Karp waited for Thelmann to say something, but nothing emerged. Smart boy: when in doubt, keep your mouth shut. Karp rose and walked out of the office.
Once again he rode down to the lobby and made for the bank of phones. Here he called Marlene. The phone rang five times, and when Marlene answered she sounded drowsy and confused.
“You OK?” Karp asked. “Is anything, um, happening?”
“No, nothing is happening, except I can barely drag myself out of bed,” she replied grumpily. “I would jump up and down to induce labor, but I don’t have the energy. If men had to do this the human race would’ve ended long ago. I hate men.”
“Except me,” he said lightly.
“Especially you. So, what have you been doing while I’ve been on my bed of pain? Hitting the hot spots? Enjoying the company of slender women?”
“That’s on for later. I’ve been by the courthouse.” He quickly summarized what he had learned.
“God, I’m throwing up,” said Marlene. “Those bastards! So now we know. It explains the Bobbsey Twins too: they probably used the same guys for the arsons and the hit on Simmons. Interesting about the tans and where they come from. But why did they always get on the flight from Philly, and why did they flash a phony Pennsylvania license?”
“All this will emerge in time. Look, I’m going to read you off two addresses on the same block in Long Island City. They’re two apartment buildings, the only property our friends don’t own in their site.”
“OK, shoot,” she said and wrote down the addresses. “You think these’d be poor risks for Allstate?”
“Very poor,” said Karp. “Get them to Bello as soon as you can. He might want to keep an eye on them. Any sign of your mutts?”
“No, but I haven’t been out, and I’m not going out. I still feel watched, though.”
“You probably are. If wise guys are involved in this it’s probably not all that difficult to find somebody to watch you. I mean, we live in Little Italy. So keep the door locked.”
“Yes, Daddy,” said Marlene. “Where are you off to?”
“Practice. I’m in Queens, I’ll cab over to the stadium.”
“You going to talk to Wallace about what Doone told me? About him and Leona?”
“I might,” said Karp, “if the opportunity comes up.”
Marlene put the phone down and headed for the couch. She had taken to dozing away the day there, reading a few pages of Eliot during her intermittent moments of consciousness. From time to time she also thought about Francine Del Fazio. The promised letter had not arrived, and Marlene was beginning to fear that it never would.
She had just gotten comfortable when the phone rang again. Marlene put a pillow over her head and waited for the ringing to stop. The answering machine clicked on. She exposed an ear and heard Ariadne Stupenagel’s voice, sounding testy: “Marlene, I know you’re hiding there, you miserable wretch! Come to the phone.” Pause. “Really! I have to speak to you. I have Julia Mackey at my place and she wants to spill her guts.”
Cursing vividly, Marlene rolled off the couch and toddled to the phone. “Stupe! What’s up?”
“Thank you very much,” said Stupenagel. “I can’t stand it when people purposely keep out of touch. It’s medieval.”
“I’m a medieval sort of girl,” replied Marlene, “as you yourself never fail to point out. What’s this about Mrs. Mackey, or was that a scam?”
“No scam, dear. She’s here at my place turning on the water works. She’s ready to rat out the world and she’ll talk about you-know-who.”
“Simmons? That’s great, Stupe! Can you get her down here?”
“What! To your place? I think it would be unwise. She’s comfortable, she doesn’t have to leave her own turf—I’d hate to give her time to reconsider. Also, I’m not sure she knows how to climb stairs. So, with all due respect to your condition—”
“Can it, Stupenagel!” Marlene snarled. “My fucking condition has nothing to do with it. Somebody tried to run me off the road the other day, and I think it’s the guys who did Simmons and I’m not moving out of the house.”
Stupenagel expelled a burst of astonished laughter. “Marlene, you’re imagining things; it is your delicate condition. In the Pleistocene, a lady as knocked up as you would be making a nest in the bushes and defending it with a sharpened stick.”
“Very amusing, Ariadne. Now let me tell you the actual situation. You’ve just given me probable cause for a warrant. You can get your sweet asses down here this very minute, or I can get on the phone and have the two of you handcuffed and brought in on a charge of obstructing justice.”
