"No, of course not," said Karp vehemently. "Garrison's problem was the fact that he didn't have anything documentary like we have now. He had to rely on testimony from sleazebags against the word of Clay Shaw, who, whatever his sexual predilections, presented himself as a solid citizen. Garrison's star witness was a petty hustler and known perjurer. Another one was a known crackpot. And he was trying to prove Clay Shaw's involvement in a conspiracy, which is always a hard case to prove. Okay, so what if Shaw knew Oswald and Ferrie and denied it? It doesn't generate guilty knowledge of, or participation in, the assassination, which is one reason Garrison's case collapsed. One thing, though: Garrison was right on about the importance of the New Orleans connection. Something was going on in New Orleans in the late summer of 1963, even if Garrison got sidetracked about what it really was. If there was a plot at all, it was hatched there, because Oswald was there and active, and guilty or innocent, Oswald is involved. He's still the key to everything."
Crane nodded distractedly. His mind seemed to have passed over to some other subject. "Okay, do what you have to and let me know as soon as anything breaks. But, Butch? Don't spend any money."
After his meeting with Crane, Karp walked over to Independence Avenue and spent money. He bought two hot dogs, an egg roll, and a root beer from one of the trucks that parked in the driveway in front of the Civil War Memorial. It was long past the tourist season, but the sun was out, and it had turned into the sort of fairly pleasant late-autumn day Washington sometimes gets. The trucks still came at noon, their immigrant drivers hoping that hungry people with slender means and no fear of stomach cancer would show up in sufficient numbers to pay for the daily rental.
As Karp was entering his building, a small man in a red stocking cap and a shopping bag darted out from the cover of one of the marble lamp supports and accosted him. Karp shied away and kept moving. The man followed him into the building, waving a ragged pack of Xeroxed sheets and raving his assassination theory. The security guard at the desk inside rose to intercept him.
"You're making a big mistake," the man shouted. "I have the evidence right here…"
Karp moved toward the elevator. Red Hat was a well-known figure around the building. He believed that Kennedy had not been assassinated at all, that only a double had been killed in Dallas, and that the former president was now living in Georgia. It was, oddly enough, not the least-plausible story Karp had heard while at this job; it did not, for example, involve beings from other planets.
He was at his desk, eating his egg roll, with his head down over a paper napkin placed on the desk to catch the falling debris, when Clay Fulton came in and sat down on a side chair.
"Is that good?" Fulton asked, curling his lip in distaste.
"It sucks."
"How come you don't get none of these fancy lobbyist lunches I keep hearing about?"
"I don't know," said Karp through egg roll, "but it's a real disappointment. I mean, I'm a Washington lawyer, right? Maybe those guys you hear about with the big lunches are just bragging. Maybe they're really grabbing franks off the hot trucks."
"Could be," said Fulton, chuckling. "I saw that movie V.T. got. That's some interesting movie."
"Yeah. He pointed out Veroa? Good. Now you know what he looks like, you can go down there and get him."
"I should get him? Why don't we just have Al Sangredo bring him up?"
"Because you're the official investigator and Al isn't, one, and two, I got something else I want Al to follow up on. I think it'd be a good idea if Al used his contacts to see exactly how this drug beef that Veroa's got hanging actually went down-how dirty is he, is it a legit beef-like that."
Fulton chewed his mustache, ruminating. "You think it might've been a setup?"
"I don't know, but I make it a point that when I talk to a guy I want information out of, I know where and how hard he can be squeezed."
The detective rose and went toward the door. "Okay. I'll get Bea to cut some travel."
"No, you can't do that. No further expenditure. Apparently we're under investigation."
Fulton stared at him in disbelief. "We're being investigated? I thought we're the investigators."
"Yeah, but they're on our ass for spending money that Congress hasn't appropriated-I forget what it's called, but it's a big deal. Put it on your card. Don't worry-you'll get it back."
"I got to fly to Miami and pick up your Cuban on my own card?"
"You got it, chief. Consider it a little vacation. Take a few days. Play the ponies. Eat some stone crabs."
