Falsely Accused

by Robert Tanenbaum

  Bello approached his desk, acknowledged Marlene’s presence with a nod, and handed her a slip of paper. She looked at it and, rolling a legal form into the old Royal on the desk, typed for a few minutes.

  “You have any trouble?” she asked.

  “No. The guy followed her cab until she went into the building. He parked the car and followed her in there too, and a security guard booted him out. He got a ticket.”

  “Good. Then?”

  “He drove around for a while and then went home. I came back here.”

  Marlene looked at the address on her form, which was an application for a protective order. “Avenue D? I thought the guy had money. It must be a dump, in that neighborhood, right?”

  “The pipeline,” said Harry.

  Marlene stared at him. She was by now used to Bello’s habit of announcing a conclusion without any intervening explanation, the result of having worked the street for many years with a partner to whom he was exceptionally well tuned. Although she often found, to her surprise, that she could follow him in these logical leaps, this particular one left her baffled.

  “What pipeline, Harry? What are you talking about?”

  “Alaska. He worked there a couple, three years. Made about fifty K a year, didn’t spend a dime. No sheet. It was in the car.”

  Marlene rapidly translated this into human speech. Harry had broken into Pruitt’s car and found some papers, probably old pay stubs, that had enabled him to make some phone calls. Harry was inarticulate by choice, not through defect; he could charm and bully people as the need arose with the best of them, and he had obviously wormed his information out of some clerk in Prudhoe Bay. And he’d run Pruitt’s name through the NIC computer and come up blank. Marlene imagined Pruitt wrestling giant pipes under the midnight sun, lost in a fantasy of reclaimed nonexistent love; she thought such a man unlikely to be seriously dismayed by a protective order. Nevertheless, that was the next step.

  She collected her papers and stood up. “Thanks, Harry,” she said and kissed him on the cheek. “Let me go and file this, and we’ll see what happens.”

  What happened was that a few days later Marlene received from a bored and harried judge a protection order forbidding Robert Pruitt from approaching or attempting to communicate with Carrie Lanin on pain of contempt of court, which event was duly celebrated by Marlene and her client with a delightful dinner at Rocco’s on Thompson Street; after which, Marlene, who had crashed heavily into sodden sleep, was awakened at a quarter to three in the morning by the phone ringing in her ear.

  It was Carrie Lanin, crying and screaming by turns.

  “Calm down, Carrie, I can’t understand what you’re saying,” Marlene said.

  “What is it? Who’s that?” asked Karp, startled out of his own deep sleep.

  “Carrie Lanin,” answered Marlene shortly, and then said into the phone, “Carrie, calm down and tell me what happened.”

  “Christ, doesn’t she own a clock? It’s three in the morning,” Karp mumbled, and put a pillow over his head.

  “He was here!” Lanin sobbed. “You said it would be over, but he came here! He sat on my bed and talked to me and stroked my fucking hair!”

  Marlene felt her stomach roil, and a sour bubble of used food rose into her throat. She was out of practice, but she remembered how to suppress the empathy and get the facts from the vic. She sharpened her voice to penetrate the blubbering. “Did he assault you? Were you raped?”

  “No! No, he just stroked me. He said … he said he was saving it for when we got married! Oh, God, make this stop! I want my life back!”

  More crying. Marlene relaxed slightly. If there wasn’t a rape, there was no immediate need to get Carrie Lanin picked up and packed off to a hospital rape center. “Carrie, listen to me. He broke in to your home at night. He touched you. That’s burglary and assault right there; plus he violated the protection order. We’ve got him. He’s going to jail.”

  Lanin didn’t seem to hear. “He kept saying you were keeping us apart, like in high school. ‘Your snotty friends.’ He said, ‘You shouldn’t have done it, darling. Going to court. We can solve all our problems ourselves. You don’t need that bitch lawyer.’ I was paralyzed. I didn’t want to scream. I didn’t want to wake Miranda. God, can you imagine? What she’d think? The effect… ? So I just let him talk. I played along with his crazy rap. I thought he might get violent.”

