No Lesser Plea (26 page)

“I thought you said your brother was a dentist.”

“Orthodontist. Doesn’t matter though. He’s connected, heavy. The mob is queer for straight teeth, it’s common knowledge. Guys who know how to fix an overbite can write their own ticket with the dons.”

“You’re a nut, Ciampi, you know that?”

“Maybe, but I’m serious about keeping this whatever-it-is from getting around the office.”

“What? You mean I can’t boast of my conquest in the locker room?”

“No, really, Butch.” She was silent for a moment, then propped herself up on one elbow and looked into his face.

“I heard about your wife.”

“
You
heard about my wife! Shit, Champ,
I
just heard about my wife. Who the hell told you? Oh, Christ, Guma!” He pulled a pillow over his face and groaned.

“Well, what did you expect? Tell Guma, tell Jimmy Breslin, except Guma maybe gets the word around a little faster. We could talk about it, if you want.”

Karp peeked over the top of the pillow. “I don’t know what to say. I mean, I feel like a jerk. I thought I was in love, I thought I knew who with, and all of a sudden, it turns out that person doesn’t exist. It’s amazing, this year. It starts out, I have a job, a career that makes sense. I believe in it. I have a marriage, maybe going through some rough spots, but I believed in that, too. Now, Jesus, the DA’s office is heading for the garbage can, my wife is gay. I thought I got through the sixties, all that bullshit. I thought I knew the answers. You know, like an exam. Study hard, work out, clean mind, clean body. Fuck the answers—I don’t even know the
questions
anymore.”

“You should have taken more philosophy.”

“Yeah, right, instead of basketball. If I was five inches taller I wouldn’t need to know how to
spell
philosophy. Oh, well, I guess the great cosmic questions will always elude me, jock that I am. How about you, Ciampi, do they elude you too?”

“Well, I’ve always had some problems with ‘what is the ultimate ground of being’ and ‘what is the meaning of “meaning.” ’ And of course, the triune nature of the Godhead has kept me awake many a night. But right now, I believe the most important question is, ‘Do you eat pussy?’ ”

“Me? Never!”

“What, never?”

“Well, I do drag a slow kiss through it, now and again.”

Marlene threw back the sheet from their bodies and stretched luxuriously. “Then do so,” she said.

Much later, there were no longer any slats of light floating in the walls, just the bluish glow of a summer evening in New York. Marlene lit a Marlboro and sent a geyser of smoke up to the ceiling.

“Karp, the soles of my feet are sweating. They never did that before. God, what can it mean? Karp? Karp are you listening?” She knuckled him in the ribs.

“Ow. Marlene, why are you always abusing me physically? You’re always
punching
me.”

“Because you don’t give me your absolute attention at all times and do everything I want.”

“Oh, well, just asking. By the way, you also drool when you pop your rocks.”

“Yeah, it’s true, my dirty little secret. Karp!”

“What now?”

“Karp, I just realized we haven’t eaten anything all day.”

“So to speak.”

“No, food! I’m starving! What have you got?” She leaped off the bed and trotted into the kitchen, her buns winking in the dying light. Karp listened to the opening of cabinets and the slamming of the refrigerator door. In a few minutes she came back holding a plastic zip-lock bag.

“This is great, Butch. I can eat the refrigerator instructions and you can have the warranty card. There is no
food
in this apartment. How can you
live
that way?”

“We of the planet Zarkon have no need of earthly foods. We get our sustenance from young females, whom we lure to our dens and drain of their vital liquids.” He made a clumsy lunge for her leg, which she avoided.

“Uh-uh, bozo. First eat. Marlene wants protein. Marlene want STEAK. If I don’t get to Max’s in five minutes, you will have to explain my shriveled corpse to the police. Let’s get cleaned up.”

So they had another shower, with appropriate soapings and rubbings and tickles, until Marlene pushed him away saying, “Oh God, don’t get me started again. I’m going to have to get my thing relined as it is.”

“Oh, yeah? There’s a guy on Coney Island Avenue does a good job. He’ll do your muffler for the same price.”

“Get away from me, you maniac,” she said, and jumped out of the shower.

There was a full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door. While Karp dried himself, Marlene wiped the fog from the mirror. She made Karp stand next to her facing it. At five-two, her head barely cleared his breastbone.

