Irresistible Impulse (7 page)

“What, did I screw something up? What?” “You did fine, Roland. Sit down and I’ll explain.” Roland glared and then flung himself back into his seat, making it creak dangerously.

Karp said, “The reason is, this is the biggest and most politically important case we’ll get this year. I planned to take at least one, and this one is going to be it.”

“Oh, it’s too important for
me
, is what you’re saying,” said Roland in a tone that approached petulance.

“And since I’m taking the case,” continued Karp, ignoring the comment, “I need someone to watch the bureau, which has to be you. You’re the most experienced guy on the staff, and the best.”

“Next to you,” Roland growled.

Roland glared when he said this and rolled his jaw. Something must have happened to my testosterone, thought Karp, reflecting that a couple of years ago he would’ve snarled right back and the two of them would have been screaming and throwing things at each other. Now, however, Roland just looked silly, like Zak when he wanted a toy. Maybe, he thought, it was the result of having two male babies in the house. The real thing spoiled you for the imitations.

Pitching his voice low, he said, “Actually, Roland, to be frank, yes,
in this case
, which is what we’re talking about. And I’ll give you two reasons: one, an insanity defense is highly likely here, a serious insanity defense, and as it happens, I’ve tried three major cases where that defense was offered and you haven’t tried any. Okay, they’re rare, but there it is. I’m familiar, you’re not, and going against Waley we need all the edge we can get.”

“I’m not afraid of Waley,” snapped Roland.

“You’re not?
Mazeltov
, Roland. But he scares Jack Keegan, and anyone who scares Jack Keegan scares the shit out of
me
. You want the second reason? This case is dripping with racial politics, white defendant, black vies. I don’t like it, but I have to deal with it.

Jack has to deal with it. You are not the first person I would pick for a situation like that.”

“What, now I’m a fucking
racist?
” Roland’s neck grew dangerously crimson.

“No, Roland, of course you aren’t, but the prosecutor in this case is going to be under a microscope, and you got a mouth on you. You are free with racial expletives—”

“What, you mean
nigger?
”

“… and you spend much of your time with white cops, cracking the kind of jokes that if a black juror heard about them, they would be less than well disposed toward the People—”

“For crying out loud, Butch, you been down the jail recently? The fucking
niggers
call each other
nigger
.”

“I rest my case,” said Karp.

Roland opened his mouth; it stayed open for a couple of beats, and then he let out most of his air and said, “This is fucked, you know that? I was pumped for this case.”

“Great, then I’m sure your prep and notes are in terrific order. We’ll do the grand jury together and then you’ll phase out. Could you let me have them as soon as possible?”

Roland stood, snarling. “Yeah, boss, and fuck you very much!”

“Thank you for your support,” said Karp genially as Roland slammed out.

The phone rang. It was V. T. Newbury returning Karp’s call.

“I need a friend,” said Karp. “Everyone hates me.”

“With some justification, I might say. You’re really going to take on Rohbling?”

“You heard already? What is it, on TV?”

“No, Keegan was unloading to Zepelli and some of the other bureau chiefs about your loose cannon-hood, and Z. mentioned it to me at a Fraud Bureau staff meeting.”

“He was really pissed, was he?”

“Mmm, not as such. I gathered he was irritated but ruefully admiring of your chospeh.”

“
Chutzpah
, V.T. You have to try to generate more phlegm with the Yiddishisms:
chhhhhutz-pah
.”

“I’ll try, but as you know, my people are phlegm-impaired.”

“True. Look, why I called, let’s have lunch, soon.”

They made a date for the following day. Unlikely as it might appear from their respective backgrounds, V.T. Newbury was one of Karp’s best friends and probably the smartest person Karp knew. Just now he badly needed both friendship and smarts.

A knock on the door and Connie Trask came in pushing one of the wire-basket carts used to transport case files around the halls. It was stacked with red cardboard folders, one for each of the murders for which Jonathan Rohbling stood accused, plus additional files Roland had assembled since the arrest.

“That was fast,” said Karp.

“Yeah, he seemed upset,” said the secretary. “He said he peed on them. You might want to check that out before you take them home. Oh, Lieutenant Fulton called. I told him you were in there with Roland giving him bad news. He laughed and said you could call him back.”

