Corruption of Blood kac-7

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  Clay Fulton tapped on the doorframe and came in. "You look beat," he said. "You should be up behind this. I thought we just got a good break."

  "Veroa? Yeah, the entrance to another set of blind alleys. Did you set up the ID on David yet?"

  "Yeah. David's speaking at some national intelligence officers' association thing in a hotel out in the burbs day after tomorrow. I figure I'll drive Veroa out there and let him loose. Antonio should be right at home in an old spies' convention. Anything else happen today?"

  "The usual. Crane is still talking to that damn caucus, so God knows what's going to happen. Bea's still getting grilled by the bureaucrats. Everybody else is tracing witnesses or farting around with experts. Speaking of which, one of the kids went out to Aberdeen and found a film archive of people getting shot. No, seriously! Apparently the army collected films from the Nazis or wherever, showing people getting executed, mostly with head shots. Wound research. We're having a showing tomorrow."

  "Great!" said Fulton after a heavy sigh. "All right if I bring the kids?"

  "No problem. There's a pool on how many times we'll see an actual human being getting shot in the head and flinging himself toward the gun like Kennedy did on Zapruder. All the shots came from the rear, says Warren, but after the guy's head explodes he goes flinging backward."

  "The old grassy knoll."

  "Right. Old grassy knoll's got me. How was Miami?"

  "Warm, with a chance of Cubans." Fulton snapped his fingers. "Oh, yeah! Speaking of Miami: I found our mobster."

  "Which mobster?"

  "Mosca, Guido. Jerry Legs. The Castro thing…?"

  "Oh, right! God, this is really important now. The Mob…"

  "They were in on it you mean?"

  "No, but did you ever see the film from the first press conference? Henry Wade, the Dallas DA, held it the day after the assassination. No? Interesting. He made two factual errors, one about Oswald's middle name and the other about the name of his phony Cuba committee. In both cases he was accurately corrected by a man standing in the rear of the room. It was Jack Ruby, the guy who never met Oswald, but somehow knew the exact name of an obscure organization Oswald was running. Yeah, I'd like to talk to Mosca about that. So… he's down in Miami? I thought he was a New Orleans boy."

  "Was. He was with the Marcello organization back in the sixties, like we heard, then I think he must've got traded to Miami, for an aging left-hander and two utility outfielders. Worked for Trafficante and then ended up with the Buonafacci organization in South Florida. He still keeps his hand in a little but he's mostly retired now-he must be pushing seventy."

  "You saw him?"

  "Yeah, he's got a nice little place in Surfside, on the bay. Friendly guy, as a matter of fact. He made me some ice tea."

  "What'd he tell you?"

  "Not one fucking thing. He was very apologetic. So, unfortunately, unless he's been raping babies and we catch him at it, and put on the squeeze, the guy's a clam. Another dead end."

  "Maybe not," said Karp.

  "How so?"

  "Mmm… it's a long shot, but when you said rape I thought of something I just heard about. Ray Guma may be in a position to do Tony Buonafacci a big favor. I think Mosca will talk to us if Tony Bones tells him to, don't you?"

  "I feel like I'm back in college," said Maggie Dobbs happily. She was perched on a chair in front of her dressing table, a pile of blouses on her lap, watching pale bubbles rise in a flute of straw-colored wine. "Why is that?"

  From her comfortable position on Maggie's bed, Marlene put down her own wineglass, now empty, stretched luxuriously, and answered, "Oh, I don't know. No kids whining. We're talking about men in a bedroom with clothes scattered all around. We're drunk. Feels collegiate to me."

  She had known girls like Maggie at Smith, pale, arty creatures, inevitably engaged to embryo stock-and-bond men from Amherst, cashmere-sweatered, plaid-skirted, circle-pinned, who dashed blondly through the campus walks like flights of pallid doves. In the usual cliquishness of college life, she had not had a great deal to say to these creatures. Marlene wore black under army surplus, smoked a lot, scowled, talked dirty, and hung out with U Mass boys, or even (shudder) townies from Northampton.

  That was, however, long ago, and the two women had both experienced an odd attraction to each other, as if catching up on some missed experience. Since meeting her at the big-shot party, Marlene had shamelessly parasited herself into Maggie's elegant and well-ordered life. Lucy was installed in a tony play group, hobnobbing with the Ashleys and Jennifers of McLean, under the eyes of perfect mommies or French nannies.

