Immoral Certainty (21 page)

Raney cracked up at that, and Marlene laughed with him, but she was thinking,
I’m flirting my ass off with this guy, and why am I doing it? And he’s not just being jolly company either. He’s been giving me lingering looks all through dinner. And I’m leading him on. Because 1 want to see if the Champ can still reel them in, with the one eye and all? Because now that I can get serious about marrying Karp, 1 want to screw it up by having a flinger with this cop?

This cop, who by the way has terrific blue-green eyes and is trying as hard as he can not to be overbearing and is treating me like spun sugar, and who would be just the person to do something completely crazy and irresponsible with without having to practically twist his arm, and drinks and smokes and is a Catholic and.
She shut that down and stood up, her face flushed.

“Time to go, Raney. Can I get a lift?”

He rose as well and clasped her arm. It was the first time he had touched her since the firing range and she felt herself stiffen. He said, “No problem. Your place or mine?”

Her response to this sally was to keep her face hard and turn away, and she kept the chill on for the drive downtown. As they pulled up in front of her loft on Crosby Street, Raney asked, “Hey, what did I do? I thought we were having a good time.”

“Yeah, we were,” she said, her face softening a little. “But do me a favor, Raney. Don’t hit on me, all right? I’m going through all kinds of shit right now and I can’t handle it. Just compadres and fellow gun-nuts, OK?”

Raney nodded and said, “Sure, Marlene. Whatever,” as blithely as he could manage, which was not all that blithe, because for his forty-two fifty-five plus tip he had been expecting a little clinch at least, and maybe even a shot at the Main Event. He glanced down at his watch. It was still early enough to zip by and see if a waitress he knew in Maspeth was interested in fooling around. She was Italian too.

The Ghia roared away, the sound of its engine echoing in the empty narrow streets. Marlene climbed the four flights to her loft. Outside the door, as she groped for her keys, she heard the sound of her TV going. She felt that odd mixture of irritation and anticipation that had become familiar since the day, not many months before, when she had at last offered Karp a key to her place.

He was stretched out on her green velvet sofa, in chinos and sweatshirt, watching two men in blazers talk about baseball. His enormous sneakers were lying on the floor next to him like beached whaleboats. A hanging Tiffany lamp, one of her few real treasures, cast a warm light over the loft’s living and dining regions; beyond, the remainder of the huge single room, an area the size of a couple of basketball courts, lay swathed in darkness.

“The Yanks took it six to four. Munson hit two homers,” said Karp.

Marlene said, “Hello Marlene darling, it seems like years, I’ve missed you so much.”

Karp looked up and said, deadpan, “Hello Marlene darling, it seems like years, I’ve missed you so much.”

“Not as much as you’d miss Thurman Munson,” she said sourly. “How long have you been lurking here?”

“I wasn’t lurking. I came here after I got finished pumping Noodles. They said you were out with the cops, but I figured you’d be back soon, so I picked up a pizza and some Cokes. I guess you ate already, huh?”

“Yeah, I did,” Marlene said, and then added quickly, to change the subject, “How did it go with Noodles?”

“Great,” said Karp, giving her an odd look. “We got the whole story of the Ferro hit, for starters. Joey Bottles was the trigger, like we thought, but Piaccere gave the go-ahead, and Sallie Bollano, the capo’s kid, was in on it too. Also Charlie Tonnatti. So we could possibly get the bunch on criminal conspiracy, if we can get corroboration on the killing.”

“A big if, no?”

“Yeah. The cops are beating the bushes. Meanwhile he gave us a half dozen bodies stashed under cement in parking garages the Bollanos own. We’re going to go after them starting tomorrow. If we score, it’s more pressure we can put on them. Plus other stuff.”

“Like what?”

“Like how come I’m sitting here talking to you and you’re standing over there by the door like you think you came in the wrong place? Is something wrong? I got spinach on my teeth?”

She walked over and sat down on the couch about a yard away from him, but he reached out a long arm and pulled her closer. He kissed her hair, then sniffed loudly several times. “What’s that funny smell?” he asked. “Like a chemical or something burning.”

She sat up and sniffed at a strand of her hair. “It must be gunpowder. I was at the police range this afternoon. Raney was showing me how to shoot.”

“Out with Pistol Jim, hey? You hit anything?”

