Irresistible Impulse

EIGHT

“Harry, can you pick up Luce at school?” Marlene asked as the afternoon grew hectic. Wolfe had arrived and waited patiently, like a well-trained dog (he had donned a cheap sports jacket and polyester slacks and obtained a new, and even more unfortunate, haircut) for Marlene to take him to Edie Wooten’s place, an appointment for which they were surely going to be late, because Marlene had taken longer than she had planned to instruct Sym in the intricacies of filling out quarterly withholding forms (Harry could have done that, but he didn’t have time, since he had to deal with the agent of the German tennis star; the Germans liked to have endless meetings about Fraulein Speyr’s tour, parodically thorough, them, and as far as Harry doing the teaching, Harry could not teach a cat to lap cream); and Marlene had to spend a half hour on the phone with the landlord negotiating the new office lease, and Posie had called saying Zak had swallowed a pin, but she wasn’t sure, and could they have hot dogs for lunch, and there was another panicked call from Carrie Lanin (one more love offering/threat from Pruitt), and Marlene had to spend another half hour calling in favors from cops she knew from the old days to put the word out that the warrant on Pruitt was serious and not just some domestic horseshit.

“No problem, Marlene,” said Harry, which is what he always said, and what he would have said had she asked him to load the building on his back and dump it off Pier Twenty-eight.

“I’m forgetting something important,” she said out loud to no one as she gathered up her bag and coat and beckoned to Wolfe. “It was something about you-have you got a gun?”

Wolfe shook his head. Marlene sighed. “Well, you’ll need one. Can you shoot? Yes, of course you can shoot. I’ll get Dane to give you one of his-he has about fifty of them. Sym! Concealed-carry application for Wolfe, okay? Don’t forget! Okay, let’s go!”

They breezed by Sym, muttering over government forms, and were out the door before Marlene braked sharply and called back inside. “Sym! I just remembered. Wolfe isn’t bonded. Get the paperwork from Allied and fill it out and make sure he signs it and notarize it and get it back to them.”

Sym rolled her eyes and grunted in acquiescence.

Marlene pushed the yellow VW (which for a wonder started right up and purred) through the uptown traffic as only a one-eyed, heavily armed woman was likely to push, endangering herself and others but escaping injury, and arrived at Edie Wooten’s building only ten minutes past the appointed time. The doorman gave them what seemed like an extra fish eye as he rang upstairs and handed Marlene the handset. Edie Wooten sounded nervous and distraught.

“Oh, God, I forgot you were coming, again!” she wailed. “Look, I know this is an imposition, but could you come back another time? We’re having some difficulty, a family thing-”

Marlene, however, was not having any of this. “No, Edie, we actually have to do this now. I have your bodyguard here, and he’s on the clock, and I have to start going through your list of possibles with you, before the concert, which is the day after tomorrow-”

“Oh, God! Yes, all right, you’d better come up.”

This time Edie herself came to the door to let them in. She was dressed in a navy skirt and sweater, and her face was flushed. There was music booming in the apartment, not the music of the cello but heavy, raucous, metallic rock. Marlene looked inquiringly at the woman as they stepped into the hall.

“My sister,” said Edie, as if that explained everything.

Marlene made the introductions, and Edie shook Jack Wolfe’s hand. Then she led them through a hallway lined with paintings to a small room set up as an office, equipped with a Sheraton desk, upholstered straight chairs, an Empire sofa in blue silk, and three oak filing cabinets. There was a marble fireplace, with some Meissen musicians on the mantel. The walls held framed concert posters showing Edie looking serene, wrapped around her cello. She closed the door against the din.

Wolfe was looking around like a mooncalf. Marlene noticed that he was staring at everything but the client.

“The list?” said Marlene, getting down to business.

Edie riffled through papers at the desk, apologizing. She was clearly under some tension; her face was drawn and lacked the beatific glow Marlene had observed during their previous meeting.

“Here it is,” said Edie, handing over several sheets.

It was a list of names only, and so Marlene, suppressing her irritation, had to go through them one by one with Edie, to identify the people and find out where they could be reached. This took some time. Edie offered refreshments; Marlene declined. Edie got up and paced around the room. She was extremely nervous, and Marlene wondered why.

Marlene said, “Well, we’ll check all these out. If your guy isn’t on the list himself, maybe one of these people saw something or knows something. Meanwhile, have you had any more contact?”

