Irresistible Impulse (37 page)

Music came floating out from an open leaded-glass casement, the same liquid phrase repeated several times, as they approached the front door. Marlene knocked on it with a massive iron knocker, feeling like a gothic novel heroine despite the fairness of the day. The music stopped.

Edie Wooten opened the door, smiled at Marlene, and gave a little yelp when she saw Sweety.

“What is
that?
”

“It’s a Neapolitan mastiff. His name is Sweety. He’s perfectly harmless, aren’t you? Aren’t you?”

Sweety shook his monstrous jowls and flung drool in all directions to demonstrate how harmless he was. The two women sat down on a pair of Adirondack chairs, and chatted about how each of them was getting on, avoiding such topics as getting your clothes slashed by a maniac and shooting someone in the middle of a carnival. A stout gray-haired woman in an apron came out, whom Edie introduced as Bridget Marney, the housekeeper. Bridget Marney looked suspiciously at Sweety, who had found a shady spot under a yew hedge, and Sweety returned the favor. Bridget brought out a sweating pitcher of iced tea and glasses on a tray, and departed.

“Is he a guard dog?” Edie asked, having observed how closely the dog had watched the servant.

“Yes, he is,” said Marlene. “I’m going to have to be away working this tennis match for the next couple of days, and I want you watched. Sweety’ll do the job, maybe better than I could.”

“We have cats,” said Edie. “Will he eat them?”

“No, but he’ll eat anyone who comes into the house except you and me.”

Edie’s eyes widened. “Isn’t that a bit extreme?”

Marlene sighed. Somehow she still didn’t get it. Except for a couple of million dollars and a cello, she was just like Tamara Morno. “No, it isn’t. Look, I am extremely worried about you. This guy was never into violence before. Something seems to have set him onto a different track. Now he’s taken a knife and ripped up your possessions. He has to know you’re here, and he’s going to come after you. Luckily, this place is a lot more defensible than your apartment or a concert hall. When he does come, I want to nail him, physically. Now, is anyone else besides you and Mrs. Marney on the island? 1 mean, for the next couple of days.”

Edie seemed surprised by the question. “Well, yes, there’s Bridget’s husband. Jack takes care of the boats and the grounds. And Ginnie—”

“Ginnie’s
here?
”

“Naturally she’s here. She and some of her friends are in the east cottage.”

“Jesus, Edie! How could you
do
that! Her friends? Tell me Robinson’s not one of them!”

Edie’s face stiffened. “It’s her
house
, Marlene. I mean, she owns it. She can have anyone there she likes. Besides, I thought we had disposed of this notion of yours that she’s the one who’s been doing all these awful things. Or Vincent.”

Blind as a bat, thought Marlene. Why do I even bother? She took a breath and said, as calmly as she was able, “Okay, she’s a saint. Does she come in and out of
this
house much?”

A significant, embarrassed pause. “No, not at all. I have my life and she has hers. The island is fifteen acres, after all.”

“Good. So, what we need to do now is introduce Sweety to your couple, and after that he won’t let anyone else into the house. You might want to convey that message to your sister and her guests.”

“He’ll bark at them, you mean?”

“No, Sweety doesn’t bark,” said Marlene. “He’ll just hold them until I come back, which might be an annoyance, especially if they need to go to the bathroom.”

Edie coughed around her iced tea. “God! This is just for a day or so, yes?”

“Oh, yeah. I’ll be back full-time, or I’ll send Wolfe, day after tomorrow at the latest. Earlier if we can catch the guy who’s stalking Trude Speyr.” Marlene explained briefly about Manfred Stolz and his goal in life.

“Is he dangerous, do you think?” Edie asked.

“Fairly. No, I take that back. Very,” said Marlene, and, to satisfy her irritation at this sweet, oblivious woman, added, “About like yours, I’d say.”

EIGHTEEN

“J
ust do me one favor,” said the district attorney. “Next time you beat up a reporter, could you try to make sure that he’s not a member of one of our fine identifiable minorities? This strikes me as not too much to—”

“I didn’t beat him up, Jack,” Karp interrupted in an exhausted voice.

“…
too much to ask
. I know you didn’t, but that’s what it looked like. The phone’s ringing off the hook. I got the borough president telling me to pull you off the trial.”

Karp breathed into the phone. There didn’t seem to be anything to say.

“Should I? You’re not having much of a game, if yesterday was any evidence.”

