Irresistible Impulse

by Robert Tanenbaum

  So they muddled on; as yet no disaster had occurred. In order to do what Marlene wanted done, Bello & Ciampi needed cash flow, and cash flow came from frightened rich people, who, Marlene did not require a Chicago economist to verify, had all the cash. All businesses have natural scales: auto factories do not employ twenty people, nor do florist shops employ twenty thousand. The firm’s natural size was going to plateau at about fifty full-time slots in the field, Marlene estimated. Of course, she could can the whole thing and go back to running what amounted to a risky hobby, turning down ninety-five percent of the women she might have helped. That, or give up her personal life in the cause of muscular feminism.

  And it was not going to be so easy to get the people. Checking out potential staff was a tedious but necessary task, since security work was one of the favorite occupations of serial sex murderers, and Marlene would have preferred not to inadvertently bring one of these aboard.

  At her desk, she saw the phone message slip Sym had marked urgent in red letters and taped to the desk lamp. It bore a familiar name, Carrie Lanin, a name that, together with the red message, made her think, oh, marvelous, this is all I need today. The woman was by way of being Marlene’s first customer: in a sense, the founding victim. An attractive single mother, a fabric designer, she had run afoul of a true obsessive, a man who had known her in high school and apparently had thought of little else since. He had arranged a meeting with her, and had instantly become jealous, aggressive, obdurate in his attentions. Marlene had once run a domestic-violence unit in the D.A.’s office, and had a good sense of what sort of man was likely to pose a physical danger. She had sensed that this man, Rob Pruitt, was the type that sang death is better than being without you, darling, and you go first. Marlene had therefore done a little preemptive striking, goading Pruitt into attacking her and then nailing him. He had gotten two to five for first-degree assault.

  Marlene made a quick calculation of the usual time spent in prison for that crime, and concluded that Pruitt must have been sprung, unless Carrie Lanin had turned up yet another unsuitable swain. She dialed the number.

  “Marlene!” cried Lanin in a shrill voice. “Oh, Jesus, thank God you called. I’ve been locked in here crouched by the phone all day. He’s back!”

  “Pruitt.”

  “The scumbag called me like nothing ever happened. He still loves me. At work yet. I had to go home.”

  “Did you call the cops? The protection order’s still valid.”

  “Oh, of course I called the cops, Marlene. They agreed to stop the war on crime to find this guy who wants to send me flowers and candy. An arrest is fucking imminent!” Her voice teetered close to hysteria.

  Keeping her own tone calm, Marlene said, “Okay, Carrie. What exactly did he say to you?”

  “Who, the scumbag? Oh, the usual shit. How he only wanted to be with me, take care of me—oh, and he had some choice words about you. You’re the bitch who came between us. He’s going to get you out of the way too.” A pause. Then, sobbing. “Marlene, I’m really freaked. His voice. It was like a fucking zombie, like he was dead already. What should I d-d-do?” Blubbering.

  Marlene waited until the crying had subsided, reflecting the while that she spent a good deal of her time, probably as much as some vacationing psychiatrists, listening to people cry over the phone. Then she said, “Carrie, listen to me. I’m going to put a man on your place. I’m going to call in some chips with the cops. We will get him and we will prosecute the violation. He’s on parole, he’ll go back to jail. Stay calm, let the machine answer. If it’s me, I’ll ring once, hang up, and call again. Got that?”

  More protests, but the weeping phase seemed to be over for now. In a few minutes Marlene was able to hang up and start worrying about where she was going to find the guy she had promised Carrie Lanin.

  “What did you think of that?” said Karp to Fulton, when Dr. Davidoff and his lawyer had left.

  “He sounds on the level,” the detective answered after a moment’s consideration. “I don’t think he’ll be inviting Robinson over for drinks anytime soon—you could see he was really pissed off.”

  “Right, the guy set him up. He had a corpse on his hands and he wanted his buddy to carry the can, and it would have washed if not for Murray Selig. So, we dig the girl up and go from there.”

