Justice Denied

10

Karp came floating up out of the pentathol fog, out of the dream he always had when he was anesthetized, the one with the little room full of dead people in it, people he knew, his mother, his grandparents, and victims of murder. They were whispering the secrets of the dead, and however hard he strained his dream ears, he could never quite make them out.

He opened his eyes. A white shape swam into view, and resolved itself into Marlene’s face. Karp tried to speak, croaked, and touched his lips. Marlene passed him a plastic cup with a bent straw attached. He drank and said, “I survived.”

“Of course you survived, you big silly. How does your knee feel?”

Karp looked down at the massive plaster log lying on the bed where his leg used to be. “I don’t know-it feels different.” A thought struck him. “My God, I have an artificial organ.”

“This disturbs you?”

“It’s better than being crippled, assuming I’m actually not crippled. Did you see Hudson, the bastard?”

“Yeah, we conversed. He said it went fine, and provided you don’t abuse it and come to physical therapy like you’re supposed to-which he doubts you’ll do, by the way-you shouldn’t have any trouble.”

“Thank you, Dr. Hudson.” He relaxed back on the pillows, and they chatted about Lucy and about inconsequentials for a while. Karp’s head slowly cleared. He said briskly, “So, what’s up in the big world? Did you see Roland?”

“Yeah, I made his month with that information about Ersoy’s loot. He was practically cackling.”

“Let him cackle. It’s still a frame job. Anything on the connection with Kerbussyan?”

“No. Hey, it’s been one day, okay? I plan on getting with V.T. to see if there’s a money trail connecting the two of them. Maybe Kerbussyan got hold of ripped-off Turkish art treasures and the Turk was buying it back.”

The Turk. The conversation with Guma still plucked at Karp’s mind. Turks and Armenians. Funny money. A gang of wise guys that specialized in taking things from airports. And the Alphabet City women. The pattern wouldn’t emerge, and maybe there wasn’t one at all. Maybe he and Marlene had been doing this too long, so that the need of the mind to make sense of the random and unpredictable violence of the City was producing hallucinations of meaning.

“What about the sex maniac?” he asked.

“Harry’s going to take me around there tonight, show me the guys.”

“They have cops for that, Marlene,” he rumbled. “Heavily armed and trained cops.”

“I don’t want to hear this, Butch.”

He said a curse under his breath, reached for the water cup, found he couldn’t twist his body far enough around to reach it, and fell back, frustrated and angry.

“I hate this,” he said as she passed him the cup. He held her hand, running his thumb across the warm meat of her palm. “And I’m horny.”

“That’s good news,” said Marlene. “A complete recovery can be expected. Does the door lock?”

“You’re not serious.”

She got up from the bed and discovered that while the door didn’t lock, the hallway outside was deserted. She went back to the bed and pulled the curtains around it.

“Actually,” she said, wriggling out of her panties, “I should be wearing a white nurse’s uniform for the absolute height of lubricity. Do you mind? You know how I am about weird places to do it. And having you helpless there is more than I can stand. I’m gushing.”

“Be gentle with me,” said Karp.

“The big one, long hair and the sideburns,” said Harry Bello. “Vincent Boguluso. Calls himself Vinnie the Guinea. The skinny one with the pizza face is Eric Ritter. Monkey Ritter. The one with the headband and the red beard is Duane Womrath.”

“What, no cute nickname?” asked Marlene. They were sitting in Harry’s Plymouth on 5th Street, where they had a good view of the three men sitting on the stoop of 525, drinking malt liquor out of quart bottles. A steamy night on 5th Street off A, people out on all the stoops, young men and girls doing the paseo, the street full of cars, their stereos blasting Latin, little boys racing up and down with toy guns, screaming, other boys, a little older, with real guns, moving envelopes of dope.

“No, just plain Duane,” said Harry. “There’s half a dozen others live in there. Men. Plus girls. Everybody else has been chased out. They use a couple of the apartments as a garage for their bikes.” He pointed at four gleaming, chopped Harleys lined up against the curb.

“And these guys did it for sure?”

“When the girl was beaten, the yells were coming from that house. Also the bites. Forensics says the wound are consistent with the same set of teeth. But.”

“Yeah, we can’t tie them positively to the roof job. Get me a witness, Harry.”