“I can do it, Jack.”

“I hope,” snapped Keegan, and then, after a pause, “How’s Marlene?”

“She’s fine. She’s out of town for a while.”

“Thank God for that!” Keegan exclaimed with fervor. A longer pause. “So, what you’re saying is, the arm is okay? You can go the distance?”

Karp chuckled in spite of himself. It was just exactly that, top of the seventh, score tied, one out, two men on, he just gave up a couple of runs, and here was the manager out on the mound, having one of those conversations the fans never get to hear. Karp said, “You want to send the new kid in, throw a bunch of fast balls?”

Keegan laughed too. “I thought of it, Butch, believe me. Like I say, it’s been suggested too, and not gently either. Could Collins do it?”

“Oh, yeah, he could,” Karp replied flatly.

The seconds ticked. Karp wished that he was face to face, not sitting here listening to the blank hiss of the telephone. Then Keegan said, decisively, “Okay, Chief, I’m not going to change policy, I’m not going to change Francis Garrahy’s policy at this late date. It’s yours to win or lose. But, Butch? You blow this, there’s going to be consequences. I got an election five months away … you comprehend what I’m saying?”

“You told me this already, Jack.”

“I know I did. A lot of times I tell you once, you don’t get it. Take care.”

After Keegan hung up, Karp immediately put the conversation out of his mind and returned to his prep. He had no hard feelings against Keegan. The district attorney’s job was a political office, although Keegan kept it as unpolitical as it could be in its daily operation. If
Rohbling
crashed, someone would have to be offered up to the voters, and Karp understood the justice of it being himself.

Terrell Collins knocked and walked in. He looked remarkably fresh, pressed and shiny in a nice dark suit.

“You get the last of the stuff from Fulton?” Karp asked.

“Yeah, right here,” said Collins, placing a neat folder on Karp’s desk. Karp looked through it. Lieutenant Fulton and his troops had spoken with anyone who had ever known Clarice Brown, the Rohblings’ nanny, or her son, Cletis, now known as Jamal al-Barka. Collins had knocked this mass of data into a summary, with questions, to which the detective had now supplied the answers. Karp smiled and placed the new material on top of the thick folder he had assembled for this witness.

“Little Cletis was not that popular with the neighbors, it seems,” said Karp. “This is good stuff on his juvenile sheet, by the way.” Juvenile records were sealed, but there were ways to find out what witnesses had done as kids that did not involve searching criminal records.

“Stole stuff from the Rohblings, and from Jonathan,” Karp continued, reading. “Hm, set a fire too. One adult stretch for armed robbery, went with the Muslims in the joint, Elmira, been a good citizen since. I doubt we’ll use any of this, but it’s nice to know. You look like you have a question.”

“Yeah,” said Collins, “what’s Waley doing with this guy, and why now?”

Karp leaned back in his chair and checked his watch for perhaps the fifth time in the past half hour. “The arc of the case. Waley’s telling a story, same as us. The book says go from the general to the particular, the broad brush first and then plug in the holes. But there’s also the performance aspects to it. He’s just had two shrinks up there. The first one’s an expert on what’s crazy—he literally wrote the book on it, and he says Rohbling is. The next is the child psychiatrist. Rohbling was crazy then, he’s crazy now: he wants them to draw the inference. But these guys are not exactly the Rolling Stones, the audience is a little snoozy, so Waley wants to wake them up. Therefore, next witness, a boyhood companion who understands the relationship that the shrinks will say forms the focus of the exculpatory insanity and explains the rage against elderly black women. It’s meat. It’s sex and child abuse. It’ll wake them up for the clean-up hitter, who’s Bannock, the current shrink. Also, to be frank, the guy’s black, and not only that, but a race man too. Waley’s got a race card here, and there’s no reason for him not to play it, in his typical elegant fashion, of course.”

“How do you figure he has a race card? I thought we had the race card. The victims—”

“Yeah, we do,” said Karp, “but like all race cards it’s doublesided. We want the jury to think, rich white boy racist killing poor black ladies for thrills and crying insanity when we catch him. The blacks vote race and the whites vote guilt to convict. Waley wants them to think, poor little white boy brutalized by a black woman, driven crazy, hence this tragedy. The whites vote race, the blacks vote guilt to acquit.”

“You really believe it works that way?” asked Collins. There was disappointment on his face.

