“You should have taken him up on it. We could use the money,” said Marlene, placing the baby, with a full bottle stuck in her gob, on a large mat in the center of the living zone. She then went into the kitchen and set the kettle to boil. Karp followed her in and sat on a stool at the butcher block counter.
“Unless you don’t think it’s a lock?” she added, looking at him questioningly.
He took a while before replying. “I honestly don’t know. I’d hate to think Roland was right, but like I said before, and like I said to him, that’s not the damn point. Why doesn’t anybody get this? The point is the investigation’s fucked. And I’ve been trying to think how I can straighten it out.” He paused, looked at her, and then glanced away. Then he asked, “Harry Bello’s coming to work starting Monday, isn’t he?”
“Yeah, why?” She caught the expression on his face, and her eyes narrowed and she snarled. “Oh, no! No fucking way! You’re not going to take my only investigator away from me. You’ve got a hundred cops you could use.”
“Yeah, but this is an off-the-books job. I can’t set up a regular cop and go, ‘A couple of your brother officers screwed up an investigation, why don’t you go straighten it out?’ Besides, where am I going to get them? Midtown South? Forget it! The D.A. squad? Those guys are all Roland’s asshole buddies. They love him. No way are they gonna put anything real into a job like this.”
“Harry’s a cop,” Marlene protested.
“In a manner of speaking. What he is is your personal ninja. There’s no way I can make him do anything. Which is why this has to be a favor, you to me.” He saw her jaw stiffen. “Honest, it’ll be a short-term thing. And it’s not gonna be anywhere near full-time…. Look,” he continued as he saw that these words were having little effect, “why don’t you do the whole thing?”
Startled, Marlene replied, “What! Butch, I’m up to my ears with my regular stuff. I can’t take on a homicide investigation.”
“It’s not a homicide investigation, Marlene. It’s just some checking up. Harry and you can do it in three or four days. See some people is all. Come on, you know you love this kind of stuff, cruising around with old Harry, the heavily armed semi-psychotic. Hell, you might even get shot. Make your week for you.”
Marlene’s mouth wriggled as she fought to suppress a grin. “I’m being manipulated,” she said.
“Yeah, and it’s working too. Hey, what’s that noise?”
There was indeed a faint rattling sound coming from the living room. They both ran around the divider. The baby’s mat was empty.
Hearts in throats, they followed the clattering noise to a corner of the living room where, under a rickety end table, their baby was yanking and sucking on an electric lamp plug she had just pulled from a wall socket, and seemed to be trying to pull the heavy ceramic lamp down on her delicate little head.
“My God! She can crawl!” cried Marlene, delighted and terrified at once. She snatched the infant out from under the table and held it to her breast, kissing it soundly. “Butch, get the baby whip! This child needs some harsh punishment. What were you thinking of, you birdbrain? (Kiss.) Plunging into danger? (Kiss.)”
“I wonder where she gets it from,” said Karp. Marlene raised an eyebrow at that, but he understood that it was a done deal. In the quite recent past he would have fought hard against Marlene taking up a task that involved her wandering the streets with someone like Harry Bello. Now he had arranged it. It was the baby, he concluded. His considerable endowment of protective instinct had become transferred from his wife to his daughter. It was not so much that he cared less about Marlene than he had in the past. It was more that he had come to realize that she was going to put herself at risk from time to time, for her own reasons, and that if he attempted to thwart her at this, she would simply lie to him and the relationship would eventually collapse. Looking around at the loft, which now seemed to hide a baby’s hideous death in its every cranny, he understood that this was the way it was supposed to work.
That Monday was, besides Harry Bello’s first day, the baby’s debut at Lillian Dillard’s group day-care. Marlene arrived well before time in order to deal with any first-day terrors, but Dillard pounced on Lucy and charmed her out of her rompers. The faithless wretch didn’t even glance up as Marlene sidled out of the room, feeling ridiculously annoyed. After all I’ve done for her.
Pausing at the entranceway, she watched Susan Weiner deliver little Nicholas with the aplomb of a Fed-Ex courier. Little Nicholas knew what was good for him too; he trudged into the center like a trouper, his shiny Sesame Street lunch box doubtless filled with food of matchless nourishment and perfectly free of harmful substances.
Marlene waved to Susan, who smiled and approached her.
“First day, huh? Any problems?”
“Not a one. It breaks my heart.”
“Yes,” said Susan, “it’s a long day. That’s why we try to schedule at least an hour of quality time in the evening.”
Marlene gave her a look to see if she was serious and then smiled politely. Marlene didn’t believe in quality time. Kids didn’t have Filofaxes; their needs were unscheduled. Marlene wanted to be a full-time mother and a full-time prosecutor. That she could not was yet another indication that life sucked, and blathering about quality time to assuage guilt was not going to change the fact that both her child and her career were suffering a net loss because of each other.
Susan was talking about how she had to go because there was this big rush on at work, where they were designing a custom façade for a gallery, and the architect wanted to pin the marble on with bronze roses and they couldn’t find exactly the right ones, and they ought to get together for lunch sometime.
Marlene wanted to kick her teeth in. She was wearing two grand on her back, and both her eyes were real and she had a perfect life and Marlene couldn’t help liking her and wanting to bask a little in that sublime confidence and grace.
Susan said good-bye and skittered off down the street and of course found a cab instantly going in the right direction. Marlene clumped off disconsolately to Centre Street, where she found her secretary and her staff acting peculiar and Harry Bello waiting in her office.
“Scaring the help, Harry?”
“How’s the kid?” asked Bello. Marlene knew that he did not mean Marlene herself, but her daughter, his goddaughter. Marlene told him about the new day-care and, seeing the look that he gave her, explained that it was a good place that she had thoroughly checked out and then added the name of the woman who ran it and the address. She knew that before long Harry would determine for himself whether or not Lillian Dillard had lived a blameless life back through grade school, and would also have checked out the other children and their parents and whether the facility was up to code in every respect. I ought to give it up and let him be the mom, she thought.
She looked at his face, which was the color of an old grocery bag left out in the rain for a long time, and just as empty of any human expression. He was unnaturally still too. He didn’t twitch his hands or rub his nose or do any of the small motions we inherit from the great apes, but sat, barely blinking, like a zombie waiting for a command from the hougan.
Harry didn’t talk much either; he never had, even when he was still tearing up the bad guys in Bed-Stuy with his partner. The partner had done all the talking. And Harry’s wife had done all the talking when he wasn’t at work. Then they had both died in the same week, and the partner’s death at least had been Harry’s fault, and that was, more or less, why Harry was what he was: a soul waiting for reincarnation but still visible to the rest of us. Old women crossed themselves when they saw him coming.