Corruption of Blood (4 page)

Crane paused, looking at Karp. A cue. “You mean the conspiracy angle,” Karp said.

“Yes, indeed, the conspiracy angle. JFK was killed by the CIA, the FBI, the Cuban right, the Cuban commies, the Russian commies, the Mob, or any three working in combination. There’s a vast literature on the subject ranging from the plausible to the insane. You’ll have to go through it all, along with the original Warren material, of course—”

“Um, Bert, slow down. You’re making the assumption that I’m gonna do this thing. I haven’t decided I am yet. I still have a lot of questions.”

Crane opened his mouth to speak and then checked himself. Karp saw him shoot a quick glance at Lerner across the table. Crane smiled and said, “Sorry, my enthusiasm runs away with me. Of course, you have questions, and I just broke my own rule about assumptions. Please—ask away.”

He waited, smiling. Karp said, “Okay, first, why me? If you’re really serious about digging up these old cans of worms, you’re going to need somebody who knows his way around politics. That’s not my strong point, as I’m sure Joe will tell you.” Karp glanced toward Lerner, who returned a cool, ironic look.

“Second, I’m not sure why you think you can get to the truth in this Kennedy thing. You know as well as I do that the chances of solving a homicide go into the toilet after a week, much less a year, much less—what is it?—thirteen years. I’m trying to think of a New York homicide case that got solved after that long and I can only come up with one.”

“Hoffmeyer,” said Lerner.

“Yeah, Hoffmeyer. Killed his wife, the cops loved him for it, but they couldn’t find the corpse. Confessed out of remorse after fifteen years.”

“He fed her to his dogs and ground the bones up into the Redi-mix for the patio,” said Lerner.

“He did. Oh, yeah, I forgot the serial cases. The Mad Bomber. We catch a guy with an MO used in an old case, we can clear it—sometimes. So—either, you got a guy trying to kill the current president in Dallas with a mail-order Italian rifle, or somebody’s confessed, which I haven’t heard about either of them. Or, maybe the job is to make a show of activity around this to cool down the Mark Lane types. In which case, I’m also the wrong guy.”

Crane was grinning broadly now. “This is just the attitude I want. Look—you’ve answered the first question yourself. I want you
because
you’re a professional homicide prosecutor, and
not
a politician or a bureaucrat. You’ve been in charge of hundreds of homicide investigations. The whole Kennedy material has
never
been approached from that perspective by a real pro, ever. That’s what was wrong with the Warren operation.”

“I thought Warren was a DA once,” offered Karp.

“Yeah, back when Pluto was a pup. He’d been wearing a black dress for a while by then, and that changes you. Besides, he had another agenda going.”

“Oh? Like for instance?”

Crane paused, frowned briefly. “I’ll get to that. Also there was Jim Garrison and the Clay Shaw thing, but that was a conspiracy case. Garrison had to show that Shaw, a prominent New Orleans businessman, had been in on the assassination planning. There was all kinds of weird stuff there, too, that Shaw was a homosexual who had a liaison with Oswald and a nut named David Ferrie—all hard to prove, and frankly, screwed up. Anyway, the fact that you’re not interested in political wheeling and dealing is a big plus as far as I’m concerned. That’s what
I’m
for; I’ll run interference while the both of you do the real investigative work. Now, as to the possibilities for really doing something: I think they’re good. The journalistic material has reached a critical mass. That stuff has to be examined by a professional team, and either tossed out for good or confirmed. And the Senate Intelligence Committee, the Church committee, has come up with some amazing stuff. I think that’s part of what’s triggering the House reinvestigation.”

“It’s been in the papers,” said Karp.

“Not what I’m talking about, and it won’t be, either,” said Crane.

Karp waited, but Crane said nothing more.

“And you’re not going to share it with me?”

“Not until you’re in for real,” said Crane.

The waiter appeared and asked them if they wanted dessert or coffee. They declined. A brief silence descended. Then Karp said, “Well, in that case, thanks for the nice lunch.”

“I don’t believe this!” Lerner blurted out after a moment.

The other two men turned to him, startled. Lerner had said almost nothing during the meal.

Now he stared at Karp, tight-jawed. “What is it, Butch? You worried about your pension already? Got a family? Lost the edge? No, you can’t believe that. You’re not dumb. You know you’re living on borrowed time… .”

