Falsely Accused (15 page)

“Yes, yes, I did,” said Stupenagel impatiently, “but … I have a feeling that not all is as it should be in the old Two-Five. I went to a retirement racket the other night—your good buddy Roland set it up—and after I talked to Clancy, I lounged in the bar, keeping my little ears open and engaging in good-natured sexist banter. There was so much testosterone in the air, I felt myself growing a beard. Anyway …”

“What about Clancy?”

“Clancy's just a bureaucrat. Nice guy, knows nothing. This Jackson character, on the other hand—”

The phone rang. “I better get that,” said Marlene, and left for her office at the end of the loft. Stupenagel refreshed her drink and began to compose in her mind the story she would hand in later that afternoon. After five minutes, Marlene returned and sat down with a puzzled look on her face.

“Who's Suzy Poole?” she asked. “I know the name.”

“Of course you do. She's the super model. Cover of
Vogue
this month? Why do you ask?”

“Oh, that was her.”

“Suzy Poole called
you
? What did she want?”

“Oh, you know—fashion tips, my famous makeup secrets—”

“No,
really!
”

“Off the record, Stupe,” said Marlene heavily. “I mean it.”

“Swear to God.”

Marlene gave her a hard look. “If this gets out, it will not be God who will punish you.” She leaned back and lit a Marlboro, only her third of the day, she was happy to realize. “Well, she's being stalked. By this guy she had a fling with. And she wants me to help her out. Carrie Lanin knows her—from the rag trade. That's how she got my name. Carrie was talking up my prowess in some ladies' john on Seventh Avenue.”

“Wait a second—models at that level must have security up the ying-yang. Doesn't she have, like, a regular bodyguard?”

“Oh, yeah, that was my thought too. She said she'd tried that. It's like living in jail, she said. The guy is everywhere. He's got some money too. Somehow he always gets her number no matter how many times she changes it. And he's smart too. There's no physical evidence, no threats.”

“What does she expect you to do?”

“Get rid of him, of course.”

“Will you?”

Marlene watched the smoke from her cigarette circulate up to the ceiling and said lazily, “Oh, I might. I just had the thought when I was talking to her that it could be an interesting thing to do. I mean, as a business.” She turned an interested face to Stupenagel's bemused one. “So, what happened with the gypsies?”

“Oh, yeah. I was telling you about Jackson. Paul. The cops at the Two-Five are not anxious to talk about Detective Jackson, even when a little drunk and getting any number of cheap feels off the kid here. Something's smelly going down up there in Spanish Harlem. This morning I got with a guy I know at Internal Affairs, Tommy Devlin. They have their suspicions, but nothing solid. Jackson lives a little too well, but that could mean he's just lucky at the track. They haven't had any complaints, not that a bunch of illegal Guats are going to make much of a stink if they're getting shook down by a cop. They think that's how the government collects taxes. I asked him about the suicides too. Those he swears're strictly kosher. The M.E. autopsied the first two as genuine hangings. Apparently there's ways to tell hanging from getting strangled. The third kid just stopped breathing like the ones I told you about in Asia. They called it ‘panic death.'”

“So where are you going with it?”

“Oh, I think I'll work the gypsies a little more, see if I can find someone who's not too scared to help.” She finished her drink, stood up, and shrugged into her coat.

“In fact, I'm off now. I'll let you know when the story comes out.” Marlene walked her to the door. “You know, we should really get a picture of you for this piece.”

“Never!” said Marlene vehemently.

“Suit yourself.” Stupenagel paused by the door. “You know, you may think me a cynical bitch, but my heart really goes out to those poor bastards. They escape from total hell down there, and they come up here and some fucking scumbag cop takes their few pathetic dollars, when a rookie cop's base salary is about eight times the per capita income of Guatemala. If that fucker is running a racket, I'm going to have his ass for it.”

“Good luck,” said Marlene, pleasantly surprised by the cynical bitch reporter's words. The two women hugged and Stupenagel stepped out of the door. She felt in her bag.

