Corruption of Blood (45 page)

Karp remained standing. He said, “Actually, Hank, I do have some questions. I’d like to know who you told that I was going to Miami and who I was going to see there.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

Karp ignored this protest. “Whoever you told, he told somebody else, and two critical witnesses were killed right in front of our noses. I know the leak had to come from you because you’re the only one besides Bert and my immediate staff who knew why we were going to Miami. I told you myself, dummy that I am, remember? Another question: did you know my apartment was bugged? Your buddy Blake Harrison sure did; he located me over the weekend with information he got from that bug. So he’s connected to the people who want this all derailed. What is he, CIA? He was nearly as forceful as you in urging me to take this job. So I’ve been asking myself why two such well-established and powerful people want me to be chief counsel.”

“Butch, sit down… .”

“I mean, it’s not like I’m going to be allowed to do any real investigation—I don’t think that’s on anyone’s agenda right now. So it can’t be my legal brilliance; Bert is brilliant too, and you didn’t like him too much.”

“Butch, will you just sit down and listen?”

“So it must be you think I’m hungrier than Bert, hungrier and more desperate. The trouble with Bert is that he’s from a Main Line family and he’s got an independent income and a big law practice. Karp, on the other hand, as you just put it so well, doesn’t have a dime—no, wait, I’m almost finished. So you think when you get me in there, with the salary and all the perks, and all the promises, like you just explained it to me, you figure I’ll just kind of roll over and let you have the kind of whitewash you want.”

Dobbs sprang to his feet as well and slammed his fist down on his desk. “God damn it,” he shouted, “that’s horseshit and you know it! If it wasn’t for me, there wouldn’t
be
a serious investigation at all.”

Karp leaned across the desk and placed his face within a foot of Dobbs’s. Quietly, speaking quickly in the frozen moment, he said, “Yeah, I know. That’s what Bert said too. And I can’t figure it out. You want a real investigation; I know you don’t believe in Warren; but you’re also working a game, Hank. For whatever reason, you’re trying to steer the investigation in a certain direction—toward something or away from something, I don’t know which. I tell you what, Hank: I’ll make a deal with you. You tell me the full story, who you told and who he’s really working for, and why you’re doing what you’re doing, and I’ll take the job.”

Karp had been staring into Dobbs’s eyes as he said this, so he could see the fear come into them.

“My God!” said Dobbs. “You’ve turned into some kind of paranoid maniac.”

Karp stood up and turned to go. Almost as an aside, he said, “By the way, Hank, one of my people saw your boy Charlie Ziller swipe a bunch of evidence from the office a couple of weeks ago. Who did he give it to?”

“They couldn’t have—,” Dobbs blurted, and then stopped short, his face blanching.

“No? Why couldn’t they have? Because he did it late at night? Because he swore that no one was watching? I don’t think you ever actually practiced any criminal law, did you, Hank? And for sure you were never a prosecutor. Otherwise, you would’ve learned that trick the first week. So, who got the package? Harrison? The CIA? It doesn’t really matter because I have copies of everything.”

In a strangled voice he said, “Get out!”

“Okay, but one thing, Representative Dobbs, some advice. You ought to make sure that whoever you hire to replace Bert is someone who never saw the inside of a courtroom. It’ll make things a lot easier on you.”

Karp walked back down the Hill through a cold, light drizzle, feeling on the one hand pretty good and on the other like a prize schmuck, not an unfamiliar combo to him.

In the office, he told Crane he’d turned down the job, leaving the other conversation out of it. Then he went to see V.T.

V.T. was on the phone. When Karp walked in he said into the receiver, “Oh, wait a sec, he just walked in.” He held the receiver out to Karp. “It’s Fulton in Louisiana. He wants to talk to you.”

“Clay. You find out anything?”

“Yeah,” said Fulton, “I found out folks in Baton Rouge don’t like smart nigger cops from New York.”

“Ah, shit, Clay, I’m sorry. You got into trouble, right?”

“A couple of the local redneck cops rousted me. I flashed my buzzer, but they thought I stole it. I had to do my Sidney Poitier impression.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Hey, it was interesting, what can I say? Pete Melchior saved my ass. Anyway, we’re still looking into this P. X. Kelly guy. So far, no connections with any Cubans. We’re trying to get hold of his bank records—that’s what I was talking to V.T. about—to see if we can match those transfers to Guel. What’s going on up there? I heard about Crane.”

