Falsely Accused Page 9

  “You were a D.A. It was your job. Now what is it? Your hobby?”

  Marlene’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “Excuse me, was that a put-down? Was that delivered in a how-silly-you-little-woman-you manner?”

  “Oh, come on, Marlene, don’t start—” began Karp, regretting the fatal words.

  “Because if it was, if that’s going to be your attitude, then I will no longer inform you about what I’m doing. Is that what you want?”

  “No, of course not,” said Karp automatically, “but …”

  “But what?”

  “It’s just … I’m sorry, I worry about you. It’s natural, isn’t it? It’s in the genes or something. Men worry about their wives when they’re pregnant.”

  “Ah, the Pleistocene argument, very good,” snarled Marlene, and then, seeing his expression, she softened and touched his arm. “Okay, you’re worried, but I can take care of myself, as you very well know, and I’ll be with a heavily armed and extremely competent cop. Jeez, Butch, old ladies from the League of Women Voters get to ride with cops nowadays. It’s no big thing.”

  Karp nodded, resignedly, and forced his face into a stiff mask that might have been taken as agreeable by anyone other than his wife. “Sure,” he said, and afterward, not being able to help himself, he asked, “Why is Harry doing this? I thought the case was closed. I mean, there’s no investigation …”

  “That’s right,” said Marlene cheerfully. “Technically, we’re illegally harassing a citizen. You going to turn us in?”

  Karp rolled his eyes and put his hands over his ears and walked out of the kitchen.

  Marlene went to the bedroom and pulled a seaman’s sweater over her T-shirt and tied black high-top Converses on her feet. She caught her hair up in a rubber band and pulled a dark blue wool watch cap over it. A short black leather coat completed the outfit.

  She went back to the kitchen, searched briefly, and took a bottle out of the grocery cabinet and stuck it in her coat pocket. She checked on Lucy, who was sleeping heavily in her typical running-at-full-tilt position. Marlene pulled the kicked-off pink quilt over the child, kissed her forehead, and went out.

  She stuck her head through the living room door. “See you later, Butch,” she said.

  Karp looked up from the papers he had spread on his lap and the couch around him, his face lit oddly by the muted television. He took in Marlene’s costume and shook his head. “You forgot the cape,” he said.

  She stuck her tongue out at him and left. As soon as she was on the stairs she felt the familiar sense of release, the tingling in her limbs, the expansion of her lungs, that she had felt when, as a proper Catholic schoolgirl in Queens she had climbed out her bedroom window at night to meet bad boys.

  Of course, she was not meeting a boy now, or a lover of any age. It would never have occurred to Marlene to violate her marriage vows—well, occurred, yes, but not actually to follow through. And in the old days, what she had been after down the family drainpipe was not precisely sex, although that was fascinating, but risk. And not merely risk, because she had never been one for simple daredevilry. She had no interest in say, skydiving, or motorcycle racing. No, it had to be prohibited risk, risk in the teeth of decent expectations.

  It had started, really, at age twelve, she reflected on the stairway, when an aunt had escorted her and a group of cousins to the famous off-Broadway production of Threepenny Opera. By the end of the show, St. Teresa of Avila had been eclipsed by Pirate Jenny as Marlene’s ideal of womanhood. She had purchased the cast recording, and then the German version, and for the next few months she made everyone around her sick of Brecht and Weill. She found herself now humming Jenny’s song about the pirate ship and then, as she reached the last landing, singing the chorus in a loud voice with a fairly accurate Lotte Lenya accent.

  She laughed to herself, thinking that it had worked out more literally than she might have liked. She could wear a pirate’s patch for real now, and had the letter bomb that destroyed her eye and maimed her hand been a little more powerful, she might have been sporting an actual hook.

  She let the big steel door slam behind her and walked out onto the damp and chilly street. There she paused, sucking in the night through flared nostrils. Marlene had long since given up the hope of leading a life that made conventional sense, settling instead for one with two irreconcilable but complementary modes: the Good Mom Desperado, not, she thought, a character much to be seen in opera. Or life. A woman must have everything—that was also a line from a song, she thought, as it flashed through her head. Joni Mitchell. I’m trying to, she thought.

