Material Witness

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  As she moved past the press of men in the narrow gap between the receptionist’s desk and the anteroom furniture, her eyes lit on Karp and she gave him a long, appraising look.

  “How’s the weather up there?” she asked, deadpan. She had a husky voice, deeper than contralto.

  “Stop slouching,” Karp shot back, and was rewarded with a peal of astonished, booming laughter.

  “Who was that?” he asked the receptionist when the tall woman had gone.

  She grinned. “Her name is”—giggle—“Ariadne Stupenagel. She’s from the Times.”

  Karp recalled the long-sought magazine article. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “It must have been an interesting interview. She looks hard to fool.”

  The receptionist rolled her eyes and giggled again, and Karp walked toward his meeting.

  “What did you do today?” asked Karp of the bride that evening.

  “Watched the soaps,” said Marlene. “Worked my fingers to the bone scrubbing and cooking and cleaning. Made some calls about child care. Had lunch with Larry and Stu downstairs. Talked to my mom. Got some calls. It’s a full life. What about you?”

  Karp was at the table shelling peas, nearly his only culinary skill. Marlene was poking with a wooden spoon at a large pot of steaming mussels, whose garlicky and wine-heavy scent filled the loft. Karp thought he could get to like this.

  “The usual Monday. Bloom nagged me about Phelps, and I had to tell him that there was a good chance that the asshole was headed for Matteawan. Phelps, not Bloom. And then I came home to my beautiful wife and a delish dinn, prepared with love and made of strange substances, all probable aphrodisiacs.”

  Marlene said, “He’s so glad I’m not a career girl anymore, he’s squirming in his chair. But enjoy it while it lasts, my love; it will be brief.”

  “I intend to,” said Karp, tossing his peas into a pot of bubbling water. “And speaking of career girls, I met a strange one today. She was interviewing Bloom for the Times. Tallest woman I ever saw. Had a funny name too … Stu something.”

  “Ariadne Stupenagel,” said Marlene.

  “How did you know?”

  “She was one of my calls today. Stupe and I go way back. She was my freshman roomie at Smith, and we ran with the same crowd until she left.”

  “What, she went for the full basketball scholarship at Holy Cross?”

  “No, she was asked to leave. Too hot for Northampton by a long way.”

  “Drugs?”

  “To be sure, but just for starters. Sex was her downfall. She was very naughty and not very discreet about it. And as you probably noticed, she’s hard to miss,” said Marlene as she served out the meal. She sat down and poured a short glass of wine for both of them. “Very naughty indeed,” she said, smiling.

  “Worse than you?”

  Marlene sputtered. “My dear! I may have let fall a few scandalous hints from my dear dead college days, but believe me, Ariadne made me look like Anne of Green Gables. Item: she kept a Honduran busboy in the closet of her room practically all sophomore year. He was about four-nine, and as she told anybody who would listen, his tool was a significant percentage of his total length. Item: she literally fucked a man to death once. A French professor with more years than sense, defending the honor of his nation. That’s what got her canned. I saw the drained corpse. Her farewell party was the event of the century. The dorm bought her a plaque.”

  “Terrific,” said Karp. “But what’s she like?”

  “Fun,” said Marlene, considering. “Not someone you would want to bare your soul to, but basically a good egg. No malice at all; honest, if she remembers; give you anything she owns; take anything you own; a whim of steel. And of course, the body itself lets her get away with a lot.”

  “What did she do after?”

  “Oh, I think she picked up a degree in some big state diploma factory, and took off for South America. She stringered for a couple of papers. Lived with the Times guy in Buenos Aires for a while. She was in Chile during the coup, apparently fucking her way through the inner circles of both the commies and the Pinochet people. No, that’s catty. She’s really a terrific journalist, ovaries of solid brass. They kicked her out, but not before she’d filed some incredible stories. Anyway, she was in Miami for a couple of years, and now she free-lances here in the city.”

  “You kept in touch?”