Bello didn’t answer, but stared out the driver’s side window at the three men on the stoop. After a few minutes they appeared to become aware of his inspection. The big one, Vinnie, stood up. Marlene measured his size against the doorway and gasped. “Harry, he’s a monster! What is he, six-eight?”

“Six-nine, three hundred ten pounds the last time he was in jail. I think he put on a little weight since then. Got a sheet on him: assault, disorderly, car theft, burglary-”

A green quart bottle glinted in the streetlight as it arced toward them and shattered on the pavement inches short of their car. Harry Bello had the door handle jacked and was halfway out the door before Marlene put a restraining hand on his arm.

“Harry, no!”

He resisted her pull for a moment and then relaxed and closed the door. “Do it right, Harry,” she said.

He nodded, started the car, gunned the motor, and sent the vehicle roaring off in a sweeping half circle that knocked over the four Harleys in a racket of bonging chrome and tinkling glass.

“That must have felt good,” said Marlene as they drove at a sedate pace up Avenue B. And then she snapped her head back, looking over her shoulder. “There’s that little girl again.”

“Hm?”

“A little girl I met in the park, the fairy princess. She was just there.” Marlene had caught just a glimpse, but the thin child was unmistakable. She was wearing a long bridal veil of white tulle as she skipped between the cars.

Bello checked the rearview mirror but saw nothing.

“What about her?”

“Oh, nothing, just a funny little kid. I was worried about her-she thought she could really fly.”

Morning, a week has passed. Marlene in her lonely bed was awakened by a call from Lillian Dillard at the day-care center. Dillard was down with a bad cold and neuritis, and the care group was canceled for the day.

Marlene cursed vividly, her cries joining the chorus of the thousands of working women to whom this very thing was happening at this very moment all across the City.

Lucy wailed from her crib, and Marlene struggled to suppress the sour juices of resentment, so as not to present a harridan’s face to her child, who in fact she dearly loved. She threw on her tattered blue robe, cleaned, diapered, and ate with the baby, watching Sesame Street, and placed Lucy in her playpen. Then she cleaned and dressed herself and called her office.

Luisa Beckett, Marlene’s deputy, responded competently to the procedural disaster that Marlene’s absence represented. The other attorneys would have to be shuffled to fill the places where the People had to be represented, motions would have to be filed or opposed, meetings would have to be canceled and rescheduled. Competent but not all that sympathetic, Luisa had no children, nor did the other female attorneys on the rape bureau staff. Marlene hung up the phone, depressed and irritated, and with no human being in range to unload on but a tiny child.

Not to be tolerated. She swept up the baby and clumped one flight down the stairs to Stuart Franciosa’s loft. There she found the proprietor, a small, elegant bearded sculptor, and his mate, still smaller and more elegant, a Creole from Louisiana named Larry Bou-dreau, at ease in their dressing gowns, sipping coffee and watching All My Children on a small color television.

Marlene breezed in, deposited Lucy on Larry Boudreau’s lap, and went to the kitchen, where she poured herself a cup of coffee. Stuart’s loft, unlike her own, consisted of a formal two-bedroom apartment, constructed of dry wall, and a large studio equipped with workbenches and a disreputable orangish sofa, on which the roommates now reclined.

“No work today?” asked Stuart.

“Day-care conked out on me. And I had a million things to do. I’m heading into a ferocious depression.”

“And so you dropped down here, where fun ever reigns supreme, in hopes of a cheerful word?”

“Not for nothing are we called gay, Stuart,” said Boudreau, holding Lucy’s hands and goggling at her as she tried to walk up his belly. He was a nurse. He had delivered Lucy Karp in an adjoining bedroom, Marlene having been caught short by an emergency involving a pair of Mafia gunmen. Larry doted on Lucy; this was not surprising, given his current position as chief nurse in the children’s ward at Columbia-Presby: she was cute, affectionate, and not dying from fulminating meningococcemia.

“What about you, Larry?” Marlene asked. “Vacation?”

“Not at all, mah dear child. Ahm night-shiftin’ it this week. Stuart heah will be rambling through wicked SoHo, breakin’ hearts while Ah attend the sick.”

Franciosa rolled his eyes. “We’re having a spat. It’s too tawdry and boring. He’s being the martyr, and I’m the heel.”