  “You probably did the right thing,” said Marlene. “Look, from one point of view this is the best thing that could’ve happened—”

  “Oh, right! It would even’ve been better if he’d raped me and carved his initials on my forehead. Then he would’ve gone away for a long time— maybe. What do really bad rapists get nowadays? Ten years?”

  “About that. It depends,” Marlene replied, uncomfortable in the knowledge that, to judge from the statutory sentence ranges, the state of New York considered selling marijuana in bulk a lot more serious than first-degree rape. A really horrendous, violent rapist might draw six to eighteen, and be paroled right after the minimum, and people who raped women they knew, especially women of the same age and race and class, usually got a lot less. Or walked. But Marlene kept all that to herself, instead pumping assurances over the wire for all she was worth, ignoring for the moment the possibility that she would not be able to deliver on them. After forty minutes of this, she had calmed Lanin down enough to end the conversation in good conscience, with a promise that she’d see her in the morning.

  Which was not that far off. Marlene could not fall back asleep and stared resentfully at Karp, who could and had, pillow still in place over his head. She rose, showered, dressed, made coffee, and drank it in her little office at the far end of the loft, watching dawn come up Crosby Street and listening to the late-night sounds of the City, the sirens, the occasional roar of a car, slowly build to the crescendo of a working day.

  She was slow and stupid as she pressed through the morning chores. Karp was up and out early, with only a perfunctory word and a hurried kiss. He obviously had a full plate with the Selig case, and Marlene was reluctant to worry him with Carrie Lanin. And if she allowed herself to think about it, she was worried, because if ever she’d seen a ticking human grenade, it was Pruitt, and she’d seen a lot of them in her work, of the DAD KILLS MOM, TOTS, SELF variety, and she wanted to share the problem with Karp. That’s what marriage was for, in her opinion, or would be, were the marriage not between a basically cryptic and surreptitious woman and a man for whom the expression straight arrow might have been especially devised.

  As she drove to the Lanin residence, she was therefore running through her head one of those fictitious conversations that are the chief barrier to actual communication between people married to each other. She told Karp what was going on, about her fears for Lanin, about her general frustration with a system that seemed incapable of protecting women from the lethal fantasies of certain men, about her fears of being sucked into a cycle of violence, about her inexplicable fascination with deadly risk. In her head, Karp answered logically, maddeningly obtuse: you know the law; some get away with it, some don’t; work inside the system; we’ve got our own lives to worry about; do what you can, but don’t go crazy. But what if doing what you can made you crazy? To that the mentalized Karp had no answer. Nor did Marlene.

  Carrie Lanin was drunk when Marlene came to her door; it was clear that she hadn’t slept either, and she hadn’t spent the small hours calmly watching the dawn break. She looked at Marlene with a hard eye, her face saying, you should have saved me from this. And there was nothing Marlene could reply to this, except hollow, comforting banalities, as we do to a friend’s news of cancer.

  Marlene dropped the kids off and went back to her loft to work the phone. The first person she called was Luisa Beckett, once something of a protégée of Marlene’s, and now in charge of sex crimes at the New York D.A.

  “What can I do for you, Marlene?” Beckett asked without preamble as soon as Marlene had annou
nced herself. The two women had become estranged after Marlene’s sudden unexplained exit from her job, a move that had left Beckett with an impossible burden and a radical, and equally unexplained, dimunition of support from the district attorney. Beckett was a true believer; Marlene, having bugged out to wealth and indolence, was clearly not, and her tone indicated that she had little time for chat with well-off housewives.

  “I did some work recently for a friend of mine,” began Marlene, and tersely laid out the facts of the case. As she feared, Beckett was not impressed.

  “You say she wasn’t raped.”

  “No, but the guy broke into her car and then her loft and assaulted her—”

  “Assaulted her by … what was it? Stroking her hair?”

  “Luisa, I realize it sounds odd, and low-priority, but believe me, I’ve met this guy, and he’s a disaster waiting to happen. Maybe for once we can do something besides shampoo the carpet after the guy’s done what these guys always do.”