  "No hitting," Marlene had said before dropping Lucy off. "You queer this deal and you'll go three rounds with me."

  "But, Mommy," Lucy had complained, "what if they're mean?"

  "They won't be mean. These are high-class kids; they already know how to kill with a look. In any case, if you have to slug somebody, body-punch. I absolutely don't want blood on the walls. Capisc'?"

  Now the two women were lounging in Maggie's boudoir (and it was a boudoir, done in jonquil frillies) with a cold bottle of a nice Moselle nearly down the hatch, and a long afternoon of nothing much ahead.

  "Are husbands the same as men?" Maggie asked musingly.

  "Well, unlike in school," Marlene said, "the mystery is gone. It's like Christmas. You're in a delicious agony wondering what you're going to get, and then you tear the paper off and there it is-just what you always wanted. Or, not, as the case may be. Whatever, the thing is, the fascination after that is learning how to play with it. Or him. A different kind of agony, if you're into it. Which, as it turns out, I am. How about you? Where did you hook up with old Hank?"

  "Oh, we met at a freshman mixer. I was at Connecticut and he was at Yale. We got engaged my junior year. Ho-hum. How about you?"

  "Oh, Karp? We worked together in the old homicide bureau. No sparks or anything. Then we were at this party and he got plastered and I had to drag him home. I crashed on his bed. The next morning I was taking a shower, and he came stumbling in, hung over, and there and then, to the surprise of both of us, we fell on each other like animals and fucked our brains out. The rest is history."

  "Oh, see, that's what I mean!" cried Maggie. "Nothing like that ever happens to me."

  "Like what?"

  "Oh, the unexpected. The dramatic. The exciting."

  "Well, as to that, it's not all it's cracked up to be, the so-called exciting life. A lot of it is pissing in your panties. And besides, my life, ninety percent of it, is just like yours. Shopping, cleaning, taking care of the kid, working." She paused and looked at Maggie. "If you're bored you could get a job."

  "Oh, right, that's what he always says. It's not being bored. Besides, I had a job, until Jeremy came. It's more like-I don't know-my life is in a, like a railroad siding, just waiting for an engine to pull me along the track again. And Hank is like some kind of express train roaring along the other track getting farther and farther away." She reached for the bottle and refilled her glass.

  "What did you do, when you worked?" asked Marlene.

  "Oh, some job in O'Neill's office. Hank got it for me, of course. Just, basically, your D.C. job: sitting around answering phones with other wife-ofs and the little hard chargers starting their Hill careers. Then when I quit, it was supposedly to start working on the files, getting the book ready, but I haven't honestly had the energy. And Hank hasn't said anything, but when I try to talk to him about the way I feel, he gives me this look, like I'm letting down the team."

  "But you're still basically okay. You and him."

  "Oh, like do we love each other. Oh, yeah." She twirled a lock of her shining hair, looked toward the heavens, and laughed. "Still madly in love!"

  "What with? What do you like about him besides that he thinks you're letting down the team?"

  "Oh, see, I didn't really mean that," explained Maggie in a nervous rush. "Actually, he's wonderful. The minute he looked at me, I went all squooshy."
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  "What was it? Body?"

  "No, although that was all right-he was on the crew at Yale. No, it was something about his head, or his face. A look. You know, it was sort of intelligent, but not smart-alecky, and noble, and with depth. Like he was injured somewhere inside and hiding the wound. You know what he reminded me of? That central figure in Picasso's Saltimbanques, the one in profile?"

  "Yeah, I know what you mean. It's one of my favorite paintings," said Marlene, thinking that guys who had that look probably got unbelievable amounts of pussy off little blond art lovers. Or Italian tough girls. Karp, of course, had it too.

  "Oh, mine too!" said Maggie, delighted. "It's in the National. We have to go see it."

  "Yes, two aging housewives standing rapt in front of a seventy-year-old painting, our knees trembling, our undies slowing getting damp…"

  "Oh, stop it!" Maggie shrieked, and threw a blouse at Marlene.

  Marlene caught it and glanced at the label. "Mmm… nice silk. From Bloomie's." She sat up and held the sleeves wide, framing Maggie's face over it. "It's not your color, really. What do you wear it with?"

  "Nothing!" Maggie wailed. "I never wear it. I have cubic yards of clothes and I never have anything to wear."