Boudreau sniffed and leveled a hooded and disdainful look at his lover over Lucy’s bouncing dark head.

“Meanwhile,” said Stuart brightly, “I have two passes to a tony reception, uptown. Shrimp and champagne. Are we interested?”

Larry said, “Ah’d love to, deah, but Ah have to wash mah hay-uh,” in a tone that could have etched bronze.

“God, I haven’t been uptown in months,” sighed Marlene.

“Why don’t you take Marlene, Stuart?” said Boudreau silkily. “She’d love it. Ah’ll watch ouah little darlin’ heah. Mind, y’all have to be back by two-thirty …”

Franciosa hesitated, neatly trapped. Marlene would insure that he behaved himself, while Larry would get to sulk nobly at home. “Want to?” he asked, after a moment’s pause.

“Since you ask …” she said. “Just twist my arm a little harder.”

Forty-five minutes later, Marlene sat in a cab with Stuart Franciosa, wearing a yellow 1950s sundress bought at a thrift shop, thong sandals, and a Panama hat with the brim turned up. She was working hard, fighting guilt, trying to bring her mood up to match her sprightly appearance. Around 14th Street, guilt retreated snarling into its cave, and Marlene turned her attention to the prospect of a delightful afternoon consuming elegant viands in the company of lovely people, none of whom spent much time examining mutilated women.

“So, what’s with this gallery? Are you in it?”

Franciosa, who had been doing some sulking of his own, shone a weak smile at her. “No, Sokoloff handles nothing but the old: antiquities, plus Byzantine and other Eastern stuff. They’re one of the main houses in the City for that.”

“So why did you get an invite?”

“They’ve used me to make copies. Lost-wax jobs, in precious metals. Scythian bracelets, Egyptian rings, that sort of stuff. Little statuettes. It’s a nice little business for them, and I get some good contacts out of it.”

“Wow, treasures of the mysterious East. It sounds deliciously romantic and decadent.”

“You got it, sister,” said Stuart, brightening.

They arrived. Sokoloff’s occupied a corner at Madison in the fifties. Inside were three spacious rooms, painted white, with track lights on the ceiling and oriental carpets on the floor. The treasures were arranged in glass cases on the walls and on pillars. Glomming the artifacts and loading up on canapés, shrimp, and Moët were perhaps fifty people, the men prosperous-looking, the women dressed in the sort of clothes one needs an appointment to buy. Marlene was introduced to the proprietor, Stephan Sokoloff, a portly old rake who lingered a tad too long over the continental kiss he placed on Marlene’s hand. Stuart ushered her away before she could object.

“Stuart!” she said in a stage whisper, “I’m dressed like a hick. I thought it was going to be arty, people with blue spikes and vicious leather.”

Franciosa laughed. He was himself wearing all black under an Italian silk double-breasted jacket in the palest possible tangerine, worn open. “It doesn’t matter what you wear when you’re the most beautiful woman in the room, dear. As you are. You saw how Sokoloff drooled over you.”

He started and placed his hand on his breast. “Speaking of which-be still my heart! Who is that dish?”

Marlene followed his gaze. It had been a rhetorical question, and she was astounded that she was actually able to answer it. “It’s V.T. Newbury. What the hell is he doing here?” The man in question was a smallish ash blonde with the perfect Anglo-Saxon features of a portrait by Copley.

“You know him?”

“Yes, and you can stop that panting, you slut.”

“He’s not straight.”

“Like a T-square. Want to meet him anyway?”

“Maybe later,” said the artist morosely, at which point he was shanghaied by a person in a feathered hat.

Marlene ambled over to Newbury, who was in rapt conversation with a squat, swarthy man dressed in a cheap and ill-fitting three-piece polyester suit. V.T. was his usual exquisite Paul Stuart self. They made an odd pair.

V.T.’s eyes widened in surprise when he saw Marlene, but she forestalled whatever remark he was about to make.

“Not a word, V.T. I’m not here, you never saw me. Gosh, that’s a lovely thing. What’s he smiling about?”

They were standing in front of a glass case containing a small statue of a boy done in some hard, bright stone. The tag said “Kouros, 14.5 cm, alabaster, Miletus, ca. 600 B.C.”