  Fulton nodded, and they moved easily into the various other cases the detective was handling for the Homicide Bureau. These were not many. Fulton was coming to the close of his career with the NYPD, a career so plump with glory—the Department’s first black college-educated detective lieutenant, and holder of innumerable awards, including the Medal of Valor, was how he was usually introduced—that he could write his own ticket, and what he chose to write was a vague assignment that allowed him to function as the private cop of the head of the New York D.A.’s Homicide Bureau.

  The two men had been close for years, since, in fact, Fulton had been a detective third and Karp a damply fresh assistant D.A. Fulton was a dozen years older than Karp in regular time, and about a century older in street experience, and something in Karp had attracted Fulton from the first day. He had barged in and became Karp’s mentor, a post he still endeavored to fill.

  “I hear you’re going to take over this granny-killer thing, Rohbling,” he observed casually, flicking a speck from the lapel of his beautifully cut blue suit. Something of a dude, Fulton. He wore custom shoes too, but since his wife was well off, an executive with a restaurant chain, he did not take bribes.

  “Can’t keep anything from a big-time dick like you,” said Karp lightly. And then, noting Fulton’s dour expression, added, “You don’t approve?”

  “Approve ain’t the point, son. You’re going to get creamed on this one.”

  “Why? It’s a solid case.”

  “Case ain’t the point neither. Unless you got a jury from a Black Muslim mosque, which you are definitely not going to get, this fucker going to fly away on an NGI.”

  “Race isn’t going to be an issue here,” said Karp stiffly, thinking in passing of his conversation with Roland.

  Fulton gaped theatrically and wiggled his finger vigorously in an ear. “Sorry, son, I must be getting deef. I thought I heard you say race don’t count in this one.”

  “It doesn’t.”

  Fulton’s face broke into a broad smile, and he started to laugh, short bursts of low chuckle that went on for some time, an infectious merriment in which Karp was hard pressed not to join.

  “What?” he exclaimed at last.

  “Son, listen good here,” Fulton said. “Look at it the other way. What if a black boy’d whacked five white grannies? They put him under the fuckin’ jail, man. They put him so deep under, he be oil. You want to talk to that boy, you got to drive into the Texaco, say, gimme a quart of thirty-weight. Hey, how you doin’, Leroy? Leroy say, glug, glug, glug… ”

  Karp, laughing, said, “That was a good imitation of a Negro, Clay. You’re getting better at it.”

  “Yeah, well, I get a lot of practice.”

  “No, but seriously, what’s your point? The system’s so racist we nail a black kid for the same crime we give a pass to a white kid on?”

  “This is a surprise to you?”

  “It’s a surprise you think I’d let it go down like that,” said Karp sharply.

  “It ain’t you, son,” replied Fulton, turning sober. “It’s just the fact that nine times out of ten, your crazy nigger goes to the slams, and a rich white kid with a good voodoo head shrinker is going to walk. Now, if he happen to have killed a quinella of cute little blondie girls, that’s one thing. Jury might say, he’s crazy, but hang his white ass anyway. Now, a bunch of old black ladies, all but one of them on welfare?” He shook his head. “You might win it, ’cause you’re that good, but it’s going to be uphill, son. Way uphill. Steep.”

  Karp was shaking his head doggedly. “Say what you want,” he said, “if the case is presented right, the jury will do the right thing. Meanwhile,
what about this guy Featherstone? You know him?”

  “Uh-huh,” said Fulton, happy to change the subject. One of the reasons he liked Karp was that he had rarely met a person of either race so devoid of race prejudice. On the other hand, that may have made it hard for him to understand how deeply that particular poison was etched into the bone of the society. “Gordy Featherstone. He just got his gold tin when I was in the Two-Eight, in ’76 or so. Wasn’t on my squad, but I heard he was a pretty good cop. Smart. Didn’t take. Didn’t kick ass that much. The collar on Rohbling was a nice piece of work too.”

  “Yeah, it was. I need to talk to him about it in the next couple days. But as far as you know, there’s nothing in there that might come up to his disadvantage?”

  Fulton grinned again. “Well, he’s black. That’s usually enough.”

