Immoral Certainty (22 page)

A woman lay on her side in the hallway, with her feet in the open doorway of apartment 3FN. Her blond hair was matted and dark with blood, and the blue robe she wore was slashed and stained almost black with it. There were thick ropes of congealed blood on the floor, and Dienst stepped carefully to avoid these as he approached the body. It was certainly a body. The throat had been slashed so deeply as to almost entirely sever the head.

Swallowing hard, Dienst stepped over the woman’s corpse and entered the living room of the apartment. The place was a shambles, in the literal sense, being as thickly sprayed with blood as the floor of a slaughterhouse. Furniture had been overturned and the remains of glassware crunched under the patrolman’s shoes. A child’s stuffed toy in the shape of a small white goat lay beside an overturned chair. It too was stained with blood, and seemed to Dienst to be the most pathetic object in the entire dreadful scene.

Nearby lay the crumpled shape of the goat’s probable owner, a boy of about seven, blond like his mother, dressed in shorty pajamas with little clowns on them. He was lying on his back, his limbs spraddled like those of an abandoned doll. His chest had been split nearly in two by a tremendous blow from some great blade. Blood was splashed high up the wall near where he lay. Dienst hurried by this door to the next room, which was the kitchen-dinette.

There at the kitchen table sat a dark-haired boy of about nine holding a telephone receiver to his ear. Dienst quickly checked the apartment’s two bedrooms and, finding them empty, returned to the kitchen, where he gently took the telephone from the boy and identified himself to the 911 operator. Then he hung up the phone and knelt to face the boy.

“What’s your name, sonny?” he asked.

“Josh Mullen. Is my mom OK?”

“We’ll have to see. We have to call an ambulance. But first we both have to get out of here. I’m going to carry you, OK?”

“I can walk.”

“Sure, but the police rules say I have to carry you. And also you have to keep your eyes closed.”

“Why?”

“Regulations,” said Dienst, and, scooping the child up and holding his head tight against his broad chest, he ran out of the apartment.

“You can’t possibly want more after last night,” said Marlene Ciampi sleepily, as she felt the suggestive probing of Karp’s big hands. The morning sun was just blasting through the grime of the two large windows that stood behind Marlene’s little white bed. This was why she had no curtains: any prospective peeper in the building opposite would be dazzled by the glare on the glass, and besides, that particular building was used as a warehouse and its windows were covered with thick green paint.

“Just a quickie to wake up on,” said Karp. He lay on his back and lifted her easily so that she dropped on top of him in the right position, with many a squishing noise.

“No, wait,” said Marlene, not with much conviction. “I have to tell you what I did.”

“Can’t it wait for ten minutes?” groaned Karp.

“How do you make it last ten minutes, as the schoolgirl said to the nun. No, really, I need to tell you.” And with that Marlene spun out the whole story of the second trash-bin victim, and the transfer of the case to Queens, and what had transpired with Mrs. Dean at St. Michael’s.

To Karp’s credit, he did not make soothing noises and continue in the direction his body had until lately been leading him. Instead he put his hands behind his head, knotted his brow and scrooched up his chin, as was his habit when thinking hard about unpleasant things.

“You think I fucked up?” said Marlene.

“Yeah, I do. I’m trying to figure out what came over you. What did you expect to gain by it? A spontaneous confession?”

Marlene rolled away from him onto her stomach and propped her chin up on her hands and elbows. “No, of course not,” she replied with heat. “I guess I thought if we told her about the bogeyman, she might—I don’t know—
do
something. I just couldn’t sit there while they took the case away from me.”

“Well, you’re sure as shit not going to get it back now. Bloom’ll skin you. And as much as I hate to say it, with justification.”

“What the hell do you mean, ‘justification!’”

“I mean that on the basis of no fucking evidence whatever you’ve seized on this woman as being some kind of sexual monster, who may be connected with a couple of nasty homicides. And you’ve been harassing her in a way that compromises you, the Office, and maybe even the case, if there ever is one.”

Marlene’s jaw dropped. “No … what? No evidence! You don’t call the doll evidence?”

“It’s crap, Marlene.”

“Yeah? Raney thought it was pretty good,” she said angrily.

