Irresistible Impulse (17 page)

“Why don’t you ask her?” said Karp.

Waley said coldly, “How amusing. I only hope you have not precipitated a disaster.” Then he brushed by Karp and left the courtroom.

Marlene spent an hour at Juilliard with Wolfe and the Lincoln Center security man, a grizzled ex-cop named McPhail, who thought they were making a big deal out of nothing, but who was willing to cooperate nevertheless to accommodate a star. He sounded like he’d done it before. She left Wolfe there to work out details and drove downtown to her loft.

There she was glad to find everything in cozy order, although the vast room smelled alarmingly of jasmine incense. She hoped Posie wasn’t using it to cover the scent of marijuana, but she also knew that she probably would have done nothing more than rant had Posie come to the door with a bong stuck in her smile. The woman was just too valuable to dismiss.

They were in the living room, watching
Sesame Street
. Marlene plopped on the couch, kicked off her boots, and jiggled both her babies, who suffered the caresses of the near stranger with benign indifference. They were warm and dry and sweet-smelling, and if Marlene felt a sudden wrenching sense of loss, the twins clearly did not. She returned them to Posie, who was staring loose-jawed at the screen, seemingly astounded by what could be done with the letter M.

“How was school, Luce?” she asked her eldest, who was stretched belly down on the rug.

“Okay. I got an A on the math test.”

Marlene raised her eyes to heaven and said dramatically, “Thank you, Jesus and St. Jude!”

Lucy laughed. “Tranh showed me some stuff when I was there the other day, and it just sort of clicked. Maybe it’s easier in Cantonese. He’s a good teacher.”

Meaning I could use some work in that department, thank you so very much, my darling, thought Marlene. Then, starting to feel a hair
de trop
at her own hearthside, and already knowing as much as she wanted to know about M., she stood up, kissed all around, gave orders for dinner preparation, and announced, “I think I’ll take the dog for a walk.”

At the magic W word, there was a clatter and scrabbling in the kitchen, and the mastiff was at her side, pressing its nose into her midriff and slobbering down the front of her slacks.

She did take the dog for a walk, and then she loaded it into the rear of the VW and drove through a thin rain and the rush-hour traffic to a construction site at Madison and Sixty-third. There she waited, leaning against the car and smoking, while quitting time came and the construction workers streamed out of the half-finished condo. She had to turn down a half dozen lewd offers before the man she wanted came through the plywood door.

“Mr. Nobili!” she called. “Could I talk to you for a moment?”

The man, a shortish, swarthy fellow with a heavy Nixonian beard shadow on his jowls, wearing yellow oilskins and a red hard hat on backward, stopped and looked over at her.

“She wants you, Arnie,” said one of his companions.

“Yo, Arnie, after you,” said another. There were a number of whistles: good, clean construction-worker fun.

Arnie Nobili smiled and approached her. She smiled back, opened the passenger door of the VW, and gestured him in. More whistles and shouts. Marlene got in the driver’s side and cranked the engine, which refused to start for a long minute and then came sulkily to life.

“Sounds like the alternator,” said Nobili. “So what is this?”

She let the engine idle, producing heat for the blower, and handed him one of her cards.

“I’m Marlene Ciampi,” she said. “Tamara Monro has retained us. I’ve helped her take out a protective order, which I understand you’ve already violated.”

Nobili’s smile vanished and was replaced by an unpleasant belligerent expression. “What, are you some kind of cop?” She noticed there was alcohol on his breath.

“No. I’m a lawyer and a private detective. I wanted to have a talk with you so that we’d understand each other.”

“
She
hired you?
She
hired you to protect her from
me?
”

“That’s correct, Mr. Nobili.”

“Well, you can fucking unhire yourself, lady. Tamara don’t need no protection.” He gestured at her with a dirty finger the size of a center punch.

“You have to stop trying to see her, Mr. Nobili. You have to understand that the relationship is over.”

Nobili moved his face closer to hers, jabbing with his finger. “Hey, it’s over when
I
say it’s over, understand? You fuckin’
tell
her that! No,
I’ll
fuckin’ tell her. She’ll never fuckin’ forget it, I get through with her.” He jacked the door handle. “And fuck your order and fuck you!” he said, and, as an afterthought, “Bitch!”

Marlene called out, “Sweety,
l’affirati!
”

Nobili paused with the door open and looked at her. “What did you say?” he snarled.

