Depraved Indifference (10 page)

“I'm chewing on your panties and dreaming of times gone by.”

A giggle from behind the mysterious screens. “Don't do that. They're from Bonwit's. OK, you can come in, but just for the bath. You can do my back and I'll bring you up to date on the case. And turn down the lights; I'm going to do the candles.”

Ten seconds later, Karp was out of his clothes and behind the screens. Marlene had lit four tall, thick candles stuck to the four corners of the tub. Karp knelt behind her, worked up a lather with the scented soap, and rubbed her back with his hands. She stretched her arms out, her hands gripping the edge of the tub, and told him what she had learned.

Karp tried to remain professional. He shared with her what had happened at the FBI. Meanwhile his hand unprofessionally snaked farther forward, soaping her flank and straying lightly over her small, pointed breasts. He became increasingly aware of something growing beneath the candle-flickering surface of the water, where his groin squashed up against Marlene's warm flesh. This is crazy, he thought, we're sitting here in this wet dream, talking calmly about work. Our goddamn relationship in a nutshell.

“Anyway,” Marlene was saying, perhaps a trifle too slowly and languorously (did he imagine?), “there are mysterious tendrils here. This is not just a gang of assholes who killed a cop halfway by accident. The connections—the cop brass acting weird, the FBI acting weird, the complexity and sophistication of the bomb. There's got to be something bigger involved, Butch, I know it. Butch? Are you listening to me?”

“Yes, Marlene, something bigger involved.”

She spun around on her knees, sloshing water, and fixed him with a steely glance. “No, you're not. You're just rubbing me up and squeezing your dong against my back, hoping I'll get sexy.”

“No, I really was listening, but come on, Marlene, you got to admit we're in a pretty romantic situation. I mean it's distracting—”

“Fuck the distracting! What about my idea?”

Karp felt his lust being replaced by annoyance and slid away to the opposite wall of the tub. “OK, let's talk about your idea,” he said harshly. “First of all, things often
are
what they seem. Some assholes left a booby-trapped bomb that killed a cop. That's the fact of the case. Why did they do it? Who gives a shit! They're assholes, right? The cop brass is acting weird because they haven't had a bomb squad cop killed in forty years. Again, who gives a shit? The FBI? Business as usual, close to the vest and just feed the locals what's good for them. Now the grenade, or whatever it was—”

“It was a grenade, I saw it.”

“You saw a couple of pieces of burnt shit on a plate. When we have a sworn statement by an armaments expert that it's a grenade,
then
it's a grenade. And even if it does turn out to be a grenade, the case doesn't need any goddamn ‘tendrils.' You got any idea how many guys brought souvenirs home from Vietnam? Not to mention stuff ripped off from the National Guard?”

“What about the timer? You got an explanation for that too?” Marlene shouted furiously.

“No, but I guarantee you I could go down to Canal Street tomorrow and buy twenty pieces of military hardware that somebody like that hijacker who repairs electronics for a living could rig up as a bomb timer.”

Marlene glared at him. “You're such a bastard, you know that? I trot out my pissy little theory and you get this big kick out of squashing it flat. You know, you've got a sadistic streak in you I can't stand.”

“Fuck this. I'm going.” Karp rose abruptly from the water, scattering droplets and making the candles gutter.

Marlene lunged forward like a striking trout and grasped his leg. “No, don't go! This is all fucked up. Don't go. Come on, sit down in the bath.”

When he had done so, Marlene sat in his lap. “Ah, Butch, I didn't mean to blow up that way. Honestly, I was so happy when I saw you sitting on my stoop tonight, drinking your little orange soda.”

“That's OK, Marlene, I'm sorry—”

“And it was so dreamy in the bath, you rubbing me. I guess I was expecting a big hand for my brilliant deductive logic and then a glorious descent into fleshly pleasures, I don't know.” Her one eye glinted in the candlelight, full of sadness or some odd emotion Karp associated with the madness of women.

“Is it too late?” he asked in a cracked whisper.

“Never too late,” Marlene said into his ear as she reached down into the water. “Kapitan, ze Britische convoy! Up periscope!”

“Marlene,” Karp gasped, “you're going to drive me crazy. I can't take this—”

She swiveled around and wriggled and straddled Karp.

