Karp let out a long breath. He shrugged. "Well, since you put it that way, how can I resist?"
"Really?" said Marlene. "Really and truly?"
"Yeah, uh-huh."
"How do you feel?" she asked challengingly.
Karp consulted his feelings, always a creaky process.
"Um, relieved, I think. Pumped. Scared shitless."
She flung her arms around him. They hugged. They kissed, with an intensity they had not experienced for some time. She drew back from him and looked into his face, smiling. She said, "Good. That's how I feel. If you didn't want to feel like that a lot, you shouldn't have married a Sicilian."
Marlene threw on her field jacket and her Yankees cap over sweatshirt and jeans and sneakers and drove her car to downtown Rosslyn, a concentration of high-rises and commercial streets across the Potomac from Washington. She stopped first at a bank and drew five hundred dollars against the MasterCard, feeling just a twinge of guilt. After consulting a Yellow Pages, she walked three blocks to a film lab.
Placing the Dobbs film on the counter, she asked how long it would take to make a copy.
The pencil-necked young technician across the counter weighed the film in his hand. "Beginning of next week?"
"No, I need it now. I mean right now."
He shook his head. "No way, lady. I got work piled up-"
"You do this yourself?"
"Yeah, me and another guy."
"Do mine at the head of the line and it's fifty in cash, under the table."
"Uh, I don't know…"
"A hundred. Cash."
He considered this for six seconds. "Okay, I'll write up a ticket."
"No ticket. Let's just do it." She moved down the counter and lifted the flap.
"Hey, um…"
"I'm coming with you. You said you were going to do it now, right?"
"Uh, yeah, but…"
"I want to watch. This is a special film."
The technician was familiar with 'special films,' although this one was not as naughty as many he'd seen. Two hours later, Marlene, smelling faintly of developer, emerged from the lab and made her way to the local FedEx office. She borrowed a phone and, charging the call to her own phone, got Harley Blaine's mailing address from a polite young voice in Texas. Then she borrowed a pen and paper from the clerk and wrote: Dear Mr. Blaine:
The enclosed film, which no one but me and my husband (and, of course, the photographer) has seen as yet, will be of interest to you. We know about the bishop and the pawn, the knight, the rook and the queen, and what they did. I believe a conversation would be useful. Please call at your convenience. We are prepared to depart for Texas whenever you wish. Like your own, this is not a government operation.
She added her phone number and signed it, and sent it with the film copy, in the lab envelope to make clear that it was a copy, to Harley Blaine
There was a travel agency across the street, and there she purchased two open return tickets to Dallas. She was about to return to her car when she had a thought and went into a nearby People's variety store for some additional purchases.
"Hey, there," said a friendly voice behind her. She turned, and there was a black woman in a tan cloth coat over a pale green uniform skirt. It took a second for Marlene to recognize her as the nanny from the park.
"Hi!" said Marlene. "How're you doing?"
"Just fine! I'm goin' to Carolina next week. I'm starting school."
"Dietician?"
"Nah, X ray. That food smell make me sick. How about yourself. You take my advice?"
"Yeah. Yeah, I did. I think I'm going to be working in a law office pretty soon."
"Oooh, hey-paralegal? That's good work that paralegal, 'cept you need clothes." She cast a doubtful eye over Marlene's ensemble.
"Um, yeah," said Marlene, "except this is more like quasilegal. They don't make you dress up as much."
Marlene went home and called Harry and asked him to come down, without explaining the situation. Harry said, "Tomorrow afternoon."
The following morning Karp went to the office, not at eight, as he had in the past, but around ten-thirty. The placed bustled with people who either did not meet his eye, so busy were they, or else, even worse, spoke briefly to him in sympathetic or condescending tones. Charlie Ziller was one of those who did not meet his eye. There were several call-back messages from Clay Fulton. Karp rang the New Orleans office of Pete Melchior, the retired NYPD cop turned private investigator, and found Fulton in.
"What's up, Butch? I've been hearing all kinds of weird stuff."
"It's all true. The word is, no further field investigation. Come on home."
"No, further… what? I was going to go to Miami and show our pictures to Odio. And this Kelly guy is looking pretty good. I got an eyewitness who saw him with Carlos Marcello a couple times back in the sixties."
"Forget Kelly. He's another dead end. V.T. figured it out. He's quitting, by the way. I guess I am too."
A long pause on the line. "That bad, huh?"
"Yeah. We got beat, old buddy. Come home."
V.T. was in his office tossing personal items into an old leather satchel. "They accepted my resignation with regret," he remarked as Karp came in. "Jim Phelps is getting out too."
"Phelps? Why him? He's a tech. I thought Wilkey wanted to up the status of the tech work."
"Yes, up, but only in the desired direction. Phelps is convinced there was hanky-panky in the autopsy photos and the X rays. Wilkey wants a second opinion. Or a third, until, apparently, he finds a techie who believes there's no problem."
V.T. looked around the gutted office. "I'm off. Oh, speaking of no problem, have you seen the prelim report from Dr. Selig and the autopsy boys?"
"No, I didn't know it was in. They don't show me stuff anymore. What did they say?"
"Briefly, all the wounds of the two men are consistent with two shots from the upper left rear. And thus the magic bullet is still magic."
"Wendt signed on to this shit?"
"He did not. A voice crying in the wilderness, however. He'll get his day in front of the committee, but I doubt it'll do much good. All the other docs, including your old buddy Selig, were being very cautious. Nobody wants to join the nut parade." He hefted his satchel and grasped Karp's hand. "What about you? You going to stay around for the whitewash? Tom Sawyer says it's fun."
"I don't think so. Me and Marlene are going to fly down to Dallas on our own, to check something out. Marlene found some stuff. She… we think there's a good chance that Harley Blaine, Richard Dobbs's old lawyer, is the queen on the board."
V.T. dropped his satchel with a bang. "You're not serious!"
Karp nodded heavily and explained the nature of the evidence and what they had done about it. V.T. remained silent for a moment, thinking and chewing his lip. Then he said, "You think this is wise? Going out there, the two of you? Whatever you've got on him, this guy's got a track record of collecting evidence from recently dead people."
"I don't know, V.T. I need to close this out, in my own mind. I mean, it's completely circumstantial. There's a million ways of laughing it out of court. The witnesses who might've talked are dead and the live ones aren't talking. It's not something I can show to Wilkey; he wouldn't understand it, because he doesn't have the instinct, and because he just wants to close this down with a minimum of fuss, and this could be big-time fuss. Marlene thinks there's a chance Blaine'll tell us something. I think you have to be Sicilian to think it'll work, but there it is: we're going, if Blaine calls back."
Blaine called back at four that day. "Will you hold for Mr. Blaine?" said a polite male voice. Marlene would.
When he came on the line, Harley Blaine sounded weaker than he had some months previously, but his voice still carried the same ironic tone.