Corruption of Blood (3 page)

Six minutes after that, he was at the day care, a cheerily decorated Tribeca storefront, at Lispenard off Broadway. Karp went in and found his daughter playing with a small ocher girl (they were the last two kids in the place) and Lillian Dillard, the proprietor. Dillard, known to all as Lillie-Dillie, was an unflappable ex-hippie who wore her graying hair in a long plait that hung to her tailbone, and favored fashion statements that included tentlike smocks made of Indian bedspreads and lots of clanking silver. She had somehow, in the midst of her serious participation in the sixties, obtained a degree from NYU in early-childhood education, and she ran her operation with love and a slightly wacky efficiency. Her most valuable trait in Karp’s eyes was that she allowed forgetful dads to pick up their kids a half hour after the agreed time without coming in for a load of horseshit.

Lucy Karp caught sight of her father and, as usual, shrieked, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,” flung herself into his arms, and otherwise behaved as if he had just returned safely from four years on the Western Front. Karp did not mind this one bit.

He hugged her and inhaled that ineffable smell that rises from the skin of well-tended young children: eau de kid, the world’s most expensive fragrance. He put the three-year-old down, found the lunch box and the drawing to show Mommy, said good-bye to Lillie-Dillie, and they headed off, hand in hand, north on Broadway. As usual, they stopped as Dave’s for a couple of chocolate egg creams, which they sipped at the marble outside counter.

“So, how was your day?” asked Karp.

“Okay. Jimmy Murphy threw up.”

“That was the high point, huh?”

“And … and … Patrick Allessandro hit me with a big block, right here.” She indicated a patch of flawless skin beneath a lock of black hair. “I
hate
Patrick Allessandro.”

“It looks all right. Does it need a kiss?”

“No. Lillie-Dillie already kissed it. Daddy! Why does that lady have purple hair?”

Karp looked over at where Lucy was pointing.

“That’s actually a man with purple hair, baby. And I guess he thinks it looks pretty.” Karp did not admonish his daughter that it was impolite to point, and that loudly noting the personal peculiarities of passersby in New York was a good way to get yourself killed. Time enough for that.

They finished their drinks and walked a few more blocks to the industrial loft building where they lived. Since he had started to drop off and pick up Lucy twice a week, Karp had gained a better appreciation of what a miracle it was to have superb day care halfway between where he worked and where he lived, all of it within convenient walking distance.

The downside was the five-flight climb to the loft itself. Karp had an artificial left knee, the result of a basketball accident in his sophomore year at Cal Berkeley, the agony of which he had nobly ignored for years, until it finally crapped out. He would never have chosen to live in a walk-up, and had not chosen this one either, but rather its owner, who flatly refused to live anywhere else.

The two of them clumped up the dusty stairs together, singing “A Hundred Bottles of Beer,” a ritual which required also that Karp become confused about how many bottles of beer were left on the wall, with Lucy correcting him, and then arguing about it, and giggling, until Karp started tickling her on the last flight of stairs, and then, snatching her up and throwing her over his shoulder, running up the last flight, to arrive breathless and laughing at their red door.

Marlene, the wife, was not home. Karp and family lived in a single room, thirty-three feet wide and a hundred long, a former electroplating factory loft. It was divided like a movie set by plasterboard walls into suitable areas: master bedroom (a sleeping loft) with closet space beneath, a bathroom, a kitchen-and-dining area, a living room, a nursery, a gymnasium, and a study, all facing on to a long corridor that ran end to end. Karp went to the closets under the sleeping loft and changed into chinos and a black T-shirt. Lucy ran to watch “Sesame Street” on the TV in the living “room.”

Karp efficiently set the table for three, opened the freezer and removed one of the many Tupperware containers waiting there, and ran hot water over it for ten minutes. A large wet reddish brick, loosened by the heat, dropped out into the pot Karp had prepared, and he placed this on a low heat. He didn’t know what it was, but it would probably be good. Marlene staged a giant cookfest once a week, on Saturday, making some huge treat from scratch—lasagna, chicken cacciatore, spaghetti and meatballs, ravioli, beef stew with wine. They feasted on it fresh and then she froze the rest in boxes, and they ate from these the rest of the week—that or takeout. Karp couldn’t cook and Marlene wouldn’t, during the workweek.