The swarthy man said, “It’s what they call the archaic smile. It’s a symbol of personality.” This delivered in a thick New York accent. Poisonality.

Marlene gave him another look. A blunt, square face, pockmarked, and a black crew cut. Intelligent eyes, but they had a hard, cynical light in them that Marlene recognized all too well.

“Not something most cops would pick up,” she said. The man laughed, and V.T. made the introductions. The swarthy man was in fact Detective Lieutenant Ramon Rodriguez, and he was in charge of the small unit of the New York Police Department that investigates art frauds and thefts.

“So, V.T., you’re working?” she asked. V.T. was a light of the D.A.’s fraud bureau.

“Yes, I suppose I am. And isn’t it pleasant? That’s why I love fraud. You get to mix with an altogether tonier class of people than in Homicide.”

“Yeah, and the food’s better too,” said Rodriguez, snagging a caviar-heaped cracker from a passing tray.

“So what’s the scam?” said Marlene, doing the same. “Is it a fake?”

Rodriguez looked at the little kouros again. “Well, it’s kinda hard to say. With stone like this, you don’t have the chemical tests you have for your organics, like wood and cloth, or pigment tests and X rays for old paintings. All you have is, you can do crystallographic analysis to see where the original stone came from and if it has weathered the way it ought to if it’s ancient. Other than that, it’s all stylistic. And provenance, of course.”

“Which means?” asked Marlene, all at once fascinated, and not because the subject was inherently gripping. Something tugged at her mind.

“Well, stylistic is Sokoloff got some guy from Yale and some guy from the Met to say it’s a realie,” said Rodriguez. “Provenance means you got documentary proof of a chain of ownership; that, or the thing’s been under observation in some church since the year one. But you can forge or fake provenance. Or explain not having any-hey, you just dug the sucker out of some tel in Iraq. Example: in 1960 a Brit named Mellaert discovered a trove of stuff at Haçilar in Turkey-pottery mostly, very old. Turns out the ‘peasant’ who led Mellaert to the find was a forger named Cetimkya, who ran the pots off himself. Of course, once you have a ‘find’ it’s open season; who’s to know the stuff’s not something ripped off out of the dig before it was catalogued? Pre-Columbian stuff is the worst for that. Robbing graves is a major industry down there, and collectors don’t ask questions. And they get ripped like crazy.

“The hard part is making them complain; nobody likes to be a mark, especially rich connoisseurs.” Connowsewers.

“So why are you here at this particular gallery? Routine?”

Rodriguez smiled, showing large, yellowish teeth. “I like the food. No, actually, I’m following up on an Interpol bulletin. Somebody popped a warehouse in Istanbul that was being used to keep stuff from the Topkapi collection. Nobody knows what the hell was in there, but a bunch of collectors in Milan, Paris, and London have been stung by phony antiquities and Byzantine stuff, supposedly the loot from Istanbul. It would be natural for whoever’s doing it to move their operation to New York too. So, watch and wait.

“I’ll say one thing for whoever’s doing this. They know what they’re doing-the craftsmanship’s outa-sight. C’mere, I’ll show you something.”

The three of them trooped over to a case by the wall. On black velvet a small painting glowed golden.

“Christ Judged by Pilate,” said Rodriguez. “Byzantine, ninth century. Okay, the wood’s right, it’s an old panel. The paint’s egg tempera, the blues are crushed lapis, the red’s cochineal-not modern pigments. The gold in the frame is really beaten, not milled. Milling wasn’t used until the tenth. But …”

He paused significantly. “Stylistic analysis. The soldier holding Christ. His helmet, his armor, even his stance and the expression on his face is right off a cross reliquary and icon of the Passion now in the treasure of the Primatial Basilica of Hungary-early thirteenth.”

“But why couldn’t the Hungarian piece be copied off this one?” Marlene asked.

“It don’t work that way. Stylistically, that figure’s too late to have been done by a Byzantine in the ninth. Here’s something else, even more interesting.”

They moved to the next case.

“Five-pointed Armenian tiara decorated with star and two eagles, gold and gems, circa 90 B.C. Same thing: the workmanship is terrific. Lost wax casting, no drawn wire. There’s one just like it in the Armenian state museum at Erevan. I mean, just like it. I’m not saying it’s a fake; it could be an ancient duplicate or a slightly later copy. But …” He waggled his hand. “In any case, it convinced Kerbussyan enough to buy it.”

