Falsely Accused (26 page)

Their old joke. Karp grinned and said, “Since you ask, I had a pretty good one. The evildoers took some lumps.”

“Did you do Bloom?” asked Marlene, who had not been following the case closely at all.

“Oh, God, no—it'll be weeks and weeks before we get to him. Right now we're just preparing the ground, digging the pits, sharpening the bamboo stakes. For instance, today I had Mrs. Ortiz up there, Fuerza's administrative aide. Been at Health since before penicillin, in her early sixties, plain as a post, she's going to retire soon, so they can't offer her anything or shaft her too much.”

“She helped you out?”

“Oh, yeah. She knows where all the bodies are buried. Anyway, the basis of this charge was that Murray hired a bunch of associate medical examiners without Fuerza's knowledge or approval. Broke the law, in other words. What actually happened was that Murray needed the examiners to keep up with his caseload, he went to Fuerza for approval, Fuerza told Mrs. Ortiz to find the money in the general Health Department budget, which she did, and Murray began recruiting. Fuerza actually wrote a note to him recommending a pal of his for one of the jobs. We also have a letter to the Mayor's Office, signed by Fuerza, backing the recruitment of four pathologists.”

Marlene looked puzzled. “That's silly. Why would they make a charge like that if they left that kind of paper trail?”

“Why indeed,” said Karp. “That's the wacky thing about this whole case. Anyway, what they'll argue here is that Fuerza stepped in to protect the City from liability after the recruits were promised jobs illegally by Murray. But the dates are wrong, and the Ortiz testimony nails it down that Fuerza was in on the deal from the beginning. All the charges are like that. They say he disclosed confidential records; he didn't and we can prove it. He failed to produce a report on office organization; he did, and Fuerza's on record at the time as saying it was a good report. He left the City without proper notice—”

“What!”

“Yeah, they had to scrape the barrel for that one. It's all picky shit like that, but the important thing is that Fuerza confirmed all of it in deposition, and now I'm going to have witness after witness, document after document, impeaching his sworn statement. When I get him on the stand, I'll totally destroy him.”

“And the Mayor too?”

“Nah, I'm going to go light on the Mayor. The Mayor will be very cooperative. Basically, his line will be: ‘I just did what these guys told me to do,' not particularly inspiring leadership, but not culpable. Fuerza will take all the shit.”

“And Bloom,” said Marlene.

“And Bloom,” said Karp. “Oh, my, yes.”

Marlene rose and began clearing, and Karp helped her. In companionable silence they scraped dishes and loaded the dishwasher.

“By the way, I have to go out tonight,” said Marlene in the midst of this.

Karp bit back a needling remark, something he was getting a good deal of practice at, and said coolly, “Oh, no problem. Where are you off to?”

Marlene answered blandly, “In all honesty, I have to see a man about a dog.”

THIRTEEN

Vickie Sills was a small woman in her late twenties, with short auburn curls and skin the color of Redi-Whip. She would have been unobtrusively pretty if not for the dark smudges under her eyes and her generally dilapidated air. Her children, a boy (Jamie), five, and a girl (Tiffany), three, were whiny and clinging. They were terrified, naturally, of the dog, Sweety, whose friendly efforts to smear them with drool had been rebuffed with hysterics. The children had been calmed and fed on Beef-a-Roni. Sweety now lay sulkily in a far corner.

The apartment in which Marlene now sat with Vickie, on a worn red plaid sofa, was the sparely furnished downstairs of a two-family brick house on a quiet street off Avenue S. It smelled of old paint, steam heat, and Vickie's incessant smoking. Marlene, who was dying for a cigarette, reckoned that she had already inhaled the equivalent of half a pack, as had the Sills children. Her fetus was shriveling without deriving a particle of pleasure, and she was starting to resent it.

Nor was Vickie a fascinating companion, her conversation consisting mainly of anecdotes illustrating the cruelty of life, with herself the chief target of fortune's fell arrow. Marlene got the uncomfortable feeling that Vickie would probably have put up with Ernie's little ways had they not included her own mutilation in the jaws of his pet. She drew the line there—not a poster girl for women's lib, Vickie. She was relating the story of how her ex had chortled as his pit bull tore apart Tiffany's little kitten, when a car door slammed on the street outside. Vickie stopped in mid-sentence, and her face turned, amazingly, even whiter.

