Irresistible Impulse (11 page)

Here, however, the nature of the crime cried out for some explanation. Why would a young white man from a wealthy Long Island suburb travel to Harlem, disguise himself as a black man, and murder elderly black women? The jury would want to know.
Karp
wanted to know. He read on, although he doubted he would find the answer among the DD5’s.

“Hey, Marlene,” said Marlon Dane at the door to her office, “this is the guy. Wolfe, this is Marlene Ciampi, the boss.”

“Glad to meet you,” said Wolfe, stepping forward and holding out his hand.

Marlene shook it and sized him up. A muscle guy, first of all. The hand was big, hard, and warm, and attached to a considerable arm and shoulder. Six-three, two-ten, Marlene’s experienced eye estimated, a jock, a bodybuilder. The face was pleasant enough in an all-American way, sandy hair, cropped closer than was fashionable, odd sandy eyebrows that stood out sharply against what must have been a tanning-parlor tan. He wore a tweed jacket over a white sweater over a shirt and tie, with dark wool pants and shined shoes. The eyes were tan too, the nose undistinguished, the expression—what was it? Not quite menschlike. An astronaut, but one of the ones who never got to go on a moon mission. Well, she thought as she gestured him to a seat, that’s what you generally got when you hired security. The best you could expect was just enough of the almost right stuff to get by.

They sat down. A little small talk. He’d spent time down South and in New England, wanted to try his luck in New York. He reached into his jacket pocket and brought out a folded resume. Marlene read it. Clean, neatly typed, not too many misspellings. Jackson Wolfe, age thirty-one, unmarried. It was a usual sort of history. High school (letters in football, track), one year of college, military service with an M.P. unit in Korea, honorable discharge, black belt in tae kwan do. The job history was a scatter of security work in several big East Coast cities, no longer than two years in each place. Also not untypical. Security was America’s fastest-growing business and nearly the only one in which a strong, quick, presentable, unskilled man who didn’t much care for the classroom could freely move from job to job and earn a modest living. It was the modern equivalent of being a cowboy or a seaman a century before, a drifter’s job.

Marlene looked up from the resume. “It says here you’re working for Macy’s now. How come you want to leave?”

“I don’t much like working retail.”

“Why not?”

Wolfe shrugged and said, hesitantly and with what seemed embarrassment, “Well, you know. It’s all shoplifting, pilferage. I don’t like … I mean, the people we pick up, most of them, they’re pathetic. Some skinny teenager, they got to have the sixty-dollar bag with the logo, the right sneakers they saw on the TV. We bust ’em, they sit in the office crying, you know, what’ll my dad say, and stuff. Even the pros, you know, miserable junkies, most of them. And the—what d’you call ’em—the guys who think they’re girls—”

“Transvestites?”

“… yeah, them: I couldn’t believe it, a PR kid, a boy, trying to walk out with an eight-hundred-dollar gown. Pathetic! Anyway, I figure I’d rather, you know, protect people from, like, terrorists, wackos, and like that. And when Dane—Lonny—told me you might be looking—”

“Right. Well, as a matter of fact, we are looking for some people.” Marlene looked at Wolfe. He met her gaze, his eyes mild, neutral, a reflecting lake, willing to be liked.

“You have any problems with working for a woman, Mr. Wolfe?” she asked.

Shrug. “No. A boss is a boss, as long as they’re not, you know …”

“What?”

“A jerk. Let me do my job, and stuff.” Wolfe allowed himself a shy smile.

Marlene smiled back. One advantage of hiring cops part-time was that your backgrounders were all done for you. The chances of getting a bum or a weirdo were much reduced. On the other hand, cops already had a job, a job that always came first, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to generate the coverage Bello & Ciampi needed for their clients out of the constantly changing patterns of their part-time availability. Also, when some dignitary visited, or some disaster happened, they might have the bulk of their coverage yanked away without much notice.

“Okay, Mr. Wolfe, let me check these references and run your name for record, and I’ll get back to you.”

“Okay, well, ah, thanks for the interview. I, ah, hope I can work here.”

Marlene smiled and shook the proffered hand again, and Wolfe walked out. She took the resume into Harry’s office, where she found Marlon Dane waving around a Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun.

“No,” said Marlene.

