Falsely Accused Page 10

  “The detectives told you this?” asked Stupenagel.

  “Yeah, they interviewed some professor up at Columbia. They get into a situation they can’t handle, they just check out—I mean, more than regular people.”

  “I’ve heard the theory. What do you think?”

  Clancy chewed his lip and then shrugged heavily. “Look, lady, I’m just a cop, right? What do I know?—you get all kinds in the City. The fact is, we can’t watch everybody in the cells, every minute. We don’t have the troops. And we can’t strip the prisoners buck naked, the civil liberties people would go nuts. We frisk them and take belts and laces and move them out to Central Booking as soon as we can. And the third one of these guys, he didn’t hang himself at all.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Roberto Fuentes. He just died. He went in there at eleven-ten at night. At six-thirty in the morning, when they went to wake them up for the trip down to Central, he was cold. Not a mark on him—just curled up and died. Sad. The kid was—what?— twenty-two. But …” He shrugged again and sighed. “That’s it. There’s some more detail in the report. Meanwhile …”

  He put his beer down on the table and picked up a raincoat from a chair.

  “I got to go,” he said and hoisted on the raincoat.

  She eyed the beer bottle, which lacked but a few swallows. “Not much of a party animal?”

  “Not much.”

  “My, my, a non-drinking Irishman! This is a better story than I expected. Hold the front page.”

  He smiled a tight smile. “Nice meeting you. I’ll send you that thing if you give me an address.”

  She fished a card out of her bag and handed it to him. She did not want him to leave, and not because she thought there was specific information she needed from him. There was something wrong about the vibrations she was getting from him, some blankness in the picture. Stupenagel did not expect every man in the world to come on to her. Hrcany, for example, hated her. But she expected there to be something, some response to the electrical probes she was constantly emitting via voice and look and body language. Either Clancy had some dead circuits or she was losing her touch.

  “Where are you off to?” she asked casually.

  “Work. Around the corner. I usually take the swing shift if I can get it.” He started to walk away, and she set off after him.

  “Four to twelve? Must be hard on your wife.”

  He looked at her, into her eyes, and she thought she saw something unexpected flicker behind the un-revealing blue—duplicity? Or pain.

  “As a matter of fact, it works out for us,” he said. “With the kids and all.”

  “Oh? How many do you have?”

  “Four. Joe Junior is ten, then there’s Bridie, she’s eight, Terry is six, and Patrick is two and a half.” He paused. “Patrick is a Down’s kid.”

  “Oh,” she said, “that must be rough.”

  He asked, “Want to see a picture?”

  She nodded and smiled encouragingly, and he pulled a color snapshot from his wallet. She studied it: three little snub-nosed, grinning extroverts, and a worn-looking but still pretty blond woman smiling uncertainly, holding the dough-faced baby that would never grow up. She handed it back to him, and as she did she caught on his face an odd look, almost an expression of triumph, as if he had played a card that couldn’t be trumped.

  A well-honed instinct led her to pounce. “Oh, one more thing: the detectives who arrested the boys who died—what were their names?”

  He didn’t stumble, which almost disappointed her. “Paul Jackson.”

  She wrote it down. “And … ?”

  “And his partner, John Seaver.” He started to move away again.

  “Are they here?”

  “No. I mean, I haven’t seen them. You could ask around. Look, I got to—”

  “Anything to these rumors about your guys shaking down gypsy cabbies?” she asked abruptly, her voice with a bright edge.

  Was that a thin smile as he turned away? She couldn’t tell. She experienced briefly an urge to run after Clancy, like Lois Lane on TV, grab his arm and become a pest. She quickly suppressed it; that was not her style. On the other hand, her style was not generating the usual results, In Stupenagel’s experience, men in the various macho trades were not famous for marital fidelity, and she was surprised that she had not been able to raise even a flirt from the cop. An unusual specimen, she thought, or maybe it was guilt about wifey at home with the bent kid. Or fidelity? Did that still exist? Or maybe she was losing her touch. She drained her beer and headed for the bar to eliminate that dread possibility.

