Corruption of Blood (52 page)

“I always liked Cheating, Poore, Widdowes, and Leffing,” said Marlene.

“Hell, you don’t have to worry, your good buddy Bloom will take you back.”

Oh, shit, thought Marlene. It was like the moment when you’re lying on your back after an overindulgence and you know that whatever you do you are going to end up on your knees with your head over the toilet. Marlene sighed and said, “Um, not really.” And it all came out.

Karp considered this for a long moment and then said, “You popped him good, huh?”

“Yeah. I think he lost a couple of caps.”

“Well, that solves one problem anyway.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean he’s gone. I’ll take him out. I’ll find a way. He’ll go. I might let him keep his law license, I don’t know. But it’ll mean we can both go back to work for the DA.”

“You’re not pissed?”

“No,” said Karp in surprise. “Why should I be pissed? You didn’t try to rape him, he tried to rape you.”

Marlene felt the most wonderful relaxation seeping into her body; she felt little demons flying in panic out of her fingertips. She started to giggle. “Oh, dear, we can go back to working our asses off among the scum of the earth. What joy! I’ve never been so happy.”

She stretched languorously and rolled over. “But you know what I’d really
like
to do, though. I’d like us to live in a classy midtown hotel, with lots of art deco furniture, and solve high-tone crimes that don’t involve severed body parts. Nick and Nora Charles never had to cope with body parts that I can recall.”

“Dear, Nick and Nora were childless, wealthy alcoholics, none of which we are. And they were fictional.”

“But they had a dog,” said Marlene sleepily. “We have a dog. It’s a start.”

“It’s not a start. If you recall, Asta was a cute little thing that Nora could scoop up at a run when she jumped into a cab to chase the bad guy down Fifth Avenue. Your dog is the
size
of a taxicab. It’s not the same thing. Marlene?”

“Sleep,” said Marlene.

The next day, before they checked out, Karp dressed carefully in a blue suit and went down to the Annex Building to quit, asking Marlene to pick him up at Georgetown University at around noon. He took his raincoat. A front was coming through and the sky was dark and blustery, and rain was falling when he left the metro at Federal Center Southwest.

Wilkey, he learned, was up on the Hill. Karp found a vacant typewriter, hunt-and-pecked out a brief letter of resignation, and left it on Wilkey’s desk. Before leaving, he added to his list of recent crimes against the United States by stealing a case box from the supply room. He transferred the material from the tattered red envelope into the case box and left without a backward look.

Karp stuck the phone message slip back in the box. He read over what he had written and tossed the stack of legal bond into the box too. The other material followed. Carrying his raincoat and the case, he went back into the library archives, row upon row of dusty boxes stacked on steel shelves. He selected a particularly disused-looking section at random and put the case into one of the boxes.

Marlene was waiting for him in her yellow car, just beyond the ornate iron gates. It had stopped raining, or rather the rain had turned into a thick drizzling mist.

“Where to, chief?” asked Marlene.

“Daddy, are we going back to New York?” Lucy asked from the backseat.

“Yeah, baby, but first I want to stop somewhere.”

Karp got behind the wheel and drove across the Key Bridge to Arlington. He took the turnoff to the cemetery. “I’ve never been. I thought we’d pay our respects on the way home.”

He parked in the lot. The mist was thicker in the low land by the river. Lucy was delighted with it and trotted up ahead until she was lost from view and then ran back giggling. “Don’t get too far, Lucy!” Marlene called out.

They stood in front of Kennedy’s grave, with its yellow flame, for a minute or so, in private thought. Then Karp asked, “What about Maggie Dobbs?”

“I was by there while you were in the library. We had tea. I handed over all the material and my notes, except for the film. I think she was glad to see my back, poor lady. But it’s her life.”

“You told her he didn’t do it.”

“Yeah. I mean, what the hell! Why should the dead plague the living?” She addressed the grave: “Including you.”

“What did you do with it? The film.”

“I have it right here.” She patted her bag. “You know, the place is deserted. If Lucy wasn’t running around, we could rip off a quick one right here. On the grave.”

Karp laughed. “Yeah, right. Being him, he’d probably look down and laugh.”

“Up and laugh. If Sister Mary Agnes at St. Joe’s wasn’t just jiving us about mortal sin and the sanctity of the sacrament of marriage, where he is, he’d have to be looking up.”

She stepped forward and took the roll of film out of her bag. She stripped it in long loops off the spool and held an end over the eternal flame. It caught immediately, and the old celluloid stock started burning fiercely. She threw the flaming coils onto the pathway and they watched it, silently, as it turned to indecipherable ashes.

A BIOGRAPHY OF ROBERT K. TANENBAUM

Robert K. Tanenbaum is the
New York Times
bestselling author of twenty-five legal thrillers and has an accomplished legal career of his own. Before his first book was published, Tanenbaum had already been the Bureau Chief of the Criminal Courts, had run the Homicide Bureau, and had been in charge of the training program for the legal staff for the New York County District Attorney’s Office. He also served as Deputy Chief Counsel to the Congressional Committee investigations into the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. In his professional career, Tanenbaum has never lost a felony case. His courtroom experiences bring his books to life, especially in his bestselling series featuring prosecutor Roger “Butch” Karp and his wife, Marlene Ciampi.

Tanenbaum was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. He attended the University of California at Berkeley on a basketball scholarship, and remained at Cal, where he earned his law degree from the prestigious Boalt Hall School of Law. After graduating from Berkeley Law, Tanenbaum moved back to New York to work as an assistant district attorney under the legendary New York County DA Frank Hogan. Tanenbaum then served as Deputy Chief Counsel in charge of the Congressional investigations into the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.

The blockbuster novel
Corruption of Blood
(1994), is a fictionalized account of his experience in Washington, D.C.

Tanenbaum returned to the West Coast and began to serve in public office. He was elected to the Beverly Hills City Council in 1986 and twice served as the mayor of Beverly Hills. It was during this time that Tanenbaum began his career as a novelist, drawing from the many fascinating stories of his time as a New York ADA. His successful debut novel,
No Lesser Plea
(1987), introduces Butch Karp, an assistant district attorney who is battling for justice, and Marlene Ciampi, his associate and love interest. Tanenbaum’s subsequent twenty-two novels portrayed Karp and his crime fighting family and eclectic colleagues facing off against drug lords, corrupt politicians, international assassins, the mafia, and hard-core violent felons.

He has had published eight recent novels as part of the series, as well as two nonfiction titles:
The Piano Teacher
(1987), exploring his investigation and prosecution of a recidivist psychosexual killer, and
Badge of the Assassin
(1979), about his prosecution of cop killers, which was made into a movie starring James Woods as Tanenbaum.

Tanenbaum and his wife of forty-three years have three children. He currently resides in California where he has taught Advanced Criminal Procedure at the Boalt Hall School of Law and maintains a private law practice.

Tanenbaum as a toddler in the early 1940s. He was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York.

A five-year-old Tanenbaum in Brooklyn, near Ocean Parkway.

Tanenbaum’s family in the early 1950s. From left to right: Bob; his mother, Ruth (a teacher and homemaker); his father, Julius (businessman and lawyer); and his older brother, Bill.

Tanenbaum’s high school varsity basketball photo from the ’59–’60 season. He played shooting guard, center, and forward, and earned an athletic scholarship to the University of California, Berkeley, where he continued to play.

Tanenbaum shooting during a basketball game his junior year of high school. He wore the number 14 throughout high school and college.