” Marlene spoke in the unnaturally even voice she used when she was angry beyond passion. “Well, it seems we have a difference of opinion. And it’s nice of you to remind me of my deficiencies as a mother. Which you never fail to do when something like this happens.”

“You obviously need reminding!” Karp snarled back.

Marlene looked at him and then back at the TV screen. “Uh-huh. Then in that case you’ll be happy to learn that I will not be endangering them anymore in the near term. I’m leaving.”

Karp felt an icy spear penetrate his vitals. “You’re what?”

“Leaving. As in not being here. Oh, I don’t mean leaving leaving. Edie Wooten just called. Her admirer dropped by yesterday evening and trashed her bedroom. Slashed her clothes up and generally wrecked things. She’s moving out to her family’s island in Gardiner’s Bay out on the Island, and she wants me to come and guard her. Actually, she just wanted a guard, and I thought okay, Wolfe can go, but we’ll be doing that tennis star and I think Wolfe is getting stale behind watching Edie, and I haven’t got anyone I can spare, and fuck it anyway, I need to get out of here, away from the jackals down there, and I can help Harry guard his kraut tennis girl wonder out at Southampton too, and so it all works out. Lucky me.”

“You’ll be gone for what? The whole summer?” Karp asked uneasily, feeling things slipping out of control, wanting to hug her, wanting things to return to what he considered real life, but unable to make the necessary effort.

She shrugged and stared blankly at the screen. “I don’t know,” she said. The news started. The lead-off tape showed fifteen seconds of the scuffle in the courthouse hallway. Marlene watched without comment. Karp got up and went to the phone and ordered Chinese food delivered.

Marlene stayed in front of the set, drinking wine, while Karp ate and fed himself and his sons and Posie. Lucy would not come out of her room to eat. Marlene finished her bottle and opened another one and drank half of that. At eleven-forty or so, she switched the set off in the middle of Johnny’s monologue and went into the kitchen, where she ate some white bean soup and bread. The loft was quiet, the only sounds the perpetual whir and dull rumble of the city outside, elevator sounds, refrigerator sounds.

And faint steps. Lucy came into the kitchen. She was wearing a green Notre Dame T-shirt that reached to her knees. She said, “Oh,” when she saw her mother. Without a word Marlene ladled warm soup into a bowl, buttered some bread, and poured out a glass of chocolate milk. Lucy sat down and ate.

“You smell drunk,” said Lucy.

“That’s because I am drunk,” said Marlene. “I think I am entitled to tie one on every time I kill somebody and spend a night in jail.”

Lucy said, “How come Daddy’s mad at you?”

“Well,” said Marlene, “he thinks I shouldn’t have gotten involved in shooting somebody when my family was around. He was worried that you or the babies would get hurt. Also, I think he thinks it’s bad for you to see somebody get shot. He would rather I was in a different business. Also, I don’t think his trial is going real well. This garbage outside, all those news guys hanging around, bothering us-it was the last straw.”

Lucy thought about this. “Is why they call it the last straw because if there aren’t enough straws, like, somebody has to drink out of the glass and the ice cubes clunk against their teeth?”

Marlene laughed and explained. Then she grew serious and said, “I’m going to go away for a while, to help Uncle Harry guard somebody and guard some other lady too. It’s a nice place, and when school is over next week, you can come out and visit me.”

A long pause. Then, suspiciously, “You’re not getting divorced or anything, are you?”

“No, we’re not,” said Marlene with a sigh. “Your father and I are tied to each other for all eternity. We may kill each other, but we’re not breaking up.” Marlene rose and lit a cigarette, a rare event in the loft, which she smoked standing in the corner of the kitchen, thus reducing her daughter’s cancer risk to some extent.

“How’s your eye?” Marlene asked.

“Okay, I guess. A little sore.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing. This fifth-grader boy got in my face, talking bad about you, and I said something back and he pushed me-”

“This was a Chinese kid?” Marlene said in surprise.

“No, a bokwai, an American kid, so he pushed me and I pushed him and then he hit me in the face and I punched his nose out. He was bleeding like crazy.”

“Okay. I should thank you for sticking up for me, but you can’t fight in school, babe. You should have walked away.”

“You didn’t.”

“No, you’re right. But that wasn’t a schoolkid fight. A man was going to commit murder, he was going to kill a woman that relied on me to protect her, so I took him down. And you can make a case that it was a risk to you all. Your daddy’s right. Anytime bullets start flying, you can never be sure where they’ll end up. But I figured the risk was worth it because it was a sure thing that the woman was going to be dead, and I was between him and you all, and I thought I was a better shot too.”

