Falsely Accused (14 page)

He stared at her and she at him for a long moment. Then he said, slowly and carefully, “You don't fucking understand, do you? There's a difference, Marlene. I cut corners, you're
a felon.
”

The word hung in the air like sewer gas. Karp turned and left the bedroom. She heard his heavy steps and the slam of the little guest room door.

SEVEN

Karp was gone by the time Marlene awakened the next morning, which she did not at all mind. She looked blearily at the clock and uttered a small shriek of alarm. Fifteen minutes to get ready and off to school. She sat up quickly and let out another shriek, of pain this time. It felt as though the flesh were being wrenched from her face with a dull spatula. In the bathroom she took one look at the Technicolor glory of her face and completed the rest of her toilette with her eye averted.

Lucy gave no trouble about being jammed by brute force into her clothes and eating her breakfast (banana and bran muffin to go) as she did not want to rile the angry and hideous stranger who had mysteriously replaced her mom during the night.

“Aren't we picking up Miranda?” the child asked meekly, when it had become clear that they were heading directly for P.S. 1.

“No, we're not. Miranda can get to school by herself.”

“What about the bad man?”

“The bad man is in jail,” Marlene replied in a tone that did not encourage further questions.

After the drop-off, Marlene shopped briefly on Grand Street and went back home. There she found the message light on her answering machine blinking, which she ignored, and also discovered that she had been traipsing through her neighborhood with her sweatshirt on inside out and the fly of her jeans gaping. She cursed and tore her clothes off and threw on a black sweatsuit, the right way, and then allowed herself a good, heaving, mucousy cry.

In the midst of this the phone rang.

“
What
?” Marlene shouted into the receiver.

“Uh-oh, she's got the rag on,” said Ariadne Stupenagel. “No, it can't be, you're knocked up, aren't you? You're supposed to have a peaceful glow, unless that's a lie too.”

“What do you want, Stupe?”

“We need to talk, girl. Can I come over?”

“Not today. I'm not receiving visitors.”

“Oh?”

“I'm washing my hair. Those split ends? There's a new conditioner I want to try.”

“Mmm, yes,” said Stupenagel after the briefest pause, “and I might have believed that, and I might have been hurt, thinking that you thought so little of me as to use such a moronic excuse to shine me on, had I not drifted by the old courthouse this morning and had a chat with Ray Guma …”

“Oh, shit!” said Marlene, with feeling.

“… and Guma filled my ear with a strange tale— my little housewife friend with her face rearranged coming into the complaint room in the small hours to swear out a complaint against a nutcase who was stalking another woman. Sisterhood is powerful.”

“Everybody knows about this now, right?”

“They will after I finish writing the story, which I will after you give me the details, which is why I'm coming over. I'm at Foley Square—I'll be there in ten minutes. Shall I bring you some nice soup?”

“How about a nice quart of bourbon?” said Marlene gloomily, and hung up the phone.

She checked the messages. They were all from metro reporters or TV stations asking for an interview, except for one from Carrie Lanin and one from someone named Suzy Poole, a name that rang a bell but distantly. Marlene could not quite recall where she had heard it. She called Carrie and got
her
machine, and left a message, and called the Poole person, and got an answering service with a crisp British accent, which assured her that her message would be passed on to Miss Poole.

Shortly after she hung up, the front doorbell rang, and there was Stupenagel, grinning and waving a quart of Ancient Age.

“I can't drink any of that,” Marlene said. “I'm pregnant.”

“Oh, don't be silly, you can have a
little
drink,” said Stupenagel, entering the loft and focusing on Marlene. “Oh, God, look at your face! At last I'm more beautiful than you! I ought to send this bum a box of candy.”

“Thanks for your support, Ariadne. You always know how to say the right thing.”

“Oh, come on, it was just a joke.” She waved her bottle again. “Get a couple of mugs and we'll forget our troubles.”

“Sorry. I meant it. You go right ahead, though.” Marlene turned away and walked toward the living room.

