Corruption of Blood (41 page)

“Clay, I—”

“Just don’t move, okay? If he gets by me and goes for his car, you just stay there, understand?”

Karp nodded.

Fulton, still crouched, moved in a quick rush down the concrete path to the door, flattened himself at the hinge side of the doorway, waited for a few seconds with his ear pressed to the door, and then slipped in.

Karp sat down on the pavement and worked on recovering his breath. He had a hole in his pants at the knee, where blood oozed, and his palms were beginning to sting fiercely. He pulled out a handkerchief and used it and a little spit to clean the road grit out of the scrapes on his hands and knee. Across the street an elderly Cuban woman observed him incuriously from her front step. In a solid Cuban working-class neighborhood like this, nearly everyone would be at work or school now; those that remained seemed in no hurry to report a gun battle on the street to the authorities.

At the end of the street a battered red pickup stopped and let out a man in stained work clothes. A school bus from a parochial school came down the street and dropped off three kids, who ran into houses. Another man, in khakis, a blue ball cap, and sunglasses, walked around the corner of the block, entered a tan sedan, and drove away. An elderly man came out of a house with a small dog on a lead. Then the street was quiet.

Fulton called to him from the doorway, and Karp rose stiffly to his feet and joined him.

“He’s dead,” said Fulton. “Our guy was waiting for him. There’s a cracked pane in the rear door with fresh tape gum on it. He broke in and waited and shot Guel when he came in. Guel’s in the kitchen; took a bunch in the back of the head with a small-caliber gun. Then our boy just strolled out the back over a little fence, into the next yard and away, while we were squatting in the fucking bushes. Shit! I
hate
this, this fucking half-assed police work. We should’ve come in here with a couple dozen guys and a warrant and sealed off … what’s wrong?”

Karp had gasped and was staring wildly. “Holy shit! I
saw
him. I just saw him! It was Caballo. He was wearing a blue ball cap, a skinny guy with sunglasses. He just walked around the corner and got into a car and drove away. And I was just sitting there, watching him. Christ!”

They looked at each other. There was nothing to say. After a moment, Fulton said, “Well, fuck this! I’m gonna call it in and then we can wrap up and get the hell out of this town.”

“No, wait, I want to take a look around,” said Karp.

Fulton started to object, but then, seeing the expression on Karp’s face, sighed and said, “You’re fuckin’ crazy, you know that? Make sure you get his blood on your shoes and leave plenty of prints.”

Karp did not get blood on his shoes. There was a good deal of it on the kitchen floor and he had to step carefully past the corpse of Angelo Guel. One look at the two bedrooms and the bathroom told him that he was not going to find anything of relevance. All three rooms had been searched by an expert: drawers turned over, closets emptied, the mattresses and pillows slit and disemboweled. There was a blue metal bank box torn open in the mess, empty. Karp poked around desultorily for a few minutes, pausing to collect some Band-Aids and antiseptic in the ruins of the bathroom, and then came back to the kitchen, cursing under his breath.

“The fucker tossed the place too,” he said in response to Fulton’s questioning look.

“You think there was something Guel had that he wanted?”

“Had to be. He did a real pro job on the place.”

“Uh-huh, back there, but not out here. He couldn’t’ve, or the ambush wouldn’t have worked. Guel would’ve seen the mess and been on his guard. He didn’t touch either the kitchen or the living room or the back room that I can see.”

“Let’s do it!” said Karp, brightening somewhat.

“No, let
me
do it,” said Fulton sourly. “You sit on that couch and if I need legal advice, I’ll ask.”

Karp sat on the couch and practiced first aid. Fulton started searching the Florida room. Forty minutes later, Fulton came out of the kitchen with a manila envelope and tossed it on the couch next to Karp.

“Where’d you find this?”

“Taped to the back of the fridge. Nobody ever looks there. Inside the fridge, yeah, but not behind it. Or under it. It’s as safe as a—”

“What’s in it?”

“Look for yourself. Bankbooks and some papers in Spanish. There’s a ledger there you might find interesting.” Fulton had a broad grin on his face.

“Tell me.”

“Well, as far back as these bankbooks go, Guel’s been depositing two grand a month in cash. Guess who from.”