  "Drag 'em out," said Marlene, focusing her attention. "Let's see what we got."

  An hour or so later, the two women stood looking at a gaudy pile of fabric three feet high, stacked on the bedroom floor.

  "God, this is so embarrassing!" said Maggie with feeling. "I feel like such a jerk."

  "I still don't understand it, really," said Marlene. "You know you can't wear all these saturated colors and wild prints with your coloring. And besides"-she lifted up a scarlet brocade jacket and a chrome yellow skirt- "none of this stuff makes outfits. Why on earth did you buy it all?"

  "I don't know. I go into a store to shop and something happens-I become a zombie. I feel this pressure crushing down on me, and I guess I just buy the flashiest thing in sight and dash out. Or else, maybe I desperately want to be someone who can wear an acid green pantsuit."

  "Well, at least you'll make Goodwill happy. I bet a lot of their customers can wear this stuff." Marlene held a red-white-and-blue bulky-knit sweater up to her chest, struck a Foreign Legion salute, and started to hum the "Marseillaise."

  "Oh, stop!" laughed Maggie. "Actually, that'd look great on you. Why don't you pick out what you want and take it?"

  Marlene dropped the sweater and gave Maggie a sharp glance.

  Maggie blushed rosily and put her hand to her mouth. "Oh, God, I didn't mean…"

  "No, I appreciate it, but the funny thing is I really have lots of clothes. I just didn't bring them with me into exile." She quickly related the story of her hasty departure from New York, leaving out the shameful proximate cause.

  This, of course, was exactly what Maggie wanted to know. It struck her as astounding that someone with Marlene's extraordinary life, and moreover, one with impeccable Waffen-feminist credentials ("You ran a rape bureau?"), would dump it to go be a wife-of in Washington. She probed uncomfortably close to the real reason, and rather than snapping out that it was none of her business and perhaps adding that they were not actually schoolgirls pouring out their little hearts, Marlene changed the subject.

  "What was that all about, what you said a minute ago-about files and a book?"

  "Oh, that!" Maggie seemed to slump. A tiny, worried indentation appeared beneath the glossy bangs. "You don't want to hear it."

  "Yeah, I do. It's something to do with your husband?"

  "Oh, all right," Maggie sighed resignedly. "My husband, prince that he is, whom I love dearly, has this little obsession. I assume you're familiar with the Dobbs case?"

  "No, what case?"

  "See? Everybody in the known universe has forgotten about it but Hank Dobbs. Oh, yeah, and, of course the Widow Dobbs. Hank thinks it's on everybody's mind as soon as they meet him. Of course, he's been elected to Congress three times and nobody's so much as mentioned it, but there it is."

  "What'd Hank do, anyway?"

  "Hank? Nothing. This is about his father, Richard. Ewing. Dobbs." She said the name portentously, like a butler announcing a belted earl. She was fairly wasted by now, sitting tailor-fashion at the foot of the bed, with the second bottle of wine tucked in the cavity of her crossed legs. They had dispensed with glasses by this time. Maggie continued in the same exaggerated "Masterpiece Theatre" diction.

  "Mr. Dobbs, as I never stop getting told by my husband, and the Widow, and all my in-laws, was… a prince. A perfect prince. Brilliant? Of course. Yale blah-blah, Harvard blah-blah. Brave? Of course! Decorated for bravery in the Pacific, Navy Cross blah-blah. Every little boy's dream of a daddy? Of course! Riding fishing boating skating baseball blah-blah-blah. I am not privy to the secrets of the marriage bed, but I have no reason to believe he would not have won the Distinguished Service Medal there too.

  "Okay," she adopted a more normal tone, "after the war, Richard and Selma Hewlett Dobbs, that's the Widow, and little Hankie, go to Washington, to make a career. Richard gets a job with naval intelligence. Very important, hush-hush work. He rises, he has a brilliant career ahead of him-secretary of the navy, probably, and who knows? The sky's the limit. The family's wealthy and well connected in Connecticut politics, not the Kennedys quite, but in the same general zone. Richard, of course, knew Kennedy, knew him quite well, and didn't think all that much of him. According to report."

  "Did you ever meet him? Richard, I mean," Marlene interrupted.

