Irresistible Impulse (6 page)

Marlene’s car, a bright yellow VW square-back of a certain age, was parked in a nearby alley. Her family was waiting around it as she approached, Karp carrying a kid on each hip, a briefcase dangling from a hooked finger, Lucy hunched and sullen. First a little peek at the telltale tiny magnets she’d left on the hood and all the doors, to make sure some naughty person had not left an explosive device. This done, they strapped the twins into their tiny astronaut seats, and Marlene said the little prayer she always said that the car would once again start. Answered. She drove Karp to the courthouse and Lucy to school, and then herself to Walker Street and work. She unbuckled the twins and hauled them out of the car, using the convenient handles of their carapace-like car seats. They were both snoozing, simultaneously for a wonder; they usually alternated naps, to make sure that nothing important escaped their joint eye. She staggered up the stairs to her office with one in each arm and her purse draped fetchingly around her neck, reflecting for the millionth time that rearing twins was not twice, but four times, as hard as rearing one child.

Marlene had now been up for over forty-five minutes without either coffee or a cigarette, and so it was with gratitude that she beheld the face of Sym, who ordinarily supplied her with the morning’s first hit of both.

“Coffee’s ready,” said Sym when Marlene came in, which is what she always said, and pushed forward her pack of Marlboro Lights so that her boss could take one. In the office Marlene pretended not to have cigarettes of her own, as she had officially stopped smoking.

Marlene plopped the car seats on the floor and poured herself a mug of dripped Medaglia D’Oro, tarry black, drank a grateful dose, and lit up.

“You got messages,” said Sym. “Tamara says she don’t want to go to court today. And some lady want us to whack her old man.”

Marlene laughed. “What, she just called up, like L.L. Bean, I want to order a hit, size XL? Did you get her VISA?”

“I told her we didn’t do like that,” said Sym primly. “Also this lady name Edith Wooten called again. I wrote it down.”

Marlene took the message slip and looked closely at the girl. Sym tended to be morose, which many visitors interpreted as hostility, but today she looked as if she was holding something in, or rather, that she was holding in even more than you might expect to be held in by a girl raped at age twelve and turned out as a whore by her daddy.

“Anything wrong, Sym? He hasn’t been bothering you again?”

“Nah. It ain’t, it
isn’t
me.”

“Who, then? Posie?”

A tiny shrug, which would have to do in place of a deposition. It was Posie, but Sym was not going to rat her roommate out.

“Okay, Sym, I’ll take care of it.” Marlene picked up the twins and headed for the door, which buzzed and clicked. In a low voice, to the closing door, Sym said, “You look real nice today, Marlene.” She was in love, something Marlene would never see and Sym would never reveal.

Marlene took the twins to the playroom and placed them on the rug. Posie came in from the kitchen, barefoot, in ragged jeans and an old sweatshirt of Marlene’s. She beamed at Marlene and the twins.

“They’re sleeping!” she said, as if it were a scientific discovery.

Marlene’s answering smile was stiff. “Yes, lucky you. Look, Posie, we need to talk about you running men in here at night.”

“Oh, no, Marlene, I wouldn’t do that,” replied Posie, lying with crystalline transparency.

“Yeah, you did. Look, kiddo, I don’t mind what you do on your off time, which is nearly every night and most weekends. Go ahead, knock yourself out, get laid, whatever. But not here. Who was it? Luke again?”

Posie had, as far as Marlene was able to observe, only two emotional states: beaming, all-encompassing love and mulish withdrawal. She now flicked into the latter. “Uh-huh, no,” she replied, hanging her head so that her long, lank black hair partially hid her face.

“Posie, listen to me. Our job is to protect women from men who want to get at them, just like when Luke was pounding on you—we protected you, we gave you a job and a place to stay. You pick up guys on the street, they could be anybody. They could get into our records, copy keys, burn the place down. It’s a breach of security.”

Ah, a third state: confused alarm. “Aw, Marlene, Luke wouldn’t do nothing like that!” Posie protested, and then blushed and stammered, “I mean—I mean, if he was here. Not that I saw him or anything.”

“Posie, not only did you see him, but you smoked dope with him.”

“Uh-uh!”

