Corruption of Blood (20 page)

The woman colored and murmured, “Thank you, I … ah …” She reached for a return compliment, baffled.

Marlene said gaily, “Oh, it’s just something I threw together,” and tripped off to the brightly lit living room, where the dozen or so guests had gathered for drinks before dinner.

A small bar had been set up in one corner of the room—a cloth-covered table with a young black man in attendance—and Marlene headed straight for it. She needed a drink; her bravado had quite collapsed upon entering the room and checking out the people gathered there. The men were all in early middle age, dressed in good dark suits, and all had the easy confidence that comes from wielding political power. The women were all suited in various ways as well; they had obviously all just come from important jobs—all, that is, except the hostess in her unfortunate golden pj’s. Aside from the expensive clothes, the women were a mixed bunch. Some were gorgeous, others were plain, and there were two enormously fat ones. It was clear that they had not been invited because of their looks or charm, but because of who they were. This should have delighted Marlene the feminist, but it did not—another source of shame. It had been easy, she realized, to be blithe about status when one had it. It shocked her how different she felt now, being nobody.

Marlene threw back half her iced vodka in a gulp, and felt Karp come up and take her arm from behind. She was being introduced to a good-looking man with sandy hair, their host. Andy Hardy, with an edge, Marlene thought. Another introduction, this time to Bert Crane, hearty and smooth. Crane told her how great Karp was. Then she was passed off to the nearest group, two women and a bald, short man with thick glasses. All of them were senior staff on committees Dobbs had an interest in. In a few moments, Karp was led away by Congressman Dobbs and Crane.

Marlene had been introduced simply as Karp’s wife, which was new and which she did not much appreciate, but there it was. There was some more commentary about how good everyone thought Karp was and how they had heard so much about him.

“What do
you
do?” asked one of the women.

“I’m a lawyer,” said Marlene.

The woman smiled. They all did. “How unusual!” she said humorously. “Who with?”

“Nobody,” said Marlene. “My daughter’s four and I’m at home with her.”

“Do you live around here?” asked the other woman. “There’s some wonderful day care in McLean.”

“No, we have a furnished apartment off Wilson in Arlington. And I’m planning to stay home with her.”

The smiles jelled. Then they began to talk again, not exactly ignoring Marlene as if she weren’t there, but each time she made a comment there was a brief pause and then the conversation would start up again as if she hadn’t said anything. This had never happened to her before. That she was smart, that she had graduated from Yale Law School, that she had something to say, apparently did not count anymore, not with these people. She was “wife-of,” and nothing else, occupying the capital’s lowest status rung. She looked over to where Maggie Dobbs was being gracious to a group of men. The men laughed at something she had said. There was the exception; if she had a house like this one, she could give big, expensive parties, and then she would be a person again.

Marlene had to think about this, the realization that for the indefinite future the only people who would talk to her would be her daughter and nannies. Such thoughts required a drink. Another vodka, please. And another.

A bell rang, an actual dinner gong. Everyone trooped into the dining room. Marlene caught a blurry glimpse of her husband talking to Dobbs and Crane. Karp waved to her, and she nodded briefly back to him. He had a worried, distracted look.

There were little place cards. Marlene found hers down at the end of the table, far from the head, where Dobbs and Crane and Karp sat, interspersed with some of the power women. The people at her end seemed distinctly junior, congressional staffers of both sexes, and, of course, Maggie Dobbs at the foot. Marlene had never been to a dinner party like this in a private home; she had scarcely imagined that they still went on, but here she was.

A caterer had, of course, been engaged: no guests hanging around the kitchen and helping with the guacamole. Black men in maroon monkey jackets served turtle soup, then a radicchio salad, then little birds en brochette, with stuffed potatoes and some sort of bland orange vegetable sculpted into flower shapes. The servers also circulated with chardonnay; Marlene politely drank when they filled her glass, which was often.

Animated talk flowed around her. After a few perfunctory attempts to engage her in their conversation, the two men on her flanks chatted for a while to each other around her as if she were a pillar at a hockey game.