“Kerbussyan!”

“Yeah. Why, do you know him?”

“I heard the name. How do you know he bought it?”

“Little red dot there on the card. Has to be old Kerbussyan. Nothing that good from Armenia comes through the New York market without him scarfing it up. He’s probably the major collector of Armenian art in the world. Look, here’s something else he bought.”

The next case held a small panel painting. The card gave Burial of St. Gregory as its title, and there was a tiny red stick-on dot there too.

“It looks a little like Giotto,” said Marlene.

Rodriguez raised an eyebrow. “Very good. It’s a contemporary of his, Tóros Roslin. ‘School of,’ more likely. Worked in southeastern Turkey-what they called Cilicia or Lesser Armenia. Funny, it’s not quite an antiquity-out of Sokoloff’s usual line.”

They studied the painting in silence for a few moments. A haloed saint was being placed in a tomb, with the usual attending mourners and angels waiting to conduct his soul to glory.

“Why is his face like that?”

“Oh, that’s the famous mask,” said Rodriguez. “St. Gregory the Illuminator was the founder of Armenian Christianity back in the fourth century or thereabouts. It’s, um, a complicated story, but the upshot was the king and queen were real broken up when he died, so they had a death mask made of his face, and after a while they used it as a cast for a solid gold mask adorned with jewels. According to one version of the legend, Gregory’s actual eyes were incorporated into the mask, miraculously preserved from corruption. It had the usual holy powers. Heal the sick, make the blind see. Gregory’s right hand, by the way, is wrapped in a silver gauntlet reliquary in the treasury of the Catholicos of Cilicia in Beirut.”

“What happened to it? The mask, I mean.”

“No one knows … if it ever existed, which I doubt. Art history’s full of legendary treasures like that. I’ll tell you one thing, though. If it ever comes through New York, Kerbussyan’ll buy it.” He looked at his watch. “Shit, I’m due downtown in court in half an hour. Nice to meet you, Marlene. Coming, V.T.?”

“Just a sec, Lieutenant, one question,” Marlene said. “Did you ever hear of a guy named Mehmet Ersoy?”

Rodriguez frowned and chewed his lip. “Name sort of rings a bell. Turkish name. What about him?”

“Well, I just thought that since his business was buying back stolen Turkish antiquities, you might have run across him.”

“Stolen Turkish antiquities? Who told you that?”

“I heard it from their guy at the U.N., in confidence, that the Turks have a program to locate and return to Turkey ancient stuff that is taken out of the country illegally and is being sold abroad. Had some serious money behind it too.”

Rodriguez shrugged. “Well, hey, it’s possible, but I never heard anything about it. I mean, from the Turks’ perspective, it don’t make a hell of a lot of sense.”

“Why not?”

“Because when the Brits and the French and the Greeks and the Italians try to get their antiquities back, they’re dealing with their own heritage. The stuff was made by their ancestors, or people they’d like to believe were their ancestors. But the Turks didn’t get to Anatolia until the Middle Ages. That statue, the tiara, and those paintings-it ain’t their stuff. It belonged to people they beat the crap out of back then. That’s why it’d be a little weird if they were buying back antiquities. I always thought they’d kinda like to forget anyone lived there before they hit town.”

V.T. and Rodriguez left. Marlene mooched listlessly around the exhibit, drinking more wine than was good for her, until the existence of a class of people who spent their time buying expensive trinkets and clinking glasses of champagne, instead of wading neck deep through the dregs of society, produced in her in an unbearable state of disgust mixed with guilty longing. She dragged a protesting Franciosa away from a coven of glittering art hags and fled the gallery, returning with a churning mind and a heavy heart to the steaming streets and motherhood.

Karp had a wheelchair in his office, but he refused to use it in public. Instead he clumped on crutches from courtroom to meetings, grasping a ratty brown folder in two fingers as he slogged away down the bustling halls.