“Thanks, Connie,” said Karp, reaching for the phone.

Lucy Karp sat in spelling, morosely waiting for her turn to come around again.
Resemble
had been her word last time. Briefly, it had flashed through her mind to say, when using it in a sentence, “Mrs. Lawrence’s face
resembles
a snotty kleenex,” but had chickened out. Spelling was not a problem. Math was the problem. Math and Mrs. Lawrence, what she did in math class.

At the next desk, Robert Liu stood up and misspelled
surrender
, and sat down blushing. Lucy stood and spelled it right and said, “The general promised he would never surrender,” looking Mrs. Lawrence in the eye as she did so. The teacher gave her that phony smile and called on the next kid, and Lucy knew she was plotting her revenge when math class came along.

As it would, inevitably. There would be a recess at ten-thirty. They would stream out to the schoolyard, and Lucy’s friends would set up the long ropes to dance double Dutch, chanting, and Lucy would leap among the strands, best of all of them, having learned to jump rope from her mother so far in the past that she could barely remember acquiring the skill. But then they would have to return to the orange-peel-smelling, hot-paint-smelling school building and have math, and Mrs. Lawrence would return the homework, Lucy’s marked with shameful red crosses, which she folded quickly and hid away in her backpack. None of her friends, not Janet Chen, or Franny Lee, or Martha Kan, who could barely speak English, had the slightest problem with long division, with problems that made Lucy’s brain freeze up and sweat start from her forehead. Then after the passing out of the homework, Mrs. Lawrence would chalk four problems up on the board, and
of course
she would pick Lucy for the hardest one, and Lucy would march up to the board, her face blazing, her stomach roiling, with three other kids, and the others would all do their problems right away and sit down, and Lucy would be up there trying to remember seven into sixty-four and what over, and the whole class would be silent, waiting, and then Mrs. Lawrence would say sweetly, “Lucy needs some help,” and then she would talk Lucy through the whole problem as if she were a tiny little moron, with many a sarcastic aside about “somebody didn’t pay attention when we were learning how to carry the number into the next column,” and the sweat would run down her sides, and her vision would go gray from loss of face, and no, she could not stand it, not even one more time.

So, when recess came, Lucy put her coat on with the others and lagged behind with the fat kids who didn’t like recess and, when she saw that the teachers weren’t looking, dashed through the open gate, slipped between two parked cars, and was gone, a fugitive from long division, running up Catherine Street toward the Bowery, her mind as blank as a washed blackboard.

FOUR

“W
hat’s up?” said Karp into the phone.

“You asked me to check out your Jewish doctor,” said Detectrive Lieutenant Clay Fulton.

Karp’s mind had been so immersed in
People v.
Rohbling
that the statement made no sense to him. Was Fulton sick? Had Karp recommended someone?

“Um … Jewish doctor?” he ventured.

“I don’t believe it! I’ve been running around all day on this. For crying out loud, Butch! Davidoff?”

“Oh, yeah! Davidoff. The dead nurse. Murray’s case. Okay, I got it. So what went down? He’s kosher or not?”

“Not. The opposite. Tayfe.”

“
Trefe
, Clay. What did he do?”

“I’m not sure yet, but one, he didn’t attend this Longren woman at all as far as I can find out. Also, the apartment where the woman died is owned by a guy named Robinson, Vincent F., also an M.D., apparently a friend, or acquaintance, of Dr. D. Want to hear the kicker? Longren was insured, a private policy via Prudential with her parents as beneficiaries, plus another policy where she worked, through Mutual New York, beneficiary her boss, guess who, Vincent Robinson, M.D.”

“Longren worked for Robinson, he’s a doc, she gets sick, she dies in his apartment, and then he brings
another
doc in to do the death cert. Smells.”

“Stinks. I talked to the insurance investigator from Mutual. He went by Robinson’s place to check out the death scene and the beneficiary. While he was there, he used the John and noticed pills. Little white pills and caps, caught in the shag rug around the toilet, like someone wanted to flush a lot of stuff and didn’t notice a few extras. He scooped them up and they turned out to be phenobarbs and Dalmane, sleeping pills.”

“Oh-ho,” said Karp.

“Oh fucking ho is right, son. We need to dig this lady up.”

