Marlene looked puzzled. “That’s silly. Why would they make a charge like that if they left that kind of paper trail?”
“Why indeed,” said Karp. “That’s the wacky thing about this whole case. Anyway, what they’ll argue here is that Fuerza stepped in to protect the City from liability after the recruits were promised jobs illegally by Murray. But the dates are wrong, and the Ortiz testimony nails it down that Fuerza was in on the deal from the beginning. All the charges are like that. They say he disclosed confidential records; he didn’t and we can prove it. He failed to produce a report on office organization; he did, and Fuerza’s on record at the time as saying it was a good report. He left the City without proper notice-”
“What!”
“Yeah, they had to scrape the barrel for that one. It’s all picky shit like that, but the important thing is that Fuerza confirmed all of it in deposition, and now I’m going to have witness after witness, document after document, impeaching his sworn statement. When I get him on the stand, I’ll totally destroy him.”
“And the Mayor too?”
“Nah, I’m going to go light on the Mayor. The Mayor will be very cooperative. Basically, his line will be: ‘I just did what these guys told me to do,’ not particularly inspiring leadership, but not culpable. Fuerza will take all the shit.”
“And Bloom,” said Marlene.
“And Bloom,” said Karp. “Oh, my, yes.”
Marlene rose and began clearing, and Karp helped her. In companionable silence they scraped dishes and loaded the dishwasher.
“By the way, I have to go out tonight,” said Marlene in the midst of this.
Karp bit back a needling remark, something he was getting a good deal of practice at, and said coolly, “Oh, no problem. Where are you off to?”
Marlene answered blandly, “In all honesty, I have to see a man about a dog.”
THIRTEEN
Vickie Sills was a small woman in her late twenties, with short auburn curls and skin the color of Redi-Whip. She would have been unobtrusively pretty if not for the dark smudges under her eyes and her generally dilapidated air. Her children, a boy (Jamie), five, and a girl (Tiffany), three, were whiny and clinging. They were terrified, naturally, of the dog, Sweety, whose friendly efforts to smear them with drool had been rebuffed with hysterics. The children had been calmed and fed on Beef-a-Roni. Sweety now lay sulkily in a far corner.
The apartment in which Marlene now sat with Vickie, on a worn red plaid sofa, was the sparely furnished downstairs of a two-family brick house on a quiet street off Avenue S. It smelled of old paint, steam heat, and Vickie’s incessant smoking. Marlene, who was dying for a cigarette, reckoned that she had already inhaled the equivalent of half a pack, as had the Sills children. Her fetus was shriveling without deriving a particle of pleasure, and she was starting to resent it.
Nor was Vickie a fascinating companion, her conversation consisting mainly of anecdotes illustrating the cruelty of life, with herself the chief target of fortune’s fell arrow. Marlene got the uncomfortable feeling that Vickie would probably have put up with Ernie’s little ways had they not included her own mutilation in the jaws of his pet. She drew the line there-not a poster girl for women’s lib, Vickie. She was relating the story of how her ex had chortled as his pit bull tore apart Tiffany’s little kitten, when a car door slammed on the street outside. Vickie stopped in mid-sentence, and her face turned, amazingly, even whiter.
“That’s him!” she squeaked.
“Let me check,” said Marlene, rising and going to the front windows. In the light of the street lamps she could see a fairly new red Mercury sedan double-parked and, coming around the front of it, a small, wiry, tan man with short, curly hair and a lowering brow. He wore a black Jets duffel coat over baker’s whites. His walk was oddly stiff, as if he were trying to keep from falling over forward, and at first Marlene imagined that he was staggering drunk, but as he emerged from between the parked cars, she saw that he was being pulled along by a big, white pit bull terrier on a steel choke collar.
“Vickie, take the kids and go into the big bedroom,” Marlene said. They vanished. Marlene heard heavy steps and the scrabbling of claws on the concrete stoop. Pounding on the door: the knob rattled and the door shook in its frame.
“Vickie! Goddammit! Open the goddamn door!”
Sweety rose slowly to his feet and stretched. His nose twitched, and a ripple zipped down the muscles of his back.
“Prego, Sweety!” said Marlene, and the dog came alert and took up a position on Marlene’s left side. Marlene opened the front door halfway and confronted Ernie Sills and his slavering companion.
When Sills saw who it was, his eyes narrowed and he snarled, “Who the fuck’re you? Where’s Vickie?”
Marlene said, “Mr. Sills, you know you’re under a court order. Please go away and leave your wife alone.”
“I said, who the fuck’re you?” Marlene could smell the fumes of beer as he shouted this into her face.
“My name is Marlene Ciampi. I’m helping Vickie and the kids get settled.”
“She don’t need no help,” said Sills, putting his hand against the door. He let his dog’s chain out a little, and the pit bull leaped at Marlene through the doorway, its teeth snapping a few inches from her leg.
“Mr. Sills, if you try to push in here, you’re going to be in a lot of trouble.”
“Ah, go fuck yourself, y’one-eyed bitch,” he snapped and threw his shoulder against the door. Marlene had to give way, and the man and dog rushed past her into the L-shaped hallway that led to the living room.
The pit bull saw Sweety before his master did, and its lunge threw Sills off balance. He went down on one knee and lost the dog chain. Marlene closed the front door.
A snarling white blur, the pit bull flung itself at Sweety’s throat and buried its teeth in the loose folds of skin that defended the mastiff from just such an attack. Of course, it was a hopeless gesture: sixty-pound terriers, however tough, do not go up against one-hundred-ninety-pound Neapolitan mastiffs. Sweety opened his huge jaws, engulfed the back of the pit bull’s neck, and jerked upward, ripping away a chunk of skin and muscle. The pit bull’s jaws remained locked on his throat. Sweety took another bite. Blood and bits of flesh sprayed around the hallway, patterning the floor and the walls.
“Hey …” said Sills.
The pit bull’s spine was exposed; the mastiff clamped his teeth around it and crunched. The pit bull’s body twitched in spasms and it lost control of its bowels and bladder, but its teeth remained locked tight, even when Sweety shook himself violently. The white body hung from his neck like an obscene lavaliere. The whole thing had taken thirty seconds.
Ernie Sills, frozen in place from the first instant of the dog fight, now rose and started to back away in the direction of the door.
“Sweety, assalite!” shouted Marlene.
In an instant, despite the dead dog hanging from its neck, the mastiff was on the man, smashing him to the ground. Sills landed on his back, with his head jammed up against the door frame.
“Sweety, afferate!” ordered Marlene. The mastiff clamped his jaws around the man’s throat. Marlene walked slowly over and knelt down by the man’s head. She was shaking with adrenaline and took a moment to calm her breathing.
“How do you feel, Mr. Sills?” Marlene asked mildly.
Only gasps came from Sills’s throat.
“Sweety, non tanto!” said Marlene. The dog’s jaws relaxed, but not very much.
“I asked you how you felt,” said Marlene.