"Yeah, right," said Fulton sourly. "And I'll work on my tan."
Marlene and her daughter looked through dusty blinds out at the courtyard of Federal Gardens, watching a small woman being dragged across the dead grass by a big black dog. The woman was their neighbor, the one Marlene called the Dwarf. Mrs. Thug. She was not, of course, an actual dwarf, merely a small, thin woman, too small and light to control an athletic and untrained dog that was delirious with joy at this brief respite from its nearly perpetual confinement.
"That lady is yelling bad words at her dog, Mommy," observed Lucy.
"Yeah, I hear," said Marlene. The woman had tripped over a grass hummock and gone down and the dog was racing around her, capering and barking. The woman and the dog ran around in circles for a while until she managed to snag the dog's lead, after which she dragged it back into her apartment. The cute puppy had become an unmanageable adolescent. A common tale, and Marlene thought it was just as well that they hadn't tried the same script with a human child. A door slammed, and Dwarf strode across Marlene's field of view, with a purple car coat thrown over her aqua-colored supermarket checker's uniform. The dog had already started its endless whining. The dramatic high point of my day, thought Marlene, that and, I have to get out of the house.
The phone rang, and Lucy cried, "I'll get it!"
Marlene followed her into the kitchen and poured herself another cup of coffee. It was probably Karp. In the wake of the Dobbs party, they had just concluded one of their bad weeks-silence, interspersed with coldly formal interactions. Karp was distracted, worried about something, probably to do with work. Marlene's share of the marital responsibility had always been to worm these worries out of him, but she no longer had the energy. Something vast and soggy hung between them, compounded of Marlene's isolation and feelings of uselessness, and the Big Secret, the Bloom thing. And sex. They had only done it once since Marlene had arrived in Washington, and remarkably-for the Karps had until then enjoyed a delicious and imaginative life of the flesh-it had fizzled. Karp had withdrawn into the despondency he exhibited when he didn't know what was going on in their relationship, favoring her on many occasions with the sort of long-suffering, whipped-Airedale looks that drove her batty. A dozen times she had opened her mouth to confront, to tell all, to break through into real life again, but each time she had lost courage.
This can't go on, she thought, and lit a cigarette from the butt of the one she was smoking-a bad sign-but what could stop it? She wasn't going to sink down into ultimate depression; the crazy scene at the Dobbses' showed that well enough. But was she going to keep on being naughtier and naughtier until something broke? She thought of Maggie Dobbs and the mad laughing in the greenhouse…
"It's a lady," said Lucy. Marlene took the receiver, knowing that it was Maggie calling, ready to give her "this is amazing, I was just thinking about you," and was oddly shocked to hear instead the voice of Luisa Beckett.
After some stilted preliminaries, Beckett said, "The reason I called, I thought you'd want to know. Morgan got sentenced on a 130.65, three counts. Max of fifteen."
"Oh, honey, that's terrific!" cried Marlene. The 130.65 was first-degree sexual abuse, a Class D felony; the baby raper would be away for at least seven years, if he survived at all at the very bottom of the Attica pecking order.
"Yeah, well, I thought you'd like to know. It was your case." Luisa's tone was dull and tired, and vaguely guilt-making.
&
nbsp; "So. How're things?"
"Okay. You know, the usual."
Marlene brought up some cases, as conversation, but Luisa did not seem to want to converse. Why the hell had the woman called anyway? What did she want, an apology for leaving them in the lurch? For fucking up? Marlene persisted mulishly, picking at the scab.
"What about that mobster, Buona-something? What happened with him?"
"Buonafacci. We're not handling that anymore. Your old buddy Guma's got it."
"Guma? Why's he got it? It's a rape case."
"Yeah, well he must've pulled some strings with narco or one of the real bureaus. They figure they can hold the rape over him, Buonafacci, and he'll help them out somehow. Don't ask me, I just work here."