The dessert was served, a banana mousse. The conversation between the two men having flagged, the one on Marlene’s good side turned his attention to her, and seemed to notice for the first time that, although unimportant, and absurdly dressed, she was stunning. He was a fair, small, even-featured man of about thirty with a supercilious eye. Marlene recalled having been introduced to him; Jim Something.

“So,” he began, “what do you do in the government? No, let me guess—something arty, National Gallery? Kennedy Center?”

“I’m a housewife,” said Marlene in a dull, low voice.

“Please! Nobody’s a housewife anymore. You’re highly decorative. Fix yourself up a little and you could walk into any front office in town and get hired. Where did you go to school?”

“Smith.”

“Oooh, very Seven Sis! And you majored in marriage?”

“I guess.”

“Well, it’s never too late, my dear,” said the man in a hearty and patronizing tone. “We need to get your juices flowing again. You don’t want to be a Potomac widow, getting wan and shriveled while hubby conquers the world. I’m sure some deep fire still burns within that domestic exterior.” He reached over and kneaded her arm.

She froze, then looked up from her dessert into his watery blue eyes. “Oh? How can you tell?”

“Men know,” he said. “They can sense the heat.”

“Can they? Sense the heat. Can
you
sense the heat?” The booze seemed to hit her all at once and she laughed, louder than was usual at such tables. “
Now
I know who you remind me of,” she cried to her dinner companion. “God! I can’t remember his name. I remember the name of the Kool-Pop artist, though. Mary Ellen Batesy.”

The man looked at Marlene, polite confusion on his face. “Pardon, who is …”

“Mary Ellen Batesy. A big blond whore, walked the stroll on West Street and when she got a little old for it went into specialty work. You saying ‘heat’ was what reminded me. See, some men like hot women, as you were so suavely informing me, but others don’t. Others like to fuck dead women, and in the Kool-Pop trade, also they call it a slab job. See, the whore usually gets a couple three bags of ice and takes a bath in them to get the skin temperature down and get her looking blue, and then she stuffs the Kool-Pops up her snatch, and asshole and in her mouth—not the
same
Kool-Pop, three
different
Kool-Pops, until they melt, according to Mary Ellen. Anyway, Mary Ellen had this gurney in her crib, just like in the morgue, and when she was chilled down and ready, she’d lie on it and cover herself with a white sheet and the john would sneak in, and jump on her and do his thing. Mary Ellen said that aside from the risk of getting pneumonia it was a better gig than regular whoring, where they wanted you to pretend you liked it. And more money too.”

Marlene was now talking in quite a loud voice, the sort of voice they developed in New York City to cut through the screaming of badly ground subway car wheels, and her end of the table had grown silent. People had stopped eating their mousse; they were all staring at Marlene.

“But that’s not what I wanted to
tell
you about, not Mary Ellen, but the guy. Christ! What was his name—Osgood, Oscar, Oswald …” Then she raised her voice to a still higher pitch and shouted down to the other end of the long table, “Butch! What was that guy who liked to fuck dead women? With the rent-a-cooler. Oscar somebody?”

Now the whole table fell silent, and into this silence, Karp’s voice said evenly, “Oscar Sobell.”

“Oscar Sobell!”
shrieked Marlene. “Yeah, Oscar. Whatta guy!” She looked right at Jim Something and said, “Yeah, Oscar. He was a little washed-out blondie like you, maybe a little more chin than you have. Oscar was one of Mary Ellen’s clients, only after a while it started to get old because as good as Mary Ellen was, she wasn’t really dead. I mean, he
knew
that. Also, Oscar was blowing a good chunk of his paycheck on Mary Ellen because she got a hundred a pop for a slab job, plus ice. So, what he did, he rented a cold locker, like people do for their furs and all, and then he went out and found a
regular
girl and he
customized
her for his special needs. Well, great, except he had to sort of wear a parka while he got his rocks off, which was inconvenient, but the real problem was—how to put this delicately … ?”

“Say, Marlene … ,” Karp rumbled from down the table. She ignored him. A murmur from the guests had begun.