The mastiff came out of the baggage space under the hatchback in a black blur, grabbed a mouthful of Nobili’s oilskin, and yanked him back into his seat. His hard hat came down over his face as he flailed and cried out. The car door swung closed with a slight click. Sweety, meanwhile, was doing its impression of the Hound of Hell, baring fangs, growling like distant lions, splashing hot slaver down the man’s collar.

“This interview is over when
I
say it is, understand?” said Marlene.

Nobili’s hat fell off in the shaking he was getting. “Make it stop! Make it stop!” he quavered.

“Sweety,
chiu gentilmenti,
” said Marlene. The dog stopped shaking Nobili, but retained its grip. “Yes, ‘make it stop.’ That’s just what Ms. Morno said to me in reference to your attentions.”

“You—you’re not allowed to do this,” said the man, gasping.

“No, I’m not, you’re right. This is a sort of kidnap. It’s a felony. I’m breaking the law, which I hate to do, but I don’t think you’ll complain, because a couple of nights ago you went by Tamara’s place and pounded on her door for an hour, and when she wouldn’t open up for you, you pulled the valves out of her tires. That’s against the law too. Now, I tried to have a civilized conversation with you so that you’d understand that the situation has changed, and you insulted me and suggested that despite the protective order, you were going to see her and harm her. So here we are. Let me restate the case. If you go near Tamara Morno again,
you
will be the one that gets hurt, not her. Do you understand? Say you understand!” The dog caught Marlene’s tone and snarled wetly.

Nobili shuddered and mumbled, “Yeah, yeah, I understand.”

“Good. Now, if I were you, I’d do some work on that booze problem too.”

“I don’t got a problem,” replied Nobili in a sullen voice.

“Yeah, you do. You start in brooding about why you’re all alone, and that makes you sad and you drink, and when you got your load, you start feeling pretty good and you start thinking that you could fix things up with Tamara, and you go looking for her and when she doesn’t want to see you, because you’re drunk, you start thinking, hey, I put myself out, I’m willing to let bygones be bygones, what the hell does this bitch want? You start feeling sorry for yourself. You blame her for things going wrong. Then you drink some more, and you start to break things and beat up on her. Then when you sober up, you forget what you did, and you can’t figure out why she doesn’t love you. And every time it’s a little bit worse, isn’t it? Yeah, it is. And you know, ordinarily something like this would end with her dead and you in jail, feeling real sorry about it. This time, however, you keep on with this horseshit, it’s going to end with
you
dead, and her free, and not feeling sorry at all. Like they say in A.A., your life’s out of control. Get some help, Arnold.”

The man said nothing, but sat there cringing from the dog and glaring at Marlene. She sighed and said, “Sweety,
lu rilassi!
” The dog gave up its mouthful of jacket. To Nobili she said, “Okay, scram! For your sake, I hope I never have to see you again.”

“What did you do today?” Karp asked at dinner that evening.

Marlene said, “I got screamed at by a rich junkie, and I terrorized a drunk. Those were the high points, I think.”

“How did you terrorize him, Mom?” asked Lucy.

“I threatened to spank him on his bare heinie. It never fails.” She cupped a hand to her ear. “Remind me again why I’m not a highly paid attorney at a white-shoe law firm.”

“Because you’re a self-destructive nutcase?” Karp ventured.

“Mmm. That doesn’t sound quite right.”

“I think it’s because you’re real brave, and you don’t want women to get hurt,” said Lucy, the literalist, the loyalist. Marlene’s heart overflowed.

“Thank you, darling,” she said, beaming. “First long division, now the inmost secrets of the psyche. Truly, there is no end to your excellence!”

NINE

T
errell Collins knocked twice on Karp’s door and, hearing a vague grunt, walked in. He found his boss amid stacks of Xeroxed pages from law books, some actual law books, teetering in green- or red-and-ochre-bound piles, and a scatter of crumpled yellow legal bond. The two men looked at each other and smiled the smile of acknowledged exhaustion. They were working on responses to Waley’s motions in
Rohbling
. It was not a trivial task.

“You get it?” asked Karp.