Karp dumped the contents of the envelope out on the couch. The account book was the old-fashioned narrow black model, with greeny yellow pages ruled for double-entry bookkeeping. Karp was not a bookkeeper and his Spanish was rusty, but it was clear that listing income under columns marked “actual”
(verdadero)
and “reported to the tax man” (
informe a impuesto)
was not a generally accepted accounting practice. As far as the IRS was concerned, Guel’s coffee and sandwich business was barely hanging on. But Angelo Guel was making plenty of money, much of it from a source identified in Guel’s neat handwriting as PXK.

Karp shoved the material back into its envelope and stood up. “Great, this is great,” he said. “V.T.’s already got a lead on it, this PXK angle.”

“So what now?” asked Fulton, indicating the feloniously violated crime scene.

“What now,” said Karp pleasantly, “is that I intend to walk down the block and call a cab from the nearest phone booth, pick up my stuff at the motel, and catch the first plane back to Washington. Basically, I’m fleeing, leaving you to clean up the mess here.”

Fulton laughed and sat down, rubbing his eyes. “Some guy!” he said. “He runs like a thief and dumps me in the shit, and after I just saved his life.”

“Hey, what can I say?” said Karp grinning. “I’m a lawyer.”

“You didn’t burn the place?”

Bishop’s voice was calm over the phone, but Caballo could tell he was upset. Extremely upset.

“No, like I said, some people showed up. They tried to get in and then I heard some shots fired. Then the guy, the client, came in at a run with a gun in his hand… .
”

“All right, I understand. Let’s not discuss it over the phone. We’ll have to continue under the assumption that whatever material your client had is in the hands of our competitors.”

“So, what should I do? You want me to go down the list?”

“No, not just yet. And I want you to stay out of Texas for as long as possible. Things in Washington will be coming to a head soon. I think I’d like you back here.”

SEVENTEEN

Marlene walked in the door and was immediately hit by, “Mommy, Mommy, guess what? Sweetie bit a bad man!”

“Oh, Christ! Harry?”

“He bit him really hard and made his pants rip off!”

“Harry!”

Harry Bello strolled in from the kitchen, wiping his hands on a dish towel tucked into the front of his pants. “How’d it go?” he asked.

“What’s this about the dog?” Marlene countered.

Harry shrugged. “The kid’s right. We were walking in that park up the highway a couple miles. I got a ball for the dog, we’re throwing it. Guy gets out of this pickup and watches us for a while. The dog comes by him, chasing the ball, he makes a grab for its collar. The dog goes crazy, does his rabies act, growling, snapping. The guy backs off, makes a run for his truck, the dog goes after him, grabs his behind, rips the seat of his pants off, shorts and all. We’re just standing there, it went down so fast. The guy’s in the truck, he starts yelling his old lady paid two hundred for the dog, he’s gonna sue our ass. I gave him the eye for a while and he ran out of steam and took off.”

“He said a lot of bad words, Mommy.”

“I bet he did, honey. Harry, this guy: about six-one, two-hundred, crew cut, bent nose, looks like a bouncer in a redneck bar?”

“Yeah. You know him?”

“In a way. He used to live next door. His wife actually did buy the dog, but this bozo was always getting on her to get rid of it. I guess he found out he could get some cash for it and wanted it back. They were real mean to him anyway, and I guess old Sweetie has a long memory.” She glanced at the dish towel.

“You’re cooking?”

“Yeah, she was hungry.”

“We’re having SpaghettiOs,” crowed Lucy, and she began to hop around on one toe singing the eponymous jingle.

Marlene lowered her brows at Bello. “Harry Bello, you brought
SpaghettiOs
into
my
house?”

Bello made an appeasing gesture. “She wanted.”

“This gets out, I’ll never be able to walk down Grand Street again.”

“I got steaks for us, wine for you,” said Bello.

“Oh,” said Marlene, “in that case …”

They ate, and afterward the dog licked all the plates and crunched up the steak T-bones like potato chips.

“So, you get anything at the old lady’s?” asked Harry when they were settled over coffee.

“You could say that. I read her diaries and some old letters.”

Bello’s left eyebrow rose a quarter of an inch, to which implied query Marlene answered with a minuscule waggle of her head: no, she didn’t want me to read them, but I did anyway.

