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“Don’t tell me you agree with her?”

“I didn’t say that. I just said it was a possibility. There was once a pretty good A.D.A. who used to say, ‘Don’t fall in love with your theory of the case.’”

It was, in fact, one of Karp’s sacred maxims. He thought for a while and then announced, “Okay, fair’s fair. I’ll check it out. So, are you going to pursue this for us?”

“Us?”

“Yeah. You’re a P.I., remember? I’ll put you on the payroll. That way, anything you find out will be protected by confidentiality of counsel.” He saw her hesitation and added vehemently, “Come on, Marlene! Otherwise it’ll be a pain in the ass-we’re working on the same case and keeping secrets from each other? It’s not like we’re in an office and I’m your boss. Besides, if you don’t do it, I’ll have to bring in somebody fresh who doesn’t know the players and has half your brains and Stupenagel will get impatient and blow us out of the water.”

After a brief but uncomfortable silence, Marlene nodded and said, “Okay, but no kibitzing! I run the investigation my way, me and Harry, and we tell you what we find.”

“No problem,” replied Karp sincerely.

“Okay. Let’s start with where we are now. Paul Jackson is the obvious suspect. I.A.D. isn’t investigating him actively because there’s supposedly a hold on Jackson coming down from the D.A.’s, because of some big joint corruption investigation, but I talked to Guma and he says Fred Spicer says there’s no investigation, which means …” She paused and stared at Karp. “What the hell does it mean?”

“It means that Bloom is generating the heaviest possible cover for Detective Jackson, and he’s doing it directly, without involving his official people. God! What in hell could the little fucker have done?”

“Him or the Mayor; Bloom could be covering something the Mayor did.”

“Yeah, yeah,” agreed Karp for form’s sake, “the Mayor too. By the way, Bloom didn’t even tell Wharton. I saw that during deposition. When I asked him what happened in May to make him want to fire Murray, he went white, and Wharton was obviously totally unprepared for the question. This is a very private party.”

Karp rose and began pacing, his face blank with thought. He mumbled to himself in time with his steps, “What did he do, what did he do?” He stopped and spun, facing Marlene. “It was May. What happened last May? About the middle of the month. That’s when it all started.”

“The gypsies died before that,” said Marlene.

“Exactly. They killed the two kids, hanged them somehow. They must have been scared shitless of a serious investigation. Everybody knew they were shaking down cabbies; the whole thing was set to blow up, and then they lucked out. They caught the D.A.-sorry, the D.A. or the Mayor-doing something that gave them a lock on any conceivable investigation-except an investigation cranked up by the one person they couldn’t control. . ”

Marlene slapped her thigh, a whipcrack sound that stopped Karp’s musings.

“Seaver!” she cried. To Karp’s puzzled stare she added, “They. You keep saying ‘they.’ I just realized who the other guy besides Jackson had to be, because Stupe got ripped off by two cops. A private party, you said: yeah, but not just Jackson and Bloom. Guma told me Bloom name-requested a cop from the Two-Five, a cop who got promoted mysteriously fast to detective second, a cop who’s working in the D.A. squad, the same D.A. squad pulling this phony investigation routine. It’s John Seaver. I’ll bet he pulled those autopsy files from the M.E. And … I’ll bet when we check, we’ll find that Seaver’s partner up at the old Two-Five was …”

“Paul Jackson,” they both said in unison, and laughed.

Karp sobered quickly. “Fine, say Seaver and Jackson are it; what does that buy us? We have no evidence, no witnesses …”

“Stupe can ID them ripping her off as a cabbie.”

“Uh-huh, a reporter’s word against two cops. No, that’s the problem, Marlene. We can’t proceed in bits and pieces like in a normal criminal case. We need the whole enchilada, with proof, or we have nothing.”

“I’ll talk to Seaver,” said Marlene. “Maybe he’s bursting with remorse.”

“Do that. I’ll call Phil DeLino in the morning and lay this out for him, maybe it’ll rattle some cages. If the Mayor’s involved in any way, Phil’ll start sniffing for a deal. If not, maybe we can get His Honor to start distancing himself from Bloom.”

After that, they talked details: who would do what and when, and who would mind the kid, the companionable bargaining of married life, in which Karp found himself remarkably able to forget that his wife’s career involved dealing with extremely nasty armed persons. Marlene made a pot of tea and they settled in to drink it, and munch on biscotti, and watch Bogart get the girl and send the bad guys to perdition.

“Do you think our life is becoming too much like a movie?” said Marlene as the final credits rolled. “Excessively romantic?”

“Having second thoughts?”

“Oh, yeah,” admitted Marlene, “and third and fourth ones. Don’t think it doesn’t cross my mind in the middle of some of the things I’ve been doing lately that I could be drafting contracts in some cozy office. Still, somebody must be living lives like they do movies about. I mean, Don Quixote was crazy, but there were actually knights, weren’t there?”

Karp gave her a look that mingled love and apprehension and then adopted a more cheerful expression, replying Bogartly, “Whatever you say, shweetheart.”

The next day Marlene dressed in civilian clothes, a plum-colored wool suit, with Ferragamo pumps and her glass eye, and went uptown to Dr. Memelstein’s office for her six-month maternity checkup, where she received something of a shock, such that on leaving she repaired to a nearby cocktail lounge, where she ordered a Jameson’s up, soda on the side, which, when it came, she decided not to drink, but sat there for a half hour, sipping the chaser.

She then called Harry Bello from a phone in the place.

“Harry, it’s me. John Seaver, D.A. squad. Did you know him when you worked there? He started in the spring of last year sometime.”

“To talk to. Why?”

“What’s he look like?” asked Marlene, ignoring the question.

“Five eight, one sixty, brown hair, brown eyes, mustache, dark complexion. A dresser. Could be some P.R. in there. Why?” More insistently.

“Harry, I’ll tell you the story later. Let’s meet for lunch at the office. Bye.”

After this, she took a cab down to the courthouse on Centre Street, where, using her old ID, she inveigled herself into the D.A. squad offices and lay in wait for John Seaver.

This is a guy in trouble, was her first thought when he walked in. He was a dresser, though. He wore a blue-gray Italian suit, with what was probably a Sulka, and the little tasseled loafers with the gold trimming that all the boys in narco like to wear. The face didn’t fit the jaunty outfit: it had gone yellowish and soft-looking, like something was rotting it from inside, and the eyes were deeply shadowed. John wasn’t getting his eight hours, Marlene concluded.

“Detective Seaver? I’m Marlene Ciampi,” she said, standing in his path before his cubicle door and holding her hand out for him to shake. Which he did, limply. “I wonder if you could spare me a minute.”

When they were seated in his space, she said, handing him a card, “I used to work here, but now I’m in private practice with Harry Bello, who used to work a couple of doors down. We’ve been retained by Bohm Landsdorff on the Selig case. You’re familiar with it?”

“Uh, not really.”

Marlene smiled charmingly. “Oh, well, neither am I, to tell the truth, but they asked me to clean up one little item, which is this investigation that the D.A. squad is apparently, supposedly, running on the medical examiner’s office. Now, I’ve already checked through official channels, Lieutenant Spicer and all, and he doesn’t know anything about it, and the defendants in this case, um, the Mayor, and the D.A., Mr. Bloom, they sure haven’t shared any information about any investigation, like they’re supposed to.” She paused.