Justice Denied (14 page)

“Yes,” said Marlene. “You're a fairy princess, right?” The child nodded. She was holding a long dowel that must have once been a balloon stick, the end of which was covered with a ball of the gold foil used by one of the fast-food chains to wrap sandwiches. She wore cracked patent leather Mary Janes and grungy white socks. Her knees were scabbed. A pinched little thing but pretty, despite the visible neglect.

“Is that your baby?”

“Yes.”

“Can I play with him?”

“Her. No, she's too little to play.”

The child smirked and whipped her wand back and forth. “I could, I could turn her into a frog,” she said confidently.

“Yes, but please don't. I have zillions of frogs, but only one baby.”

The girl pirouetted on a toe, to make her scarves flutter. She was holding her body very stiff in an effort to maintain the appropriate hauteur, and looking down her nose at Marlene in a way that would have been funny were it not so serious. Marlene said, “What's your name?”

“Princess, no, Special
Fairy
Princess Latameeshiana. The first. What's yours?”

Marlene introduced herself and the baby and then asked, “You live around here?”

“I live on the moon,” said the girl, staring at an ordinary-looking man in a dark coat walking down the path. As he passed, the girl leaned close to Marlene and said in a stage whisper, “You see that man? He's a werewolf.”

“I don't think so.”

“You don't believe in
werewolves
?”

“Not that much.”

“How about … witches? Do you believe in witches?”

Marlene thought seriously about it. “Yeah, I guess I do.”

The child laughed out loud. “Ha-hah! There's no such thing as witches.”

“No? Then what do you believe in?”

The girl intoned her credo portentously, ticking it off on her fingers. “I believe in werewolves, monsters … God, dinosaurs, vampires, fairies, and … angels. You can see angels. It's true.”

Marlene let her face show an interest that was less than half patronizing. The sun was warm, the baby was sucking happily at her bottle, and Marlene was content to learn all about the characteristics of angels from an urchin. It was more interesting than condo-buying details, and more pleasant than listening to women talk about being raped.

More glass broke, the sound coming from around the bend in the path. The force of the argument rose a degree. The little girl stopped talking, and Marlene realized that she had asked a question.

The girl asked it again, “Did you ever see one?”

“An angel? No, I don't think so. Did you?”

“All the time. Do you know what happens if an angel is bad? God takes off their wings, and they fall down and smoosh. They have real blood and goosh in them. Really! Or they could become vampires. It depends.”

“It's an interesting theory,” Marlene agreed.

The child pirouetted again, admiring her wings.

“Fairies have special wings, so they could never get smooshed. I can really fly.”

Marlene smiled uncertainly and gave the child a close look. Imagination was all very well, but the Princess, who, by the ragged look of her was not one of reality's darlings, might be taking it too far. Oddly, Marlene thought of the Jane Doe on the slab at the morgue. Maybe she had thought she could fly too.

“You know, Princess,” Marlene began, “pretend wings are very pretty, but they're different from real wings, aren't they? I mean, birds have real wings and they can really fly—”

Marlene's introduction to ontology was interrupted, as such discussions so often are in the City, by a major felony. There was a hoarse scream, and a ragged man came racing down the asphalt path, staggering, his face a perfect mask of blood. Before Marlene knew it, she was on her feet, positioned between the gory apparition and little Lucy. The wounded man did not, however, spare them a look, but crashed through a low bush and across the picnic field, to a chorus of curses and more screams. His pursuers, two tattered louts, one with a knife in hand and the other clutching a broken wine bottle, came racing after. By that time Marlene was wheeling her stroller rapidly in the opposite direction. After thirty yards or so, she thought to look for her recent companion, but the little girl had entirely vanished. In this respect, at least, a fairy indeed.

7

H
ave a good time?” asked Karp when Marlene arrived, breathless, at the loft. She put on a smile and declined to tell her husband that she had been chased from the park by armed thugs bent on murder. Instead she conveyed delight in the recreational opportunities of the neighborhood and then asked, “How did your thing with Roland go? Did he attack you with his triceps?”