“Oh, crap, I left my pad on your sofa,” she said.

“I'll get it,” said Marlene.

Stupenagel waited in the shadowed hallway, pulled from her bag a Leica M3 loaded with ASA 400 black-and-white film, and looked through its eyepiece. As Marlene, returning with the pad, stepped into the light from the track unit outside her living room, Stupenagel silently snapped two frames and put the camera back into her bag.

“I thought that went pretty well,” said Murray Selig. The Mayor had just been ushered out amid a flurry of false smiles and the usual faux collegial banter between Karp and his opposite number, the corporation counsel, Josh Gottkind.

“You did, huh?” replied Karp sourly. He was thinking that at this moment the Mayor was visiting with Jack Weller, accepting apologies and being assured that the firm was not involved in this sad and
messhugah
affair.

“Yeah, I thought the guy was, you know, more cooperative than I thought he would be,” said Selig in an uncertain tone.

“Oh, he was cooperative, all right. On the other hand, he doesn't know much, and I didn't push him very hard for it. Did you notice that he got annoyed every time Gottkind told him not to answer?”

Selig nodded. “But he didn't want to talk about the probation business.”

“No, he didn't, because the City changed the probationary period from six months to one year
after
they hired you, and he never officially informed you of that fact. You had a reasonable expectation that your probationary period was over. I needed to pin him down that he never told you.”

“And you did.”

“That's right. He's in a tough position, which is why, when he refused to answer, I told him I would be in Judge Craig's chambers this afternoon and walk out with an order to compel in my hand, and this evening the news would be ‘Mayor Refuses to Answer Questions in M.E. Case.'”

“So we're doing good?”

“Oh, the Mayor's easy. Pinning down the other people will be a lot harder. Speaking of which, the fun's about to begin on your end. Tomorrow Gottkind gets his crack at you.”

Selig shrugged. “Let him take his best shot.”

“It's not that simple, Murray,” said Karp, a hint of irritation in his voice. “You're under oath, and they'll be scrutinizing every word you say for fishhooks to hang favorable precedents on. I know we've been through this a little before, but let me lay out the legal situation as it affects what you're supposed to say.”

Selig looked at his watch. “Will this take a long time?” The doctor, having placed his affairs in Karp's hands, had shown little interest in the nuts-and-bolts aspects of the case.

“No, Murray, about as long as an autopsy,” said Karp. “Okay. You know we're suing under the Fourteenth Amendment because we hold that you've been deprived of liberty and property without due process. The property part is your interest in your job; you can't be deprived of it without a formal hearing beforehand, which you did not get. The liberty interest involves the stigma created by the charges made against you, which has deprived you of your ability to pursue your normal occupation. The classic case is
Bishop
v.
Wood:
a cop got fired for insubordination and ruining morale. Plaintiff argued that accusing him of that behavior in public constituted a badge of infamy,' such that he could never again pursue his usual occupation as a cop, hence deprivation of liberty without due process. Same with you. Liberty to pursue your normal occupation, a chief medical examiner of a major city, was taken from you without due process of law. What we'll be asking the court for is, on the property side, reinstatement and back pay, and on the liberty side, damages, to recompense you for that damaging loss of reputation. Stigma plus, as we call it.” “That's what pays you, the damages.” “Right, Murray, that's what pays me. Now, the defendants are going to try to demonstrate two things. The first is that you did not have a property interest in your job. The Supreme Court gives a lot of leeway to states for determining if an employee actually has such an interest. They don't want a situation where every town clerk who gets canned thinks he has a federal case. The idea is that coincident with your taking a public job, you admit to understanding that there are legitimate causes for dismissal, as established under statute. It's called the ‘bitter with the sweet' doctrine. There are two ways the City can do this. One, they can show that you were still on probation and hadn't yet acquired any job rights. They say it's a year, we say it's six months. I think we can roll them on this. It falls on employer to inform employee of any probationary period, and they told you it was six months when they hired you, and that should be it. The more serious problem is whether you in fact had a rational expectation of a right to a job that couldn't be taken away without a hearing. That is, we have to point to actual rules that say whether the C.M.E. position requires a formal hearing before dismissal.”