A nervous giggle. “Marlene! You wouldn’t!”
“Try me, honey!” said Marlene, her voice tight.
A pause. “Well, OK, but don’t blame me if she clams up. Honestly, this is just like Chile.”
Marlene hung up the phone, took a deep breath, and tried to compose herself. She had let Ariadne get to her again, the digging little comments about motherhood, as if Marlene had not more than proven … there, she was doing it again! Insidious, it was—little all-girl guerilla demolition teams from the patriarchy inside her very skull. She shook herself into action.
First a bath—no, there wasn’t time. But she’d have to dress. She marched to her full-length mirror; what she saw brought out an involuntary yelp of dismay. She was in an old blue plaid flannel bathrobe of Karp’s, virtually the only garment in the loft that she could bear to wear. It had several large stains on it; tiny crumbs perched on the lapels. Her hair was dull and arrayed in random coils like old extension cords at the bottom of a storage carton. Her face was puffy and sallow, and her eye patch looked pathetic rather than romantic.
OK, elegance was out. Arty squalor, then. She splashed water on her face, wrapped her foul hair in a big antique paisley scarf, pulled on black tights and a denim maternity maxi-skirt stained with white paint from when she had repainted the crib, and grabbed a clean white dress shirt from Karp’s side of the closet. Her good amber necklace, some religious medals on gold chains and—a prize—Stuart’s dirty boy pendant. Dance slippers. She stood in front of the mirror again: there! Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke!
A glass of wine, to promote keenness of mind, a gargle to mask the odor of wine, a few slaps on the damask cheeks to bring up the color, and … knock, knock.
Julia Mackey was the sort of woman called striking—that is, designed to strike the senses of men like a ball-peen hammer. Her eyes were green, her hair ashy blonde and arranged in a great, stiffened cascade on either side of her oval face. Her nose was long and chiseled, her lips a delicious painted pout. She was wearing a fur-lined, belted trenchcoat and buttery boots with little brass spurs on them.
Stupenagel’s eyes widened when she saw Marlene’s getup, but she wisely refrained from comment. Julia looked around in frank wonder, like an Omaha tourist at a punk disco. To her, Marlene seemed perfectly in place; of course, that was what someone who lived in a filthy, clanking factory would wear.
Marlene took their coats and seated them in what passed for her parlor. Julia had revealed a fawn-colored wool pants suit over white cashmere, with pearls. She sat gingerly on the old red couch, as if expecting it to exude nameless substances, all of which might be hard to dry-clean.
“Coffee, anyone?” said Marlene brightly.
“No, I couldn’t possibly,” said Julia. “I’m so nervous already.”
“All right, then,” said Marlene, and picked up a legal pad and a ballpoint. “Let’s get down to business. Ariadne here tells me you have some information regarding the murder of Marion Simmons.”
Julia started at this bluntness and cast a questioning look at Stupenagel. She said, “I didn’t say that. I don’t want to get involved.”
“But you are involved, Mrs. Mackey. In a murder case.” Marlene waited for the repetition of the ugly word to sink in, and studied the woman’s face. It was composed of layers, she thought. At the surface, the perfectly comp
osed and made-up face of an aspiring young society matron, bland and a perfect screen for the projection of whatever was fashionable. Beneath that, something harder, around the eyes, the tilt of the jaw, the mouth that might at any moment curve into a contemptuous sneer and open on a barrage of street obscenity—a bit of the gun moll and demi-mondaine there. Deeper still, in the way her eyes flitted when she thought no one was watching, a kid from the sticks, way out of her depth and badly frightened. It seemed to Marlene that these layers were coming apart, like an old piece of plywood delaminating in a junkyard.
“Now, look, I understand that this began as a journalistic interview,” Marlene continued. “Then, at a certain point, you decided that you wanted to go to the authorities, and Ms. Stupenagel here knew me personally and agreed to set up this meeting, on an informal basis—”
“I didn’t say anything about the authorities,” Julia protested. “She said she had this friend who knew her way around the system and could give me advice.”