“Well, we’re sort of on hold here, Clay. Dobbs just offered me Crane’s job, and I turned it down.”

“You what?”

“I turned it down. Dobbs is our leak. No, I can’t get into it now, it’s a long story, and besides, I’m not sure that this line isn’t bugged too.”

“As bad as that, huh?”

“Maybe worse. Look, meanwhile, keep working the PXK angle. There’s got to be something; I can feel it. Oh, see if you can find any connection between Kelly and Henry Dobbs, or his family.”

“Yeah, right. We’re gonna get yanked, aren’t we?”

“Probably, but let’s get as much done as we can until the ax falls.”

Hanging up, Karp turned to V.T. and told him what had happened at Dobbs’s office. V.T. took it with his typical aplomb. “Well, well, Hank has a taste for conspiracy, just like dear old dad.”

“I thought he didn’t do it. That’s what Marlene’s been trying to prove—oh, that reminds me. Marlene mentioned a name that rang a bell and I said I’d try to track it down. Gaiilov? Did you mention it?”

“Maybe, in passing. Armand Gaiilov, he calls himself Arnie Galinski nowadays, is one of the Dallas Russians who were friendly with Lee and Marina when they came back to Texas after their Russian stay. De Morenschildt’s another.”

“Gaiilov knew Oswald?” said Karp, amazed.

“Yeah, sure. Half the people in Texas knew Oswald, to hear them tell it, almost as many as people who were involved in the conspiracy. What about it? What’s Marlene’s angle here?”

“Nothing. Just that, well, this Gaiilov was apparently the Soviet agent who saved Richard Dobbs’s ass when he was accused of spying. Dobbs’s lawyer, Harley Blaine, waved Gaiilov in the government’s face and they dropped the charges. And you say he knew Oswald.” Karp stood with his hands in his pockets staring up at the stained ceiling.

“You’re seeing a connection,” said V.T.

Karp looked at him. “Shit, V.T, how do I know? Everybody knows everybody else. Dobbs knows Blaine, and he’s leaking stuff to somebody. Blaine was CIA, and we know that the CIA is stonewalling. Blaine knows Gaiilov and Gaiilov knew Oswald. Now, if
P. X. Kelly
knows Oswald, Blaine, or Gaiilov …”

“We’d all put on grins and say ‘small world’ in chorus.”

Karp, deep in thought, strolled around the cluttered office. V.T. had brought a rickety conference table in and covered it with labeled folders. Karp asked, “What’s all this stuff?”

“Oh, just an idea, speaking of small world. I’m making a central file of every name that’s come up in the investigation with all the information we have on each person and cross-references to all the other files. Maybe it’ll turn something up.”

“Yeah, well make one for Representative Henry Dobbs too.”

“I’ll do that,” said V.T., laughing. “Oh, as to accomplishments, look at this.” He tossed Karp a black loose-leaf notebook.

Karp riffled it. “What is it?”

“It’s a sort of concordance for the Depuy film. It describes each shot, giving frame numbers and naming the people in each one, those we’ve identified. Where we haven’t ID’d them, we give them numbers. And it includes whatever info we have on them, all in one place. You might want to check it out against the film. I’ve seen it so many times, I’ve probably made some mistakes.”

“Okay,” said Karp, “I might do that. Maybe I’ll spot P. X. Kelly behind a bush waving a handful of cash.”

A week passed, and then another. Crane’s resignation was on the front page for a day, and then the assassination committee seemed to drop from the national view, like a doomed DC-10 vanishing from a radar scope. Crane slipped away back to Philadelphia after a small cheerless staff dinner. Karp had one brief meeting with Louis Watson, the new chairman. Watson said he was counting on Karp to hold the staff together until a new director could be found, and Karp said that he would try to do so. They did not discuss the work of the staff or assassination theories.

It snowed six and a half inches one Thursday, which meant that the entire federal government ground to a halt, it being a well-known condition of employment in the federal bureaucracy that you never have to drive in snow. The snowfall and its attendant disasters occupied a good chunk of the
Post
’s front page, but that newspaper did reserve five or six inches on page eleven for an announcement that a man named Claude Wilkey had been selected to replace Bert Crane. Karp noted with ironic amusement that Dobbs had indeed taken his advice: Wilkey was a professor at an Ivy League law school, and as far as Karp could determine from the brief vita in the
Post,
he had never tried a case in his life.