Karp also put on a smile and declined to tell Marlene about Roland offering him a piece of ass. He did mention the idea of a bet on the Tomasian thing.

“You should have taken him up on it. We could use the money,” said Marlene, placing the baby, with a full bottle stuck in her gob, on a large mat in the center of the living zone. She then went into the kitchen and set the kettle to boil. Karp followed her in and sat on a stool at the butcher block counter.

“Unless you don't think it's a lock?” she added, looking at him questioningly.

He took a while before replying. “I honestly don't know. I'd hate to think Roland was right, but like I said before, and like I said to him, that's not the damn point. Why doesn't anybody get this? The point is the investigation's fucked. And I've been trying to think how I can straighten it out.” He paused, looked at her, and then glanced away. Then he asked, “Harry Bello's coming to work starting Monday, isn't he?”

“Yeah, why?” She caught the expression on his face, and her eyes narrowed and she snarled. “Oh, no! No fucking way! You're not going to take my
only
investigator away from me. You've got a hundred cops you could use.”

“Yeah, but this is an off-the-books job. I can't set up a regular cop and go, ‘A couple of your brother officers screwed up an investigation, why don't you go straighten it out?' Besides, where am I going to get them? Midtown South? Forget it! The D.A. squad? Those guys are all Roland's asshole buddies. They love him. No way are they gonna put anything real into a job like this.”

“Harry's a cop,” Marlene protested.

“In a manner of speaking. What he is is your personal ninja. There's no way I can make him do anything. Which is why this has to be a favor, you to me.” He saw her jaw stiffen. “Honest, it'll be a short-term thing. And it's not gonna be anywhere near full-time…. Look,” he continued as he saw that these words were having little effect, “why don't you do the whole thing?”

Startled, Marlene replied, “What! Butch, I'm up to my ears with my regular stuff. I can't take on a homicide investigation.”

“It's not a homicide investigation, Marlene. It's just some checking up. Harry and you can do it in three or four days. See some people is all. Come on, you know you love this kind of stuff, cruising around with old Harry, the heavily armed semi-psychotic. Hell, you might even get shot. Make your week for you.”

Marlene's mouth wriggled as she fought to suppress a grin. “I'm being manipulated,” she said.

“Yeah, and it's working too. Hey, what's that noise?”

There was indeed a faint rattling sound coming from the living room. They both ran around the divider. The baby's mat was empty.

Hearts in throats, they followed the clattering noise to a corner of the living room where, under a rickety end table, their baby was yanking and sucking on an electric lamp plug she had just pulled from a wall socket, and seemed to be trying to pull the heavy ceramic lamp down on her delicate little head.

“My God! She can crawl!” cried Marlene, delighted and terrified at once. She snatched the infant out from under the table and held it to her breast, kissing it soundly. “Butch, get the baby whip! This child needs some harsh punishment. What were you thinking of, you birdbrain? (Kiss.) Plunging into danger? (Kiss.)”

“I wonder where she gets it from,” said Karp. Marlene raised an eyebrow at that, but he understood that it was a done deal. In the quite recent past he would have fought hard against Marlene taking up a task that involved her wandering the streets with someone like Harry Bello. Now he had arranged it. It was the baby, he concluded. His considerable endowment of protective instinct had become transferred from his wife to his daughter. It was not so much that he cared less about Marlene than he had in the past. It was more that he had come to realize that she was going to put herself at risk from time to time, for her own reasons, and that if he attempted to thwart her at this, she would simply lie to him and the relationship would eventually collapse. Looking around at the loft, which now seemed to hide a baby's hideous death in its every cranny, he understood that this was the way it was supposed to work.

That Monday was, besides Harry Bello's first day, the baby's debut at Lillian Dillard's group day-care. Marlene arrived well before time in order to deal with any first-day terrors, but Dillard pounced on Lucy and charmed her out of her rompers. The faithless wretch didn't even glance up as Marlene sidled out of the room, feeling ridiculously annoyed. After all I've done for her.

