Falsely Accused (24 page)

“No. Of course, if I was really crazy, I wouldn't tell you the truth, would I? Or would I? Tell me, do you trust me?”

“Oh, yeah,” he said immediately. “With my life. I trust your integrity. I trust your decency. However, it's my learned opinion as a professional criminal justice guy of long standing, and some reputation, that you're into something that's way over your fucking head. That's not a trust thing, that's a judgment thing. I could be wrong.”

“Thank you for that opinion. I will consider it in my chambers.”

“You do that,” said Karp.

Both of them had on their faces the kind of shy smiles they wore when they realized that they had yet again escaped the shoals and riptides and were back on the fair, broad seaways of marriage.

“So,” said Karp brightly, “what kind of gun did you get?”

“A Colt Mustang .380. The guy threw in a cheap revolver too.”

“Well,
mazeltov,
” said Karp with a bland smile. “Use them in good health.” He stood up. “I think I'll help Lucy with her bath.”

In all, a good day, was Marlene's thought when, toward midnight, she floated into the antechamber of sleep. Karp had given her one of those violent fucks she dearly loved, and which she thought one of the ways in which a good marriage discharges otherwise unappeasable aggression and discontent. She was sore and lightly bruised, and Karp, now breathing huskily beside her, had numerous flaming bite marks on him, at least one of which, she hoped, would show above his collar the next morning.

At this point the phone, her closely guarded private number, rang next to her ear. She snatched it up on the first ring. There was a woman on the line.

“Is this Marlene Ciampi?”

“Yes?”

“This is Harlem Hospital Center Admitting. Do you know a person named”—she pronounced it wrong, carefully—“Ariade Stupenagel?”

“Yes, Ariadne. Has something happened to her?”

“Yes, she's in the E.R. now. She doesn't have health insurance, and when we asked her for a responsible party, she gave us a card with your name on it.”

“What happened to her?”

“Urn, ma'am, are you the responsible party? Otherwise, you know, I can't, um, discuss—”

“Yes, yes, I'll be responsible,” Marlene snapped. “What was it—an accident?”

“Uh, no, ma'am,” said the woman. Marlene could hear paper rustling. “We have police involvement in this case. This is an assault case.”

TWELVE

“They picked her up by the Mount,” said the detective. “That's up at the north end of the park near 104th Street, east. It's used as a composting area. Real deserted.”

“How did you find her?” asked Marlene. They were sitting on plastic chairs in a crowded hallway in Harlem Hospital's E.R., surrounded by sick or bleeding people, some on gurneys, some slouching exhausted in the same sort of chairs. Marlene was in the sweats, sneakers, and leather jacket she had thrown on after getting the call. The detective was dressed in a rumpled blue suit and a damp tan raincoat, a chunky, sad-eyed black man. He seemed intelligent and concerned. Marlene had identified herself as the victim's closest friend, a former D.A., and a current private investigator. The detective was therefore somewhat more forthcoming than detectives usually are when interviewing people connected to victims.

“We got a call at the precinct,” he said. “Anonymous, of course.”

“Of course. What precinct? The Two-Five?”

“No, the Two-Three,” said the detective. “Anyway, a night like this, she would have died for sure, exposed like she was. We're treating it as attempted murder.”

“She was naked?”

“Underpants, socks, and sneakers.”

“Raped?”

“We're checking that. It looks like a gang thing to me. Some of these kids are pretty nasty little suckers.”

“I doubt that,” said Marlene. “That it was a kid gang.”

The detective looked at her sharply. “Oh, yeah? Why is that?”

“Ariadne is six-one and strong. She isn't your typical New York housewife or secretary. She carried a nine-inch Arab dagger almost all the time and she knows how to use it too. For the last ten years or so she's been playing risky games with guerillas, bandits, and secret police all over the world. She could eat the average gang of kid muggers for breakfast.”

“You think she was a target? It wasn't random?”

“I'd bet on it.”

The detective wrote something on his notepad. He asked, “So she had enemies.”

Marlene snorted a laugh. “You could say that. Ariadne enjoys pissing people off. She thinks it's her professional responsibility as a journalist.”

“Like who, in particular?”

