Irresistible Impulse (16 page)

Ginnie strode with the unnaturally careful stride of the drugged to the sofa and arranged herself on it, showing her thin white thighs nearly up to the crotch and the garters that held up her pink stockings. No tracks on the thighs, Marlene observed. She probably takes it in the veins on the tops of her feet.

Ginnie said in a mock confidential voice, “My dear little sister, you understand,
Mah-leen
darling, is a pather—a pathological liar. What’d she tell you? Some man was chasing her? Some
bad
man? Who was going to put his big weenie into her? Well, darling, I can tell you that—that the
only
thing that’s been between her thighs is that fucking
costly
Stradivarius, that absolutely
no one
was ever allowed to touch. Now, I, on the other hand, am the one who really
needs
a bodyguard.” She turned her attention to Wolfe. “How about it, Silent Sam? Would you like to guard my
body?
” She wriggled her hips and ran a long pink tongue around her mouth and giggled again.

Neither Marlene nor Wolfe responded to this, although Marlene noticed that Wolfe’s ears went red. Edie came back into the room bearing a tumbler full of clear liquid and ice cubes. She handed it to her sister, who took a swallow, coughed, and sprayed out what was in her mouth. She came off the sofa like a cheap toy, her face reddening, the cords of her neck rigid. “You moron! I wanted a
drink!
Don’t you know what a drink is, fuckface!”

She reached back to throw the heavy tumbler at her cringing sister, but Marlene was there with a neat wrist lock, on which she applied a hair more pressure than was strictly necessary. The tumbler fell to the carpet.

“Oww! You’re
hurting
me!” the woman cried. She had to bend her knees to relieve the pain.

“Sorry, but that’s a no-no.
Darling
,” said Marlene. “Now, are we going to be good and let the grownups get on with their business?”

A burst of hysterical cursing, quite remarkable in its fluency and rage.

“Oh, don’t hurt her,” Edie wailed. Tears gushed from her eyes. Marlene shrugged and let the lock go, and Virginia Wooten fell down on all fours, still cursing. A loud buzzer sounded from elsewhere in the apartment.

“That’s for me, that’s for me!” Ginnie cried, and scrabbling to her feet, without a backward look or another word, she left the room, taking care to slam the door so hard behind her that the figurines shook on the mantel and the posters slid askew.

Edie collapsed in tears on the sofa. Marlene handed Edie a package of tissues from her bag.

When the weeping had lapsed into sniffles, she said, “I’m so sorry you had to go through that, Marlene. Oh, God, I don’t know what to say. I’m so
mortified!
”

“Well, don’t be. This is not nearly the worst thing that someone has said to me in this business. I have an
extremely
thick skin. But I’m a little concerned about you. Does she, ah, come here often?”

“Oh, she makes a
descent
three or four times a year, I guess, usually when she’s having problems with her current man.” This was said with sighing resignation.

“Why do you let her?”

“Why?” Edie seemed surprised by this question. “She’s my
sister
. My parents gave up on her, oh, years ago, and I’m all she has. She was raised in this apartment. The idea of barring the door to her—I couldn’t ever do that. I keep thinking that some day she’ll … I don’t know …
burn out
, if that’s the expression. She … what she’s like now, she wasn’t always like that. She was beautiful and—we can’t say
gay
anymore, can we—but spirited, and fun. The house was always full of her friends. My parents are rather solemn people, and of course the girl genius ha-ha was always sawing away, sawing away. Oh, I just
worshipped
her, my big sister …” She began to cry again, softly, a slow drip of tears.

“Yes, well, Edie,” Marlene said, “the point from my perspective is, do you recall at our first interview, we talked about people with a disordered lifestyle and how vulnerable they were?”

“You mean prostitutes?”

“Yeah, them and drug addicts. And that also applies to the people they’re in intimate contact with. A junkie is a doorway to some fairly nasty people. Your sister is a—”

“Ginnie isn’t a drug addict!”

“Well, actually, she is, my dear. And one of the things we’re going to explore is her possible connection to whoever is bothering you.”