There didn't seem to be much to say after that. Marlene finished the call feeling, if possible, worse than she had before it. The dog was howling again. Marlene got Lucy dressed and threw on her own rags in a concentrated fury, scattering sparks and cigarette ashes over everything, leaving the breakfast dishes in the sink, which she herself considered the very lowest level of sluthood, and was just wheeling the stroller out when the phone rang again.
"This is amazing," Marlene said to Maggie Dobbs. "I was just thinking about you."
Karp noticed the change when he walked in that evening. There was music playing, one of Marlene's tapes, and instead of the sour old-paint and steam-heat smell that was the base pong of the Federal Gardens, the apartment was redolent with the perfume of a Marlene dinner in preparation-garlic, onions, oregano, wine-that and patchouli incense, also a Ciampi trademark.
Lucy came dashing out of the kitchen and leaped into his arms. "Daddy, we went to the zoo!"
"Really? Who did you go with?"
"Um, Laura, she's my friend. And a lady. We saw monkeys. They were throwing their poop!"
Karp carried her into the kitchen, where Marlene was setting the table with the cheap ware provided by the building management. There was, however, a bunch of yellow mums in a mayonnaise jar in the center of the table, and there was a checked red-and-white paper tablecloth. Two green Coke bottles held tall candles. Karp put his daughter down and leaned over and kissed his wife.
"I'm impressed," he said.
"You like it? You don't think it's too Lady and the Tramp? Pathetic?"
"Not at all. Are we celebrating something?"
"No, why? Oh, you mean why the switch from Blanche DuBois to Betty Crocker?" Leaning down to check the oven. "I just had a nice day, and I thought, after reading the Post, that you probably didn't have a nice day, so I thought maybe I would take vacation from self-pity and make a real dinner and have some wine and pretend that we're still alive down here." Interruption by Lucy on the subject of the great apes. Microlesson in natural history supplied.
"Who's this Laura?" Karp asked.
"Maggie Dobbs's six-year-old. Maggie called me up and invited me for a day at the zoo since we got this nice break in the weather. So we went."
"She came here?"
"Of course not. I have some pride left. No, I arranged to meet her at the Rosslyn metro and she came by in her big blue Mercury wagon and off we went. Lucy and Laura fell in love. We saw the zoo, we went shopping in a nonpeckerwood supermarket up on Connecticut, where I bought real food. What can I say? It was magic."
"You like her? Maggie Dobbs I mean."
"Yeah, she's okay. Not my usual type of pal, but nice. Sweet-natured, generous. Funny too. I think she's a little dominated by the congressman. He's real ambitious, wants to be a senator or in the cabinet, for starters.
Anyhow, it's a lot of pressure on her, parties, waving to the crowds, doing good works. She showed me how to wave to a crowd for two hours without your arm falling off. It's a real technique." Marlene demonstrated, also miming a fixed and glassy smile, through which she said, "I think dinner's ready."
So it was. They ate: meat-stuffed shells with sauce and cheese on top, salad with roasted peppers, and a bottle of reasonable domestic red. Lucy nodded off at the table. They stashed her in bed and moved to the living room, and sat on the tatty couch and finished their bottle.
"Well, this is indeed very similar to real life," observed Marlene, sighing contentedly. They sat in their old companionability, speaking of the day's events. Marlene mentioned her call from Luisa, Karp talked about the film and his meeting with Crane. Suddenly he broke off and looked directly at her, his gaze intense.
"All right. Now that you got me drunk I'm going to make a confession," he said. "It was a serious mistake coming here, taking this job. You were right and I was wrong. It's totally fucked. Crane is going to be out on his ass in a fairly short time and then I don't know what I'm going to do. I screwed up and I screwed you up and I'm sorry."
Marlene, who would have given anything to hear this a couple of months ago, found herself curiously unaffected, and certainly nowhere near a disposition to gloat. She snuggled closer to her husband and said, "Well, it could be worse. Maybe we both needed a break from the DA, and this is better than a stretch in a mental hospital." Laughing. "Marginally better, anyway. You think the investigation is totally fucked?"
"I don't know. I think there'll be a narrow window for doing decent work between now and when whoever comes after Crane clamps down. Something could break."
