Corruption of Blood (24 page)

The phone rang, and Lucy cried, “I’ll get it!”

Marlene followed her into the kitchen and poured herself another cup of coffee. It was probably Karp. In the wake of the Dobbs party, they had just concluded one of their bad weeks—silence, interspersed with coldly formal interactions. Karp was distracted, worried about something, probably to do with work. Marlene’s share of the marital responsibility had always been to worm these worries out of him, but she no longer had the energy. Something vast and soggy hung between them, compounded of Marlene’s isolation and feelings of uselessness, and the Big Secret, the Bloom thing. And sex. They had only done it once since Marlene had arrived in Washington, and remarkably—for the Karps had until then enjoyed a delicious and imaginative life of the flesh—it had fizzled. Karp had withdrawn into the despondency he exhibited when he didn’t know what was going on in their relationship, favoring her on many occasions with the sort of long-suffering, whipped-Airedale looks that drove her batty. A dozen times she had opened her mouth to confront, to tell all, to break through into real life again, but each time she had lost courage.

This can’t go on, she thought, and lit a cigarette from the butt of the one she was smoking—a bad sign—but what could stop it? She wasn’t going to sink down into ultimate depression; the crazy scene at the Dobbses’ showed that well enough. But was she going to keep on being naughtier and naughtier until something broke? She thought of Maggie Dobbs and the mad laughing in the greenhouse …

“It’s a lady,” said Lucy. Marlene took the receiver, knowing that it was Maggie calling, ready to give her “this is amazing, I was just thinking about you,” and was oddly shocked to hear instead the voice of Luisa Beckett.

After some stilted preliminaries, Beckett said, “The reason I called, I thought you’d want to know. Morgan got sentenced on a 130.65, three counts. Max of fifteen.”

“Oh, honey, that’s terrific!” cried Marlene. The 130.65 was first-degree sexual abuse, a Class D felony; the baby raper would be away for at least seven years, if he survived at all at the very bottom of the Attica pecking order.

“Yeah, well, I thought you’d like to know. It was your case.” Luisa’s tone was dull and tired, and vaguely guilt-making.

“So. How’re things?”

“Okay. You know, the usual.”

Marlene brought up some cases, as conversation, but Luisa did not seem to want to converse. Why the hell had the woman called anyway? What did she want, an apology for leaving them in the lurch? For fucking up? Marlene persisted mulishly, picking at the scab.

“What about that mobster, Buona-something? What happened with him?”

“Buonafacci. We’re not handling that anymore. Your old buddy Guma’s got it.”

“Guma? Why’s he got it? It’s a rape case.”

“Yeah, well he must’ve pulled some strings with narco or one of the
real
bureaus. They figure they can hold the rape over him, Buonafacci, and he’ll help them out somehow. Don’t ask me, I just work here.”

There didn’t seem to be much to say after that. Marlene finished the call feeling, if possible, worse than she had before it. The dog was howling again. Marlene got Lucy dressed and threw on her own rags in a concentrated fury, scattering sparks and cigarette ashes over everything, leaving the breakfast dishes in the sink, which she herself considered the very lowest level of sluthood, and was just wheeling the stroller out when the phone rang again.

“This is amazing,” Marlene said to Maggie Dobbs. “I was just thinking about you.”

Karp noticed the change when he walked in that evening. There was music playing, one of Marlene’s tapes, and instead of the sour old-paint and steam-heat smell that was the base pong of the Federal Gardens, the apartment was redolent with the perfume of a Marlene dinner in preparation—garlic, onions, oregano, wine—that and patchouli incense, also a Ciampi trademark.

Lucy came dashing out of the kitchen and leaped into his arms. “Daddy, we went to the zoo!”

“Really? Who did you go with?”

“Um, Laura, she’s my friend. And a lady. We saw monkeys. They were throwing their
poop!
”

Karp carried her into the kitchen, where Marlene was setting the table with the cheap ware provided by the building management. There was, however, a bunch of yellow mums in a mayonnaise jar in the center of the table, and there was a checked red-and-white paper tablecloth. Two green Coke bottles held tall candles. Karp put his daughter down and leaned over and kissed his wife.

“I’m impressed,” he said.

“You like it? You don’t think it’s too
Lady and the Tramp
? Pathetic?”

