Corruption of Blood

by Robert Tanenbaum

  “So, you get anything at the old lady’s?” asked Harry when they were settled over coffee.

  “You could say that. I read her diaries and some old letters.”

  Bello’s left eyebrow rose a quarter of an inch, to which implied query Marlene answered with a minuscule waggle of her head: no, she didn’t want me to read them, but I did anyway.

  “It keeps coming back to Harley Blaine,” said Marlene. “It turns out Blaine was the one who started dating Selma, back then, and then Richard Dobbs fell in love with her, and then Harley seemed to lose interest and she started going out with Richard and then she married him. Her letters to Blaine were there too; that was one of the things a gentleman did in those days, return a lady’s letters when the romance was over. And his to her too; she kept them all those years, which tells you something. It was weird reading them in order; first, he’s hot as a furnace, swearing eternal love, quoting poetry, and then it’s like, over the course of a week, he’s turned it all off; the letters start sounding like he’s writing to a pen pal in Uganda. Then her letters get cold too. She writes him a note: he left a camera. He left a hat. Hope you are well. He left another camera.”

  “The guy had a lot of cameras.”

  “Yeah, well he could afford them. Then they stop writing, except for Christmas cards. She had an affair too, later on, so it wasn’t the perfect American family after all. In the diaries she talks about Richard frankly as if he were another child—‘the boys,’ as in ‘I got the boys out of the house,’ meaning Richard and Hank. In forty-five or so she falls for this guy she calls ‘Q’ in the diary and it lasts for three, four years. Intensely romantic. No letters from Q though. The diary says she wants to leave her husband, but Q won’t let her. Finally, he breaks it off. She’s crushed. She stops writing diaries. Around then is when the spy stuff started, so maybe they were afraid it would come out in the investigation.”

  “Backward,” said Bello.

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought too,” Marlene agreed. “Usually the lover wants the married one to leave the marriage and he or she won’t. The guy wasn’t married, whoever he was, that’s clear from the diaries. But … who knows? Maybe, like the man said, the very rich are different from you and me.”

  An inquiring look from Harry.

  “What’s the connection to the case? I don’t know, but there’s a pattern. Here’s Richard in the center, the golden boy. He brings Blaine in as a kind of brother, and Selma in as a kind of wife, and their job is sort of to protect him, and keep the gold shiny. They … I don’t know what’s the right word … they invested in him, like, if Richard shone, so would they. He was the center. In fact, now that I think of it, Blaine probably sort of gave Selma to Dobbs. Blaine was in love, so he said, but when the golden boy expressed an interest, it was ‘take her, she’s yours.’ Blaine’s really the most interesting character in the trio. Slick. A slick liar. And not just slick; I get the feeling of snakes below the surface. That whole CIA thing with Gaiilov and before. I’d give anything to be able to go out there and talk to him face-to-face.”

  “Wizard of Oz.”

  She laughed. “Yeah, right! With the dog pulling at the curtain. My God, Oz! I almost forgot. Wait a sec!”

  She got up from the kitchen table and dashed into the living room, returning with her bag. She rummaged in it briefly and then placed a small, worn Kodak-yellow box on the table. “After I went through the diaries and put everything back the way it was, I didn’t have much time to look around. The rest of the attic was mostly the usual stuff—suitcases, a wardrobe with old clothes in it, furniture. I checked out the suitcases, nothing, the wardrobe, nothing, the bookcases … maybe a hundred or so books, all old kids’ stuff in complete sets, boys’ books: Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, Rover Boys, Zane Grey, and a complete set of the Oz books. You know the big size, with those great pictures and the funny curvy writing in gold on the covers? Okay, I used to love them when I was a kid, so of course, I looked through them, not really looking for anything in particular, just looking at the pictures. If you want to know, I was feeling kind of grimy, like you do when you find something out about someone, something shameful, that you weren’t supposed to know, and I thought that Oz would cheer me up. But I found this”—she tapped the little box—“in a cut-out space in Tik-Tok, the Mechanical Man of Oz.”

  Bello handled the little box. “So what is it?”