“Oh, a little bit over,” she whispered. “Aahgh! That's it, oh, that's perfect. Isn't that perfect? Oh, my gosh, I'm—we're floating away.”

6

A
RINGING PHONE
brought Butch Karp out of a love-sodden sleep, after which he hung a right and plunged back into dreamland again. It wasn't his phone anyway. He rolled over and pressed a pillow over his head, a pillow that smelled of Marlene, a cocktail of patchouli oil and sex. Karp wriggled at the returning memory. Marlene had outdone herself last night, as was her occasional and unpredictable wont, concluding with a marathon steeplechase athwart Karp's exhausted yet potent body. His crotch was still tender.

Which reminded him of another requirement of nature involving the same zone. Flinging off the quilt and sheets, he heaved out of bed. He had forgotten, however, that he was sleeping not on his own bed on the floor, but on Marlene's high four-poster, with the result that he stumbled and banged his shin painfully on the bureau close by. He cursed and looked around the sleeping platform, rubbing sleep from his eyes. Below, Marlene was visible only as a tousled mass of black hair above the back of an armchair. She was chattering to someone on a pink Princess phone. It went with her sleeping loft, which she had furnished as a little girl's bedroom in an Italian neighborhood in Queens, circa 1950. She had a white four-poster single bed with pink dust ruffles—an authentic relic of her girlhood—a white bureau, and a white vanity table, with a pink crinoline skirt and a matching bench. All bore patterns of cherubs and roses. There was also the armchair, a brocaded monstrosity that might have been French Provincial, had France been occupied in the seventeenth century by Italo-American sanitation workers.

He stood and rubbed his bumped shin against the back of his calf. Climbing down the stairs to the main floor, he padded, naked and huge, across to the tiny toilet closet.

“Yahoo!”

When Karp emerged, his girlfriend was jumping up and down on her bed, yelling and flapping her arms by intention and her breasts by default. It made a pretty sight, piquing both his curiosity and lust.

“What happened, Marlene?”

She bounded off the bed and ran over to the rail that surrounded the sleeping platform. “I was right, dammit! I knew it. That was Marino on the phone. He just heard from his lab and from the post-explosion guys at the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms unit. It
was
a grenade! And they had never seen that type of timer before, but it looked to them like military hardware, and—”

“Marlene, hold your horses. So it's a grenade. Big deal. I told you, they could have stolen it from a National Guard armory—”

“Yeah, they could have, if they stole it in Omsk. For your information, Mr. Smarty-pants, Terry Doyle was blown up by a disassembled Soviet RDG-5 hand grenade. The fuse fragments are derived from the standard UZRG and the charge was RPX, about one hundred grams. It all checks. Warsaw Pact, all the way.”

“Oy vey,” Karp said.

“No kidding. Stay there, I'm coming down. There's more.” Marlene neatly vaulted over the rail into Karp's arms. She hugged him and stretched to kiss his ear.

“What else?” he asked, hugging her back.

“First say, ‘Marlene smart, Butch dumb.'”

He did so, with reasonably good grace, and she continued.

“They're checking out the timer. But the big news is, when Marino got back to Rodman this morning, somebody had ransacked the room where they were keeping the evidence. Luckily, Frank had loaded the crucial stuff into a carton and taken it home. How about them apples?”

“How about them,” Karp said wonderingly. “And the only people with access to Rodman at night would be—oh, shit.”

“Cops,” Marlene finished with grim satisfaction.

“Christ, I got to call Denton. I should have called him last night, but I was seduced from my duty …” He squeezed the small cantaloupe-firm buttock convenient to his right hand.

She skipped away from him and began to climb the ladder to the sleeping loft. She said over her shoulder, “Well, it's Sunday, and far too early to be thinking of business. I'm going back to bed.”

Karp went over to the downstairs wall phone and dialed Denton's number. As he did, he glanced up: Marlene was in a yoga headstand at the foot of the high bed, her legs spread wide apart, her ankles rotating in small circles. Thus distracted, Karp dialed. An irate woman answered in Spanish. Dial again: a dog hospital. Karp turned his back on Marlene's gyrations and concentrated on the number.