“Not at all. Are we celebrating something?”

“No, why? Oh, you mean why the switch from Blanche DuBois to Betty Crocker?” Leaning down to check the oven. “I just had a nice day, and I thought, after reading the
Post,
that you probably didn’t have a nice day, so I thought maybe I would take vacation from self-pity and make a real dinner and have some wine and pretend that we’re still alive down here.” Interruption by Lucy on the subject of the great apes. Microlesson in natural history supplied.

“Who’s this Laura?” Karp asked.

“Maggie Dobbs’s six-year-old. Maggie called me up and invited me for a day at the zoo since we got this nice break in the weather. So we went.”

“She came here?”

“Of course not. I have some pride left. No, I arranged to meet her at the Rosslyn metro and she came by in her big blue Mercury wagon and off we went. Lucy and Laura fell in love. We saw the zoo, we went shopping in a nonpeckerwood supermarket up on Connecticut, where I bought real food. What can I say? It was magic.”

“You like her? Maggie Dobbs I mean.”

“Yeah, she’s okay. Not my usual type of pal, but nice. Sweet-natured, generous. Funny too. I think she’s a little dominated by the congressman. He’s real ambitious, wants to be a senator or in the cabinet, for starters.

Anyhow, it’s a lot of pressure on her, parties, waving to the crowds, doing good works. She showed me how to wave to a crowd for two hours without your arm falling off. It’s a real technique.” Marlene demonstrated, also miming a fixed and glassy smile, through which she said, “I think dinner’s ready.”

So it was. They ate: meat-stuffed shells with sauce and cheese on top, salad with roasted peppers, and a bottle of reasonable domestic red. Lucy nodded off at the table. They stashed her in bed and moved to the living room, and sat on the tatty couch and finished their bottle.

“Well, this is indeed very similar to real life,” observed Marlene, sighing contentedly. They sat in their old companionability, speaking of the day’s events. Marlene mentioned her call from Luisa, Karp talked about the film and his meeting with Crane. Suddenly he broke off and looked directly at her, his gaze intense.

“All right. Now that you got me drunk I’m going to make a confession,” he said. “It was a serious mistake coming here, taking this job. You were right and I was wrong. It’s totally fucked. Crane is going to be out on his ass in a fairly short time and then I don’t know what I’m going to do. I screwed up and I screwed you up and I’m sorry.”

Marlene, who would have given anything to hear this a couple of months ago, found herself curiously unaffected, and certainly nowhere near a disposition to gloat. She snuggled closer to her husband and said, “Well, it could be worse. Maybe we both needed a break from the DA, and this is better than a stretch in a mental hospital.” Laughing. “Marginally better, anyway. You think the investigation is
totally
fucked?”

“I don’t know. I think there’ll be a narrow window for doing decent work between now and when whoever comes after Crane clamps down. Something could break.”

“You don’t think
you’ll
get the slot if Crane goes?”

Karp considered this for a moment in silence, thinking about Harrison’s offer. “I might get it offered but I don’t know if I’d take it. I think it’d come with too many strings. It’s a political job, and I probably wouldn’t be much good working the politics of it, not even as good as Bert, which as we now know isn’t good enough. I mean, what I am is a prosecutor. That’s all I really know how to do.”

“Well they definitely have the right film,” said Bishop over the phone. “And one of their investigators is headed for Miami to see Veroa.”

The thin man turned the sound down on the movie he was watching on television and repositioned the handset against his ear. “Do we need to do something about Veroa?”

“No, Veroa’s solid. I doubt he’ll identify me with what we have hanging over him, and he doesn’t know the rest of it at all.”

“Others do.”

“Yes. Although I’d say there are no more than two who could be damaging enough in the short run to require extreme intervention,” agreed Bishop.

“So you want me to …”

“No. Not yet. Let’s see what emerges.”

“You’re cutting it close. If they find out about P
—”

“Shut up!
For God’s sake, man, this is an unsecured line. And yes, close is how I like to cut it. As you should know.”

ELEVEN

Karp stood in front of the counsel’s table and looked down at the witness. Behind and above Karp sat Flores and four other members of the subcommittee, barricaded by their high dais. From his chair at the first witness table Paul A. David projected an air of irritable boredom. The bony face with the heavily ringed eyes told all who watched that a hardworking public servant was being subjected to unwarranted abuse.

