Gottkind asked for an adjournment so that his own summation would not be interrupted, which request Craig granted. It would take the morning and part of the afternoon of the next day, after which Karp would have a chance to rebut. That meant that Craig would charge the jury on Wednesday, which meant that the trial would probably conclude this week. Karp looked up from his note taking and regarded his client. Murray was pale, drawn, diminished, and Karp sincerely hoped that the money would make up for this, to some degree. A wretched thing, indeed.
“Stupe, goddammit, how could you!” yelled Marlene over the phone as soon as she knew who was on the line.
“Sorry, kid-like the Mob says, it’s nothing personal. No way I was going to be scooped on this one, not taking the kind of lumps I took. As soon as I knew Dalton was nosing around the Two-Five-”
“You’re still a total shit.”
“Thank you. How’s the trial going?”
“Fine, despite your best efforts,” Marlene snarled. “They’re doing summations. Butch expects a verdict Thursday or Friday.”
“Oh, so they didn’t throw it out because of my story, huh? What a bunch of fraidy-cats you all turned out to be!”
“It was only because we found out what was really going on. The Mayor wants to get the thing behind him as soon as possible, and cut any connection he has with Bloom.”
“Oh, so it was Bloom!” exclaimed Stupenagel. “What was he doing? It couldn’t have been something to do with that Guatemalan kid who got killed? By the way, what happened down there in Chester? What was it like killing Jackson?”
“Actually, Stupe, I was just about to call Jimmy Dalton and give him the whole story,” replied Marlene with the nastiest tone she could manage, and hung up.
The phone rang again immediately. Marlene let it ring ten times before she picked up.
“You weren’t serious about calling Jimmy, were you?” asked the reporter.
“I don’t know, Stupe. As long as we’re being bitches, why don’t you give me a good reason why I shouldn’t?”
Marlene was only playing with the reporter, so it was with considerable surprise that she heard Stupenagel say, “I know where Corazon Machado is.”
“How? How do you even know her name?”
“You forget my contacts in the Guat community, dearie. As soon as your girl’s surnames were on the wire, I started pumping. It was hard, because the Machados all really are witnesses to the San Francisco Nenton massacre. But I convinced the community to help because it’s obvious they need protection.”
“So where is she?”
“In Miami. At the Krome Avenue Detention Center, en route for Guatemala and certain death. I’m flying down there tomorrow to talk to her. The story I get is that someone ratted her out to la migra. Any idea who that could be?”
“Bloom, obviously. He called in some favors and got her processed on a fast track. Quasi-legally, of course, but who gives a shit about another greaser shipped off? Look, Stupe, I got to get off and call Butch. He might be able to do something.”
“Wait a minute! You were going to tell me-” Marlene hung up and redialed the federal courthouse.
In the break after Karp finished his summation, a clerk handed him a sheaf of phone messages. Most of these were from the press, which he tore up and trashed. One was from Marlene, marked urgent. One was from Bloom.
He went to a public phone and called Marlene first. He spoke with her for five minutes, and then hung up and called a number in Washington, D.C. He spoke briefly, then terminated the call, and called a number in Miami, where he did the same. Then he returned Bloom’s call. As he dialed, he noted that the number was not that of the D.A.’s centrex board, but Bloom’s private number, the one his friends called, the one that rang on the special phone on his desk.
“Let’s talk,” said Bloom when he picked up and Karp announced himself.
“We’re talking.”
“Not on the phone. Come by this evening. Say six? We’ll have some privacy.”
Karp was about to say something violent and obscene, but stopped himself. The sentiment would be better expressed face to face. Besides, he was truly impressed with Bloom’s apparently inviolable chutzpah. He said, “Okay. Six,” and hung up.
Karp walked into the D.A.’s private office at a quarter past six. The outer office was deserted; Bloom had left word with the guard below to let him up. The D.A. was sitting behind his desk, with only the desk light on. The blinds were drawn. The scene was almost parodically noir; Karp idly wondered why Bloom had arranged it that way, and decided that he could not understand it, which was also true of nearly everything else the man did. Bloom’s face was in shadows, but did not appear to be dripping sweat, nor were the eyes wild and bulging with terror. Bloom looked as he always did, prosperous and comfortable. He was in shirtsleeves, with yellow suspenders. He had a long cigar in his hand.
“Sit down,” said Bloom, gesturing to one of his leather and steel sling chairs.
“What do you want?” said Karp, not sitting.
“I want to put this all behind me,” answered Bloom.
“What is this ‘all’? That you raped a child? That to conceal that you covered up two murders by the police? That you connived to have a decent man fired to cover that up?”
Bloom waved his cigar dismissively. “First of all, I didn’t rape anyone. And besides, the kid is dead and so is the man who killed her. For all we know, Jackson was the rapist. So we can cancel all that out. The Selig thing-I want to tell you I regret that. I was misinformed by my staff.”
“You didn’t do it to cover up Jackson’s murders, you’re saying.”
“Of course not!”
Karp was interested to note that Bloom’s famous imitation of moral outrage remained intact. “So why are we here?” Karp inquired.
Bloom essayed a smile, not a pleasant expression to see. “Why not? After the battle’s over, we’re all colleagues, right? Members of the bar? I won’t pretend that I like you personally, and I know you as sure as hell don’t like me, but we’ve always been able to work together. I’m thinking chief assistant district attorney. I’ll handle the politics, you run the office.”
“You’re going to jail,” said Karp.
A short barking laugh from Bloom. “Don’t be stupid! There’s not a shred of-”
Karp kept talking, to himself it seemed, but out loud. “You’re trying to distract me with this moronic offer. From what? There are only two people who can put you away. One is John Seaver, but I sense that you’ve already gotten to him. He’s a flexible man, Seaver. Why should he piss off the D.A., especially when there’s no confirmation of any accessory to murder charges and he can lay it all off on his dead partner? The other is Corazon Machado. Who knows what kind of physical evidence she kept? That’s probably part of what Jackson was looking for when he tossed her place, that and information about where the girl was. Well, he found that, all right, but he missed your apartment keys. Maybe he missed something else. So you got some of your friends in immigration to frog-march her out of the country. Even then it’ll take some time to process her, and you don’t want either me or Marlene to spend time looking for her, so you come up with this … scheme, offering me this job.”
Here he paused and rubbed his chin and gave Bloom a look of the type we bestow on the two-headed calf or the baby with scales and fins floating in murky fluids at the carnival side show. “I can’t figure you out,” Karp said, genuine puzzlement in his voice. “You really think this is just another peccadillo you can wiggle away from, and that I’ll sort of be party to it. Even though you tried to rape my wife.”
“I didn’t-”
“Shut the fuck up! And in a way, I don’t blame you. I’ve been covering your ass for years. Your corruption. Your incompetence. Your actual crimes. I guess I thought I was doing it for the office. I’m really a sort of good German, in a way, and you saw that, and used it. But now, now you’re going down. See, what I did, a couple of hours ago, is that I called another corrupt fuck I know, who happens to be a U.S. congressman who owes me a big one, and I got him to spring Corazon Machado, pending a full investigation of her case, and I called a P.I. I know down there to pick her up and take care of her. She’s flying back here in the company of a newspaper reporter who speaks fluent Spanish. I bet they’ll have a lot to talk about on the way up. The papers’ll be a real interesting read tomorrow morning. I can’t wait.”