Immoral Certainty (26 page)

“That’s some hell of a knife,” said Balducci. “Cut somebody’s head off with that mother.”

Marlene was walking north on Broadway, when she heard the shout: “Hey, good-lookin’” followed by the loud kissing noises used by many men on the streets of New York in order to make themselves attractive to strange women. Marlene trudged steadily on, her face assuming the forbidding grimace of the accosted city woman, an amalgam of fright and helpless rage. Another shout. Ordinarily, she would have spun around and given the asshole the finger, but today she didn’t need the aggravation. She had awakened feeling queasy and depressed and a day of plea-bargaining had improved neither her stomach nor her spirits.

“Hey, Marlene!”

Hearing her name called in the accents of her childhood, Marlene at last stopped and turned. She saw the green Ghia with the primered fender and walked toward it, smiling her relief.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said. “You should be ashamed of yourself. How are you?”

“Pretty good as a matter of fact,” said Raney. “We just caught the mutt who killed that woman and her kid over in the East Village.”

“Way to go! Good case?”

“Not bad. No witnesses, but we got prints, bloodstains, the murder weapon, motive, means and opportunity. It’ll fly unless you guys fuck it up. How about yourself?”

She shrugged. “The usual bullshit.”

“Anything new on St. Michael’s? Or the trash-bag killer?”

At this her face fell. “How should I know? That’s over.”

“What kind of ‘over’? I thought this was a big deal to you.”

“Was is the word. Let somebody else get kicked in the ass on that one. I had my share.” She caught the disappointed expression on his face and added, in a tone that revealed her own interest, “Why do you ask? You’re not still screwing around with that?”

“Yeah,” he said, caution creeping into his voice. “I guess I still am.”

“You ever get a case there, you could let me know.”

“I’ll do that,” said Raney sourly, looking at her with a look she didn’t care for at all.

Marlene twitched at her hair in a nervous gesture. “Well, nice talking to you, Raney, but I got to go. I have to get my hair cut.”

“Get in, I’ll drive you.”

“No, don’t bother,” she protested vaguely, “it’s right by the Fourth Street IND.”

Raney reached across and flung the curbside door open. “Marlene,” he growled, “get the fuck in this car!” Surprising herself, she entered, and they shot away from the curb.

“Look, Marlene,” Raney began, when they had driven a few blocks in stiff silence, “you started this shit with Dean, you got me all wound up on it, and now you’re leaving me hang. What’s going on?”

“Nothing. Raney, it just didn’t work out. There’s no case. It happens.”

“No case my ass! Marlene, don’t bullshit a bullshitter. You knew damn well something was going down there, something real big. They yelled at you? Fuck, they yelled at me too. Fuck ’em! I can’t believe you’re that hot for a pension or….” He stopped suddenly, arrested by a thought. “It’s Karp, right? Karp gave you the zinger on this, and you caved right in.”

It was true enough and it still hurt. Marlene felt the blood rush to her face. “That’s off the wall, Raney,” she snarled. “Karp had nothing to do with it.”

“Yes, he did. A little pillow talk, a little spankie, and you can the case. I guess I don’t have that problem, counselor, because I’m not fucking my boss.”

“Oh, go to hell, Raney!” Marlene shouted, and opened her door to leave. But Raney downshifted and tromped on the gas, swinging out into the traffic with such force that Marlene fell back in her seat and the partly opened door swung shut.

“What’re you, crazy? Let me the fuck out of this car!” she shouted. Raney increased his speed instead, weaving through the traffic, leaving a wake of curses, horns, and rude gestures.

“You’re not getting out of here until we talk,” said Raney grimly. He swung around a bus and shoved a tape into the cassette player. Chopin’s A minor mazurka blasted from the speakers. After a moment, Marlene leaned back in her seat and took out a cigarette. This was starting to get interesting. She had never been kidnapped by a heavily armed Chopin freak before. And she had to admit he drove like a god. And he was, of course, right about Karp, and she did feel rotten about her lie and about the case.

Raney skidded the car around the left turn at West Fourth Street and pulled into a small parking lot. He parked the Ghia with its passenger side three inches from a blank wall, turned off the engine, and lit a cigarette. The mazurka ended and the nocturne in G minor came on, slow and infinitely sad.

