Corruption of Blood (48 page)

Karp stared at her. “Blackmail him? Are you serious?”

“Oh, silly, it won’t come to blackmail,” said Marlene lightly. “It’ll be very civilized. I’ll send him a copy of the film and tell him what we know about his involvement in Kennedy, and we’ll go out there and talk.”

Karp held his hands to his head. “I don’t believe I’m hearing this!” he shrieked. “If we’re right, this guy has already aced a couple dozen people, not to mention the president of the United States. How about if you’re wrong and he sends three guys with machine guns? Did you ever think of that?”

They locked eyes for a full minute, tense and breathing hard. At the end of this, Marlene nodded curtly once and got up from her chair. “Fine, have it your way. I’ll pack.”

“What? Wait a minute, Marlene… .”

“Why? Why wait? Just call the goddamn office and tell them you’re quitting. We can be on the road tonight, running back to New York with our tails between our legs.”

“Marlene …”

She stomped out of the room and he followed her up the stairs to their bedroom, where with violent motions she started flinging drawers open.

“Marlene, stop it!”

She turned to him, eye blazing. “Why? Hey, you were the one who wanted to find out who whacked JFK. It was no big thing for me. I was happy in New York, remember?”

“You’re not being fair,” he said, despising himself for saying it.

“Oh, for Chrissake, what does ‘fair’ have to do with it. What the problem is, is you
still
don’t trust my judgment. Look—I
know
this guy. I studied him in films over thirty years. I read nearly everything he wrote. I know how his mind works. I know what the people who were most intimate with him thought about him. I read his fucking
love letters.
I’m
telling
you that this will work.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

She paused and her face lost some of its tension. He was going to roll on it. “If it doesn’t,” she said, “we’ll both be dead. Which is why I’m going to call Harry Bello to come down here.”

“Bello? Why? What does he have to do with it?”

“Simple. We’ll tell him the whole story and leave the stuff in the envelope with him. If anything happens to us, he’ll take care of Lucy, one, and two, he’ll track them down and kill them all, all the goddamn chessmen, every one.”

Karp let out a long breath. He shrugged. “Well, since you put it that way, how can I resist?”

“Really?” said Marlene. “Really and truly?”

“Yeah, uh-huh.”

“How do you feel?” she asked challengingly.

Karp consulted his feelings, always a creaky process.

“Um, relieved, I think. Pumped. Scared shitless.”

She flung her arms around him. They hugged. They kissed, with an intensity they had not experienced for some time. She drew back from him and looked into his face, smiling. She said, “Good. That’s how I feel. If you didn’t want to feel like that a lot, you shouldn’t have married a Sicilian.”

Marlene threw on her field jacket and her Yankees cap over sweatshirt and jeans and sneakers and drove her car to downtown Rosslyn, a concentration of high-rises and commercial streets across the Potomac from Washington. She stopped first at a bank and drew five hundred dollars against the MasterCard, feeling just a twinge of guilt. After consulting a Yellow Pages, she walked three blocks to a film lab.

Placing the Dobbs film on the counter, she asked how long it would take to make a copy.

The pencil-necked young technician across the counter weighed the film in his hand. “Beginning of next week?”

“No, I need it now. I mean right now.”

He shook his head. “No way, lady. I got work piled up—”

“You do this yourself?”

“Yeah, me and another guy.”

“Do mine at the head of the line and it’s fifty in cash, under the table.”

“Uh, I don’t know… .”

“A hundred. Cash.”

He considered this for six seconds. “Okay, I’ll write up a ticket.”

“No ticket. Let’s just do it.” She moved down the counter and lifted the flap.

“Hey, um …”

“I’m coming with you. You said you were going to do it now, right?”

“Uh, yeah, but …”

“I want to watch. This is a special film.”

The technician was familiar with ‘special films,’ although this one was not as naughty as many he’d seen. Two hours later, Marlene, smelling faintly of developer, emerged from the lab and made her way to the local FedEx office. She borrowed a phone and, charging the call to her own phone, got Harley Blaine’s mailing address from a polite young voice in Texas. Then she borrowed a pen and paper from the clerk and wrote:

Dear Mr. Blaine:
    The enclosed film, which no one but me and my husband (and, of course, the photographer) has seen as yet, will be of interest to you. We know about the bishop and the pawn, the knight, the rook and the queen, and what they did. I believe a conversation would be useful. Please call at your convenience. We are prepared to depart for Texas whenever you wish. Like your own, this is not a government operation.

