Corruption of Blood (11 page)

V.T. rewound it and they watched the Zapruder film again at normal speed. It took twenty-two seconds. They were silent for the few seconds it took to rewind.

“Again?” asked V.T.

“Not right now,” said Karp. He rose, stretched, and turned on the lights. “We have a photo tech yet?”

“Uh-huh. I convinced Jim Phelps to join the cause. You don’t recognize the name? He’s the guy who liberated the Zapruder film and he’s done some interesting enhancements. He impressed me. A certain passionate sincerity that ought to balance my own blithe amateurism.”

“I’ll need to meet him.”

“I’ll set it up. Also, I have that list for the autopsy panel you wanted.”

“Murray’s heading it, right?” Newbury bobbed his head in assent, but with a sour expression on his face.

“What’s the matter, you have something against Murray Selig?” Karp asked.

“No, not as such. The credentials are fine. You can’t beat chief medical examiner in New York City. On the other hand, you and he have been pretty tight over the years. His objectivity may be called into question. It might have been better to give it to someone with whom we have no prior connection.”

“Come on, Murray’s the best in the business. You think he’s going to shave the findings to make me happy?”

V.T. shrugged. “You’re the boss. Okay, next: I’m going to set up an index for the materials we’re gathering. I’ll base it on the index Sylvia Meagher made in sixty-four, of course. We’d really be even further up shit’s creek without that. And I’ll make a separate list of the stuff we should have that’s missing, not that I have very high hopes of finding it.” He rose and sighed and ran his hand through his fine pale hair.

It struck Karp that V.T. had been putting in hours as long as his own and even after a few weeks his face was beginning to show the strain.

“Fulton’s coming on Monday?” V.T. asked.

“Yeah. He called yesterday. He’s got his little mafia of retired cops ready to start as contract investigators. Speaking of which, first thing Monday we should have a meeting. I’ll get Selig to come down, and you should get your photo guy in. I’ll try to figure out which of the people wandering around here knows what the hell they’re doing.”

V.T. nodded unenthusiastically and went to the door. Karp said, “I’d like to see that fist of missing stuff as soon as possible. I’m going over to see the Senate Intelligence Committee. Maybe they’ll know about some of it.”

“Tomorrow morning all right?”

“Sure. Like what kind of stuff, by the way?”

V.T. shot him a glum look. “Like Kennedy’s brain, for starters. And it’s probably not in the Dirksen Building.”

Karp read for the rest of the day until his eyes burned. He reached the end of a chapter and threw the heavy book on a pile. He’d gone through three yellow pads making notes on the Warren Report, cross-checking his reading with the critical works also spread out across his desk: Meagher’s
Accessories after the Fact,
Thompson’s
Six Seconds in Dallas,
Lane’s
Rush to Judgment,
Epstein’s
Inquest.
He reviewed his notes and distributed more little yellow slips among the critical books. As always, he finished these sessions with an incipient headache and a queasy sensation in his belly.

Having entered this work without any prejudgment of the Warren Report, he had never concerned himself particularly with its critics. He had read the
Times
and watched Uncle Walter on CBS like millions of Americans, and the idea that a lone nut had shot the president was perfectly reasonable to him. He also had a deep-seated reluctance to accept the idea of conspiracy on the part of government agencies, even though he had in his career exposed several such conspiracies.

That was the point, in fact. If
he
had exposed conspiracies, and
he
was a law-enforcement official, it was difficult to believe that other law-enforcement officials could not have done likewise. Since none had, in the last decade, it had seemed to him probable that no conspiracy existed. He also had a professional’s reluctance to accept the conclusions of amateurs. In his long experience at the DA’s office in New York, and in contradiction to the great mass of popular culture pertaining to the subject, no amateur, no Miss Marple, no Poirot, no Sam Spade, no Lew Archer, had ever contributed in the slightest to the solution of a homicide. Private investigators were a joke among the pros he worked with.