Karp almost believed it himself. The guy was good, you had to give him that. Karp had ducked a million lies from culprits of various types in his career, but he could not recall a more bland and skillful liar than Mr. David. David was sticking to the same story he had given the Warren people. A man identifying himself as Lee Harvey Oswald had arrived in Mexico City on September 27, 1963. Thereafter, he had gone to the Cuban embassy and asked about a transit visa to Cuba; when told he had to go to the Soviet embassy for clearance, he went there too. The CIA had photo surveillance of both places and telephone taps and wall bugs as well. Oswald’s voice, asking about applying for a visa to visit the Soviet Union through Cuba, had supposedly been recorded on tape, and the tape shipped to CIA headquarters.

“And what happened to this tape, Mr. David?” Karp asked.

“As I’ve said many times before, since we had no idea Oswald would become important later, the tapes were routinely destroyed by recycling, approximately a week after they were made.”

“That would be early October? Assuming, of course, that the call was made on or about October 1, 1963. Yes? Good. Now let’s turn to the photographic evidence. It’s clear that the photo forwarded as being Oswald bears no resemblance to Oswald. Why was that?”

“It was a mix-up,” said David in a tired voice. “Our cameras had malfunctioned.”

“All the cameras at both Communist embassies broke down just as Oswald walks in? In all the time he was in Mexico City flitting back and forth among the embassies, you don’t have a single clear picture of him?”

“Yes. As I said, we couldn’t know he was going to be important.”

“So, no pictures, but you did have a tape of his voice. That’s how we know he was in Mexico, right?”

“Yes, that and identification by people working in the Cuban embassy.”

“Yes,” said Karp, “all those identifications. Well, obviously someone went to Mexico City and asked about those visas, and got his voice recorded. Mr. David, are you aware that shortly after the assassination, and a full month after you have testified that this tape was destroyed, the FBI listened to that tape and concluded that it was not the voice of Lee Harvey Oswald?”

You had to give him credit. He didn’t blink. “I’m not aware of that,” he said.

“So the tapes were in fact not destroyed.”

“They were destroyed.”

“Not according to J. Edgar Hoover,” said Karp, brandishing a photocopy of the FBI memo. It was entered into evidence and David was given a chance to study it.

“So,” Karp continued, “if the tapes were routinely destroyed as you claim, Mr. David, how do you explain the FBI listening to them a month afterward?”

“I can’t explain it,” said David.

“Does the CIA have a copy of this tape still in its possession?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“Then who, if you know, ordered this evidence destroyed,
after
Lee Harvey Oswald became a suspect in the murder of President Kennedy?”

“I can’t answer that,” said David.

“What does that mean?” asked Karp sharply. “You haven’t the knowledge or you refuse to share it with the committee?”

Then occurred the oddest thing that had ever happened to Karp in the course of questioning witnesses. David said, “I don’t care to answer any more questions.” Then he rose, turned, and walked out of the room.

Karp gaped, his brain frozen. He thought inanely of calling out to David to stop, and checked himself, thus avoiding seeming even more of a fool than he now felt himself to be. Flushing pink, he looked frantically up at the dais. There was no help there. Flores was conferring with Representative Morgan. The other members seemed bemused, including Dobbs, who was staring vacantly at the door closing behind David.

“Mr. Chairman,” said Karp at last, “I think we have cause for a contempt citation here.”

A frown and a significant pause. “The subcommittee will take this under advisement. Call the next witness.”

Who was an official of the FBI; as it turned out, he didn’t know where the tape was either.

When the hearings at last adjourned, Karp returned to the Fourth Street building in a foul mood, bit the heads off two junior staff who approached him with minor problems, and retired to his office, seething. Crane was not in. Sondergard was closeted with a trio of suits from the comptroller general. V.T. was with the photo analysts.

Karp tried to get interested in a report about nuclear magnetic resonance as a technique for comparing bullet fragments and found himself reading the same paragraph for the third time.

He was not, it appeared, interested in nuclear magnetic resonance. What he was interested in was Paul Ashton David. The man’s face swam into his mind’s eye, its calm assurance irritating even in memory. And something else about it, something he couldn’t pin down. A face from the past?