“You know, Marlene,” said Stupenagel, following, “I hope you're not turning into one of those health fascists. Good God! My dear mother used to tell me she never passed a sober day during the whole time she was preggers with me.”

Marlene gave her a baleful look and said, “No further questions, Your Honor.”

Stupenagel snorted a laugh. “I guess I waltzed into that.” She strode into the living room, flung her greatcoat onto the couch, sat down, and placed the bottle on the coffee table. “Well, shall we get started, then?”

Marlene fetched a tumbler and sat down in the bentwood rocker. “What are we starting, Stupe?”

“The story I'm going to write about you, of course.” She reached into her canvas bag and drew out a steno book and a pencil.

“There's no story, Stupe. I helped out a friend is all,” said Marlene wearily, and looked with longing at the bottle.

“Don't tell me my business, girl. You're news. Okay, let's start with when this Lanin character first told you she was being stalked.”

Marlene looked at her friend, at the sharpened pencil poised quivering over the pad, at the bright and merciless gleam in her eye. The thought entered Marlene's mind that it was like having a pal who became a gynecologist: whatever the prior relationship, it inevitably became different when you were up on the table with your legs spread, watching her approach with the shiny instruments of the profession.

“What's funny?” Stupenagel asked, seeing the expression that now crossed Marlene's face.

“Oh, nothing,” said Marlene, putting her mug into neutral. Then she began the tale of Carrie and Rob, the official version, of course, and hoped that Stupenagel was not as perceptive as Karp.

Someone had once told Karp that clients were to the law what the serpent was to the Garden of Eden. Heretofore the truth of this had not been pressed upon him, as he had spent virtually all of his professional career as a prosecutor, for whom the client is the People, a pleasant abstraction having no propensity to deviousness or complaint. It was different now that he had a real client breathing, complaining, and being devious in his office. He did not much like it.

“Murray,” said Karp in a soothing voice, “it won't matter. We'll get by.”

“Yeah, you say that,” replied Selig. “How're you going to do all the things you need to do for this trial without support from your firm? It'd be like trying to do a solo on a coronary bypass.”

“Right, and if I needed a coronary bypass, I'd take your advice. You need this trial, so take mine!”

A moment of glaring, and then Selig shook his chunky frame and grinned sheepishly. “Oh, crap, Butch—look, I didn't mean to give you a hard time. I just hate this.”

Karp smiled back. “That's because you're a decent human being involved in a lawsuit. You're
supposed
to hate it. If you liked it, I wouldn't have anything to do with you. Anyway, as I was about to point out, we can hire support on the outside. I have a freelance paralegal lined up, and a steno who's going to come in a little while and take the Mayor's deposition. That's part of what's happening now, at this stage of the proceedings. I'll be deposing the defendants—”

“Just the Mayor?”

“No. Fuerza too. And the D.A.”

“What's the point of him? I didn't work for the D.A.”

“No,” said Karp smoothly, “but his defamation helped form the basis of the firing, and added to the stigma you're suffering now.” This partial truth was accepted without demur, and Karp continued. “We'll also depose all the people who supplied information in the two letters that formed the basis of the decision to fire you.”

“The lies.”

“As we will prove,” said Karp. “Also, the defendants will get a crack at you and all of our witnesses, and they're obviously going to concentrate especially on you.”

“That's okay,” said Selig lightly. “I have nothing to hide.”

Karp shot a stern look across his desk. “Wrong thinking, Murray. Everybody has something to hide—Mother Teresa, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, I don't care—
everybody
. The issue here is, you want to win this case, you don't hide it from me.”

Selig nodded soberly. “I understand.”

“Okay, let me make sure that you do. This case is about reputation. They said you're a sleazeball, you say you're not. It is to their very great advantage to blacken you even more than they have already. Now, they've restricted the calumny to your professional behavior as C.M.E., but at this point any sleaze will do, because they're trying to paint a picture for the jury and they want to make it the portrait of Dorian Gray. Look, let's say for the sake of argument that you enjoy fucking chickadees in the privacy of your own home …”

Selig guffawed.