“I don't know,” said Marlene after a brief pause. “Take your pick. Last year she exposed some nasty connections between American officials and the generals who're murdering Indians in Guatemala. She did a piece recently on stalkers that might've gotten some people annoyed.”

“Uh-huh,” said the detective, writing. Then, casually, he asked, “By the way, how come you thought the call came in to the Two-Five?”

Smart guy, thought Marlene, and was about to tell him Stupenagel's interest in the cabbie suicides, and the involvement of Paul Jackson, but thought better of it. It had been some time since she had spoken to Stupenagel about it; maybe the whole thing hadn't panned out. And the woman had not mentioned being followed after that one time. And, more to the point, she didn't know this guy, or his connection, if any, with the cops out of the Twenty-fifth Precinct who were supposedly doing the shakedowns.

“I don't know—Two-Three, Two-Five—I guessed it was one of the East Harlem precincts, considering where you found her.”

The detective grunted, wrote, asked a few more questions and then flipped his notebook shut. He handed Marlene a business card. Lester Moon, Detective Third Grade. She gave him one of hers.

“Call me if you think of anything else,” said Moon with a meaningful look, and strode off through the deep misery.

Marlene managed to track down the harried Panamanian intern in charge of Stupenagel's case, from whom she learned that her friend had survived surgery; that her internal bleeding was under control; that her broken bones had been set; that she was out of immediate danger; and that he had another patient he had to see right away.

Marlene then marched into the administration office and obnoxiously flashed her checkbook and her gold Visa card to attract the attention of various civil servants, through whom she arranged for Stupenagel to be transferred from Harlem Hospital Center to Columbia-Presbyterian. The Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons supplies interns to both hospitals. They send the ones with good American M.D.'s to Columbia-Presby and the ones from third world countries holding degrees from places like Guadalajara U. to Harlem. Marlene knew this, and she had no compunction about buying her friend's way out of a public hospital, and thus supporting a dual health-care standard she would have abstractly opposed at any cocktail party. Then she went home and cried and awakened Karp, who comforted her and wisely refrained from expressing his constant fear that the next midnight phone call would be about Marlene.

It took three days for Stupenagel to recover her senses enough to converse for any length of time. On each of those days, after taking care of Lucy and dropping her at school, Marlene had come, and sat through the visiting hour, and chatted inanely to the unanswering, white-swathed figure on the hospital bed.

When she arrived on the third day, Stupenagel's bed was propped up and her eyes were open. They were ringed with yellow-violet bruises. Much of the rest of her face was concealed by plaster, except for a rough hole at the side of her mouth, through which she could suck nourishment and carry on a slurred conversation.

“How are you, Stupe?” asked Marlene, sitting in a chair by the bedside.

“Oh, I'm having a ball. Dope's pretty good. Nurse said you're paying the freight for this. Thanks, but you don't have to. Call my dad.” She gave Marlene a telephone number with a 216 area code, and Marlene wrote it down.

“You want to know what happened, huh?”

“Sure,” said Marlene.

“So would I,” said Stupenagel. “The last thing I remember I was in my apartment. I had just come back from uptown, I'd taken my coat and my boots off, and I was drinking a Bloody Mary I'd just fixed. I remember thinking I wanted to call you. Drinking the drink, and then I woke up here. First thought after waking up, it was some kind of explosion. Gas. Seems like not. I got pounded, they tell me.”

“Yeah. You don't remember anything?”

“Nope. Traumatic retrograde amnesia, they call it. A cute kid doctor came in this morning when I came to and explained it all to me. Some of it may come back over the weeks. He said.”

“What's your guess, then?”

“Hmm. Where to begin? Well, I'm working on an exposé of the Guatemala thing, a long piece for
Harper's.
Somebody down there might have heard about it and sent somebody up here to do some Central American public relations on me. Unlikely, but possible. There's the stalking piece—one of the guys I mentioned might have been brooding … an old boyfriend … shit, I don't know, Champ—”

“What about the Two-Five shakedown business?” asked Marlene.

“What business was that?” responded the injured woman vaguely.

