Reversible Error Read online

  “Yeah. Fine.”

  “Light duty, huh?”

  “OK, OK, OK,” she gasped. “It was a screwup. I didn’t think it would go down like this.”

  “Yeah, well, it happens. By the way, that was quite a shot to the nuts. Characteristic, if I may say so.”

  “Thanks, Raney,” said Marlene sourly. “Hey, can I borrow your jacket? My tits are hanging out here.” Raney shrugged it off and she slipped into it, grateful for its warmth as well as the protection it afforded from the gapers in the small crowd that had gathered around them.

  Raney stood up and helped Marlene to her feet. She recovered her shoe and leaned against him to put it on. She was still wobbly and dizzy with adrenaline and fatigue. Raney said, “Look, we got to call this in.” He pulled a card out of his wallet. “There’s a booth on Madison and 66th. Call this number. Ask to talk to Detective Franklin. When you get him, explain the situation and tell him we need a blue-and-white and a bus.”

  “A bus?”

  “Yeah, you know, an ambulance. Hey, are you sure you’re OK?”

  “Uh-huh. Just a little shook.”

  “OK, then meet me at the two-oh and we’ll book him. What’s the charge, do you think?”

  Marlene sighed. “Better make it possession for now.”

  “Possession? What’re you talking about? I thought this was the Wagner killer.”

  “It is. I think. But my witness never got a look at him and I don’t know him from Adam. He just fit what we were looking for, in general. Meanwhile, he offered me coke in the place there, and he tossed a vial during the chase. You should find it in the street. It’s enough to hang on to him with until I can get JoAnne there and ID him.”

  “Holy shit, Marlene!” Raney yelled. “You mean to fuckin’ tell me—”

  “Don’t, Raney. It’ll work out OK—trust me. Let me make that call now. You got a quarter?”

  The guy was loaded and shipped, leaving a small round bloodstain on the sidewalk. The cops found the vial the guy had dumped, half-full of white powder. Raney and Marlene walked back to Tangerines in silence.

  The noise of an excited crowd greeted them when they were half a block away from the club. Marlene buttonholed a chubby young woman in a fringed white dress.

  “What’s going on?”

  “It’s crazy!” the woman replied. “Some chick with a big knife got this guy cornered in the hallway by the John. She’s yelling he raped her and she’s gonna cut his business off. It’s wild! I’m going home to watch it on TV.”

  Marlene felt a thrill of despair. “What kind of woman?” she croaked weakly. “A blond in a dark tent dress?”

  “Yeah, frosted blond. But it was a wig. She pulled it off and threw it at the guy. It was just like the movies!”

  The woman hurried off down the street. Marlene started to run toward Tangerines, but Raney grabbed her arm.

  “Marlene, what the fuck is happening?” he cried.

  “It’s JoAnne. My witness.” She broke away from him and trotted heavily down the street to the club, her belly roiling, her heart popping against her breastbone. Fifty or so people were milling around outside and more were flowing out of the door. Marlene pushed vainly against the tide. Raney caught up with her, put his arm around her, hoisted her up on his hip, and, waving his shield and shouting, “Police! Coming through!” forced their way into the bar.

  Someone had turned the cleaning lights on, giving the interior of Tangerines the charm of a raddled whore at noon: stained carpet, rusty tin ceiling, overturned chairs and tables, pools of spilled drinks and melting ice. Marlene and Raney moved along the length of the deserted bar, broken glass and ice cubes crunching under their feet.

  In the corridor leading to the rest rooms stood three men, two large in white shirts and bow ties, one small in a sports jacket. Raney approached the jacket, flashed his shield, and said, “Police. What’s going on?”

  The jacket backed out of the way and pointed down the corridor. “Bitch is crazy, man. She took this guy hostage. We haven’t been able to get near her—she’s got a fuckin’ sword in there.”

  Raney and Marlene both looked where he was pointing. JoAnne Caputo was crouched in the corridor. She was muttering and snarling at a man cringing a few feet from her, backed into the corridor’s dead end. In her right hand she held a K-bar knife, Marine issue, which she waved and poked at the man. Marlene noted with horror that the man bore a striking resemblance to the guy they had just arrested. He was bleeding from several cuts on the arm and his face was drawn and frightened.