  “Well, you can’t see much on eight-millimeter just by holding it up to the light, but it looks like a naughty movie.”

  “Porn?”

  “Not exactly. Not hard-core suck-fuck anyway. It looks like one of those old-fashioned amateur jobs. A couple at the beach, they take off their clothes, they fall on the blanket and so on. I just looked at the first couple of feet or so. I wish we had a projector here.” She put the film box back in her purse.

  “Why’d you take it?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I didn’t like the idea of the Dobbs kids visiting Granny’s in a couple years and finding it and bringing it home and running it after din-din one evening. Maybe I’ve joined up in the great goal of protecting the rep of Richard Ewing Dobbs. I think he took this film himself, by the way, and developed it too, either with actors, or with real people, as a peeping Tom. Or maybe Blaine did.”

  “The skeletons,” said Harry.

  “Yeah, I shook the closet and out they came.”

  Harry went off to a motel around six-thirty and Karp came home just after ten. A snowstorm had hit the lower Midwest and Karp had been unable to get a direct flight back, and had spent four hours on standby in Atlanta, and was in no mood to do anything but sleep.

  “How was Miami?” Marlene asked anyway when they were in bed.

  “Somebody killed our two witnesses and I got shot at and Clay knocked me down and I scraped the shit out of my palms.”

  “On the other hand you got some sun,” said Marlene, suppressing horror. “Who shot at you?”

  “One of the guys who got killed. It’s a long story.”

  “So it was a total loss?”

  “No, we found some interesting stuff. It might give us a lead to this Irishman in Louisiana who might’ve been involved in some way. He was paying off this Cuban for some reason, the guy who got killed. Of course, the evidence was illegally taken, so I’ll probably go to jail, but I don’t care right now. God, I’m whipped!”

  “Should I rub your back?”

  “That would be nice,” said Karp, rolling over.

  Marlene rubbed, and thought. “One thing, on this project I’m doing for Maggie? I’d sort of like to do some of it at home and I need something to look at eight-millimeter film with. One of those thingies with a little screen?”

  “Umm. Yeah, an editor. I could bring one home. Umm. Keep doing that and you can have Cinerama.”

  Karp was awakened the next morning by a peculiar feeling; someone was rubbing his hand with a hot washcloth and giggling. He had incorporated this sensation into one of those odd and vivid early-morning dreams, as one does with the sound of the alarm clock, and then the alarm clock did go off and Karp opened his eyes and looked into the red-rimmed eyes of the dog that was licking his hand.

  “Yaaagh!” In one motion he heaved himself into a sitting position with a pillow between his chest and the monster. Lucy stood there in her flowered nightie, convulsed with shrill laughter. The dog panted and deposited a string of thick saliva on the bed.

  “Marlene!”

  She strolled in from the bathroom, brushing her hair.

  “You called?”

  Karp pointed mutely at the dog.

  “Oh. I guess I forgot to tell you. Butch, Sweetie. Sweetie, Butch. I’m going to make some coffee.”

  “Daddy, we scared you, didn’t we?” asked Lucy, still giggling.

  Karp was being a model modern husband at breakfast. “What kind of dog is it?” he asked calmly.

  “You’re not pissed off?”

  “Surprised, maybe. But, being married to you, my life is
full of surprises. I come home one day, and you’ve bought a car, even though I know we don’t have a dime. Maybe you’ll tell me someday how you did it, maybe not. I come home from a trip and there’s a washing-machine-sized dog in the house. Hey, I’m easy. So, what kind?”

  “The vet said it was a Neapolitan mastiff.”

  “Neapolitan, huh? This is a full-grown dog?”

  “No, it’s still putting on weight. It should reach one hundred sixty pounds more or less.”

  “You bought this thing?”

  “No, actually, I got it from Thug ‘n’ Dwarf. They abandoned it, sort of.”

  “Uh-huh. Gosh, a big dog, a big stolen dog, like that, we get back to the city, we ought to start thinking seriously about getting a house. Westchester, the Island maybe. Dog like that needs a big yard.”

  “Nice try, buster, but no sale. That is an urban Neapolitan mastiff. Naples is a city. He’ll adapt to loft living, all right, probably better than some other people in the family I could mention.”