She added her phone number and signed it, and sent it with the film copy, in the lab envelope to make clear that it was a copy, to Harley Blaine

There was a travel agency across the street, and there she purchased two open return tickets to Dallas. She was about to return to her car when she had a thought and went into a nearby People’s variety store for some additional purchases.

“Hey, there,” said a friendly voice behind her. She turned, and there was a black woman in a tan cloth coat over a pale green uniform skirt. It took a second for Marlene to recognize her as the nanny from the park.

“Hi!” said Marlene. “How’re you doing?”

“Just fine! I’m goin’ to Carolina next week. I’m starting school.”

“Dietician?”

“Nah, X ray. That food smell make me sick. How about yourself. You take my advice?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I did. I think I’m going to be working in a law office pretty soon.”

“Oooh, hey—paralegal? That’s good work that paralegal, ’cept you need clothes.” She cast a doubtful eye over Marlene’s ensemble.

“Um, yeah,” said Marlene, “except this is more like quasilegal. They don’t make you dress up as much.”

Marlene went home and called Harry and asked him to come down, without explaining the situation. Harry said, “Tomorrow afternoon.”

The following morning Karp went to the office, not at eight, as he had in the past, but around ten-thirty. The placed bustled with people who either did not meet his eye, so busy were they, or else, even worse, spoke briefly to him in sympathetic or condescending tones. Charlie Ziller was one of those who did not meet his eye. There were several call-back messages from Clay Fulton. Karp rang the New Orleans office of Pete Melchior, the retired NYPD cop turned private investigator, and found Fulton in.

“What’s up, Butch? I’ve been hearing all kinds of weird stuff.”

“It’s all true. The word is, no further field investigation. Come on home.”

“No, further … what? I was going to go to Miami and show our pictures to Odio. And this Kelly guy is looking pretty good. I got an eyewitness who saw him with Carlos Marcello a couple times back in the sixties.”

“Forget Kelly. He’s another dead end. V.T. figured it out. He’s quitting, by the way. I guess I am too.”

A long pause on the line. “That bad, huh?”

“Yeah. We got beat, old buddy. Come home.”

V.T. was in his office tossing personal items into an old leather satchel. “They accepted my resignation with regret,” he remarked as Karp came in. “Jim Phelps is getting out too.”

“Phelps? Why him? He’s a tech. I thought Wilkey wanted to up the status of the tech work.”

“Yes, up, but only in the desired direction. Phelps is convinced there was hanky-panky in the autopsy photos and the X rays. Wilkey wants a second opinion. Or a third, until, apparently, he finds a techie who believes there’s no problem.”

V.T. looked around the gutted office. “I’m off. Oh, speaking of no problem, have you seen the prelim report from Dr. Selig and the autopsy boys?”

“No, I didn’t know it was in. They don’t show me stuff anymore. What did they say?”

“Briefly, all the wounds of the two men are consistent with two shots from the upper left rear. And thus the magic bullet is still magic.”

“Wendt signed on to this shit?”

“He did not. A voice crying in the wilderness, however. He’ll get his day in front of the committee, but I doubt it’ll do much good. All the other docs, including your old buddy Selig, were being very cautious. Nobody wants to join the nut parade.” He hefted his satchel and grasped Karp’s hand. “What about you? You going to stay around for the whitewash? Tom Sawyer says it’s fun.”

“I don’t think so. Me and Marlene are going to fly down to Dallas on our own, to check something out. Marlene found some stuff. She … we think there’s a good chance that Harley Blaine, Richard Dobbs’s old lawyer, is the queen on the board.”

V.T. dropped his satchel with a bang. “You’re not serious!”

Karp nodded heavily and explained the nature of the evidence and what they had done about it. V.T. remained silent for a moment, thinking and chewing his lip. Then he said, “You think this is wise? Going out there, the two of you? Whatever you’ve got on him, this guy’s got a track record of collecting evidence from recently dead people.”

