Corruption of Blood (16 page)

“Tonight’s okay,” said Bello.

That was another thing about Harry Bello, and it took some getting used to. Harry not only didn’t waste words, sometimes he eliminated both sides of whole conversations. Marlene would have said something about having a late meeting and asking whether it would not be too much trouble for Harry to pick up Lucy at day care and to watch her while she was out. How Harry knew that Marlene was about to call him to ask just that favor, and not something else, was a mystery. Another one was how a man with eyes that dead could light up and be such a sweet godfather to her daughter.

“Thanks,” she said. At least one problem was taken care of. She looked up at him expectantly; Harry did not drop by for small talk; barely for large talk. “What’s happening?” she asked.

“Mrs. Morgan caved.”

“She did?”
Marlene shouted, springing to her feet and clapping her hands together like a little girl. “Oh, Harry, when? What happened?”

“I told her Morgan wanted to pin it on her son, kid’s eighteen. Messing with the little girls. So … she gave him up.”

“What? When did Morgan try to pin it on the son?”

A slight tilting of the lips; Bello’s working smile. “After I suggested it to him,” he said.

Marlene shook her head in admiration. “Harry, you’re a piece of work.”

Harry said, “That protection argument. The guy’s definitely connected.”

Marlene switched gears. “Argument? Oh, yeah, Luisa’s wise guy. He is?”

“He’s Tony Bones’s oldest kid.”

“No kidding? Did he threaten her?”

A shrug.

“So do you agree with Luisa, or what? Protection?”

Another shrug. “I’ll look into it. When’ll you be home?”

“Ten or so, probably, but Butch should be home way before that. Thanks, Harry.”

He nodded and was gone.

Marlene had a final visitor, around five-thirty. She was deep in the most difficult task of public administration, figuring out how many people are required to do something that nobody has ever done before. Thick bound printouts of court records spread out across her desk, personnel manuals gaped open on chairs, and Marlene was punching a desk calculator with enthusiasm, one pencil clenched in her teeth and another, forgotten, stuck in her hair, when Raymond Guma walked in after a perfunctory tap on the glassed door.

She looked up, not pleased, and removed the pencil from her mouth, saying, “Not now, Goom.”

“This’ll just take a second,” said Guma. He was a stocky man in his late forties with a monkey face, large spreading ears, and a greasy mop of black ringlets that had just started to recede back from a low forehead. The shadow of his beard was more than Nixonian, giving him a seedy appearance that was reinforced by the big tie knot pulled down to the third button and the bagginess of the trousers. He looked at the cluttered desk. “What’re you doing, your taxes?”

“Just some admin shit,” said Marlene snappishly.

He stood staring, in no hurry to leave.

“What
is
it?” she asked.

“Oooh, who’s got the rag on today? I heard about your little display this afternoon. Maybe you’re suffering from lack of nooky too.”

“Fuck you, Guma! Is that what you came in here for, to bust my hump?”

Guma rested a pudgy thigh on the edge of her desk. “No, it’s business. Guy charged with rape and assault, name of Buonafacci?”

“Tony Bones’s kid.”

Guma’s eyebrows lifted. “You know already?”

“Yeah, Guma, even though we’re a bunch of dumb cunts around here, we occasionally get the message. What about him?”

“Tony called me. He wants to know can anything be done.”

“Done? What is this, Guma? Since when are you running errands for the
cugines?”

Guma pulled his chin in sharply, spread his hands, and frowned. “Hey! What’re you talking ‘errands.’ One, the guy’s a friend, the father, it’s a courtesy, find out what’s happening to his kid. What’s the difference he’s a don? Two, Tony could do us a lot of favors on open cases. It’d be nice having him owing us a big one. Three, he’s willing to make it right with the girl.”

Now, of course, this sort of thing happens all the time in DA’s offices. Criminals know more about crime than anyone else, and in most of the major crimes that do get solved, critical information comes from the bad guys, for which reason the law likes to cultivate favors among them. On any normal day, Marlene might have been receptive to Guma’s proposal, but this was not a normal day, nor was Marlene her normal self. Her deputy already suspected her of favoritism toward her supposed tribe, she had dissembled with her husband, she was about to go to dinner with a man she disliked in order to advance her career: she felt, in short, sufficiently corrupt without doing a big one for Tony Bones.

