Finishing her sandwich, she took a long swallow, and sighed. Then she looked up at Karp as if she had just noticed him. "Pretty speedy, huh?" she said, laughing at herself.
"I'd say so. How about a juicy one?"
"Sounds right."
She crossed over and sat on his lap and gave him a wine-and-marinara kiss. "Mmm, good! And the last straw? Ann Silber came into my office as I was just about to leave and totally collapsed. Out of control. I had to stay with her for an hour before she was fit for company."
"The new kid? What happened to her?"
"Oh, she went out with the cops on an abandoned child call. They found this six-month-old boy in a shooting gallery. Skin and bones, with maggots crawling over his eyes." She shuddered. "How's Lucy?"
"Fine. Relatively maggot-free."
"Nice to hear. How was yours?"
"The usual," said Karp. "I got an interesting call about a job."
Karp didn't expand on this, nor did Marlene pump him. Karp got lots of offers.
TWO
Marlene regarded Karp's trip to Philadelphia as merely a good excuse for a day off and had asked him to bring home a cheese-steak and a Liberty Bell piggy bank. Karp was scarcely more enthusiastic as he rode the elevator up to Crane's Market Street office. The car was done in dark, gold-flecked mirrors, with shiny baroque brass rails and trim. A fancy building, and a fancy office, he observed when he got there: dark wood panels set off the shine of the mahogany furniture and the blond receptionists.
Crane had a huge corner office with a good view of Ben Franklin hanging in the cloudy sky. He stood up when Karp entered and so did the other person sitting there, a tall, saturnine man with deep-set intelligent eyes.
"Glad you could make it, Butch," said Crane. "You know Joe Lerner, of course."
"Sure. Long time, Joe." The two men shook hands. Lerner seemed to have aged little in eight years. A little more jowly, the crinkly hair receding and graying on the sides, he still crackled with a nervous, aggressive energy. Karp imagined Lerner was remembering the green kid Karp had been and was doing his own assessment of the current version.
They left immediately for lunch, which was taken in one of those expensive, dark, quiet saloon-restaurants that thrive around every major courthouse in the nation by purveying rich food and large drinks to lawyers and politicians and providing a comfortably dim venue for deals.
Seated in a secluded booth, the three men declined cocktails and ordered carelessly: the "special." No bon vivants, these. There was a period of obligatory sports talk. All were basketball fans, all had played in college, but only Karp had played NBA ball, albeit for six weeks as part of an undercover investigation. Crane wanted to hear all about that.
The food came; they ate. Over coffee, Crane settled back and gave Karp an appraising look, which Karp returned. Crane was a good-sized man in his early fifties, who exhibited the perpetual boyishness that seems to go with being a descendant of the Founding Fathers and rich. He had a sharp nose, no lips to speak of, light blue eyes, and graying ginger hair, which he wore swept straight back from his high, protuberant brow.
"So-to business," he said. "First, some background. What do you know about the JFK assassination?"
"Not much," said Karp. "Just what everybody knows."
"You haven't read the Warren Report?"
"Not really. Just the Times stuff and Cronkite on TV. Like everybody."
"All right. Let me say this. If the victim had been a minor dope dealer, and you had Lee Harvey Oswald in custody as a suspect, and the cops brought the evidence presented to the Warren Commission to you, as a homicide case, you would've laughed in their faces and given Oswald a walk. You wouldn't have even taken that trash to a grand jury. And they served this up on the most important homicide in American history."
"That bad, huh?"
Crane nodded. "Worse. All right, it's never been any big secret. As a result, almost from the start the Warren Commission has been under fire. Three main reasons."
He held up a big, freckled hand and counted on his fingers.
"One, it didn't take a genius to figure out that even if the conclusions of the commission happened to be correct, no legitimate case had been presented. The chain of evidence for critical material was a hopeless mess. The autopsy was a joke. There was no follow-up on possibly critical witnesses. Two: The conclusions are inherently implausible. The existing amateur film of the actual assassination locks in the time sequence of the shots striking Kennedy, which means that if you want all the shots to come from Oswald's rifle you have to make some fairly hairy assumptions about what happened to the three shots Warren assumed that Oswald got off. The magic bullet and all that-you remember the magic bullet? Also, 'assumed' is a word I don't like hearing around homicide investigations, but that's nearly all Warren is made of. Look-you know and I know that crazy things can happen to bullets. I wouldn't want to rule anything out a priori. But you also know that if you're going to make a claim that a missile did a bunch of things that no missile is likely to have done, then your ballistics and your forensics have to be immaculate. Which in this case they are distinctly not. Three-and this is the tough one. It wasn't some junkie who got killed-it was the president of the United States, a man with important political enemies, some of whom may have been involved in the investigation itself. Then we have the supposed assassin, who is not your garden-variety nut, but a former radar operator with a security clearance who defected to the Soviet Union, who was involved with Cuban weirdos, who had a Russian wife, and who was killed in police custody by a guy who had close ties with organized crime."
Crane paused, looking at Karp. A cue. "You mean the conspiracy angle," Karp said.
"Yes, indeed, the conspiracy angle. JFK was killed by the CIA, the FBI, the Cuban right, the Cuban commies, the Russian commies, the Mob, or any three working in combination. There's a vast literature on the subject ranging from the plausible to the insane. You'll have to go through it all, along with the original Warren material, of course-"
"Um, Bert, slow down. You're making the assumption that I'm gonna do this thing. I haven't decided I am yet. I still have a lot of questions."
Crane opened his mouth to speak and then checked himself. Karp saw him shoot a quick glance at Lerner across the table. Crane smiled and said, "Sorry, my enthusiasm runs away with me. Of course, you have questions, and I just broke my own rule about assumptions. Please-ask away."
He waited, smiling. Karp said, "Okay, first, why me? If you're really serious about digging up these old cans of worms, you're going to need somebody who knows his way around politics. That's not my strong point, as I'm sure Joe will tell you." Karp glanced toward Lerner, who returned a cool, ironic look.
"Second, I'm not sure why you think you can get to the truth in this Kennedy thing. You know as well as I do that the chances of solving a homicide go into the toilet after a week, much less a year, much less-what is it? — thirteen years. I'm trying to think of a New York homicide case that got solved after that long and I can only come up with one."
"Hoffmeyer," said Lerner.
"Yeah, Hoffmeyer. Killed his wife, the cops loved him for it, but they couldn't find the corpse. Confessed out of remorse after fifteen years."
"He fed her to his dogs and ground the bones up into the Redi-mix for the patio," said Lerner.
"He did. Oh, yeah, I forgot the serial cases. The Mad Bomber. We catch a guy with an MO used in an old case, we can clear it-sometimes. So-either, you got a guy trying to kill the current president in Dallas with a mail-order Italian rifle, or somebody's confessed, which I haven't heard about either of them. Or, maybe the job is to make a show of activity around this to cool down the Mark Lane types. In which case, I'm also the wrong guy."