  Marlene made her way up Grand to Paglia’s restaurant. When she had first moved to this neighborhood, the place had on most nights been full of local Italians and cops from the old police headquarters down the street. Now it had become SoHo-ized, like most of the places in the area. There was a maitre d’ and a line of elegant couples waiting for seats. Marlene pushed past these to the bar, where she found Harry Bello waiting, staring blankly at a club soda.

  Marlene sat on a stool beside him and ordered the same, wishing, not for the first time, that fetuses enjoyed booze. When it came, she finished it in a few gulps and said, “You up for this?”

  Harry ignored the question. “He’s out.”

  “Driving?”

  “Eating. A Spanish joint on C.”

  “You know where his car’s at?”

  Harry nodded.

  They paid and left. On impulse Marlene swiped a big white chrysanthemum from the large vase in the restaurant’s entranceway.

  They waited in Harry’s old Plymouth and watched Rob Pruitt walk down Seventh Street to where he’d parked his blue Dodge. He got in and cranked it up and drove off.

  “What do you figure, a quarter mile?” asked Bello.

  “Maybe less, but after it happens he’ll probably futz around for a while trying to fix it. Let’s go.”

  They left the car and entered a tenement building. Pruitt lived in the front apartment on the third floor. Harry picked the lock in two minutes, and they went in.

  The apartment was simply furnished and remarkably clean and neat. Pruitt had obviously patronized several of the many used- and unpainted-furniture stores in the neighborhood. He owned a gold velvet easy chair and a scarred thirteen-inch TV on a battered tin stand, and a table, chairs, and chest of drawers in unpainted pine. He slept on a box spring and mattress, neatly made up with gray military surplus blankets. The closet and drawers held an odd combination of worn work clothes and brand-new dressy casuals, many with the store labels still attached. Like the furniture, these last were clearly purchased from shops in the immediate area: colored silk shirts, stiff leisure suits, and the tan leather jacket Carrie had described, clothing suitable for a visit to one of the local salsa clubs. Pruitt was good at taking on the local coloration.

  In the bedroom also, Marlene’s flashlight picked up a corkboard, covering nearly an entire wall, on which was arranged a photographic homage to Carrie Lanin: yellowed and faded clippings from student newspapers, showing her cheerleading and prom queening; some pages neatly cut from the same high school yearbook Marlene had already seen, ditto; a wedding photograph (sans groom); an 8 x 10 glossy high school photo in cap and gown. There were also a dozen or so recent photographs, candids obviously, of Carrie on the street. Pruitt had some skill with a camera.

  Harry came up behind her and took in the scene. He shone his light on the top of the chest beneath the corkboard. There were two candles in red glass containers, bought at a local botanica, flanking a little museum of Carrieana. Some keys. A pair of blue lace panties. A lipstick. A receipt from Elaine’s.

  “Her place,” said Harry, pointing his penlight at the keys.

  “Yeah. He must have taken an impression of her keys during their date. Maybe she went to the ladies’ and he waxed them. Once he had a set, he could visit whenever he wanted, and he took souvenirs. Okay, let’s make a donation to the shrine.”

  She removed
from her pocket the empty Karo corn syrup bottle whose contents she had poured into Pruitt’s gas tank. The syrup was at this moment (she trusted) turning to hard candy in the cylinders of his car. She placed the bottle on the bureau and stuck the mum from Paglia’s in it. Then, using the bedroom window as a mirror, she applied the lipstick to her mouth, removed one of the photos from the board and planted a red kiss on the back of it. She took a ballpoint from her pocket, wrote a short message in neat block letters, and propped the photo up against the bottle.

  “What did you write?” asked Harry when they were back in the Plymouth.

  “Forget her! Come to me, my darling. Only I love you as you deserve.”

  He gave her a complex look, which from long experience she could read: a blend of doubt and worry. It also meant that Bello had fathomed what she was up to.

  “It’ll work, Harry.”

  He was silent for a moment and then he said, not as a question, “You’re going to have to take a shot.”

  “Yeah, I know,” she agreed. “But I can’t think of another way.”

  SIX

  Moore’s Bar and Grill is on Lexington Avenue between 119th and 120th streets, right around the corner from the Twenty-fifth Precinct, which occupies a four-story building on 119th. Moore’s is a cop bar, owned by an ex-cop and patronized almost exclusively by cops. There is at least one like it a short walk from each of the City’s station houses. At a quarter of four in the afternoon the place is usually jammed and noisy with the day shift taking off and the swing shift getting up attitude before starting work.

