Corruption of Blood

by Robert Tanenbaum

  After three weeks of study, however, these beliefs had been seriously eroded, and he had conceived a ferocious resentment against the people associated with the Warren Commission. His reading had shown him what any experienced homicide prosecutor would have gathered. The commission report was not an investigation that might have substituted for a trial of the dead Oswald, but merely a prosecutor’s brief, and not a very good one at that. As Crane had suggested at their first meeting, Karp would have laughed out of his office a junior ADA who had waltzed in with something of this quality as prep work for the trial of a street mutt accused of popping a whore.

  He had seen a similar botch any number of times in training ADAs: love at first sight. The cops provide a likely suspect; the kid gathers evidence that aids in convicting that suspect, and shows up at Karp’s pretrial meeting with a fat file and a big grin, which grin Karp demolishes by pointing out all the things the defense is going to bring up that the kid didn’t think about, or didn’t think were important. The autopsy. Did you see the films? Are the wounds consistent with the weapon we say he used? What about that weapon? Chain of evidence? Do you have it, an unbroken written record of everyone who touched it from the time it was found in possession of the defendant to the present instant? You “think” so? Not good enough. What about the witnesses? You got “most of them”? Why not all of them? They didn’t see anything or they didn’t see what you thought they should have seen? Better apply for a continuance, kid. You’re not ready for court.

  And that was what happened on Karp’s watch in a cheap street killing of a nobody. This—he glanced in distaste at the nicely bound blue volumes—was an investigation of the murder of a president in front of umpteen thousand people, supervised by the chief justice of the United States. Karp recalled what Bert Crane had said about Warren and his report—that Warren was rusty, that the problem with the report was the peculiar life histories of both the main suspect and the guy who’d shot him. The critics made much of that too, but Karp thought both they and Crane were off the mark. The problem with this thing was that it was a lousy investigation. A third-year law student could’ve come in off the street and walked Lee Harvey Oswald through its gaping holes.

  Karp rose, put his suit jacket on, grabbed some more reading material, and threw it into an accordion folder. He walked through the deserted office and out into the darkening streets. The Federal Center metro station was a block away, and he took the Red Line train to the Court House stop in Arlington.

  The Federal Gardens Apartments consisted of four two-story red brick buildings with tacky and pretentious white colonial porticoes, despite which they remained easily distinguishable from Mount Vernon. Most of Karp’s neighbors appeared to be noncommissioned military on temporary assignments or the kind of working stiffs that dressed in uniforms with embroidered name tags. There was a rusty playground set in the worn grassy quadrangle, which was littered with trash and forgotten plastic toys. There were lots of children in the complex, although Karp, who left for work at seven and returned after dark, saw them mainly on weekends. He heard them often enough, though. The interior walls were thin.

  He entered his apartment and turned on the light. A small living room contained a nubby plaid couch, an easy chair with a reddish flowered slipcover worn at the arms, a scratched blond wood coffee table, a standard lamp with a rusty nylon shade. In the rear of the ground floor there lurked a tiny dim kitchen and a dining alcove with a table of the same blond wood and four chairs. There was a dark stain on the table in the shape of a map of China, where someone had once spilled ink, probably during the second Roosevelt administration. Up a narrow flight of stairs were two bedrooms and a bath. The place was dark and low-ceilinged, but it was cheap and ten minutes by train to Karp’s office.

  Cheap was the main thing. Housing prices in the District had exploded in the seventies and Karp had vastly underestimated the cost of keeping two households. As it was likely that he would be unemployed after the committee concluded its work, he had resolved not to touch his small savings until then. He now understood why congressmen took bribes.

  Karp changed into comfortable clothes, went down to the kitchen, and heated up and consumed, without tasting it, a TV dinner. Then he went into the living room, lay down on the couch, and read for ten minutes before falling into a profound sleep.

