Irresistible Impulse (36 page)

“You’ll be gone for what? The whole summer?” Karp asked uneasily, feeling things slipping out of control, wanting to hug her, wanting things to return to what he considered real life, but unable to make the necessary effort.

She shrugged and stared blankly at the screen. “I don’t know,” she said. The news started. The lead-off tape showed fifteen seconds of the scuffle in the courthouse hallway. Marlene watched without comment. Karp got up and went to the phone and ordered Chinese food delivered.

Marlene stayed in front of the set, drinking wine, while Karp ate and fed himself and his sons and Posie. Lucy would not come out of her room to eat. Marlene finished her bottle and opened another one and drank half of that. At eleven-forty or so, she switched the set off in the middle of Johnny’s monologue and went into the kitchen, where she ate some white bean soup and bread. The loft was quiet, the only sounds the perpetual whir and dull rumble of the city outside, elevator sounds, refrigerator sounds.

And faint steps. Lucy came into the kitchen. She was wearing a green Notre Dame T-shirt that reached to her knees. She said, “Oh,” when she saw her mother. Without a word Marlene ladled warm soup into a bowl, buttered some bread, and poured out a glass of chocolate milk. Lucy sat down and ate.

“You smell drunk,” said Lucy.

“That’s because I
am
drunk,” said Marlene. “I think I am entitled to tie one on every time I kill somebody and spend a night in jail.”

Lucy said, “How come Daddy’s mad at you?”

“Well,” said Marlene, “he thinks I shouldn’t have gotten involved in shooting somebody when my family was around. He was worried that you or the babies would get hurt. Also, I think he thinks it’s bad for you to see somebody get shot. He would rather I was in a different business. Also, I don’t think his trial is going real well. This garbage outside, all those news guys hanging around, bothering us—it was the last straw.”

Lucy thought about this. “Is why they call it the last straw because if there aren’t enough straws, like, somebody has to drink out of the glass and the ice cubes clunk against their teeth?”

Marlene laughed and explained. Then she grew serious and said, “I’m going to go away for a while, to help Uncle Harry guard somebody and guard some other lady too. It’s a nice place, and when school is over next week, you can come out and visit me.”

A long pause. Then, suspiciously, “You’re not getting
divorced
or anything, are you?”

“No, we’re not,” said Marlene with a sigh. “Your father and I are tied to each other for all eternity. We may kill each other, but we’re not breaking up.” Marlene rose and lit a cigarette, a rare event in the loft, which she smoked standing in the corner of the kitchen, thus reducing her daughter’s cancer risk to some extent.

“How’s your eye?” Marlene asked.

“Okay, I guess. A little sore.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing. This fifth-grader boy got in my face, talking bad about you, and I said something back and he pushed me—”

“This was a Chinese kid?” Marlene said in surprise.

“No, a
bokwai
, an American kid, so he pushed me and I pushed him and then he hit me in the face and I punched his nose out. He was bleeding like crazy.”

“Okay. I should thank you for sticking up for me, but you can’t fight in school, babe. You should have walked away.”

“
You
didn’t.”

“No, you’re right. But that wasn’t a schoolkid fight. A man was going to commit murder, he was going to kill a woman that relied on me to protect her, so I took him down. And you
can
make a case that it was a risk to you all. Your daddy’s right. Anytime bullets start flying, you can never be sure where they’ll end up. But I figured the risk was worth it because it was a sure thing that the woman was going to be dead, and I was between him and you all, and I thought I was a better shot too.”

“What if a bullet hit me and killed me, what would you do?”

Marlene put out her smoke in the sink and sat down next to Lucy. She said, “I would cry for a year and a day, and tear all my hair out, and then
I
would have another little girl.”

“Better than me?”

“Oh, far, far better than you. You have a smart mouth and you’re much too skinny. Look at this! Ribs!” Tickling.

“And you’re much too fat!” giggled Lucy, tickling back.

The next morning before dawn, Marlene wrote out notes for Karp, Lucy, and Posie and slipped out of the loft with a duffel bag over her shoulder and her dog at heel. By the time it was full day, she was tooling East on the Long Island Expressway, watching as the westbound lanes made their daily transformation into the world’s longest parking lot, and feeling nearly herself again, whatever that was. Although she was going to work, it felt like a vacation, the first break from daily domesticity in nearly ten years. It was a nice day, warm, fleecy clouds overhead. The idiot light for the electrical system flickered on and stayed on; Marlene cared not for idiot lights. She turned the radio up high. The dog stuck its great head out the rear window and lolled its tongue, attracting startled looks from the drivers of the passing cars.