“Karp! Where've you been? I've been trying to get you all night.” Denton sounded angry and harassed, not at all inclined to make allowances for a Sunday morning.

“I was out. What's up?”

“Our hijackers surrendered, that's what's up. At six-fifty Paris time, yesterday evening. They're coming back aboard military transport. They're scheduled into Kennedy at two-ten this afternoon.”

“That's great! Where are they supposed to go then?”

“Federal custody, so I guess they'll take them down to FBI headquarters.”

“Ummm. Not so good there. I can interview them at the FBI, no problem, but afterward … Look, Bill, we've got to end up with physical custody of those people. I'll call Bloom and get him to pull his famous strings. I want them in Riker's under our control.”

“What's the matter, don't you trust the Feds?”

“Yeah, to take care of the Statue of Liberty. And speaking of trust, I think we got a little problem closer to home.” Karp related to Denton what he had learned from Marlene, and got several short, sharp expletives in return.

“I find those guys, they're dead. And I'll find them if—”

“Bill. Stop. I mean, my advice is, find out what you can, but no witch hunts while this case is going on, now that we actually have a case. You don't want to drive whoever's screwing up deeper under cover before you find what the source of the pressure is. What could make cops want to screw up the prosecution of a cop killer?”

“Nothing.”

“It's something, bet on it. So we've got to make sure that everything about this case is absolutely by the book—collection and custody of evidence, arrest and custody of suspects, procedure, documentation, the works. That means everything gets double-checked by you and me or people we personally trust.”

“Right. You got it. Meanwhile—”

“Meanwhile, I need the flight crew and passengers taken to Centre Street. Park them in a courtroom and I'll get a gang together to do interviews. Then I'll roust a judge and get warrants for the homes and business premises of the suspects. You need to get in there fast, toss the joints, pick up any evidence relating to bomb manufacture, conspiracy, and so on. And I want all evidence in my immediate custody as soon as possible. That's critical. What else? Oh, yeah, the bomb on the plane. Where's that now?”

“The bomb? Oh, right, you don't know. It was a dud.”

“A dud?”

“Yeah? Funny, right? There was nothing in that pot but air. And a brick.”

Karp arrived at FBI headquarters, trailed by a small, grayish man named Murray Rothman. A court stenographer, he was well-known for his perpetual availability and his tomblike discretion. Karp was going to tackle the hijackers himself; he'd given Marlene the more onerous responsibility of rousting a couple of assistant DAs out of their Sunday torpor to interview the flight crew and passengers.

The entrance to the building was cordoned off by the familiar gray sawhorse barriers, lined with photographers and TV crews, and several television vans were parked nearby. Farther back, several hundred other people were milling noisily in the late summer sunshine. Some of these were passersby or New York gawkers, but the majority was an organized group carrying homemade signs: “Free the Freedom Fighters,” “Free Croatia.” They were respectably dressed middle-aged and elderly people, not the kind usually found in demonstrations in Manhattan. There was a priest with them, which was not surprising, since most New York demonstrations are so equipped. What was a bit odd was that this one was haranguing the throng.

Karp introduced himself to the uniformed lieutenant on duty. Denton's name worked its usual magic, and he and Rothman were allowed into the lobby. There he waited with cops and plainclothesmen of various organizations, all conversing cryptically or speaking strange-sounding CB talk into hand radios. Nobody spoke to Karp. He didn't have a radio.

After ten minutes they heard sirens and a convoy comprised of two NYPD blue-and-whites, a white U.S. Marshal's Service car, an unmarked car with a red flasher, and a dark van pulled up into the cleared space out front. As men piled out of the vehicles, Karp spotted Pillman getting out of the unmarked car. Several men in plainclothes, who Karp supposed were U.S. marshals, opened the sliding doors of the van. The five hijackers clambered down, first the four men and then the woman, blinking in the sunlight.

Three marshals led them to the building entrance. The cameras popped and whirred; reporters shouted questions. The crowd caught sight of them, and the contingent with signs exploded in cheers. The male hijackers lifted their handcuffed hands above their heads and waved to the crowd, smiling broadly. Karp noticed that they did not clench their fists, a gesture he had always regarded as a sort of international symbol of one's willingness to deal radically with all problems.