  There was a pause on the line, and Marlene imagined what was going through Beckett’s head, which was not hard because it was probably what would’ve gone through Marlene’s head a couple of years ago when she had been sitting where Beckett was now and someone had called with a story like this. She knew Beckett’s desk was covered with files representing first-degree rape and aggravated-assault cases, hundreds of them, the walking wounded of the sexual wars, and here was this bozo-ette bending her ear about some rich bitch having a little trouble with her boyfriend.

  On the other hand, five years ago Marlene had seen the talent in a skinny black kid from a third-rate law school and made Luisa Beckett her assistant chief, so there was a debt and probably always would be. Marlene heard a faint sigh over the wires. “Okay, okay, what do you want me to do?”

  “Just make sure the case doesn’t drop through the cracks. This is the kind of thing worth fifty seconds in a calendar court. He could just walk.”

  “You want him to do time?” Beckett’s tone was incredulous.

  “Of course I want him to do time.”

  Beckett laughed. “Honey, you got me confused with Super Woman. Is there something wrong with your memory? You know what this place is like. What if he pleads not guilty, which you know he will, because these assholes never think they did anything wrong. You think I’m going to get a trial slot for a case of hair stroking?”

  “Okay, Luisa, I understand all that,” said Marlene resignedly. “Just do your best, all right? I appreciate it.”

  When she got off the phone with Beckett, Marlene immediately redialed the same number and asked to be connected with Harry Bello. He wasn’t in, and she left a message. While she waited, she rushed around the loft, making beds, picking up after Lucy, and running a load of dishes through the washer. She was just taking a container of soup for her lunch out of the refrigerator when Bello called back.

  She told him what Pruitt had done. “I talked to Luisa, Harry. You can pick him up.”

  “Uh-huh.” The tone was not enthusiastic.

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Marlene, “I already got the line about it’s a shit charge from Luisa. But maybe the judge who issued the protection will be hard-assed for once. We could get lucky. And Harry? I want him to know he’s been arrested. Also, if any illegal items are lying around in plain view—”

  “Right,” said Bello. “In plain view.”

  Karp looked at the chart he had constructed and tapped out the rhythm of “The Yellow Rose of Texas” on his bottom teeth with a pencil. It helped him to think. The chart consisted of two sheets of legal paper taped together. On it Karp had written, among other things, the statements contained in the memos and letters to the Mayor from Dr. Fuerza and District Attorney Bloom that comprised the charges against Murray Selig, the “cause” for which he had been fired. Next to each was a list of people he wanted to depose in relation to the veracity thereof, together with notes on relevant case law and statutory references. Karp always made charts like this when he was organizing the presentation of a case. As the thing progressed, the chart would accumulate notes, in increasingly smaller writing, and balloons and red arrows and legal references. It would become furry with constant handling, and Karp would carefully repair the inevitable tears at the edges and folds with cellophane tape until the thing looked like something that ought to be preserved in an argon chamber at the National Archives. What he never did was copy the chart onto new paper. This was only partly a superstitious act. In fact, Karp’s memory was eidetic for patterns in space; he could remember the moves of every basketball game he had ever played in, and the layout of every place he had ever lived. Not so his memory for things told to him (like names) or for faces, which was dreadful, and accounted for much of his reputation as a somewhat cold and distant man.

  Thus his recall of the facts and personages of every case he tried was keyed to the position it occupied on that double sheet of yellow lined paper. By the time he had to stand up in front of a judge to argue a motion or in front of a jury to plead his cause, the chart, the body of the case, would be set into his mind like a bronze casting, and the chart itself would be folded away in its file, never to be looked at again. But he never threw them away either.

  He was shaken out of a state of extreme tooth-tapping concentration by the phone. The receptionist announced that a Mr. Hrcany wished to speak with him.

  “You sicced that reporter on me,” said Hrcany when he came on the line.

  “How are you, Roland?” said Karp. “Long time, no hear.”

  “Well, you know we public servants get real busy, not like you guys in white-shoe law firms.”