“OK, Raney, let’s talk,” said Marlene at length. “You scared the shit out of me, you soothed me with music, I’m jelly. Yes, you’re right—Karp convinced me there was no case. There being no case, it’s agony for me to keep thinking about the damn thing. I’m not proud of it, but there it is. Now, can I get my haircut? Raney? Hello?”

Raney didn’t answer. When the nocturne was finished he sighed and switched off the deck. He slumped despondently in his seat, ignoring his captive and smoking.

“You like classical music?” asked Marlene inanely, for want of something to break the silence.

“No,” he said. “Just this tape. I used to play it in ’Nam. It belonged to a guy I knew. I mean not this particular tape—this is the fourth one I bought. I wear them out. The guy stepped on a mine made out of a one-oh-five shell. There was nothing left of him but a damp spot on the ground. And this tape. I picked it up. The tape played perfect, it was amazing. And I kept it.

“You know, I drew on a guy today—that East Village killer. I had a couple of clear shots, but I didn’t, you know, pop him. I thought about you, while I was chasing this asshole around, your face was in my mind. This sounds crazy, doesn’t it? You think I’m a real nut case.”

Marlene thought nothing of the kind. She was filled with an enormous tenderness for him, for his suffering, for the suffering of her brother Dom, who had also, as it happened, stepped on a mine in Vietnam, for the inarticulate grief of the men of her caste and class, from whom she was irrevocably cut off.

“No,” she said, and put her hand on his. He reached out then and put his hand behind her neck and pulled her towards him and kissed her hard on the mouth.

It was a good kiss, thought Marlene, delicate tongue action and no clacking teeth. She felt herself kissing back, felt the insistent tingle in the groin and the warm flutters. She imagined herself going somewhere with Raney, a room somewhere, taking off her clothes, lying on a bed, imagined what his body would be like, imagined spreading her thighs….

And then, almost before she was aware of it, a powerful nausea convulsed her belly. She wrenched away from him, gasped, and was violently sick out the window of the car.

“Jesus,” said Raney, in a stunned voice. “What was that all about?”

“Oh, God, I’m sorry. Oh, this is awful!” Marlene cried, tears of shame springing from her eyes. Raney reached into the glove compartment and pulled out a package of tissues. Marlene dabbed at her mouth and face.

“That’s a pretty strong reaction, Ciampi,” he said. “I been turned down before, but …”

“Oh, shit, Raney, I wasn’t, it isn’t you. I’ve been nauseous all day. I must have picked up the flu or some food poisoning. I’m sorry, but, oh shit! I don’t know what to say—let’s forget it, huh?”

He smiled and started the car. “We should call it the world’s shortest romance. OK, where’s this beauty parlor you’re going to?”

Raney duly deposited her at Vittorio’s on Sixth off Fourth Street and drove off. Normally, a hairdo was a relaxing experience for Marlene. She liked being cosseted and admired and immersed in trivia and amusing gossip. Today, however, she could not shake her irritability. She was short with her favorite hairdresser, who soon gave up his attempts to engage her, and snipped away morosely in silence. While he was blow-drying, she felt sick again and had to rush to the bathroom.

“Darling, you look wasted,” said the cutter sympathetically, when she returned. “Are you OK?”

“Yeah, fine,” said Marlene. “Hey, what’s everybody looking at?” The cashier and several waiting patrons were clustered in the doorway, looking out to the street and talking excitedly.

“Oh, the funniest thing. As soon as you left for the powder room, this absolutely enormous man came trundling in and grabbed up some hair off the floor. Yours, as a matter of fact, and then raced out.”

“What did he look like?” asked Marlene, her heart thumping.

“Oh, huge! Six-five, maybe two-ninety. Dressed in a black suit. Sort of a round head, like that guy in the Charles Addams cartoons … say, where are you going—you’re not dry yet!”

Marlene had scooped a handful of bills from her purse and flung them at the cashier and then dashed out the door and into the street. She looked up and down Sixth and then raced around the corner and checked West Fourth, but of the big man there was no sign.

Karp knew something was wrong the minute he walked into Marlene’s loft. It was just past nine and Karp had spent the last four hours arguing with the members of six different law enforcement agencies with whom he would have to coordinate his projected raid on the Bollano family’s secret castle. Then he had been soaked during his walk home by the rain that had started in the evening. He was not in a good mood, and he now suspected, as he looked around, that he was not about to be greeted in a way that might improve it.