After three weeks of study, however, these beliefs had been seriously eroded, and he had conceived a ferocious resentment against the people associated with the Warren Commission. His reading had shown him what any experienced homicide prosecutor would have gathered. The commission report was not an investigation that might have substituted for a trial of the dead Oswald, but merely a prosecutor’s brief, and not a very good one at that. As Crane had suggested at their first meeting, Karp would have laughed out of his office a junior ADA who had waltzed in with something of this quality as prep work for the trial of a street mutt accused of popping a whore.

He had seen a similar botch any number of times in training ADAs: love at first sight. The cops provide a likely suspect; the kid gathers evidence that aids in convicting that suspect, and shows up at Karp’s pretrial meeting with a fat file and a big grin, which grin Karp demolishes by pointing out all the things the defense is going to bring up that the kid didn’t think about, or didn’t think were important. The autopsy. Did you see the films? Are the wounds consistent with the weapon we say he used? What about that weapon? Chain of evidence? Do you have it, an unbroken written record of everyone who touched it from the time it was found in possession of the defendant to the present instant? You “think” so? Not good enough. What about the witnesses? You got “most of them”? Why not
all
of them? They didn’t see anything or they didn’t see what you thought they should have seen? Better apply for a continuance, kid. You’re not ready for court.

And that was what happened on Karp’s watch in a cheap street killing of a nobody. This—he glanced in distaste at the nicely bound blue volumes—was an investigation of the murder of a president in front of umpteen thousand people, supervised by the chief justice of the United States. Karp recalled what Bert Crane had said about Warren and his report—that Warren was rusty, that the problem with the report was the peculiar life histories of both the main suspect and the guy who’d shot him. The critics made much of that too, but Karp thought both they and Crane were off the mark. The problem with this thing was that it was a lousy investigation. A third-year law student could’ve come in off the street and walked Lee Harvey Oswald through its gaping holes.

Karp rose, put his suit jacket on, grabbed some more reading material, and threw it into an accordion folder. He walked through the deserted office and out into the darkening streets. The Federal Center metro station was a block away, and he took the Red Line train to the Court House stop in Arlington.

The Federal Gardens Apartments consisted of four two-story red brick buildings with tacky and pretentious white colonial porticoes, despite which they remained easily distinguishable from Mount Vernon. Most of Karp’s neighbors appeared to be noncommissioned military on temporary assignments or the kind of working stiffs that dressed in uniforms with embroidered name tags. There was a rusty playground set in the worn grassy quadrangle, which was littered with trash and forgotten plastic toys. There were lots of children in the complex, although Karp, who left for work at seven and returned after dark, saw them mainly on weekends. He heard them often enough, though. The interior walls were thin.

He entered his apartment and turned on the light. A small living room contained a nubby plaid couch, an easy chair with a reddish flowered slipcover worn at the arms, a scratched blond wood coffee table, a standard lamp with a rusty nylon shade. In the rear of the ground floor there lurked a tiny dim kitchen and a dining alcove with a table of the same blond wood and four chairs. There was a dark stain on the table in the shape of a map of China, where someone had once spilled ink, probably during the second Roosevelt administration. Up a narrow flight of stairs were two bedrooms and a bath. The place was dark and low-ceilinged, but it was cheap and ten minutes by train to Karp’s office.

Cheap was the main thing. Housing prices in the District had exploded in the seventies and Karp had vastly underestimated the cost of keeping two households. As it was likely that he would be unemployed after the committee concluded its work, he had resolved not to touch his small savings until then. He now understood why congressmen took bribes.

Karp changed into comfortable clothes, went down to the kitchen, and heated up and consumed, without tasting it, a TV dinner. Then he went into the living room, lay down on the couch, and read for ten minutes before falling into a profound sleep.

He awoke with a start to the sound of a violent argument in the apartment next door. Screaming, breaking things, and an unfamiliar sound, the whining and barking of a dog. The quarrel reached a crescendo and then abruptly terminated with a slamming door and a final crash of something breaking. The whining and barking, however, continued. Karp cursed and checked his watch. He was late for his nightly phone call.

Marlene was cool when she answered, as if she were speaking to a distant relative.

“How’re things?” he asked.

“Not bad.” And, away from the mouthpiece, muffled: “It’s Daddy.”

“Got a new husband yet?”

“Yeah, I just picked this dude off the street, name of Frank or Ralph, something like that—anyway, he’s far better than you in every possible way.”