“I don’t know, V.T. I need to close this out, in my own mind. I mean, it’s completely circumstantial. There’s a million ways of laughing it out of court. The witnesses who might’ve talked are dead and the live ones aren’t talking. It’s not something I can show to Wilkey; he wouldn’t understand it, because he doesn’t have the instinct, and because he just wants to close this down with a minimum of fuss, and this could be big-time fuss. Marlene thinks there’s a chance Blaine’ll tell us something. I think you have to be Sicilian to think it’ll work, but there it is: we’re going, if Blaine calls back.”

Blaine called back at four that day. “Will you hold for Mr. Blaine?” said a polite male voice. Marlene would.

When he came on the line, Harley Blaine sounded weaker than he had some months previously, but his voice still carried the same ironic tone.

“Miss Ciampi. Well, here we are again, talking about the dear dead days of yore. Your package arrived, and I will say that I did not expect to be surprised by anything at my stage of life, but I
was
surprised. My heart must be stronger than my doctors are telling me, or it might’ve just gone off the rail when I saw that film. What a devil that Dick was! And we thought he couldn’t keep a secret!”

“I take it then that you didn’t know about the film, or the shots of Weinberg at Arlington,” said Marlene.

“Mmm, why don’t we reserve such conversation for our tête-à-tête. There’s a Delta plane that leaves National at ten-twenty tomorrow. Do you think you could be on it? I’ll have you met.”

“And my husband.”

“Of course, and Mr. Karp. I’ll look forward to meeting you both. Until then.”

He broke the connection.

“It was weird, Butch,” Marlene said later, when Karp had returned home and they were seated on the ratty couch in their living room. “It was like we were doing him a favor. He wasn’t even breathing hard, or no harder than he usually breathes—the guy must be on his last legs.” The front bell rang.

“That must be Harry,” said Marlene, rising.

“Or a Cuban gunman,” said Karp.

But it was Bello. They had a nice dinner. Marlene made a Sicilian dish, veal rolls with parsley and pine nuts, and Harry had brought a bottle of Vignamaggio Chianti from the city. Harry didn’t drink anymore, of course, so Marlene had most of the wine herself, and became quite merry, despite Karp’s continually referring to the dinner as the Last Meal. Harry was well briefed on the investigation and the purpose of the trip. The various negative outcomes were not mentioned, not in words, although Marlene and Bello exchanged a number of looks that contained major cable traffic.

In the morning, Karp gave Harry the thick red envelope. “Hide it behind the refrigerator,” he said. “They never look there.”

Harry accepted the thing solemnly. “Take care of her,” he said.

“Take care of Lucy,” said Karp, the statement delivered in a tone that allowed interpretation: either “for tonight” or “until age eighteen.”

“No problem,” said Harry. Meaning, either.

In the airliner, taxiing to the runway, Marlene said, offhandedly, “He wouldn’t risk bombing the plane, would he?”

“Marlene,” said Karp, “you should wait until we’re high in the air before saying things like that.” He slumped in his seat and tightened the safety belt another notch.

No fireball, however, marred an uneventful flight. At Dallas-Ft. Worth International, there was a man in the arrival lounge with a sign that said Ciampi/Karp. He was a young blond, with an unstylish crew cut and a roughly triangular physique, his big shoulders straining against a neat tan blazer. He wore brown whipcord trousers over cowboy boots, and a western shirt with a bolo tie. On the clasp of the bolo and the breast pocket of his blazer was a seal that bore a silhouette of a chess queen in white, on a dark green field.

They followed him out of the concourse to where a white Lincoln limo waited. The man held the door while they entered the back and sank into smooth, soft leather, and then he got behind the wheel and drove off.

“It’ll be about an hour, folks,” the driver said. “There’s drinks and things in the little refrigerator there, if you want.”

They each took a cold Coke. “Guy really knows how to run an assassination,” Karp whispered. “We’re going out in style.”

Marlene shushed him and looked out the smoked window. As they drove north on the Tollway, suburbs changed gradually into country: wire fences, rolling hills, white-faced cattle grazing in small herds. They left the freeway and proceeded down a succession of increasingly smaller roads until they came to a barred gate with a gatehouse nearby. The man inside it came out and swung the gate aside. He was dressed in the same costume as their driver, with the additional touch of a white Stetson. On the arch over the gate, Queen Ranch was picked out in carved wooden rustic lettering; between the two words was a large plaque with the chess queen emblem.