The immense room was dark except for an eerie red glow emanating from the sleeping platform end. A sour odor hung in the still, warm air. “Marlene?” he called. No answer. He dropped his briefcase, shrugged out of his dripping suit jacket, kicked off his wet shoes and climbed the ladder to the sleeping platform.

The windows over the bed had been covered with sheets and blankets roughly tacked up. At the foot of the bed was a large stainless steel bowl, the source of the sour odor. The only light came from two small candles in red glass holders on Marlene’s vanity table. Marlene’s boudoir suite was the very one she had used during her girlhood in fifties Queens—white with flower decals. The vanity had an oval mirror and a crinoline skirt. It usually held Marlene’s large collection of Dolls of Other Lands—weird enough, Karp had always thought—but these had been displaced by the candles and an array of religious items: a small statue of Our Lady of Lourdes in luminescent white plastic, two rosaries, one black and the other amber, a pewter crucifix, and an array of scapulars, holy medals, and the colored cards bearing pictures of saints that are given to young ladies in convent schools when they have been particularly diligent.

“Hey, Marlene, what’s up? What’s wrong—are you sick, or what?” Karp addressed these questions to a lump curled up under the bedclothes. Receiving no answer he gently tugged back the covers, revealing his own cutie lying on her side with a wad of pink Kleenex as large as a cantaloupe clutched to her tear-damp face.

“Marlene, what’s wrong?” he demanded again, touching her face, which was cold and clammy.

“Nothing,” she mumbled.

“Don’t tell me ‘nothing’! You’re crying under the covers, the windows are covered up like
Great Expectations,
and this religious stuff—what, the Pope is coming to lunch?” Karp spoke lightly, but he was fighting against his worst and most secret fear: that Marlene’s porch light had finally flickered out, that she had gone from merely nutty, to nuts.

She sat up suddenly and clutched at him like a drowning child. “I just got scared being alone,” she said into his shirt.

Since Marlene had always seemed to him utterly fearless, Karp couldn’t help laughing. “You? Scared of what, for chrissake?”

“No, really, Butch! Look at this!” She rummaged under the blankets and pulled out a damp 5 by 7 photograph, which she handed to Karp. It was not a very good photograph, being pale and grainy, with a blurred cross in one corner that showed it had been taken through a small-paned window, but it was clear enough to preserve the identity of its subject, which was Marlene. She had been shot wearing her plaid flannel bathrobe and sitting in this very bed.

Karp glanced up at the covered windows, and Marlene followed his glance. “Yeah, right,” she said. “He took it through that window at night, from the roof of the building across the street.”

“Where did you get it?”

“I found it down on the street. It was wired under the drainpipe on the corner.”

“Wired … ?”

“Yeah, the water washes away the image, and the person gets sick and dies. It’s witchcraft.”

Karp snorted. “What’re you talking, witchcraft?”

“It’s true. God, Butch, I feel better now that you’re here! I was paralyzed.” She stood up and got a cigarette and then sat down next to him on the bed. She was still in the clothes she had worn to the office that day. “This afternoon a guy came into Vittorio’s and picked up a swatch of my hair, a guy, by the way, who matches the description we got of Lucy Segura’s boyfriend. The bogeyman.”

“Did you see him?”

“No, but the people in the place did. It’s the guy, Butch.”

Karp took a long breath. “Ah, Marlene … aren’t you getting a little carried away here … ?”

“I’m being hexed,” she said bluntly.

“You’re kidding!” said Karp, with a smile he didn’t feel.

“Do I look like I’m kidding? It’s working, too. Look, I haven’t been sick a day since I had chicken pox when I was ten. Now I feel like death warmed over. I’ve been vomiting continuously since I got up this morning.”

“So you’re sick—it’s the flu, or maybe food poisoning. Have you seen a doc?”

“I went to Larry downstairs. He doesn’t think it’s the flu. And how could it be food poisoning? I already puked up everything I’ve eaten for the last two weeks. Then he asked if I was maybe pregnant.” She let out a short rough laugh.

“Are you?” Karp asked casually.

“Of course not, dopey! I’m late, but I’m always a little screwed up that way. Also I got a loop in, as you know very well.”

“Yeah, but … look, Marlene, Larry downstairs is a nice guy, but he’s not a doctor.”

“He’s a nurse.”

“My point—you need to see a real doctor.”