Torrisi started to say something, but Denton held up a hand to silence him. "Look, do me a favor, read the evidence, then make up your mind. If you still feel you can walk away from this, then no hard feelings, we'll get someone else."
With the other three men looking at him like dogs waiting for someone to throw a stick, Karp exhaled. "Okay, I'll take a look and let you know. I doubt I'll change my mind, but maybe I'll be able to help you or whoever you find with the strategy."
The meeting ended with a round of handshaking. A few minutes later, Karp was walking north on Centre Street when a Yellow Cab pulled up on the other side of the street and a tall, blond woman hopped out. She waved as she ran across the nearly deserted street toward him. "Hiya, Butch, imagine finding you here. Heard you just came from City Hall. Imagine that…and on a Sunday…and my sources tell me the mayor-to-be and a couple of other interesting folks were there, too."
If Karp could have run away with any chance of success, he might have started sprinting. But he knew Ariadne Stupenagel would just have followed him all the way home.
Loud, brassy, obnoxious, and persistent as lice, Stupenagel wasn't the worst journalist he'd ever met; in fact, if put on the rack or jabbed with a red-hot poker, he might even have admitted that she was pretty damn accurate and fair in her reporting. He also knew she was fearless and indefatigable in her pursuit of a story.
That past summer and fall, she'd done a series of four stories for the Village Voice based on what was supposed to be the rather ordinary life of a district attorney. While she did a good job on it, she was still one of them. The media. The ink-stained, hollow-eyed wretches who lied and misinformed depending on what was in it for them. She'd even managed to seduce his aide-de-camp, Gilbert Murrow, which made him nervous as all hell about their pillow talk.
"Hello, Stupe," he said with the least enthusiasm he could manage. He knew she wouldn't take the hint, but he wanted to let her know that he wasn't pleased about being spied on.
Ariadne fell into step beside him. "So want to tell me what's up between you and hizzoner-to-be?"
"Nope."
"Oh, then that was an admission that you met with Mr. Denton?"
"Nope."
"You're not going to tell me much of anything, are you?"
"Nope."
They'd reached the entranceway to 100 Centre Street, and Karp pulled up and faced the reporter. Stupenagel had her usual irritating "I know more than you think I know" smirk on her face, but he wasn't giving in.
"Sorry, Ariadne, you're going to have to go find some other mouse to torment today. This is where we part ways. I'm going inside."
Ariadne looked hurt. "That's cold, Karp. I thought we had a great working relationship and here you're not even going to invite a girl in to get warm."
"Nope," he replied, and walked up the steps where a security guard held open the door for him.
"You know I'll find out," she yelled before the door closed, but he didn't turn around.
Karp smiled. She probably will, he thought. Doesn't matter, I won't be getting involved in this. He took the elevator up to his eighth-floor office and let himself in. Flicking on the light, he pulled up short.
In the middle of the outer office was a mountain of boxes all marked in black Magic Marker "People v. Jayshon Sykes et al."
He sighed. Why is it everybody seems to know me better than I know myself? Well, I don't want to leave these here for the secretary to find in the morning. The newspapers and television stations would have a field day if word got out.
An hour later, he'd carried all the boxes into his inner office and stacked them in a corner with the telltale lettering against the wall where it couldn't be read easily. But he didn't open them. Instead, he put his coat back on, tugged the Cossack hat around his ears, and left the building. As he headed north toward home, the wind pushed him along, adding to the feeling that he was being swept along in a current he couldn't see or control.
4
Marlene dabbed halfheartedly with her paintbrush at the canvas on her easel. She couldn't quite get the dark green-gray ocean around the pier right, though she was reasonably satisfied with how she'd roughed in the Coney Island Ferris wheel in the foreground of the painting.
The day had fortunately warmed up quite a bit since the morning, but the sun was weakening and clouds were moving in; she was still starting to feel the cold seep beneath her parka as she stood on the boardwalk. A little hot tea would hit the spot, she thought, recalling the Russian teahouse she'd seen when she arrived in Brighton Beach a quarter mile or so down the boardwalk from where she had set up her easel.
She was working on her latest assignment in the painting course that she was taking through New York University. "A landscape," the professor had demanded, "only I want you to work objects into the foreground to get better acquainted with depth of field." Hence the Ferris wheel…and she planned to insert a beachcomber between it and the distant pier. It was really too cold to be painting; she kept the tubes of acrylic paints in a shirt pocket inside her parka but could put only a dab on her palette at a time or it would stiffen too much to use.
Marlene didn't really know why she'd chosen this location. Probably because of the discussion she'd had with her husband that morning about the rape case. But she'd also needed to take her mind off her visit to her parents' house that morning and she didn't want to go home.
Her parents still lived in the same house in Queens where she and her five siblings had been raised for most of their lives. It was a modest four-bedroom, three-story (including the basement) brick that epitomized the postwar era in which it was built-solid, family oriented, a celebration of middle-class values. There was a small backyard where her father had erected a metal swing set, taking inordinate pride in how he'd used Folger's coffee cans filled with cement to anchor the legs. It was still there-although rusted and unusable, her father had never been able to bring himself to take it down.
All of her life her parents had tended to their home and yard as proof of a good life well spent. But lately she'd noticed the signs of neglect: peeling paint inside and out that her father would never have allowed in bygone days; dirty windows; and little things that didn't work, like doorknobs. The gardens that her mother would have in the past carefully cleared of detritus and turned with fresh compost in preparation for the next spring were filled with the golden-brown husks of weeds, leaves, and bits of paper and other trash left by the passing wind.
When she entered the house, she found her father panicked as he trotted around, looking beneath couch cushions and under furniture. "My car keys," he said, his voice choking with tears, "I can't find them. Help me find them, Marlene."
"What's the rush, Pops? What's the matter?" Marlene asked, unsettled by the wild look in her father's eyes and the tears that rolled down his cheeks.
"Your mother, she's gone," he shouted. "I think she wandered off again…and in this cold she'll freeze to death." He overturned another cushion, and not finding his keys, began to sob.
Marlene moved quickly across the room and put her arms around him. "It's okay, Pops," she said. "When was the last time you saw her?"
Although she was determined to remain calm for her father's sake, there was some cause for alarm. Her mother suffered from Alzheimer's, and of late she'd taken to leaving the house-ostensibly to visit a neighbor or check on her gardens-but once outside she'd forget where she was going and then where she'd come from. She'd just wander off and was not always properly clad for the weather, which on a day like that one could be dangerous for an eighty-four-year-old woman.
"Maybe an hour ago," her father said. "I went back to our bedroom to take a little nap… I'm so tired, so tired…she keeps me awake, you know, just gets up out of bed and wanders around the house. I just wanted a little nap. But when I woke up she was gone. Mary, Mother of God, please help me find my keys."