“So,” said Roland, “this little visit, it means you’re gonna get off my ass on Tomasian?”
“Well, yes and no, Roland. It’s not that simple.”
“Then let me hear the yes part first.”
“Okay, Tomasian is your case. You do it how you want, and I won’t make any more public comments about how you’re handling it. I’m going to sit on my private opinion that the case is fucked.”
Hrcany flushed and was about to say something, but Karp stopped him with a hand gesture and continued, “Hold on a second. Here’s my problem. You’re an experienced prosecutor. You got an instinct. You want to play it a little cute sometimes, a little closer to the horns than I do, than I’d like, that’s fine. For you.
“But I got fifteen, twenty kids on the staff who don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground. They weren’t trained by Garrahy’s old homicide bureau, like you and me. They see the stuff you pull, they think it’s cool for them to do it too. And it’s not. I can’t have thirty or so cases I think are fucked up running all the time, and I can’t nursemaid every case individually. You see the problem?”
“Assuming I do,” said Roland carefully, “what’re you going to do about it? This is the no part coming, right?”
“Yeah. Basically, I want to fill in around your investigation. You say the cash and the letters and the details of the vic’s life are irrelevant. Fine. Go that way. But I need to find out for sure. And I’m going to.”
“What, you’re going to investigate my investigation?” asked Roland with some heat.
“No, that’s not the point. I just want to check out the stuff you thought wasn’t worth checking out. If it doesn’t amount to anything, you’re the hero and I’m the goat.”
“And the opposite if it does, right?”
“No, as a matter of fact: I intend to feed you anything I find out. Like I said, it’s your case. And if it turns out that Tomasian is innocent, you’ll do the right thing. And it’ll be a good lesson for the kids.”
The glower was back in Roland’s eyes. “Fuck the kids! I don’t like this. It’s like you’re working D. against me.”
“No, it’s not,” said Karp. “I’m just completing the investigation for the People.” Roland snorted derisively, but Karp continued in the same calm tone. “The thing of it is, Roland, I’m going to do it either way. Now, we can duke it out in public and split the bureau and make Wharton and them real happy, or we can approach it like friends and colleagues who’re trying to work out a difference of opinion. It’s really up to you how it goes down.”
Hrcany sipped his coffee and considered this at length. He thought Karp was chasing rainbows, but still, the notion that Karp would, in a sense, be working for him on the case was certainly attractive. And he knew he could depend on Karp’s promise that any new stuff that came up would not be used in an embarrassing way. It was a covered bet, a two-way win, the kind that Roland liked best.
He looked Karp in the eye and rapped sharply, once, on the table. “Okay, deal.” A smile spread across his face. “You wouldn’t want to make it more interesting? A little side bet?”
“Okay, if I lose, I’ll kiss your ass in Macy’s window,” said Karp.
“No, I mean for real. Money. Say a yard. Come on!”
“No bet, Roland. You know I don’t bet.”
Roland laughed. “Yeah, right. Okay, I’m mollified. How about a piece of ass as long as you’re here?”
“What!”
“Yeah, in the bedroom. Seventeen. Got a cooze on her feels like she’s only been fucked about a dozen times. Hah! That’s not counting last night and this morning.” He cupped his hand to his mouth.
“Hey, Mollie! You wanna fuck my friend here?”
From the direction of the bedroom came a querulous reply that Karp could not make out. Roland gestured in that direction. “Go ahead. In return for the bagels. I’m serious. She’ll do you.”
“Not today, Roland,” said Karp, rising and suppressing a wince. “But I appreciate the offer. Catch you later.”
Karp let himself out. The air was crisp and clean, springlike, not too laden with distillates, for which Karp was grateful. Although accustomed to wading ankle-deep in society’s rotted pus, depravity on a more intimate level, as, for instance, practiced by friends, disturbed him. That it disturbed him also disturbed him. It cut him off in a way from the prevailing mood of his times, which, being at heart a companionable man, he would have liked to have shared.
But no, having dipped lightly into the fleshpots immediately after his first wife had run out on him, he had found that he didn’t much care for casual sex, or any of the ordinary weirdnesses of his era.
He had just resigned himself to young-fogeyhood when Marlene dropped into his life. She had, in contrast, stinted herself nothing in the sexual phantasmagoria that was 1970s New York, and Karp was content to thus sample the fleshpots at, as it were, second hand. Feeling virtuous, warmed by recalling his most recent encounter just that morning with his very own sensual calliope, Karp walked back toward the downtown subway.
Marlene, at this moment, had completed the ever-wrenching transition from scented houri to cart horse. She was about to take her infant daughter to the park, an enterprise which, if one lives in a five-floor walk-up in the City and the nearest park is ten blocks away, requires nearly the equipment and preparation of an assault on the Eiger.
With the baby on one hip and a huge canvas bag on the other, and while balancing a collapsible stroller on her shoulder, Marlene clumped down the narrow stairs. Out on the sun-dappled, filthy street she set up the contraption and placed the child in it, and leaned over to strap her in.
It was a scene still oddly out of place on that industrial street. All around her, cursing workmen were offloading huge spools of heavy wire from a truck and manhandling them to the cable hoist in Marlene’s building, where they would be hauled up to the drawing mill that occupied the two middle loft floors. This was one reason why Marlene had decided to get out of her loft for the day. The ancient motor that ran the hoist was located in her home, and all morning it would be producing a deafening racket.
She set off down Crosby to Grand and then headed east. Soon she left the industrial loft zone and entered the heart of Little Italy. At Grand and Mulberry she passed the tenement where her grandmother had lived for most of her long life. From before Marlene could remember until she had left for college, she had spent every Sunday in that apartment, and afterward, on fine evenings, she had played on these streets, potsy and jump rope and the various lost street games of the City that amused children in the era before TV took over the hours between dinner and bedtime: ringalevio, red light green light, giant steps, Chinese handball.
The neighborhood was still the same on the surface. The shops were still nearly all Italian, as were the restaurants, although the Chinese were pressing in, especially around the junction with Mott Street. Yet Little Italy was shrinking and growing older. Marlene’s parents’ generation had largely abandoned it for the near suburbs, and most of her contemporaries were not interested in walk-up tenements.
The remaining old folks were out in force today, however, it being one of the first warm weekends of the year. Marlene stopped and spoke with several black-clad grand dames, friends of her grandmother’s, who were sitting out in front of their doors on folding chairs. Lucy was made much of.
The old men were out too, and the doors of the social clubs, storefronts with their large windows painted brown or dark green, were open to catch the spring breezes. Marlene spent a few minutes chatting with a retired capo of the Lucchese family, who tried to give Lucy a cube of nougat exactly the right size to jam in a six-month-old’s trachea. Marlene intervened in time to avert what might have been the old gentleman’s first unintentional murder and moved on.