“… delicately, as I was saying,” she declaimed in her powerful, clear, courtroom voice, “the problem was that after a few months, his girlfriend was becoming, ah,
gummy,
from all the jelled
semen,
which apparently cut into the quality of the experience he was after. So he racked her, hung her up by the mouth on one of the hooks they supplied there, and went out to the stroll and customized another one. And another one, and another one. Well, what happened then is that the warehouse made an error and gave Oscar’s key by mistake to a nice old lady who wanted to store her minks, and of course she complained to the management, because naturally she didn’t want to share her cold space with a pervert and four dead whores, you could see why, and they called the cops. Oscar had, needless to say, given a phony name and address, and it was all over the papers, so Oscar didn’t come back to the warehouse. The police were baffled, as they say. They circulated a description to the other cold-storage places, but no luck. Oscar didn’t show. Which was when the kid herself here thought of Mary Ellen Batesy and the other ladies who specialized in slab jobs. There are more of them than you’d think. Anyway, Mary Ellen remembered Oscar. And there he was at his place on Staten Island; he’d just ordered a big cold locker for his basement. My brilliant and famous husband, only he wasn’t my husband then, just screwing me on the side, put him away for consecutive life terms. And a good thing too, because, who knows, with his tastes, he might have started on
Jewish
American princesses… .”

“Marlene … ,” said Karp, more sharply. The table remained silent except for embarrassed whispers.

Marlene paused, not because of Karp’s interruption, but because of the insistent nausea rising from her stomach, the result of pouring unaccustomed rich food and a lot of alcohol, quickly drunk, into the seething acids of despair.

“Silly me,” she said in a lower voice, “I’ve monopolized the conversation again.” She rose shakily and pushed back her chair with a rattle that now seemed as loud as gunfire. “Be right back,” she muttered, and stumbled out of the room.

Dinner resumed in her wake as if nothing had happened, and the truth is that such scenes are not at all unusual in the more refined precincts of the capital. Washington, as Alice Roosevelt once remarked, is full of brilliant men and the women they married when they were very young. Being a wife-of is a harder career than one might imagine, and many of these women, suited by nature, if not society, for different work, get drunk a good deal as a result, sometimes publicly. Remarkably, this nearly always generates substantial sympathy, not for them, but for their husbands.

Everyone at the party was, in fact, especially nice to Karp after dinner. The guests returned to the living room, where coffee and after-dinner drinks were served. Karp had decided not to think about Marlene for a while. No one seemed particularly concerned about her behavior, and Karp was, in truth, happy that it hadn’t been worse. That Marlene could be a gigantic pain in the ass, he well knew, and he accepted it as a fact of nature. That her behavior could have a specific cause never entered his mind.

Besides, he was enjoying himself. There is a form of flattery worked on people in important positions in Washington that only a saint well advanced in humility will be able to resist; sadly, few of these are summoned to government service. Karp was perhaps less susceptible than most, but still far from Zion.

Now he sat comfortably on a love seat with an intelligent, pixie-faced woman in her early forties. The woman, whose name was Felicity McDowell, had her silver-blond hair cut short and was dressed in a splendid blue silk pants outfit that had not obviously been thrown together at the last moment, nor was she drunk and disorderly. They had a nice conversation. She knew who Karp was, of course, not just his current job, but his former one. She had lived in New York and was familiar with some of his more spectacular cases. Admiration flowed. She was a journalist and a documentary filmmaker. The possibility of doing a film about the DA’s work arose. Difficulties in doing this were explored. Interesting possibilities were dangled.

The conversation turned, as if reluctantly, from Karp’s glory to her own modest achievements. McDowell had just completed a feature on, of all people, the Lee Oswalds.

“Oh?” said Karp when she announced this. “It must have been hard to do.”

“You mean Marina? Oh, no, she’s quite good with her English now. She’s a smart woman, actually. Lee didn’t want her to learn any English, you know. He was afraid it would loosen her attachment to him.”

“No, actually, I meant Oswald. His character. A very strange and complex man.”

“You’re joking,” she replied with a charming laugh. “He was a … a …
putz—
is that the right word? A nonentity. Nobody at home.”

“Maybe. A guy I work with says if he was such a schmuck, he didn’t kill the president, and if he did kill the president, he wasn’t such a schmuck.”