“Right. But this is a church for priests like Father Raymond. Whom God protect, but you know what I mean. Dwindling parish, the only reason they don’t get rid of it is because of the historical importance of the building and the parish and so on. Someone like you I’d expect to find a little higher up in the Church. On the provincial’s staff. A dean at Ford-ham. Or running a mission. Or in Rome.”
He examined the glowing tip of his cigarette and said, off-handedly, “Well, I was in Rome for a time. Some time ago.”
“Really? What doing?”
His smile thinned, and when he answered his voice was flat. “You certainly are a detective, aren’t you? Since you ask, I was at the Gesu.”
Marlene raised her eyebrows. She thought, My, my, you must have been quite the boy to get busted all the way from the headquarters of the Society of Jesus back to here, and wondered what it was he had done, but forbore asking.
Yet the question hung in the air between them and made further conversation difficult. When their cigarettes were gone, they said good night. Marlene walked home thinking about why a Jesuit so clever as to have once been one of the dozen or so aides to the Black Pope himself should have ended up as a curate in Old St. Pat’s, and then ran through a similar set of questions about herself: why a Sacred Heart, Smith, and Yale graduate was trotting along Mulberry, fresh from the kind of evening she had just had, with a gun in her pocket and her garters flapping in the chilly breeze, and had as little answer.
Karp was still awake when she let herself in, propped up in the bed with a scatter of papers and files around him, making notes on a legal pad.
He grinned at her when she came in. “So how did it go? Did you always hurt the one you love?”
She groaned and flopped crossways on the bed.
“Don’t ask! And if you were any kind of loving husband, you would help me get out of these fucking boots. Christ, my poor feet!”
“Gosh, I was hoping you’d walk all over me in them and show me all the tricks you learned.”
She twisted herself around and looked at him. Yeah, she thought. What better way to get that place and that man out of her head. “All right, wiseass,” she said, “you asked for it.”
She went to her bureau, pulled out four scarves, grabbed a corner of the duvet, and yanked it off the bed, scattering legal papers. As usual, Karp was wearing only a T-shirt.
“Hey!” he protested. “What’re you …?”
Marlene got onto the bed and seized Karp’s wrist.
“Marlene. What are you doing?” he asked. “I was just kidding, Marlene. Marlene? Marlene, come on …”
But he did not, however, resist physically as she tied all four of his limbs to the bedposts.
Then she went to his closet and got his black leather belt.
“Marlene,” he said, giggling, “you touch me with that thing and you’re history. I mean it, Marlene.”
“Silence, disgusting worm!” cried Marlene, leaping up onto the bed and strutting around on it.
“Disgusting what …? Marlene, cut it out!” They were both laughing and trying to stifle themselves at the same time, in the fashion of couples in bed who share a dwelling with minor children.
She dangled the belt over his groin. “Hm. See, he’s pretending he doesn’t like it, but the body never lies, does it? Does it?”
She fell to her knees and straddled his chest and slowly inched her way up until her crotch was nearly at his face.
“Take my panties off, slave!” she hissed nastily. “With your mouth.”
Remarkably, Karp was able to stop laughing long enough to do it.
Some time later, Karp whispered into her ear. “Dear, could I say something? Could we never do this again?”
Marlene shifted so she could fix him with her real eye. Except for her underpants she was still fully dressed, boots and all.
“Gee, Butch, you could’ve fooled me. I thought that really turned you on. I was just thinking that we could get our money’s worth out of the ten bucks I had to shell out for the membership card in that S-M club. You could borrow it, go down there, make a regular thing of it.”
“Maybe in my next life.”
“So … what? It’s back to the biweekly three-minute special in the missionary position?”
“I guess so,” said Karp. “I now find I’m really an old-fashioned girl. Although … I could maybe crank it up to four minutes. I hear there are dietary supplements … say, could you take off that dog collar? I’m getting spiked here. Jesus, I go to bed with my wife, it’s like playing second base against Ty Cobb.”
She laughed. “Oh, it’s always something with you. The good thing about real masochists, I’ve found, is that they never complain.” She removed the spiked collar and said, “Now. I am going to take a long, hot one and then return in my shapeless virginal white nightie. That should make you happy.”
“It will,” said Karp. “Oh, before you get too comfortable, you had a message from Bello on the private line. Some kind of emergency in Brooklyn.”
She sat up with a start. “What! Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I was tied up,” he said with a grin. “There’s a number by the phone.”
Marlene found the slip of paper, dialed it, got an answer from a precinct house in Brooklyn, asked for Bello, and when her partner came on the line said, “Harry, it’s me. What happened? What? How? Oh, shit! Harry, okay, I’m sitting down. Please, please, tell me he didn’t use that fucking machine gun. Oh, thank you, Jesus! Where is he now? They haven’t booked him through yet? Have you talked to the homicide A.D.A.? Okay, I’ll meet you at the precinct in like half an hour. Okay. Okay. Bye.” She slammed the phone down and glared at Karp.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Oh, Lonny Dane shot and killed Donald Monto over in Bensonhurst. He came after Mary Kay Miller with a.22 rifle, and Dane took him down. I got to go over there and straighten it out. Oh, shit! This had to happen tonight!”
She staggered to her feet and scooped her car keys off the dresser and her leather jacket off the floor. She blew Karp a kiss and said, “Sorry about this-it shouldn’t take too long, but if I’m not home by the time you have to leave, please don’t forget to walk Sweety. Posie’ll handle the kids, except don’t let Lucy wear jeans to school, okay?”
“Fine,” said Karp, keeping a straight face. “You sure you haven’t forgotten anything?”
She wrinkled her brow. “I don’t think so. Why?”
Karp held up a scrap of lacy black. “Your panties, one, and two, you’re going to make a better impression down at Brooklyn Homicide if you change out of that outfit.”
After they stopped laughing, Marlene said, “I’m glad to see you’re not all bent out of shape about this, at least.”
Karp shrugged. “Hey, what can I say? As long as you guys shoot them in Brooklyn.”
THIRTEEN
The third week in November and they still hadn’t finished picking the jury in Rohbling. Judge Peoples had made it clear that he did not want to go into the holiday season without a completed panel, and neither Karp nor Waley thought it prudent to defy him in this. In truth, there was little choice, for the weeks of grinding had eaten away their initial thirty peremptory challenges until, on the last day, Karp had two left and Waley had none. Karp was not sure whether that was a victory or not. He had bitten his lip to keep from challenging some venirepersons who had ultimately been impaneled, and had used his challenges to knock off some people he thought should have been removed for cause, most of which had to do with attitudes toward psychiatry. Peoples, of course, had steered this process through his ability, which he was not loath to use, of ruling what was “cause” and what was not.
Nevertheless, they now had a jury-seven women and five men on the panel and two alternates, both male. Of the fourteen, five were black, two were Asian, four were Hispanic, and the rest non-minority white. No singletons that anyone could observe; Karp made it a rule never to have singletons on homicide juries, because having someone who felt isolated from his peers was asking for a holdout and a hung jury. Karp made an exception to the rule with respect to college educations, and there was but one on the panel who had a degree, a retired NYU professor (male) who had been the last one picked, after Waley had exhausted his challenges. Karp felt pretty good about that, although the man was just an alternate. The rest were your basic New York solid types- homemakers, small business owners, clerks, artisans, a bike-messenger manager, three housewives. Their average age was rather older than the city’s average age, retired people being the only citizens who want to get picked for a jury. Five of them were, in fact, retirees.