“That's him!” she squeaked.

“Let me check,” said Marlene, rising and going to the front windows. In the light of the street lamps she could see a fairly new red Mercury sedan double-parked and, coming around the front of it, a small, wiry, tan man with short, curly hair and a lowering brow. He wore a black Jets duffel coat over baker's whites. His walk was oddly stiff, as if he were trying to keep from falling over forward, and at first Marlene imagined that he was staggering drunk, but as he emerged from between the parked cars, she saw that he was being pulled along by a big, white pit bull terrier on a steel choke collar.

“Vickie, take the kids and go into the big bedroom,” Marlene said. They vanished. Marlene heard heavy steps and the scrabbling of claws on the concrete stoop. Pounding on the door: the knob rattled and the door shook in its frame.

“Vickie! Goddammit! Open the goddamn door!”

Sweety rose slowly to his feet and stretched. His nose twitched, and a ripple zipped down the muscles of his back.

“
Prego,
Sweety!” said Marlene, and the dog came alert and took up a position on Marlene's left side. Marlene opened the front door halfway and confronted Ernie Sills and his slavering companion.

When Sills saw who it was, his eyes narrowed and he snarled, “Who the fuck're you? Where's Vickie?”

Marlene said, “Mr. Sills, you know you're under a court order. Please go away and leave your wife alone.”

“I
said,
who the fuck're you?” Marlene could smell the fumes of beer as he shouted this into her face.

“My name is Marlene Ciampi. I'm helping Vickie and the kids get settled.”

“She don't need no help,” said Sills, putting his hand against the door. He let his dog's chain out a little, and the pit bull leaped at Marlene through the doorway, its teeth snapping a few inches from her leg.

“Mr. Sills, if you try to push in here, you're going to be in a lot of trouble.”

“Ah, go fuck yourself, y'one-eyed bitch,” he snapped and threw his shoulder against the door. Marlene had to give way, and the man and dog rushed past her into the L-shaped hallway that led to the living room.

The pit bull saw Sweety before his master did, and its lunge threw Sills off balance. He went down on one knee and lost the dog chain. Marlene closed the front door.

A snarling white blur, the pit bull flung itself at Sweety's throat and buried its teeth in the loose folds of skin that defended the mastiff from just such an attack. Of course, it was a hopeless gesture: sixty-pound terriers, however tough, do not go up against one-hundred-ninety-pound Neapolitan mastiffs. Sweety opened his huge jaws, engulfed the back of the pit bull's neck, and jerked upward, ripping away a chunk of skin and muscle. The pit bull's jaws remained locked on his throat. Sweety took another bite. Blood and bits of flesh sprayed around the hallway, patterning the floor and the walls.

“Hey …” said Sills.

The pit bull's spine was exposed; the mastiff clamped his teeth around it and crunched. The pit bull's body twitched in spasms and it lost control of its bowels and bladder, but its teeth remained locked tight, even when Sweety shook himself violently. The white body hung from his neck like an obscene lavaliere. The whole thing had taken thirty seconds.

Ernie Sills, frozen in place from the first instant of the dog fight, now rose and started to back away in the direction of the door.

“Sweety,
assalite
!” shouted Marlene.

In an instant, despite the dead dog hanging from its neck, the mastiff was on the man, smashing him to the ground. Sills landed on his back, with his head jammed up against the door frame.

“Sweety,
afferate
!” ordered Marlene. The mastiff clamped his jaws around the man's throat. Marlene walked slowly over and knelt down by the man's head. She was shaking with adrenaline and took a moment to calm her breathing.

“How do you feel, Mr. Sills?” Marlene asked mildly.

Only gasps came from Sills's throat.

“Sweety,
non tanto
!” said Marlene. The dog's jaws relaxed, but not very much.

“I asked you how you felt,” said Marlene.

“Ahh, not… not good,” said Sills, his eyes rolling in his head. The bloody dead muzzle of his dog was pressed up against his cheek.