“Christ, we look like two different species. What a giant! If you were wearing roller skates, I could practically give you a blow job without bending down.”

“Damn it, isn’t it funny how you never can find a skate key when you want one? Ahhhgh! Stop it, Marlene! I thought you wanted a steak.”

Later, as they were dressing, she asked, “What happened to your knee? It looks like Frankenstein’s face.”

“I hurt it playing ball in college. It was sort of a freak accident. I landed on my face with my leg sticking up over somebody’s back. Then a two-hundred-and-thirty pound forward came flying through the air and landed on my ankle. The lever effect. The only thing holding my leg to my thigh was skin.”

“Oh, yucch, poor baby!”

“Yucch is right. My orthopedist said it was the perfect knee injury. Everything that could rip out in a human knee ripped out. He had residents from all over the West Coast coming in to observe. Didn’t do a bad job, though. I can walk all right, mostly, even run a little. But big-time basketball? Finito.”

“How come? I read all the time about the pros getting hurt and still playing.”

“That’s different. First of all, practically nobody gets hurt in basketball as badly as I did. I told you, it was a freak. Then again, they’re already part of the team. They can wrap themselves up, shoot in some dope, and play a couple of minutes. It’s different if you’re trying to break in. You’re competing with guys who are in perfect shape … and well …” Karp was staring out the window as he said this, his voice dying away at the end. Marlene touched his arm.

“You still feel bad about it, huh? Were you really good?”

“Yeah, I guess. I don’t have that much natural talent, and I’m a hair short for the pros, but I worked at it. I can handle the ball. I’m a dead shot from anywhere on the court. I can, I could, jump better than most white guys. I think I would have had a shot at point guard or second guard someplace. Being a honky helps, there. The fans don’t like seeing ten black dudes running around. Hey, let’s change the subject. This is getting me depressed.”

“Fine. How come you live this way? I mean the place looks like a crash pad. No food, no furniture. Shit, you don’t even have a wastebasket.”

“I eat out a lot.”

“No, really, Butch.”

“Really? Because eating in is what you do at home, and this isn’t a home. You think I want to fix a little frozen Salisbury steak every night and eat it in front of the tube? I sleep here, and keep my clothes here, period. And every so often some hot little number insinuates herself into my life and I fuck here.”

“Every so often, eh? How often is that?”

“Just kidding, Marlene. The truth is, you are the first human being besides me to enter this apartment since I moved in. You have stolen the virginity of my Macy’s seventy-nine dollar box spring and mattress. OK?”

“Yeah? Well, keep it that way, Buster, if you know what’s good for you.” She poked him sharply in the midsection, and trotted out of the apartment. He followed, happy and enslaved.

They ate huge steaks at Max’s, oblivious to the glitter underground cavorting around them. They saw a movie. They talked. Karp spilled his guts; he had not talked so much outside a courtroom in years, if ever. For a loudmouth, Marlene was a surprisingly good listener. They walked. They shared an egg cream from a sidewalk stand on Canal Street near Broadway, the heart of New York’s bazaar, the junction of Little Italy, Chinatown, and SoHo. There was nothing in the world, legal or illegal, you could not buy within half a mile of where they stood: dried sea cucumbers from the Sulu Sea, a World War II bombsight, a Parmesan cheese as tall as a man, an abstract expressionist painting, a gram of cocaine, a ton of powdered cinnamon, a ton of cocaine, the services of a naughty masseuse, an acupuncturist, a fortune teller, an assassin.

Karp was not in the market for any of those exotica. He thought, I have what I need. Then he thought, be careful, this is a classic rebound situation. He looked at Marlene leaning against the metal serving counter, a Marlboro clenched in her teeth at a jaunty angle, observing the midnight ramblers on Canal Street. He thought about rebounding, about rebounding in basketball. An image popped into his head, of himself jumping high into the air and catching Marlene, naked and curled into a ball, rebounding off a backboard, snatching her away from half a dozen grabbing hands. He laughed out loud. But when Marlene asked him what he was laughing about, he said, “Nothing. You had to be there.”

They strolled back uptown to Karp’s place. The air remained warm and not as humid as it would be later in the summer. Marlene went into an all-night emporium and bought, over his protests, a metal wastebasket with the Statue of Liberty and other New York scenes printed on it.

