Falsely Accused (23 page)

A chubby man in his late fifties rose from behind a cluttered desk and shook Bello's hand. Bello introduced him to Marlene as Frank Arnolfini. Marlene looked around the small, veneer-paneled room. For a rod and gun club, it was remarkably light in the rod department. Shelves held shooting trophies and the little banners they give out at conventions. A glass showcase counter was full of handguns, and a rack held rifles and shotguns. The walls were decorated with posters supplied by arms and shooting accessory manufacturers, and the sort of plaques and photographs that people accumulate during a long career with the New York Police Department. Arnolfini was an ex-cop and a part-time gun dealer.

After some chat about how bad the weather was and how they were both doing in retirement, Arnolfini turned to Marlene and said, “Harry tells me you're interested in a weapon.”

“Actually, Harry's interested in me getting a weapon. I can't stand the idea myself.”

Arnolfini chuckled understandingly. “Yeah, well, a lot of ladies are that way. But there's really nothing to be scared of if you have the proper training. We run a pretty good handgun course here for women.”

“Uh-huh, but as it happens, I'm not scared of guns, and I'm a natural shot.” Arnolfini and Bello exchanged looks. Arnolfini shrugged and said, “You want a carry gun, you're probably in the market for a semiauto, a nine, right?”

“How big is it?” asked Marlene shortly.

Arnolfini smiled in a way that confirmed Marlene's impression that she was about to be patronized.

“Well, that would depend,” he said. “There's all different kinds.”

She felt a wave of bitchiness rise within her. She didn't want to be here, she didn't like guns. That she was here, and that she probably was going to buy a gun, and carry it, stemmed from her decision to go into an enterprise that might require her to shoot somebody. Having to lie in a bed she had made was not something Marlene was fond of doing.

Arnolfini went to the handgun cabinet, took out a selection of semiautomatic pistols, and arranged them on a felt pad on top of the glass.

“These are all good nines,” he said. “Your Browning Hi-power, a little old but still a classic, your Beretta 92F, pricey but a great gun, your Heckler P9S,
very
pricey but the best; I can give you a deal on this one. And here's your Smith 669 in stainless. A good piece, and under six hundred bucks.”

When Marlene made no move to handle any of the weapons, Arnolfini picked up the Smith and held it out to her.

“Try it. It's real light.”

Marlene took it and let it dangle from her hand like a wet dish towel. “It's a brick,” she said.

“It's only twenty-six ounces empty,” replied Arnolfini. “Look, here's something maybe you don't get. The heavier the pistol, the easier the recoil. For a woman that's something to think about.”

Marlene put the Smith down on the pad. “Smaller. I'm not going to carry anything that big all the time, and if I don't have it on me all the time, I might as well not have one at all.”

“You ain't going to get much smaller than that in a decent nine.”

“What about an Astra Constable. A .380?”

Arnolfini shook his head. “Nah, you don't want anything smaller than a nine, Marlene. Believe me. You need the stopping power.”

“I shot a man through the lip once with a Constable. It stopped him pretty good.”

The gun dealer gave Bello a look and Bello nodded gravely. The gun dealer shrugged and bent down behind the counter again.

“I don't carry any Astras, but you want light, this is light.” He put a small, angular pistol on the pad. “It's a Colt Mustang Pocket Lite in aluminum alloy. Twelve and a half ounces.”

Marlene picked up the gun, worked the action, and squeezed off a dry-fire shot. “Fine. I'll take it.”

“You don't want to fire it?” said Arnolfini.

“I'll trust you it works,” she said.

“Shoot it, Marlene,” said Harry.

She met his eyes and looked away. He was serious about this, and it came from his concern about her safety, which it was not in her heart to despise. She nodded and said, “Okay, let's shoot.”

Arnolfini led them through a hallway to a firing range, a four-stand affair that took up most of his building. He turned on the lights, a rack of space heaters, and a blower. An icy breeze wafted over them, its chill hardly deflected by the gusts from the heaters. Arnolfini broke open a box of .380 semi-wadcutters, and they all worked silently for a few minutes loading three clips. The gun dealer snapped a silhouette target to a traveler and sent it twenty-five yards downrange.

