“Hey, Goom, you know we love you. Butch has been real busy, but as soon as we get a break, you’ll come over, you’ll eat, you’ll drink some wine. I’ll make pasta fagiol’.”
Guma’s face broke into a smile, and he made a friendly grab at her ass. She allowed the familiarity. Guma was harmless.
“This must be some favor. Who do I have to whack out?”
She sat on the edge of the desk and said, “It’s nothing, really. I just need you to call Fred Spicer and find out whether the D.A. squad is running an investigation on the medical examiner.”
“That’s it? Whyn’t you ask him yourself?”
Marlene laughed. “Because Fred wouldn’t tell me there was a fire if the building was burning down. You know Fred.”
“Yeah, I do. Okay, I’ll make the call.” He rose and picked up his phone, then hesitated. “Just a second- how come you want to know?”
“It’s a long story, Goom.”
He replaced the phone and sat down again. “That’s okay. I got time.” He grinned, showing crooked, gap-spaced teeth.
Marlene sighed and spun out the tale, omitting any reference to Ariadne Stupenagel, which was something like painting the Last Supper without Jesus, but necessary, since some years back Ms. Stupenagel had taken up Ray Guma during a period when he had information about a story she was writing and, after it was published, had dropped him on his head. Thus, in this version it was Marlene, working for Karp, who had discovered the phony suicides, and she made it sound as if the sole point of the inquiry was helping Butch with the Selig case.
When she was finished, Guma asked, “You really think some cop at the Two-Five killed a couple of beaner cabbies?”
“Hey, how should I know, Goom? I’m out of the business. My only concern right now is seeing if someone is trying to pin fucked-up autopsies on Murray Selig.”
Guma gave her a hooded look and dialed his phone. Spicer, the longtime chief of the D.A. squad, was in, and Guma spent the obligatory time talking Knicks and Rangers, after which he put the question. Marlene was able to follow the answer via Guma’s end of the conversation. When he hung up, she said, “No investigation?”
“None that Fred knows about. Of course, it might be somebody else doing the investigating.”
“No, Guma, the people at the morgue told her-I mean, told me-that the guy said he was from the D.A. Besides, who else could it be?”
“Well, if a cop’s involved, it could be I.A.D.”
She shook her head. “No, Devlin at I.A.D. swears they got nothing going on. And plus, they bought the suicide story, so why would they be poking around to see if it was legit?”
“I don’t know, kid. The snakes are a devious bunch. I tell you who you could talk to, though- Johnny Seaver.”
“Seaver? That name rings a bell. A cop, right?”
“Yeah. He’s on the D.A. squad.”
“He is? I don’t remember him at all.”
“He came on after your time,” Guma explained, “earlier this year, maybe April, May.”
“And why is he important?”
“Well, for one thing, he transferred in from the Two-Five, so if anything is going on funny up there, he might have a clue. Another thing, he made detective second real early for no reason anybody could see. That means he’s either got a rabbi way up at the tip of Police Plaza-”
“Or he’s a snake?” Marlene was confused. She knew that the NYPD recruited cadets right out of the academy to work in its Internal Affairs Division, policing the police, and that these men tended to be promoted early to make up for the hardships of spying on brother officers, but she couldn’t understand why the bosses would waste a snake in the small D.A. unit charged with investigating public corruption and doing humble chores for the A.D.A.’s.
“Not exactly,” said Guma. “He could be a snake on ice. He got blown in some cop sting, and they wanted him parked out of the way until they figured out what to do with him. Why I say that is that Fred told me he just showed with a name-requested letter from Bloom, which means it came from pretty high up in the cops: superchief or above.”
Marlene glanced at her watch. If she didn’t leave right now, she was going to be late picking up Lucy. She gathered her bag. “Okay, I’ll give him a ring,” she said, and then leaned over and patted Guma on the cheek. “Paisan, thanks a million for this. I’ll call you, okay?”
“Yeah, whenever. By the way, you ever see that friend of yours, you know, Queen Kong?”
“Ariadne? Yeah, from time to time.”
“Yeah, well, next time you see her, tell her fuck you from me.”
At the school Marlene extracted Lucy from a knot of Asian girls, refused Lucy’s whispered request to show them the gun, and walked to the car. She noticed Miranda Lanin playing with another group in the schoolyard and then spotted her mother coming down the street. Marlene waved and smiled, to which Carrie returned a stiff nod of recognition and walked on by. She had not seen Carrie Lanin since her tormentor had been convicted, and clearly the woman was not interested in renewing their relationship.
“Are you still friends with Miranda?” Marlene asked her daughter as they entered the yellow VW.
“She’s too babyish,” Lucy pronounced dismissively. “I have another tooth loose.”
“We’ll alert the tooth fairy. So, who do you hang with now? Janice Chen?”
“Sometimes. But my special best friend is Isabella. Are we going there now?”
“Yeah, I thought we’d drop by,” said Marlene. She started the car and pulled carefully around the waiting schoolbuses. “Isn’t Isabella a little old for you, dear? She’s-what? — fifteen?”
“She’s fourteen. Her birthday’s in January.”
“Really? She told you this?” Nod. “What else did she tell you about herself?”
“Um, stuff. Could we have a birthday party for her? When she gets fifteen, you’re supposed to have a big party,” she said.
“Well, we’ll see, but honey, you know Isabella- well, if she’s talking to you, then you’re the only one she talks to. Besides her brother, Hector. We don’t know where she comes from or who her parents are or what happened to her, so if you know any of that stuff, it’s really important for you to tell me.”
“She got raped,” said Lucy.
Marlene gasped and stared at her seven-year-old child.
“Urn, dear, what do you know about rape?”
“Everything,” said Lucy blithely. “I read it in a little book in the shelter. It had pictures. It’s when bad men hurt ladies with their penis.”
Marlene gulped and it was a moment before she found her voice. “And did Isabella tell you how this happened?”
“Bad soldiers shot her daddy with guns and cut him up, and then they ran away, Isabella and Hector and Isabella’s mommy. On a boat. They had to sit under the fish, and she was real scared.”
“This was in Guatemala?”
“No, in San Fanisco. That’s where she lived.”
“San Francisco?”
“Uh-huh. Then they came here and the bad soldiers chased them and Isabella got raped. And they raped her mommy too, and all the ladies got raped and they burned down their houses. That’s how come she doesn’t have any clothes or toys. We could buy her some clothes for her birthday, couldn’t we, Mommy?”
“Yes, of course-but, Lucy, did Isabella tell you her last name? Or where her mommy lives?”
Lucy shrugged and turned her face toward the side window. After a minute or so, she said, “She’s not supposed to tell ’cause of the bad soldiers. Hector says she has to stay at Mattie’s shelter until Hector is big and has a gun and kills all the bad soldiers. Then they could go to school.”
At the shelter Marlene sent Lucy to the playroom and went to see Mattie Duran.
“They killed my cat,” Mattie announced when Marlene entered.
“Oh, shit! Megaton? When?”
“Last night. He got out through a window and went down the escape. We found him all cut up on the sidewalk in front this morning. The bastards!”