Karp sat with his daughter, learning letters and numbers, while the loft filled with the odor of dinner. It was spaghetti and meatballs, a winner. After dinner, Karp cleared up and chivied Lucy into the bath. Marlene had saved one of the thousand-gallon black rubber electroplating tanks from the former factory, scrubbing it out and adding a heater and a filter to make a huge hot tub.

Lucy cavorted in the warm water with a variety of floating toys. Her mother had drown-proofed her at eight months, and she swam like a little eel. Karp knelt on the concrete tank stand and washed his child’s hair, to some men, Karp included, life’s most sensuous delight not connected to actual sex.

After that, into the yellow nightie printed with rosebuds, and some sitcom TV. At eight,
Goodnight Moon
was read and the duck-shaped night-light switched on. Karp sat by her bedside for half an hour, watching her fall asleep.

He fell asleep himself shortly thereafter, stretched out on the tatty red velour sofa, reading cases. He was awakened by the slam of the front door. He looked at his watch: ten-thirty, nearly.

He heard the sound of a heavy briefcase hitting the floor, then the toilet door slamming, then peeing, then a flush, then a cupboard being opened, then the cork going out of a bottle, and the clink and splashing he knew to be wine pouring out into a glass, then some mixed kitchen noises—opening and shutting of refrigerator door, dish rattling, and so on—and then his wife appeared around the hall of the living zone, with a sloppy meatball sandwich on a plate and a large tumbler full of cheap red wine.

Marlene fell into a sling chair across from the couch and kicked her shoes off, sighing.

“Don’t ask,” she said and took a deep swallow of wine.

Karp took a long, fond look at his wife. Even flustered and worn from a long day working one of the city’s more trying jobs, she was good to see, and he always had to suppress, as he had from earliest times of their acquaintance, a spasm of disbelief that she had chosen him, of all people.

Then and now a remarkable-looking woman. Classic features? A phrase used loosely enough, but Marlene actually had them the way they liked them in fifth-century Athens: the heart-shaped face, the straight nose, the rose-petal mouth, the broad cheekbones. Her skin was a dusky bisque, on which she typically wore no makeup, nor did she need any. The sculptor who lived downstairs from them said she looked exactly like the statue of Saint Teresa by Bernini. Marlene had lived a rougher life than the saint. She had a glass eye and was missing two fingers on her left hand.

“Morgan
again?” asked Karp.

“Needless to say. With his fucking wife, actually.”

Morgan and his fucking wife had taken care of a series of foster children in their large Inwood home, model citizens, until a school nurse had become suspicious. What she thought was a bladder infection in the Morgans’ seven-year-old turned out to be gonorrhea. All six of the Morgans’ fosterlings had it as well; the youngest, age seventeen months, had the oral version.

Marlene chomped away at her sandwich, leaning over her plate, dripping fragments and talking around mouthfuls. She had been hunting Morgan for weeks now, having the kids examined by psychologists, making sure the evidence they generated was genuine and that the enraged social workers did not encourage them to stretch the truth in any way. Marlene was in charge of a small unit at the DA’s specializing in sex offenders, and
Morgan
was the current hot case.

Morgan would admit nothing and he had a good lawyer. His wife was the key to the case.

“I hit her with recordings of the oldest kid’s testimony, right. Timeesha, nine years old. The shitbag has been fucking her since she was six. No response. Din see nothin’. He’s a good man. Wait’ll I nail her as an accessory. Then we’ll see.”

Finishing her sandwich, she took a long swallow, and sighed. Then she looked up at Karp as if she had just noticed him. “Pretty speedy, huh?” she said, laughing at herself.

“I’d say so. How about a juicy one?”

“Sounds right.”

She crossed over and sat on his lap and gave him a wine-and-marinara kiss. “Mmm, good! And the last straw? Ann Silber came into my office as I was just about to leave and totally collapsed. Out of control. I had to stay with her for an hour before she was fit for company.”

“The new kid? What happened to her?”

“Oh, she went out with the cops on an abandoned child call. They found this six-month-old boy in a shooting gallery. Skin and bones, with maggots crawling over his eyes.” She shuddered. “How’s Lucy?”

“Fine. Relatively maggot-free.”

“Nice to hear. How was yours?”