“Everything, as a matter of fact. I’m a natural shot, according to Raney, another of my little girl’s ambitions fulfilled. God, now that you mention it, I really stink. I’m going to take a bath.”

With that she rose and went behind a painted Japanese screen, where rested the five-hundred gallon black rubber former electroplating tank, a souvenir of the loft’s previous occupants, that Marlene had refitted for domestic use. Karp turned off the TV. The loft was silent but for the delicious slithery sounds of a woman undressing. When he heard the soft splash of Marlene’s descent into the deep tank, Karp went around the screen, pulled up a wooden kitchen stool, and sat down next to the tank.

The only light was a faint glow from the street through the distant windows and the jewel-like reflection of the Tiffany shade on the white tin ceiling above the bath. Of Marlene, only a white neck was visible as it rose above the black lip of the tank. Her head was lost against the black water.

“You want me to do your hair?” asked Karp.

“Oh, would you? I’d love it.” She ducked her head and came up dripping rubies and amethysts. Karp squirted a glob of herbal shampoo on her head and rubbed it into her thick hair. She sighed and leaned back against the side of the tank.

“You’re nice to me and I was so mean to you,” she said after a few moments. “You come back from a trip and you’re going to put like the entire Mob in jail and I don’t even give you a kiss.”

“You can correct that. It’s never too late.”

“Oh, I will, when the time is right.” She leaned back and gave herself over to the curiously intimate business of having her hair cleaned. Karp had strong, sensitive hands, she reflected—odd when you thought about it, because in so many ways Karp was not sensitive, to art, for example, or food or music or literature. Even Raney liked Chopin, or pretended to. She would have to ask him about that.

“Rinse,” said Karp into her ear. “I’ll soap you up again.”

She took a deep breath and slid down into the water, wagging her head from side to side to clear the suds from her hair. Her limbs floated loosely in the warm water and they were starting to tingle with sex.

Nature’s own heroin, she thought, and Karp was her pusher. Whatever differences they had, in some unexplainable fashion he held the key to her body and its pleasures. She sat up abruptly and tried to shake these feelings off. That was the problem—there was stuff they had to talk about, but rarely did because when things got spiky it was too easy to slip into flesh. Or storm out, with a loving reconciliation to follow.

So, to Karp’s disappointment, when the shampoo was over, instead of rising like Aphrodite from the waves and leaping into his arms, she dried herself off properly, put on a red silk robe, lit a cigarette and sat down in a bentwood rocker in the living area. Karp clumped down again on the couch.

“Now,” she said briskly, “tell all. How was California?”

“Like always. Hot and crazy.”

“And Susan?”

“Looks good. Didn’t give me any trouble about the papers, the divorce. We were getting along good, very civilized, until I asked her if me and Noodles could hole up on her farm for a while, just ’til Guma could figure some way to extract us with security. Then she blew her top. Ran us off as a matter of fact. That’s how I came to drive home.”

“What about Guma’s arrangements?”

“Oh, yeah. It turned out that the day after I spoke to him he won a pile on a ball game. Took a week’s leave and went to Saratoga with a bimbo to play the ponies. I slipped his mind. You know what he said when I laid into him about it this afternoon? ‘I had faith in you, Butch.’ Then he wanted to hear spicy lesbian commune stories.”

“Have you got any?”

“If you consider being glared at by a bunch of average-looking women spicy.”

“Yeah, it’s funny the way some men are fascinated by lesbian sex,” said Marlene thoughtfully. “You see it a lot in pornography. I’ve always wondered why. You would think it would repel the male libertine.”

“Well it doesn’t fascinate me; in fact, it gives me the creeps.”

“Does it? I don’t know. I went to girls’ schools for eight years, and there’s always a low buzz from that corner in girls’ schools. Of course, at Smith in the sixties the buzz got to be more of a rattle. Long kisses in the common rooms, gasps through the walls at night and everyone being terribly sophisticated. Kind of attractive in a way, I always thought.”

Karp felt a deadly chill starting in his middle. “Uh, Marlene, did you ever … you know, ever …”

Something in his tone made her look directly at him. “Me? Oh, I see. You’re worrying whether you picked another joker. No, I never did, not that there weren’t offers. I guess I got real close a couple of times because I had a sneaking admiration for women who were totally free of something I felt was going to drag me down. Marriage. Kids. My mom’s life. As Ti-Grace used to say, ‘Lesbians are the shock troops of women’s lib.’ So I guess I honor them for that. And for guts.