Collins deposited a short stack of Xeroxes on one of the desk’s few bare zones. “White’s dissent in
Massiah
, with commentaries on same. I don’t see how it’s relevant, though; it relates to counsel after indictment. The motion is to suppress a confession obtained in violation of
Miranda. Massiah
is about Sixth Amendment right to counsel being violated by the cops sticking a secret informant on a defendant out on bail
after
indictment.”

“Yeah, I know that, but Waley mentions the dissent in his points and authorities, so we have to look at it. Why he mentioned it, I have no idea. It’s a dissent, Whizzer White sticking up for the prosecution as usual, and getting creamed, but Waley uses it to make a general point about the use of interpersonal confidence to draw out a confession. It’s all part of the weave here; he’s spreading a net to catch the attention of the judge, tilt him his way.” Karp tapped his teeth with a pencil, a habitual gesture. Then he looked up at Collins and said, “You ever read a pair of motions like this?” He indicated the actual motion documents, sitting alone on one side of his desk, festooned like barbaric brides with torn strips of yellow bond indicating legal references.

“They’re pretty good,” admitted Collins. “Dense argument, the guy knows the law.”

“Pretty good? Terry,
you’re
pretty good, I’m
very
good. This”—he tapped the motions—“is fucking
Mozart
. I’m reading this, and I’m thinking, yeah, he’s right, we don’t have much of a case. Peoples is eating this up, I know it. Do you know him at all well? Peoples, I mean.”

“Just by rep,” said Collins, settling himself on the edge of the desk. “He’s real smart, a little arrogant maybe. No nonsense in the courtroom. Hates to be reversed on appeal. In general, a prosecutor’s judge; I mean, you present a decent case, he’ll support you, he’ll resist the usual defense scams pretty well.” He shrugged. “That’s about all I know. All in all, I think it was a good break getting him for
Rohbling
.”

“Maybe,” said Karp. “I notice you left out the first thing an average person would mention about him.”

Collins wrinkled his brow for a second or two. “You mean that he’s black? Jesus, Butch, the guy’s to the right of Reagan. He hates affirmative action, he never gives any credence to race-based exculpatory arguments …” He checked himself and then added, “Oh, I get it. The bend over backward to be fair to the white kid accused of killing black women. You think that’s going to be important?”

“I don’t know, but I would bet on Peoples taking the concept of fairness to its extreme limit. If we win one on the merits, it’s going to take twice as much to win the next one, because Peoples is going to want to keep the score even. On the other hand, we won’t get any freebies; we can forget the ‘prosecutor’s judge’ business, especially with Waley in there. Not a cheap-trick guy, Waley.”

Karp massaged his chest and took several deep breaths to relieve the tension he felt growing in his chest. Then he stretched and said, “My head’s too full of details. I need to step back and see how it’s fitting together. Why don’t you tell me the case?”

“Tell you … ?”

“Yeah, tell me the case. Why do we have this mutt behind bars? Tell me a story. Amuse me.”

Collins smiled and got to his feet. As he spoke, he paced back and forth, four feet in one direction, four in the other, as if he were in court.

“Okay. Saturday evening, April 20, a disturbance is heard by neighbors of Jane Hughes, age sixty-eight, of 1718 St. Nicholas Avenue. A witness sees a slightly built, short-haired, neatly dressed black man leaving that building at around ten-thirty. He’s carrying a blue fabric suitcase. The following day Mrs. Hughes’s son arrives to take his mother to church—”

“Right, cut to the evidence at the scene.”

“Okay, Hughes is found lying in the wreckage of a coffee party—she was entertaining someone, two cups and so on. Stuff is smashed, she put up a struggle. She was a good-sized woman, by the way, a retired practical nurse. Gordon Featherstone catches the case, and right away he notices that Hughes has long nails and some of them are broken off, and he makes sure the hands get bagged. Autopsy shows she died from being smothered by an object made of heavy blue cotton canvas. She’s got the fibers way up her tubes. No sexual assault, by the way, but forensics finds blue fibers, skin, blood, and body hairs under the nails. Skin is brown in color, but the hairs and the blood ID as Caucasian. They analyze the skin fragments, and they find commercial brown dye. So we have a white man disguised as a black man.”

“Stop a minute. You talk to Featherstone yet?”

“On the phone, not face to face.”

“You ask him was he surprised it was a white guy?”

Collins smiled and nodded. “As a matter of fact, I did. He was amazed. Never happened before.” Collins seemed to share the detective’s feeling.