“What’re you talking about, Joe?” asked Karp irritably.

“You know what I’m talking about. You think I don’t know what goes on up there? You’ve been lucky. But you’re dead-ended. Bloom has you in a box, and he’s squeezing. How long can you last? Another year or two? Three? Sooner or later he’ll get you out. You’ll be lucky if he doesn’t scam you into something that’ll get you disbarred.”

“Joe, I don’t need a lecture about Bloom.”

“No? Then why the hell don’t you jump at this? You’re actually telling me you’re gonna keep working for fucking Sandy Bloom instead of coming in with Bert Crane and closing the homicide of the century?”

“It’s more complicated than that,” said Karp lamely. But Lerner had virtually repeated one side of his own internal arguments. The complication was, of course, The Wife. And The Kid. And Moving. Karp had already wrecked one previous marriage because, among other things, he had moved his first wife away from Southern California, where she had been comfortable and happy and working at something she enjoyed, to New York (because he’d wanted to work for the DA there), where she hadn’t much of anything but Karp himself; which proved, in the event, insufficient.

Lerner was looking at him as if he had Karp’s number—not a nice look. He asked, “How’s Marlene these days, Butch?”

“She’s fine,” Karp answered shortly. Crane caught the interplay. He said, “I’m sure something could be found for your wife, Butch. I hear she’s quite a competent attorney in her own right.”

“Yes,” said Karp, beginning to steam. “She is. And I’ll need to discuss this with her. And think about it some more. Why don’t I call you tomorrow or Monday?”

Crane frowned. “All right. But we need to get moving on this.”

After thirteen years, why the rush? Karp thought to himself, but said nothing.

On the train back to the city, Karp went through the interview again in his mind, obsessing about what he should have asked, how he should have acted. It was an uncomfortable pattern of thought, and unfamiliar. Nerds did it, playing out witty things never said to snooty girls, going home on the subway to Queens, having failed to score in the Village.
L’esprit d’escalier.
Karp nearly always said exactly what he thought at the moment (except, of course, when he conversed with his wife). Athletics, they say, builds character, and Karp had the sort of character built by big-time athletics: all-state guard, high school all-American, Pay-Ten star, and that peculiar six weeks in the NBA. You see the opening, you go for it. Roll over anybody who gets in the way. You screw up, you don’t think about it, there’s always another game. Shoot the ball.

It happens that this sort of character is also well suited to prosecuting homicides, although less so for major life decisions requiring introspection. That’s what Marlene was for.

Karp shook himself free of troubled thought and watched New Jersey flow by outside the dirty window. What he should have said, he concluded, when Crane first offered the job was, “Sure. When do I start?” Holding that thought, he dozed.

“What’s wrong?” asked Marlene, five minutes after she arrived at the loft. Karp had come back to town, hopped a cab to the day care, picked up Lucy early, for a change, and was now draped across the red couch watching the news on TV. Karp looked up at her.

“Nothing,” he lied.

“How was Philadelphia?”

“Okay. I got a nice lunch.”

“What was the guy like?”

“Crane? A good guy. Reminded me a little of Garrahy, if Garrahy had been a WASP. A straight shooter. Joe Lerner was there too. He sends his regards. How was your day?”

Marlene sat in her rocker and threw off her shoes. “Hell on earth,” she began, and launched into a familiar litany: witnesses not showing, witnesses fishtailing; the idiocy of social workers and psychologists; the cynical malfeasance of the police. People who prosecute sex crimes rarely have a nice day.

Karp had, of course, heard it all before, and was as a rule no more than passively sympathetic, when he did not offer irritating advice about what Marlene should do or should have done to solve various problems.

Now he was almost therapeutic—considerate, patient, interested. When she started to run down, he asked casually, “It might be nice to take a break, wouldn’t it?”

“Oh, like a long weekend? Try me! Like where? Vermont?”

“Um, no, I meant a real break. Doing something else. Do you really want to spend the rest of your life with scumbags? I mean, you come home like this every day, bitching and complaining about the witnesses, the shrinks. Trying to put together child abuse cases, rapes … yeah, occasionally, very occasionally, there’s a real bad guy, and maybe you can put him away for seven years and he gets out in three and a half, and meanwhile you got all the others. He-said, she-said; who the hell knows what happened in the back of the goddamn Buick?” He looked at her searchingly. “Don’t you get tired of it? Wouldn’t you like to do something else. I mean you paid your dues.
I’ve
paid my dues… .”