“On the other hand, you are or you aren’t. I’m not. And now?—I’m not as freaked out by domesticity as I was when I was twenty. My mom sure has gotten a lot smarter in the last ten years or so.

“And I like men. I like them
because
of the difference, as irritating as that is sometimes. Not the cheap joke difference either, but the mysterious part, something to do with understanding the way the world’s put together, what being human is all about. Shit, I’m drifting into metaphysics. Typical, when I just made one of the worst boners of my undistinguished career—another proof I’m in the wrong business, I guess.”

“What boner?” asked Karp.

“I’m too embarrassed to tell you now,” said Marlene, which wasn’t strictly true, but she did not want to get into the Mrs. Dean story just now, when the feelings she had partially suppressed in the bath were now releasing themselves unmistakably in her body.

“Besides,” she continued, cocking her leg and letting her gown slip away from her middle, “I think the time is right.”

After coming up for air from a kiss worth a week of waiting or more, she added, “It just occurred to me that I love you because we have nothing in common. It explains a lot.”

“Oh, yeah?” replied Karp. “I thought we had a lot in common.”

He had managed to pry one of Marlene’s perfect little breasts from its nest of red silk and was contemplating it like a jewel thief would the Hope Diamond. He was lying on his side and his free hand was cupping the thick mat of black hair between her thighs.

“No, not that office shit. I mean real difference. Family, ideas, what’s important. It’s like a guarantee against submerging myself, losing it …” She broke off the thought in a series of gasps. Marlene in this mood had a trigger pull a good deal lighter than that of a Browning Hi-Power automatic.

“Butch, take off your clothes! Quick, quick!” she cried, throwing off her gown. “Now, do it slow. I want to watch it. Oh, my! It’s so …” Then a period of inarticulate gasps and cries. “Oh, Butchie, this is so … ah, why, why can’t we talk and come at the same time?”

“Because God is kind,” said Karp.

From his perch behind the roof parapet of the building opposite Marlene’s the Bogeyman could not see what was going on in the loft. He had an expensive pair of 10x20 binoculars that his Mommy had given him, so he could watch people better, but the screen hid the green couch from his view. He had seen the bad witch get into her bath, though, and in front of the tall man too. That was bad, he knew. Ladies with no clothes was bad. Except in church.

He kept watching. He was comfortably situated; the night was warm and he had a container of milk and some chocolate chip cookies. And he had nothing else to do. Mommy had said follow the bad witch and say everything she did. After a while, the tall man and the bad witch came out from behind the screen and climbed up on a sleeping platform and went to bed. The bed was right under the windows that faced the street and there were no curtains or shades, so he had a good view. They both had no clothes on. The man was very big, almost as big as the Bogeyman himself. He wondered if he could beat him up. He wondered if they would do dirty in the bed, but they just went to sleep. He watched for a while, dreamily, and finished his milk and cookies.

A movement in his coat pocket aroused him. He reached in carefully and removed a black pigeon. He stroked it absently for a few minutes, then replaced it in his pocket and went down the fire escape to the street.

He crossed the street to the outer door of Marlene’s building. Taking out the pigeon, he stroked it a few times to calm it down and then smashed its head against the door. In its fresh blood he drew an upside down cross on the door and let the corpse drop onto the doorstep. Then he went a block down the street and sat in a doorway to wait for the dawn.

CHAPTER
10

“M
y mom’s bleeding,” said the little boy’s voice on the phone. The 911 operator was a skilled listener to people in trouble and caught the note of barely controlled panic in the high voice. She quickly extracted the child’s name and address and dispatched a patrol car to the address given, while encouraging the boy to remain on the line. Obviously something awful had happened in his home and she wanted to keep in contact should whoever did it return.

Patrolman Martin Dienst, working the four to twelve shift out of the Ninth Precinct, caught the 911 call and was at the door of 217 Avenue A within ten minutes. He left his partner in the blue-and-white and climbed the three flights to apartment 3F North. Dienst had eleven years on the job and a year in Danang with the Marines before that, but what he saw when he reached the top of the landing was rich even for his system.