  They finished their conversation, Fulton promising to look into the affairs of Dr. Vincent Robinson, and then the detective left, leaving Karp with the burden of Rohbling lying embodied in the thick files on his desk and on the wire cart nearby. He had already gone through it all once, enough to follow the case’s presentation to the grand jury. That was coming up in a few days, and Roland Hrcany would bear the brunt of that task. Karp had no doubt that an indictment would be secured on all five homicide counts; grand juries almost always did what the prosecutor asked of them. Then they would arraign on the indictments, a judge would be selected, and the trial date would be set. The trial before a petit jury was, of course, something else again.

  He picked up the file on the murder of Jane Hughes and resumed reading. This was the crime for which Jonathan Rohbling had been arrested, and was for that reason the key to the prosecution. The other four women had not even been classed as homicides until Rohbling had confessed to killing them. Mrs. Hughes had been sixty-eight, the widow of a mechanic, the mother of five, the grandmother of seven. On Saturday, April 20 of current year, at around eleven in the evening, neighbors in her respectable St. Nicholas Avenue building had heard shouts and crashing sounds from her apartment. Shortly thereafter, witnesses had seen a young black man carrying a soft-sided dark suitcase leaving the building. He was unknown to these witnesses. The following day Mrs. Hughes’s son had arrived early to take his mother to church. There being no answer to his ring, he had the superintendent open the door, and found his mother dead on the kitchen floor, amid signs of a violent struggle. The medical examiner had declared smothering to be the cause of death. Karp read through the M.E.’s report. There had been no sexual assault. Gordon Featherstone had caught the homicide case.

  Karp read through the sheaf of DD5’s generated by the detective’s investigation. With allowances for the stilted language required by the NYPD, these were good, clear reports, a separate form for every action carried out in pursuit of the unknown killer. What was missing was the contemplation, the thinking, the instinct, that had led Featherstone along his successful path. Karp had to piece this together from hints. Son reports nothing of value missing from the apartment. Son reports mother did not own a dark soft-sided suitcase. Coffee set out for two persons on coffee table in living room of victim’s apartment. No sign of forced entry. Now the interpretation: Mrs. Hughes had known her assailant, had been entertaining him, in fact. The assailant was not a thief, nor was he a rapist. That let out the local bad boys. The family and friends all had alibis; there was no sign of murderous rancor there either. Confirmed: Featherstone’s witnesses did not find the picture of the killer in the zone book at the Two-Eight. There were fingerprints (Karp read the forensics reports), but they did not match any stored in the files of the Bureau of Criminal Investigation. A request was sent out, without much hope behind it, to the FBI. Of more immediate interest were the fibers found under Mrs. Hughes’s nails and, curiously, between her teeth and caught deep in her respiratory tract. They were navy blue cotton canvas fibers. A mystery.

  Karp loved this part. He loved reading the DD5’s and the arrest reports, the crime-scene unit reports, the forensic and M.E. reports. He loved seeing how the little tendrils of information curled into cords, and then ropes, and then stout cables, winding around a particular person, tying him tightly, dragging him with Karp’s help, of course, to justice. Ultimately, he would have to re-create Featherstone’s process for the jury, to show them that the cable had coiled itself inevitably around the throat of one man and one man alone, the D., Jonathan Rohbling.

  And as he thought this, he could not help thinking a more disconcerting thought. In general, despite the importance accorded motive in the fictive universe of films and books, Karp thought motive irrelevant. If the facts showed the guy did it, who cared why he did it? Naturally, since juries read books and saw movies, motive inevitably made an appearance. Still, you never wanted the prosecution to rest on purported mental states—did the defendant hate, or love, or fear, or desire—because it was a place for the defense to introduce doubt, and of course, there was inherently doubt in any objectification of an inner state. So Karp never based his presentation on motive; he wanted to convince the jury only that the defendant was at a certain place and did a certain thing to the victim, which caused the victim’s death.

  Here, however, the nature of the crime cried out for some explanation. Why would a young white man from a wealthy Long Island suburb travel to Harlem, disguise himself as a black man, and murder elderly black women? The jury would want to know. Karp wanted to know. He read on, although he doubted he would find the answer among the DD5’s.