  Ariadne Stupenagel chose this time to make her entrance. She was wearing tight red jeans jammed into black and silver cowboy boots with two-inch heels, and a pale gray silk blouse. Over this she wore a Soviet military greatcoat with colonel’s pips and blue KGB flashes on the shoulder boards. She carried a stained khaki haversack that had once held a medical kit. The loud male hubbub in Moore’s diminished perceptibly as she passed through.

  “What the fuck is that?” asked the cop standing at the bar next to Roland Hrcany. He was not the only one asking the question either. Hrcany looked up from his scotch and looked away. He rolled his huge shoulders as if shrugging off a burden. Although Hrcany was not a cop, he spent a good time of his spare time in cop bars. He liked cops, and cops liked him, not a usual state of affairs between members of the police force and the prosecutorial bar. The cops liked Hrcany because he treated them like the men they were, because he was a real man himself, because he was a rake of legendary reputation, not averse to sharing his collection of willing girls with favored policemen, and because he was more tolerant than most other prosecutors about the universal and necessary perjury of the police. So tolerant was Hrcany that cops would often reveal to him just where they had violated the rules of evidence and arrest, and Hrcany would go so far as to advise them on how to bring off these fairy tales on the stand. On the other hand, he drew the line at actual fabrication, and knew enough about the ways of the police so that no one but a practicing idiot would try to sell him a total load of manure. The cops respected this. He was a very successful homicide prosecutor.

  Hrcany replied, “It’s a reporter. I said I would introduce her to Joe Clancy.”

  His companion gave him a cop look. Hrcany caught it and explained, “It’s okay. The bosses cleared it. It’s just some kind of hero story.”

  The cop grunted and stared again at the woman, who had by now spotted Hrcany and was approaching. “Christ, you’d need a fucking ladder,” the cop muttered.

  “Hello, Roland,” said Ariadne. “What a charming place!” she added in a tone implying the opposite. Stupenagel had, in her colorful career, met any number of men who hated her, but almost invariably it had been for good cause. She hadn’t done anything to Hrcany, however, yet, but he had been rude and uncooperative from the first moment. It surprised her but did not particularly dismay.

  “Glad you like it,” replied Hrcany in the same tone.

  “Buy you a drink?” she asked.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Well, let’s get started. Where’s Clancy?”

  Hrcany got off his bar stool and walked off without a word. Stupenagel followed him across the floor and into a large back room. Like the bar proper, this was full of off-duty cops, but cops much drunker than the ones in the front. They were sitting at a dozen or so round wooden tables or swaying happily among them. Those at the tables were pounding their glasses and bottles to the beat of an amplified Irish band set up on a small stage in the front of the room. It was a retirement party, a racket, as the cops say, for one of the cops in the Two-Five. The air was thick with noise, smoke, and beer fumes. Someone had decorated the walls and ceiling with green and white crepe paper, and shiny paper shamrocks and leprechaun hats.

  “He’s over there,” said Hrcany, indicating a tall man leaning against the wall, alone, waving a brown bottle of Schlitz in time with the music.

  “Introduce me.”

  “You want me to introduce you? Why, you want to date him?”

  “That’s the point of this, Roland,” said Stupenagel patiently. “You’re a regular guy—you introduce me to him and then he’ll know I’m a regular guy, too. If I wanted to walk in here cold, I wouldn’t have been on your ass making myself unpleasant all these weeks. It’s nothing personal.”

  Hrcany opened his mouth, but stifled the remark he had in mind, which was personal in the extreme. Instead he marched up to Clancy and held out his hand.

  “Hey, Joe. Nice racket.”

  “Yeah,” said Clancy. “Jerry’s a popular guy.”

  The two men chatted about Jerry, a detective second grade who was retiring after thirty on the job. The reporter hung behind Hrcany and pretended to be fascinated by the anecdotes about old Jerry, and studied her quarry. Clancy was a large man in good shape: his gut did not hang puffily over the belt line she could see under the tan suit jacket. The jacket itself, though plainly off the rack, hung nicely on his square shoulders, and Ariadne concluded that he was one of those fortunate men whose physiques fell precisely into the dimensions of the standard sizes, a 44R in his case, she reckoned. His hands were large and calm and covered with crisp, short red hairs, as was his skull. He wore his hair in a Marine Corps buzz cut, which revealed patches of twisted scar tissue. Not a man to shrink from honorable blemishes, thought Ariadne, an observation that recommended him to her. His face was the traditional map of Ireland edition: square jaw, softening a little underneath, snub nose, lipless, wide mouth.