Pausing at the entranceway, she watched Susan Weiner deliver little Nicholas with the aplomb of a Fed-Ex courier. Little Nicholas knew what was good for him too; he trudged into the center like a trouper, his shiny Sesame Street lunch box doubtless filled with food of matchless nourishment and perfectly free of harmful substances.

Marlene waved to Susan, who smiled and approached her.

“First day, huh? Any problems?”

“Not a
one.
It breaks my heart.”

“Yes,” said Susan, “it's a long day. That's why we try to schedule at least an hour of quality time in the evening.”

Marlene gave her a look to see if she was serious and then smiled politely. Marlene didn't believe in quality time. Kids didn't have Filofaxes; their needs were unscheduled. Marlene wanted to be a full-time mother and a full-time prosecutor. That she could not was yet another indication that life sucked, and blathering about quality time to assuage guilt was not going to change the fact that both her child and her career were suffering a net loss because of each other.

Susan was talking about how she had to go because there was this big rush on at work, where they were designing a custom façade for a gallery, and the architect wanted to pin the marble on with bronze roses and they couldn't find exactly the right ones, and they ought to get together for lunch sometime.

Marlene wanted to kick her teeth in. She was wearing two grand on her back, and both her eyes were real and she had a perfect life and Marlene couldn't help liking her and wanting to bask a little in that sublime confidence and grace.

Susan said good-bye and skittered off down the street and of course found a cab instantly going in the right direction. Marlene clumped off disconsolately to Centre Street, where she found her secretary and her staff acting peculiar and Harry Bello waiting in her office.

“Scaring the help, Harry?”

“How's the kid?” asked Bello. Marlene knew that he did not mean Marlene herself, but her daughter, his goddaughter. Marlene told him about the new day-care and, seeing the look that he gave her, explained that it was a good place that she had thoroughly checked out and then added the name of the woman who ran it and the address. She knew that before long Harry would determine for himself whether or not Lillian Dillard had lived a blameless life back through grade school, and would also have checked out the other children and their parents and whether the facility was up to code in every respect. I ought to give it up and let him be the mom, she thought.

She looked at his face, which was the color of an old grocery bag left out in the rain for a long time, and just as empty of any human expression. He was unnaturally still too. He didn't twitch his hands or rub his nose or do any of the small motions we inherit from the great apes, but sat, barely blinking, like a zombie waiting for a command from the
hougan.

Harry didn't talk much either; he never had, even when he was still tearing up the bad guys in Bed-Stuy with his partner. The partner had done all the talking. And Harry's wife had done all the talking when he wasn't at work. Then they had both died in the same week, and the partner's death at least had been Harry's fault, and that was, more or less, why Harry was what he was: a soul waiting for reincarnation but still visible to the rest of us. Old women crossed themselves when they saw him coming.

On the other hand, you didn't have to tell him anything twice. Or once either. Without a word Marlene handed him the folder on the Alphabet City Jane Doe. He read it silently. Marlene turned to other work. After fifteen minutes, he put it back on the desk and said, “You think he might do it again.” Marlene felt a rush of gratitude and smiled at him. With no prompting at all, Harry had seen in the photographs and the autopsy report and the bare-bones investigation exactly what she had seen, and understood that of course this was why an anonymous death with some oddly sexual bits might be important.

She said, “Yeah. What do you think? Too stale?”

“I could try to find him.”

Marlene's brows knotted. “What, the killer?”

He gave her a look, the one he gave her when she missed the subtext of one of his telegraphic messages.

“No, the guy who called it in. For starters,” said Bello, rising and picking up the fat file. “Can I keep this?”

Marlene nodded and Harry Bello disappeared, and she wasn't entirely certain that the door had opened. Five minutes later, she cursed and banged her desk. She had forgotten about the agreement with Karp, about Harry and the Armenian thing.