“What? Oh, with the Music Lover?” said Edie vaguely. “Just a note. Wait, I’ll get it.” She walked out of the room. Marlene exchanged a glance with Wolfe. In Marlene’s experience, being stalked tended to concentrate the mind of the stalkee to the exclusion of nearly everything else, but Edie seemed oddly distracted.

They heard voices off, angry ones, and an increase in the volume of the trashy rock music. The doors opened, and Edie came in. She was even more flushed, with a desperate expression in her eyes. Following close behind her was a woman wearing a thin silvery spaghetti-strap mini-dress over pink thigh-length stockings and platform shoes. She was extremely thin, her face all sharp bones around bright, heavily mascaraed blue eyes, her neck stringy and taut, her collarbones staring through pale skin that seemed too fragile to hold in her vital organs. She pushed past Edie into the room and looked at Marlene and Wolfe with sharp interest, like a predatory bird examining a fallen nestling.

“Oooh,” she said, “are these the bodyguards?”

“Ginnie, please …” said Edie Wooten. The thin woman ignored her. She looked Wolfe up and down, swaying slightly on her heels, and, apparently finding nothing to detain her, turned her gaze on Marlene. Marlene stood up and said, “Hello, I’m Marlene Ciampi.”

Edie said, “Oh, excuse me, Marlene, this is my sister, Virginia Wooten.”

Marlene was about to extend her hand but decided not to. The woman was on something, clearly. She combined the hyperactive movements of the speed freak with the slurred diction of the sedative aficionado. That suggested she was taking setups- Dexamils and Qualuudes together-or speedballs, injecting heroin and cocaine simultaneously.

“Marlene? Mah-leeeene! Mah-leen fum da Bronx? Oh, Jesus, Edie, you have no fucking class at all, do you? Where did you find this, in the yellow pages?” She laughed, a soundless giggle that contorted what was actually the (presumably) last years of an extraordinarily pretty face. The giggles died down. No one else made a sound. Edie was rending her usual tissue. Ginnie was staring intently at Marlene’s face. “My God, this is rich!” she said, snorting. “What is that, Mah-leen, a glass eye? Oh, marvelous, a one-eye private eye! You’re inimitable, Edie darling. She imagines someone is pursuing her, and then she hires a half-blind detective to stop him.” A spate of laughter that ended with a racking cough. “Get me a fucking drink, goddammit,” she snarled at her sister. Edie, her face white, dashed away.

Ginnie strode with the unnaturally careful stride of the drugged to the sofa and arranged herself on it, showing her thin white thighs nearly up to the crotch and the garters that held up her pink stockings. No tracks on the thighs, Marlene observed. She probably takes it in the veins on the tops of her feet.

Ginnie said in a mock confidential voice, “My dear little sister, you understand, Mah-leen darling, is a pather-a pathological liar. What’d she tell you? Some man was chasing her? Some bad man? Who was going to put his big weenie into her? Well, darling, I can tell you that-that the only thing that’s been between her thighs is that fucking costly Stradivarius, that absolutely no one was ever allowed to touch. Now, I, on the other hand, am the one who really needs a bodyguard.” She turned her attention to Wolfe. “How about it, Silent Sam? Would you like to guard my body?” She wriggled her hips and ran a long pink tongue around her mouth and giggled again.

Neither Marlene nor Wolfe responded to this, although Marlene noticed that Wolfe’s ears went red. Edie came back into the room bearing a tumbler full of clear liquid and ice cubes. She handed it to her sister, who took a swallow, coughed, and sprayed out what was in her mouth. She came off the sofa like a cheap toy, her face reddening, the cords of her neck rigid. “You moron! I wanted a drink! Don’t you know what a drink is, fuckface!”

She reached back to throw the heavy tumbler at her cringing sister, but Marlene was there with a neat wrist lock, on which she applied a hair more pressure than was strictly necessary. The tumbler fell to the carpet.

“Oww! You’re hurting me!” the woman cried. She had to bend her knees to relieve the pain.

“Sorry, but that’s a no-no. Darling,” said Marlene. “Now, are we going to be good and let the grownups get on with their business?”

A burst of hysterical cursing, quite remarkable in its fluency and rage.

“Oh, don’t hurt her,” Edie wailed. Tears gushed from her eyes. Marlene shrugged and let the lock go, and Virginia Wooten fell down on all fours, still cursing. A loud buzzer sounded from elsewhere in the apartment.

“That’s for me, that’s for me!” Ginnie cried, and scrabbling to her feet, without a backward look or another word, she left the room, taking care to slam the door so hard behind her that the figurines shook on the mantel and the posters slid askew.

