Irresistible Impulse (47 page)

“And he’ll pick up the bureau.”

“I expect so. God knows he’s lusted after it long enough. And he’ll do a good job. I’ll tell you something, Marlene, when the foreman stood up there—he was that NYU professor
I
put in there, the alternate—and read the verdict, I felt this incredible sense of relief. Do you think I set all this up? Insisting on running this trial. Just to get a rest?”

“It wouldn’t completely stun me if it was true,” said Marlene. “I saw Lionel T. on the tube, by the way, pontificating, Apparently, justice was done.”

“Maybe it was,” said Karp. “Rohbling’s going somewhere where he won’t have much access to elderly black ladies, maybe not for twenty-five to life, but a good long time. I will say Waley was gracious in victory. A real gentleman, and a lesson in how to run a trial. But I’ll get him next time.”

“That’s my old Butch!” said Marlene. “Speaking of getting, I have a suggestion for your first special project.”

“I’ll entertain it.”

She described her recent contacts with Vincent Robinson and what he had done to her. Karp was silent for a few seconds. Then he said, in quite a different, a sterner voice, “I think it’s time Dr. Robinson was suppressed.”

“On what charge, Counselor?” asked Marlene.

Karp laughed, a muffled sound, because Zak was trying to sit on his face. “Oh, charges! This is Special Projects, honey. We don’ need no stinkin’ charges.”

Karp had a nice office to go with his new job, one just down the hall from the district attorney’s, with the old-fashioned sort of furniture and a good three-window view. Its former occupant was a man named Conrad Wharton, who had been, under the
ancien regime
, one of Karp’s most implacable enemies. Sitting in Wharton’s special oversize chair, behind Wharton’s special oversize rosewood desk, made Karp prone to unwonted fits of giggles.

It was now four days after the verdict in the Rohbling trial. The press had gone on to other things, as had the militants. Karp was cheerily back at work, a rested, smiling Karp, a different man from the fearsome, hulking scowler he had lately been, and already launching his first special project.

To this end he had called a meeting in the D.A.’s conference room. Around the long oak table sat those interested in the malefactions of Dr. Vincent Fiske Robinson: Paul Menotti, the U.S. attorney, more grumpy than usual at finding himself off his own turf; Cynthia Doland, his lovely shadow, crisp and demure in a pale off-white linen suit; V.T. Newbury, representing Fraud; Lieutenant Clay Fulton, in charge of investigating the murder of Margaret Evans, in which Robinson was a suspect; and Karp, at the head of the table.

Karp said, “We’re still waiting for one more person, but I think we can get started. Lieutenant Fulton will bring us up to date on the status of the investigation. Clay?”

Fulton took a cheap memo pad out of his breast pocket, thumbed through it, and began. After sketching in his surveillance of Robinson the previous winter and what it had yielded, he moved on to the more fruitful recent inquiries.

“First, we know Robinson was in town on the night Margaret Evans was murdered. He was club hopping off a yacht. They docked at City Island, where a stretch limo met them and took them into Manhattan, and carried them from place to place. We interviewed most of the party. Some say Robinson was there with them throughout; others think he might have slipped away for a while with a woman named Virginia Wooten. What I gather from their accounts was that everyone was doped or drunk enough that they wouldn’t have noticed an elephant wandering away for a couple of hours.”

“What does this Wooten woman say?” Menotti asked.

“I don’t know because we haven’t had a chance to talk with her. She seems to have disappeared.” He paused to let this sink in. “On the other hand,” he continued, “she could be anywhere and show up tomorrow. They don’t call these folks the jet set for nothing. Moving to the victim: Margaret Evans was a medical-records specialist responsible for, among other things, the pharmaceutical records at the St. Nicholas Medical Centers dispensary on Amsterdam Avenue and One-oh-fifth Street. She’d been working there for eight years, and her colleagues considered her a good worker. A decent, honest woman, one of them said. On the night she died … hello, Marlene.”

Marlene paused at the door, then walked in. Karp introduced her as a private detective with some special knowledge of Vincent Robinson. “Ms. Ciampi has agreed to help us out
pro bono
,” said Karp. “Marlene, I think you know everyone but Paul Menotti from the A.G. and his assistant, Cynthia Doland.” Marlene shook hands and sat down.