  "Yes, a couple of times. He died in sixty-three. Right before Kennedy. Of course, by then he was totally destroyed by what happened. I remember a shy man with tinted glasses, who didn't say much. A sad, sad man, around whom everyone walked on eggs. Excruciatingly careful not to disturb him through word or deed."

  "You know, now that you remind me, the name does ring a faint bell. Wasn't he involved in the Joe McCarthy business-some kind of communist accusation?"

  "Oh, it was far, far more than an accusation, my dear. Richard Ewing Dobbs was tried for and nearly convicted of treason black as night."

  "My God! This was what, during Korea?"

  "Yes, indeed, and they'd just fried the Rosenbergs. It was a capital case. But what happened was that Harley Blaine stepped in and saved the day." Seeing Marlene's uncomprehending look, she added, "The lawyer. From Texas?"

  The name stirred vaguely in Marlene's memory. One of the great defense lawyers of an earlier decade. She asked, "He was the defense."

  "Yes, but there's more to it than that. Harley and Richard were biddies. Buddies. God, I have to lay off this wine. The kids will be back any minute. Well, they were friends from college. Went to Yale and then Harvard together and they were in the navy together. Started in Washington about the same time too. Anyway, what you have to understand is, when the thing happened to Richard, he became a pariah. That was how it was in the fifties. People he'd known for years cut him dead on the street. People wouldn't let their kids play with Hank anymore. Like that. Except for Harley. And apparently John Kennedy. Harley quit his government job in the Pentagon and took up Richard's defense. Kennedy didn't do that, but at least he didn't go out of his way to shun him. That was important."

  "What had he done? I mean, why did they accuse him?"

  "Well, that was the strange thing about it. Basically, the FBI had caught an employee of the Soviet embassy, a guy named Viktor Reltzin. Reltzin was an actual spy, no question about it. They caught him with top-secret technical data on the nuclear submarine-building program, which was getting started then. Reltzin claimed that he was just a courier. The way they worked it was, on a specific day each week, Reltzin would go out to Arlington Cemetery and check out a particular grave marker. There'd be a special arrangement of flags and flowers on the grave and that'd tell Reltzin where to pick up the secret stuff, a wastebasket or a hollow tree, whatever. And Reltzin would use the same method to communicate with his contact. 'Dead-drops' is the term, I think. Y
ou sure you don't remember this? It was a big scandal-using the graves of American heroes to commit treason and all. No? Well, believe me it was a big thing at the time. We have the clippings. Anyway, they put the screws on Reltzin and he gave them the name of his contact, who was a low-level Navy Department clerk named Jerome Weinberg. So the FBI set a trap… My God! Look at the time! The play group will be over by now."

  "Uh-oh-don't tell me we have to drive over there and pick them up?"

  "No," said Maggie, with a silly grin. "The Winstons have a driver. A drive-ah. Claude. Claude will deliver our little dears in the Caddy. Let's go downstairs so we can greet their smiling faces at the door. Or their shrieking faces, as the case may be."

  The two women walked unsteadily down the stairway and into the kitchen, a big, cheery, light-filled room with built-in everything of the latest design, and divided by a long butcher-block counter. Maggie got coffee and hot chocolate efficiently started. Marlene was mildly surprised that Maggie could still function. Functionality while stoned was apparently a quality required in the wife-of business.

  "So what happened then?" Marlene asked. "With Reltzin and what's his name? Weinstein."

  "Weinberg. Oh, they nailed him delivering a package at Arlington. He cracked right away and said that he got the secrets from Richard Dobbs. That was it. They came and arrested him the day before Thanksgiving, 1952. No bail, of course. He was in jail for nineteen months while the trial went on. But Harley got him off in the end."

  "How did he do that?"

  "Well, all the government had was Weinberg's say-so, that and Richard's fingerprints on the documents. But they were his documents to begin with, so that didn't mean much. Then there was some secret stuff that I'm not really clear on. Harley Blaine found out that the CIA had this Russian defector, and that the defector claimed that Richard was innocent, that Weinberg had made the whole thing up to cover himself, to play that he was just the delivery boy. 'Agent Z' they called him, the defector. Very cloak-and-dagger. So the CIA said they couldn't let the agent testify because of national security, and Harley said he was going to subpoena him anyway, and they went eyeball to eyeball on it and the CIA said no go and that was it. The judge threw out the case. But that didn't help Richard much. He was 'accused traitor Richard Ewing Dobbs' for the rest of his life."