Now he was sitting in the conference room of the district attorney with the other senior bureau chiefs-Fraud, Rackets, Supreme Court, Criminal Courts, Appeals-and the D.A.’s administrative deputy and hatchet, Conrad Wharton. Karp did not have much in common with any of these men. They were Bloom’s creatures all, adept at public relations, smooth administration, coordination, the judicious use of prosecutorial power. Karp was the only one of them who was a serious trial lawyer.

There was some good-natured joshing about Karp’s leg, to which he responded in the same tone. Wharton did not join in this. He never talked to Karp if he could help it, or noticed his existence in any way, except under the absolute press of business. He wrote Karp a lot of memos though, mostly to point out deficiencies in his management of his bureau.

It was curious. Karp had sent any number of vicious, depraved monsters to prison, where they certainly did not wish to go, but he doubted that any of these hated him as much as the baby-faced little man at the end of the conference table, to whom Karp had never, to his own recollection, done a personal injury. It was a mystery, one that annoyed him, although it cannot be said that he tossed nightly in his bed because of it.

Still, he recognized that Wharton’s hatred caused him trouble. Whenever administration could trip up a bureau, there was Wharton’s ankle in Karp’s way. Karp reflected, in fact, that there had been an unusual number of D.A.’s meetings called during the week he had been on crutches: perhaps Wharton was taking some sadistic pleasure in seeing him hobble around.

The D.A. entered, in shirtsleeves and red suspenders; to his credit, these did not have tiny golden justice scales upon them. The D.A. was in his early fifties and looked like a suburban anchorman: razor-cut, blow-dried tannish hair going attractively gray; even, pleasant, if undistinguished features; terrific teeth. He was charming.

He began the meeting by charming his minions. Karp was charmed by solicitous concern about his knee, plus a remark about not having to worry anymore about hiring the handicapped, which raised a gust of dutiful, unpleasant laughter. The bureau chiefs gave their reports. Wharton handed the D.A. a sheet of paper on which was written a set of probing questions about various cases that might get the D.A. into trouble or show the office in a bad light.

Karp’s questions were about the Hosie Russell case and the Tomasian case, as he had expected.

“What about this Russell? You’re sure he’s the right guy?”

“Yes. It’s a circumstantial case, but it’ll go the right way.”

“That’s not what I hear. The word is the cops picked up the first black lush they came across in the neighborhood and cooked up a bunch of incriminating evidence. The black community is pissed off.”

“If that’s what you hear, you’re talking to the wrong people. We have two positive witnesses, one of them a black man, tying Russell to the crime. The evidence is good, and it’ll hold up under challenge.”

“That’s what you said about Morales. And Devers. Those were embarrassments, but they were nothing to what we’ll have if this case gets fucked up. A young woman stabbed in broad daylight in front of a good building …”

Karp felt his face heat and felt the eyes of the other chiefs on him. He had gotten angry before. He had tried arguing from the perspective of a trial lawyer. None of it had done any good. This had nothing to do with the job he was doing and everything to do with Karp himself. He paused for a number of seconds before answering.

“You’re the D.A. You sign the indictments. Would you like me to let Russell go?”

The D.A. looked startled, as he did any time someone (usually it was Karp) reminded him of his legal responsibility.

“No, of course not! But I’m holding you responsible for seeing that this comes out right. Now, on this Tomasian thing. The U.N. liaison office is still extremely upset. I was on the phone with a man for a half hour this morning, assuring him that terrorism was not about to take over the City. I hope to hell I wasn’t wrong and you’ve got your act together on this one.”

Karp said, straight-faced, “I think it’s absolutely certain that terrorism isn’t taking over the City.”

“You know what I mean,” snapped Bloom. “I don’t like what I hear from your operation on this thing. Dissension. Duplicate investigations. I don’t think you realize what’ll happen if the press gets hold of these stories.”

“There’s nothing for the press to get hold of,” said Karp calmly. “There’s one investigation. Roland Hrcany is in charge of it. We have an indictment and a defendant in custody.”

“And he’ll go for it? You can promise that?”

“No, as a matter of fact, I can’t.”

“Why not? Is there something wrong with the case?”

“No,” said Karp after a brief pause. “It’s a good case.” He was about to add that the only problem with the case was that the defendant hadn’t done the crime, but decided against it. The D.A. wouldn’t be interested in stuff like that. What he said was: “It could be better. We’re working on it.”

“Do that!” the D.A. said, and moved on briskly to other business.