  “Hey, Marlene,” said Marlon Dane at the door to her office, “this is the guy. Wolfe, this is Marlene Ciampi, the boss.”

  “Glad to meet you,” said Wolfe, stepping forward and holding out his hand.

  Marlene shook it and sized him up. A muscle guy, first of all. The hand was big, hard, and warm, and attached to a considerable arm and shoulder. Six-three, two-ten, Marlene’s experienced eye estimated, a jock, a bodybuilder. The face was pleasant enough in an all-American way, sandy hair, cropped closer than was fashionable, odd sandy eyebrows that stood out sharply against what must have been a tanning-parlor tan. He wore a tweed jacket over a white sweater over a shirt and tie, with dark wool pants and shined shoes. The eyes were tan too, the nose undistinguished, the expression—what was it? Not quite menschlike. An astronaut, but one of the ones who never got to go on a moon mission. Well, she thought as she gestured him to a seat, that’s what you generally got when you hired security. The best you could expect was just enough of the almost right stuff to get by.

  They sat down. A little small talk. He’d spent time down South and in New England, wanted to try his luck in New York. He reached into his jacket pocket and brought out a folded resume. Marlene read it. Clean, neatly typed, not too many misspellings. Jackson Wolfe, age thirty-one, unmarried. It was a usual sort of history. High school (letters in football, track), one year of college, military service with an M.P. unit in Korea, honorable discharge, black belt in tae kwan do. The job history was a scatter of security work in several big East Coast cities, no longer than two years in each place. Also not untypical. Security was America’s fastest-growing business and nearly the only one in which a strong, quick, presentable, unskilled man who didn’t much care for the classroom could freely move from job to job and earn a modest living. It was the modern equivalent of being a cowboy or a seaman a century before, a drifter’s job.

  Marlene looked up from the resume. “It says here you’re working for Macy’s now. How come you want to leave?”

  “I don’t much like working retail.”

  “Why not?”

  Wolfe shrugged and said, hesitantly and with what seemed embarrassment, “Well, you know. It’s all shoplifting, pilferage. I don’t like … I mean, the people we pick up, most of them, they’re pathetic. Some skinny teenager, they got to have the sixty-dollar bag with the logo, the right sneakers they saw on the TV. We bust ’em, they sit in the office crying, you know, what’ll my dad say, and stuff. Even the pros, you know, miserable junkies, most of th
em. And the—what d’you call ’em—the guys who think they’re girls—”

  “Transvestites?”

  “… yeah, them: I couldn’t believe it, a PR kid, a boy, trying to walk out with an eight-hundred-dollar gown. Pathetic! Anyway, I figure I’d rather, you know, protect people from, like, terrorists, wackos, and like that. And when Dane—Lonny—told me you might be looking—”

  “Right. Well, as a matter of fact, we are looking for some people.” Marlene looked at Wolfe. He met her gaze, his eyes mild, neutral, a reflecting lake, willing to be liked.

  “You have any problems with working for a woman, Mr. Wolfe?” she asked.

  Shrug. “No. A boss is a boss, as long as they’re not, you know …”

  “What?”

  “A jerk. Let me do my job, and stuff.” Wolfe allowed himself a shy smile.

  Marlene smiled back. One advantage of hiring cops part-time was that your backgrounders were all done for you. The chances of getting a bum or a weirdo were much reduced. On the other hand, cops already had a job, a job that always came first, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to generate the coverage Bello & Ciampi needed for their clients out of the constantly changing patterns of their part-time availability. Also, when some dignitary visited, or some disaster happened, they might have the bulk of their coverage yanked away without much notice.

  “Okay, Mr. Wolfe, let me check these references and run your name for record, and I’ll get back to you.”

  “Okay, well, ah, thanks for the interview. I, ah, hope I can work here.”

  Marlene smiled and shook the proffered hand again, and Wolfe walked out. She took the resume into Harry’s office, where she found Marlon Dane waving around a Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun.

  “No,” said Marlene.

  “Marlene, would you just listen?” said Dane, cradling the hideous thing like a puppy.