  Between the two of them, Marlene and Harry Bello kept Rob Pruitt pretty well stalked. Marlene took the shift between suppertime and the small hours of the morning, so that Harry could obtain the unnaturally tiny amount of rest that he needed. Harry objected to this—there was no telling when Pruitt might turn on his tormentor—but relented when Marlene agreed to take her dog along in her car. Karp knew better than to object.

  They were not tailing Pruitt, precisely, only making sure that he understood that he was under observation. Carrie Lanin had been supplied with a new, unlisted phone, and she reported happily that she had not been bothered by the man either over its wires or by any additional personal invasions.

  Pruitt had a new car, a dingy green Toyota Corolla. When Marlene took up her station outside his building, she could see him watching it from his window or from just inside the street door of the tenement. He was waiting for another sabotage attempt, which Marlene had no intention of providing. On several occasions, she followed him on long, seemingly aimless car rides through lower Manhattan, making only desultory attempts to keep him in sight. She was not interested in where he went. When she lost him, she would just drive to Duane Street and park in front of Carrie Lanin’s loft. Often on these occasions Pruitt would come by, and then she would wave gaily, and have the pleasure of seeing him roar off with squealing tires.

  This went on for a week. Two weeks. Then Harry Bello called one evening and reported that Pruitt had started to drink heavily in a local saloon.

  “You think?” asked Marlene.

  “Your call,” said Bello.

  “Let’s do it. Say, ten.”

  Marlene fed her family and then tried to watch television with Karp, unsuccessfully. Nothing held her interest. She kept getting up and pacing, doing little meaningless errands and chores. Karp finally asked her what was wrong.

  “I have to go out,” said Marlene.

  “All right,” said Karp.

  “Not now, a little later. I’m meeting Harry.”

  Karp nodded. No news here.

  “I have to get dressed,” she said, and hurried away to the bedroom.

  No ninja look tonight. A sweet vulnerability, somewhat antique and out of fashion. Marlene had several elderly great aunts who, on each Christmas and birthday, supplied her with the sort of clothes a nice Catholic girl might be expected to wear on Queens Boulevard should 1955 ever make an appearance again. Marlene was thus able to dress herself in a white frilly blouse with a Peter Pan collar, a heavy tan wool skirt designed to conceal the lines of the body, and a white angora sweater that closed with a little gold chain. Her hair, which usually framed her face in a shaggy mane of natural curls, cut to shadow her bad eye, she now pulled back into the old schoolgirl center parting, held in place by industrial-strength plastic barrettes on either side. A dab of pale pink lipstick and a pair of round spectacles completed the image. Marlene thought she looked a lot like her cousin Angela, who was a bookkeeper for the archdiocese.

  “I’m going now,” she said, presenting herself at the door to the living room. Karp looked away from the set and cast an appraising glance at his wife.

  “Could you do ‘A Bushel and a Peck’ before you go?”

  “What?”

  “What. Okay, let’s see,” Karp remarked, “nearly every other night this past couple of weeks you slip out of here looking like Richard Widmark
going up against the Nazis, and now you look like Rosemary Clooney. Is there something going on I should know about?”

  “Not really,” she said.

  The bar was so small and crummy it hardly had a name, just a dingy white sign supplied by a mixer company and a fizzing neon that said B R. Inside, a bar ran nearly the length of the room, which was about the size and shape of a railway car. Most of the lighting, dim and reddish, came from a collection of beer company signs hung on the wall. Sitting at the bar when Marlene walked in were three Latina whores, a short, dark man in a suit of aqua crushed velvet (their business manager), a pair of deteriorated alcoholics in grimy rags, and, at the extreme end of the bar, almost invisible in the shadows, Harry Bello in his usual gray suit. The barkeep, a chubby Puerto Rican with a shaved head and a wad of hair like a toilet brush under his nose, looked up as she entered. So did the whores and the pimp. The drunks looked at their drinks, as did Bello.

