No Lesser Plea (34 page)

So that when the mighty explosion awakened both sleepers, and Denise looked around in panic and in the dim light saw Richie thrashing around under the doll, she concluded—not without reason—that two people were performing an act that she had read about with a combination of fascination and horror, but which was as yet outside her experience—and performing it in
her
house. She shouted, “Stop! What! Wha … Stop, who, who, what!!”

Richie was trying to put his mind back together. He seemed to have lost a considerable amount of time. He recognized the DA’s wife, but not what was three inches from his nose, which was a fairly good simulacrum of the female pudenda. That is, he knew what it was, but had no clue as to its owner, never a good situation to wake up into.

He sat up, which caused the doll to flip over onto its back. Now its welcoming arms, huge, red-tipped breasts, and gaping thighs were directed at Mrs. Bloom. Of course, Richie was out of bed by now, covering his crotch with a pillow and running around the room trying to find his clothes. Mrs. Bloom naturally concluded that this man, having reduced one woman to paralysis through that unspeakable act, was about to perform it on her. In her confusion, she shouted, “Stay away from me!” and picked up her most recent gin-and-tonic glass.

Richie said, “OK, lady, I just got to find my clothes,” but in so saying he advanced toward her bed to search the other side of the room. She flung the glass at him. It glanced off his head, flew up to the ceiling and shattered the ornate glass light fixture. A rain of glass shards fell down on the bed and the doll, one of which punctured its skin.

With a fizzing sound that might have come from Fartin’ Martin, the doll simultaneously deflated and flew across the room, a sexual gargoyle on the rampage. Which is why Denise Bloom was standing at the window screaming like a being demented. Which, at the time, she was.

Bloom was also screaming. “The terrorists have got my wife! Wharton, get the security guard! Do something, damn it!”

The security guard, who was, of course, Marty Konstantelos, burst out of the bushes brandishing his nightstick and his .38. He took several long steps on the terrace, slipped on the slimy surface, skidded twenty feet like a speed skater out of control, bowled over several people, including Wharton, and caught his head a nasty knock against the stone steps. As he sank into unconsciousness, his fabled gas reservoir let loose a cannonade that would have honored a chief of state, much less a district attorney.

At that moment an almost unidentifiable creature leaped up on the retaining wall. It was short and squat and glistening black in color, and stank. One might have guessed it was a sort of ape or a subhuman amphibioid creature that time forgot. A bottle of Scotch glittered in its grubby paw, not a usual accessory of such creatures. Perhaps an ape after all. Marlene identified it first. “Guma, you rotten son of a bitch! You stole my souvenirs!” she shrieked.

Guma—it was him indeed—jumped from the wall and raced across the terrace.

“Run! Run! It’s the fucking bees!” he shouted, and was gone down the path. And in fact the shock wave from the blast had upset half a dozen of the beehives in the meadow near the fish pond. The bees were not amused. In a moment the air was full of tiny yellow bodies and cries of pain. Marlene, Karp, and V.T. raced after Guma toward the parking area. They leaped into the old Mercury, rolled up the windows, and swatted bees as Guma peeled off down the drive, throwing a rooster-tail of gravel in his wake.

“Whoo-ee!” Guma exclaimed, as they roared onto the state road. “We stink like four inches up a penguin’s asshole. Anybody want some Scotch?” Everybody took a restorative belt. They also soaked V.T.’s ascot in Scotch and used it to dab at their stings.

“Hey, Ciampi! You ain’t mad at me, are you. For borrowing your bomb?”

“Shit, not really, Goom. I couldn’t think of a better use for it actually. On the other hand, you ever go near my office again, paisan, I’ll break your fucking head.”

“And she will, too, Guma,” added Karp sincerely.

They drove in silence for a while, and then V.T. let out a sigh and said, “Well, I guess he probably won’t invite us back there for a long time.” They laughed about that all the way down the Sawmill River Parkway.

Guma dropped Marlene and Karp off at Karp’s place. They took showers and changed clothes. Marlene was spending most of her time at Karp’s place by now, but kept her apartment—just in case.

“Hey, Marlene, why isn’t the water draining out?” yelled Karp from the bathroom.

Marlene was wrapped in a towel, sitting on the bed drying her hair. It had frizzed into a near-Afro that she was struggling to bring under control with a dryer and a steel brush. “Oh, that’s my hair. It always clogs. I’ll get some Drano tomorrow.”

