Irresistible Impulse (3 page)

“This is the race thing.”

“This is. The black community is concerned. They see this nice rich white boy from the North Shore with a funny hobby that involves killing elderly black ladies. It makes them irate. They’re worried about what the esteemed gentleman called ‘legal tomfoolery.’ They want this guy dangling from a lamp post, and failing that, they want his white butt upstate forever.” Keegan took a Bering cigar from his desk drawer, pulled it from its silver tube, and stuck it in his mouth, unlit. “So. Anything new?”

“Not much,” said Karp. “We ordered a psychiatric evaluation and Bellevue says he’s competent. Grand jury should start next week sometime. I think we want to expedite this—”

“No joke. Red ball on this one.”

“Okay, it’s the beginning of November. Five counts of murder are going to take some time to present, so let’s say we arraign on the indictment before the end of the month, and then motions—say forty-five days?”

“Say ninety days, if you’re lucky. This is Lionel Waley you got here on defense, the Duke of Delay.”

“Okay, that rolls us well into next year. So we’ll figure jury selection to start up in March.”

“Yeah, that’ll be a delightful experience too. It took a full month to select a jury for Bobby Seale. Count on at least that. Roland is going to do it, I presume. The actual trial.”

Karp had been waiting for this. He met Keegan’s gaze and answered, “No. I’m going to take it.”

Keegan’s eyes narrowed, and they stared at each other for an unlikely length of time. Then Keegan pursed his lips and examined the pale green wrapper of his cigar. He said, “You know, Butch, when I got to be D.A., I fondly imagined that my subordinates would do what I told them to do. I was mistaken, although I recall that when Phil Garrahy was in this chair, we all tried to do pretty much what he told us. Now, I think I’ve mentioned a time or two that as a bureau chief you can’t take trials—”

“You used to take trials.”

“May I finish? Thank you. And especially you can’t take a horrendous long trial like Rohbling is going to be, and rebuild the Homicide Bureau, and run it, and keep on top of everything else you have to do. And have a life. You’ve got three kids.”

“You had four kids and you did it.”

Keegan’s face dropped a shade into the red zone. “Yes, damn it, back in the sixties, when we had half as many homicides, and a dozen men in the bureau with twenty, twenty-five years’ experience, who didn’t need their noses wiped like your people do, and, frankly, before Warren and the Supremes got into the act, when we could do things to move cases through that we can’t do now. There’s no comparison.” He held up a meaty hand to check the expostulation he could see forming on Karp’s face. “Look, there’s no point in discussing it. I think I’ve made myself clear on this. On the other hand, you’re the bureau chief; I don’t intend to second-guess you. But here’s something to think about: if this case goes sour, there will be a shit storm of uncontrollable fury directed at both you and me. I have to face an election in a year’s time in a city where nearly half the electorate is non-white. So all the things we’re trying to do to bring this office back from perdition will be at risk. You need to understand that aspect.”

“I do,” said Karp. “I can handle it.”

Keegan replaced the cigar in his mouth and stared at Karp down its length, as along a gun barrel. “You ever go up against Lionel T. Waley?” he asked.

“No. You?”

“I did. In 1963. This is before he became the nation’s greatest criminal lawyer, as I believe he actually calls himself.”

“Is he?”

Keegan grinned. “Well, he wins a lot of cases. He’s up there with Lee Bailey and Nizer. You know what they say: if you can’t get Bailey, get Waley. Of course, Lionel says it’s the other way around.”

“Did you win?”

“I did not. He whipped my young ass. This was the Sutton case, a classic society killing. Is that a blank look? Babs Sutton, department store heiress? No? How soon they forget. Jesus, that whole world is gone. Cafe society, so called. In any case, Babs, or as the society columns used to say, the Princess Radetsky, was married to this playboy, Prince Ladislas Radetsky, and of course the prince continued to play, and Babs found him in their suite at the Waldorf, on top of a sixteen-year-old whore. She took out, if you can believe it, her pearl-handled .32 and gave him five through the chest.”

“She
walked
on this?”

“Oh, yeah. Waley gave them the defending the sanctity of the home horseshit. Driven to madness by the violation of the nuptial bed was how he put it. Had a jury full of decent Catholic women too, and he dressed the defendant like an understudy for the Little Flower. Oh, it was rare! My mistake was thinking that the facts spoke for themselves. Wrong, at least with Waley. You’re sure you don’t want to think it over?” He shot Karp another gunsight look over the cigar.