So she said, “Forget it, Guma. The woman’s marked up, she made a complaint, we have a good rape case. He wants to plead to the top count, rape one, I might drop the assault and I’ll see about putting in a word with the judge, but that’s it.”

Guma slapped the side of his head with the heel of his hand. “Jesus! Marlene? Earth calling Ciampi? The girl is a ‘model’; she’s a ‘dancer.’ What does that tell you?”

“I don’t care if she’s got a sheet for soliciting, Guma. This sweetheart beat her and raped the shit out of her and he’s going for it.”

Guma’s color was rising and his voice became louder.

“Marlene, what the fuck you mean ‘he’s going for it’? The kid’s gonna waltz in there with Di Bennedetti or Schoenstein, or some other distinguished criminal member of the criminal bar, tell his sad story of misguided youth and a thieving whore, and walk out of there with a suspended sentence and probation for sexual mis and assault three. The girl’ll get nothing and you all are gonna have wasted your fuckin’ time preparing a bullshit case.”

“No deal, Guma,” said Marlene.

“You’re serious?”

“Yeah.”

“Then fuck you very much, and I’ll try to do the same for you someday!” he shouted, and slammed out of the office. Marlene sighed and went back to her columns of figures, hoping that Luisa Beckett would be happy about this. Marlene certainly wasn’t.

District Attorney Bloom lived on Park Avenue just north of Sixty-fourth Street, in a duplex on the top floor. His family had made a pile as meat-packers during the Civil War and an even greater pile later when the meatpacking district had become Sutton Place and their stockyards had turned into the most gilded real estate on Manhattan Island. Bloom also owned a large spread in Westchester, where he kept his family, preferring to spend the bulk of his time in his pied-à-terre. He was the kind of person who actually called it that.

Marlene arrived shortly after seven, having splurged for a cab. She was wearing her working clothes, a plain gray wool suit, and a cream silk blouse, with a tan raincoat on top. She carried a large leather bag and a briefcase, in which rested her work of the last four hours.

A green-coated doorman smelling lightly of drink ushered her in and told her she was expected. The elevator was brass, rosewood, and mirrored. Marlene checked her face and adjusted her eye.

The door to Bloom’s place was opened by a short middle-aged Latina woman in a tan uniform and apron, who took Marlene’s coat and bag and directed her silently down a hallway lined with lit paintings. Marlene spotted a small Hockney and what looked like an Utrillo.

Bloom was waiting in a large room fitted out as a library: two walls book-lined floor to ceiling, an oriental rug on the floor, and on the third wall two large windows decked out with pale drapes and showing the lights of Park Avenue and the East Side beyond it. In the center of the room was a long mahogany library table with suitable chairs and an arrangement of side tables, standard lamps, dark leather couches, and club chairs, in one of which sat the master of the establishment.

Bloom looked up from the book he had been reading. He was wearing a baby blue knit golfing cardigan with the seal of a country club on it, an open-necked tattersall check shirt, tan whipcords, and Gucci white loafers, no socks. He rose and greeted Marlene warmly, which included a lingering squeeze on the arm and some remarks about how good she looked, as if he hadn’t seen her for months, instead of just a few hours ago. He offered her a drink and she accepted a white wine. Bloom opened a bottle of Pouilly at a small bar hidden behind a panel made from phony books, placed it in a silver ice bucket, and brought it over to a coffee table. He made a little ceremony of pouring it out into crystal goblets, accompanied by some wine-snob chatter. His eyes were bright and it was obvious that this was not his first drink of the evening.

They sat at the coffee table, Marlene on the couch, Bloom on the club chair opposite, and drank. Bloom refilled their glasses. He described his meeting with the “governor’s people": they wanted his support on a big anticrime bill now before the legislature. According to Bloom, Bloom was the pulsing center of criminal justice clout in the state of New York. The actual content of his talk was not, however, about legal or judicial ideas and plans, but about politics, specifically the politics of personal relationships, about which Marlene was ready to agree he was a reigning expert. One guy was out to get him, these two were in collusion because one owed the other a sleazy favor. That one was fucking his colleague’s wife. Bloom went on, and did not spare the bottle.