  He awoke with a start to the sound of a violent argument in the apartment next door. Screaming, breaking things, and an unfamiliar sound, the whining and barking of a dog. The quarrel reached a crescendo and then abruptly terminated with a slamming door and a final crash of something breaking. The whining and barking, however, continued. Karp cursed and checked his watch. He was late for his nightly phone call.

  Marlene was cool when she answered, as if she were speaking to a distant relative.

  “How’re things?” he asked.

  “Not bad.” And, away from the mouthpiece, muffled: “It’s Daddy.”

  “Got a new husband yet?”

  “Yeah, I just picked this dude off the street, name of Frank or Ralph, something like that—anyway, he’s far better than you in every possible way.”

  “Good. As long as you’re happy.”

  “I’m euphoric,” she said, and then after a brief pause, “I was on TV yesterday.”

  “Yeah? What, you hosted ‘Saturday Night Live’?”

  “Almost as good. I talked to the National Association of Attorneys General about rape. One of the locals picked up about twelve seconds of moi for the local news. I did my line about how after the legislature changed the law on corroborative evidence, our conviction rate went up thirty percent.”

  “That’s great, Marlene! God, Bloom usually hogs that whole thing for his buddies and his own self.”

  “Yeah, well apparently, I’m one of Bloom’s buddies now,” she said.

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah, a bunch of feminists had a rally in front of the courts building and the TV gave them a big play. Apparently, car theft gets something like eighty times the investigative resources that rape gets, and forget about narco. Also there was a series about rape in the Voice and a piece in New York with a couple of juicy horror stories. Mr. Bloom was very glad to have his very own pet feminist talk to the press.”

  “So you’re famous.”

  “Please! Quasi-famous at the most.”

  “Like it?”

  A pause. “Yeah. Yeah, I do. It’s nice to get some recognition, and I think it’ll be good for the program.”

  “You get any new staff yet?”

  “No, but … what’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means don’t hold your breath. Bloom is a master of the meaningless gesture. He could be setting you up.”

  “I can take care of myself,” Marlene snapped, with more edge than she had intended. “Just because you’ve had a running war with him for all these years doesn’t mean I have to. We’re separate people, something which has been getting a lot clearer to me since you left.”

  “Marlene, what are you talking about?” Karp demanded, his voice rising. “Bloom is a corrupt fuck, and you know it.”

  A pause. “Let’s change the subject, Butch,” said Marlene coolly. “What’s going on down there? Solved the crime of the century yet?”

  “Yeah, well, it would help if I had a staff, or money to pay one, or an office that worked, but besides that it’s going great. Why don’t you come down here for the weekend? I miss you.”

  “I have stuff to do and no money. Why don’t you come up here?”

  “Same answer.”

  “Great. Well, in that case, I’ll see you when I see you. Here, talk to your daughter.”

  Clunking of phone, sound of tiny running feet. His heart clenched.

  “Daddy, I have an elephant balloon.”

  “That’s great, baby,” said Karp, and chatted with his daughter for a few minutes, in the sort of unrewarding and stumbling conversation possible with a three-year-old who is really only interested in when you’re
coming home.

  “Lucy, good night now,” said Karp. “Let me talk to Mommy again.”

  But the child placed the phone carefully back on the hook, and Marlene did not call back. After some moments of agonized waiting, Karp punched up their number, but hung up before it could ring.

  On the Monday following another miserable work-clogged and lonely weekend, Karp for the first time marshaled his investigative staff. They met in a small windowless office that had been designated the conference room. It was bare and dusty except for two long folding caterer’s tables placed end to end and a motley collection of chairs, which the attendees had dragged from their own offices. There were little piles of dead cockroaches on the floor and the room stank of a recent extermination.

  It was not, Karp thought, a particularly impressive group for the task at hand. Most of them were young, in their mid to late twenties, congressional staff types, all of them, male and female, wearing neat career suits in muted colors. There were also several older men in cheaper suits who exuded the vague bonhomie that marked them as political hacks. Karp was sure that none of them had ever investigated a homicide or worked a major criminal case. Bright or slow, ambitious or defeated, they were paper pushers all.