A look of confusion on her face: “I don’t understand. What are you saying? I should just quit—or what?”

“I mean we should seriously sit down and think about what we’re doing, the kind of life we have—”

At that instant there was a loud, high-pitched shriek from the nursery, of just that timbre that turns parental blood to transmission fluid. They both sprang up, crashing into each other like the Three Stooges exiting a ballroom, and raced down the hallway, Marlene in the lead.

Lucy was standing in front of her bed, red-faced, in hysterics.

Marlene knelt to embrace her, but the child shook away from her and backed away toward the bed.

“What’s wrong, baby! Calm down and tell Mommy what’s wrong,” cooed Marlene, heart in throat.

Karp, trained observer that he was, said, “It’s her foot.” The child had all her weight on her left leg, with only the toes of her bare right foot touching the floor. Marlene lifted her thrashing, sobbing daughter and grabbed at her ankle. She inspected the foot and cursed. “Christ, she’s got another splinter.”

“No needuh! No needuh!” yelled Lucy.

“Baby,
please
calm down! Mommy has to take it out. You don’t want an infection, do you?”

“Nooooo! No neee-duh!”

“Hold her,” said Marlene, after which ensued Karp’s absolutely least favorite paternal chore, that of clamping in a viselike grip the wriggling, choking, screaming, red-faced, snot-bubbling changeling his darling had become, while its mother probed the splinter out with a flame-sterilized number two sharp.

And after that necessary torment, Lucy extracted the maximum of cosseting, as being only her due. After a fretful supper there were multiple tuckings in, expeditions for milk and cookies, story after story read, cramp-backed sittings by the little bed—in short, all the forms of torture imposed upon guilty, loving parents by their innocent young.

The couple collapsed in the living room, having at last seen their kid off to dreamland. Marlene poured herself a stiff one of jug red and drank off half of it.

“God, did I not need that! I’ve told her a million times to wear her slippers.”

“She’s only three and a half,” said Karp in defense. “She gets splinters because we live in a decaying industrial building. Maybe she should wear gloves too, and a face mask.”

“Please, don’t start… .”

“No, really! It’s all part of the same thing. You have a job that drives you crazy and leaves you exhausted, we live in a five-flight walk-up with splintery floors and leaky plumbing that’s freezing in winter and boiling in summer, and you wonder why we’re irritated all the time.”

“We’re not ‘irritated all the time,’ ” snapped Marlene. “Every time something happens you blame it on the loft. Okay, we’ll get the floors sanded and refinished.”

This was far from a new argument. The loft had originally been Marlene’s dwelling. She had constructed it herself, with help from family and friends, tearing out the industrial ruins, cleaning it, painting it, putting in drywall, kitchen and cabinet work. She’d lived in it happily for six years. When Karp moved in it had seemed to him just one of his lover’s delightful eccentricities. But as the seat of a marriage, and a place to raise a child, it was, in his often-voiced opinion, a giant pain in the ass.

“Refinishing isn’t going to do any good. The damn floor’s sagging all over the place. It’s probably totally rotted out underneath.”

“Okay, we’ll
replace
the fucking floor! Why are you
hocking
me about the floor? Why now?” A flush had appeared across her famous cheekbones and she took another swallow of wine. Then she looked at her husband narrowly. He met her gaze for an instant and then glanced away.

“Because,” said Karp, “we have to make some decisions. How long are we going to keep pouring money into this place? I mean, is this
it?
We’re going to live here forever?”

Marlene wasn’t listening. She was still staring at him and the expression on her face was not pleasant.

“What?” said Karp.

“You rat! This isn’t about the floor, or Lucy, or how hard I work. They offered you a job in Philly and you want to take it and move and you’re afraid to just come out and say it.”

Karp felt his face steam in embarrassment. A denial sprang to his lips, but, to his credit, he suppressed it. He
was
a rat.

“Well?” pressed his wife. “Did they?”

He nodded.

“And you want to take it.”