Corruption of Blood (8 page)

“Maybe they didn’t want to. Maybe they were incompetent. Besides, it was Texas. You ever been in Texas?”

“Yeah, in the army. Why?”

“Well, so you know what it’s like. Do they have food? Do they have shows? Do they have clothes? They’re hicks, face it. So, get a couple of sharp New York kids like us in there, a little hustle—it’ll be a whole different story.”

Fulton laughed again. “So what you’re saying is because you can’t get a knish in Texas, we’ll make it happen thirteen years later, where they drew a blank?”

“That’s it. I rest my case.”

Fulton stared at him for a moment and said, smiling, “You need professional help, not a cop.”

“Come on, Clay. You’re a homicide investigator. Investigate the homicide of the century! What’re you gonna do when you retire? Security for department stores? Teach at John Jay? You’ll go batshit.”

“This is for
me,
right? You’re doing me a
favor
? Just a minute, let me make sure my wallet’s still here.” He patted at his suit coat pocket. “Okay, wise guy, how long you figure this gig is going to take? Months? Years?”

“This I don’t know,” admitted Karp. “Say a year …”

“Okay, that means I’m gonna have to go to Martha and say, ‘Guess what, baby? We’re going south. Back to the land o’ cotton …’ ”

“Oh, horseshit, Clay! Washington isn’t the
South!
”

“Do tell,” said Fulton, giving Karp a hard look. “And there’s Texas, too. Those old boys’re gonna love having a big-city nigger poking around in what they did or didn’t do, the heaviest case they ever saw.”

Karp was taken aback, and felt himself flush with embarrassment. It had not occurred to Karp that Fulton and his wife would be at all discommoded by moving from their apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to a city that was still heavily segregated, in fact if not in law, or that poking into a Texas investigation might be a problem for a black man.

Karp said, “Okay, forget it. I wasn’t thinking… .”

Fulton stood up, leaned over, and placed his hand on Karp’s arm. “No, I appreciate being asked … I guess.”

He perched on the edge of the desk and looked at Karp with the fatherly expression he sometimes assumed with the younger man. He was only twelve years older, but he had spent most of his adult life as a street cop uptown, which worked out to an effective seniority of about a thousand and four years.

“Goddamn,” said Fulton, shaking his head and grinning, showing his gold tooth, “our little Butch’s really gonna do it. A long time, the two of us.”

“Yeah, eleven years. Dr. Fulton’s College of Criminal Knowledge for green-ass prosecutors. I would’ve sunk like a stone, you hadn’t grabbed me by the shorts.”

“Mooney McPhail.”

Karp smiled. “Yeah, Mooney McPhail. An easy grounder to short and I bobbled it.”

“You were second seating for Joe Lerner.”

“Right, another blast from the past. He’s in on this too, by the way, the MLK side. I had a witness said she saw Mooney use the knife, and picked him out of the lineup. That was the case. Holy shit! What a fuckup!”

“Only she didn’t. It was her sister saw it and she told—what the hell was her name?—Esther, Ethyl?”

“Methyl,” said Karp.

“Methyl, right. She got the whole story from the sister and she decided to be the witness, because the sister had the arth-a-ritis.”

“Yeah, it would’ve been a classic, if it’d come out on cross. Defense would’ve asked, ‘Did you actually observe this with your own eyes,’ and old Methyl would’ve said, ‘Oh, no, my sister told me the whole story and she don’t lie.’ Case dismissed.”

Fulton laughed. “Turned out the sister didn’t see it either. Took me a month to find the girl who told the sister… Damn!”

“What?”

“It just flashed on me, where I was.”

“What, when you found the witness?”

“No, where I was when I found out about Kennedy. I was up on St. Nick, up around ‘forty-third, making a collar. Some pimp cut a girl. I was a detective second out of the Two-eight. I had him in cuffs on the street and my partner, Mike Samuels, was just opening the car, and I looked up and there was a crowd of about fifty people around this appliance and stereo store, pressed up against the grilles. They had a bunch of TVs there, on all the time. We locked the mutt in the back and I went over to see what was going on. We’d been in the building maybe forty minutes with this asshole, and in that time Kennedy’d been shot and pronounced dead. The man never meant that much to me personally, but it was a hell of a jolt—the
president
and all that. But the people on the sidewalk, most of them were carrying on like it was Lincoln all over again, a couple of old church ladies hollering, ‘Sweet Jesus God … ’ ”

Fulton paused for a deprecating chuckle. “It affected a lot a folks up there. I guess it’s … they’ve seen a lot of young men die for no reason, just from meanness and stupidity. It must’ve kind of crystallized the whole thing for them. My mom, now … still got a magazine cover of JFK framed, and Bobby too. Right next to Dr. King. And Jesus, of course. Hell of a thing!” He shook his head.