“I’ll get on it,” said Karp. “Meanwhile, why don’t you ask Dr. Davidoff to drop by for a chat? And have him bring along his treatment records for the deceased.”

Marlene spent a fairly unpleasant morning with Tamara Morno, the Tamara who did not want to go to court, standing in the hallway of her Chelsea apartment and yelling until the woman relented, and dressed and came with her, trembling and looking over her shoulder out the back window of the cab, to the courthouse on Centre Street, where Marlene arranged for an order of protection against Tamara’s boyfriend. Then she had to sit with the weeping woman, and buy her coffee and pastries and calm her down enough so that she could go home. Tamara Morno was a small, round-faced woman with a dramatically sensual figure and a mouse-like disposition, a good combo if you were looking for trouble with men. Marlene made a note to have a talk with the guy, Arnie Nobili, the lover, yet another of the very many men who thought it the peak of attractiveness to swear that if they couldn’t have her, nobody could. Having her in Mr. Nobili’s case included partial strangulation and cigarette burns, plus hocking Tamara’s stuff when he needed to pay off his gambling debts. Not lowlifes, either of them, though: she was a secretary, he was an electrician, both in work, both demonstrably sane except for a touch of impairment in the romantic zone.

Marlene checked her watch as Tamara’s cab pulled away. A little early, but she would go uptown anyway and soak up some class. It was a dull day and chilly, and a long, slow ride in a warm cab would have a calming effect. She stuck two fingers in her mouth and let out a blast that lifted a thousand pigeons from the courthouse plaza and brought a yellow cab across two lanes of traffic to the curb.

Edith Wooten’s building was one of the old dowagers that line Park Avenue between the Fifties and the Eighties, tan, ornate, brass-bound, and well-doormanned. Marlene was asked her name by one of these, white gloved and red faced, and made to wait while he rang up. After speaking a moment into the intercom, he beckoned to Marlene and handed her the instrument.

“Ms. Ciampi?” said Edith Wooten’s voice. “I didn’t expect you so soon, and … oh, I’m devastated, but, you see, I’m in the middle of a rehearsal, and … would it completely destroy your day if I had you just wait up here for say, a tiny half hour?”

“A tiny half hour’s fine, Ms. Wooten.”

“Oh, grand! You see, Anton came over from Amsterdam for just this concert, and his wretched plane was late. And, you know”—here she lowered her voice as if offering a confidential explanation—“it’s the Shostakovich, the E
minor trio
, you see, so …”

“Oh, of course,” agreed Marlene blankly, “the E minor, so …”

“Yes. Well, I’ll tell Francis to send you up.”

Sent up, and greeted at the door by a uniformed maid, Marlene entered the kind of dwelling rarely encountered in hyper-transient Manhattan, for the Wootens had been in possession of it since the building was constructed in 1923. The maid parked her in a white paneled room with a nice view of Park Avenue through the champagne silk drapes. The furniture was old, of course, not the kind of old you get from antique stores, but the kind you get when you buy new from Tom Chippendale in 1804 and hang on to it: two elegant armchairs upholstered in rose silk, a small sofa in the same material, and a low Sheraton-design table with worn brass fittings. The rug was a silk Tabriz, Marlene thought, early nineteenth century, much worn. She walked across it to check out the paintings. Two nice water colors, one a park scene by Prendergast, the other a portrait sketch by Sargent. There were tuning-up sounds coming through the door to her right, and shortly this door opened and there entered a solidly built, pink-faced blond young woman with pale, dreamy, gentle eyes. She wore a simple black wool dress reaching a dowdy length below the knee.

“Ms. Ciampi!” said this person, shaking Marlene’s hand with a solid, warm grip. “I’m Edie Wooten. How good of you! I’m terribly sorry about this mess. Honestly, if you can bear to wait, I’d be so grateful.”

Marlene estimated the woman’s age at about twenty-five, although she also might have been eighteen, so fresh was her face, so mild and untroubled were her green eyes. Someone to whom nothing really bad had ever happened, was Marlene’s instant thought, followed by a pang of envy, covered by a recoil of shame: nothing until now, or else she would not have called.

“It’s no problem. You said half an hour?”

“Yes, thereabouts. One run-through. You can wait here or use the phone, whatever you like. I could have Audrey bring you some coffee? A magazine?”

“No, don’t bother.”