  “Yeah, I see,” said Raney. “You the manager?” he asked the sports jacket.

  “Yeah. You gonna shoot her?”

  “No, I don’t think so. You called the police? Good. Look, take your people and clear the area. If any more cops show, send them back here.”

  The manager seemed relieved and did as he was told. When they were alone, Marlene said, “Raney, let me talk to her.”

  “Uh-uh. This is police business. You oughta wait outside.”

  “Bullshit!” cried Marlene, and moved toward the corridor. Raney stuck his arm out to block her, but at that moment heavy steps sounded in the bar and a TV crew—camera with blazing lights, a soundman, and an intrepid local news reporter—came charging in.

  “Get out of here! Are you crazy?” shouted Raney at the crew.

  Marlene used this distraction to break away from the detective. JoAnne too had turned at the sounds. The TV light dazzled her. She held up her free hand to shield her eyes. She saw someone coming toward her out of the halo of unbearable light. She struck out wildly with the knife, felt it catch in something, heard the ripping of fabric. She saw a face inches from her own, a familiar face. She tried to shake the fog of a dozen drinks out of her mind. Arms wrapped around her, pulling her close to a body slick with sweat, a woman’s body.

  “JoAnne!” a voice cried. “It’s Marlene! It’s OK, you got him. It’s over.” JoAnne Caputo started to wail, horrible screeching cries, the violation of the body at last finding its own voice. Marlene held her, swaying, saying inane and calming things into her ear. The big knife clunked on the floor.

  She saw the guy come out of his corner, saw him run past, heard curses and the crash of bodies. She looked over her shoulder and saw Raney wrestle him to the ground. Suddenly the place was full of cops. It was over, but only in real life. There was still the television.

  THIRTEEN

  Karp was sitting in the darkened living-room section of the loft, staring at the gray flicker of a late movie, when Marlene crawled in at two A.M. He looked up bleakly as she entered.

  “Are you going to say, ‘Where have you been, young lady?’” she asked.

  “No,” said Karp. “I’m not your father. And I know where you’ve been. It was on the late news.”

  “Ah, shit!” cried Marlene. She went to the cupboard and brought out a bottle of red wine and a glass, filled it, lit a cigarette, and threw herself down on a rocking chair, facing Karp. She was still wearing Raney’s jacket, its lining hanging out where the blade had slashed it.

  “So. How did I look?” she asked belligerently.

  Karp shrugged. “Like everybody else on TV. Like an asshole.”

  “We got the guy,” she said.

  “That’s nice, Marlene,” said Karp flatly, still staring at the screen.

  She finished her wine in two gulps and put the glass down on the old door set on concrete blocks that served the loft as a coffee table. She clutched the jacket more tightly around her. “That’s it? No congratulations on a job well done from my leader?”

  “No. Because it’s not your job. It’s not your job to go running around after suspects. It’s not your job to tackle crazy women waving knives—”

  “She was my witness and she’s not crazy.”

  Karp brought his fist violently down on the coffee table, bouncing it askew and toppling the glass. The dregs of the wine spilled over the white surface like blood from a wound. “Shut up!” he
shouted. “Don’t argue with me! Don’t make excuses! This isn’t fucking court! I’m not your goddamn parole officer.”

  “I knew you’d do this,” she snarled. “You can’t stand it when I’m not a good little girl. Well, if you’d gotten off your ass and gone to bat for me with the cops, I wouldn’t’ve had to chase the fucking bastard down myself.”

  Karp was up on his feet, facing her, screaming. “What the fuck are you talking about! I did go to the cops. And what the hell does that have to do with anything? Don’t you get it? Even PW’s go on light duty when they get pregnant! You could have lost the baby!”

  Marlene shot up too, knocking the rocker backward. Their faces were inches apart. “Oh, that’s what it is. The baby!”

  “You don’t think I should be concerned?” Karp cried. “This is the second time this year that you’ve got yourself involved in a situation that required you to run around the streets with your clothes off because you insist on being Nancy fucking Drew and the girl commandos. And you promised me, you swore to me that you would take it easy. And then you go on this … I don’t know … crusade—it’s insane when you’re carrying a child.”