“The usual,” said Karp. “I got an interesting call about a job.”

Karp didn’t expand on this, nor did Marlene pump him. Karp got lots of offers.

TWO

Marlene regarded Karp’s trip to Philadelphia as merely a good excuse for a day off and had asked him to bring home a cheese-steak and a Liberty Bell piggy bank. Karp was scarcely more enthusiastic as he rode the elevator up to Crane’s Market Street office. The car was done in dark, gold-flecked mirrors, with shiny baroque brass rails and trim. A fancy building, and a fancy office, he observed when he got there: dark wood panels set off the shine of the mahogany furniture and the blond receptionists.

Crane had a huge corner office with a good view of Ben Franklin hanging in the cloudy sky. He stood up when Karp entered and so did the other person sitting there, a tall, saturnine man with deep-set intelligent eyes.

“Glad you could make it, Butch,” said Crane. “You know Joe Lerner, of course.”

“Sure. Long time, Joe.” The two men shook hands. Lerner seemed to have aged little in eight years. A little more jowly, the crinkly hair receding and graying on the sides, he still crackled with a nervous, aggressive energy. Karp imagined Lerner was remembering the green kid Karp had been and was doing his own assessment of the current version.

They left immediately for lunch, which was taken in one of those expensive, dark, quiet saloon-restaurants that thrive around every major courthouse in the nation by purveying rich food and large drinks to lawyers and politicians and providing a comfortably dim venue for deals.

Seated in a secluded booth, the three men declined cocktails and ordered carelessly: the “special.” No bon vivants, these. There was a period of obligatory sports talk. All were basketball fans, all had played in college, but only Karp had played NBA ball, albeit for six weeks as part of an undercover investigation. Crane wanted to hear all about that.

The food came; they ate. Over coffee, Crane settled back and gave Karp an appraising look, which Karp returned. Crane was a good-sized man in his early fifties, who exhibited the perpetual boyishness that seems to go with being a descendant of the Founding Fathers and rich. He had a sharp nose, no lips to speak of, light blue eyes, and graying ginger hair, which he wore swept straight back from his high, protuberant brow.

“So—to business,” he said. “First, some background. What do you know about the JFK assassination?”

“Not much,” said Karp. “Just what everybody knows.”

“You haven’t read the Warren Report?”

“Not really. Just the
Times
stuff and Cronkite on TV. Like everybody.”

“All right. Let me say this. If the victim had been a minor dope dealer, and you had Lee Harvey Oswald in custody as a suspect, and the cops brought the evidence presented to the Warren Commission to you, as a homicide case, you would’ve laughed in their faces and given Oswald a walk. You wouldn’t have even taken that trash to a grand jury. And they served this up on the most important homicide in American history.”

“That bad, huh?”

Crane nodded. “Worse. All right, it’s never been any big secret. As a result, almost from the start the Warren Commission has been under fire. Three main reasons.”

He held up a big, freckled hand and counted on his fingers.

“One, it didn’t take a genius to figure out that even if the conclusions of the commission happened to be correct, no legitimate case had been presented. The chain of evidence for critical material was a hopeless mess. The autopsy was a joke. There was no follow-up on possibly critical witnesses. Two: The conclusions are inherently implausible. The existing amateur film of the actual assassination locks in the time sequence of the shots striking Kennedy, which means that if you want all the shots to come from Oswald’s rifle you have to make some fairly hairy assumptions about what happened to the three shots Warren assumed that Oswald got off. The magic bullet and all that—you remember the magic bullet? Also, ‘assumed’ is a word I don’t like hearing around homicide investigations, but that’s nearly all Warren is made of. Look—you know and I know that crazy things can happen to bullets. I wouldn’t want to rule anything out a priori. But you also know that if you’re going to make a claim that a missile did a bunch of things that no missile is likely to have done, then your ballistics and your forensics have to be immaculate. Which in this case they are distinctly not. Three—and this is the tough one. It
wasn’t
some junkie who got killed—it was the president of the United States, a man with important political enemies, some of whom may have been involved in the investigation itself. Then we have the supposed assassin, who is not your garden-variety nut, but a former radar operator with a security clearance who defected to the Soviet Union, who was involved with Cuban weirdos, who had a Russian wife, and who was killed in police custody by a guy who had close ties with organized crime.”