  “Well, in that case,” replied Karp equably, putting on his suit coat and preparing to make his exit, “I’ll have to content myself with the pleasure of watching you, and you alone, scooping gigantic dog turds off Crosby Street each and every morning and evening.”

  Karp crossed the street in front of the Annex building to avoid several of the more prominent Kennedy nuts, including the man in the red hat, and slipped into the entranceway. He had noticed in himself since the events in Miami a growing sympathy for the clan. In the office, he checked his messages, looked with distaste at a large pile of unread mail, and went immediately to Bert Crane’s office.

  Who was in, for a change. Dispensing with pleasantries, he told Crane what had gone down in Florida and what they’d learned from Mosca. Crane was not slow in grasping the implications. “There’s a leak.”

  “Yeah, there is. And we should be able to find it, because the only people who knew we were going down there to talk to Jerry Mosca were me; Fulton, who was with me; V.T. Newbury, who’s a total clam on stuff like this; and Dobbs and you.”

  Crane caught the obvious implication and to his credit did not make any protestation, but sat in thought, chewing his lip.

  Karp asked, “What about Flores?”

  Crane shook his head vehemently. “Hell, no! Flores doesn’t talk to me anymore, except to issue formal reprimands, and if he did, he’d be the last person I’d give any sensitive information to. God, Butch, I can’t think of anyone around here who knew, and Lord knows Hank didn’t tell anyone on the committee. I stressed that to him very—”

  Crane stopped, stricken. Karp said, “Yeah, I know. We’re in deep paranoia here. If we believe that the fact that two critical witnesses were killed before they could testify is not just a sad coincidence, then we have to believe in an active conspiracy that’s still intact and functioning.”

  “And do you believe this?”

  Karp nodded slowly. “I sort of have to now. Did V.T. tell you about the stuff that got stolen right out of this office? Yeah? It adds to the picture, doesn’t it? And I think I saw Caballo himself, in the flesh.”

  “The Oswald look-alike? Where?”

  “In Miami, right after Guel was killed. He was a block away and wearing dark glasses and a hat, but the more I think about it, the more I think that’s the guy. And why shouldn’t they use him? It’s completely safe. The guy doesn’t exist, except at the bottom of a pile of false identities. What’re we gonna do, put out an all points bulletin to pick up Lee Oswald? They’d lock us up.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “Go through the motions with everything else, the medical stuff, the forensics, redo Warren. Like I’ve said before, necessary but hopeless. Nothing’s going to emerge from that but endlessly debatable minutiae. I think it’s still essential to get Paul David under oath.”

  “Forget that,” Crane said. “Flores won’t have it.”

  “Oh, great! How about Santos Trafficante?”

  “We can try,” said Crane, “but if he declines to show, I doubt we’re going to get a contempt citation out of the chairman.”

  “So we’re running a major investigation without any real judicial clout? Is that what I’m hearing?”

  “For now,” said Crane

  “Okay, in that case, for now, all we can do is pursue the new leads, this Turm character, and this PXK angle, in total secrecy. Clay’s still down in Miami, and I’m going to get him to New Orleans in a couple of days. Also, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to stress the ‘total’ part. Even regarding Hank.”

  “Surely you don’t think …”

  “I don’t know what I think, Bert. There’s … well, Marlene has been doing some research for the Dobbs family, about the father. There’s a link, or was at one time, between the family and the CIA. God knows how deep it goes.”

  “That’s absurd, Butch! Without Hank Dobbs there’d be no investigation.”

  Karp started to protest, but then sighed and was silent for a moment, collecting his thoughts. “Yeah, of course. I don’t know what’s happening to me. Maybe the paranoia is getting to the point where I’m not functioning anymore. And, of course, that’s the whole point of what’s happening. Whoever’s doing this, orchestrating this, knows how paranoia works. They want to keep that atmosphere going, so that reasonable people will embrace the Warren Report just to keep from going crazy. And it’s working. They know the whole pattern, so that as we expose piece after piece, they’re there before us, twisting the evidence, stealing stuff, killing witnesses.” He shook his head and rubbed his face. “So,” he asked, “how are things going here?”