Finally, at one of the infrequent pauses, Marlene said briskly, “Well, should we get going? I’ve worked up a lot of stuff and I don’t want to be out too late.”

Bloom stared blearily at her, as if he had forgotten the ostensible purpose of their meeting. He said pettishly, “Yes, well, but supper. We haven’t had our supper yet. I’m starving, aren’t you?”

No: what Marlene was was irritated and starting to get woozy from the wine. But “Sure,” was what she said, imagining a pizza or a plate of sandwiches. Wrong again; the DA ushered her down the hallway and into a dining room, where a table had been set for two. Candles were lit. They sat, and the Latina servant began to serve a full meal: lobster bisque to start, an arugula salad, little fillets with roast potatoes and asparagus. And more wine, of course. The DA went to a wine closet built into the paneled wall of the dining room and brought out a Chateau Petrus. Marlene learned what it had cost, and what a hard bargain Bloom had driven with the wine merchant, and how hard it was to get first-growth seventies, and so on and on until Marlene wanted to throw something heavy at him. Instead, she drank three glasses of the stuff, which was, she was still able to admit, truly marvelous.

A familiar feeling struck Marlene about then, almost a déjà vu. This was exactly like a bad blind date with one of the stuffed shirts she had spent evenings with in law school. Marlene had been living with three other poor students in a New Haven fleabag, subsisting on peanut butter and spaghetti, and from time to time, when she was feeling unusually resentful of her poverty and the squalor in which she lived, she would allow herself to be picked up by some rich jerk and fed lavishly at a fancy restaurant, after which the main problem was how to keep him out of her pants. Marlene had never actually let herself be fucked for a nice meal, but she knew any number of distinguished and brilliant women, in both college and law school, who had, and thought little of it.

The dishes were cleared at last. Marlene said, “Can we get through this now? I really have to go soon.” Karp would be waiting at the loft now; Lucy would be fast asleep. She was struck by a powerful desire to be away from this bore and sitting in comfy clothes in her own kitchen talking to her husband. Or in bed.

She had interrupted one of Bloom’s insider anecdotes. He frowned petulantly and said, “Yes, yes, all right. My God, you’re relentless, aren’t you? You should relax more, my dear. Go with the flow, as the kids say. I tell you what—I have a Zabar’s cheesecake. I’ll have it served in the library, with coffee and brandy. How would that be? Cozy? And you can at long last unburden yourself. Sound good?”

“Fine,” said Marlene, rising. Okay, she thought, be polite, be correct, people do this all the time, you have to learn to get on with people you don’t particularly like, be a grown-up. She lifted her chin and constructed a smile on her face, and forced a little self-deprecating laugh.

Bloom returned the smile and chuckled. See! she thought. It’s easy. They removed to the library.

The servant brought a tray with a whole, perfect blond disk of cheesecake and a silver coffee service. Bloom went to the bar. Marlene arranged her papers on the mahogany coffee table and waited. After a while, Bloom returned with two snifter glasses, each containing a hefty shot of amber liquid. Bloom poured out the coffee and sliced the cheesecake, and sat down on the couch next to her. Marlene ignored the cake, and the pressure of his thigh next to hers, took a quick sip of coffee, slipped on her specs, and went into her spiel. She felt curiously detached now, as if she were floating back among the towering bookcases watching a windup version of Marlene making the pitch. She glanced at Bloom from time to time to see how he was receiving it. He seemed all right, with the same bland semismile he usually wore stuck like a cheap decal on his pink face.

She finished and looked up. “That’s it. Any questions?”

Bloom shook his head. “No. I’m overwhelmed. A terrific job, Marlene. I think that’s a really good base to go on with. Very feasible.”

“You think so?”

“I do. You’ve got a great, great future with the office. Onward and upward,” he said, patting her thigh several times. “Let’s drink to it!” He raised a snifter, Marlene raised hers, they clinked, they drank. Marlene liked cognac, and this was the best she had ever tasted, a bubble of smooth fire in her throat.

They had another. They talked, and now she started to talk, about herself, about Karp. Bloom seemed interested. He drew her out. The conversation became more intimate. There was something avid about his interest in Karp, in “what he was really like,” something disturbing. Marlene found herself talking automatically, without thinking. She experienced once again that feeling of detachment, of not being herself, in her body, in charge.