“… okay, you're a little embarrassed, you don't tell me. So at deposition, they got this, oh, say, some secretary up there on what looks like some minor paper trail matter and they ask her, did you bring those papers to Dr. Selig? Yes. And what was he doing when you got there? Oh, he was fucking this chickadee out by the birdhouse. Now, at that point I object, of course, but it's now part of the public record, and unless I can get it thrown out by the judge via a motion
in limine,
the jury will hear about it, and that's what they're going to see when they look at you, a guy with a vice he's ashamed to admit, and they're going to
inevitably
think, if he's covered this up, what else is there, and even if we destroy all their charges one by one, they're still going to think, hey, where there's smoke … You follow the logic?”

“Uh-huh. Okay, but I have this secret, what does it matter if I tell you first? What can you do? It'll still come out.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” said Karp. “The point is, if I'm not surprised, then
we're
in control, not them. We can do a deal. Let's say we find out the Mayor likes to get sucked off by a python, he keeps it in a bathtub down at City Hall …”

“I love your imagination. Snakes can't suck anything, though—they have no lips.”

Karp rolled his eyes. “Let me write that down, I never want to forget it. It's just an
example,
Murray, for chrissake. Okay, we tell the D.: forget the chickadees, we won't touch on the snake. Alternatively, we bring up the chickadees ourselves.”

“What's the point of that?”

“Anything you bring up voluntarily has less sting than it does if the other side brings it up. In the hypothetical we're discussing, we'd go in with a shrink: Dr. Selig has this chickadee problem, he's fighting it, he's in recovery. In your professional opinion, did it affect his work one iota? No. No further questions. Now the jury sees a courageous guy who's trying to conquer an embarrassing fault, and isn't afraid to admit it. Shit, if he'll come out about the chickadees, he's sure as hell not hiding anything else. Get the point?”

“Point got,” said Selig. “But I'm sorry—right now no secret vices spring to mind. I'll talk to Naomi, though. She knows my faults better than I do.”

Karp gave his client a hard and unamused stare, but his client's eyes slid away. Karp was about to say something when the buzzer on his desk bleated, and the receptionist announced the arrival of the Mayor of the City of New York.

Stupenagel stuck her pencil behind her ear and flipped through the pages of her steno pad. The story she had just heard was consistent and logical, but still it stirred some reportorial instinct of suspicion. “It was lucky that this cop Bello was there when this guy started to beat on you,” she said, trolling.

“There was no luck to it, Stupe. I told you, he was shadowing her. We figured Pruitt would make a move sooner or later.”

“Sounds almost like you baited a trap.”

“Carrie Lanin is not a criminal,” Marlene said with some heat. “She has the right to go anywhere and see anyone anytime. She doesn't have to live like a hermit because some asshole is harassing her. Besides”—here she pointed at the livid bruises that covered most of her face—“do you think I planned for
this
to happen?”

Stupenagel did not. She had a good imagination and considerable experience with violence, but this experience did not support the notion that someone who looked like Marlene Ciampi would risk her face to put some jerk in prison. She nodded slightly and changed her tack.

“How long do you think he'll get?”

“Oh, maybe five years, maybe three.”

“Is that worth it?”

Marlene took a deep breath and searched for an answer. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe somebody will shank him in prison. Maybe he'll discover he likes fucking punks up the ass.”

“Not very likely, is it? The guy sounds truly obsessed.”

“Yeah,” Marlene agreed. “Maybe that's why I got involved. Maybe I thought that the only thing that worked against an obsession was a counter-obsession, a stronger one. I just felt …
impelled
to stop him, you know? Do you ever get feelings like that? Yeah? Anyway, it felt good.”

Stupenagel wrote this down and then put her pad on the coffee table. “Speaking of obsessions, I think I'm getting one over this gypsy cab business. And the jailhouse suicides.”

“Why? I thought you said it was likely that they really had killed themselves.”