Karp walked out of the bathroom, naked. “Hair in the drain? Drano? Does this mean the romance has gone already?” He bent over and nuzzled her neck. She shivered. “Nah, it just means—ahh, that’s so fine!—it just means we should get ready for new and startling levels of intimacy.” She held his head between her hands and stared into his eyes. “We’re in pretty deep and there’s a lot we don’t know about each other.”

“Especially me,” agreed Karp. “I mean sometimes you really whack me out, Marlene. I mean the stuff you pull. It scares me. You just decide to, I don’t know, disappear, or join the circus or something. You know?”

“Yeah, I know. You want me to be calm, so you can admire my beauty in peace. Like this.” She draped the towel over her head and struck a Mona Lisa pose. “I mean I know I’m easy on the eye. Shit, I’ve been hearing that since I was six. I know about the advantages of being attractive. But in a way, I hate it. It’s like what V.T. says about being rich. Is it
me
that’s desirable, or is it the other stuff, the money or the face? I mean, to a freak or a poor son of a bitch that’s looney, right? But there it is. My innermost fear.”

“It’s you,” said Karp, taking the hair dryer and the brush out of her hands. “Just you.”

She lay back and flung the towel down. “It better be, Buster.”

Chapter 17

“K
arp, I keep getting your mail. When are you going to tell the mail room you moved?”

Marlene had come into his office a little before noon and dropped a pile of envelopes on his desk. “I’ll get around to it, Marlene. I’ve been really busy.”

“I guess that means we’re not going to lunch today.”

“I guess it does.”

She sidled around to his side of the desk, bent over, and licked his ear. He pulled away and gave her his long-suffering look. “Marlene, I got to do all this stuff.” He gestured at the piles of forms, computer printouts, and other paperwork on his desk.

She backed away, her face hardening. “Well,
excuse me,
Mr. Boss. I beg your pardon. I guess I’ll just climb back into my faucet until the next time you turn on the goddamn tap.”

“Come on, Marlene, give me a break. Look, I appreciate you bringing the mail over and I’ll take care of the mail room today, OK?” He glanced down at the pile of envelopes.

“Hey, Marlene, these are all opened.”

“So? I just want to see what you’re up to. You mind?”

“Yeah, I fucking well mind! Where the hell do you get off opening my mail?”

“Why? You’ve got big secrets?”

“That’s not the point. You don’t open other people’s mail.”

“Oh, no? You think it’s too personal? You spent last night licking my ovaries, and I can’t peek at your
personal
correspondence. If you were banging your secretary, you’d let
her
peek at your
personal
correspondence, wouldn’t you?”

Karp got to his feet. “Marlene, what the hell has got into you?” he shouted. He realized she was picking a fight, but didn’t understand why.

“I would explain it to you, but it turns out
I
haven’t got the time.” She turned and stormed out, slamming the door and rattling the glass.

Karp slumped back in his seat and made some tooth marks on his pencil. The phone rang. It was Helen Simms, the bureau secretary.

“You all right in there? Nothing broken?”

“Yeah, Helen, it’s fine. Just fine.”

“You want to take this call I been holding. It’s a Mister Sussman.”

After a few initial pleasantries, Sussman got to the point, which was Mandeville Louis.

“Mister Karp, my client believes you have a personal animus against him. I confess, for myself, that I fail to see what you gain by not agreeing to an early disposition of this case, which is going on three years old now.”

“I don’t agree, Mister Sussman. Your client killed two people in cold blood. I want to put him in jail for a long time. That’s not personal, that’s my job.”

“Yes, of course. But you know very well that cases like Louis’s are usually settled expeditiously. The man as no criminal record. He is mentally ill. He can’t be tried. My God, can you imagine what would happen to the criminal justice system if every case of this type was blockaded in the way you seem intent on doing here? Surely Mister Bloom cannot approve. I had understood that he set quite a high priority on greasing the wheels of justice, so to speak.”

“Yeah, but first of all, it’s not every case. It’s one particular case, and second, I don’t believe Mister Louis is mentally ill.”

“Oh? Have you added a forensic psychiatric degree to your credentials?”