“Good. As long as you’re happy.”

“I’m euphoric,” she said, and then after a brief pause, “I was on TV yesterday.”

“Yeah? What, you hosted ‘Saturday Night Live’?”

“Almost as good. I talked to the National Association of Attorneys General about rape. One of the locals picked up about twelve seconds of
moi
for the local news. I did my line about how after the legislature changed the law on corroborative evidence, our conviction rate went up thirty percent.”

“That’s great, Marlene! God, Bloom usually hogs that whole thing for his buddies and his own self.”

“Yeah, well apparently, I’m one of Bloom’s buddies now,” she said.

“Oh?”

“Yeah, a bunch of feminists had a rally in front of the courts building and the TV gave them a big play. Apparently, car theft gets something like eighty times the investigative resources that rape gets, and forget about narco. Also there was a series about rape in the
Voice
and a piece in
New York
with a couple of juicy horror stories. Mr. Bloom was very glad to have his very own pet feminist talk to the press.”

“So you’re famous.”

“Please! Quasi-famous at the most.”

“Like it?”

A pause. “Yeah. Yeah, I do. It’s nice to get some recognition, and I think it’ll be good for the program.”

“You get any new staff yet?”

“No, but … what’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means don’t hold your breath. Bloom is a master of the meaningless gesture. He could be setting you up.”

“I can take care of myself,” Marlene snapped, with more edge than she had intended. “Just because you’ve had a running war with him for all these years doesn’t mean I have to. We’re separate people, something which has been getting a lot clearer to me since you left.”

“Marlene, what are you talking about?” Karp demanded, his voice rising. “Bloom is a corrupt fuck, and you know it.”

A pause. “Let’s change the subject, Butch,” said Marlene coolly. “What’s going on down there? Solved the crime of the century yet?”

“Yeah, well, it would help if I had a staff, or money to pay one, or an office that worked, but besides that it’s going great. Why don’t you come down here for the weekend? I miss you.”

“I have stuff to do and no money. Why don’t you come up here?”

“Same answer.”

“Great. Well, in that case, I’ll see you when I see you. Here, talk to your daughter.”

Clunking of phone, sound of tiny running feet. His heart clenched.

“Daddy, I have an elephant balloon.”

“That’s great, baby,” said Karp, and chatted with his daughter for a few minutes, in the sort of unrewarding and stumbling conversation possible with a three-year-old who is really only interested in when you’re coming home.

“Lucy, good night now,” said Karp. “Let me talk to Mommy again.”

But the child placed the phone carefully back on the hook, and Marlene did not call back. After some moments of agonized waiting, Karp punched up their number, but hung up before it could ring.

On the Monday following another miserable work-clogged and lonely weekend, Karp for the first time marshaled his investigative staff. They met in a small windowless office that had been designated the conference room. It was bare and dusty except for two long folding caterer’s tables placed end to end and a motley collection of chairs, which the attendees had dragged from their own offices. There were little piles of dead cockroaches on the floor and the room stank of a recent extermination.

It was not, Karp thought, a particularly impressive group for the task at hand. Most of them were young, in their mid to late twenties, congressional staff types, all of them, male and female, wearing neat career suits in muted colors. There were also several older men in cheaper suits who exuded the vague bonhomie that marked them as political hacks. Karp was sure that none of them had ever investigated a homicide or worked a major criminal case. Bright or slow, ambitious or defeated, they were paper pushers all.

V.T. Newbury was, of course, solid, but Karp had his doubts about whether Newbury or anyone else could form this mob into an effective research organization. Karp glanced across the table at Clay Fulton, who gave him a hooded, eye-rolling look. Fulton was solid too, but even under his supervision none of these people was going to be able to hit the streets of a strange town and ferret out secrets from the lowlifes. Ziller was there— Karp still didn’t know quite what to make of him—as was Jim Phelps, V.T.’s photo expert; short, bearded, wearing a cheap tan safari suit. At the end of the table sat a small dapper man with a brush mustache and heavy black horn-rimmed glasses—Dr. Murray Selig, former chief medical examiner of New York and the chairman of the forensic panel.