  Marlene took off her raincoat, further astonishing her audience. It was not a venue that went in much for frilly blouses and white angora sweaters. She walked to one of the two round plywood tables and took a seat across from Rob Pruitt. He was drinking straight, cheap bourbon behind beer, and he stank of it across the table. He looked up woozily when Marlene sat down, and focused his eyes with some effort. Marlene noted that his clothes were soiled and his eyes were red-rimmed. Nor had he shaved in a couple of days; Marlene wished she had him in court this very minute.

  “What the fuck do you want?” said Pruitt.

  “You don’t look so hot, Rob,” Marlene replied. “I think you were a lot better off up in Alaska. I think it might be time for you to leave.”

  “You’re following me around,” he said. “You’re … and that cop, following me. I saw you.”

  “You think I’m following you, Rob? We live in the same neighborhood. We’re neighbors. Our paths cross.”

  He stared at her, his jaw working.

  “And why that accusing tone, Rob?” she asked. “Wouldn’t you like being followed? Didn’t you think Carrie liked it?”

  “I love her,” he said, his voice robotic and dull.

  “But she doesn’t love you.”

  “She loves me,” in the same tone.

  Marlene glanced at one of the beer clocks. “No, she thinks you’re a schmuck and a pest. She hates you.”

  He looked at her, his eyes narrowing. “Why are you doing this? Why are you trying to break us up?”

  “I don’t know, Robbie,” she replied lightly, “maybe because I’m obsessed with you. Maybe I want you for my very own.” She paused and then said, very carefully, “Forget her! Come to me, my darling! Only I love you as you deserve.”

  It took several seconds for it to register. Marlene thought he hadn’t gotten the point and was about to say something further, as a result of which her guard was down when Pruitt snarled and lunged at her across the table.

  He grabbed the front of her sweater with his left hand and swung a roundhouse right that landed on the side of her jaw, not a solid blow because of the clumsy angle, but hard enough to make her see red. The table went over, as did her chair. Pruitt was yelling something. He was on top of her on the beer-stinking floor, his left hand on her throat now, and his right crashing down on her mouth, this time a solid hit. She tasted blood. She tried to claw his eyes, but he knocked her hands away and struck her again as she turned her head, landing a good one on her ear. Sound vanished into ringing. His knee pressed into her chest; her breath failed and she saw his rage-distorted face begin to gray out.

  Then she heard, through the ringing, a sharp crack, a sound like a bat hitting a ball or a book falling off a table. Instantly, his weight was gone. She coughed and gasped and rolled onto her side, trying to get the air flowing again and her vision working. Blood was flowing down her chin in a steady stream. She caught a pool of it in her cupped palm and wiped it off on her white sweater, and then she pressed the satin hem of the sweater tightly against her mouth

  As the ringing faded she became aware of a grunting, shuffling noise, punctuated with meaty thuds. She struggled to a sitting position and looked around the barroom. A tableau: the patrons and the bartender frozen in place, their expressions ranging from avid to dull; at stage center Harry Bello calmly breaking Rob Pruitt to pieces with a short length of lead-loaded one-inch pipe wrapped in neoprene. Pruitt was on his knees, held up by Harry’s hand on his collar. Marlene saw at once that Pruitt’s jaw was out of line and his right wrist hung at a bad angle. As she watched, Harry’s pipe swung out in a short, precise arc and cracked his client’s collarbone. She watched him for a moment, both horrified and awed. Harry wasn’t even breathing hard. He was beating a man to death with the same effortless skill that Fred Astaire used when he began the Beguine.

  “Enough, Harry,” she croaked. She rose to her feet, trailing drops of blood and put a restraining hand on his arm. “Enough,” she said again, louder.

  He looked at her and said, “Are you okay?”