“What if a bullet hit me and killed me, what would you do?”

Marlene put out her smoke in the sink and sat down next to Lucy. She said, “I would cry for a year and a day, and tear all my hair out, and then I would have another little girl.”

“Better than me?”

“Oh, far, far better than you. You have a smart mouth and you’re much too skinny. Look at this! Ribs!” Tickling.

“And you’re much too fat!” giggled Lucy, tickling back.

The next morning before dawn, Marlene wrote out notes for Karp, Lucy, and Posie and slipped out of the loft with a duffel bag over her shoulder and her dog at heel. By the time it was full day, she was tooling East on the Long Island Expressway, watching as the westbound lanes made their daily transformation into the world’s longest parking lot, and feeling nearly herself again, whatever that was. Although she was going to work, it felt like a vacation, the first break from daily domesticity in nearly ten years. It was a nice day, warm, fleecy clouds overhead. The idiot light for the electrical system flickered on and stayed on; Marlene cared not for idiot lights. She turned the radio up high. The dog stuck its great head out the rear window and lolled its tongue, attracting startled looks from the drivers of the passing cars.

At Riverhead, she turned south and joined the Southern State Parkway, which she took into Southampton. She had no trouble finding the South Shore Club, a huge, glittering-white, over-architected, angular structure on a private road just northwest of Southampton village. The Meadow Club is the place where old money plays tennis in Southampton, and they don’t let just anybody in, and those that they do let don’t get to play tennis in anything but white. In contrast, anyone who has the $150,000 fee can play at South Shore, and they can hit the courts in Day-Glo knickers if they so desire. The management of this club had worked long to capture the women’s professional tennis tour as a symbol that the arrivistes who made up their membership had indeed arrived and to give the snoots at Meadow one in the eye.

Marlene told the guard at the gate who she was, and he directed her to the employees parking lot, around the back. There she parked next to Wolfe’s Chevy and Harry’s Plymouth. A pimply youth in a pale blue blazer, holding a portable radio, gave her directions to the security meeting. She left Sweety in the car, the windows cracked.

They were holding the meeting in a basement room used for changing and breaks by the staff of the club: There were lockers along one wall and uniforms of various types stacked on shelves or hung in cleaner bags from the pipes that lined the ceiling. About twenty men were sitting on metal folding chairs or standing about in groups. These were the bodyguards of the tennis celebrities who would be playing in the tournament. Most of them had the serious, cynical faces you picked up in the cops. There was a stir when Marlene walked in, smiles, not entirely sympathetic ones. Marlene was famous in the bodyguard world.

She found Harry Bello and Wolfe and sat down next to them. Harry was wearing a blue Lacoste shirt, pressed gray slacks, and polished loafers. He was blending in again.

Some men entered the room: a short redhead wearing a blue blazer with a club crest on it, a man in the white-shirted uniform of the Southampton police, and a tall, crop-headed state trooper. The man introduced himself as Mort Griffin, the head of security for the club, and introduced the policemen who were to serve as security liaisons with their respective organizations. He began to speak about the security arrangements for the tournament, and the coordinations necessary to prevent large numbers of armed men from getting in one another’s way. Marlene was soon bored, but she observed Harry taking detailed notes. He likes this, she thought, and he’s good at it. It saddened her that their old relationship, like the old casual organization of Bello amp; Ciampi Security, was passing away. The fact was that Harry was a pro at this and she was not, nor did she especially want to be.

The meeting broke up after the security chief had pointed out a row of pale blue blazers, hanging from a pipe, each in bags marked with a name. All security personnel working the event were required to wear them.

They shrugged into their blazers. To Marlene’s surprise, hers fit perfectly. Wolfe went off to a meeting about radio procedure. Harry handed Marlene a thick folder.

“This is what we got on our guy,” he said.

She opened it and leafed through the pages. “Harry, this is all in German,” she said.

“Yeah, but there’s a couple of sheets there says he’s in the country as of last Tuesday. Check out the picture.”

Manfred Stolz, the stalker, had been arrested twice for harassing Trade Speyr, once in Bonn and once in Paris. The photos showed a wiry man with a bony face, a big Adam’s apple, and frizzy reddish hair. He wanted to marry Trude Speyr, failing which he intended to kill her-the usual. What wasn’t usual was that he had declared it quite openly, been jailed for it, and gone on declaring it.

