“Nope,” he shook his head and grinned. “Oh, I do spend a certain amount of time every day thinking of ways to bore people to death.”
“Well, you’ve succeeded there,” Stupenagel grumped. “No wonder Marlene had to leave.” The moment the comment left her lips, she regretted it. “Sorry.”
For a long moment, he had given her the famous Karp Stare—his gray-gold eyes narrowing into a disconcerting “You want to fuck with me?” look that had intimidated many a would-be perjurer on the witness stand into telling the truth. But then the look softened and he shrugged. “Don’t worry about it. There’s probably more truth to that than I care to admit.”
8
SURROUNDED BY A FEW HUNDRED PEOPLE HE DIDN’T KNOW or want to know in a ballroom at the Waldorf-Astoria, Karp recalled the conversation with the reporter and thought of his wife with longing. But Marlene was a thousand miles to the southwest at an art school in Taos, New Mexico. It was half a continent in terms of distance, but at least she was closer in other ways than she had been a year ago when she’d sequestered herself on a Long Island farm, away from their kids, away from him, away from her previous life.
Sometimes it was hard to believe they’d both been young, gungho prosecutors for Garrahy when they began a torrid love affair that had grown into something much deeper. She had long ago quit the district attorney’s office and moved through a variety of other professions, including owning a VIP security firm that made her millions when bought by a larger firm that then went public with its stock.
The move to Long Island she had explained as necessary to her subsequent career choice as the owner of a company that raised and trained dogs for security uses from protection to bomb-detection. But they both knew that the self-exile had little to do with dogs and everything to do with their marriage.
Lying at the heart of their rift was a profound difference in philosophy regarding the application of the law. He believed in—or more accurately had pledged his life, fortune, and sacred honor to—upholding the U.S. Constitution and especially the laws of the state of New York. A writ of habeas corpus was art to him; he reveled in the challenge of proving a case beyond a reasonable doubt, and believed in the sanctity of the jury system even with all of its problems. He felt deeply that adherence to the spirit, as well as the letter, of the law was all that stood between a free and open society and the twin evils of a police state on one side, or the Huns at the gate on the other.
Marlene, however, had no more patience for what she saw as the inherent weaknesses of a system that had been convoluted and bastardized until the courts were more about protecting the rights of the guilty than meting out justice for the victims. The tangible result of her dissatisfaction had been a willingness to take the law, as well as a gun, into her own hands.
Inwardly, Karp cringed away from thinking about that aspect of his wife’s past. Otherwise, he would have had to admit that she was an unindicted felon, probably a murderer. While it was true that those she’d killed were men who arguably deserved it, including serial rapists and murderers, vigilante justice went against everything he believed in.
The episode that had sent her into exile at the dog farm was her response to the attempted murder of one of their twin sons, Giancarlo. Seeking revenge, she’d called upon an old friend—Tran Do Vinh, a former Vietnamese schoolteacher and Vietcong guerrilla chief—who ran an organized crime syndicate in the homeland of his former enemies. Despite his former and current professions, Tran was absolutely loyal to Karp’s wife and daughter. At the former’s request, he and his band had wiped out the population of a remote town in the hills of West Virginia—a murderous nest of vipers, to be sure, but still they’d been tried, convicted, and executed without the benefit of due process, and some of the casualties had been women and children caught in the crossfire.
Karp skirted the need to turn in his own wife because, so far as he knew, Marlene had not violated the laws of New York. In weaker moments, such as when she was playing black widow and happily trying to devour her mate, he’d admitted to himself that without her, his life would have been as colorful as a volume of the New York Criminal Code. She was yin to his yang, as she once explained to him, except that at the time she was naked and talking dirty and used the expression to elaborate on how their anatomical differences were so well suited to one another.
Still, his rationale had not prevented a philosophical cancer from growing between them. Marlene might have continued to move farther away from the family until she was lost to them forever—like a moon slowly escaping the gravitational pull of its planet—but in an ironic twist, she was brought back into orbit by the lethal abilities that caused the problem in the first place. That past winter, she had once again used her skills, only that time it was to stop Islamic terrorists from blowing up 100 Centre Street.
In one way, it would have been no great loss. The building was a stark and artless gray monolith built during the Depression and designed as though the architect felt no need to consider beauty as an important asset for an edifice that would house the city courts, the district attorney’s office, and the Tombs. However, on that day, the governor, the district attorney, her husband, and maybe a couple thousand other people, including a hundred or so children in the day care center, were inside.
Marlene and her daughter had figured out the terrorists’ plan, and his wife had shown up in time to send them to Allah slightly ahead of schedule. But even then her efforts were almost too late and the bomb had partly detonated and destroyed part of the building, killing a dozen innocent people and injuring several dozen more.
With more blood on her hands, the demons that tormented Marlene had threatened to carry her over the mental edge into accepting the fact that for better or worse, she was destined to be a killer. But Karp had reminded her that this time, her actions had saved hundreds, if not thousands, of lives. Nor were they motivated by revenge or to mete out vigilante justice.