“Anyway, I ran back to the car and told Samuels what was up, and of course, he had to go over and check it out for himself. The mutt asks me what’s up and I tell him and he says, ‘Well, fuck him! When we gonna move?’ Like he was late for a big date.”

Fulton stood up and said, “Tell you one thing. I do this, and it works, I’d get my momma off my case. She’s been pissed at me for joining the cops from day one. Can you believe, she still introduces me: ‘This is my eldest, Clayton, first college graduate in the family and he threw it all away to be with the police.’ ”

Karp brightened. “So you
will
think about it.”

“I’ll
think
about it, boss. We’re in the thinking stage here. Give me a couple of days. Meanwhile, I’ll see you later on at the party.”

“You’re not supposed to tell me about it,” said Karp glumly. “It’s supposed to be a surprise.”

Four hours later, Karp was in that state of woozy euphoria he obtained through drink, a state that for him lasted about twelve minutes before being replaced by faint nausea and a sick headache. Karp couldn’t drink at all, this lapse being a source of keen amusement to his friends and his wife, all of whom could put it away pretty good.

The farewell party was well under way. The homicide bureau had kicked in for a catered spread—chopped liver, little shrimpy hors d’oeuvres, fried wontons, tiny pizzas—and some decent liquor and beer. There were about fifty people in the bureau’s outer office, where the desks had all been pushed to the walls. The secretaries had set up a big boom box, which was now blasting out the Village People’s “YMCA” for the fifth time and people were getting funky in the center of the floor, doing the peculiar spastic dancing that made the 1970s such a world of fun.

“No more,” said Karp to the man attempting to refill his glass with champagne. “I’ll get blotto.”

“That’s the point,” said the man, continuing to pour. “If the guest of honor can walk out steadily, it’s an insult to his friends. We’ll carry you on a door.”

The man’s name was Vernon Talcott Newbury. He was a lawyer in the fraud bureau and Karp’s closest friend among the people he had started with in the old DA’s office. A rare bird, Newbury, in the gritty environs of 100 Centre Street: rich, for one thing, very rich, a sprig of a family of New York bankers who regarded the Rockefellers as pushy newcomers. Yale College and Harvard Law for another, unlike most of the people working at the DA, who were more likely to have come from places like Fordham and St. Johns. A lean, small man with longish, ash blond hair, he had the remarkable good looks, “chiseled” as the expression has it, of one of the gentlemen in white tie that Charles Dana Gibson used to draw in company with his famous girls.

Karp had never figured out what had brought V.T., as he was universally known, into the DA, or what kept him there. V.T. would not give a straight answer. “One slums,” he might say, or, “My family are practitioners of fraud; I prefer to study it.” It did have something to do with his family, Karp had concluded early on: that great intermarried, extended family of WASPs, with names off the street signs of lower Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn, as exotic as Nepalese to Karp, and as fascinating. Such clans tend to produce at least one maverick in each generation, and V.T. was the one in his. He might as easily, and with about the same level of family disapproval, have chosen to have become a lion tamer at Ringling’s or opened a delicatessen in Passaic.

Karp himself had a contracted family, and had he been a reflective type he might have considered that a vicarious association was one of the things that attracted him to V.T., as well as to his wife, whose clan was also vast.

There she was now, dancing with a young black paralegal. She was wearing a full plum maxiskirt with the bottom three buttons undone, so that as she danced it whirled upward, showing her thin and splendid legs. Her black curls were shoulder length and cut so that they fell over the left side of her face. In that way, if Marlene held her head cocked, as she always did, it would be more difficult for someone to tell that her right eye was glass.

This damage had never interested him; he had loved her before, when she was stunning and perfect, and afterward, when she was merely a gorgeous exotic. As always, when he watched her dance, he was excited and vaguely saddened at the same time. Marlene loved to dance; Karp did not. He hadn’t even before his knee had been replaced, thinking himself gawky on the floor and conspicuous with it.