Marlene bellied up to the barrier, slipped muffs over her ears, and without preamble, in her usual casual way, began firing. She shot two clips of five into the target's chest and, for a lark, shot the last clip into the head. Arnolfini flipped the traveler switch and brought the target back.

“Very nice,” he said with new respect in his voice. The chest shots fell into two neat patterns, neither larger than a playing card. The five head shots were somewhat more dispersed, but still impressive shooting.

“Of course, it's a lot different on the street,” he added. “The guy's moving, it's dark, maybe he's shooting back. That's why you want a weapon that'll put him down with one hit, which this little thing probably won't do. It's really a backup gun.”

“Yeah, well, I'm a sort of a backup person, Frank,” said Marlene lightly. “Harry's going to do the heavy killing, aren't you, Harry?”

She saw the shock on his face, and immediately wished she were a thousand miles away with her tongue cut out. How
could
she have! Bello turned away and walked out of the range.

Back in the office, Marlene took out her checkbook and examined her bill for the Mustang, two extra clips, a nylon belt holster, and a box of Federal 90-grain jacketed hollow points. Arnolfini explained that she was getting the cop discount since she was with Harry. It made her feel worse.

“You want one of these?” the dealer asked. He was holding a shiny .22 revolver. “For the price of a box of rounds? I bought out a guy last month. Made in Brazil. Not a bad little gun for plinking, but I can't sell 'em.”

Marlene was too tired to refuse. “Yeah, sure,” she said, “throw it in.” But the shiny gun had reminded her of Lucy's cap pistol—and the reality of keeping weapons in the loft. “Have you got a gun box, a safe, with a lock?”

He had several, and Marlene bought a green one about the size of a file drawer, with a push-button combination lock. Harry helped carry it out to the car.

“I'm sorry, Harry,” she said when they were sitting in the car. “There's absolutely no excuse for me saying that kind of shit to you.”

“Forget it,” mumbled Harry as he started the car.

“No, listen, you need to hear this! Look at me, Harry!”

Bello stopped the car and looked at her, his face its usual mask. Marlene spoke quickly and in a low tone, as in a confessional. “I have problems with this, Harry. And they're coming out in sneaky little digs like that in there. It's driving me up the wall, and I don't like the way I'm acting and feeling behind it. This gun thing. First, it's going to drive Butch crazy all over again, having a gun in the house, and I'm going to have to deal with that, and then, for me personally, I don't
like
being armed, or maybe it's I like it too much. Maybe it's the same thing, if you know what I mean. It was one thing, sort of exciting work, getting Pruitt and stopping the other guys we've been handling this past couple of months, but it's something else completely, dealing with guys who want to kill their girlfriends and we might be in the way, and we might have to shoot them first. I killed one guy, and it almost wrecked me and I had dreams about it for weeks—did I have to do it, did it have to go down that way … ?”

“The way I heard it,” said Harry, “was you didn't have a choice. The guy was shooting at a cop.”

“Right, right, of course, but you always think, maybe you set up the situation. Anyway, that's the point, what you just said, this business might put you in a situation where you're getting shot at, and I have no right to be in a position where I can't help you out. So I'm packing, but …” She shook her head, as if trying to jar sense into it, and then made a gesture of futility with her hands, saying, “It's a fog, Harry. I mean, what the fuck … what'm I doing? What're
we
doing?”

“One day at a time,” said Bello.

“That's a platitude, Harry,” she snapped.

He stepped on the accelerator and moved the car down the street. They drove back to the runnel in silence. In the roar of their passage through the tube, he said, and his words were low-pitched so that she had to strain to hear them, “You'll get used to it. You'll probably never have to use it. Frank, there, the gun expert? Thirty-five years in Bed-Stuy, never shot one. You have to, you'll do the right thing.”

“You say that, but how do you
know
that, Harry?”

“I'm here, right?” he said.