“Any citizen would have been obligated to act in that situation,” he told her, “but not many would have been as successful. Maybe instead of tallying up another sin, you should see it as a shot at redemption…. No pun intended.” He didn’t know how much of his little speech she bought into, but instead of running back to her dog farm on Long Island after he was sworn in as district attorney, she’d remained in New York with her family.
Marlene insisted that they all view her return to the family fold as a one-day-at-a-time arrangement, and they knew not to push her beyond that commitment. But one day had turned into one week and then one month, then four more. Despite efforts at emotional self-preservation, he knew that the kids had begun to hope that the change was permanent. As a matter of fact, so had he.
Still, it was not as if a light switch had been flipped and she was suddenly exorcised of the ghosts and self-doubt. She had been falling down a deep, dark hole for a long time and, as she told him one night, she saw herself as desperately hanging on to the last rung of the ladder more than climbing back up.
Karp would wake some nights, suddenly conscious that she was not in the bed next to him. He’d get up and find her staring out a window or looking at her reflection, he couldn’t tell which. If she didn’t see him, he remained in the shadows so that he could watch without disturbing her. Sometimes he thought she looked like a wild animal trying to determine which way the forest lay over the constant hum of the city, others like a little girl lost, her cheeks wet with tears.
One night he found her sitting at the kitchen table with one hand around the neck of a bottle of Hennessey and the other around her Glock 9mm. She claimed to have heard a noise that roused her from her sleep. “I got up to see if we had a burglar, then stopped off for a nightcap.” He smiled and joked that burglars weren’t eligible for the death penalty in New York, but he’d never forget the longing way she’d looked down at the gun.
Marlene Ciampi…former Catholic schoolgirl from Queens, alumna of Sacred Heart, Smith College, and the Yale School of Law…crusading a
ssistant district attorney…vigilante…self-made millionaire…was a deeply scarred woman. Deeper than the wounds she’d suffered back when they first starting going out and she’d opened a letter bomb intended for him. She’d lost her left eye in the explosion and the injuries to her face had never completely disappeared, but it was the wounds he couldn’t see that worried him.
She’d looked up from her gun that night with her one beautiful brown eye and he saw the death wish and wanted to break down and cry. Instead, he’d gently pried the bottle and the gun out of her hands and then picked her up as one would a child and carried her back to their bed. He’d held her tight for the rest of the night while she sobbed, as though he could surround her with his love and keep the bad things out. The next morning she was back to being the sassy Sicilian-American doll he’d fallen hopelessly in love with, acting as though the whiskey and tears had finally purged her demons. But he knew that as high as she was at that moment, she would eventually head down the other side of the hill, and he might not be able to stop the plunge.
Butch Karp, the man who daily made difficult decisions that profoundly affected the lives of hundreds of people and did it without blinking, didn’t know what to do to help his wife. With the clarity of an ice pick in the head, the dilemma brought back to him the horrible days long ago when he was a teenager and his mother got sick with cancer. There had been nothing he could do then either, except stick her with a hypodermic full of morphine to ease the pain. He had tried to forget the worst of those times, but he would always remember wondering how he’d cope in a world without her.
What he was experiencing with Marlene was similar, except that he was afraid of losing her to guilt, not cancer, and this time there was no psychological morphine to offer. Any suggestions he made that she seek counseling were either laughed off during her up periods as unnecessary, or angrily thrown back in his face when she was down as an attempt to get rid of her. “It’s all pseudo-science, mumbo-jumbo anyway,” she argued. “They don’t have any answers. They can’t even agree among themselves.”
Then to his surprise, one afternoon when he came home from work, she announced that she was going away for four months to an art school in Taos, New Mexico. She had never mentioned New Mexico or been interested in anything more than looking at art before, but he soon learned that it wasn’t just an art school. When the twins, weren’t around, she’d confided that the school was run by psychiatrists and was designed for women who were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. The painting and sculpting was actually part of the therapy. After the initial surprise in which a tiny male voice in his groin area expressed dismay at the thought of her leaving for four months, he’d reacted positively.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” she’d warned him. “I’m not sure I buy any of this ‘healing through art’ crap. Sounds like just another School of Quackery. But Taos is supposed to be beautiful, and I feel like I’m running to something instead of away.”
Marlene had shown him a brochure from the Taos Institute of Art Healing. He thought that it looked alien. The buildings on the small campus were square, rose-colored structures that looked like the homes in The Flintstones cartoons. The landscape pictured in some of the photographs seemed even more foreign to him—a dry and barren wasteland made up of thorny bushes, dry grass, gnarled trees, and rocks, lots of rocks.
On one hand, he was a little jealous. As a child, his hero had been John Wayne. A Saturday just wasn’t a Saturday without a twenty-five-cent double feature of the Duke riding across just such landscapes. He’d been mesmerized by Wayne’s traditional characters—the rugged individualist, willing to sacrifice himself to stop grave injustices and rid the community of evil. Incorruptible. Indefatigable. Every year, he’d begged his parents to “go out West” for their family vacations. And even as an adult, Karp knew part of him was still trying to emulate his hero. But he also worried that the wide-open spaces of New Mexico looked like a place where things got lost, not found, and wondered what that would mean for his wife.