Fulton continued from where he had left off. “On the night she died, Evans made herself dinner and ate it alone. At about ten-thirty she opened the door to the people who killed her. No signs of forced entry. I say people, because one of them was a woman. She left some short blond hairs in the apartment. A man out walking his dog noticed a couple he hadn’t seen around before walking out of Evans’s building around eleven. He wasn’t close enough to get a good ID, but it was definitely a man and a woman. Both blonds. So it certainly would’ve been possible for Robinson and this woman Wooten to travel uptown, get into Evans’s apartment on some excuse—I mean, he was the victim’s boss, practically—kill her, and get away downtown without being missed by a bunch of dopers.”

“Why’d he kill her, if he did?” asked Menotti. “I have to say this is pretty speculative.”

Fulton said, “She was going to rat him out. We played the black woman’s voice from the hot-line tape to some of her relatives. It was her.”

In the ensuing silence, Karp said genially, “V.T., maybe you can add something here.”

“Well, first, in the last two months,” said V.T., “there has been a very substantial increase in the street supply of prescription drugs in the City and along the East Coast. This is mostly d-amphetamine, Percodan, Nembutal, and Quaaludes, all drugs with a healthy street market. During that same time period, the St. Nicholas Med Centers filled prescriptions for thirty thousand Percodan tablets and fifty thousand Dextramphetamine caps. The service area seems to be unusually prone to painful afflictions and weight problems. Their books seem to balance, though: a bona fide patient for each piece of scrip. But there’s no doubt it’s a racket, and a big one too. We have a watch on a numbered account in the Caymans that we think is associated with Robinson. Major increases in the same period.”

“That’s still pretty vague,” said Menotti. “You won’t even get an indictment on that showing.”

“Did you show it to him?” V.T. asked Fulton.

“No,” answered the detective, “I was saving it for now. This was found in Margaret Evans’s purse.”

He passed a plastic evidence pouch across the table. In it, Menotti saw, was a slip of paper with his own name and his office phone number written on it. “I don’t recall she ever called us,” he said. “Do you, Cynthia?”

“I don’t think so,” said Doland, “but if she called the hot line, she could have called here too. It could have been anonymous. I’ll review the logs, see if she did.”

Karp said, “Fine. Okay, Marlene here has a view of Robinson that might be helpful. Marlene?”

“I’ve spent some time around this man in connection with another case,” said Marlene. “Vincent Robinson is a sadist. I mean that in the technical sense. He derives pleasure from causing pain, and he’s frank about it. He thinks he’s a superior man and has the right to do what he likes to anyone. He is from a well-off family but has the ambition to become enormously rich in his own right. Needless to say, he is totally amoral. He runs with a group of people who fancy themselves decadents. They indulge in sexual fantasies of the sadomasochistic variety and plenty of drugs, dispensed by Robinson, of course. These people are harmless ninnies, except, possibly, to themselves, but Robinson is a truly dangerous man. For one example, he knew that I would be facing an armed and possibly dangerous stalker, and he slipped some psychedelics into a thermos I was using. For another, if he is our killer, the use of the blue suitcase to smother Mrs. Evans was no accident. He wanted to get back at Mr. Karp here for investigating him, and thought copying Rohbling’s style would help confuse the jury. Which it did. His weak point, in my opinion, is his desire for notice, to be admired in his awfulness. I think he uses Virginia Wooten for this. She is essentially his slave, and he keeps her docile through the use of drugs and sexual cruelty. I like her for the accomplice here. I also think she would also know just about everything useful to us about Dr. R.”

“Yeah, that’s why he sent her to Timbuctu,” said Menotti. “Well, there doesn’t seem much point in going on, until we have Wooten to talk to, and since we have no idea where she is …” He left the thought hanging and began to make leaving-the-meeting motions.

“Oh, I think one of us knows where she is, or could make a good guess,” said Marlene. “How about it, Cynthia? Want to help us out?”

Everyone stared at Marlene and then at Doland, who colored slightly and gave a good imitation of a baffled innocent.

“Is this a joke?” Menotti rumbled.