Karp was suddenly exhausted. All at once, his little stratagems and evasions, his training sessions, his back-breaking work, seemed utterly futile. Some part of his mind knew the problems he was having with Marlene were connected with the monumental, and—said one part of him—absurd task he had set himself. He was heading for an emotional crash and burn
again.
And for what? If the law could not punish a ravening wolf like Mandeville Louis, a villain standing ankle deep in blood and laughing about it, then what was the point of it all?

Moral fatigue had dulled Karp’s mind, and he did something foolish. He began telling Sussman what he and Dunbar suspected about Louis’s M.O. He wanted, he needed, the sleek defense lawyer to step out of his formal role as advocate and share Karp’s horror at what Louis had done and at the failure of the justice system to do much about it. Crazy, but true.

“And so, Mister Sussman,” Karp concluded, in his best summation-to-the jury style, “I am convinced that your client, far from being a mental incompetent who committed a single impulsive crime, is a cynical and extremely clever
mass
murderer who may have been responsible for as many as one hundred killings in the past ten years. He has been consciously manipulating the criminal justice system, and I have decided to put a stop to it. As long as I have any association with the District Attorney’s Office, Mandeville Louis will not cop to a lesser. He can sit in Matteawan as long as he likes. Meanwhile, the police will continue gathering evidence linking him to his other crimes.” This was a bluff. Karp knew he was lucky to get Dunbar to look for the third man. It would be virtually impossible to get the cops to open dozens of closed files.

Sussman, whose interest in justice was tenuous at best, remained unimpressed. “That was very interesting, Mister Karp. Now I’ll tell one. Once upon a time, a little girl named Red Riding Hood lived with her mommy in the middle of a big forest …”

“OK, Sussman, you made your point,” snapped Karp. “I don’t give two shits if you believe me or not. But, you ever feel like calling me again, let me say this. If your man decides to plead guilty to the top count of the indictment, I’m all ears. Other than that, save your dime.” He slammed down the receiver.

Leonard Sussman stared for a moment at the dead phone. Then he dialed a familiar number.

Louis was at arts and crafts when they called him to the phone. He was painting. Robert Fallon was teaching him how. Fallon joked about starting an atelier in the loony bin, to carry on his traditions after he departed for friendlier places. Fallon talked incessantly about escaping, about what he would do when he was free in South America. It was starting to get on Louis’s nerves. First of all, he thought Fallon was bullshitting. All the fucker did was eat. He’d need a guy with a forklift to escape. Louis was putting on weight, too, on the starchy food, but he knew he would never become one of the doughy creatures he saw every day in the lounge. He wondered why there were weight rooms in prisons but not in looney bins.

Also, he didn’t like hearing Fallon talk about what he had done with those girls, and what he was planning to do. Louis did not dwell on the murders he had committed. He didn’t particularly get off on killing people, any more than a mailman gets a charge out of stuffing mailboxes. What Louis got off on was getting away with it.

So when he heard what Sussman had to say about what he had heard from Karp, Louis experienced a blow to the core of his being. Someone had found him out and would not let him off. Nothing like this had happened to him since the ice pick incident over twenty years ago. For an instant of blinding disorientation he was back in the yard of his family’s home, trying to burn a blood-stained jacket as the police car approached.

Sussman was saying, “Mister Louis, I tell you he’s clutching at straws. He hasn’t a case and he’s bluffing. Let me tell him you’ll go to trial—he’ll cave, I know it.”

Louis made no answer. He was shaking and struggling for control.
Karp knew. Karp knew.

“Mister Louis. Mandeville. Are you listening?”

“Karp knows,” Louis said, in a creaky voice.

“Beg pardon? What was that?”

“No trial. Set up a hearing, just like before. Nothing’s changed.”

“Mister Louis, did you hear a word I said? This Karp is …”

“Let me worry about that, Sussman,” Louis interrupted. “I’ll worry about Karp.”

“Hey there, Pres, how’s my boy?”

Preston Elvis let out a long, desperate sigh when he heard the familiar voice on the phone. For months after he delivered the fatal heroin shot to Donald Walker he had stayed away from Louis’s apartment, foregoing the delights of DeVonne, the yellow Firebird, and the easy money he got from swiping bits of Louis’s pure heroin and selling it, heavily cut, to his friends. He had returned to the home of sorts he had before, he went to prison, living off the welfare check of a woman named Vera Higgs. Vera, a mild and willing creature of eighteen, had borne him one child while he was in prison and was heavily pregnant with another. He was astonished that Louis had known where to find him.