As he watched, she caught his eye and winked and went through a set of parodically dirty contortions.

“Marlene’s not going down with you, I hear,” said V.T.

“Not right away,” said Karp, turning back to his friend. “We’re being modern.”

V.T. nodded and smiled ruefully. He himself had been carrying on for a number of years a hopeless affair with an artist who lived in the Berkshires and who would on no account move to the city. “Yes,” he said, “how well I know it! Prisoners of women’s liberation, a burgeoning gulag. And without even the balm of self-pity, since we richly deserve anything they can dish out, we swine. Sins of the fathers. The best cure is more wine.”

He poured himself another glass of champagne. V.T. had sprung for a case of Moet magnums, a typical gesture, and one that had contributed mightily to the current hilarious mood of the party. Nor had he stinted himself in the use of his own gift. A bar of scarlet had appeared across his cheekbones, and his intelligent blue eyes were starting to approximate the cheap plastic glitter of a baby doll’s.

“Fuck ’em, anyway,” said Karp woozily. “You know, Newbury, you should get out of here, too.”

“Why? The party’s roaring and we have four bottles of wine left.”

“No, I don’t mean the party. I mean the DA’s.” Karp put an affectionate arm across Newbury’s shoulder. “Look, V.T., I have a slot for a head of research on our staff. Why don’t you take it?”

Newbury cocked his head and looked at Karp out of a narrow eye. “You’re joking, right?”

“No, I’m not. You should do it. We’ll have a ball.”

“But I’m a funny-money man. Fraud is my life.”

“The People rest,” said Karp.

V.T. laughed, sputtering around a mouthful of champagne. “What? You have the brass to suggest that the Warren Commission and the concept of fraud can possibly exist in the same universe of discourse? It was printed in the
Times
! Walter Cronkite—”

“Will you?”

“Of course,” said V.T., without an instant’s hesitation.

The party wore on. People drifted away, leaving the hard-core fun lovers, who became more raucous, as if hoping to make up in noise what was lost in numbers. The sun went down; the lights were doused and replaced with candles. Around nine, Karp slipped into his private office and sat down behind his desk. He began rummaging through the drawers, extracting personal items.

There were few of these, or few that he wished to retain, at any rate. A block of clear Lucite in which was embedded a round from an AR-16 that had been removed from his shoulder after an unsuccessful assassination attempt. A softball signed with the names of all the team members, and by Francis Phillip Garrahy, the year the DA’s team had won the city league championship. He rose and assembled a carton taken from a stack Connie Trask had provided. He thought he would not need more than one.

Off the wall came his law school diploma and his New York bar certificate, and a framed photograph his friends had signed and given him when he had first been appointed to the homicide bureau back in Garrahy’s day.

The door opened and Marlene came in.

“What are you doing lurking in here?” she said, swaying slightly. She was nicely drunk.

“I’m not lurking, I’m cleaning out.” He handed her the photograph. “I’m taking this for inspiration,” he said.

It was a grainy reproduction of a famous World War II photograph, the charge to destruction of the Pomorske Cavalry Brigade during the Nazi blitzkrieg against Poland. In the foreground were several German tanks, and coming toward them out of the smoky distance was a long line of horsemen in white tunics and
schapskas,
waving pennoned lances. The gift was meant as a comment on fighting homicide in New York.

Marlene looked at the relic, and at her own signature prominent on the bottom. “You still feel like that? Charging the tanks?”

“I don’t know. Lately, I’ve started to see myself as being on the other side—more panzerlike. I guess I don’t like it.”

“I thought I was supposed to be the intractable romantic in this family,” said Marlene petulantly. “You’re supposed to be the solid one. You’re supposed to be there for
me.
”

Karp laughed at that and tapped the photo. “Wait—I thought I was the romantic Polish lancer, dashing into danger.”

“Yes, but a
dependable
romantic Polish lancer, who helps with child care and does dishes.”

Karp laughed again and went on with his packing. Some personal books and a few papers went into the carton. He walked to the line of bookcases that held the records of his hundred or so murder trials. He pulled out a few at random, and then put them back. “I’ll have to get Connie to pack these and send them home.”