“Thanks, Connie,” said Karp, reaching for the phone.
Lucy Karp sat in spelling, morosely waiting for her turn to come around again. Resemble had been her word last time. Briefly, it had flashed through her mind to say, when using it in a sentence, “Mrs. Lawrence’s face resembles a snotty kleenex,” but had chickened out. Spelling was not a problem. Math was the problem. Math and Mrs. Lawrence, what she did in math class.
At the next desk, Robert Liu stood up and misspelled surrender, and sat down blushing. Lucy stood and spelled it right and said, “The general promised he would never surrender,” looking Mrs. Lawrence in the eye as she did so. The teacher gave her that phony smile and called on the next kid, and Lucy knew she was plotting her revenge when math class came along.
As it would, inevitably. There would be a recess at ten-thirty. They would stream out to the schoolyard, and Lucy’s friends would set up the long ropes to dance double Dutch, chanting, and Lucy would leap among the strands, best of all of them, having learned to jump rope from her mother so far in the past that she could barely remember acquiring the skill. But then they would have to return to the orange-peel-smelling, hot-paint-smelling school building and have math, and Mrs. Lawrence would return the homework, Lucy’s marked with shameful red crosses, which she folded quickly and hid away in her backpack. None of her friends, not Janet Chen, or Franny Lee, or Martha Kan, who could barely speak English, had the slightest problem with long division, with problems that made Lucy’s brain freeze up and sweat start from her forehead. Then after the passing out of the homework, Mrs. Lawrence would chalk four problems up on the board, and of course she would pick Lucy for the hardest one, and Lucy would march up to the board, her face blazing, her stomach roiling, with three other kids, and the others would all do their problems right away and sit down, and Lucy would be up there trying to remember seven into sixty-four and what over, and the whole class would be silent, waiting, and then Mrs. Lawrence would say sweetly, “Lucy needs some help,” and then she would talk Lucy through the whole problem as if she were a tiny little moron, with many a sarcastic aside about “somebody didn’t pay attention when we were learning how to carry the number into the next column,” and the sweat would run down her sides, and her vision would go gray from loss of face, and no, she could not stand it, not even one more time.
So, when recess came, Lucy put her coat on with the others and lagged behind with the fat kids who didn’t like recess and, when she saw that the teachers weren’t looking, dashed through the open gate, slipped between two parked cars, and was gone, a fugitive from long division, running up Catherine Street toward the Bowery, her mind as blank as a washed blackboard.
FOUR
“What’s up?” said Karp into the phone.
“You asked me to check out your Jewish doctor,” said Detectrive Lieutenant Clay Fulton.
Karp’s mind had been so immersed in People v. Rohbling that the statement made no sense to him. Was Fulton sick? Had Karp recommended someone?
“Um … Jewish doctor?” he ventured.
“I don’t believe it! I’ve been running around all day on this. For crying out loud, Butch! Davidoff?”
“Oh, yeah! Davidoff. The dead nurse. Murray’s case. Okay, I got it. So what went down? He’s kosher or not?”
“Not. The opposite. Tayfe.”
“Trefe, Clay. What did he do?”
“I’m not sure yet, but one, he didn’t attend this Longren woman at all as far as I can find out. Also, the apartment where the woman died is owned by a guy named Robinson, Vincent F., also an M.D., apparently a friend, or acquaintance, of Dr. D. Want to hear the kicker? Longren was insured, a private policy via Prudential with her parents as beneficiaries, plus another policy where she worked, through Mutual New York, beneficiary her boss, guess who, Vincent Robinson, M.D.”
“Longren worked for Robinson, he’s a doc, she gets sick, she dies in his apartment, and then he brings another doc in to do the death cert. Smells.”
“Stinks. I talked to the insurance investigator from Mutual. He went by Robinson’s place to check out the death scene and the beneficiary. While he was there, he used the John and noticed pills. Little white pills and caps, caught in the shag rug around the toilet, like someone wanted to flush a lot of stuff and didn’t notice a few extras. He scooped them up and they turned out to be phenobarbs and Dalmane, sleeping pills.”
“Oh-ho,” said Karp.
“Oh fucking ho is right, son. We need to dig this lady up.”
“I’ll get on it,” said Karp. “Meanwhile, why don’t you ask Dr. Davidoff to drop by for a chat? And have him bring along his treatment records for the deceased.”
Marlene spent a fairly unpleasant morning with Tamara Morno, the Tamara who did not want to go to court, standing in the hallway of her Chelsea apartment and yelling until the woman relented, and dressed and came with her, trembling and looking over her shoulder out the back window of the cab, to the courthouse on Centre Street, where Marlene arranged for an order of protection against Tamara’s boyfriend. Then she had to sit with the weeping woman, and buy her coffee and pastries and calm her down enough so that she could go home. Tamara Morno was a small, round-faced woman with a dramatically sensual figure and a mouse-like disposition, a good combo if you were looking for trouble with men. Marlene made a note to have a talk with the guy, Arnie Nobili, the lover, yet another of the very many men who thought it the peak of attractiveness to swear that if they couldn’t have her, nobody could. Having her in Mr. Nobili’s case included partial strangulation and cigarette burns, plus hocking Tamara’s stuff when he needed to pay off his gambling debts. Not lowlifes, either of them, though: she was a secretary, he was an electrician, both in work, both demonstrably sane except for a touch of impairment in the romantic zone.
Marlene checked her watch as Tamara’s cab pulled away. A little early, but she would go uptown anyway and soak up some class. It was a dull day and chilly, and a long, slow ride in a warm cab would have a calming effect. She stuck two fingers in her mouth and let out a blast that lifted a thousand pigeons from the courthouse plaza and brought a yellow cab across two lanes of traffic to the curb.
Edith Wooten’s building was one of the old dowagers that line Park Avenue between the Fifties and the Eighties, tan, ornate, brass-bound, and well-doormanned. Marlene was asked her name by one of these, white gloved and red faced, and made to wait while he rang up. After speaking a moment into the intercom, he beckoned to Marlene and handed her the instrument.
“Ms. Ciampi?” said Edith Wooten’s voice. “I didn’t expect you so soon, and … oh, I’m devastated, but, you see, I’m in the middle of a rehearsal, and … would it completely destroy your day if I had you just wait up here for say, a tiny half hour?”
“A tiny half hour’s fine, Ms. Wooten.”
“Oh, grand! You see, Anton came over from Amsterdam for just this concert, and his wretched plane was late. And, you know”-here she lowered her voice as if offering a confidential explanation-“it’s the Shostakovich, the E minor trio, you see, so …”
“Oh, of course,” agreed Marlene blankly, “the E minor, so …”
“Yes. Well, I’ll tell Francis to send you up.”
Sent up, and greeted at the door by a uniformed maid, Marlene entered the kind of dwelling rarely encountered in hyper-transient Manhattan, for the Wootens had been in possession of it since the building was constructed in 1923. The maid parked her in a white paneled room with a nice view of Park Avenue through the champagne silk drapes. The furniture was old, of course, not the kind of old you get from antique stores, but the kind you get when you buy new from Tom Chippendale in 1804 and hang on to it: two elegant armchairs upholstered in rose silk, a small sofa in the same material, and a low Sheraton-design table with worn brass fittings. The rug was a silk Tabriz, Marlene thought, early nineteenth century, much worn. She walked across it to check out the paintings. Two nice water colors, one a park scene by Prendergast, the other a portrait sketch by Sargent. There were tuning-up sounds coming through the door to her right, and shortly this door opened and there entered a solidly built, pink-faced blond young woman with pale, dreamy, gentle eyes. She wore a simple black wool dress reaching a dowdy length below the knee.