  “There it is! Not me, not what I want, just your precious bloodline. Well, fuck you, Jack, and fuck the baby too! You think I’m gonna sit on my butt and knit booties and smile like the Mona Lisa for the rest of my life? Think again! I’m gonna live my own life exactly as I please. And that includes doing whatever I have to do to get my job done, as I decide. Not you, and not some fetus. It’ll have to take its chances, the same as everybody else in this goddamn city.”

  “What job? You don’t have a job after next week,” Karp shouted.

  “Oh, yes I do! I’m gonna take this case down to the wire.”

  “You can’t! You’re out!”

  “No, I’m not. I get to stay for continuing cases, and this guy is the same guy who’s been doing the rapes I’ve been working on for months, so it’s the same case.”

  Karp opened his mouth to speak, to scream in fact, but was suddenly affected by a feeling of inutility and despair. He sank back on the couch, shaking his head. “I can’t believe it,” he said. “You’re crazy. Out of your fucking mind.”

  “I’m always ‘crazy’ when I don’t do what you want.”

  “Right, Marlene,” Karp said with a sigh. “Whatever you say.”

  “Now you’re going to get all depressed for days,” said Marlene. “I wish one time we could just have a good fight and clear the air.” She shucked out of the jacket, stuffed her rags of shirt into the trash, and vanished behind the screen that divided the living area from the bathing tank.

  Karp had averted his eyes from her nakedness. What Marlene wanted, he knew, was a slam-bang battle, including blows, a long blubbering cry, and a good fuck to top it off. Karp wondered why he couldn’t do it. But he could not; some deep knot of resistance to such a release tied him into this angry passivity. He was right and she was wrong.

  Karp’s parents had never fought, that he remembered. Father knew best. He laid down the law. Mom smiled bravely under the cold and sarcastic logic with which he did so, right up to the doors of death. Maybe she cried secretly, her head jammed under two pillows. Did he remember that?

  Karp got up, drank a glass of water at the kitchen sink, and slipped into his sneakers. Marlene was splashing and humming to herself in the bath. Humming! She was fine. He was left holding the bag, the anger, the sense of betrayal. Karp muttered a curse and walked out, slamming the door behind him.

  He knew he would walk the streets until three-thirty in the morning, wondering whether the next thirty years were going to be like this, feeling angry at, and sorry for, himself at the same time. And he knew he would crawl back between the sheets with Marlene and hope for it all to have blown over by the morning, or the next day, or the next. In any case, in the morning he could at least go to work and take it all out on the felons.

  Roland Hrcany was not ordinarily sympathetic to the struggles of the younger ADA’s. Like Karp, he had been bred in a hard school by the old guys of the former Homicide Bureau; unlike Karp, he saw no reason why he shouldn’t give back what he had got, with interest. He was, in fact, the very last of the senior attorneys to whom a rookie would go for advice and counsel, so that the presence of Peter Schick in his office, wanting to talk, aroused his curiosity, if not his sympathy.

  “So,” he said, leaning back and cocking one foot up on his desk. “You’re here. Spit it out. By the way, you look like shit.”

  Schick flushed and grimaced. “Yeah, well, I guess I’m not sleeping too good. Um, I don’t know exactly how to put this, but, um, it’s driving me up the wall. It’s this drug-killings task force …”

  “Yeah? What about it?”

  “Well, there was a meeting this morning. Manning was talking about how they couldn’t find this witness, Booth, and that he had information from a reliable informant that Clay Fulton was involved in the disappearance. You know they saw him leaving the scene of the attempted homicide?”

  “Yeah, I heard. So what did Bloom say?”

  “He got all excited,” Schick said. “He wanted a full-scale investigation started on Fulton. And he kind of looked at Karp real hard, because he knows that Karp is, like, close to Fulton and he always defends him. But this time Karp just shrugged and said he’d set it up.

  “Then, later, I went to him and asked him how we were going to proceed on the Fulton thing, and he said to forget it, he was just blowing smoke. Then I asked him about Booth and what he thought about the Fulton connection, and he said he didn’t think there was anything in it.”

  “But you think there is?” asked Hrcany.

