“Uh-huh,” said the detective, writing. Then, casually, he asked, “By the way, how come you thought the call came in to the Two-Five?”
Smart guy, thought Marlene, and was about to tell him Stupenagel’s interest in the cabbie suicides, and the involvement of Paul Jackson, but thought better of it. It had been some time since she had spoken to Stupenagel about it; maybe the whole thing hadn’t panned out. And the woman had not mentioned being followed after that one time. And, more to the point, she didn’t know this guy, or his connection, if any, with the cops out of the Twenty-fifth Precinct who were supposedly doing the shakedowns.
“I don’t know-Two-Three, Two-Five-I guessed it was one of the East Harlem precincts, considering where you found her.”
The detective grunted, wrote, asked a few more questions and then flipped his notebook shut. He handed Marlene a business card. Lester Moon, Detective Third Grade. She gave him one of hers.
“Call me if you think of anything else,” said Moon with a meaningful look, and strode off through the deep misery.
Marlene managed to track down the harried Panamanian intern in charge of Stupenagel’s case, from whom she learned that her friend had survived surgery; that her internal bleeding was under control; that her broken bones had been set; that she was out of immediate danger; and that he had another patient he had to see right away.
Marlene then marched into the administration office and obnoxiously flashed her checkbook and her gold Visa card to attract the attention of various civil servants, through whom she arranged for Stupenagel to be transferred from Harlem Hospital Center to Columbia-Presbyterian. The Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons supplies interns to both hospitals. They send the ones with good American M.D.’s to Columbia-Presby and the ones from third world countries holding degrees from places like Guadalajara U. to Harlem. Marlene knew this, and she had no compunction about buying her friend’s way out of a public hospital, and thus supporting a dual health-care standard she would have abstractly opposed at any cocktail party. Then she went home and cried and awakened Karp, who comforted her and wisely refrained from expressing his constant fear that the next midnight phone call would be about Marlene.
It took three days for Stupenagel to recover her senses enough to converse for any length of time. On each of those days, after taking care of Lucy and dropping her at school, Marlene had come, and sat through the visiting hour, and chatted inanely to the unanswering, white-swathed figure on the hospital bed.
When she arrived on the third day, Stupenagel’s bed was propped up and her eyes were open. They were ringed with yellow-violet bruises. Much of the rest of her face was concealed by plaster, except for a rough hole at the side of her mouth, through which she could suck nourishment and carry on a slurred conversation.
“How are you, Stupe?” asked Marlene, sitting in a chair by the bedside.
“Oh, I’m having a ball. Dope’s pretty good. Nurse said you’re paying the freight for this. Thanks, but you don’t have to. Call my dad.” She gave Marlene a telephone number with a 216 area code, and Marlene wrote it down.
“You want to know what happened, huh?”
“Sure,” said Marlene.
“So would I,” said Stupenagel. “The last thing I remember I was in my apartment. I had just come back from uptown, I’d taken my coat and my boots off, and I was drinking a Bloody Mary I’d just fixed. I remember thinking I wanted to call you. Drinking the drink, and then I woke up here. First thought after waking up, it was some kind of explosion. Gas. Seems like not. I got pounded, they tell me.”
“Yeah. You don’t remember anything?”
“Nope. Traumatic retrograde amnesia, they call it. A cute kid doctor came in this morning when I came to and explained it all to me. Some of it may come back over the weeks. He said.”
“What’s your guess, then?”
“Hmm. Where to begin? Well, I’m working on an exposé of the Guatemala thing, a long piece for Harper’s. Somebody down there might have heard about it and sent somebody up here to do some Central American public relations on me. Unlikely, but possible. There’s the stalking piece-one of the guys I mentioned might have been brooding … an old boyfriend … shit, I don’t know, Champ-”
“What about the Two-Five shakedown business?” asked Marlene.
“What business was that?” responded the injured woman vaguely.
“You know, Stupe, the gypsy cabs, the suicides in jail, that guy who roughed you up-”
“Oh, God, of course! Jackson! Something just broke on that, but I can’t remember …”
Marlene waited some time, but Stupenagel did not finish the thought. Finally she said, “Meanwhile, can I do anything?”
A rattling sound came from behind the bandages, a sad attempt at laughter. “Now she asks!”
“Right,” said Marlene, refusing the proffered guilt trip. “Every time you get your face smashed in, you have a free crack at my professional services. What do you want me to do?”
“Check out the D.A.’s investigation of the shakedowns.”
“There isn’t any investigation, not according to the former chief medical examiner.”
“You talked to him?” There was a surprised squeak in the muffled voice.
“No. He happens to be a client of my husband’s. Butch asked him.”
“Hnnh. He might be in on the scam, then.”
“I doubt that. I mean, Butch doubts that.”
“Oh, well then, it’s the gospel. Okay, maybe you can get your hands on the original ausotsy-whoops, goddamn, I’m so fucked up-autopsy reports. We can show them to somebody, see if these kids really killed themselves.”
“Okay,” said Marlene, “I’ll try. Is that it?”
No answer. Marlene leaned closer. “Stupe?”
“Mmmm? What?”
“You drifted off.”
“Yeah. I do that. Call my dad, okay?”
“Sure. Get better now, okay?”
Stupenagel closed her eyes and her hand twitched, but whether it was in farewell or a random spasm Marlene could not tell.
From a phone booth in the hospital, Marlene called Mr. Stupenagel at his office in Cleveland. The man was calm and low-key about the disaster, asking for information, getting what Marlene had, thanking her politely, and signing off. It was clear that he had been waiting for such a call for a long while. Then Marlene called the morgue at Bellevue and asked to speak to Dr. Dennis Maher.
“Peg o’ my heart!” said a light Irish voice in her ear.
“Hello, Denny. How’s it going?”
“Ah, flourishing, flourishing, my dear. They’re dyin’ to get in here!”
Marlene laughed dutifully at the ancient joke. “Why I called, Denny, is I need some help.”
“Unto the half of my kingdom. As you’re aware, my practice is largely with the silent majority, but I could brush up a bit for you, Marlene. Would it be a wee gynecological problem, he said hopefully?”
Marlene ignored this. “Would you be free for lunch today? My treat?”
“Oh, let’s see now-shall I gnaw upon a stale tuna sandwich from a machine in an office reeking of formalin, or shall I dine in splendor with a beautiful woman, her paying the tab? Oh, God, these decisions!”
“I’ll take that as a yes. How about Malachy’s on Twenty-third?”
“Would that be the saloon with the largest selection of unblended Irish whiskey in the whole of this great city? Why, I don’t believe I’ve ever entered the door.”
“Twelve-thirty,” said Marlene, laughing, and hung up.
Denny Maher was part of the great Irish Medical Migration of the 1960s, in which the Irish Republic’s decision to combine brilliant training with rotten salaries redounded to the benefit of New York’s best hospitals. Maher was one of the few forensic specialists in this wave, and the M.E.’s office had snapped him up. At thirty-six, he was single and a drinking man, characteristics not unrelated to each other. Marlene liked him. He had been something of a pet of the D.A.’s office for years, a big reason being his status as the purveyor of Olde Medical Examiner, a fruit punch made with absolute alcohol purloined from the morgue, which had long been the centerpiece of bureau parties at the old D.A.’s.