“No, and this is going to be a team thing too. I don’t intend to do it all myself.”

“Oh, well,
that’s
a relief,” said Keegan and laughed. “Jesus! Well, I knew you were a stubborn Jew son of a bitch when I hired you. I have only myself to blame. What I should do is call Marlene and get her to bang on your head. How is she, by the way?”

“Fine, I guess. We tend to pass in the night.”

“I presume she’s still … you know.” He made a shooting gesture with his hand.

“Uh-huh. Apparently the business is flourishing.”

Keegan shook his head. “What a world! And her a mother with three children!”

“What can I say, Jack? It’s important to her. I’m married to her. I love her. Case closed.”

“Well, yes,” said Keegan. “I didn’t mean to pry. Except, if there’s any mercy left in the world, the next time she shoots someone, it’ll be in Brooklyn. Outside the fucking County of New York.”

“It’s my daily prayer,” said Karp.

TWO

M
arlene Ciampi, wife of Karp, was at that moment standing in a shop in Chinatown buying a dozen pork kidneys for her dog, with any thoughts of shooting, in Manhattan or elsewhere, far from her mind. The dog, a Neapolitan mastiff only somewhat smaller than a Shetland pony, was outside on the sidewalk, slavering. Marlene’s daughter, Lucy, aged eight, was wandering through the rear of the store, where the butcher shop faded into a dusty sundries emporium. Marlene watched the counterman wrap her dog food, feeling, as ever, the pang of guilt that came from purchasing for this purpose meat meant for Chinese humans. And she knew the counterman knew it, although the hostile glare with which he greeted her was no different from the same expression worn by nearly all of the merchants in the little Mott Street shops when they had to deal with the
guai lo
, the white ghosts.

“Can I have this, Ma?”

Her daughter was holding up a bag of dried lichees wrapped in the peculiar stiff cellophane, never seen anywhere else, that was used to package much of what was sold in Chinatown. Marlene assented to the treat, paid the surly cashier, and they left the shop. As they did so, there was a burst of nasty laughter from a group of young men loitering outside. Leaning against the wall and sitting on plastic milk crates, they were the type of young men often to be seen lounging in Chinatown, almost always dressed in black, their trousers loose and pleated, and silky, their hair worn long and artfully swept back, the fingernails on their little fingers at least an inch long. They were laughing because they were discussing, in Cantonese, the sexual uses to which Marlene might be put. While Marlene was untying Sweety, the mastiff, from a sign pole, Lucy turned to the young men and said, calmly and without heat, in reasonably fluent Cantonese, “Dead things! Impotent turtles! Your grandfathers disown you.”

After a moment of stunned silence the young men howled in rage and came off the wall and up from the milk crates. Lucy stood by Marlene and stuck her tongue out at them. Two elderly women passing in the street, who had heard the exchange, giggled and hid their mouths with their hands.

“What’s going on, Lucy?” asked her mother, giving the young men the eye.

“Oh, nothing, Mom, we were just talking,” said Lucy, with the confidence of one who has a 220-pound attack-trained dog standing by as well as a literal pistol-packing mom.

The Chinese youths mumbled and glowered and pretended nothing had happened, like embarrassed cats. Lucy and Marlene moved on, Lucy cracking lichees and sucking on the intense sweetness of the fruit, and the slick, heavy seed within, crunching the fragile shells into fine sandy grains and scattering them as she walked. It was the best hour of her day, the only time she had her mother to herself, as in the blessed past, before the advent of Them. Lucy went to P.S. 1, where the Chinatown kids went, along with a handful of gringo children from SoHo, whose parents liked the idea of their offspring inhaling solid Confucian values with their lessons. The advantage of being able to speak with her friends a language that her mother did not understand had early appealed to her, and, discovering in herself a remarkable gift for tongues, she had avidly learned Cantonese from her little gang of bilingual schoolmates.

They were walking north on Mott, toward Canal.

“Are we going to Tranh’s now?” Lucy asked.

“Uh-huh. What was all that back there, Lucy? With those punks?”

“They’re gangsters, Mom.”