Karp grinned. “No, I don’t. I’ve tried dozens and dozens of cases with black D.’s and white vics, where black jurors stood up and played straight and convicted. Of course, I’ve never been a racist myself before, so that could make a difference.” He put this one out lightly, watching the other man.

Collins didn’t react. Instead he asked, “So what do you think his line with al-Barka is going to be?”

“Wait a second.
Do
you think I’m a racist?”

“Sure, Butch. Everybody’s a racist. I am. You are. This is America. It’s our national religion. The question you want to ask is, do I think your racism affects how you’re handling the trial, or how you behave toward me, and the answer to that is no, not so far.” He was looking Karp directly in the eye as he said this, his gaze calm and implacable. He held it for a moment and then repeated, “So, what do you think his line’ll be with al-Barka?”

Thxvock. Thwock. Thwock-thwock-thwock-thwock. Ahhhh! Clap-clap-clap-clap
. Tennis was not Marlene’s favorite game, not to play and not to watch. The matches seemed much of a muchness to her, although from the behavior and conversation of the people sitting near her in the back of the stands, Trude Speyr was having a terrific day. Marlene was at the center rear row of the portable grandstand, positioned so she could sweep the crowd with the Leica mini-binoculars she carried. She had a button earphone in her ear and a lapel mike, both connected to the portable radio hung at her belt. Harry had splurged for the best stuff; when they elected a woman president, Bello & Ciampi could take over from the Secret Service.

Under her pale blue blazer she was wearing an ill-fitting, uncomfortable shoulder rig in which sat a Colt Lightweight Commander .45 pistol she had borrowed from Marlon Dane, since her own gun now resided in some NYPD evidence locker. She had a pair of handcuffs in a side pocket.

Although she was not where she wanted to be, or doing what she wanted to be doing, she was a good soldier. This job was important to Harry, and to the firm that supplied the cash that enabled her to pursue her real interests, and so she stood in the mild sunshine and scanned the crowd, looking for Manfred Stolz’s red hair and bumpy neck.

“Marlene. Wolfe Post Two, come in,” said a crackling voice in her ear button.

“Marlene here. What’s up, Wolfe?”

“I think I spotted him.”

“Where?”

“Section B. Four rows up from the court. Yellow shirt, white floppy hat.”

Marlene trained the binoculars. It was hard to see the man’s face under his hat, but as he moved to watch the action (Speyr was about to win her third straight set), she was able to see his neck and the fringe of pale hair over his ear.

Into her mike she said, “Okay, Wolfe, move into the aisle behind him. Bring up Dane and the others and place them on the cross aisles above and below. Don’t do anything until I get there.”

“Copy,” said Wolfe. Marlene started to move down the aisle.

Jamal al-Barka was a tight-faced beige man, dressed in the characteristic bow tie and dark suit of his organization. He had a lot to say, and Waley gave him ample scope to say it. Karp threw a number of sidelong looks at Collins, to which he received eyebrow raises and shrugs. With only occasional direction by counsel, Mr. al-Barka spoke on and on. The jury learned about the long history of oppression of the black nation at the hands of whites. They learned about the child-rearing customs of slavery days, and how the slave children learned the differences between white and black people, and the traditions that underlay the use of black servants to raise white children. There was little that Karp could do about this, other than occasionally object to the relevance of the question asked, but since it had been established by experts that Rohbling’s disorder, if any, was rooted in his childhood experiences with Clarice Brown, an exposition of the facts thereof was clearly allowable. There was no limit, other than the judge’s patience, to how long and in what detail a witness was allowed to speak. And Peoples was a patient man.

From Waley’s point of view, Karp thought, it was something of a bravura performance, bringing a black nationalist up as a defense witness for a white man accused of cross-racial murder. Once again he had to remind himself that Waley was trying to demonstrate insanity. The rules were different now. Karp began to work out a counter strategy for his cross.

As the day wore on, the witness’s theme moved slowly from the old plantation to the Rohblings’ house on Long Island some fifteen years ago. The questions became sharper now. Did your mother hate the Rohblings? Yes. Did you? Yes. Did she hate Jonathan? Yes. How do you know this? Descriptions of abuse, the pinchings, the twistings of arms, the famous enemas. Did Jonathan report these abuses to his parents? Never. Why not? They didn’t care about him. They just wanted him out of sight. Was that the only reason? No. He loved her. She was the only one in the world who paid attention to him. That’s what they were buying for their fifty dollars a week, a black woman’s brutal love.