“He looks easy to spot,” said Marlene.

“Maybe. In Paris he wore a wig.”

“Fiendish,” said Marlene. “Okay, Harry, I got to go see Edie Wooten right now. I’ll spend the night there, and I’ll meet you back here tomorrow morning. Say seven-thirty? We’ll have breakfast, providing the help is allowed to eat on site.”

“She wants to meet you,” said Harry.

Marlene rolled her eyes and protested, but then she recalled all those meetings Harry had gone to with the Germans, and she meekly followed him up a flight of stairs to the club dining room, where a reception for the tennis stars was under way. The room was large and white, with huge angled windows facing the ocean, and everyone in it who was not wearing a uniform was rich or famous or both or a worshiper of wealth and fame. Harry led her through the crowd and penetrated a knot of people surrounding what turned out to be a lithe blond teenager. Trude Speyr stopped talking to a short world-famous pop music star and cast an interested blue-eyed gaze at Marlene. Harry made the introductions. There was a startled murmur from the group. Marlene and the girl shook hands. Strobe lights flashed.

They exchanged some banal words, Speyr speaking halting, accented English while the sycophants beamed. Some manager-type in lime green slacks made a crack about the shooting at the fair, and all the famous people tittered. Marlene would have said something vicious had not Harry pinched the back of her arm.

“How can you stand it, Harry?” she asked when they were back outside. “Those people …”

“Beats chasing scumbags down stairways. Beats corpses with maggots in their eyes. Beats waking up covered by your own puke. And it pays the bills.”

She was about to object that wearing a pissy blazer and dancing attendance on gilded assholes was not what she’d had in mind when she started the business, but bit it back. She looked at her friend in the clear afternoon light of a Long Island summer and saw that he looked good, not great, of course, but not a three-day corpse either. He was doing a man’s job, and a difficult one, on his own, and Marlene could, almost for the first time, see the person he had been before his life came apart, a quiet, decent man with a wry sense of humor.

And who was she to talk, she who was just dashing off to care for her very own gilded asshole genius? So instead of having another fight, she hugged him and smiled and was rewarded by a flickering smile in return. She kissed his cheek and got into her car. Which did not start. Sweety whined.

“Won’t start?”

“You’re some detective, Harry,” said Marlene peevishly. “What’ll I do?”

“I’ll get Wolfe to drive you. No problem,” said new Harry, the exec.

Twenty minutes later, Wolfe pulled his Caprice around. Marlene and Sweety got in, and as they did, Wolfe pulled a tape out of his stereo and shoved it under his seat.

“What’s the tape, Wolfe?” she asked.

“Urn, nothing,” he replied. They pulled out of the parking lot and onto the narrow road.

“Come on, Wolfe. What, you’re ashamed of your musical taste? How bad could it be? Worse than Conway Twitty? Mantovani? Tiajuana Brass? Lawrence Welk?”

His face worked nervously. “It’s, ah, not music. It’s like, uh, a motivational tape. For, you know, dealing with people.”

It was Marlene’s turn to feel embarrassed. She had not thought Wolfe a striver; nor had it occurred to her that what she considered a throw-away muscle job could represent, for someone like Wolfe, the basis for a career. To cover she said brightly, “So, do you have any music tapes to go with your fine stereo?”

“In the glove,” he said.

In the glove compartment were two cassettes in new boxes, a Greatest Hits of the 70’s collection and a Best of the Eagles, Volume One. Marlene slipped in the Eagles and turned up the sound, and they headed north with “Take it Easy” playing, Marlene singing along, Wolfe driving, stolid and silent.

They drove north to Sag Harbor, to the marina she had been told to look for, which they discovered to be a white-painted storefront with signs in front of it advertising charter boats (Donna T., SeaWind) and rental Lightnings and Whalers. There was a long gray dock and a small gray beach next to it where some kids were messing with Jet Skis. While Marlene searched out the proprietor, Wolfe took Sweety to throw sticks on the beach. The dog liked him and he was good with the dog. It occurred to Marlene that the firm could send Wolfe to guard dog school and get him a big dog of his own. A little staff development.

She found the manager, a thin old boy in greasy gray coveralls (Ralph embroidered on the breast) and arranged the ride. Edie Wooten had already called him, he said, and was that your big dog?