  “Not really. Occasional calls and cards, and the old girl grapevine. But she called me today on that piece she’s doing about the D.A. I’m going to have lunch with her tomorrow at an elegant boite, her treat, get as drunk as I can in my delicate condition, and, she imagines, feed her the real dirt on the office.”

  Karp took a drink of wine, gagging slightly as he al-most always did, but getting it down. “I hope that’s just a figure of speech.”

  “Don’t you wish! But really, this is deep background—no names. And I’m damned if that schmuck is going to come on like Mr. District Attorney.” She grinned. “But what I’m really going to do is boast on you.”

  “Oh? What will you say?”

  “Oh, I’ll rave about your great track record, your famous exploits. She’ll be eating her liver with envy, and I’ll love every minute of it.”

  In his heart, Stanley Malinski thought that death was an excessive punishment for an occasional piece of strange in the back of his Peterbilt, but he had been expecting it momentarily for three days. They had been unpleasant days. From the simple self-told lie that the killers had never seen him, he had gone on to fantasies of flight—name changing, hiding in Brazil—to drunken stupor, to fits of incoherent rage, and finally to his current dull sense of despair. It had never occurred to him to involve the police. It had not occurred to him to struggle when the two guys had picked him up in the truck yard.

  Thus, his surprise, when he found himself sitting in the passenger seat of his own car on a dark industrial street near Kennedy, with the older of the two hoods behind the wheel and the little one in the backseat, was simply that he was still alive, that the older guy was questioning him politely, that he could still feel the tingle of hope.

  “OK, Stanley, the main thing here is, we got to tie up all the strings,” said Carmine. “We need to talk to anybody who saw stuff they wasn’t supposed to see, and make sure they forget what they saw. Like we’re talking to you. We don’t want any trouble, just a little conversation and then we’re out of here. You follow me?”

  “Yeah, sure,” said Malinski, trying as hard as he could to project sincerity into the flat, dark eyes of the other man. “Hey, I told you I never told nobody, I swear to God …”

  “I believe you, Stanley,” said Carmine. “But we still got to talk to the girl.”

  Malinski could not keep from jumping a little at that and swallowing hard. “The girl?”

  “Yeah, Stanley, the girl who was in the truck with you. The one who drives the red Toyota.”

  Malinski, to his credit, had not mentioned the woman and now made a feeble effort to protect her. “Oh, just somebody I picked up in a bar. Honest, I don’t think she even looked out the—”

  “What bar, Stanley?”

  “Um, the Danny Boy, on Bell.” It was a very feeble effort.

  “What’s her name?”

  “Hey, she’s just somebody who hangs around … um, Francine, I swear to God she never told me her last name.”

  Carmine didn’t know whether he believed the man or not, but he did not have time, nor was the situation right, for him to exercise his considerable skill in extracting information. In any case, he thought the man was not lying in what he did relate.

  “OK, that’s it—one more question, Stanley. You ain’t left-handed, are you?”

  “No. Why?”

  Carmine got out of the car, and Joey put a cheap .32 revolver to Malinski’s right temple and fired. He then placed the gun in the dead man’s twitching fingers and left the car himself.

  The two men then walked silently to their own Chevrolet, which they had previously
stashed at the murder site, having used a stolen car to pick up their victim. Carmine thought it had gone pretty well. Malinski’s wife would report odd behavior prior to the event; the gun was a cheap street shooter that anyone could pick up anywhere. It would pass as a suicide, and would have no connection whatever to Simmons. Carmine was thankful that Joey had remembered to keep his mouth shut during the questioning of the driver, to distinguish right from left, and to refrain from taking a second shot. It could work out after all, provided they got the woman.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  On this Phelps thing,” said Karp. He paused and tapped on his desk with a pencil. “You should have no problem finishing it off yourself.”

  “Myself?” asked the man on the other side of the desk, amazed. His name was Peter Schick. He was a loose-jointed, tall, red-haired man, and very nearly the youngest and least experienced member of Karp’s staff. For the four months he had worked for the D.A. he had done nothing more than legal research for the senior people, stand in at calendar courts when someone was away, and such legal broom work as answering coram nobis petitions from the incarcerated wanting to be let out.