“Oh, for crying out loud, Posie, I can smell it on your clothes. No, just be quiet and listen to me. I told you, I don’t care what you do on the outside, although I can’t believe you’re seeing that little shit again—”

“He was nice to me, Marlene. No kidding! He’s really changed. He got a job and all—”

“… that
little shit
again, unless you want to give him a shot at knocking the rest of your teeth out, but not here. Never again, Posie, I mean it! And no dope here either.”

The twins started to wake, whining. Marlene walked out as Posie’s pathetic excuses and apologies blended with their more appropriately infantile wails. She looked into Harry Bello’s office and found him on the phone. Waving a greeting, she went into her own cubicle, took off her coat, sat down, lusted for another cigarette, regretted yelling at Posie, yearned for a child-care worker who was not a street person, felt guilty about this, briefly considered the alternatives (sullen third-world types, day-care centers with restrictive hours), dismissed these, thought about how marvelous Posie was ninety-nine percent of the time, sighed, and dialed the number Sym had written down.

The voice that answered was light and youthful sounding, decked with the long, multi-toned vowels favored by the New York upper crust and made famous by the late FDR and his Mrs. (Yea-es? How gooo-od of you to cah-all!)

Marlene inquired as to why Ms. Wooten required the services of a security firm.

“Well. As to that, Ms. Ciampi, I would rather not discuss it on the phone. But, briefly, I have been getting disturbing letters. And other tokens.”

“This is someone you know?”

“No. It’s, um, I suppose one could call him a fan.”

“You’re a performer?” asked Marlene, and then mentally kicked herself for not finding out who Edith Wooten was before calling. There was a pause on the line, and then the voice, which now was tinged with amusement.

“Yes, I am. Do you suppose you could visit me at my home. I have quite a busy schedule and—”

“No problem, Ms. Wooten,” said Marlene quickly. She got an address on Park in the seventies and ended the call.

She immediately punched in a familiar number, one that, if answered, would connect her with the only person in her acquaintance who might conceivably know someone with that sort of voice at that sort of address.

“V.T.? Marlene.”

“Hello, Marlene,” said Vernon Talcott Newbury. “This is remarkable. I am abandoned by the Karp clan for weeks on end, and now I get calls from both of the principals in one day. I have a message from Butch. Is this about the same thing?”

“I doubt it, V.T. This is a private thing. I was wondering if you knew the name Edith Wooten.”

A laugh. “You need to get out more, dear. This is the cultural capital of the world, you know.”

“I know. I took Lucy to see
The Great Muppet Caper
just last week. Who is she?”

“Ah, well, where to begin? She’s a Wooten, of course, of the Wooten Island Wootens. Only two privately owned islands in the Sound, the Gardiners have one and they have the other. Her mother’s a Temple, of the Sag Harbor Temples. Her brother, who I think is named Rad or Had, went to Harvard with Foley Maynard, who—”

Marlene interrupted. V.T. could go on. “She’s a friend of yours?”

“Not a friend, exactly. She went to Brearley with my cousin Sniff, though, I think for a couple of years, and then switched to Juilliard; she was probably about twelve or thirteen. You really don’t know who she is?”

“
A
musician obviously. I doubt it’s rock and roll.”

“Quite. Well, I’m no expert, but Mother, who is on the Philharmonic board, says she’s another Jacqueline Du Pre, potentially in a class with Rostropovich. I’m sorry, maybe those don’t ring any bells either?”

“Don’t be snide, V.T., I’m just a dumb guinea from Ozone Park. So she’s a cellist, huh?”

“Yes. Why the interest?”

“Oh, just checking something. Anything else about her? She married?”

“No, but she’s not more than, say, twenty-four. She’s Ginnie Wooten’s sister, of course.”

“Of course. V.T., who the fuck is Ginnie Wooten?”

“You do need to get out more, Marlene. She was on
Life
once. The Avedon shot, buried in sand, tits sticking out, with the sweat?”

A vague memory tugged. Like most native working New Yorkers, Marlene did not pay much attention to the antics of celebrities, most of whom were out-of-towners who came to the City to get famous, got famous, and then disappeared like the dirty snow on its streets.

“That’s it? She’s a model?”

“Not quite. A professional naughty, Ginnie, like what’s her name in the sixties—Edie Sedgwick. Screws artists and rock stars, a major supporter of the pharmaceutical industry, like that. So, my curiosity is boiling over. What’s going on?”