“No. The last time I saw Ms. Doland, she was dressed in a white confirmation dress and white patent mary-janes—no, that’s a lie. I saw her last just the other day at Wooten Island, with Ginnie Wooten and Robinson. Nice white bikini, no mary-janes. The time before that, I should have said, she was beating up a guy in a sex club so he would come on her shoe. You’re one of that gang in your off hours, honey. I came in here this morning and saw you, and I swear, if it hadn’t been for that crisp linen suit and your prissy look, I probably wouldn’t have recognized you. Maybe your boss will want to talk to you about how come it’s been so hard to pin anything on Robinson. Maybe some discreet leaks? But right now the only thing I personally want to know is: where is she?”

There is a great deal of difference, Marlene reflected some weeks later, between being tied up for fun and being tied up for real. She observed this to her husband, just after he had informed her that Ginnie Wooten had made a full statement implicating Robinson in a dense slate of crimes, including the murder of Margaret Evans. They were in their kitchen, putting groceries away.

“Yeah, Ginnie didn’t much care for jail,” Karp was saying. “I can’t say for certain, but I think they arranged for her to be in a cell with a broader ethnic and sexual orientation than she’s used to up on Park Avenue.”

“Our beautiful mosaic,” said Marlene. “And she spurned it?”

“I’m afraid so. They may have made fun of her watchamacallit’s … you know, those things in her crotch. May have hurt her feelings, poor kid. I really think that Robinson thought she’d take the whole rap for him, but Roland offered her a sweet deal and she jumped at it.”

“They arrest him yet?”

“The warrant’s cut. Roland said he’ll call when they have him wrapped. Want to come to the perp walk? We can hold hands and wave to him as he slithers by.”

“No, I don’t want to see his face again,” said Marlene quickly, and knew that it was true and knew why: that leap in front of the subway train attraction, the foul suck of the sadistic, that dwelt in her own soul, that she fought every day, that Robinson had recognized and gloated over. She felt a chill and shook herself.

“What’s wrong?” asked Karp. “You looked funny.”

“I don’t know,” she said lightly. “Someone walked on my grave.”

And as she busied herself with humble domestic tasks that evening, and cast her mind back over the dreadful and bloody year she had just spent, the idea floated into her mind of a party, a truly gigantic and memorable party, symbolizing … she did not quite know, but something—escape, survival, the crazy dance of her life. She would invite
everybody
, which was feasible now that they had the elevator. She would invite a gang of Jamaican dopers and killers she knew from Brooklyn, and ask them to provide the music, and a Mexican shelter operator and cutthroat feminist, also a killer, and old Dr. Perlsteiner, and a crazy reporter, an old pal from college, if she was in the country, and everyone from her company, Harry and Sym, and Dane, and the Homicide Bureau and the Rape Bureau to party with the criminals, and an elderly British demolition expert she knew and Karp’s old Aunt Sophie (maybe they would get it on?) and of course, the D.A. himself, and everyone in the building, of course, and her whole family, including her crazy vet brother, and Tranh the reformed Vietcong, who would cook shrimp balls and fried dumplings and other delicacies in a giant flaming wok, while Lucy and her gang of girlfriends carried around plates of smoking goodies, and everything washed down with gallons, crates, of champagne. And, of course, Father Dugan, and ask him to bring that Irish kid, Kevin Mulcahey, along, because, if the kid couldn’t get laid at
this
party, he might as well check into the seminary. Posie, for one, would suck him out of his clothes in a New York minute. She imagined herself gazing over the throng, explaining to the priest who everyone was, all the impossibly conflicted fragments of her life so far, the lions and the lambs cavorting. Maybe he would have something interesting to say, no doubt in Latin. And let’s have that doctor too, Davidoff, the one whose misadventure had caught Murrey Selig’s eye and started the long, slow demise of Vincent Robinson.

Karp would enjoy such a party, the new Karp, the new relaxed, home-at-six Karp, with whom Marlene had for the last few weeks fallen again in love, owing to the time, the bland, missionless time together alone, which (in a good marriage) is to marital bliss what steroids are to lifting weights.

These pleasant daydreams were interrupted by the ringing of the phone. Karp said, “That’ll be Roland,” and picked it up. He spoke for ten minutes, and when he got off there was an odd look on his face.

“Well?”

“Oh, they picked him up with no trouble. Brought him in, he gave them the finger and asked to call his lawyer. No surprise there.”

“And?” She was observing him closely. He was leaning against the counter, idly tossing a can of soup in his hands, with his gaze fixed on infinite nowhere.