“Who gives a shit what Raney thinks! Raney’s not going to the Grand Jury with this garbage,
you
are. God damn, Marlene! What the fuck’s wrong with you? Since when do D.A.’s get involved in this level of an investigation? If Raney wants to go over to St. Michael’s and blow smoke, let him! Cops do shit like that all the time. But it’s not your job.”

“Yessir, boss,” she snapped, turning away on the bed. He sat up quickly then and grabbed her by the shoulders, forcing her to look at him.

“Marlene, listen to me,” he said, his face serious. “I love you. But this is really aberrant behavior and it worries me. I want to make some sense out of this, and I can’t if you snarl at me. OK?” She nodded glumly. He was going to lecture her and it made her stomach churn with resentment.

“Now let’s look at this like lawyers,” he resumed. “One. You got an accusation that is not only hearsay, but attributed to a child of six. Have you interviewed the child? No. Have you determined by a medical examination that the child has been sexually abused? No. Have you obtained a formal complaint from the mother? No. Did you interview any of the other kids at the center or their parents? No. No hits, no runs, the side is retired. That’s the sexual-abuse-of-a-minor part.

“On the murder part—forgetting for a minute that you knew it was a Queens D.A. case, and that you might have fucked up
their
investigation by dicking around like you did—we have,
again
the unsupported testimony of a child, plus a police report that some miscellaneous witnesses maybe saw a man of a certain description accompanying a child who might have been the deceased.

“Do we have that man? No. More to the point, do we have a shred of evidence that this maybe-man is connected with Mrs. Dean or her center? Sure we do. We have the statement of a three-year-old child that her deceased sister was given an expensive doll by the bogeyman, and a statement by a doll expert that a doll
like
that one
might
have been in Mrs. Dean’s collection or in any of a dozen other collections in the city.

“Was it Mrs. Dean’s doll? We don’t know. Can we find out? No. Why? Because not only is this horseshit not a case, it’s not even probable cause for a search warrant. And yet on the strength of it one of the smartest lawyers in the damn Bureau—that’s you, dummy—goes off and plays Nancy fucking Drew. And I’d love to know why.”

Marlene tightened her jaw and tried to stare Karp down. “I know she’s mixed up in it.”

To her surprise Karp nodded. “Right. I believe you. You’re a great investigator, Marlene. It’s the truth. You got brains and energy and you got the nose for a fishy pattern. So Mrs. Dean is selling chicken out of her day-care center. So what! That’s not the point.

“Christ, Marlene! I could stand on top of the courthouse and hit fifty people with a rock who I know—
I know
—did stuff that would make Dean look like Mother Theresa. And I can’t touch them. Why? Because I don’t have a case against them that’ll stand up in court. That’s what we
do,
baby—remember? We develop and prosecute cases. We don’t ride out and chase the bad guys.”

Marlene dropped her gaze and let out a long, silent breath. As usual, Karp had brought forth a great summation. It was a technique Karp had learned from the tough old lawyers in the Homicide Bureau and he had every right to use it on her. She was guilty, no question: aggravated fuckupery and dumbness in the first degree. She could handle that. She understood that getting beat up was part of being one of the guys.

But what made her shudder and bite her lip was that Karp didn’t understand, had never made the effort to understand, and probably never would understand her feelings. Who did he love anyway? The perfect investigator? The great fuck? Why didn’t he say, “I understand what seeing children hurt does to you, and I understand why it clouded your judgment, and I’ll find some way to fix it, and I’ll support you, and together we’ll catch those fiends and make them stop.” That’s what she wanted and at some level she despised herself for wanting it.

She stood up and said in as calm a voice as she could manage, “I’m going to take a bath.” Karp watched her climb down from the sleeping platform and walk naked across the floor to the great tub. He felt a pang of tenderness, mixed with remorse. She looked so vulnerable from the back—you could count her ribs and the bumps in her graceful spine and she had angel wings like a ten-year-old. With her shoulders slumped and her dragging pace she seemed like a whipped child.

He knew himself to be the whipper, and was agile in his retreat from acknowledging his own mean streak, the faint sadistic tincture in his relations with Marlene. Instead he blamed her and affected puzzlement. He knew she was smart, brilliant even. But she would get on these nutty one-track toots and everything she knew would go out the window. And he would have to yank her back, and then she would get all depressed, like now. Why did she do this to him?

