Jumping Jerry couldn’t wait
He jumped off the Empire State
Down and down and down he flew
Landed on Fifth Avenue
Hundred-ninety-eighty-seventy-sixty-
fifty-forty-thirty-twenty
SPLAT!
Or alternatively, you could end with the most disgusting possible raspberry noise. She entered her car. The dog made a companionable whine and panted.
“Don’t ask, Sweets. Just don’t ask,” she said as she cranked up the car and pulled away from the curb. In fact, as she now recalled, she had skipped to it, when alone with her sister Pat and her younger cousins, and not standing on the dignity of twelve years. She had been a damn good double-dutch skipper, too. All the Ciampis had skipped, including the boys. Her dad had been a welter-weight club fighter in the forties for a couple of years, and skipping was macho training rather than a girl thing at casa Ciampi, where everyone also learned to box. Marlene had kept up training, too. She had a speed bag and a heavy bag set up at home, and she worked out a couple, three times a week-not a Jazzercise girl, Marlene-still including skipping. And, naturally, Marlene had taught her daughter. Lucy still skipped, and was brilliant at it, but she did it in private, not with Mom anymore. It’s just a phase, Marlene thought, trying to generate a little self-comfort. But really, who knew? Who knew, for example, what Jumping Jerry Fein’s spectacular suicide had done to his daughter? Clearly, she was in a marriage made elsewhere than in heaven, but did that follow necessarily from the big jump? Flash forward twenty years-Lucy sitting all beat up in room 37: “Yeah, well, my mom was this hard-rock feminazi with a gun, so I guess I just became a doormat to get back at her.”
“Is that why I don’t want to do this silly woman’s investigation, Sweety?” she asked. “Because I don’t want to get into it? Some other miserable family. I am a simple person, basically. No, really, don’t laugh! I love my husband, I love my children, even that rotten brat, I don’t try to change the world, I’m not an ideologue, I don’t tear cigarettes out of people’s mouths in restaurants, I don’t throw paint on furs. All I do is I try to keep a tiny fraction of the violent shitheads of the world from hurting their loved ones. This is simple, no? Yell, scream, be depressed, but no hitting, no stabbing, don’t shoot them with guns. It’s kindergarten.”
Marlene waited for the light at Houston and Lafayette and turned to face the mastiff, who turned his contemplative, sag-faced, red-eyed gaze on her, the better to concentrate his canine wisdom on her kvetching.
“But I always seem to get involved. I’m down in it all the time, slopping around with the toxic worms, who did what to who, back when, why-Brenda fucking Nero, this new one. . I don’t know, Sweets, this is not what I bargained for. If I wanted to do social work, I would have a little office with light oak and nubbly tweed furniture, and my MSW diploma and some soothing abstracts on the walls, and a black plastic thingie on my desk with my name engraved, or maybe a wooden one, with the swoopy carved letters. Do you see me doing that? Of course you don’t. It’s not me. I don’t have good listening skills. I have good shooting skills, although God knows I never asked for that either. So? Any sage advice?” She waited. “What’s that? Eat decayed corn dogs and sniff anuses? Okay, it sounds extreme, but if it works for you, I’ll try it. I tried everything else.”
Chapter 4
One of the habits that Karp had retained from his days as a worker bee was culinary, or rather anti-culinary. In the lunch hour, in fine weather when he had no unavoidable business luncheon, he repaired to one of the shiny cancer wagons lined up along the edges of Foley Square, and there consumed remarkable quantities of what his mother always called chazerei, or pig swill. Today he was eating macerated beef lips and pork by-products forced into a condom and served in a piquant mustard sauce on lozenges of absorbent cotton, with kraut, washing this (the second of a matched pair) down with fizzy orange sugar water. Next to him, on the bench, there rested a yellowish square in waxed paper, the shape and very nearly the taste of paving material, which had been purveyed as a knish.
As he ate, he read through a stack of files, moving them, after reading, from one side of his seated position to the other, using the knish as a convenient paperweight. Although Karp could not possibly keep abreast of the thousands of live felony cases handled by the D.A.’s office, he made an effort to examine enough of a sample to give him a feeling for the tone of the office as a whole. From time to time he found some funny business and he pounced. As now. This, from Felony Bureau, was a major prosecution against a car-theft ring, an interstate operation involving numerous chop shops, crooked parts dealers, and gangs of thieves who functioned as suppliers. It was an elaborate case that had required many months to develop and involved cooperation with the FBI.
Karp muttered and made notes on a legal pad, ripped off the pages, stuck them in the folder, and was about to move on to the next one when he looked up and was startled to see an elderly woman sitting on a bench across the path from him who was also muttering and making notes on a legal pad. Her pad was tattered and faded, and she was using a stumpy pencil instead of an office ballpoint, and she was wearing more than one dress and had next to her a shopping cart stacked with boxes and black plastic bags. Like most New Yorkers, Karp was careful to give the homeless their privacy and did not ordinarily stare, but this woman’s face was interesting, plain, large-nosed, but with deep-set, large dark eyes, rimmed with brownish skin, like rust stains. Her drawn cheeks were decorated with spots of cherry rouge, and there were flakes of bright lipstick clinging to her lips and the skin surrounding them. Her hair was frizzy and dirty gray, and upon it she wore a black velvet hat with a tiny veil, such as his mother had worn back in the fifties. The woman stopped and looked up just then, and met his gaze, hers turning wary. He smiled and indicated his pad and hers.
“Nice day to work outside,” he said.
“Are you a counselor, sir?” she asked after rather a long pause. Her voice was cracked from disuse, but she spoke with the exaggerated clarity of the New York native who has been at pains to disguise the accent.
“I’m with the D.A.,” said Karp.
“Oh. I have such an interesting case here,” she said, waving a thick and filthy manila folder. “Maybe you would be so kind as to give me your legal opinion. I believe a great injustice has been done, a very great, a very great, great injustice, and they’re getting away with it.” She lowered her voice and glanced theatrically over both shoulders. “With murder.”
“Would you care for a knish?” Karp asked, hoping by this gesture to forestall what he knew could be an unpleasant encounter. The courthouse area was, naturally enough, well supplied with those of the mad whose nuttiness came out in legal colors, and this person was clearly one of them.
“Oh, no, I couldn’t take your lunch,” she fluttered.
“Please.” He stood and extended the brick to her in its square of waxed paper, meanwhile slapping his (actually quite flat) stomach with his other hand. “I don’t need it,” he said heartily. “It’d only go to waste.”
“Oh, well, in that case, thank you very much,” she said, and accepted it and took a first small bite, closing her eyes as if she were tasting a spoonful of molossal at Le Pavillon.
Karp took this opportunity to make his escape, feeling somewhat ratty about it, but not too ratty, and not really regretting his lost knish.
Back in the office, he called the ADA in charge of the car-theft-ring prosecution, a luminary of the Felony Bureau named Weingarten, and asked him to stop by if he had no other commitments. Officially, Karp should have called Weingarten’s bureau chief, Tim Sullivan, and taken it through channels, or, failing that, he should have had O’Malley call the Felony office secretary to set up an appointment, but he chose not to. Sullivan would bitch to Keegan, of course, and Keegan would answer that the chief assistant could call anyone in the office he damn pleased, and then yell at Karp to for chrissake go through the chain of command, and Karp would forget to do so the next time, and thus each of the hundreds of attorneys in the office would learn that they could at any moment expect such a call and have to answer instantly for any of the cases under their control, which, of course, was the point of Karp doing it in so outrageously unbureaucratic a fashion.