"You don't think you'll get the slot if Crane goes?"
Karp considered this for a moment in silence, thinking about Harrison's offer. "I might get it offered but I don't know if I'd take it. I think it'd come with too many strings. It's a political job, and I probably wouldn't be much good working the politics of it, not even as good as Bert, which as we now know isn't good enough. I mean, what I am is a prosecutor. That's all I really know how to do."
"Well they definitely have the right film," said Bishop over the phone. "And one of their investigators is headed for Miami to see Veroa."
The thin man turned the sound down on the movie he was watching on television and repositioned the handset against his ear. "Do we need to do something about Veroa?"
"No, Veroa's solid. I doubt he'll identify me with what we have hanging over him, and he doesn't know the rest of it at all."
"Others do."
"Yes. Although I'd say there are no more than two who could be damaging enough in the short run to require extreme intervention," agreed Bishop.
"So you want me to…"
"No. Not yet. Let's see what emerges."
"You're cutting it close. If they find out about P-"
"Shut up! For God's sake, man, this is an unsecured line. And yes, close is how I like to cut it. As you should know."
ELEVEN
Karp stood in front of the counsel's table and looked down at the witness. Behind and above Karp sat Flores and four other members of the subcommittee, barricaded by their high dais. From his chair at the first witness table Paul A. David projected an air of irritable boredom. The bony face with the heavily ringed eyes told all who watched that a hardworking public servant was being subjected to unwarranted abuse.
Karp almost believed it himself. The guy was good, you had to give him that. Karp had ducked a million lies from culprits of various types in his career, but he could not recall a more bland and skillful liar than Mr. David. David was sticking to the same story he had given the Warren people. A man identifying himself as Lee Harvey Oswald had arrived in Mexico City on September 27, 1963. Thereafter, he had gone to the Cuban embassy and asked about a transit visa to Cuba; when told he had to go to the Soviet embassy for clearance, he went there too. The CIA had photo surveillance of both places and telephone taps and wall bugs as well. Oswald's voice, asking about applying for a visa to visit the Soviet Union through Cuba, had supposedly been recorded on tape, and the tape shipped to CIA headquarters.
"And what happened to this tape, Mr. David?" Karp asked.
"As I've said many times before, since we had no idea Oswald would become important later, the tapes were routinely destroyed by recycling, approximately a week after they were mad
e."
"That would be early October? Assuming, of course, that the call was made on or about October 1, 1963. Yes? Good. Now let's turn to the photographic evidence. It's clear that the photo forwarded as being Oswald bears no resemblance to Oswald. Why was that?"
"It was a mix-up," said David in a tired voice. "Our cameras had malfunctioned."
"All the cameras at both Communist embassies broke down just as Oswald walks in? In all the time he was in Mexico City flitting back and forth among the embassies, you don't have a single clear picture of him?"
"Yes. As I said, we couldn't know he was going to be important."
"So, no pictures, but you did have a tape of his voice. That's how we know he was in Mexico, right?"
"Yes, that and identification by people working in the Cuban embassy."
"Yes," said Karp, "all those identifications. Well, obviously someone went to Mexico City and asked about those visas, and got his voice recorded. Mr. David, are you aware that shortly after the assassination, and a full month after you have testified that this tape was destroyed, the FBI listened to that tape and concluded that it was not the voice of Lee Harvey Oswald?"
You had to give him credit. He didn't blink. "I'm not aware of that," he said.
"So the tapes were in fact not destroyed."
"They were destroyed."
"Not according to J. Edgar Hoover," said Karp, brandishing a photocopy of the FBI memo. It was entered into evidence and David was given a chance to study it.
"So," Karp continued, "if the tapes were routinely destroyed as you claim, Mr. David, how do you explain the FBI listening to them a month afterward?"
"I can't explain it," said David.
"Does the CIA have a copy of this tape still in its possession?"
"Not to my knowledge."
"Then who, if you know, ordered this evidence destroyed, after Lee Harvey Oswald became a suspect in the murder of President Kennedy?"
"I can't answer that," said David.
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