“Four to twelve? Must be hard on your wife.”
He looked at her, into her eyes, and she thought she saw something unexpected flicker behind the un-revealing blue-duplicity? Or pain.
“As a matter of fact, it works out for us,” he said. “With the kids and all.”
“Oh? How many do you have?”
“Four. Joe Junior is ten, then there’s Bridie, she’s eight, Terry is six, and Patrick is two and a half.” He paused. “Patrick is a Down’s kid.”
“Oh,” she said, “that must be rough.”
He asked, “Want to see a picture?”
She nodded and smiled encouragingly, and he pulled a color snapshot from his wallet. She studied it: three little snub-nosed, grinning extroverts, and a worn-looking but still pretty blond woman smiling uncertainly, holding the dough-faced baby that would never grow up. She handed it back to him, and as she did she caught on his face an odd look, almost an expression of triumph, as if he had played a card that couldn’t be trumped.
A well-honed instinct led her to pounce. “Oh, one more thing: the detectives who arrested the boys who died-what were their names?”
He didn’t stumble, which almost disappointed her. “Paul Jackson.”
She wrote it down. “And …?”
“And his partner, John Seaver.” He started to move away again.
“Are they here?”
“No. I mean, I haven’t seen them. You could ask around. Look, I got to-”
“Anything to these rumors about your guys shaking down gypsy cabbies?” she asked abruptly, her voice with a bright edge.
Was that a thin smile as he turned away? She couldn’t tell. She experienced briefly an urge to run after Clancy, like Lois Lane on TV, grab his arm and become a pest. She quickly suppressed it; that was not her style. On the other hand, her style was not generating the usual results, In Stupenagel’s experience, men in the various macho trades were not famous for marital fidelity, and she was surprised that she had not been able to raise even a flirt from the cop. An unusual specimen, she thought, or maybe it was guilt about wifey at home with the bent kid. Or fidelity? Did that still exist? Or maybe she was losing her touch. She drained her beer and headed for the bar to eliminate that dread possibility.
Between the two of them, Marlene and Harry Bello kept Rob Pruitt pretty well stalked. Marlene took the shift between suppertime and the small hours of the morning, so that Harry could obtain the unnaturally tiny amount of rest that he needed. Harry objected to this-there was no telling when Pruitt might turn on his tormentor-but relented when Marlene agreed to take her dog along in her car. Karp knew better than to object.
They were not tailing Pruitt, precisely, only making sure that he understood that he was under observation. Carrie Lanin had been supplied with a new, unlisted phone, and she reported happily that she had not been bothered by the man either over its wires or by any additional personal invasions.
Pruitt had a new car, a dingy green Toyota Corolla. When Marlene took up her station outside his building, she could see him watching it from his window or from just inside the street door of the tenement. He was waiting for another sabotage attempt, which Marlene had no intention of providing. On several occasions, she followed him on long, seemingly aimless car rides through lower Manhattan, making only desultory attempts to keep him in sight. She was not interested in where he went. When she lost him, she would just drive to Duane Street and park in front of Carrie Lanin’s loft. Often on these occasions Pruitt would come by, and then she would wave gaily, and have the pleasure of seeing him roar off with squealing tires.
This went on for a week. Two weeks. Then Harry Bello called one evening and reported that Pruitt had started to drink heavily in a local saloon.
“You think?” asked Marlene.
“Your call,” said Bello.
“Let’s do it. Say, ten.”
Marlene fed her family and then tried to watch television with Karp, unsuccessfully. Nothing held her interest. She kept getting up and pacing, doing little meaningless errands and chores. Karp finally asked her what was wrong.
“I have to go out,” said Marlene.
“All right,” said Karp.
“Not now, a little later. I’m meeting Harry.”
Karp nodded. No news here.
“I have to get dressed,” she said, and hurried away to the bedroom.
No ninja look tonight. A sweet vulnerability, somewhat antique and out of fashion. Marlene had several elderly great aunts who, on each Christmas and birthday, supplied her with the sort of clothes a nice Catholic girl might be expected to wear on Queens Boulevard should 1955 ever make an appearance again. Marlene was thus able to dress herself in a white frilly blouse with a Peter Pan collar, a heavy tan wool skirt designed to conceal the lines of the body, and a white angora sweater that closed with a little gold chain. Her hair, which usually framed her face in a shaggy mane of natural curls, cut to shadow her bad eye, she now pulled back into the old schoolgirl center parting, held in place by industrial-strength plastic barrettes on either side. A dab of pale pink lipstick and a pair of round spectacles completed the image. Marlene thought she looked a lot like her cousin Angela, who was a bookkeeper for the archdiocese.
“I’m going now,” she said, presenting herself at the door to the living room. Karp looked away from the set and cast an appraising glance at his wife.
“Could you do ‘A Bushel and a Peck’ before you go?”
“What?”
“What. Okay, let’s see,” Karp remarked, “nearly every other night this past couple of weeks you slip out of here looking like Richard Widmark going up against the Nazis, and now you look like Rosemary Clooney. Is there something going on I should know about?”
“Not really,” she said.
The bar was so small and crummy it hardly had a name, just a dingy white sign supplied by a mixer company and a fizzing neon that said B R. Inside, a bar ran nearly the length of the room, which was about the size and shape of a railway car. Most of the lighting, dim and reddish, came from a collection of beer company signs hung on the wall. Sitting at the bar when Marlene walked in were three Latina whores, a short, dark man in a suit of aqua crushed velvet (their business manager), a pair of deteriorated alcoholics in grimy rags, and, at the extreme end of the bar, almost invisible in the shadows, Harry Bello in his usual gray suit. The barkeep, a chubby Puerto Rican with a shaved head and a wad of hair like a toilet brush under his nose, looked up as she entered. So did the whores and the pimp. The drunks looked at their drinks, as did Bello.
Marlene took off her raincoat, further astonishing her audience. It was not a venue that went in much for frilly blouses and white angora sweaters. She walked to one of the two round plywood tables and took a seat across from Rob Pruitt. He was drinking straight, cheap bourbon behind beer, and he stank of it across the table. He looked up woozily when Marlene sat down, and focused his eyes with some effort. Marlene noted that his clothes were soiled and his eyes were red-rimmed. Nor had he shaved in a couple of days; Marlene wished she had him in court this very minute.
“What the fuck do you want?” said Pruitt.
“You don’t look so hot, Rob,” Marlene replied. “I think you were a lot better off up in Alaska. I think it might be time for you to leave.”
“You’re following me around,” he said. “You’re … and that cop, following me. I saw you.”
“You think I’m following you, Rob? We live in the same neighborhood. We’re neighbors. Our paths cross.”
He stared at her, his jaw working.
“And why that accusing tone, Rob?” she asked. “Wouldn’t you like being followed? Didn’t you think Carrie liked it?”
“I love her,” he said, his voice robotic and dull.
“But she doesn’t love you.”
“She loves me,” in the same tone.