Edie shook her head metronomically during this last exchange as if by that motion she could order her sister’s life. “No, no, that’s just not possible, that’s not—”

“As well as,” Marlene continued, “the possibility that
she
is the one that’s actually producing this harassment.”

Edie Wooten just stared, struck dumb.

“While you were out of the room just now, she told me that you were making the whole thing up, that you were a pathological liar hallucinating out of sexual deprivation.”

“I am not sexually deprived,” Edie blurted, and then blushed, and then the two women burst into laughter. Wolfe looked confused and arranged his face in a bland smile.

“I’m glad to hear it,” said Marlene. “We’ll need his name too, or theirs. While we’re at it, you said something about receiving another note from the guy?”

She had, and produced it, wrapped in a plastic bag.

The note was handwritten on expensive, creamy stationery.

“Good taste. Classy guy,” said Marlene, handling the note by its edges. “Were all the notes written on this kind of paper?”

“No, just the ones in, oh, I guess the last four months or so. Before that they were on cheap stationery or lined paper.”

“Could I see that?” asked Wolfe. They both stared at him; it was as if a chair had spoken. Marlene handed it to him. “Careful! Don’t touch it like that. We may have to get prints off it.”

“Sorry,” Wolfe muttered and looked closely at the note, which read:

You don’t need anyone else to protect you my darling one. Get rid of them or I will be very displesed. I will be there. Play the E minor Shostakovich Mendelssohn D minor and the Schubert Rosamunde quartet. Remember I am watching you always. Be faiuthful.

your only true love

A Music Lover

“What do you make of it?” Marlene asked him. He shrugged and seemed surprised at being asked.

“I don’t know. He printed. The O’s are funny. They look more like, you know, parentheses.
Faithful
spelled with a U; that’s not right, is it?”

“No. And displeased spelled wrong too. Well, maybe it will help.” She put the note back in its plastic and stood up. “Okay, Edie, we’ll start checking this list. I’ll run the names through the cops, see if anyone’s got a weird streak. And we’ll check with the security people at Juilliard about precautions at the concert itself. By the way, are you going to play the pieces he mentioned?”

“Just the Shostakovich, as I told you before. The other two are a Mozart quintet and the Schumann piano and strings quartet.”

“Hm. What’s he done before when you haven’t played his favorites?”

“Nothing much. He writes an angry note and puts it someplace where I’ll be shocked to find it. Under the pillow, in the underwear drawer …”

“Yeah, well, that’s his mistake; it narrows it down because of the access he needs.” Marlene secured the note and made ready to leave. She shook Edie’s hand, as did Wolfe. The woman had recovered her composure; aside from a redness about the eyes there was no sign of the recent upheavals. Metal music blared as they left the apartment.

The elevator was opening as they entered the short hallway. A tall man stepped out, handsome, with straight blond hair, dressed in black clothing that included a tight leather motocross jacket studded with chrome rivets. He nodded politely to them and pushed the bell on the Wooten apartment.

“And let’s find out who that one is too,” said Marlene as they descended.

Part 56 of the Supreme Court of the State of New York was, despite its noble-sounding name, a calendar court, which is a sort of legal valve or appliance. Its grimy, crowded, noisy precincts provided a place for pleas to be entered or changed, plea bargains to be accepted or refused, trials to be scheduled or rescheduled, and for those who delighted in delay for reasons of legal strategy to obtain however much of this precious substance they required. In short, Part 56 could have been replaced by the sort of electronics now used to order pizzas or reserve a place on an airplane, if efficiency were all that were required of it, but such was not the case. Part 56 and its numerous siblings existed (and exist still) because the criminal law ultimately is not about numbers or efficiency. It is about our mortal flesh. And therefore there must be rooms like this one, high-ceilinged, echoing, unornamented, graceless, with peeling paint, tattered window shades over dusty windows, battered furniture, smelling of steam heat, old paint, and frightened, harried people, so that particular human bodies can be brought into physical propinquity for even a fleeting moment (it is usually fleeting enough), these bodies being the judge, the accused, the counsel for the accused, and the representative of the People.