“You know, Stupe, the gypsy cabs, the suicides in jail, that guy who roughed you up—”

“Oh, God, of course! Jackson! Something just broke on that, but I can't remember …”

Marlene waited some time, but Stupenagel did not finish the thought. Finally she said, “Meanwhile, can I do anything?”

A rattling sound came from behind the bandages, a sad attempt at laughter. “
Now
she asks!”

“Right,” said Marlene, refusing the proffered guilt trip. “Every time you get your face smashed in, you have a free crack at my professional services. What do you want me to do?”

“Check out the D.A.'s investigation of the shakedowns.”

“There isn't any investigation, not according to the former chief medical examiner.”

“You talked to him?” There was a surprised squeak in the muffled voice.

“No. He happens to be a client of my husband's. Butch asked him.”

“Hnnh. He might be in on the scam, then.”

“I doubt that. I mean, Butch doubts that.”

“Oh, well then, it's the gospel. Okay, maybe you can get your hands on the original ausotsy—whoops, goddamn, I'm so fucked up—
autopsy
reports. We can show them to somebody, see if these kids really killed themselves.”

“Okay,” said Marlene, “I'll try. Is that it?”

No answer. Marlene leaned closer. “Stupe?”

“Mmmm? What?”

“You drifted off.”

“Yeah. I do that. Call my dad, okay?”

“Sure. Get better now, okay?”

Stupenagel closed her eyes and her hand twitched, but whether it was in farewell or a random spasm Marlene could not tell.

From a phone booth in the hospital, Marlene called Mr. Stupenagel at his office in Cleveland. The man was calm and low-key about the disaster, asking for information, getting what Marlene had, thanking her politely, and signing off. It was clear that he had been waiting for such a call for a long while. Then Marlene called the morgue at Bellevue and asked to speak to Dr. Dennis Maher.

“Peg o' my heart!” said a light Irish voice in her ear.

“Hello, Denny. How's it going?”

“Ah, flourishing, flourishing, my dear. They're dyin' to get in here!”

Marlene laughed dutifully at the ancient joke. “Why I called, Denny, is I need some help.”

“Unto the half of my kingdom. As you're aware, my practice is largely with the silent majority, but I could brush up a bit for you, Marlene. Would it be a wee gynecological problem, he said hopefully?”

Marlene ignored this. “Would you be free for lunch today? My treat?”

“Oh, let's see now—shall I gnaw upon a stale tuna sandwich from a machine in an office reeking of formalin, or shall I dine in splendor with a beautiful woman, her paying the tab? Oh, God, these decisions!”

“I'll take that as a yes. How about Malachy's on Twenty-third?”

“Would that be the saloon with the largest selection of unblended Irish whiskey in the whole of this great city? Why, I don't believe I've ever entered the door.”

“Twelve-thirty,” said Marlene, laughing, and hung up.

Denny Maher was part of the great Irish Medical Migration of the 1960s, in which the Irish Republic's decision to combine brilliant training with rotten salaries redounded to the benefit of New York's best hospitals. Maher was one of the few forensic specialists in this wave, and the M.E.'s office had snapped him up. At thirty-six, he was single and a drinking man, characteristics not unrelated to each other. Marlene liked him. He had been something of a pet of the D.A.'s office for years, a big reason being his status as the purveyor of Olde Medical Examiner, a fruit punch made with absolute alcohol purloined from the morgue, which had long been the centerpiece of bureau parties at the old D.A.'s.

He arrived ten minutes late at the saloon, looking the same to Marlene, who hadn't seen him in a couple of years. A slight man, he had a boyish, freckled face and crinkly red hair. His eyes were watery blue, trimmed with the decorative red stigmata of the serious lush.

Maher kissed Marlene on the cheek loudly, said a variety of flattering, and false, things in his consciously adopted stage Irishman's brogue, ordered a whiskey, drank it, ordered another, a different malt, for purposes of comparison, drank that, compared the two, declared the second superior, ordered another of the second to reward the firm, ordered a steak, ate it washed down with a pint of Guinness, all the while talking delightful nonsense, and then, pushing away his plate, his face flushed red, his eyes rolling, asked, “And now, my benefactress, what is the little favor that Dr. Maher, late of Trinity College, Dublin, can do to repay all this magnificence?”