  After a minute or so of chatter, Hrcany became aware that the Aqua Velva-colored eyes that went with this face were resting ever more often on the large woman standing behind him, whose head, he was uncomfortably aware, was hovering an unacceptable distance above his shoulder.

  He said, abruptly, “Joe, I’d like you to meet Mzzz Stupenagel. Mzzz Stupenagel, this is Joe Clancy.”

  The woman extended her hand, said, “I’m glad to meet you. I’ve heard a lot about you,” and received a firm, formal grasp. Clancy was not the sort of man who either gripped too hard or sent a sexual message. Another point scored.

  At that moment three men drunk enough to think wearing shiny green paper leprechaun hats amusing rolled up, hailed Roland as a lost brother, and urged him away to the free beer. He left with no discernible reluctance.

  “You got to the bosses,” he said.

  “I did.” In the pause that followed Clancy seemed to be concentrating on the music. Stupenagel read it as demonstrating that although he was now cleared to talk to her, he had not been ordered to do so, and was doing it of his free will.

  “You’re a friend of Roland’s?” Clancy asked. His voice was soft, but it seemed to cut effectively through the clamor. Stupenagel had spent considerable time among men whose work required them to make themselves clearly heard in extremely noisy and violent places, and she recognized the trick. She could do it too.

  “Like a brother to me,” she lied. “He said he would introduce
me to you, so you could tell me all about being a hero cop—”

  Clancy uttered a derisive snort. “You believe everything you hear?”

  “You ran into a burning building. You rescued those kids from that fire.”

  Clancy shrugged. “Hey, I was there, I was helping them evacuate the building, I was leading some kids down a hall. The fire was in the building next door. There was an explosion. The next thing I knew I was on fire, so I picked up the kids and ran out. They played it up big, because we were in the middle of the Knapp scandal and they needed a cop who saved a bunch of P.R. kids.”

  He told the story wearily, as one who wishes it would go away. Stupenagel had seen this before as well. The denigration of heroism by the hero is often a form of boasting, and she wondered whether it was that in Clancy’s case. The man was starting to interest her. Time for a pinprick.

  “Speaking of Hispanic kids, they seem not to do well in your lockup. Why is that?”

  Clancy remained calm. “You read my report?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll send you a copy.”

  “Thank you. What’s the short version, for now?” Clancy looked out again at the revelry. He asked, “Do you want a drink?” Stupenagel nodded. “Sure. A beer’d be fine.” Clancy walked off through the crowd to a cloth-covered table on which a tin tub full of ice and beer bottles rested. A large, dark-haired man in a blue sports coat hailed him, and they spoke a few words. The dark man looked briefly over at her, but she was too far away and the room far too dim and smoky for her to be able to read any expression on his face. Clancy returned with a cold bottle and a paper cup. Stupenagel remarked the cup. She poured her beer into it and sipped it, like a lady should. Then she took out her notebook.

  “It was a real bad thing,” said Clancy. “The first one, Ortiz, we thought it was a fluke. Bring a gypsy cabbie in for a hack violation and he kills himself? Unbelievable. What, he had remorse because he picked up a fare on the street? Okay, there’s an investigation, like there always is, we lose somebody in custody, and they cleared us. Guy hung himself on his shirt, the M.E. confirms it. Suicide. The next one’s a couple of weeks later, same thing. Jorge Valenzuela, his name was. Now we’re going crazy. We got bosses up the ying-yang, running around trying to find, did we follow procedure. And we did, to the letter. These guys, they weren’t considered suicide risks, like a guy gets drunk and wastes his wife and kids, he sobers up, you figure he might try for a hat trick, do himself too. But these were bullshit charges, maybe a fine at most. So we—I mean, the detectives—investigate. Okay, it turns out these guys are not your regular Hispanics, they’re more like Indians, from down in Central America somewhere, Guatemala, I think. Salvador. And they’re wetbacks. So they, like, have a psychological problem with jail.”