Karp decided to use his unexpected snow holiday to review the concordance that V.T. had made of the Depuy film. He did not imagine that this evidence would ever appear in a court of law, not the way things appeared to be going, but he was a pro, and he thought that there might be a faint chance of catching something that others had missed.

He had set up the little editor on the kitchen table and was anticipating a boring but restful winter’s afternoon of running through the Depuy film frame by frame and editing the concordance. This proved more difficult than he had expected. Like many (perhaps all) men whose profession requires the exercise of abstract thought, he had little attention to spare for the concrete realities of domestic life. If he had, he would never have embarked on a project requiring concentration and careful manipulation of a notoriously cranky device in the kitchen of a tiny apartment containing an active and curious three-year-old, an extremely large dog, an intelligent woman in the final stages of a large project that also required the use of that very same machine, in the aftermath of a blizzard that confined them all to close quarters. A more sensitive man would never have started such a project under these circumstances; a more sensitive man would therefore probably not have discovered how and why John F. Kennedy was slain, a discovery that Karp ever afterward would associate with the smell of cocoa boiling over, with gray light and swirling snow.

Karp’s first mistake was being charmed by his daughter’s identification of the film editor as a “dolly television.” He agreed that it was indeed a dolly TV (ho ho!) but that Daddy had to play with it for now. This offended Lucy’s well-developed sense of justice and entitlement; the dolly TV should be in
her
room so her dollies could watch it. Explanations. Whining. Tantrum.

“Can’t you … um … go someplace?” Karp pleaded to his wife, amid the wails.

“Go where?” replied Marlene. “It’s the Antarctic out there. Also, I was planning to use the machine today. I didn’t expect to have you stumbling around the house.”

Karp threw up his hands and choked off a nasty response. “Okay,
I’ll
go out with her, and you can use the machine, and then
you
can watch her and I’ll work.” He turned to the child. “How about that, Lucy?” he asked, summoning his final reserves of good nature. “You want to go play in the snow?”

Lucy sniffled back tears and nodded solemnly.

“Take the dog,” said Marlene.

When she was alone in the house, Marlene made herself a pot of coffee, drank some, lit a cigarette, and spent ten minutes just listening to the quiet. Then she rewound the film Karp had been looking at and spooled in the film she had taken from the Dobbs attic.

The first few seconds were an establishing shot of a locale: a stretch of wide, calm water, a bay of some sort, a deserted beach, and a large white beach cottage. It was very early in the morning. Marlene stopped the film and studied the building curiously. Then she stripped the film out of the camera and went to get a box containing several of the Dobbs films she wanted to look at again, found one, mounted it, and rolled it for a minute or so until she found a film of a family party in the summer of fifty-five and the Dobbs and Hewlett cousins playing on the beach in front of a beach cottage. She had been right; the place in the attic film was the isolated cottage belonging to Selma Dobbs’s family, at Niantic on the Sound.

Replacing the attic film, Marlene rolled on. A couple emerged from the house. The woman, a trim, pretty blond in her late thirties, was wearing a two-piece suit from the postwar era, and carrying a beach blanket. The man wore trunks and carried a bottle of champagne and two stemmed glasses. They were laughing. The woman spread the blanket and they sat on it and drank champagne and kissed and laughed and watched the sun climb higher over the Sound.

There was a cut and suddenly the man and the woman were much closer. The cameraman had changed lenses and was now shooting through a big telephoto. The image was grainier, but not grainy enough to prevent Marlene from seeing that the woman was Selma Dobbs and the man was Harley Blaine.

Marlene watched, fascinated, as the wine was finished and the kissing became more passionate. They wrapped themselves in the beach blanket; bathing suits were tossed out on the beach. The blanket became a wriggling, heaving tube. The blanket fell away; they didn’t miss a stroke. Marlene tried to reconcile her image of the austere dowager she had met with this abandoned creature being pounded into the sand, her back arched in ecstasy, her legs wrapped around her lover’s neck. The camera panned slowly from her face, an orgasmic mask, down to Blaine’s thrusting hips. Marlene felt her face grow hot, a combination of intense embarrassment and turn-on.