“Of course it requires one,” said Selig vehemently. “It says so in the position description in the City Green Book.”

“So it does,” Karp agreed, “and we have general support for right to hearing before dismissal in several sections of the state Civil Service Law. But section 557 (a) of the Administrative Code says the Mayor can boot you out just by telling you why. Which, of course, he did.”

A puzzled frown appeared on Selig's face. “But that doesn't make any sense. How can the law say two different things?”

Karp laughed briefly. “How indeed? Now you know why lawyers make the big bucks. Look, Murray: doctors wear white coats because they have to make sure there's no dirt on them. Judges wear black robes so the dirt don't show. The job here is to devise some way of saying that although there appears to be conflict, precedent tells the judge to resolve it in our favor.” Karp studied his yellow crib sheet and made a note on its margins. Then he handed his client a document of some twenty or so closely typed sheets. “This is how I think the questioning is going to go. What I mean is, those are the questions I'd ask you if I was on the other side. Let's go through them one by one, because I want to hear your answers.”

“Don't I swear to tell the whole truth?” asked Selig lightly.

“Only if they ask for it, Murray,” said Karp. “And if I let you.”

Before her visit to Marlene's loft, Stupenagel had no thought of doing anything dramatic with her evening. She had planned to return to her West End Avenue sublet to work on her story over a bag of take-out Chinese. Marlene's tale, however, and the evidence of her damaged face, had gotten under her skin. Although she was genuinely fond of Marlene, she was most fond of her when Marlene kept to her place, which in Stupenagel's mind was Mom, Wifey, and at the most, Legal Drudge. It was entirely unacceptable for Marlene to have the sort of adventure she had just experienced, except, of course, by accident. That Marlene had
planned
to risk her neck in this way vexed the reporter no end, because if Marlene could have her luxurious and now trendy loft, and a baby, and a husband whom she did not despise, then she simply
couldn't
be allowed to embark on that kind of adventure, the kind that Stupenagel herself routinely arranged to have. That was the deal that Stupenagel had made with life, and it did not bear thinking that it might not be universally valid.

To her credit, she did not have for Marlene any ill will because of this; nor did she plan to discommode her in any way, beyond the sort of nastiness native to the profession of journalism. But she did enjoy twitting Marlene for being a hausfrau, and planned to continue to do so, and this was only feasible if she continued to outclass Marlene in the adventure business.

These thoughts occupied her as she strolled aimlessly up Grand Street and across Mulberry, past the shuttered groceries and import shops, and the storefront social clubs around which clustered groups of flashy young men, leaning on their double-parked cars.
There
was trouble, she thought, but not precisely the right kind. She received a good deal of commentary as she walked past these knots of wise guys. One of the men, short, hairy, and drunk, stood grinning in her path, demanding an obscene favor and handling his genitals, while his pals urged him on. Stupenagel had in her bag, beside camera and notebook, a short, razor-sharp, bone-handled Arab dagger she'd picked up during her first visit to Syria, and she considered briefly gutting this man with it and then escaping from the country with the Mafia on her tail, and whether that would make a good story. That such an action would cross her mind at all showed how irritable she had become out of this silly Marlene thing. She straightened herself, gave the man a withering look, and walked around him as if he had been a load of dog poop on the pavement.

It was at that moment that it popped into her head that she would go undercover as a gypsy cab driver and catch Detective Paul Jackson at whatever it was he was doing.

EIGHT

Marlene waited a couple of days, until Karp was more or less over the snit he had got into over the Lanin affair, and they were comfortably settled in the marriage bed, before she sprang it on him. He laughed and said, “Yeah, right!” before it struck him that she was not laughing along.

“You're not serious?” he asked.

“Yeah, I'm serious. I think it's a good idea.”