Toward dawn, they were in bed, pumping each other to yet another Big O. Remarkable how Marlene, filthy mouthed in the office, in deepest sex would say only “oh gosh” and “oh dear” like a barely fallen Carmelite. Now, though, she was even passed the “oh gosh” stage, sweating and flushed, her head lashing back and forth across the pillow like the tail of a harpooned eel, at which point the telephone rang. Around the sixth ring, the sound penetrated into Karp’s brain. He let ten more rings go by, until he realized both that the phone was not going to stop and that he was conditioned, like Pavlov’s dog, to stop what he was doing, no matter what, and answer a ringing phone.

“Sorry, I got to answer that,” he gasped.

“Sure, yeah. But make it snappy,” said Marlene.

He rolled off and picked up the receiver. “Yeah?”

“Karp, is that you?”

“No, it’s Henry Kissinger. Who is this?”

“Butch, it’s me, Sonny Dunbar. I been trying to get you all night.”

“Well, you got me now. This better be good, Sonny.”

“No, it’s bad, real bad. Donny’s dead.”

“Dead? When … what happened?”

“They called us from Vorland about ten-thirty. He was dead in his cell at bed check. They think he got hold of some dope and OD’d. I’m over at his house—we just got my sister to bed. I still can’t believe it, you know? Anyway, I thought you better hear about it.”

“Thanks, Sonny. Look, I’m sorry as hell about this … let’s talk later, see where we stand.”

Karp hung up and flopped back on the pillow. He hadn’t thought about Mandeville Louis and Donald Walker for some time. He was carrying a full caseload now; it was hard enough to keep abreast of current cases, not to mention the strain of the Garrahy campaign. Tomorrow he would have to pull the file and rethink the case. But these thoughts were interrupted by a small, warm hand gliding down his belly to his groin.

“Ding-dong! Remember me?”

“Oh, yeah. Where was I?”

“Right here. Just a little higher. Ahh, that’s marvelous,” she said. But he couldn’t get Donald Walker’s frightened face out of his mind. That man was scared shitless, he thought, and he was right.

At the office the next day, Karp felt sleepy and sated, and found himself staring out the window at nothing. Shortly after noon, Sonny Dunbar came into his office, looking ashen and drawn.

“Pretty rough, huh?” said Karp. “You feel like going for coffee or a drink?”

“Nah, I got coffee up the wazzoo.”

“OK, what’s the story?”

Dunbar told a fairly common tale, but a sad one nonetheless. Donald Walker had drawn three-to-five for his role in the Marchione killings. Because he had no record of violence—and because Karp put in a good word—he was sent to the minimum-security facility at Vorland, in the Hudson Valley, about ninety minutes out of the city.

At Vorland, he was supposed to receive therapy and rehabilitation in the company of other young men who had gotten into trouble but were not regarded as dangerous, and whose crimes did not seem to warrant a ticket to the hell of Attica.

Or so it was supposed to work. Because of the peculiar distinction the law makes between adult and juvenile offenders, many individuals in Vorland’s population had half a dozen years of ferocious criminality behind them when their slates were wiped clean on their eighteenth birthdays. They may have been
adult
first offenders, but they were hardly simple lads in their first bit of trouble.

Besides that, Vorland had been designed for a high ratio of correction officers to inmates. That ratio was consumed—like so many other good ideas—by the implacable grinding of the criminal justice machine. Vorland had twice as many inmates as it had been designed for. It was better than the Tombs; it was better than Attica, but that wasn’t saying much. It was also one of the easiest places in the state of New York to cop drugs. The prison dealers just got on the phone and arranged for a friend to take a pleasant drive upstate, take a stroll along the eight-foot chain-link fence that bounded the facility, and flip a package over the top at a prearranged time and place.

Apparently Donald Walker had gotten a phone call the previous evening. It was from a woman claiming to be his sister; this was later discovered to be a lie. Walker had talked with her for a few minutes and the next day had been seen walking near the fence in the area known to the inmates as the Holy Land, because of the good things that fell out of the sky. By nine that evening he was dead, his belt around his arm, an empty syringe sticking in his vein.

“The little jerk,” Dunbar went on, “he was clean for most of a year and then he goes and pulls a dumb trick the first time somebody, some ‘friend’ lays some shit on him. Go figure!”