Selig chuckled at this, but Naomi was not amused. She gave Karp the Look, to which he responded with a disarming grin. She decided to return to the original subject. “Assuming we never learn the reason, what happens?”
“Well,” said Karp, “in that case, after we destroy the substantive charges, they get a free throw at Murray. I’ve explained this, right, Murray?”
“Yeah,” said Selig around a mouthful of lobster Cantonese, “the chickadees. And the snake.”
Naomi’s eyes widened. “What? Chick-a-whats?”
“These are legal terms, Naomi,” said Selig with a wink at Karp. “Butch thinks they’ll bring something in from left field to blacken my name. Like, I beat my wife.”
Mrs. Selig’s unamusement increased; she was not used to being winked at, nor was she accustomed to remarks of that nature from her husband. She moved to redress the balance. “Well, if that’s the case, we’re home free; Murray’s only vice is leaving his dirty underwear for the maid to pick up.”
Murray blushed and coughed and swallowed some water, and Naomi breezed on to topics of more general interest. “Speaking of beating, you remember, Murray? That woman whose name I can never remember got beaten in the park the other night, the one who wrote that piece in the Times about Butch. She had something in the Voice late last year. Terrible! This city …” She lifted her eyes to heaven and expertly snagged the last sweet-and-sour shrimp.
“Irene somebody,” offered Selig.
“No, it wasn’t Irene, Murray. Something much weirder.”
“Ariadne Stupenagel,” said Karp.
“That’s it,” said Naomi. “As a matter of fact, that article was the reason we thought of you in the first place. You’d think somebody like that would be smarter than to go into that end of the park in the middle of the night.”
Naomi and her husband then drifted into a common upper-middle-class New York topic, Nothing Is Safe Anymore, including the usual vignettes about previously “safe” buildings raided by no-goodniks, friends who’d been mugged, and the extreme measures they all had to take to protect themselves. Karp nodded and put in a phrase or two, not really listening. Something nagged at the edges of his mind, some connection waiting to be made. He began to feel slightly dizzy and claustrophobic, but whether from the MSG in the food or Naomi’s chatter he could not tell.
They finished eating; the waiter came and cleared. Selig wanted to order pineapple ice cream; Naomi mentioned his arteries; Selig asked who was the doctor. Naomi said it was his funeral, but not to expect her to attend. Selig asked Karp whether it would hurt his chances if he beat his wife just this once. In this way the conversation came around to the phrase Karp was waiting for, all unknowing.
“Speaking of damaging material,” said Selig, “did you ever find out whether there was anything to that story about a D.A.’s investigation of the M.E.?” Karp didn’t answer. “Butch?”
“Huh? Oh, right-no, that seems to have been a rumor …” He stopped talking, his face slack, his eyes staring at nothing. The Seligs shared a concerned look.
“Butch, is … something wrong? Need a Gelusil?”
Karp snapped to, showing intensity now. “No, I’m fine,” he said. “Look, Murray, I want you to come back to my place after court this afternoon. There’s something I want you to take a look at.”
FOURTEEN
Karp and Marlene sat at their round dining room table and watched Murray Selig look at photographs of corpses. Marlene had turned the track lighting up to its highest setting and brought her halogen desk lamp in from her office, so that the cozy domestic space shone with the unforgiving light of the autopsy room. As Selig studied each picture with the aid of a hand lens, Karp studied Selig. The man was not happy. Oddly enough for someone who had been fired for purported deviations from procedure, Selig was in fact a procedural fanatic. He did not at all like being asked to view unofficially obtained autopsy snaps, and even before he sat down to look at them, he had argued vehemently against the possibility of coming to any valid conclusions from photos alone.
Forty minutes passed. Karp got up once to go to the bathroom, and Marlene went to her office to call her service and answer some calls. Business was brisk, although many of the calls were from women who wanted their exes beaten up on general principles or frightened into coming across with child support. Returning to the dining room after several unpleasant conversations with angry women, Marlene found that Selig had put his magnifier down and removed his glasses.
“Done?” she asked.
Selig rubbed his eyes and looked up at her bleakly. “As done as I’m going to get. Are you two going to tell me what this’s about? I’ll tell you right now, I don’t like it at all.” In his mild way, he was quite angry.
Karp said, “Murray, first you have to tell us, is there anything fishy about the finding of suicide in these?”
“Fishy?” Selig looked away. Karp knew from past experience that Selig was extremely loath to contradict the findings of other pathologists, especially any who had worked for him in his former position.
“Yeah, fishy,” Karp pressed. “Did the two kids who supposedly hanged themselves really do it?”
Selig put his glasses back on and furrowed his brows. “It’s really impossible to state authoritatively without an examination of the bodies,” he said sententiously, lifting the stack of photographs and letting them drop.
“Murray, damn it!” Karp said, his voice rising. “You’re not in court on this. You were clucking like a mother hen looking through those pictures. Will you please for crying out loud tell us what you saw!”
“I don’t see why-” Selig began huffily, but Karp cut him off with a look and a warning snarl.
“Okay. There was no reason for Dr. Rajiv to have noticed it, but seeing the Ortiz and Valenzuela shots together … look, here are the posterior photographs. It’s the ankles.”
Both Karp and Marlene stared at the backs of two pairs of dead men’s legs.
“What are we supposed to see?” asked Marlene.
“You can see them better with the lens. Notice the transverse bruising on the posterior surface of the Achilles tendon. The bruising runs around the foot just distal to the medial malleolus.”
They looked and agreed that there was a mark there, in the same place on both corpses.
“What does it mean?” asked Karp.
“Well, the funny thing is, the marks on the throats of the two men are just right. They were made by hanging: that is, their bodies, the neck tissues, that is, were pulled with their own weight, at least, against the suspending fabric. There’s the characteristic inverted-V bruising. But the marks on the ankles are like mirror images, if you will, of the neck bruises. Which could suggest that, well, a rope was passed around the ankles and force applied in a direction opposite to that exerted at the neck.”
“Murray, in plain English,” said Karp, “are you suggesting that there might have been foul play here?”
“Let’s say it’s a plausible hypothesis,” said Selig carefully. “If you wanted to fake a suicide hanging, there are two ways you could do it. One is, you tie somebody up and actually hang them from a fixed point, like in an old-style execution. The other way is do the whole thing horizontally. You tie a rope around their neck, tie that to a solid object, tie a rope to their feet, and heave. You’d need considerable strength to do that, though, or some mechanical help. To get the neck bruises to look right you’d need to exert a force equal to the weight of the victim, in these cases in the hundred-and-thirty-pound range.”
“I don’t understand,” said Marlene. “Why would anyone go through the trouble of killing someone that way?”
Selig shrugged. “Hell, I don’t know. People do funny things to people. If you just showed me the picture cold, without knowing it was a prisoner, I would’ve said a sexual ritual gone wrong. Knowing it’s a prisoner, I’d guess … torture? A little sadism? The killer wanted to be in control. The pulling part, I mean.” He cleared his throat and there was a moment of silence while they all thought.