  V.T. Newbury was, of course, solid, but Karp had his doubts about whether Newbury or anyone else could form this mob into an effective research organization. Karp glanced across the table at Clay Fulton, who gave him a hooded, eye-rolling look. Fulton was solid too, but even under his supervision none of these people was going to be able to hit the streets of a strange town and ferret out secrets from the lowlifes. Ziller was there— Karp still didn’t know quite what to make of him—as was Jim Phelps, V.T.’s photo expert; short, bearded, wearing a cheap tan safari suit. At the end of the table sat a small dapper man with a brush mustache and heavy black horn-rimmed glasses—Dr. Murray Selig, former chief medical examiner of New York and the chairman of the forensic panel.

  Karp began, “This is our first general meeting and I hope it’s our last. I hate meetings.” Muffled, polite laughter. “This staff is still small enough so that we can talk to each other just about every day. I also want to minimize written reports and bureaucratic garbage as much as possible. I assume you’ve all met V.T. here. He’ll lay out the research assignments for each of you. The well-dressed gentleman sitting across from me is Clay Fulton, on leave from the New York PD. He’ll handle all the fieldwork with such of you as he thinks can help out. We’ve divided the work into a number of lines of research in two big groupings. First, we want to know to the extent possible what really happened in Dallas that day. We’re therefore going to reexamine, one, the ballistics and other forensic material, two, the photographic evidence, including the various amateur films, and, three, there’ll be a special reexamination of the autopsy evidence by Dr. Selig and his team of forensic pathologists.

  “The second grouping is concerned with why Kennedy was shot and whether the actual facts of the crime were covered up by either governmental or nongovernmental sources, or a combination of the two. The recent Church committee report gives us some reason to believe that neither the CIA nor the FBI was perfectly forthcoming with Warren. We’re going to look into, one, the Cuba connection, right- and left-wing versions, and the CIA involvement; two, we’re going to review the investigation of Oswald’s background; three, we’re going to check out the organized crime connection; and four, we’re going to see what we can find out about Jack Ruby.”

  Karp then read off a list of assignments and looked up. Everyone except Fulton, Selig, and Newbury was scribbling away on pads. Karp continued, “V.T. has set up a filing system and an initial set of leads for each group. We’ll expect you all to use your heads in following them up. I’m available any time for a conference on any particular problem, but I’m not going to have time to nursemaid you through this. One other thing: I intend to run this as a professional investigation. You’ll hear a lot about political sensitivities and pressures. I want you to ignore them. The reason we’re here, the reason the Warren Commission screwed up, was just that kind of knuckling under to politics, and I’m not going to be party to a repetition of that. All we’re going to be concerned with here is evidence and the best interpretation of that evidence, on the basis of our professional judgment and not a damn thing else.”

  He paused and looked around the table. Some of the faces bore faint smirks or incipient expressions of disbelief. Then he added, “Some of you may have problems with that, in which case you’re welcome to leave. And I can guarantee you this: if you sign on here and I do find out you’re crimping the investigation to suit somebody’s political agenda, you’re out and I don’t care who your patron is. I know Bert Crane will support me on this. Okay, any questions?”

  A silence, then a series of anticlimaxes. Somebody asked about furniture. Another asked about travel funds, and a third raised the critical issue of whether congressional staff parking privileges would be retained. It was a replay of the conversation between Flores and Crane. Karp referred these matters to Sondergard. Nobody seemed to have any substantive questions about who shot JFK. The meeting broke up in the usual burble of cross-conversation, centering around V.T. Karp slipped out feeling tense and irritated.

  Later, Karp sat in his office with Fulton and Murray Selig. “Welcome to the funhouse,” he said.

  “You got yourself a problem, boychik,” said the pathologist. “Comparatively, I got it easy.”