“And so I can,” answered Marlene. “My advice is to tell me everything you know.”
“I can’t do that,” cried Julia, her body stiffening. She seemed about to bolt. Marlene made her voice stern.
“Listen to me! You were damn lucky to run into Ariadne. Don’t you realize that you were bound to be questioned on this? Mrs. Mackey, you are a material witness in a homicide case. I could have you arrested right now.”
Julia stiffened her jaw. “If you’re going to question me officially, then maybe I should have my attorney present.”
“You can have whatever you want, Mrs. Mackey, but the whole point of the present interview is to keep this unofficial as long as possible. If you insist on a lawyer at this stage, then it does become official and a matter of public record, and that means the press and the whole circus of publicity, at a time when we haven’t got our stories straight and speculation will be completely flagrant. The tabloids will go crazy. You don’t seem to realize that Ariadne and I are doing you a favor.”
Julia turned to Stupenagel and said petulantly, “I never should have talked to you. You got me into this.”
“No, she didn’t,” said Marlene. “We knew who you were from other sources. We knew you were at Simmons’s funeral. We knew all about your affair with him. We know who your husband is and what he’s doing in Long Island City, and we know that Simmons knew it too. We know that he spent the last night of his life with you.”
This farrago of truth, plain lies and suspicions had its effect. The perfect face crumpled and dissolved into tears. Ariadne put a comforting arm around Julia, while the weeper fumbled a hankie out of her elegant leather bag. Marlene rose heavily and stumped over to the cabinet, where rested the remains of her wedding booze, a dozen or so bottles containing anything from a shot to most of a fifth. She selected a bottle of Remy, poured a hefty slug into another wedding present, a Waterford snifter, and handed it to Julia.
She drank half of it in a gulp, coughed violently, and in a few minutes her hysteria had subsided into sniffles. Businesslike, Marlene took up her paper and pen once more and prompted, “Why don’t you begin with how you first met Marion Simmons?”
“It was at a party for the team, last April or May,” Julia began. “Frank has an interest in the Hustlers. I didn’t want to go, but Frank insisted. He does that a lot.
“OK, what you have to know about Frank and me, we don’t have … I mean we get along, but there’s nothing there. We have Emily, our little girl, but that’s not enough, is it? He has women, and he doesn’t bother to hide it either. OK, fine, he wants an armpiece he can bring to affairs, take care of the kid and the house, I can live with that, you know? But it affected me.
“So at this party, I started talking to Marion. You want to know something? I never talked to a black person before, except, like, clear the table, bring the car. I guess I started just to pi—to irritate Frank; I’d had a couple of drinkies.”
She finished her present drink, as if to demonstrate the act. Marlene tipped another two fingers into her glass. Then Mrs. Mackey went on. “We were out on our terrace. We’re on Sutton Place and we have a river view. The night was warm, the moon was full. What can I say? I was swept off my feet.
“He was a passionate, intelligent man, strong, sensitive. Everything a woman needs. I wanted him more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life. He called me the next day, and we checked into a hotel and spent the afternoon in bed. It was paradise. I was completely fulfilled as a woman.”
“Mrs. Mackey, did your husband know about the affair?” Marlene asked.
“Well, I didn’t rub his face in it, but I’m sure he knew. It wasn’t exactly the Manhattan Project.”
“And did you and Simmons ever discuss your husband’s business dealings?”
“Not really. Why should we? We were in love. We talked about us, how we could be together more.”
“Were you contemplating the break-up of your marriage?”
Was that a cloud that crossed Julia’s face? It passed in an instant. “We talked about it. You know, it was like a fantasy … dreams, you know? The whole thing seems like a dream now, or like a movie you saw when you were a kid, that affected you, but it wasn’t real. Frank would never agree, and if I sued him, he’d never let me have Emily. He’d say I was an unfit mother. Can you imagine going into court and saying I wanted to raise my daughter with my black lover? Marion …” Fat tears crawled out of the mascara jungle, leaving tracks. She dabbed her eyes. “I’m a wreck,” she said.