Edie collapsed in tears on the sofa. Marlene handed Edie a package of tissues from her bag.

When the weeping had lapsed into sniffles, she said, “I’m so sorry you had to go through that, Marlene. Oh, God, I don’t know what to say. I’m so mortified!”

“Well, don’t be. This is not nearly the worst thing that someone has said to me in this business. I have an extremely thick skin. But I’m a little concerned about you. Does she, ah, come here often?”

“Oh, she makes a descent three or four times a year, I guess, usually when she’s having problems with her current man.” This was said with sighing resignation.

“Why do you let her?”

“Why?” Edie seemed surprised by this question. “She’s my sister. My parents gave up on her, oh, years ago, and I’m all she has. She was raised in this apartment. The idea of barring the door to her-I couldn’t ever do that. I keep thinking that some day she’ll … I don’t know … burn out, if that’s the expression. She … what she’s like now, she wasn’t always like that. She was beautiful and-we can’t say gay anymore, can we-but spirited, and fun. The house was always full of her friends. My parents are rather solemn people, and of course the girl genius ha-ha was always sawing away, sawing away. Oh, I just worshipped her, my big sister …” She began to cry again, softly, a slow drip of tears.

“Yes, well, Edie,” Marlene said, “the point from my perspective is, do you recall at our first interview, we talked about people with a disordered lifestyle and how vulnerable they were?”

“You mean prostitutes?”

“Yeah, them and drug addicts. And that also applies to the people they’re in intimate contact with. A junkie is a doorway to some fairly nasty people. Your sister is a-”

“Ginnie isn’t a drug addict!”

“Well, actually, she is, my dear. And one of the things we’re going to explore is her possible connection to whoever is bothering you.”

Edie shook her head metronomically during this last exchange as if by that motion she could order her sister’s life. “No, no, that’s just not possible, that’s not-”

“As well as,” Marlene continued, “the possibility that she is the one that’s actually producing this harassment.”

Edie Wooten just stared, struck dumb.

“While you were out of the room just now, she told me that you were making the whole thing up, that you were a pathological liar hallucinating out of sexual deprivation.”

“I am not sexually deprived,” Edie blurted, and then blushed, and then the two women burst into laughter. Wolfe looked confused and arranged his face in a bland smile.

“I’m glad to hear it,” said Marlene. “We’ll need his name too, or theirs. While we’re at it, you said something about receiving another note from the guy?”

She had, and produced it, wrapped in a plastic bag.

The note was handwritten on expensive, creamy stationery.

“Good taste. Classy guy,” said Marlene, handling the note by its edges. “Were all the notes written on this kind of paper?”

“No, just the ones in, oh, I guess the last four months or so. Before that they were on cheap stationery or lined paper.”

“Could I see that?” asked Wolfe. They both stared at him; it was as if a chair had spoken. Marlene handed it to him. “Careful! Don’t touch it like that. We may have to get prints off it.”

“Sorry,” Wolfe muttered and looked closely at the note, which read:

You don’t need anyone else to protect you my darling one. Get rid of them or I will be very displesed. I will be there. Play the E minor Shostakovich Mendelssohn D minor and the Schubert Rosamunde quartet. Remember I am watching you always. Be faiuthful.

your only true love

A Music Lover

“What do you make of it?” Marlene asked him. He shrugged and seemed surprised at being asked.

“I don’t know. He printed. The O’s are funny. They look more like, you know, parentheses. Faithful spelled with a U; that’s not right, is it?”

“No. And displeased spelled wrong too. Well, maybe it will help.” She put the note back in its plastic and stood up. “Okay, Edie, we’ll start checking this list. I’ll run the names through the cops, see if anyone’s got a weird streak. And we’ll check with the security people at Juilliard about precautions at the concert itself. By the way, are you going to play the pieces he mentioned?”

“Just the Shostakovich, as I told you before. The other two are a Mozart quintet and the Schumann piano and strings quartet.”

“Hm. What’s he done before when you haven’t played his favorites?”

“Nothing much. He writes an angry note and puts it someplace where I’ll be shocked to find it. Under the pillow, in the underwear drawer …”

“Yeah, well, that’s his mistake; it narrows it down because of the access he needs.” Marlene secured the note and made ready to leave. She shook Edie’s hand, as did Wolfe. The woman had recovered her composure; aside from a redness about the eyes there was no sign of the recent upheavals. Metal music blared as they left the apartment.