  Crane seemed glad to accept the change of subject. “Worse and worse. Flores has taken leave of his senses. He sent me a letter saying he doesn’t want us besmirching his name and asking for all his official stationery back.”

  “His stationery? His stationery!” Karp started to laugh and it was a while before he could bring himself under control.

  Crane laughed too, but then quickly sobered. “Actually, it’s not funny. He also revoked our franking privileges and told me not to make any more fiscal commitments under his name. Since legally everything we do is under his name, it means we’re essentially out of business until we can clear this up.”

  “God! How’s the committee taking this?”

  “Well, Hank’s gone to the leadership and is politicking like mad. It’ll come to a head over the weekend and we should have some resolution by Monday.” Crane reached over to his credenza and handed a newspaper clipping to Karp. “This was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

  It was a front-page New York Times article about Crane. Karp scanned it in growing disbelief. “But this is nothing. It’s all the old crap recycled into a new piece, with some more innuendo tossed in.”

  “Yeah, but it puts the seal on the tomb. For seventeen years, apparently, I’ve been causing nothing but controversy, and doing botched and questionable investigations.”

  “So what’ll you do?”

  “There’s nothing I can do, Butch. The press has spoken. You know very well that the last thing the Times and the Post want is for anyone to take a serious crack at Warren. They’d look like fools for endorsing it before the ink was dry if we came up with a credible alternative. My mistake was not realizing that. And … I guess I wasn’t the politician I thought I was. So …” He waved his hand weakly, taking in the office, and beyond it, the Kennedy investigation and the sticky webs of the national capital in which it now writhed.

  “And there’s nothing we can do?” Karp asked inanely, knowing the answer.

  “Yeah, there is,” said Crane. “Wait for Monday.”

  “Nice tan,” said V.T. when Karp walked into his office.

  “I don’t have a tan. I have shredded palms and a sore knee.” He displayed his hands.

  “That’s too bad,” said V.T. “Perhaps next time you should choose another resort. What happened?”

  Karp descri
bed briefly the events at Guel’s house, and deposited the package Fulton had found there on V.T.’s desk. He waited while V.T. perused the items in it.

  “Creative bookkeeping,” said V.T., tapping the little ledger book. “Interesting. Do you recognize this character?”

  V.T. was pointing to a foggy Xerox copy of what appeared to be a newspaper in Spanish, and the photograph of a man.

  “No, what is it?”

  “Well, from the style, I’d say it was cut from Granta, the Castro paper. It shows, and I quote, in rough translation, ‘the desperate imperialist saboteur, El Soplete, captured by the Revolutionary Militia in Cienfuegos.’ El soplete means the blowtorch. According to this, he got the handle back when he was with Batista’s secret police on account of the way he liked to extract information from prisoners. A real honeybunch. It looks like the commies shot him too. Hmm. Let me check, just to make sure.”

  V.T. fingered through some files stacked on his desk, extracted one, and pulled out a couple of photographs, one a glossy, one a copy of a news photo.

  “This glossy is a frame from the Depuy film. This one, one of our kids just dug it up from an old émigré newspaper. Same guy in all three, right? Allowing for age, that is. The scar on the cheek shows in each one, that and that nose.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Leopoldo Carrera. The guy we like for the third of the trio that visited Sylvia Odio in Dallas. Oswald, Guel, Carrera. All dead. As is the one guy we had who could confirm it, Guido Mosca.”

  “Shit! But there’s still Odio herself.”

  “Yeah,” said V.T. “There is, and a big priority right now is to get her to look at pictures.”

  “Okay, I’ll take care of it. Meanwhile, what’s happening with this PXK thing?”

  “Looking better. Mr. Kelly is well known in both Baton Rouge and New Orleans. A political contributor, conservative, maybe a Bircher. He knew Clay Shaw and he knew Depuy. He’s a trucker, and thus not unfamiliar with the Teamsters and hence with Carlos Marcello. And … are you ready for this? He ran an airfreight service back in the late fifties and early sixties, and briefly employed David Ferrie as a pilot.”