Groups comprising the last three of this necessary quartet crowded the well of the court and moved before the bench as their case numbers were called off by the court officer. The well was in constant motion, a clumsy dance, which for music had a low tumult of many voices, with the time beaten out by the crack of the gavel. No case was distinguished from any other case—all received nearly the same time and attention—a few minutes, no more—from the harried gray-haired woman on the presidium.

Until the officer called out a number and then “
People
versus
Jonathan A. Rohbling”;
then there was a stir and a passing hush. Everyone knew who Rohbling was: the Granny Killer, and everyone, even the junkies, who ordinarily had no interest in anything whatever except their One True Love, paused a moment to cop a glance.

Karp was just as fascinated. He had never seen Rohbling in the flesh, and had been observing him closely from the moment he had been led into the room. The man was small and remarkably slight. Karp knew he was nearly twenty-two, but he could have passed for fourteen, for he was not five foot seven and weighed perhaps a hundred and thirty pounds, dripping. Waley, who stood by his side, was by no means a physically imposing man, but he towered over his client; as a couple they looked like a dad taking his unpromising son to his first day of high school. Rohbling’s dull brown hair was cut very short (he had apparently worn a wig imitating short Negroid hair while committing his crimes), and he stared blankly out at the confusion through thick, smudged glasses. His eyes were greenish brown, unfocused and wandering. He had a peculiar mouth, whose thick, soft lips were the first things any schoolyard bully would have seized upon; “girl’s lips” the bully would have called them. They had a dried whitish crust on them.

Karp tried to imagine this person wandering Harlem in blackface. More to the point, he tried to imagine the jury imagining it. It was plausible, yes. With dyed skin and the wig, Rohbling would have been able to pass as a frail, scholarly African-American youth. Did he look crazy? No, he was completely passive, and Karp supposed he had been sedated in Bellevue. Was that an error on Waley’s part? An agitated client would have looked better, assuming Waley was going to go with the insanity plea. But Waley was a civilized man. He would not have subjected his client to distress if the man was really insane, if Waley really believed he was insane. But maybe not, maybe Waley
wanted
Karp to think that Waley really thought … Here Karp put a check on his line of thought. The man had gotten to him, and he was starting to do what he had lectured scores of young prosecutors not to do, which was to get caught up in strategy. Just present the facts of your case as well as you can and let the defense worry about strategy, about motives, about psychology; he had said that a thousand times.

They read out the charges, and the judge asked for Rohbling’s plea. Rohbling said he was not guilty. That was a mild surprise; Waley had decided to wait on the insanity plea. There was nothing unusual about Rohbling’s voice, and he seemed to understand what was going on around him. The judge sent the case for trial in Part 46, Supreme Court of the State of New York. The choice was at random, based on the current state of the various trial part calendars. Karp thought for a second, connecting part numbers and faces and names. Judge Marvin Peoples would be trial judge in
People
v.
Rohbling
. That would be interesting. Karp glanced over at Waley to get his reaction to the designation of their judge, but could detect nothing but a slight pursing of the lips.

Waley approached a step closer to the bench and said, “Your Honor, on the matter of the disposition of my client’s pending trial. My client stands in need of psychiatric care not available in the prison ward at Bellevue. The North Shore Psychiatric Institute at Cold Spring Harbor would be able to provide such treatment and is a secure facility. My client comes from a distinguished family with strong community ties, who would be willing to offer any reasonable bail.”

The judge looked at Karp. “Do the People have an objection?”

“Yes, Your Honor. The defendant is accused of multiple murders. There is no precedent for bail in such cases. And I believe that there are still a number of psychiatrists working at Bellevue who would be amazed to hear that they are incompetent to provide any treatment the defendant requires.”

The court smiled thinly and said, “A good point, Mr. Karp. The prisoner is remanded to custody at Bellevue until trial.”

The guard led Rohbling away. The court officer called the next case number, and the calendar court resumed its grinding.

Karp walked up the aisle with Waley close behind him.

“That was uncharitable and unnecessary, Mr. Karp,” said Waley in a low voice.

Karp stopped and turned to face the lawyer. “Your boy gets treated like everyone else, Mr. Waley.”

“Does he? Do you think the fact that our judge appears to be a black woman of grandmotherly age figured at all in her decision?”