Wolfe left, saying that he would pick her up the next morning, and with her dog on a leash and her duffel bag slung, she boarded a shining, elderly mahogany launch. Twenty minutes later, after a passage over calm, boat-flecked Gardiners Bay, they disembarked at a little dock at Wooten’s Island.

Marlene let Sweety off his chain and walked up a path dressed in tan gravel between thick fir hedges. This led to a wide lawn, shady under old maples and sycamores, and the house itself, a Tudor manse like a small Nonesuch, done in soft-looking carved stone the color of lips. Weathered garden chairs and a round table were arranged on the velvety lawn, and there was a walled rose garden off to the left of the house, with the bright blooms showing over the wall.

Music came floating out from an open leaded-glass casement, the same liquid phrase repeated several times, as they approached the front door. Marlene knocked on it with a massive iron knocker, feeling like a gothic novel heroine despite the fairness of the day. The music stopped.

Edie Wooten opened the door, smiled at Marlene, and gave a little yelp when she saw Sweety.

“What is that?”

“It’s a Neapolitan mastiff. His name is Sweety. He’s perfectly harmless, aren’t you? Aren’t you?”

Sweety shook his monstrous jowls and flung drool in all directions to demonstrate how harmless he was. The two women sat down on a pair of Adirondack chairs, and chatted about how each of them was getting on, avoiding such topics as getting your clothes slashed by a maniac and shooting someone in the middle of a carnival. A stout gray-haired woman in an apron came out, whom Edie introduced as Bridget Marney, the housekeeper. Bridget Marney looked suspiciously at Sweety, who had found a shady spot under a yew hedge, and Sweety returned the favor. Bridget brought out a sweating pitcher of iced tea and glasses on a tray, and departed.

“Is he a guard dog?” Edie asked, having observed how closely the dog had watched the servant.

“Yes, he is,” said Marlene. “I’m going to have to be away working this tennis match for the next couple of days, and I want you watched. Sweety’ll do the job, maybe better than I could.”

“We have cats,” said Edie. “Will he eat them?”

“No, but he’ll eat anyone who comes into the house except you and me.”

Edie’s eyes widened. “Isn’t that a bit extreme?”

Marlene sighed. Somehow she still didn’t get it. Except for a couple of million dollars and a cello, she was just like Tamara Morno. “No, it isn’t. Look, I am extremely worried about you. This guy was never into violence before. Something seems to have set him onto a different track. Now he’s taken a knife and ripped up your possessions. He has to know you’re here, and he’s going to come after you. Luckily, this place is a lot more defensible than your apartment or a concert hall. When he does come, I want to nail him, physically. Now, is anyone else besides you and Mrs. Marney on the island? 1 mean, for the next couple of days.”

Edie seemed surprised by the question. “Well, yes, there’s Bridget’s husband. Jack takes care of the boats and the grounds. And Ginnie-”

“Ginnie’s here?”

“Naturally she’s here. She and some of her friends are in the east cottage.”

“Jesus, Edie! How could you do that! Her friends? Tell me Robinson’s not one of them!”

Edie’s face stiffened. “It’s her house, Marlene. I mean, she owns it. She can have anyone there she likes. Besides, I thought we had disposed of this notion of yours that she’s the one who’s been doing all these awful things. Or Vincent.”

Blind as a bat, thought Marlene. Why do I even bother? She took a breath and said, as calmly as she was able, “Okay, she’s a saint. Does she come in and out of this house much?”

A significant, embarrassed pause. “No, not at all. I have my life and she has hers. The island is fifteen acres, after all.”

“Good. So, what we need to do now is introduce Sweety to your couple, and after that he won’t let anyone else into the house. You might want to convey that message to your sister and her guests.”

“He’ll bark at them, you mean?”

“No, Sweety doesn’t bark,” said Marlene. “He’ll just hold them until I come back, which might be an annoyance, especially if they need to go to the bathroom.”

Edie coughed around her iced tea. “God! This is just for a day or so, yes?”

“Oh, yeah. I’ll be back full-time, or I’ll send Wolfe, day after tomorrow at the latest. Earlier if we can catch the guy who’s stalking Trude Speyr.” Marlene explained briefly about Manfred Stolz and his goal in life.

“Is he dangerous, do you think?” Edie asked.

“Fairly. No, I take that back. Very,” said Marlene, and, to satisfy her irritation at this sweet, oblivious woman, added, “About like yours, I’d say.”