Marlene and Stupenagel exchanged a brief look, and Marlene resumed her questioning. “One thing, Mrs. Mackey. I understand that shortly after Simmons’s murder, when Ariadne first interviewed you, you appeared distraught and frightened. You seemed terrified that your husband was going to do something to you. Why was that, and do you still feel that way?”
“Frightened?” said Julia after a pause. “Of course I was frightened. Marion was gone, my whole world was turned upside down. I was scared that the whole thing would come out in a way that Frank couldn’t ignore and that he would take it out on me. And I—” She stopped, blew her nose, drank more cognac.
“Yes, go on,” urged Marlene.
Julia looked away and said in a cracking voice. “I thought, my first thought was that Frank had had him killed.”
“Why did you think that?”
“Because he has a violent temper, and … he is connected. He could get it done.”
“But the question is, why wait?” Marlene said. “This had been going on for eight or nine months. Like you said, it was no big secret. Any ideas on that?”
At this, the spillways opened again and Julia blubbered incoherently, crying literally on Stupenagel’s shoulder.
She rolled her eyes at Marlene over Julia’s back while her blouse soaked up tears.
The story came out in bursts amid the sobbing. She had overheard details of the stadium scam when she had picked up a telephone extension on a conversation between her husband and the Queens borough president, Dan Logan. She had mentioned it to Simmons casually, but he had seized upon it as a way to winkle her away from Mackey. She begged him not to do it, but he was driven by love and heedless of danger.
When the story was all out, Marlene said, “Do you know for a fact that Simmons confronted your husband and threatened him with exposure?”
“I didn’t see him do it, if that’s what you mean. But he must have.” She sighed. “Poor Marion, he said he would die for me … and he did!”
“What happened on the night of the murder? That would have been Tuesday, the twenty-sixth of last month. He came to see you, didn’t he?”
“Yes. Yes, he did. About eleven. Frank was out of town. Emily was with friends. I told him it was too dangerous for him to visit me at home, but he wouldn’t keep away. He came in and we … couldn’t keep our hands off each other. We fell down on the rug in the living room, and we did it with our clothes on. Like teenagers. Then he left. I saw him go into the elevator. And that w
as the last—”
Wracking sobs, then, “What are you going to do? What’s going to happen to me?”
“The investigation is continuing on various fronts,” replied Marlene blandly. “But you should hold yourself ready to sign a formal statement encompassing everything you’ve told me.”
Julia nodded glumly and the interview wound down. Stupenagel walked Julia down to Canal Street to catch a cab. Marlene sat in her rocker and tried to read over her notes, but found she couldn’t concentrate. The interview had disturbed her more than she thought it would. The silly woman had got to her. She put the legal pad aside and drew an embroidery hoop out of a canvas bag and began to run tiny stitches into a christening gown, a project started with great enthusiasm five months ago, then abandoned and now taken up again with surprising pleasure. She was just completing the tail of a tiny bluebird when the door rocked with importunate pounding.
Marlene got up to answer it and let in Ariadne. “She’s off to her happy home,” said Stupenagel. “How about that—did she deliver the goods or not?”
Marlene mumbled something noncommittal and resumed her seat. Stupenagel said, “Hey, you got a beer?”
Marlene said, “The fridge. Help yourself.” She picked up the embroidery hoop again. Stupenagel popped a Schaeffer can and sat down on the couch. “What’s that?” she asked. “Knitting little booties? How cute.”
“This is embroidery, Ariadne. The mesdames of the Sacred Heart do not knit, but they do embroider and they expect the young ladies placed in their care to do likewise. Sister Marie Aemilia, who taught me the stitches, once embroidered a cope for His Holiness, Pope John XXIII.”
“I’m impressed,” said Stupenagel. “Is what you’re doing for the pope, or do you have to work your way up?”
“It’s a christening gown. Don’t look at me like that. It’s a perfectly appropriate activity for a Catholic mother-to-be. Tell me, Ariadne, don’t you ever get tired of being hard-boiled?”
Stupenagel looked puzzled. “What, you’re bent out of shape because we gave that bimbo a hard time?”
Material Witness Page 27