“Marlene, would you just listen?” said Dane, cradling the hideous thing like a puppy.

She glared, cocking her head to fix him with the full force of her good eye. Dane was a former cop, discharged on one of those odd NYPD disability pensions that paid people half their pay forever for extremely subtle injuries. Dane had been pushed down a flight of stairs by a fugitive, producing a stiffness in his right elbow such that were he to be involved in a furious gunfight, he might not be able to out-draw the desperado. Besides that he was fine: more than that, was bursting with energy. He was a stocky man with dense brown hair, dark eyes, and a curiously lush thick-lipped mouth. Today he was dressed in his undercover outfit, a red hooded sweatshirt stained with plaster dust, faded jeans, and yellow construction boots. He looked like he was about to set a rivet with the gun.

“I don’t have to listen, Lonny,” said Marlene. “This is not open to argument. I thought I made myself clear the first time you brought it up, and also the second through fifth times, but let me restate it in simpler terms. Ready? No machine guns. None. Not one. Negatory on the machine guns. We are eighty-six as far as machine guns go. Do I have to go on, or do you get it yet?”

“Marlene, I got to say, you’re making a mistake here,” Dane persisted, ignoring this last. “All the big security firms use these. The clients expect it, especially the big shots. It looks cool too, the client gets out of the limo, we’re standing there with these babies slung under our coats …”

Marlene sighed. “But, Lonny,” she said in a controlled manner, “you know, we have very few clients who are heads of state or oil ministers. The people who try to get to
our
clients are jerky boyfriends and lone nuts, not gangs of international terrorists. I get nervous with some of the guys we hire carrying
revolvers
. They start carrying something like that, I might as well check into a psycho ward.”

“But …”

“Lonny? Please? End of discussion.”

Which it was. Dane put the weapon away in his duffel bag, and conversation turned to a report on the man Dane was watching, Donald Monto, the rejected swain of one Mary Kay Miller. Monto had been spending his evenings drinking and cruising past Ms. Miller’s Brooklyn home. Before long, Marlene had every confidence, he would be drunk enough to break down her door, as he had on two past occasions, and try to beat Ms. Miller into jelly in order to demonstrate his affection. On the next occasion, however, Dane would be there, would identify himself, and should the man fail to retreat (a reasonable expectation), Dane would, in the presence of Ms. Miller, render Monto incapable of doing anything anti-door for a good long time, perhaps indefinitely.

“That
stronzo!
” snapped Marlene when Dane had gone. “Fucking machine guns!”

“Muscle,” said Harry. “He does okay, though, he don’t have to do much heavy thinking. How was his friend?”

“Looks all right,” she said, tossing the resume on the desk. “More muscle. You’ll check him out. If he’s okay, let’s give him a shot. He sounds like he’s got a sympathetic heart, and he looks like he can take care of himself. This is not an everyday combo.”

“He probably likes bazookas, your luck,” said Harry. Marlene had her first serious laugh of the day.

Outside the building, the Music Lover looked up from across the street at the wide semicircular window. He could see Marlene and Harry. If she turned her head, he thought, she could look right at me. And then she would turn her head away. He was so full of delicious pleasure at the thought that he quivered, and his groin grew hot
.

SIX

“Y
ou look beat,” Karp said.

“I’m totally ruined,” Marlene said. “I have to pee, and I can’t bear the thought of moving my body out of bed to the bathroom. Could you, like, do it for me?”

“I would, but I’m too tired.”

“Your trial, huh?”

Both of them were talking like zombies, lying corpse-like in bed, staring up at the ceiling with glazed eyes; it would have been amusing if either of them could have spared the energy to laugh. It was Sunday night after a weekend with no rest.

“Right,” sighed Karp. “I have to see Waley tomorrow. I thought I should know the case and the relevant law before I met him.
He
probably does. But I had to spend all Friday with this silly woman who screwed up a perfectly simple case, where the witnesses weren’t—”

“I don’t want to hear it,” groaned Marlene, putting her hands over her ears.

“Right, why bother? The bureau is going to go down the tubes.”

“Uh-huh. Explain to me again why it was so important for you to take this case, even though everyone told you not to.”