The elevator was opening as they entered the short hallway. A tall man stepped out, handsome, with straight blond hair, dressed in black clothing that included a tight leather motocross jacket studded with chrome rivets. He nodded politely to them and pushed the bell on the Wooten apartment.

“And let’s find out who that one is too,” said Marlene as they descended.

Part 56 of the Supreme Court of the State of New York was, despite its noble-sounding name, a calendar court, which is a sort of legal valve or appliance. Its grimy, crowded, noisy precincts provided a place for pleas to be entered or changed, plea bargains to be accepted or refused, trials to be scheduled or rescheduled, and for those who delighted in delay for reasons of legal strategy to obtain however much of this precious substance they required. In short, Part 56 could have been replaced by the sort of electronics now used to order pizzas or reserve a place on an airplane, if efficiency were all that were required of it, but such was not the case. Part 56 and its numerous siblings existed (and exist still) because the criminal law ultimately is not about numbers or efficiency. It is about our mortal flesh. And therefore there must be rooms like this one, high-ceilinged, echoing, unornamented, graceless, with peeling paint, tattered window shades over dusty windows, battered furniture, smelling of steam heat, old paint, and frightened, harried people, so that particular human bodies can be brought into physical propinquity for even a fleeting moment (it is usually fleeting enough), these bodies being the judge, the accused, the counsel for the accused, and the representative of the People.

Groups comprising the last three of this necessary quartet crowded the well of the court and moved before the bench as their case numbers were called off by the court officer. The well was in constant motion, a clumsy dance, which for music had a low tumult of many voices, with the time beaten out by the crack of the gavel. No case was distinguished from any other case-all received nearly the same time and attention-a few minutes, no more-from the harried gray-haired woman on the presidium.

Until the officer called out a number and then “People versus Jonathan A. Rohbling”; then there was a stir and a passing hush. Everyone knew who Rohbling was: the Granny Killer, and everyone, even the junkies, who ordinarily had no interest in anything whatever except their One True Love, paused a moment to cop a glance.

Karp was just as fascinated. He had never seen Rohbling in the flesh, and had been observing him closely from the moment he had been led into the room. The man was small and remarkably slight. Karp knew he was nearly twenty-two, but he could have passed for fourteen, for he was not five foot seven and weighed perhaps a hundred and thirty pounds, dripping. Waley, who stood by his side, was by no means a physically imposing man, but he towered over his client; as a couple they looked like a dad taking his unpromising son to his first day of high school. Rohbling’s dull brown hair was cut very short (he had apparently worn a wig imitating short Negroid hair while committing his crimes), and he stared blankly out at the confusion through thick, smudged glasses. His eyes were greenish brown, unfocused and wandering. He had a peculiar mouth, whose thick, soft lips were the first things any schoolyard bully would have seized upon; “girl’s lips” the bully would have called them. They had a dried whitish crust on them.

Karp tried to imagine this person wandering Harlem in blackface. More to the point, he tried to imagine the jury imagining it. It was plausible, yes. With dyed skin and the wig, Rohbling would have been able to pass as a frail, scholarly African-American youth. Did he look crazy? No, he was completely passive, and Karp supposed he had been sedated in Bellevue. Was that an error on Waley’s part? An agitated client would have looked better, assuming Waley was going to go with the insanity plea. But Waley was a civilized man. He would not have subjected his client to distress if the man was really insane, if Waley really believed he was insane. But maybe not, maybe Waley wanted Karp to think that Waley really thought … Here Karp put a check on his line of thought. The man had gotten to him, and he was starting to do what he had lectured scores of young prosecutors not to do, which was to get caught up in strategy. Just present the facts of your case as well as you can and let the defense worry about strategy, about motives, about psychology; he had said that a thousand times.

They read out the charges, and the judge asked for Rohbling’s plea. Rohbling said he was not guilty. That was a mild surprise; Waley had decided to wait on the insanity plea. There was nothing unusual about Rohbling’s voice, and he seemed to understand what was going on around him. The judge sent the case for trial in Part 46, Supreme Court of the State of New York. The choice was at random, based on the current state of the various trial part calendars. Karp thought for a second, connecting part numbers and faces and names. Judge Marvin Peoples would be trial judge in People v. Rohbling. That would be interesting. Karp glanced over at Waley to get his reaction to the designation of their judge, but could detect nothing but a slight pursing of the lips.