“It will have to turn into steam, then, dear. Thanks a million for the info. I owe you a Coke.”

Marlene put the phone down and went into Harry’s office.

“You still mad at me?”

Harry looked at her and shook his head, a millimetric negative. Harry Bello was fifty-seven going on ninety, a solid, cylindrical Italian-American man with a tan, wrinkled face like a grocery bag left out for a month in the sun and rain. His eyes, deeply socketed, were still, black, holding no hope, void of compassion. A hard case, Harry. He didn’t drink anymore, but on the other hand, as far as Marlene knew, he had not done any of the Twelve Steps either. Harry had until recently been a detective with the N.Y.P.D. There are around four thousand of these, of whom somewhat over a hundred occupy the highest rank, detective first grade. Harry Bello had been one of them, elite of the elite, for which reason, when Harry’s wife had contracted a particularly miserable form of cancer, and Harry had started to drink heavily, and been drunk when his partner of fifteen years had gone into a building alone on a routine canvass and been killed, and Harry had drunkenly hunted down and executed a kid who may or may not have been the murderer, the Department had pulled a cloak over the affair and assigned Harry to a meaningless job and waited for him to drink himself to death or eat his gun. At that point, however, Marlene had casually extended a hand, which Harry, for reasons Marlene had never quite understood, had gripped with a dead man’s grip. Harry was Lucy’s godfather, a role he took with sometimes frightening seriousness, as if this antique commitment represented his sole remaining link with the human community, a reason for not becoming in actuality what he often resembled around the eyes, a corpse. During the period when he had worked for Marlene at the D.A.’s Rape Bureau, they had called him the Doberman. Before that, when he was still a cop, he was known as Dead Harry.

Meanwhile, there was that remarkable brain at Marlene’s disposal, and a protective will that, while focused mainly on Lucy, spread its penumbra also over the mother, in a way that often pinched, as now.

She said, “I don’t see why we should change anything, Harry. Honestly, you worry too much. We’re doing okay.”

“Marlene, I went over this,” said Harry in his tired voice. “Domestics are poison. Either you got some guys want to whack out their women decide to punch your ticket while they’re at it, or you keep on trying to reason with the same kind of guys, and things heat up, and you whack
them
out, which puts you up in Bedford on a felony.”

“None of that has happened, Harry.”

“You don’t have cancer either, but I notice you’re trying to quit smoking. I’m thinking of the kid here, Marlene. Leave that kind of shit to the cops, is what I’m saying. That’s what they get paid for.”

“God, between you and my husband!” Marlene cried. “Okay, you want out? You’re getting nervous in your old age? Good! I’ll work it by myself.”

Harry held up a mollifying hand. “Marlene, I didn’t say that. Look, this is getting to be a broken record. I got no problem with the protection program. Tennis players, the loonies and the celebrities, fine, okay. The others, help with protection orders, moving them into apartments, the shelters. You want to keep doing that, we can handle it. It’s a business. But …” Here he paused.

“But,
what
, Harry?”

“No more setups. That’s out. And no more Polaroids on the assholes.”

Marlene took a deep breath. Another. “Okay, fine, Harry, you made your point. I won’t involve you.”

Harry stared at her for a moment and then nodded once. He
had
made his point, and Marlene would do what she was going to do. She might keep doing setups, which was where she used a stalked woman as bait and when the stalker came after her, armed, performed the justifiable homicide, which was the only way to make sure some (admittedly, a small fraction) of men engaged in this activity would never do it again. Or she might still get some other people she knew to pay visits to guys who pounded their wives, and show the guys Polaroids of what the women looked like at the emergency room and then work them over so that they looked just exactly like the Polaroids. But he thought it would slow her down, at least. He was thinking of Lucy.

Karp had expected Roland Hrcany to blow up when he told him that he, not Roland, would do the Rohbling case, and he was not disappointed. Crying, “Why!” Roland sprang from his chair and slammed his hands down on Karp’s desk, beetling his brows, rolling his mighty shoulders, bulging his seventeen-inch neck, tightening his jaw, exhibiting, in fact, the full repertoire of anthropoid male aggression, and causing him to resemble a blond gorilla even more than he normally did.

“Sit down, Roland,” said Karp in a calming voice. He had seen the display before.