At Riverhead, she turned south and joined the Southern State Parkway, which she took into Southampton. She had no trouble finding the South Shore Club, a huge, glittering-white, over-architected, angular structure on a private road just northwest of Southampton village. The Meadow Club is the place where old money plays tennis in Southampton, and they don’t let just anybody in, and those that they do let don’t get to play tennis in anything but white. In contrast, anyone who has the $150,000 fee can play at South Shore, and they can hit the courts in Day-Glo knickers if they so desire. The management of this club had worked long to capture the women’s professional tennis tour as a symbol that the arrivistes who made up their membership had indeed arrived and to give the snoots at Meadow one in the eye.

Marlene told the guard at the gate who she was, and he directed her to the employees parking lot, around the back. There she parked next to Wolfe’s Chevy and Harry’s Plymouth. A pimply youth in a pale blue blazer, holding a portable radio, gave her directions to the security meeting. She left Sweety in the car, the windows cracked.

They were holding the meeting in a basement room used for changing and breaks by the staff of the club: There were lockers along one wall and uniforms of various types stacked on shelves or hung in cleaner bags from the pipes that lined the ceiling. About twenty men were sitting on metal folding chairs or standing about in groups. These were the bodyguards of the tennis celebrities who would be playing in the tournament. Most of them had the serious, cynical faces you picked up in the cops. There was a stir when Marlene walked in, smiles, not entirely sympathetic ones. Marlene was famous in the bodyguard world.

She found Harry Bello and Wolfe and sat down next to them. Harry was wearing a blue Lacoste shirt, pressed gray slacks, and polished loafers. He was blending in again.

Some men entered the room: a short redhead wearing a blue blazer with a club crest on it, a man in the white-shirted uniform of the Southampton police, and a tall, crop-headed state trooper. The man introduced himself as Mort Griffin, the head of security for the club, and introduced the policemen who were to serve as security liaisons with their respective organizations. He began to speak about the security arrangements for the tournament, and the coordinations necessary to prevent large numbers of armed men from getting in one another’s way. Marlene was soon bored, but she observed Harry taking detailed notes. He likes this, she thought, and he’s good at it. It saddened her that their old relationship, like the old casual organization of Bello & Ciampi Security, was passing away. The fact was that Harry was a pro at this and she was not, nor did she especially want to be.

The meeting broke up after the security chief had pointed out a row of pale blue blazers, hanging from a pipe, each in bags marked with a name. All security personnel working the event were required to wear them.

They shrugged into their blazers. To Marlene’s surprise, hers fit perfectly. Wolfe went off to a meeting about radio procedure. Harry handed Marlene a thick folder.

“This is what we got on our guy,” he said.

She opened it and leafed through the pages. “Harry, this is all in German,” she said.

“Yeah, but there’s a couple of sheets there says he’s in the country as of last Tuesday. Check out the picture.”

Manfred Stolz, the stalker, had been arrested twice for harassing Trade Speyr, once in Bonn and once in Paris. The photos showed a wiry man with a bony face, a big Adam’s apple, and frizzy reddish hair. He wanted to marry Trude Speyr, failing which he intended to kill her—the usual. What wasn’t usual was that he had declared it quite openly, been jailed for it, and gone on declaring it.

“He looks easy to spot,” said Marlene.

“Maybe. In Paris he wore a wig.”

“Fiendish,” said Marlene. “Okay, Harry, I got to go see Edie Wooten right now. I’ll spend the night there, and I’ll meet you back here tomorrow morning. Say seven-thirty? We’ll have breakfast, providing the help is allowed to eat on site.”

“She wants to meet you,” said Harry.

