“You look like shit, Marlene,” said Harry Bello.
“I feel like shit, Harry,” said Marlene glumly, which came out, “I seel ike sit, Ahee,” because of the swelling of her lips and tongue. They were in an interview room at the Ninth, an irregular meeting, but Harry still retained some clout from his years on the cops and, of course, everyone knew who the husband was. Harry wanted to hear the story before the Osborne Group lawyer got there.
“Besides that, how was your day?”
She had to laugh, a high sound that lasted a little too long. “Actually, until Butch called and said Lucy got beat up, I was having a pretty good one.”
His eyes widened. “Lucy got beat up?”
She placed a calming hand on his arm. “It’s okay, Harry, she’s okay. I’ll take care of it.”
“Bullshit, you’ll take care of it. You can’t take care of yourself. Who did it?”
She took her hand away and her look hardened. “Don’t get involved, Harry, all right? It’s got nothing to do with you.”
“I’m her godfather, Marlene.”
“Good, so protect her from the flesh and the devil, but don’t butt into this. You want to hear the story or should I go back to the cells? It hurts when I talk.”
He relented, nodding. “Okay, go ahead. You had this great day.”
“Yeah, this morning I was at the abortion clinic in Chelsea, to check on the security construction. It’s going good, Ms. Reiss-Kessler is very pleased. My views on abortion did not come up, I’m back in the club. Like you said, you never know. The cops got the guys who did it, some sect in Jersey. All but one of them. You heard about this? The actual shooter got away, name of Reginald P. Burford. Blasted his way through a roadblock and escaped to the wilds of New Jersey. I didn’t know Jersey had any wilds, but apparently they do, down there in the Pine Barrens, lots of little villages full of skinny blond people with their eyes too close together. Reginald is from there. It’s like looking for a Mafioso in Sicily. Anyway, me and Ms. Reiss-Kessler had a nice chat, she wanted to know if we could arrange firearms training for her staff, maybe she could branch out into making non-flushable corpses. I managed to dissuade her from this. Then lunch. I fed the dog. .” She stiffened. “Jesus, Harry, the dog’s still in the back of the car. He’ll be frantic!”
“He’ll be sleeping. Don’t worry about the dog, I’ll take care of the car and the dog. What happened after lunch?”
“Oh. Right, so then I came here-I mean, I went to the shelter to talk to Vivian, tell her what I’d found out already, and get her take on it. And I was holding the big questions in reserve, hey, Viv, how come a nice Jewish girl marries a psychotic mobster? Also what happened? How come out of nowhere you just have to investigate dad’s death after twenty years? You know, see if I could develop enough report to drop that kind of stuff on her.”
“Rapport, you mean.”
“Huh? Oh, right, rapport. So, anyway. .” She seemed to go blank for a moment. Then she blinked and asked, “Sorry. Where was I?”
“You were going to tell her what you learned already. Marlene, are you feeling okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. Well, so I go in there, she’s looking rocky, antsy, not a stay-at-home, our girl, maybe she misses shopping, getting in the Jag and driving the roads. A little cabin fever. She does pills, too. I tell her I went over the press reports, the background, the trials, disbarment proceedings, transcripts, and all that, and the story is that he was despondent over the loss of his livelihood and that’s why he did it, and did she agree, was he depressed in the days before he did it or not? And she said, in effect, horseshit, my father wasn’t down, he was always up, full of life, he had money stashed, he had plans for moving to California, starting over. Very passionate. She thinks he got whacked.”
“What do you think?”
“No evidence for it. No other parties seen in the area. On the other hand, no suicide note either. The police instigation, from the press reports, looks serious, no editorial suggestion it was anything more than a regular whatchamacallit, a. . I mean, that he killed himself. I need to talk to your pal Black Jack, though.”
“Uh-huh, and what about your big questions? I mean, does she even know you know she’s Bollano’s wife?” Harry was watching Marlene very carefully, his stomach fluttering, his hands damp.
“No, we didn’t get to that yet. I was trying to get her to list all the people involved in the cast then, who were still around and who might know something, and I mentioned her mother and she got upset, no, my mother doesn’t know anything I don’t, and we fenced around about that for a while, and then my paginator rang and I went down to call Butch, and while I was on the phone the bastards broke in. They must have jimmied the front door, and they used a. . you know, a thing, a wrecking bar to break through the glass, and she, Vonda, shot at them but missed, and they started shooting at her and then. . and then I. .”
She looked up at him, her brows knotted, her thick eyebrows nearly touching. “I can’t remember. First they broke the door down with the iron, and then I threw it at my mother.”
Harry’s reflexes were not what they had been, not after the years of boozing, but he started moving when he saw her good eye roll up in her head, and so he was able to catch her before she fell off her chair.
Karp had himself driven home in a police car, a privilege he rarely exercised, except in direct line of duty, which, he now observed sourly to himself, home had very nearly become, with his daughter a possible witness to murder and his wife behind bars.
The little boys, at least, remained uninvolved in any crime more serious than Deliberate Spill of Apple Juice, two counts (Zik), and Assault With Plastic Brontosaurus (Zak). Karp held court on his lap in the living room, and let both of them off with a warning. Where’s Mommy? they wanted to know. Mommy’s still at work, he lied. He asked Posie to go ahead and feed the monsters, and asked, “How’s Lucy?”
Posie rolled her eyes and pointed her chin in the direction of the girl’s bedroom.
“She got home, went in there, locked the door, and hasn’t been out once. She’s grounded, huh?”
“In a way,” said Karp. He went to the bedroom and got out of his suit and into chinos and a faded sleeveless sweatshirt and, sighing, went down the hall to knock at the prison door.
“Lucy, it’s me, open up.”
Steps, the click of the lock, more steps. He went in. A cassette recorder was playing some sort of odd music, a throbbing, low electronic droning, with a voice over it, husky, insistent, seductive, not singing but speaking in precise short sentences. Lucy had returned to her bed and picked up a small blue book. Karp sat on Lucy’s wooden swivel chair and took in his surroundings, as always, with some wonder at the mysteries of how kids turned out. Unlike most children her age, Lucy was neat, almost compulsively so. Her room resembled the habitation of a scholarly nun: a simple narrow bed, with a duvet in the form of the flag of Italy, above it a colorful, rough, gory Haitian crucifix, low bookcases along one wall, the books lined up and arranged by subject and author, on the other wall a desk, excruciatingly neat, sporting a little row of dictionaries between plaster gargoyle bookends, above which a large cork board displayed calligraphy samples, a chart of the 209 common radicals used in Chinese characters, a print of a portrait of an elderly gentleman in ecclesiastic garb (Cardinal Mezzofanti, 1774–1849, once the Vatican librarian and, Karp had been informed, a linguist quite in Lucy’s class), a school picture of her eighth-grade class, matted in cardboard, a poster of Bob Marley singing, a glossy photograph of a woman with short blond hair wearing sunglasses and a man’s suit and tie all in white, and a colored map of the world, showing in color-coded boxes the languages spoken thereupon, with a scatter of red map pins indicating those Lucy Karp had already mastered.