Karp went back to his office and worked on the Russell case. He wanted to move it swiftly through the courts and, for a wonder, it was moving swiftly. They had opened up a new Supreme Court part a few weeks ago, and its calendar was not loaded yet. Theoretically, it was possible to dispose of a murder case in two months from arrest to sentencing, if you had the right court and it was not to the defense’s advantage to slow things down.

Unfortunately, it usually was. Witnesses forgot or died. Pleas were more acceptable after a decent interval in jail. But this time Freeland seemed almost eager to rush things along, as if he could not wait for the personal confrontation with Karp. That suited Karp just fine. Pretrial was set for the morrow, and he was busy researching arguments for the motions the defense was likely to bring when his wife walked in.

“It’s conventional to knock,” he said.

“In an office, yeah,” said Marlene, “but this is your bedroom and I’m your wife. I have conjugal rights.”

“Which you intend to exercise now?”

“Dream on.” She looked around the office. Karp had set up a steel folding bed he had snitched from the jail infirmary. A steel clothes rack on casters from one of the courtrooms was hung with his suits. There was a suitcase standing nearby with shirts and other necessaries.

“I still can’t believe you’re doing this,” she added. “Nobody lives in their office.”

“It’s only for six weeks, Marlene, maybe less. We’ve been through all this. I have to be here for Russell, and I can’t get up and down from the loft, and we can’t afford a hotel right now.”

Marlene slumped down in a visitors’ chair and lit a cigarette she didn’t really want. She smoked in silence for a while. Karp went back to his reading. She stood up abruptly. “Well, so much for domestic felicity. I’m going to pick up Lucy. What do you want for dinner?”

“Chinese?”

“Good choice. MSG helps build strong bones. See you.”

She left. Karp worked until his eyes burned and then lay down on his bed of pain. He drifted off and was awakened by his daughter’s tiny fingers probing his facial orifices.

“She misses you,” said Marlene, setting out white cardboard containers on the conference table. “She’s been whiny all week. Her little schedule is all disturbed.”

“I’m sorry,” said Karp lamely, kissing the child.

They ate, Lucy sitting on his lap, grabbing for indigestible morsels and making a mess.

“What’s going on in the big world?” he asked to break the silence.

“Um, the usual. I saw Geri Stone again today down in the lobby. She’s stalking the halls, dressed in black and buttonholing strangers and trying to convince them it wasn’t her fault the guy she sprang whacked her sister. She’s become one of the Centre Street characters, like the Walking Booger and Dirty Warren. Everybody calls her The Sister. I think she’s deteriorating.

“What other news? I’m following up on what we learned from the Turks and at that art gallery. V.T is working the banks, trying to get a line on whether Ersoy had moved any serious money out of the U.S. before he got shot.

“Harry located Gabrielle Avanian’s parents today. The father says he hasn’t got a daughter and hung up on him. He spoke to an older brother later. Apparently the father disowned her when she moved out and started shacking with Tomasian. The brother is supposed to come down to the hospital tomorrow and give us an ID on her. She’s still out of it.

“Harry also did a repeat canvass of the buildings across from the murder scene on Fifth Street. No luck, so we’re still looking for a witness that’ll tie those mutts in the motorcycle gang to the Jane Doe killing.”

“Something is jelling in my brain about all this,” said Karp, “but I can’t quite get it to come clear.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean, me too. Here’s a thought. The U.N. guy, Kilic, said that Ersoy’s money was for buying art. I don’t think so. But maybe he was selling art.”

“Huh? Why do we connect him with art at all? Why not dope or sex?”

“Because Kilic is covering up something, and he was the one who suggested that Ersoy was in the art business. He must have known that we’d look into it and wanted to be covered in case Ersoy’s name came up in connection with the art trade. And, of course, there’s the one man whose name shows up in both ends of this business-the Armenian nationalist and art collector, Sarkis the K. I’d like to have a chat with him.”

“I miss you,” said Karp.

She looked at him for a while, her face unreadable. “Yeah, well, me too. If I’d wanted to be a single mother I would’ve started at age sixteen and my kid would’ve been going to proms by now. This can’t go on.”

“What can we do?”

“I don’t know,” answered Marlene wearily. “I’ll think of something.”