It was Carrie Lanin, crying and screaming by turns.
“Calm down, Carrie, I can’t understand what you’re saying,” Marlene said.
“What is it? Who’s that?” asked Karp, startled out of his own deep sleep.
“Carrie Lanin,” answered Marlene shortly, and then said into the phone, “Carrie, calm down and tell me what happened.”
“Christ, doesn’t she own a clock? It’s three in the morning,” Karp mumbled, and put a pillow over his head.
“He was here!” Lanin sobbed. “You said it would be over, but he came here! He sat on my bed and talked to me and stroked my fucking hair!”
Marlene felt her stomach roil, and a sour bubble of used food rose into her throat. She was out of practice, but she remembered how to suppress the empathy and get the facts from the vic. She sharpened her voice to penetrate the blubbering. “Did he assault you? Were you raped?”
“No! No, he just stroked me. He said … he said he was saving it for when we got married! Oh, God, make this stop! I want my life back!”
More crying. Marlene relaxed slightly. If there wasn’t a rape, there was no immediate need to get Carrie Lanin picked up and packed off to a hospital rape center. “Carrie, listen to me. He broke in to your home at night. He touched you. That’s burglary and assault right there; plus he violated the protection order. We’ve got him. He’s going to jail.”
Lanin didn’t seem to hear. “He kept saying you were keeping us apart, like in high school. ‘Your snotty friends.’ He said, ‘You shouldn’t have done it, darling. Going to court. We can solve all our problems ourselves. You don’t need that bitch lawyer.’ I was paralyzed. I didn’t want to scream. I didn’t want to wake Miranda. God, can you imagine? What she’d think? The effect…? So I just let him talk. I played along with his crazy rap. I thought he might get violent.”
“You probably did the right thing,” said Marlene. “Look, from one point of view this is the best thing that could’ve happened-”
“Oh, right! It would even’ve been better if he’d raped me and carved his initials on my forehead. Then he would’ve gone away for a long time- maybe. What do really bad rapists get nowadays? Ten years?”
“About that. It depends,” Marlene replied, uncomfortable in the knowledge that, to judge from the statutory sentence ranges, the state of New York considered selling marijuana in bulk a lot more serious than first-degree rape. A really horrendous, violent rapist might draw six to eighteen, and be paroled right after the minimum, and people who raped women they knew, especially women of the same age and race and class, usually got a lot less. Or walked. But Marlene kept all that to herself, instead pumping assurances over the wire for all she was worth, ignoring for the moment the possibility that she would not be able to deliver on them. After forty minutes of this, she had calmed Lanin down enough to end the conversation in good conscience, with a promise that she’d see her in the morning.
Which was not that far off. Marlene could not fall back asleep and stared resentfully at Karp, who could and had, pillow still in place over his head. She rose, showered, dressed, made coffee, and drank it in her little office at the far end of the loft, watching dawn come up Crosby Street and listening to the late-night sounds of the City, the sirens, the occasional roar of a car, slowly build to the crescendo of a working day.
She was slow and stupid as she pressed through the morning chores. Karp was up and out early, with only a perfunctory word and a hurried kiss. He obviously had a full plate with the Selig case, and Marlene was reluctant to worry him with Carrie Lanin. And if she allowed herself to think about it, she was worried, because if ever she’d seen a ticking human grenade, it was Pruitt, and she’d seen a lot of them in her work, of the DAD KILLS MOM, TOTS, SELF variety, and she wanted to share the problem with Karp. That’s what marriage was for, in her opinion, or would be, were the marriage not between a basically cryptic and surreptitious woman and a man for whom the expression straight arrow might have been especially devised.
As she drove to the Lanin residence, she was therefore running through her head one of those fictitious conversations that are the chief barrier to actual communication between people married to each other. She told Karp what was going on, about her fears for Lanin, about her general frustration with a system that seemed incapable of protecting women from the lethal fantasies of certain men, about her fears of being sucked into a cycle of violence, about her inexplicable fascination with deadly risk. In her head, Karp answered logically, maddeningly obtuse: you know the law; some get away with it, some don’t; work inside the system; we’ve got our own lives to worry about; do what you can, but don’t go crazy. But what if doing what you can made you crazy? To that the mentalized Karp had no answer. Nor did Marlene.
Carrie Lanin was drunk when Marlene came to her door; it was clear that she hadn’t slept either, and she hadn’t spent the small hours calmly watching the dawn break. She looked at Marlene with a hard eye, her face saying, you should have saved me from this. And there was nothing Marlene could reply to this, except hollow, comforting banalities, as we do to a friend’s news of cancer.
Marlene dropped the kids off and went back to her loft to work the phone. The first person she called was Luisa Beckett, once something of a protégée of Marlene’s, and now in charge of sex crimes at the New York D.A.
“What can I do for you, Marlene?” Beckett asked without preamble as soon as Marlene had announced herself. The two women had become estranged after Marlene’s sudden unexplained exit from her job, a move that had left Beckett with an impossible burden and a radical, and equally unexplained, dimunition of support from the district attorney. Beckett was a true believer; Marlene, having bugged out to wealth and indolence, was clearly not, and her tone indicated that she had little time for chat with well-off housewives.
“I did some work recently for a friend of mine,” began Marlene, and tersely laid out the facts of the case. As she feared, Beckett was not impressed.
“You say she wasn’t raped.”
“No, but the guy broke into her car and then her loft and assaulted her-”
“Assaulted her by … what was it? Stroking her hair?”
“Luisa, I realize it sounds odd, and low-priority, but believe me, I’ve met this guy, and he’s a disaster waiting to happen. Maybe for once we can do something besides shampoo the carpet after the guy’s done what these guys always do.”
There was a pause on the line, and Marlene imagined what was going through Beckett’s head, which was not hard because it was probably what would’ve gone through Marlene’s head a couple of years ago when she had been sitting where Beckett was now and someone had called with a story like this. She knew Beckett’s desk was covered with files representing first-degree rape and aggravated-assault cases, hundreds of them, the walking wounded of the sexual wars, and here was this bozo-ette bending her ear about some rich bitch having a little trouble with her boyfriend.
On the other hand, five years ago Marlene had seen the talent in a skinny black kid from a third-rate law school and made Luisa Beckett her assistant chief, so there was a debt and probably always would be. Marlene heard a faint sigh over the wires. “Okay, okay, what do you want me to do?”
“Just make sure the case doesn’t drop through the cracks. This is the kind of thing worth fifty seconds in a calendar court. He could just walk.”