  Karp shot him a look. “Yeah, there’s nothing to it. The guy’s a cinch for Matteawan. They’re decorating his room right now. Just make sure he’s run through the medical hearing, process the paperwork, and he’s gone.”

  “What if he’s not crazy?”

  “Oh, in that case you’ll let me know. Unless you want to prosecute the Chelsea Ripper by yourself. Fame, fortune, the plaudits of a grateful city … ?”

  “No, thanks,” Schick replied with a nervous laugh. “I can barely find my way to the men’s room as it is. OK, that’s Phelps. What’s next?”

  Karp consulted the list he had prepared for the weekly meetings he held with each of his junior staff, and scratched the Phelps item off. “OK, next: what about the dismissal on Paxton?”

  Schick looked puzzled. “Yeah, that’s gone. Last Tuesday. They got a confession from the other guy.”

  “So Paxton’s out of jail?”

  Schick shrugged. “I guess so. I could call the Legal Aid—”

  “No, don’t guess,” said Karp. “Know! Every person in custody is your responsibility until he walks out the door. Not Legal Aid’s, yours. And don’t trust the paperwork. Call: Know where the body is. If you don’t, one day it’s going to show up in an embarrassing place—inside when it’s supposed to be outside, or vice versa.”

  Schick nodded, flustered, and made a note. Karp moved on to the next case, sympathizing, regretting once again how little time there was to bring young attorneys along in some way other than sink or swim.

  Ten minutes later, Schick having left fuller than he had been of legal procedure, tactics and caveats, Karp turned again to his morning’s paperwork. He had forgotten something, something to do with Phelps. It was some detail he ought to have discussed with Schick. It didn’t rise to the surface, which was annoying because Karp prided himself on never slipping where procedure was concerned, although he habitually forgot birthdays and once had shown up for work on the Fourth of July.

  It was because it was the Phelps case, he concluded, dismissing the thought at last. Bloom was riding him on it, unreasonably, needling him, as if it were his fault that the man was a maniac and thus incompetent, as if Karp could weave some legal magic so that Bloom could go on TV and tell the public that the dastard had got his deserts. But in fact there was nothing to be done; even Schick could handle it.

  The phone buzzed. Connie Trask said, “There’s a Ms. Stupenagel and a Mr. Ube here to see you.”

  “Oh, shit!” said Karp.

  “Want me to get rid of them?”

  “No, I just forgot I agreed to see them. Send ’em in.”

  Karp had agreed to the interview mainly to please Marlene, who had built Karp up shamelessly during her lunch with her old friend. Nevertheless, he was ever wary of the press.

  Stupenagel was wearing black silk pantaloons tucked into soft leather boots, a red T-shirt with a sequined design on it and her black leather trenchcoat. She looked like she had learned to dress for success at the court of Ming the Merciless.

  They made small talk while the photographer scooted around the office, crouching, bobbing, standing on chairs and taking what seemed like dozens of pictures of Karp. Karp remembered not to pick his nose or yawn.

  The photographer exchanged a look with the reporter, excused himself and left.

  “I thought we could talk more easily alone,” Stupenagel said.

  “I have no secrets,” said Karp with a bland smile.

  “Ha-hah!” Her laugh was full-throated and hearty. “I doubt that. Your wife tells me some very interesting stories. I think your career has the makings of a fantastic article.”

  Karp said, “Wives tend to boast, and Marlene has a vivid imagination. It’s not all that interesting since Perry Mason retired.”

  “Oh? What about the Israelis kidnapping you? What about being shot by Cuban terrorists? What about the psychopath who faked being incompetent so he could cover up the fact that he was a mass murderer? Not too dull there, hey?”

  “Um, let’s roll back a minute. I thought this article was going to feature the district attorney and the office generally. I thought all you wanted from me was just some general background on how the office works.”