Marlene left at the end of April. Gonna be a long, lonely summer, he thought, as he watched her truck disappear down Crosby headed for the Holland Tunnel and parts west.
She’d been gone for a month, and there had not been a lot of correspondence or phone calls. She did write to tell him not to take it personally, but the counselors had urged her to learn to live with herself before she moved on to her relationships with other people. “For a while they want me to just paint and let my issues percolate to the top where I can deal with them one at a time.”
Karp happily noted that she signed her letter, “I love you more than ever,” but he got most of his New Mexico news from his twenty-year-old daughter, Lucy, who had gone with Marlene. She’d said it was “to keep an eye on my nefarious mother for her own good, as well as everyone else’s.” But he knew that Lucy’s reasons were more complex than that.
All he had to do to gain perspective if he ever started feeling sorry for himself was think of his daughter. His entire family seemed to attract danger as picnics did ants. Lucy had been abducted and shot at before she was sweet sixteen. Then that past fall, she’d been kidnapped again, this time by the serial killer Felix Tighe. It turned out that he had been planting a series of car bombs for the terrorists leading up to their attack on the courthouse, but he had his own reasons. He intended to kill Karp, who had put him in prison, but not before he’d destroyed his family starting with the rape, torture, and murder of Lucy.
Tighe had taken Lucy to the basement of an abandoned building and begun his torments when a former Catholic tertiary, a sort of lay order of aid workers, named David Grale, arrived in the proverbial nick of time to save her. A deranged killer himself, who lived in the city’s underground tunnels hunting “demons” that he thought inhabited humans, Grale and his army of “mole people” had spirited Tighe away. The killer had never been seen alive again, but a rat-gnawed skull had been left at a church and later identified as Tighe’s through dental records.
Lucy was probably the best, most moral person that Karp had ever known. Deeply religious and committed to the Catholic faith of her mother’s side of the family, she claimed to have a direct line to the martyred Saint Teresa of Avila. According to his daughter, the saint appeared to her in times of need to offer advice and as a sort of spiritual sounding board. He didn’t really know what to make of Lucy’s visions, but there was no denying that she had an unusual strength and seemed to have come through her ordeal with Tighe in astoundingly good shape.
The “art school thing” was her mother’s thing, Lucy said when she informed Karp that she, too, would be going to New Mexico. She planned to dedicate herself to missionary work, helping out with a Catholic youth center that worked with Indian teenagers from the Taos Pueblo. Lucy, who was a savant with languages and spoke more than forty by his last count, said she was also excited at the prospect of studying one of the oldest and most unique languages in the world. She called the language Tiwa and said that only the Taos Pueblo Indians spoke it.
• • •
Karp wondered how the mother-daughter bonding was going as he moved through the crowd at the fund-raiser shaking hands and graciously thanking those who endorsed his candidacy. “But I haven’t decided whether to run yet,” he heard himself repeating over and over again until he wondered why he bothered.
Finally, he felt he’d pressed as many palms as he could stand and gave Fulton a high sign as he started moving toward the exit. Thinking about his own wife and daughter made Karp want to go home and see his boys, Zak and Giancarlo. He’d been so busy between work and marching to Murrow’s calendar that he’d seen little enough of them for the past month.
The previous night he’d been looking forward to a rare evening with no engagements and suggested that they take in a Yankee game, but the boys begged off, saying they needed to go to a friend’s house to study for their bar mitzvahs. They got home late and popped their heads into his room where he was propped up on
the bed reading a book, John Adams, by David McCullough. He invited them in for a chat, but they’d made a big show of stifling yawns and headed off to sleep.
They were still sleeping that morning when he got up and left the apartment for the office. He wanted to spend a couple of hours going over old case files, looking for clues to what he suspected was a new serial killer in town.
Two days earlier, the Times had come out with a story, in the Metro Section, about three Catholic priests who had been reported missing in the past four months from the area encompassed by the Five Boroughs, including one from Manhattan. There’d been no word from them since and, despite the lack of any evidence, foul play was feared. It was still just a police missing persons investigation, and he wasn’t even sure why it troubled him so much. But he thought he’d take a look in the archives and see if any killers with a thing for priests had been released from prison in the recent past. Nothing stood out during his cursory examination of the files. The potential suspects that had come to his mind were still locked up or, in one case, had been stabbed in the heart while taking a shower in his cell block.
When he got back to the apartment that afternoon, the boys were involved in different pursuits, each according to his personality. Zak was playing one of his violent video games with plenty of gunfire, explosions, bloodcurdling screams, and death rattles. Giancarlo was off in his room picking out a tune on an old guitar Marlene had picked up for him before she left.
“So how did studying go last night?” he asked.
• • •
Hoax Page 9