  Schick looked away, embarrassed. “Yeah, I know there is. Um, that’s why I had to talk to somebody about it. Before I went to Karp. I mean, I’m way over my head here.”

  “So, talk! Why do you know there’s a connection?”

  “Because I saw it. Last Friday, when we were all playing ball in the park—a couple of us were hitting fungoes, just farting around, you know, a little bombed. Somebody got off a good shot and the ball went into the woods along the left-field line. I went into the woods looking for the ball. So I came over this little rise, I’m down on my hands and knees looking, and I lift my head over the bushes and I can see the path and a bench in front of some rocks. About twenty yards away, Karp is sitting on the bench with a black guy, and I look again and I see it’s Booth.”

  “How did you know it was him?”

  “For cryin’ out loud, Roland! I’ve been practically sleeping with the guy’s jacket for the past month. It was him. I wasn’t close enough to hear what they were saying, but after a while Karp gives Booth something, like a little envelope, and Booth gets up and walks away. Then Karp yells out something and Fulton comes out from behind some rocks. Fulton’s got a tape recorder. They sit down and listen to the tape and talk for a little while, and then they shake hands and walk away.”

  Hrcany was staring directly at Schick as he related this, and after he fell silent the intensity of the pale-blue gaze did not diminish. Schick met it uncomfortably, swallowing hard. After some moments of this, Hrcany seemed satisfied. He considered himself an expert on lying and was convinced that the younger man was relating the truth. He nodded and pursed his thin lips. “So. What’s your take on all this, Schick? What’s Karp doing?”

  “I don’t know. I think he’s protecting Fulton—that’s the general plan. What he’s doing with Booth …” He shrugged helplessly. “Like I said, it’s way over my head.”

  Hrcany dropped his foot and sat upright. “Yeah, it is. OK, I’ll take it from here. You know to keep quiet about this.”

  Schick nodded. Relieved of his burden, he felt like a new man. “Um, if I can help—” he began.

  Hrcany made a dismissive gesture. “Yeah, I’ll call you. Meanwhile, you keep in touch if you learn anything else in the same line.”

  After Schick had left, Hrcany sat awhile in thought, occupying himse
lf by lifting the front of his desk off the floor, in a series of slow curls, stretching the fabric of his shirt across his coconut-hard biceps until it creaked. Hrcany considered himself Karp’s friend, as friends were counted in his bleak view of human nature at the New York D.A.’s office: someone you could depend on most of the time and who would probably apologize if he screwed you unusually hard.

  Hrcany, in fact, admired Karp, and the people that Hrcany admired comprised a very small club. Karp was the only criminal lawyer in the D.A.’s office that Hrcany considered his peer, and perhaps, if he were to be completely honest, something more than a peer—the best.

  His admiration was, however, crusted with just the faintest patina of contempt; Karp was a great lawyer, sure, but after all, something of a Boy Scout, not enough of a street fighter. There was the problem. That Karp had not told him about what he was running with Booth and Fulton, that he had, as it now appeared, maneuvered, manipulated, Hrcany out of the drug task force so that he could put a raw know-nothing in there and thus become free to play whatever game he was playing, disturbed Hrcany more than he was willing to admit. It struck him at the heart of his own self-esteem—his status as resident master of dirty pool.

  He did not, of course, wish to hurt Karp in any way. Karp was a buddy. But if someone flicked you with a wet towel in the locker room, you had to flick him back. Hrcany reached for the phone.

  He dialed the number of the Twenty-eighth Precinct and talked briefly. Then he hung up and dialed the Thirty-second. He talked with two cops there. An interesting picture started to emerge. He made a few more calls. Hrcany knew cops. More to the point, he had stuff on a lot of cops, small stuff, most of it, but enough, in the atmosphere of paranoia that had affected the NYPD after the Knapp corruption scandals, to give Hrcany a way to get information that few men outside the department were able to acquire.

  After the fourth call, he stretched, again flexed his collection of large muscles, and studied the yellow sheets of legal bond he had covered with notes. His technique had been simple. What about this Fulton, I hear he’s real dirty. You heard that too? I hear you used to hang around with him. No? Good. Who’s he hanging with, then?