  She said, “Yeah, it’s just a cut lip. It looks worse than it feels. You better make the calls.”

  Harry nodded and let go of Pruitt’s collar. The man collapsed at her feet like a sack of golf balls. Harry cuffed him to the bar rail and went off to phone. Marlene sat down. One of the whores gave her a damp cloth. Marlene smiled thanks at her and dabbed at the dried blood. She checked the beer clock and looked at the door expectantly. Right on schedule, in walked Carrie Lanin.

  After the cops and the ambulance and the emergency room and swearing out the multiple complaints against Pruitt, it was two-thirty before Marlene walked into the loft. They’d cleaned up her face and put a few stitches into her mouth, but she was turning interesting colors. Her lip looked like a raw Italian sausage, her outfit like a butcher’s apron.

  Unfortunately, Karp had dozed off in front of the TV, and was awakened by her return.

  “Jesus Christ, Marlene… !”

  “I don’t want to hear about it, not tonight,” she said, moving past him toward the bedroom. He followed close behind.

  “Wait! What the hell … ?”

  “I’m okay, I’m not badly hurt, I’ve been to the emergency room …”

  “But what happened?”

  She stripped off the gory angora and blouse and tossed them into a corner. “It was Pruitt. I went to meet Carrie, he followed her, we went into a bar, he followed us in and he jumped me.”

  Marlene was stripping off her filthy skirt as she uttered this whopper, the official tale she had concocted and sworn to, and had her back to Karp, so she did not observe the expression on his face as he took it in. She would have been dismayed to have seen it.

  “And … ?” he said.

  She slipped into a robe and turned to face him. “And what? Harry was backing me up and he arrested Pruitt. He’s in jail now. Look, it hurts when I talk, and I want to take a hot bath—can the interrogation wait?”

  “No, it can’t,” said Karp, blocking the door. “Let me understand this. This guy comes strolling into a bar where you and his girlfriend are sitting and just cracks you in the face? And your tame cop is just standing by waiting to arrest him? Do I have this right? Why did he hit you?”

  “Why?” cried Marlene on a rising note. “Because he’s a nut, that’s why. He thinks I’m standing in the way of true love. We were just talking and—”

  “Oh, horseshit, Marlene! You set this up. You concocted a trap for this bozo to generate an assault charge and a probation violation. And you’re going to go to court and swear to a pack of lies to put him away, aren’t you?”

  Karp’s voice had risen to a shout, and Marlene unconsciously retreated a step.

  “He belongs in a cell,” she snarled through clenched teeth. “What do you want? For me to wait until he kidnaps her, or rapes her, or murders her? He’s a stalker, for Christ’s sake!”

  “Right, and who’re you?” Karp yelled. “God almighty? Deciding who gets put away, who’s the unacceptable risk?”

&
nbsp; “Oh, you know, I can’t stand you when you get this self-righteous attitude. Like you never cut a corner in your life to nail some scumbag.”

  He stared at her and she at him for a long moment. Then he said, slowly and carefully, “You don’t fucking understand, do you? There’s a difference, Marlene. I cut corners, you’re a felon.”

  The word hung in the air like sewer gas. Karp turned and left the bedroom. She heard his heavy steps and the slam of the little guest room door.

  SEVEN

  Karp was gone by the time Marlene awakened the next morning, which she did not at all mind. She looked blearily at the clock and uttered a small shriek of alarm. Fifteen minutes to get ready and off to school. She sat up quickly and let out another shriek, of pain this time. It felt as though the flesh were being wrenched from her face with a dull spatula. In the bathroom she took one look at the Technicolor glory of her face and completed the rest of her toilette with her eye averted.

  Lucy gave no trouble about being jammed by brute force into her clothes and eating her breakfast (banana and bran muffin to go) as she did not want to rile the angry and hideous stranger who had mysteriously replaced her mom during the night.

  “Aren’t we picking up Miranda?” the child asked meekly, when it had become clear that they were heading directly for P.S. 1.