Waley approached a step closer to the bench and said, “Your Honor, on the matter of the disposition of my client’s pending trial. My client stands in need of psychiatric care not available in the prison ward at Bellevue. The North Shore Psychiatric Institute at Cold Spring Harbor would be able to provide such treatment and is a secure facility. My client comes from a distinguished family with strong community ties, who would be willing to offer any reasonable bail.”

The judge looked at Karp. “Do the People have an objection?”

“Yes, Your Honor. The defendant is accused of multiple murders. There is no precedent for bail in such cases. And I believe that there are still a number of psychiatrists working at Bellevue who would be amazed to hear that they are incompetent to provide any treatment the defendant requires.”

The court smiled thinly and said, “A good point, Mr. Karp. The prisoner is remanded to custody at Bellevue until trial.”

The guard led Rohbling away. The court officer called the next case number, and the calendar court resumed its grinding.

Karp walked up the aisle with Waley close behind him.

“That was uncharitable and unnecessary, Mr. Karp,” said Waley in a low voice.

Karp stopped and turned to face the lawyer. “Your boy gets treated like everyone else, Mr. Waley.”

“Does he? Do you think the fact that our judge appears to be a black woman of grandmotherly age figured at all in her decision?”

“Why don’t you ask her?” said Karp.

Waley said coldly, “How amusing. I only hope you have not precipitated a disaster.” Then he brushed by Karp and left the courtroom.

Marlene spent an hour at Juilliard with Wolfe and the Lincoln Center security man, a grizzled ex-cop named McPhail, who thought they were making a big deal out of nothing, but who was willing to cooperate nevertheless to accommodate a star. He sounded like he’d done it before. She left Wolfe there to work out details and drove downtown to her loft.

There she was glad to find everything in cozy order, although the vast room smelled alarmingly of jasmine incense. She hoped Posie wasn’t using it to cover the scent of marijuana, but she also knew that she probably would have done nothing more than rant had Posie come to the door with a bong stuck in her smile. The woman was just too valuable to dismiss.

They were in the living room, watching Sesame Street. Marlene plopped on the couch, kicked off her boots, and jiggled both her babies, who suffered the caresses of the near stranger with benign indifference. They were warm and dry and sweet-smelling, and if Marlene felt a sudden wrenching sense of loss, the twins clearly did not. She returned them to Posie, who was staring loose-jawed at the screen, seemingly astounded by what could be done with the letter M.

“How was school, Luce?” she asked her eldest, who was stretched belly down on the rug.

“Okay. I got an A on the math test.”

Marlene raised her eyes to heaven and said dramatically, “Thank you, Jesus and St. Jude!”

Lucy laughed. “Tranh showed me some stuff when I was there the other day, and it just sort of clicked. Maybe it’s easier in Cantonese. He’s a good teacher.”

Meaning I could use some work in that department, thank you so very much, my darling, thought Marlene. Then, starting to feel a hair de trop at her own hearthside, and already knowing as much as she wanted to know about M., she stood up, kissed all around, gave orders for dinner preparation, and announced, “I think I’ll take the dog for a walk.”

At the magic W word, there was a clatter and scrabbling in the kitchen, and the mastiff was at her side, pressing its nose into her midriff and slobbering down the front of her slacks.

She did take the dog for a walk, and then she loaded it into the rear of the VW and drove through a thin rain and the rush-hour traffic to a construction site at Madison and Sixty-third. There she waited, leaning against the car and smoking, while quitting time came and the construction workers streamed out of the half-finished condo. She had to turn down a half dozen lewd offers before the man she wanted came through the plywood door.

“Mr. Nobili!” she called. “Could I talk to you for a moment?”

The man, a shortish, swarthy fellow with a heavy Nixonian beard shadow on his jowls, wearing yellow oilskins and a red hard hat on backward, stopped and looked over at her.

“She wants you, Arnie,” said one of his companions.

“Yo, Arnie, after you,” said another. There were a number of whistles: good, clean construction-worker fun.

Arnie Nobili smiled and approached her. She smiled back, opened the passenger door of the VW, and gestured him in. More whistles and shouts. Marlene got in the driver’s side and cranked the engine, which refused to start for a long minute and then came sulkily to life.

“Sounds like the alternator,” said Nobili. “So what is this?”

She let the engine idle, producing heat for the blower, and handed him one of her cards.

“I’m Marlene Ciampi,” she said. “Tamara Monro has retained us. I’ve helped her take out a protective order, which I understand you’ve already violated.”

Nobili’s smile vanished and was replaced by an unpleasant belligerent expression. “What, are you some kind of cop?” She noticed there was alcohol on his breath.