“It keeps coming back to Harley Blaine,” said Marlene. “It turns out Blaine was the one who started dating Selma, back then, and then Richard Dobbs fell in love with her, and then Harley seemed to lose interest and she started going out with Richard and then she married him. Her letters to Blaine were there too; that was one of the things a gentleman did in those days, return a lady’s letters when the romance was over. And his to her too; she kept them all those years, which tells you something. It was weird reading them in order; first, he’s hot as a furnace, swearing eternal love, quoting poetry, and then it’s like, over the course of a week, he’s turned it all off; the letters start sounding like he’s writing to a pen pal in Uganda. Then her letters get cold too. She writes him a note: he left a camera. He left a hat. Hope you are well. He left another camera.”

“The guy had a lot of cameras.”

“Yeah, well he could afford them. Then they stop writing, except for Christmas cards. She had an affair too, later on, so it wasn’t the perfect American family after all. In the diaries she talks about Richard frankly as if he were another child—‘the boys,’ as in ‘I got the boys out of the house,’ meaning Richard and Hank. In forty-five or so she falls for this guy she calls ‘Q’ in the diary and it lasts for three, four years. Intensely romantic. No letters from Q though. The diary says she wants to leave her husband, but Q won’t let her. Finally, he breaks it off. She’s crushed. She stops writing diaries. Around then is when the spy stuff started, so maybe they were afraid it would come out in the investigation.”

“Backward,” said Bello.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought too,” Marlene agreed. “Usually the lover wants the married one to leave the marriage and he or she won’t. The guy wasn’t married, whoever he was, that’s clear from the diaries. But … who knows? Maybe, like the man said, the very rich are different from you and me.”

An inquiring look from Harry.

“What’s the connection to the case? I don’t know, but there’s a pattern. Here’s Richard in the center, the golden boy. He brings Blaine in as a kind of brother, and Selma in as a kind of wife, and their job is sort of to protect him, and keep the gold shiny. They … I don’t know what’s the right word … they
invested
in him, like, if Richard shone, so would they. He was the center. In fact, now that I think of it, Blaine probably sort of
gave
Selma to Dobbs. Blaine was in love, so he said, but when the golden boy expressed an interest, it was ‘take her, she’s yours.’ Blaine’s really the most interesting character in the trio. Slick. A slick liar. And not just slick; I get the feeling of snakes below the surface. That whole CIA thing with Gaiilov and before. I’d give anything to be able to go out there and talk to him face-to-face.”

“Wizard of Oz.”

She laughed. “Yeah, right! With the dog pulling at the curtain. My God, Oz! I almost forgot. Wait a sec!”

She got up from the kitchen table and dashed into the living room, returning with her bag. She rummaged in it briefly and then placed a small, worn Kodak-yellow box on the table. “After I went through the diaries and put everything back the way it was, I didn’t have much time to look around. The rest of the attic was mostly the usual stuff—suitcases, a wardrobe with old clothes in it, furniture. I checked out the suitcases, nothing, the wardrobe, nothing, the bookcases … maybe a hundred or so books, all old kids’ stuff in complete sets, boys’ books: Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, Rover Boys, Zane Grey, and a complete set of the Oz books. You know the big size, with those great pictures and the funny curvy writing in gold on the covers? Okay, I used to love them when I was a kid, so of course, I looked through them, not really looking for anything in particular, just looking at the pictures. If you want to know, I was feeling kind of grimy, like you do when you find something out about someone, something shameful, that you weren’t supposed to know, and I thought that Oz would cheer me up. But I found this”—she tapped the little box—“in a cut-out space in
Tik-Tok, the Mechanical Man of Oz.”

Bello handled the little box. “So what is it?”

“Well, you can’t see much on eight-millimeter just by holding it up to the light, but it looks like a naughty movie.”

“Porn?”

“Not exactly. Not hard-core suck-fuck anyway. It looks like one of those old-fashioned amateur jobs. A couple at the beach, they take off their clothes, they fall on the blanket and so on. I just looked at the first couple of feet or so. I wish we had a projector here.” She put the film box back in her purse.

“Why’d you take it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I didn’t like the idea of the Dobbs kids visiting Granny’s in a couple years and finding it and bringing it home and running it after din-din one evening. Maybe I’ve joined up in the great goal of protecting the rep of Richard Ewing Dobbs. I think he took this film himself, by the way, and developed it too, either with actors, or with real people, as a peeping Tom. Or maybe Blaine did.”