  “You’re satisfied with the panel?” Karp asked.

  “Oh, yeah, all good people. That’s not the issue, though.”

  “What is?”

  “The material. If the material isn’t there, how are we going to come up with anything different than Warren did?”

  “Oh, come on, Murray!” Karp snapped. He reached for the summary volume of the Warren Report and flipped it open to the famous ugly profile drawing of JFK with the trajectory of the magic bullet going through its neck. “Are you going to endorse this crap?”

  Selig smiled and placed his hands over his ears. “I don’t want to hear it. We’ll look at the evidence available and we’ll judge from that. You know how I work.”

  Karp tossed the volume down with a bang that raised a little flurry of plaster dust. “Yeah, right. Sorry, I know you’ll do what’s right.”

  Then the three men, who had worked together on hundreds of violent deaths over many years, chatted briefly about the simpler cases of the past, until Selig had to leave to catch a plane back to the city.

  When he had gone, Fulton observed, “He’s right, you know. Autopsy could draw a blank on this one.”

  Karp shook his head. “I don’t believe it. This”—he motioned at the blue book—“is a lie. Murray won’t be party to a lie. I don’t expect him to get the full story, but I’d be willing to bet he’ll explode this one.”

  Fulton shrugged. “Maybe. I hope so. Meanwhile, what are we going to do about this investigation? That crew in there couldn’t find a cat in a grocery bag. You in deep shit here, Stretch.”

  “We in deep shit, you mean. Any ideas?”

  Fulton rubbed his hand slowly over his close-cropped head for a moment before he replied. “Well, there’s you and me and V.T. Maybe a couple of the crew’ll turn out to be some good. They can’t all be as useless as they look.”

  “You mentioned ex-cops on the phone.”

  “Uh-huh, cops on pensions, here and there. They’d be willing to pitch in.”

  “Like who?”

  “Al Sangredo, used to work the Two-five?”

  “Yeah, way back. He still alive?”

  Fulton chuckled. “Al better not hear you say that. Yeah, he’s down in Miami. Got a private license, still dabbles a little. He’s up for it. He’s a Spaniard, but he can get into the Cuban business down there. He was Fidel’s bodyguard for the cops when he made that New York visit back in the fifties, so he knows the other side too. Apparently they hit it off, him and Fidel.”

  “Oh, great! That’s a desir
able reference in Little Havana.”

  Fulton laughed. “Then there’s Pete Melchior in New Orleans… .”

  “What about here?” Karp asked impatiently. Fulton gave him a disbelieving look and shot back, “Man wasn’t killed here, son. We don’t need no more people here in D.C. We’re damn lucky that New York cops hit the warm climates a lot when they throw in their tin. Spend the bribe money in peace. This is gonna be cleared up in Texas, probably New Orleans, maybe Miami, if the Cubans are connected up to it, like the Senate Intelligence report says. I think I got a guy in Dallas too. What I mean is, we need folks know those towns, which I don’t and neither do you.”

  Karp shook his head as if trying to throw off sleep and sighed. “Yeah, sorry. That’s what this fucking place does to you. I been here a lousy month and I’m starting to think the world ends at the Beltway, like everybody else.” He looked at his watch. “I have to get over to Schaller’s office.”

  “The CIA stuff?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You want me to come with you?”

  Karp gave Fulton a puzzled look and opened his mouth to say something like, “No, why should you,” when the other man’s implication struck him, generating an unwelcome shiver.

  Karp laughed unconvincingly. “You think Langley is going to gun me down on Independence Avenue and steal back their files?”

  “It’s been known, if you believe half what these assassination nuts say.”

  “Fuck it!” said Karp. “I’m not that paranoid yet.” He picked up his briefcase, shrugged into a suit jacket and his raincoat, and headed for the door.

  Fulton issued a rough laugh. “ ‘Yet’ is the right word, baby. We’re just starting out.”