Marlene rolled her eyes and protested, but then she recalled all those meetings Harry had gone to with the Germans, and she meekly followed him up a flight of stairs to the club dining room, where a reception for the tennis stars was under way. The room was large and white, with huge angled windows facing the ocean, and everyone in it who was not wearing a uniform was rich or famous or both or a worshiper of wealth and fame. Harry led her through the crowd and penetrated a knot of people surrounding what turned out to be a lithe blond teenager. Trude Speyr stopped talking to a short world-famous pop music star and cast an interested blue-eyed gaze at Marlene. Harry made the introductions. There was a startled murmur from the group. Marlene and the girl shook hands. Strobe lights flashed.

They exchanged some banal words, Speyr speaking halting, accented English while the sycophants beamed. Some manager-type in lime green slacks made a crack about the shooting at the fair, and all the famous people tittered. Marlene would have said something vicious had not Harry pinched the back of her arm.

“How can you stand it, Harry?” she asked when they were back outside. “Those people …”

“Beats chasing scumbags down stairways. Beats corpses with maggots in their eyes. Beats waking up covered by your own puke. And it pays the bills.”

She was about to object that wearing a pissy blazer and dancing attendance on gilded assholes was not what she’d had in mind when she started the business, but bit it back. She looked at her friend in the clear afternoon light of a Long Island summer and saw that he looked good, not great, of course, but not a three-day corpse either. He was doing a man’s job, and a difficult one, on his own, and Marlene could, almost for the first time, see the person he had been before his life came apart, a quiet, decent man with a wry sense of humor.

And who was she to talk, she who was just dashing off to care for her very own gilded asshole genius? So instead of having another fight, she hugged him and smiled and was rewarded by a flickering smile in return. She kissed his cheek and got into her car. Which did not start. Sweety whined.

“Won’t start?”

“You’re some detective, Harry,” said Marlene peevishly. “What’ll I do?”

“I’ll get Wolfe to drive you. No problem,” said new Harry, the exec.

Twenty minutes later, Wolfe pulled his Caprice around. Marlene and Sweety got in, and as they did, Wolfe pulled a tape out of his stereo and shoved it under his seat.

“What’s the tape, Wolfe?” she asked.

“Urn, nothing,” he replied. They pulled out of the parking lot and onto the narrow road.

“Come on, Wolfe. What, you’re ashamed of your musical taste? How bad could it be? Worse than Conway Twitty? Mantovani? Tiajuana Brass? Lawrence Welk?”

His face worked nervously. “It’s, ah, not music. It’s like, uh, a motivational tape. For, you know, dealing with people.”

It was Marlene’s turn to feel embarrassed. She had not thought Wolfe a striver; nor had it occurred to her that what she considered a throw-away muscle job could represent, for someone like Wolfe, the basis for a career. To cover she said brightly, “So, do you have any music tapes to go with your fine stereo?”

“In the glove,” he said.

In the glove compartment were two cassettes in new boxes, a
Greatest Hits of the 70’s
collection and a
Best of the Eagles, Volume One
. Marlene slipped in the Eagles and turned up the sound, and they headed north with “Take it Easy” playing, Marlene singing along, Wolfe driving, stolid and silent.

They drove north to Sag Harbor, to the marina she had been told to look for, which they discovered to be a white-painted storefront with signs in front of it advertising charter boats
(Donna T., SeaWind)
and rental Lightnings and Whalers. There was a long gray dock and a small gray beach next to it where some kids were messing with Jet Skis. While Marlene searched out the proprietor, Wolfe took Sweety to throw sticks on the beach. The dog liked him and he was good with the dog. It occurred to Marlene that the firm could send Wolfe to guard dog school and get him a big dog of his own. A little staff development.

She found the manager, a thin old boy in greasy gray coveralls (
Ralph
embroidered on the breast) and arranged the ride. Edie Wooten had already called him, he said, and was that your big dog?

Wolfe left, saying that he would pick her up the next morning, and with her dog on a leash and her duffel bag slung, she boarded a shining, elderly mahogany launch. Twenty minutes later, after a passage over calm, boat-flecked Gardiners Bay, they disembarked at a little dock at Wooten’s Island.

Marlene let Sweety off his chain and walked up a path dressed in tan gravel between thick fir hedges. This led to a wide lawn, shady under old maples and sycamores, and the house itself, a Tudor manse like a small Nonesuch, done in soft-looking carved stone the color of lips. Weathered garden chairs and a round table were arranged on the velvety lawn, and there was a walled rose garden off to the left of the house, with the bright blooms showing over the wall.