  “Originally, yeah. But I spent two hours with Mr. Bloom, and all I got was a lot of numbers and bureaucratese. There’s no flesh there, dig? And I like my work to have flesh, glistening with sweat and pulsing with blood.” Her eyes glittered as she stared at him.

  “That’s very colorful language, Ms. Stupenagel—”

  “Please, it’s Ari, since we’re former roommates-in-law. And you’re Butch, right?”

  “Right. Well, as I say … Ari: colorful language, I can see where you’re a writer and all, but really, the incidents you mention make up a very small part of a D.A.’s career. Most of it is very dull.”

  She nodded once and flashed the kind of smile one puts on after hearing a significant departure from the strict truth, and said, “Fine. Bore me.”

  “Hmm?”

  “Bore me,” she repeated. “I want to know what it’s like. Tell me how the office works on a day-to-day level: what the people do, what they love, what they hate, what they fear. I didn’t get any of that from Bloom, because, if you want my opinion, he didn’t know. I suspect you do. Am I right?”

  Karp signaled agreement.

  “And I get the sense that you and the D.A. don’t see eye to eye on a lot of things.”

  “The usual trivial professional differences of opinion.”

  “In fact, I heard you’ve caught him with his hand in a particularly dirty cookie jar, and not just once.”

  “I can’t imagine where you could have heard that,” said Karp, deadpan.

  “Imagine that I heard it from those ruby lips you know so well.” She gave him a smile, along with a burst of pheromones and body language that promised much, and which would have been reasonably effective on Karp were it not for Marlene and what she had told him about La Stupenagel, and the understanding that this was as much part of Stupenagel’s professional equipment as her steno pad.

  Karp sighed. “Ari, let’s stop for a second. What you’re trying to do, I do for a living too. Getting information out of people who don’t want to give it to me is mainly what this job is about, in the preliminary stages. Q. and A. it’s called, and the difference is that the guy wants to talk to me, because he wants to convince me that he didn’t do it, one, or his buddy didn’t do it, two, or, three, his buddy did do it instead of him.

  “And the other difference is that when I write something down, I got an audience of twelve people, and if they all believe me, it’s not just a matter of somebody seeing something they don’t like in the Times. It means somebody’s going upstate to get fucked in the ass every day for fifteen years. I just mention that so you know I know how to get information out of people who really don
’t want to tell me the truth. I’ll stipulate that you do too, so let’s stop fooling around.”

  She laughed aloud again. “That’s great! I can use all that. So what do you want to do?”

  Somewhat taken aback, Karp replied, “I’m glad to talk about my perceptions of the job and my career, within limits. I set the limits. You don’t pump me. I don’t care to talk about the D.A. personally or office policy. Also, this is it for the bureau. I don’t want you talking to anybody else besides me—”

  “I can’t promise that.”

  “In that case, I’ll see you in court, as we say around here,” Karp said flatly. They locked eyes and flared nostrils for a long moment, and then Stupenagel grinned.

  “OK, deal. Can we get some coffee? I’m dropping.”

  Karp got up and went out and came back in five minutes with two coffees, during which time the reporter had read, upside down, all the papers showing on his desk. That he got his own coffee impressed her enough that she was vaguely guilty about this for about seven seconds.

  “So,” said Karp. “What do you want to know?”

  Evening, a week later, and Karp was down at the end of the loft bouncing his basketball, moving on sneakered feet, dribbling around his neck and between his legs, recovering the fine moves. He wondered why it had never occurred to him that the wooden-floored loft with its great empty spaces was a perfect practice room for basketball. The ceilings were high enough too. He could set up a basket.…

  Marlene called him to dinner, and for an instant he experienced a flash of intense and unbearable memory: his mother calling him for the same reason as dusk closed in on the suburban driveway where every day after school he would shoot and rebound and dribble and shoot again, hour after dreaming hour. “Just a minute, Ma.” Another ten shots, another call, another excuse, until, sighing, she would come out of the house and take the ball from his hands.