“No, I bet you're not,” said Marlene. “It's no fun to be attacked by a big dog. Do you understand how Vickie felt when you got your dog to chase her? She felt just like you do now. Look, you pissed on yourself. You must be very frightened. Aren't you frightened, Mr. Sills?”

“Wha—whadyou want?”

“I'm giving you an experience, Mr. Sills, the same experience you've been giving your family. You're being attacked by a big animal, and your pet has been torn apart in front of your eyes, just like you did to your daughter's little kitten. How do you like it so far?”

There was no answer. Marlene said, “Sweety,
piu strettamente
!” The dog's jaws clamped tighter, and Sills jerked and made noises.

“You have to answer me, Mr. Sills. How do you like it?”

“Don't. Don't like it. Jesus, make it let go.”

“Sweety,
non tanto
! That's good, Mr. Sills. You don't like it, and your family didn't like it when you did it to them. Now, I don't know what you're thinking right now, Mr. Sills, because I don't know you. Maybe you're thinking that you're going to get back at me, or your family, and that somehow you're going to be able to continue doing like you've been doing. Maybe you're the kind of person who's completely out of control. I sure hope not, for your sake, Mr. Sills. Because things have changed. And I hope that this experience—I mean, lying here in your own piss with your dead dog squashed against your face—will have a good effect. You remember when you barged in here, I said that if you did, you would be in trouble, and here you are, in trouble. Is this enough trouble for you? Answer me!”

The tone of Marlene's voice was enough to make Sweety utter a diesel-ish growl. “Yeah, yeah, enough …” yelped Sills.

“Fine. Now, look: I'm not forcing you to do anything bad; I'm just trying to get you to do the right thing. You've got a problem dealing with anger, you have a little drinking problem, you can find programs to help you out. I hope you do. But meanwhile, you have to be nice to your kids; support them; be polite to your ex-wife. You know, be a man! I think you can do that, don't you?”

“Yeah … sure,” said Sills.

“I'm delighted to hear it,” said Marlene cheerfully. “And I'm going to let you up in a second, and I'm not even going to call the cops and report that you violated your protective order, because I don't want you to go to jail, maybe lose your job. Here's the thing, though, Mr. Sills: if I hear you're giving Vickie a hard time, I will find you. I know where you live and where you work. And we'll share another experience, only this time the dog will eat your face right off your skull—nose, eyes, ears, the works. Look into my eye, Mr. Sills, and tell me that you believe me. And make me believe you!”

“And then?” asked Maggie Duran over the phone.

“Nothing much,” answered Marlene. “I gave Sweety ‘
Lasciane
' and he backed off and Sills got up and ran out of there without a word. Burned rubber too.”

“Hot damn, girl! You've made my month!”

“Glad to hear it,” said Marlene a little sharply. “It was extremely unpleasant. I had to use a kitchen knife to cut the fucking dead dog's jaws off of Sweety, and then Vickie went hysterical when she saw the mess. The place'll need to be repainted, and then I had to stop by the animal emergency room on First Avenue to get my dog stitched up.”

“Send me the bill.”

“I intend to,” said Marlene, and shortly thereafter she closed the conversation.

It was nearly one in the morning, and Marlene had stripped and showered and taken a hot soak in her converted electroplating tank and thrown her clothes into the machine before calling Mattie Duran with her report. Now she was lounging in her office, in her kimono, feeling faintly nauseated from the aftereffects of violence and wondering whether the stress was hurting the baby, and cursing yet again the scientists who had condemned cigarettes and alcohol for the pregnant.

She saw that the message light on her machine was on, and so she punched the button and listened to messages from her mother, Ariadne Stupenagel, and Denny Maher. The last was the only one who was likely, nay, certain, to be up and talkative at one a.m. and so, consulting her Rolodex, she dialed the morgue and asked for the extension of the lab room that Maher used as a home away from home.

“Peg o' my heart!” said Maher when he heard her voice.

“Did you get it?”

“It?”

“Oh, Denny, don't tell me you forgot!”

“Oh, now, wait a minute, it's coming, it's coming … ah, sure, and how could I forget a promise to the likes of yourself? You'll be interested to know that something is definitely amiss in regards to the three young Ibero-Americans, late of this city. Someone has snatched the autopsy reports, and the lads're being cremated—”