The rain did not let up all that afternoon, and when the sun went down it changed to sleet, driven by a nasty east wind. It was, however, positively halcyon compared to the weather within the loft when Karp discovered how Marlene had spent her Jersey morning.

“You brought
guns
into our home?
Guns
?” was his anguished cry. This was at the dinner table. Marlene had made a favorite dish of Karp's, veal parmigiana, which that barbarian considered the epitome of Italian cuisine and which she rarely degraded herself to prepare, but did this time, feeling queasily like Lucy Ricardo.

“Don't raise your voice!” she said.

“Why not? You'll shoot me?” he shouted.

“Lucy, dear,” Marlene said, “if you're finished, you can go to your room now.”

“Can I see your gun, Mommy?” Lucy asked, her eyes widening.

“
May
I see your gun, Mommy?” said Marlene automatically.

“
May
I see—”

“No, you can't,” said Marlene. “What you
can
do is get ready for your bath, and then you can watch
Gilligan's Island.
”

“Oh, why don't you show it to her, Marlene?” said Karp nastily. “Let her play with it, even. She will anyway, sooner or later.”

At this Marlene turned upon her husband a look of such bone-chilling malevolence that he shut up. After Lucy had run off, she said, “How
dare
you suggest that I'm endangering my child! How dare you!”

They locked gazes and ground teeth for an interminable-seeming moment. Then Karp sprang to his feet, knocking over his chair with a clatter. He had his big fists clenched and appeared to be looking for something to break.

“Shit, Marlene!” he shouted. “Why are you
doing
this? Why are you fucking up our life with this shit?”

“I am not doing any such thing,” responded Marlene in a voice unnaturally calm. While Karp gaped and glared and shot flames from his nostrils, she continued, “You object to what I'm doing. It upsets you. A couple of years ago, you dragged this family off to that hellhole in D.C., taking Lucy away from her friends and her relatives without a moment's thought …”

“Wait a min—”

“… without, as I say, a moment's thought, and as I recall I did not scream or yell or insult your integrity or your love for your daughter, or me …”

“I didn't—”

“… whereas I have given this a great deal of thought. Are you going to sit down and listen?”

Karp picked up his chair and sat down in it, after the manner of men who are tied into similar chairs with paper targets on their breasts.

“As I say,” Marlene resumed, “a great deal of thought. I didn't want to get a gun at all. Harry thought I needed one—let me finish this, please!— because he was concerned for
my safety. I decided to get one because I was concerned for his
safety. We're going to get in the way of domestic violence from time to time, and I intend to back him up just like he backs me up, and I need a gun for that. As far as safety goes around here, I have a gun safe, in which the guns will sit, locked and unloaded when they're not attached to my body. I also intend to show them to Lucy and let her handle them so she knows what they are and what they can do.” She leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms.

“Is that it? You're finished?”

“For the nonce,” she replied.

He sighed and rubbed his face. It had taken Karp a long time to learn that in domestic disagreements, the point was not, as it was in the courtroom, to win, but rather the restoration of felicity. This apparently required a different set of skills from those he had honed to a diamond edge, and it was clear to him that he had still not got it right. “I said/she said, “I was sorry a million times about Washington, and you keep bringing it up whenever I give you shit about something you want to do. It's not fair.”

Marlene thought about that for a little. “You're right,” she said, “it's not. I'll try to lay off of that.”

“Okay, and I'm sorry I said that about Lucy and the gun. It was a cheap shot.” He sighed again. “But.”

“Yes?” she said, a long, drawn-out yes.

“I don't know what ‘but.' Sometimes I think I'm inside this, ah, plastic bubble, and if I can just push through, everything will be clear and I'll just accept everything. I mean, I'll stop worrying about you and the kid the way I do. I mean, if you're here, I'll love you, and if you're gone, you're gone and I'll be sad. But no churning stomach all the time. And sometimes I think, I've done it, and I'm through, but then something like this goes down and I realize there's
another
bubble outside the one I just went through. And I think things like, she's acting crazy because she
wants
me to stop her. That's not true, is it?”