“It was important because I am an arrogant schmuck, and as an arrogant schmuck I naturally believe I can do things that no one else can do, like managing a major case against the best defense lawyer in the country while running a homicide bureau that handles a thousand cases a year. How’s Lucy doing?”

“Terrible. She went to bed in tears again. I feel like I’m tearing pieces of flesh from her body. She’s so ashamed of herself she can’t think straight, and I lose my temper. I am many things, but apparently a math teacher is not one of them. Why can’t she learn this shit? I’m thinking. It’s easy! And of course, it’s
not
easy for her for some reason, and then I think she needs to go into some kind of counseling, so she can tell someone what a bad mother I am. Anyway, it’s clear that something else is going on—it’s not intellectual deficit. I mean, for Christ’s sake, the kid speaks Chinese, she reads at the ninth-grade level … Fuck! I can’t think about it anymore. Look, could you, like, stroke my head?”

“Like this?”

“Yes. Kind of ease the toxic thoughts out of there. Would you mind terribly if I wet the bed?”

“Not at all. On the other hand …” He paused, listening. “I think we are both going to have to get up anyway.” A thin cranky wail drifted through the loft, which was soon followed by a second, almost identical cry, and then both gained volume until they had reached the precise pitch and intensity that evolution had found to be the most irritating to the human adult—but doubled.

“Teething,” said Karp unnecessarily, and swung his feet out of bed.

Marlene clenched her own teeth, distorted her face into a Medusa-like rictus, balled her fists, and thrashed her legs violently about, emitting a hideous sound somewhere between a muffled shriek and a sob. The spasm lasted for a good half minute, leaving Marlene limper even than before. Karp ignored the display, having grown used to it since the twins arrived. Marlene had assured him that the release it afforded helped prevent her from dashing their tiny brains out.

“I’ll get Zak,” said Karp nobly, the senior twin being notoriously the harder to calm.

Marlene grunted, cursed, stiffened her jaw, got out of bed, and clumped into the bathroom. This can’t go on, she thought. I have to do something to make this stop.

Karp was not ready to meet with Lionel T. Waley the next morning. The regular meeting of the bureau to review cases had gone badly, although young Nolan had much improved his case against Morella and had received a nice round of applause. Karp was not as up on the cases as he usually was and was compelled to fake it, a habit he deplored in others and despised in himself. Roland Hrcany made sure that Karp knew he knew that Karp was screwing up, and Karp was certain that many of the others did too. While he could depend on Roland’s native sadism to prevent any truly wretched cases from going forward, the meeting simply added to his feeling that things were slipping out of control.

Lionel Waley’s presence made him feel it even more, through invidious comparison, for if anyone was ever in complete control, it was Waley. Karp had taken as much care with his appearance as he could manage, but he had slept only three out of the last twenty-four hours and it showed. He had definitely remembered to shave, because there was a prominent gash smarting under his chin, and he was dressed, although he realized just after he had risen to shake Waley’s hand that the shirt button over his belt was undone, allowing a charming view of his undershirt.

Waley was, in contrast, as perfect as an oil portrait of a nineteenth-century alderman, and like one of these, he seemed to glow softly. He was a slight, well-proportioned man in his early sixties. His hair was white and curly, like that of a show poodle, or Santa, and this lent a softness to what otherwise would have been too severe a face. His eyes, large and canny under thick white brows, were gray-blue, and he wore a beautifully tailored, conservatively cut suit of a similar shade, the sort of ineffably custom color that never appears on pipe racks at even the best department stores. He spoke in deep, mellow. tones, like an oboe in low register, and he had the perfectly neutral accent of a newscaster.

After a somewhat briefer than usual bout of pleasantries, Karp said, “Your meeting, Mr. Waley. What can I do for you?”

“Well, I believe we can do something for each other, Mr. Karp, and put this dreadful tragedy behind us in a way mutually credible to our respective causes.”

This was not the sort of language that dripped from the mouths of lawyers much in evidence at 100 Centre Street. The stately period was not often heard in those precincts, and when it was, Karp was frequently the source. He enjoyed a certain formality of language, as befitting the dignity of the law (assuming it still retained any in Centre Street) and tending both to suppress the passion that could lead to legal errors and to allay the hostility of the lowlifes. Now, however, Karp found it irritating, perhaps because he sensed that Waley considered
him
one of the lowlifes.