  “This is a gray-shoe law firm at the most, Roland. White-shoe law firms don’t hire Jews.”

  “And very wise of them too. What’s the story on this cunt reporter? Mzzz King Kong?”

  “It was Marlene, and I wouldn’t say ‘sic’ Stupenagel asked if Marlene knew anyone knowledgeable about cops and your name came up. Why? Did you talk to her?”

  “Did I talk to her! Jeez, it was up to her I wouldn’t do anything else. The bitch won’t leave me alone.”

  “You could hit on her. That usually gets rid of them for you pretty good.”

  Hrcany ignored the last part of this. “Come on, Butch, I have standards. You may not think I do, but there’s a limit.”

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  “Get out of here! She’s closing in on menopause, she’s got a big nose and no tits … need I go on?”

  “Actually, she’s around thirty and the real reason is because she’s taller than you. A lot taller.”

  There was a pause, during which Hrcany decided not to pursue this line of conversation. Instead he said, “She wanted to know about Joe Clancy. You got any idea why?”

  “Didn’t she tell you?”

  “No, all I got was a load of horseshit about a feature on traffic cops.”

  “Clancy’s a traffic cop?”

  “Not really,” said Hrcany. “He’s a patrol sergeant in the Two-Five, uptown. But he could have something to do with traffic, with parking, with hack violations—”

  “It was the latter, I think. Something about shaking down gypsy cabs up by there and some Spanish guys who died in custody. She thought Clancy was in charge of the case.”

  “Yeah? That’s stupid. Clancy wouldn’t have been in charge of any investigation. He’s patrol, for chris-sake, not a detective.”

  “What about the shakedown?”

  “The fuck I know. What I told her was as far as I knew, Joe Clancy of the Two-Five was prime. Got the police medal of valor in seventy-one: ran into a burning building and came out with three little kids hanging off him and his hair on fire. Family man, got a bunch of little paddies and so on. A churchgoer.”

  “So? What’s her problem with that?”

  “Nothing except she wants to talk to him direct, and Clancy, being a Patrol Guide reader, won’t talk to the press without authorization. And she keeps bugging me to get her together with him. And
…” Hrcany paused significantly.

  “And now you’re bugging me about it. What do you want me to do, Roland?”

  “You’re a famous big cheese—”

  “Medium-size cheese. Ex-medium-size cheese.”

  “Famous ex-medium-size cheese. You know the big shots up on the twelfth floor in the P.D. Make a call. Get Clancy to see her. Get the bitch off my case.”

  Karp considered this request for a long moment. Ordinarily, he would not have minded doing a favor like this for Roland Hrcany. He liked Roland, especially when Roland was in this kind of faintly embarrassing bind. And he had the contacts. He had been very close for a long time to the chief of detectives, and as head of the Homicide Bureau he had been a major player in Manhattan’s criminal justice bureaucracy. He had met most of the current superchiefs and their aides. Even if he was no longer a player, there were people who owed him favors. The only thing that made him hesitate was the suspicion that Ariadne Stupenagel had figured this out too, and was using Roland, all unconscious, as a means of manipulating Karp. On the other hand …

  “Butch? You still there?”

  “Yeah, Roland. Okay, no problem. I’ll call Barry McGinnity at Public Affairs. It shouldn’t be any big deal.”

  FIVE

  Pruitt looked good in court for his arraignment, so good that Marlene’s heart sank when she spotted him moving with his lawyer through the thronged courtroom. He didn’t have long, greasy hair, he was not dressed in filthy leather garments, he did not have a teardrop tattooed on his cheek, or LOVE and HATE inscribed on the knuckles of his hands. He was not wearing the oversize sneakers the cops called perp shoes. He lacked, in short, all the obvious stigmata that would tell a casual glance that he was a dangerous man, and in this court a casual glance was all he was going to get. Pruitt was dressed in his honest, somewhat ill-fitting, workingman’s best suit, in dark blue, with a white shirt and a red striped tie He had heavy black lace-ups on his feet. His hair, cut in humble, honest, Italian-barbershop style, was combed flat with water.