But too great a plunge, it seemed. “Oh, listen, dolling, why do you want to talk about sad old stuff? Talk about the happy. I had too much sad old stuff, dolling, believe me.”
There was a moment of embarrassed silence, and then Tran, bless his heart, launched into an innocent question about old Paris, and the French chatter cranked up again.
Abe Lapidus looked at Marlene. There was a shadow in his eyes that hadn’t been there before. He leaned over her and said, in the manner of a lawyer counseling a client at trial, “You want to know about Jerry? The whole megilla?”
“I think I have to, Abe.”
“You don’t believe let sleeping dogs lie?”
Marlene said, “You know, Abe, as a matter of fact, I do. Unfortunately, this dog is up, awake, and tearing around growling and biting. People have been hurt already, including me, and more people are going to get hurt. That’s what I think. What do you think, Abe?”
Abe sighed and said, “You get out of here, you call me. We’ll have lunch, I’ll give you some names.”
Chapter 13
They kept Marlene in the hospital for eight days, which in her opinion was at least three days too long. She felt fine, she told them, but they continued to probe her with the wonderful and expensive machinery of the modern neurological suite until they were satisfied that they were more or less tort proof, should she begin to imagine herself the Empress Josephine upon her release.
Karp came to take her home, and found her in her room, sitting on the edge of the bed, dressed in the clothes he had brought in the previous day, a black cotton shirt and trousers and a long, smoky silk scarf, which she had made into a turban around her cropped head. Marlene did not look good in a turban, or in the yellowing bruises that covered one side of her face, and, as her false eye was no longer shielded by a strategic fall of hair, her glance was curiously lopsided. And glum. It tormented Karp’s heart to contemplate what he was about to do, but he chilled it down and said, “We have to talk about this business, Marlene.”
“What, now?” she asked, scowling.
“Yeah, now.” He drew a deep breath, released it, as before taking an important foul shot. “I need you to give me the whole story. On Vivian Bollano. And on whatever’s happening out there in connection with the Chinatown murders. Whatever you know.”
She stared angrily at him, but his glance didn’t falter, and after a moment her eyes fell and she asked coldly, “To whom am I speaking now? My husband, or the chief assistant district attorney?”
“Well, Marlene, the answer to that is ‘both,’ and the fact that this creates problems for us is not my doing.”
“What are you going to do? Interrogate me? Maybe I should have my attorney present.”
In one part of his mind, Karp saw himself pointing to the telephone and heard himself saying, “Maybe you should,” but what he did instead was to slump into a chair, catch her eye with his again, and say, “Marlene! Look at me! Listen to me! This is tearing me up. It’s breaking my heart. I’ve already compromised myself six ways to Sunday getting you in here instead of the lock-up ward at Bellevue, but I can’t just give you a free ride if I think you have knowledge constructive to three homicides. Which I do. God, I don’t want to put legal pressure on you. Legal pressure! We’re married, for crying out loud! I want you to tell me because you love me, because you trust me, and because I’m worried nauseous about our daughter, who’s in danger because of something I think she saw and won’t tell me about. Now, come on, Marlene! Talk to me!”
“And if not, what?” she asked, her voice neutral.
“Oh, shit! That’s not the right answer, Marlene.”
She repeated it. He looked at her, closed his eyes, shook his head, sighed, and said, “Okay, if not, then there are a pair of cops down the hall who will take you in and process you just like any other person charged with assault. I’m out of the loop officially in any case; Tim Sullivan will handle the whole thing out of Felony. He’s going to ask Roland what the story is, and Roland is going to say, because it’s the truth, that you’re hiding something, and Tim’s people will bring that to the attention of the judge. Roland could also buy, or pretend to buy, the story that Bollano’s people are putting out, that it was an assassination attempt on him-”
“Do you believe that?”
“Oh, crap, of course I don’t believe that, Marlene. That’s the point, it doesn’t matter what I believe. I’m supposed to be out of it.”
“But if I spill my guts here, then you’re in it again, you smooth the way, get me through arraignment and bail, and I’m home all cozy and safe. Is that the deal?”
She was perfectly right. The thing stunk, a spaghetti tangle of legal and domestic business, an archetypal Karp family katzenjammer. Flat-voiced, he said, “Yeah, that’s the deal.”
She nodded. “Okay, then here’s my response to that deal. About Vivian Fein Bollano, I will say absolutely nothing. Everything that has passed between us is protected by attorney-client privilege, and I will so maintain to a judge when the time comes. About the other thing: you’ve probably come to the same conclusion I have, that either Lucy witnessed the Asia Mall killings or some of her friends did, or they all did. Lucy was out of circulation for a couple, three hours that afternoon at just the right time. You know about Lucy and Janice getting rousted by a couple of gangsters. Then she gets snatched last week. Tran believes that on both occasions the people involved were mainly interested in finding out what the girls knew and whether they’d told anyone else about it. He’s turned up a name, Leung, a local hard boy, but clearly just a go-between-”
“Why? Why just a go-between?”
“Because the Sings were big shots, triad guys. Somebody wanted them hit would have to have some serious muscle to back up the play. Leung’s a small-timer. Tran says.” She summarized Tran’s information about the Yee-Leung connection.
“But the cops say they sent in people from out of town,” Karp objected. “Why would they care if the girls saw who did it?”
“They shouldn’t,” said Marlene. “The fact that they do argues against the foreign hit-team story.” She reminded him what Tran had told her earlier about triad politics and the likely results of the killings at the Asia Mall.
“In any case,” she went on, “neither Lucy nor Janice nor Mary is going to come forward as a witness because Janice and Mary are too vulnerable and Lucy is too loyal. The cops and Tran are looking for the Vietnamese who snatched Lucy, and when they’re caught, we’ll know a little more. Meanwhile, I don’t judge that any of them is in serious danger, as long as none of them come forward as a witness.”
“You’re encouraging Lucy to keep quiet here? You approve of this?” Karp could not keep the outrage out of his voice.
“Yeah, not approve exactly,” said Marlene forcefully, “but understand, appreciate where she is, where they all are. Like it or not, they come from a different culture, and our little honey has roots in that culture, at least partially. Given a choice, I’d rather keep her roots intact than tear them up in the interests of a judicial process. I respect your parental interest, believe me, but right now, with Tran watching her, she’s as safe as we can make her, safe as the child she is is going to be. You understand what I mean, Butch? As the child she is, not the child you’d like her to be. I know you think I designed her to be this way and I’m a terrible mother and all-”
“I don’t-”
“You do, but believe me when I say I didn’t do anything like that. I wish to God she collected stuffed animals and went to the Girl Scouts, but she’s never going to be that kid. Deadly genes, and not only from me, by the way, darling, plus the usual shake of the dice, thank you, God. I love her to pieces and I know you do, too, and the chance that she’s going to break both our hearts is very high.”