“No. I’m a lawyer and a private detective. I wanted to have a talk with you so that we’d understand each other.”

“She hired you? She hired you to protect her from me?”

“That’s correct, Mr. Nobili.”

“Well, you can fucking unhire yourself, lady. Tamara don’t need no protection.” He gestured at her with a dirty finger the size of a center punch.

“You have to stop trying to see her, Mr. Nobili. You have to understand that the relationship is over.”

Nobili moved his face closer to hers, jabbing with his finger. “Hey, it’s over when I say it’s over, understand? You fuckin’ tell her that! No, I’ll fuckin’ tell her. She’ll never fuckin’ forget it, I get through with her.” He jacked the door handle. “And fuck your order and fuck you!” he said, and, as an afterthought, “Bitch!”

Marlene called out, “Sweety, l’affirati!”

Nobili paused with the door open and looked at her. “What did you say?” he snarled.

The mastiff came out of the baggage space under the hatchback in a black blur, grabbed a mouthful of Nobili’s oilskin, and yanked him back into his seat. His hard hat came down over his face as he flailed and cried out. The car door swung closed with a slight click. Sweety, meanwhile, was doing its impression of the Hound of Hell, baring fangs, growling like distant lions, splashing hot slaver down the man’s collar.

“This interview is over when I say it is, understand?” said Marlene.

Nobili’s hat fell off in the shaking he was getting. “Make it stop! Make it stop!” he quavered.

“Sweety, chiu gentilmenti,” said Marlene. The dog stopped shaking Nobili, but retained its grip. “Yes, ‘make it stop.’ That’s just what Ms. Morno said to me in reference to your attentions.”

“You-you’re not allowed to do this,” said the man, gasping.

“No, I’m not, you’re right. This is a sort of kidnap. It’s a felony. I’m breaking the law, which I hate to do, but I don’t think you’ll complain, because a couple of nights ago you went by Tamara’s place and pounded on her door for an hour, and when she wouldn’t open up for you, you pulled the valves out of her tires. That’s against the law too. Now, I tried to have a civilized conversation with you so that you’d understand that the situation has changed, and you insulted me and suggested that despite the protective order, you were going to see her and harm her. So here we are. Let me restate the case. If you go near Tamara Morno again, you will be the one that gets hurt, not her. Do you understand? Say you understand!” The dog caught Marlene’s tone and snarled wetly.

Nobili shuddered and mumbled, “Yeah, yeah, I understand.”

“Good. Now, if I were you, I’d do some work on that booze problem too.”

“I don’t got a problem,” replied Nobili in a sullen voice.

“Yeah, you do. You start in brooding about why you’re all alone, and that makes you sad and you drink, and when you got your load, you start feeling pretty good and you start thinking that you could fix things up with Tamara, and you go looking for her and when she doesn’t want to see you, because you’re drunk, you start thinking, hey, I put myself out, I’m willing to let bygones be bygones, what the hell does this bitch want? You start feeling sorry for yourself. You blame her for things going wrong. Then you drink some more, and you start to break things and beat up on her. Then when you sober up, you forget what you did, and you can’t figure out why she doesn’t love you. And every time it’s a little bit worse, isn’t it? Yeah, it is. And you know, ordinarily something like this would end with her dead and you in jail, feeling real sorry about it. This time, however, you keep on with this horseshit, it’s going to end with you dead, and her free, and not feeling sorry at all. Like they say in A.A., your life’s out of control. Get some help, Arnold.”

The man said nothing, but sat there cringing from the dog and glaring at Marlene. She sighed and said, “Sweety, lu rilassi!” The dog gave up its mouthful of jacket. To Nobili she said, “Okay, scram! For your sake, I hope I never have to see you again.”

“What did you do today?” Karp asked at dinner that evening.

Marlene said, “I got screamed at by a rich junkie, and I terrorized a drunk. Those were the high points, I think.”

“How did you terrorize him, Mom?” asked Lucy.

“I threatened to spank him on his bare heinie. It never fails.” She cupped a hand to her ear. “Remind me again why I’m not a highly paid attorney at a white-shoe law firm.”

“Because you’re a self-destructive nutcase?” Karp ventured.

“Mmm. That doesn’t sound quite right.”

“I think it’s because you’re real brave, and you don’t want women to get hurt,” said Lucy, the literalist, the loyalist. Marlene’s heart overflowed.

“Thank you, darling,” she said, beaming. “First long division, now the inmost secrets of the psyche. Truly, there is no end to your excellence!”