They washed and dressed in silence. Karp went to the door and said, “I got an early meeting and then I’m taking a calendar for one of the guys. You coming? We could get breakfast at Sam’s.”

“I’ll be along later,” she said. “I need to make some calls from here first.”

“OK, see you later.” He kissed her on the cheek and she patted his arm absently. He turned to go and then he stopped himself and said, “Hey, we should meet later this week and go up to the jewelry district.”

“Jewelry district? What for?” she said, blank-faced.

“To get a ring. Earth calling Marlene. Your big rock? Engagement ring? You. Me.”

“Oh, yeah. Sure, that’d be great. Fine,” she said, smiling with a sad eye.

When he was gone, Marlene called Dana Woodley at home and told her not to take Carol Anne to St. Michael’s. “But, Marlene,” Dana wailed, “what’ll I do with her? I don’t know ary a soul in my buildin’ and I cain’t miss no more work. An’ I cain’t afford the reg’lar day care …”

“Bring her to work, Dana.”

“Can I do that?”

“Sure. We’ll find some little things for her to do. She’ll be fine and besides, it’s just temporary for the summer and then she’ll start school full-time in the fall. Anybody gives you any heat, tell them to see me.”

That’s that, thought Marlene when she had hung up. That concludes my personal obligation in re: St. Michael’s Child Development Center and Whorehouse. She meant it too. Marlene had substantial reserves of stony self-control, little used of late, but available at need. She would be good from now on. She would forget about ruined children. She would take her medicine like a man. She would do the job. She would get married. She would stay out of trouble.

When Marlene saw the dead pigeon on her door step, she barely noticed it. You see dead pigeons (and cats and dogs and rats) in that neighborhood all the time. If it was still there in the evening she would boot it into the roadway. As she locked the tan steel door to the loft building she saw the reversed cross scrawled on it in what looked like red primer paint. That didn’t impress her either: another graffito. They had to paint over the door every couple of months. New York is as hard on witchcraft as it is on dry cleaning.

As Marlene walked south toward the subway at Broadway and Canal, the Bogeyman stirred out of his shallow doze and started toward the subway too. He had plenty of tokens in his little change purse, and he didn’t have to follow her. He knew where she was going.

Getting chewed out is never pleasant, but getting chewed out by a nasty little empty suit like Sanford Bloom, the District Attorney, is very bad. When he is right it is the worst of all. Bloom didn’t even do it himself. Everybody had to love Bloom, so of course he could never yell at anyone. But he watched with a sad smile while Conrad Wharton, his administrative chief, a Kewpie doll with the soul of a toad, did the deed. Marlene took it, for what else could she do? She promised she would never even say Irma Dean’s name again. She promised that she would stay away from the trash-bag killer case, the
Queens
trash-bag killer case, for the rest of her natural life. She meant it, too, at the time.

After her chew-out Marlene went to the ladies on the ninth floor and had a good weep among the gurgling pipes. Then she fixed her face and made her nine-thirty court like a good soldier. As she labored, she reflected on how right Karp was. You couldn’t stop crime. You couldn’t even slow it down. You couldn’t save the babies. What you could do was crank the system and put asses in jail. Maybe it did some good. Karp was right, but she found herself blaming him for the way things were, for her own barely contained misery, for the collapse of civilization.

She avoided Karp at lunch. She did not go back to her office, but picked up a yogurt from the snack bar on the first floor and hid out in an empty office. She took off her shoes, leaned back in a swivel chair and began reading a Barbara Cartland romance, one of her secret vices. After a few minutes the silence of the lunchtime office was broken by the sound of footsteps and a whistled tune, the andante from the Second Brandenburg.

“Marlene!” said V.T. Newbury. “What are you doing skulking back here? I see you’re improving both mind and body.” Newbury was a small, elegant, handsome man with dark blond hair worn long and combed back. He had the chiseled features that Gilbert Stuart had painted into portraits of eighteenth century gentlemen, many of which were, in fact, of his ancestors.

“I’m not skulking,” Marlene said, stashing the novel in her bag. “Actually, I am. I’m a little blue today.”