“I know, honey, that’s why you shouldn’t talk to them.”

“They were talking bad about you. Sex stuff.”

“Yeah, I figured. Nevertheless …”

“If they give us any heat, you could shoot them.”

“
You
shoot them, Luce. I’m through with shooting people,” said Marlene, and changed the subject to the events of the past school day.

Chatting amiably, they came out onto Canal. Here Chinatown had flowed past its historic barriers, pushed by the new immigration attendant upon the partial collapse of the Bamboo Curtain and the oriental misadventures of the American government. Much of this immigration was not, strictly speaking, Chinese, for it included Thais, Filipinos, and Vietnamese, of which Tranh, of the eponymous noodle shop, was one. It was a tiny, narrow place, with steamed windows, rich garlicky smells, a counter and four shaky tables.

“Oh, here you are,” said Tranh from behind the Formica barrier, when Lucy ran in. “Usual?” asked Tranh.

They agreed that it would be. Marlene had been bringing Lucy here for her after-school
gouter
, as they used to call it at Sacred Heart, for a little over a year, or just after the twins had arrived and Marlene had thought her daughter in need of a special daily treat. The place was nearly always empty at this hour, and unlike many of the proprietors of hole-in-the-wall Asian joints, Tranh did not treat them like lepers. He was grave, correct, and polite, although his English seemed limited to the two phrases he had just used plus “everything okay?”, “thank you,” and “goodbye.”

Marlene liked the place because it wasn’t cheeseburgers, because Lucy liked it, and because Tranh, through some odd telepathy had, on her first visit, while she watched Lucy gobble hot noodles with bits of pork and onion, placed before her a huge cup of the sort of milky, hot, very powerful coffee that Parisians call a
grande crème
. It was such an unlikely gesture from an oriental man on Canal Street that Marlene, stupefied, had simply thanked him and drunk the coffee gratefully. He had done the same on each subsequent visit, no comment passing between them beyond polite thanks on her part, a stiff little bow on his.

Tranh was thus one of her small urban secrets: an odd bird entirely. She reckoned he was in his late forties, although he could have been anywhere from thirty-five to sixty. His face was lean and hard looking, with a long, pensive upper lip and tufted black brows, topped by the typical, dreadful, Asian-guy haircut—nothing on the sides and a black crest above, like Woody the Woodpecker. His face’s chief distinguishing mark was a circular indentation at the temple, as if someone had tried to shove the butt of a pool cue through his skull. His arms were thin and sinewy, finished by long-fingered, nicotine-stained hands badly scarred across their backs. His motions at the stove were crisp and economical. He smoked constantly, unfiltered Pall Malls, and read dusty-looking Vietnamese newspapers when business was slow.

The woman, Tranh thought, looked worried today. Usually she took one cigarette with her coffee, but now she had smoked two already, and the girl was barely half through with the noodles. Perhaps he should offer her another coffee. No, it was best to leave everything the same. He was well practiced in looking at things out the corner of his eye while pretending to read a newspaper. She was not like the other American women who occasionally came in to pick up a coffee or a take-out meal. She reminded him more of the women he had known in Paris before the war, the intense, shiny girls interested in politics or literature. One girl in particular—he could not recall her name, but she had that small grace, finely boned but strong, the dark curly hair, the ivory skin, still smooth, although she was no longer in the first flush of youth. Not a woman who had gone down the ordinary paths. She had only one eye too; the right one was glass. He had noticed that the first day. Also the left hand was missing fingers. Tranh was something of a connoisseur of mutilations. It could have been an auto accident, of course, but he suspected something rather more interesting had happened to her. And she carried a gun, a small automatic tucked in a plain nylon holster on her belt, on the left side, although she was right-handed. He had spotted that the first day too, although she always wore some sort of jacket to conceal it. There were, of course, many police in the neighborhood, because of the nearness of the courts and police headquarters, but he very much doubted that she was a police officer. He had a lot of experience spotting those too. In memory of Paris, he had made her the first
grande crème
. And she had accepted it with grace, and had not tried to use the offering as an occasion to chatter, for which he was in turn grateful. He would have liked to converse with her. He could not remember the last time he had spoken at any length to a woman. But he was stupid in English, and he would not have wanted to be stupid to this woman.