No, there was at least one. Karp felt eyes on him, and he turned to confront the intense gaze of a stranger. Who extended his hand across the table and said, “I’m Milt Freeland.”
Karp took the proffered hand. “Tom’s replacement, right? Glad to meet you.”
“You have good sources of information: it’s not even official yet. Of course, no one could replace Tom,” said Freeland in a tone that implied that not only could Tom Pagano be replaced, but that it was about time. Freeland was in his late thirties, a thin, small man with a large nose, black horn-rims, and an aureole of reddish hair around a balding dome. He was wearing a too-tight baby-shit-colored three-piece suit and a dark red tie with little gold justice scales embroidered on it.
Karp said flatly, “No, no one could.”
Pagano was looking down the table at the two men. He shouted out, “Hey, Freeland, that’s the guy to beat.”
“I intend to,” said Freeland quietly. Karp nodded politely at this and stood up. He tapped on a glass with a swizzle stick and raised his beer.
“I’d like to propose a toast. To Tom Pagano, a great lawyer and a great guy-a man who could defend scumbags year in and year out without ever becoming a scumbag himself-well, hardly ever-the guy who, next to Francis Garrahy, taught me more about trial work than anyone else, and doesn’t he regret it! Best of luck, Tom!”
Tom Pagano laughed, the table applauded, and after a few minutes spent in the usual raillery, Karp was able to slip away.
Marlene felt a touch on her upper arm and turned to look into a pair of familiar swimming-pool-colored eyes.
“Raney! What are you doing here?”
“A little security detail. Lots of important people wandering around drunk.”
“Yeah, it would be a tragedy if anything happened,” said Marlene. “Somebody tossed a bomb in here, it’d set criminal justice back four days. Well, it’s been months! You’re looking spiffy. That’s quite a suit.”
Jim Raney was a detective with the NYPD, with whom Marlene had a history going back several years. The suit-a double-breasted number in a very pale tan-did look good on his slim figure. He grinned and pirouetted. “You like it? I got a deal.”
“From whom? Roscoe’s Fashions for the Heavily Armed?”
“I wore it for you, Marlene,” he said, rolling his eyes and batting his eyelashes, and placing a warm hand on her knee. He had them to bat, thought Marlene. Raney had never made a secret of his attraction to her, but hers to him was something she preferred not to think about. Those wild Irish boys! Their milky skin, their big blues, their golden hair, their crazy-making attitude toward women! Which was why, although ever on the cusp of falling for Peter Pan, Marlene had married Captain Hook.
She laughed and patted the erring hand. “Wanna dance, Raney?”
There was a three-piece combo playing tunes derived from the youth of Tom Pagano and his contemporaries. Later, when drunkenness was more general, they would play Italian kitsch-“Way, Marie!”, “Hey, Comparé,” “Come-onna-my-house”-and wizened judges would sway to the music and shout the words, whether they were Italian or not.
Raney and Marlene danced to “Dancing in the Dark.” He was a good dancer, and she liked to dance more than she usually got to, married to Karp. He held her tightly, and his right hand slipped lower than its official position at her waist.
“So what’s new, Raney? Any hot cases?”
“I passed the sergeants’ exam.”
“You did? Good for you. Does that mean a transfer?”
“Yeah, they got me slated to move into the Nine next month. They want me to finish up on this airport task force first.”
“How’s that going?”
“Umm, not all that great. The usual wise-guy horseshit. A couple of guys that’ve been boosting stuff from air freight for years got themselves whacked outside a bar on Ninth Avenue. We got the guy, or anyway, a guy who’ll go down for it. Besides that, domestics and drug shit. The usual. How about yourself? They still raping them pretty good?”
The hand was now gently cupping her right buttock. She did not object, because she had just thought of something she wanted from Raney, whore that she was.
“Jim, there’s something I’m interested in-in the Nine.”
“Oh?” It was not an encouraging noise.
“Yeah, a Jane Doe, took a header off a building in Alphabet City. Camano’s handling it as a suicide, a pross. I think it could be a murder, maybe a weirdo.”
Raney’s manner changed instantly from genial to chill. “What does the M.E. say?”
“Undetermined pending further investigation. But the woman was raped. She had teeth marks all over her.”
Raney shrugged and relaxed slightly the intensity of his clutch. The music changed to “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White,” but he didn’t feel like a chacha. He said, “It takes all kinds, Marlene. Why don’t we just wait for the further investigation?”
“Ah, shit, Raney! You know there won’t be further investigation. Not if they got it pegged as a suicide. Not if there isn’t a family making waves. All I’m asking is, just give it a shot. Just look into it.” She smiled fetchingly and tweaked his tie. “Come on. For little me?”
Raney grinned at her. “Marlene, darling. You know I love you, but … let me say that if you were offering me a lot more than a cheap feel on the dance floor, a lot more, the absolute last thing I am gonna do is to stick my nose in another cop’s investigation, especially in a precinct where I’m not even in there yet, and where I’m gonna have to move into a command slot. No way, baby.”
“Oh, crap, you’re just like my husband,” she cried. “Okay, just forget it. I want another drink.”
When Marlene arrived home two hours later, she was at that stage of drunkenness when the jolly effects of inebriation have begun to thin out, and the brain and body are about to take their revenge for having been flooded with a deadly poison. At this point one can drink more until oblivion arrives, staving off the reckoning until the morrow, or stop drinking and tough it out. Marlene had chosen the latter course, not wanting to render herself comatose in the midst of a pack of drunken lawyers, or in proximity to (the quite sober) Detective Raney.
Raney got her home in his beat-up Ghia. His behavior was beyond reproach, limited to a peck on the cheek at parting and a comradely pat on the thigh.
She could hear the wails from the first floor. Little Lucy was having one of her evenings. Entering the loft, she found Karp stumping to and fro like Captain Ahab, looking gray, holding the red-faced, squalling infant and patting her back despairingly.
Marlene threw down her coat and snatched her daughter. “I fed her,” said Karp. “I changed her. I fed her again. She wouldn’t calm down.”
Marlene sat in the bentwood rocker. “Did you sing and rock?”
“Of course,” said Karp indignantly. “It didn’t work. She’s been crying for hours. She’s not sick, is she?”
“No. What did you sing?”
“I don’t know-what does it matter? Rock-a-bye baby, nursery rhymes, the usual.”
“That’s the problem,” said Marlene and began to rock and sing:
Chistu voli pani,
Chistu dici: ’Un cci nn’e,
Chistu dici: Va ’rrobba,
Chistu dici: ’Un sacciu la via,
Chistu dici: Vicchiazzu, vicchiazzu,
camina cu mia!
Ten minutes of this and the child was out cold. Marlene put her in her crib and returned to the kitchen, where she ate four aspirin and a glass of tomato juice. Then she collapsed on the red couch next to Karp.